Sunday, January 6, 2008
Slept in. My favorite breakfast at home with Patrick. House chores. Patrick did dishes and laundry while I vacuumed and reorganized computer and telephone equipment in the rackmount. Secured devices with brand new Kensington locks. Set up an emergency monitor connection for the headless Mac Mini. Set up an easy access USB port for the Mac Mini. Shortened an audio cable that was too long. Lengthened and rerouted a network cable that was too short. Got shared folders working in Fusion. Got Winamp and KeePass working in Fusion. Got the cordless telephone working again. Got the wireless headphones working again. Organized and labeled mounting hardware. Cleared trash and packaging. Organized user manuals. Installed Max 0.7.1. Cut my hair, showered. Sold a rackmount chassis for $25. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken quesadillas, side of black beans. Worked on fixing Lodestar following the webhost migration. Gave Aaron his new instructions for accessing webmail. Some htaccess file directives are not being processed, and I don't know why yet. Tried using Apple's Image Capture application to download photos from my camera, but I didn't like it because I preferred the utility built in to XP which lets you name a folder in which to store the images while you download. I couldn't see a way to do this in Image Capture, and I didn't want to use iPhoto because I didn't want to be locked in to a single application. (Chris later pointed out to me how to do this—change the "Download to:" picklist from "Pictures" to "Other..."—but in my opinion this is one example of an interface that is too elegant because it hides the Other option under a picklist thereby creating more of a hurdle: you need to select the picklist in order to even see that the option exists. In any case, in OS X the images result in names like IMG_0001.jpg whereas in Windows the images result in names identical to my folder name with 001, 002, and so forth, so I still prefer the Windows interface.)