8:12 PMThursday, 1 January 2004
1/1/04
All day I’ve been looking at dates on my Mac and thinking something is wrong. I guess fifteen years of “this is an invalid date!” has me trained.
Happy new year everyone. I’m up in New Hampshire with my parents, working and relaxing, and will be back in Illinois on Sunday. I’ll hopefully be blogging a bit more soon, though I still have a lot to sort out.
Sunday, 23 November 2003
AIM consolidation
AOL has finally implemented multiple simultaneous sign-ons to the same AIM screen name. As of today, I have no more use for njriley@mac.com (previously used on my PowerBook) and njrwireless (previously used on my hiptop): I use njriley everywhere. This not only makes it easier for other people to contact me via AIM, it means I’m more likely to get your messages. Half the time my hiptop is sitting somewhere I’m not, or I can’t hear it or feel it vibrate when I’m wearing headphones. Someone IMs me, then gets frustrated that I don’t respond when I appear to be around.
A bonus is that it’s a lot more convenient not using iChat all the time if you want to carry on audio and video chats. I hope to see some type of iChat-on-demand make its way into the third-party AIM clients for the Mac, so it’s possible to start AV chats from a contextual menu or similar mechanism.
I also looked at the popular third-party AIM clients for the Mac. Adium 2 seems wonderful except for its lack of Address Book integration and a few user interface nits; Proteus seems to have fallen behind, as it seems quite flaky, and I can’t get its Address Book integration to do anything. Proteus also maintains its own buddy lists separate from those stored on the service, which I’d have to manually sync between my desktop and laptop Macs, and copy separately to my hiptop…not worth it. Fire I haven’t tried in ages; it used to be very unstable.
So until I can see people’s names instead of their nicknames in other clients with a minimum of setup, I’m sticking with iChat.
Friday, 21 November 2003
LiveJournal doubles
Another in the series of "this is dumb" screen shots.
Every few weeks it seems LiveJournal revises their RSS generation, and half the LiveJournals I subscribe to become "unread" in NetNewsWire. Most of the time the changes are unnoticeable, but this time it was definitely for the worse (yet slightly more humorous).
Wednesday, 19 November 2003
Philip K. Dick
A Wired article mentions the increased visibility of Philip K. Dick’s work as Hollywood picks off short stories to make into movies.
Quite coincidentally, I just finished a book of Dick’s short stories which Steve loaned me, including four of those which had been turned into movies (Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report and Paycheck). Being a not-too-fanatic watcher of movies, I’ve only seen Total Recall and Minority Report.
I read “Second Variety” last night, was somewhat drawn into its world, but it ultimately left me thinking how hollow its premise was. I spent more than half the story anticipating how it would end, just wondering what was taking so long. Tonight I finished with “War Veteran”, which was for me among the best stories in the book. Dick seems to do a lot better writing about people than technology, though part of that may be my inability to ignore the technical implausibility of many situations.
One of Apple’s computer systems had issues on Sunday when I called for repair service, and it apparently caused the request for a box for my PowerBook to be lost. I spoke with a very helpful, realistic (and funny) woman at Apple today, and I should be able to call back in the morning to get a same-day box shipped to me.
