Sunday, December 30, 2007
Woke up at 4 AM, blew my nose and did some coughing. Couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and webbed for a while, then went back to bed until noon. I didn't say much about our Netflix sign-up experience from yesterday. The signing up part and adding movies to our queue was pretty simple. We worried initially about adding anything to our queue because we wanted to control what we received first. "Oh, no—don't add that one first" and "Maybe lets have this one be the first." We thought that 2 seconds after clicking the Add button under a film title a robot arm in Los Gatos would have the movie in an envelope and tossed into a mail bin for delivery. After finally settling on what would be first (The Line of Beauty), we decided to investigate the instant play feature. We got excited when we saw all the material available for us to view instantly. We spent several minutes looking over the choices and made a decision: Amazing Stories. I clicked Add and eventually we reached an error message saying that our computer did not have the requirements to play the video. Apparently, Netflix supports only Windows and not Mac, so the brand new 24-inch iMac running OS X is incompatible with this Netflix feature (I think they call it Instant Play), and of course they don't say that anywhere before you sign up. No problem, I thought, I'll just restart into Boot Camp. (I don't have VMWare Fusion installed yet—still haven't been back to their website after it gave an error while attempting to download a trial version of Fusion.) After Boot Camp started, I again opened up the Netflix website, manually navigated back to the same place, and this time we got a different error message about the system requirements. Netflix doesn't work in Firefox, only in Internet Explorer. I rolled my eyes, copied the URL, opened IE, quit Firefox, pasted the URL, hit Enter. And then we got a different error message which reminded me that I had not bothered to install Windows Media Player in this installation of Windows, because who uses WMP anymore, and isn't it enought that I have Flip4Mac installed on the OS X side? So I downloaded WMP11 and installed it. Back to Netflix. This time another error—something about a missing codec and it pointed us to a download page for the installer. I install the codec, and I think at this point it finally worked. By golly we were determined to watch crappy quality video with crappy sound just like the Netflix focus group and marketing team said we would. In setting up file and folder sharing in OS X 10.5 Leopard yesterday, I realized that something is screwy in the way Apple is handling Samba. After configuring some shared folders, I went back in to System Preferences to look at my settings and one folder was missing from the list even though I clearly saw on a networked laptop that the share still existed. I restarted the service through the System Preferences GUI, and it did not reappear. I even went so far as to attempt to manually troubleshoot Samba directly, which reminded me of frustrating times with an old Cobalt Qube 3 I had, but not only was the conf file very difficult to find but it also did not seem to contain any of the settings which I knew were currently in effect. I did not want to dig any deeper. Later, after a restart, I returned to the System Preferences and the missing share had reappeared. The other way I know that Sharing is not reporting data correctly is that I ended up seeing multiple versions of the same file share, e.g., Music, Music-1, Music-2, possibly because of repeated attempts to readd what appears to be a missing share. This is screwed up, and I am hoping that 10.5.2 fixes it. Yesterday I started a second brown paper grocery bag to hold the facial tissues after using them. Since February 6, I think I've had to blow my nose about 300 times. Actually, since I used each tissue for multiple nasal exhalations, you could also view this as about 1500 to 2400 nasal exhalations involving mucus. Something else screwy about OS X: sometimes I double-click a text file and TextWrangler starts but then the opening of the file fails and the screen blinks. Later, I think after a restart, it works again as it had before. Grocery shopping. Mailed a package to Tina. Napped. Stopped in at work to pick up some software I need to install at home. Dinner at Chris and Nate's with Chris, Nate, Jen, Phil, Danny, Drew, Tina, Paul. Chris and Nate made 3 homemade pizzas and a garden salad with assorted build-your-own toppings. For dessert, Paul brought a sans rival, but different than the one we tried from Ron and Fonsie. PDD brought a bottle of wine and a bottle of port. I brought creamy burgundy champagne.