Still going after all these years.
As I was writing the previous item, Adam was complaining that Outlook’s support for turning email into calendar items isn’t intuitive. Why? Because it uses drag and drop.
As I wrote there, figuring out how drag and drop worked as a Windows programmer was one of the hardest things I had to do. Admittedly, that might have had more to do with the development environment I was using than the Win32 APIs…
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Brent continues to chug along, gearing up for a new NetNewsWire Lite beta that will support a published clipboard format for RSS items. This means you can use cut and paste and drag and drop to connect stuff from NetNewsWire Lite to other apps. Maybe it’s time to get off my butt and figure out what’s wrong with Manila Envelope–and see if I can get the new Drag and Drop in AppleScript Studio working.
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…members of the Alabama GOP accused the Democratic governor there of wrangling an endorsement from Charlton Heston by taking advantage of his recent announcement that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know. According to the record, he was endorsed because of a strong pro-gun and pro-conservation record, Heston’s two hot buttons. The NRA is required by its charter, apparently, to give any candidate an endorsement who gets an A on their annual scorecard.
I don’t know if Heston was “grossly manipulated” by the Democrats, but I do think that State GOP Chairman Marty Connors (“a gross manipulation of Mr. Heston”) and Republican candidate Bob Riley’s campaign spokesman David Azbell (“you have got to wonder if people are acting in Mr. Heston’s best interests”) have together done more to destroy Heston’s political capital than his disease has.
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The wedding was a ton of fun. Apparently I missed the most fun of all, the bridal party night out, which happened the day before I got to Maine (I will pay good money to anyone involved for footage of my wife dancing with Kelley’s sister in law to an Eminem tune).
We had a good time at the rehearsal dinner. During the long wait for food (familiar to anyone who’s had a rehearsal dinner for 30 people at a restaurant not used to serving that many at once), we got a little creative with the nametags Kelley’s friend Dan had gotten. He apparently couldn’t find proper nametags at the grocery store (there being no close office supply store at the Maine/Canada border), so picked up a stack of the store’s special pricing stickers. We all tried to figure out what kind of “special pricing” the bride and groom were under, with the result that their nametags were emblazoned with the legends “Low mileage,” “Original woodwork intact,” “Available for a limited time only!”, and “Make best offer.”
The wedding itself was smooth, with two exceptions. The flower girls had been told to get rid of all their flower petals, resulting in a much lengthier than expected trip down the aisle and a lot of banging on the bottom of their flower baskets to dislodge the remaining petals. And the bride dropped the groom’s ring. While picking it back up, she said, “All you folks with video cameras can use your fancy digital rigs to edit that out!” Not a chance, Kelley. The highlight of the reception was probably the minister returning in full Elvis regalia, though the bride dancing with her father to a recording of his college group singing a song he had arranged many years before was a close second, as was the ten-year-old cousin who kept telling Lisa she had to come dance with him when the DJ played the Britney Spears song.
Returned home late last night from Maine. This morning I was awakened (Lisa had already gone to the office) by a rapping on the wall more or less behind my head. I threw on khakis and a t-shirt and went out through the garage to see what was going on. As I opened the outside door, a squirrel ran away.
Sighing, I went back through the garage and tried to open the door, only to realize it was locked. No keys in my pocket. Thankfully we had left a window unlocked on our back porch, or I’d still be out there freezing. More trip details later.
After a really long flight (Seattle to Atlanta to Boston to Bangor, Maine), I got in to find that Lisa was delayed in construction. I looked around for something to do and was surprised (well, astonished, really) to find Bangor International Airport’s first Internet café.
Well, to be fair, it’s really an Internet kiosk plus cell phone dealership. But it is absolutely the last thing I expected to see, and it’s $3 for 15 minutes. And as the likelihood of WiFi in this part of Maine is pretty remote, it’ll do just fine.
Almost as unexpected as flying into Atlanta at 5:30 this morning (Terminal A), bracing myself to find an awful bagel or something, and finding a place that did really excellent scrambled eggs, bacon and biscuit. I could have had grits and gravy if I wanted it. There was even wireless from Laptop Lane–unfortunately, they weren’t savvy enough to provide web-based self service sign ups, so it refused to serve me an IP address and was therefore pretty useless. On the whole I prefer the Internet access in Bangor.
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A while back after installing Jaguar I found that Manila Envelope no longer worked, or worked only intermittently. I upgraded to 10.2.1 last night, and I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but it worked again–for about two minutes. I posted two test posts successfully to the editing region, but now it’s not working at all.
Did Apple break something in 10.2? I’d love to know. One possibility is the new Core Foundation web services framework, which has probably been shimmed under the existing AppleScript SOAP support introduced in 10.1 (at least, that’s how I’d do it). Another possibility is that something broke in the CFString search and replace functionality that I use to do fancy text processing. Debugging it is really really painful.
At least I have wireless. I had forgotten about my Wayport membership. My flight takes off in another hour or so, and I can’t wait. It’ll be the first time all week I’ve had any sleep.
In case I don’t get a chance to update later: I’m off to join Lisa in Calais, Maine for Kelley’s wedding. Have a good weekend.
Dave asks folks to try out a revised Radio aggregator that uses the guid attribute in RSS 2.0. Problem: After installing it, it actually re-lists every item in the person’s RSS file each time you scan, regardless of if you’ve already seen and deleted the item or not.
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Brent announces the release of NetNewsWire Lite v. 1.0. Congratulations on a great app, Brent. I’m weaning myself slowly from Radio’s aggregator to NetNewsWire’s. Can’t wait for the Pro version.
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There are a ton of people writing iCal scripts. The coolest so far is this announcement on Studio Log: Have Quicktime Player Read Your Schedule for Today. I can’t look at the script on my work machine, but I would guess it grabs the text from iCal and runs it through text-to-speech and outputs it to Quicktime Player.
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I almost forgot until I saw Anita’s post about the festivities last night. As we introduced ourselves, we talked a bit about ego surfing (Anita is the third Anita, Brent the second or third hit, Jerry the #4). I mentioned that I would always be the second Jarrett, at least as long as NASCAR remained popular and kept Dale’s site highly ranked.
At this the other lady at the table (a large table in the middle of the room with a few random onlookers still seated) stirred. Putting down her drink, she said, “I’m a big NASCAR fan. My number one is Mark Martin.” I said, “That’s great. I guess I have to root for Cousin Dale.” She asked whether I meant “Junior”; I hastened to clarify “Dale Jarrett.” At this she launched into a several minute discussion of how NASCAR wasn’t just popular, it was “grown from hard work”; how Martin was deserving because he had a family and young children; how old she was and how long she had been watching NASCAR; and other details. All at a fairly slow pace, not slurred, but relentless. Being less bold than Coleridge’s Wedding-Guest, I couldn’t stop her with a “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!” Eventually I figured out that nodding and smiling silently while maintaining eye contact was the best way to stop the conversation. She moved off and we got on with our meetup.
Am I a sadder and a wiser man? No, but I am still subtly troubled by the conversation. Was she desperately lonely? mentally ill? or just drunk?
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Anita blogged my rambling rant about Mozart’s Requiem. Her comments page has good feedback–particularly comment #3 which correctly calls me on my imprecise musical history. No one is really sure why Süssmayer or Mozart chose to end the final movement with the opening angry Requiem theme, and there is a lot of history between Mozart and Fauré. But at the end of the day, all we are left with is the final artifact. And I still argue that the outraged emotion of Mozart is a more adequate response to the World Trade Center attack than Fauré’s peacefulness–at least from where we sit today, one year on.
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Just got back from the Seattle blog meetup at the Sit ‘n’ Spin. Decent turnout–at the peak we had seven folks, six of whom blogged. Attendees besides me: Brent, Anita, Nat, Jerry, and C. (whose name I truncate not for privacy’s sake, but because I never quite caught it across the table. Sigh. The hearing is the second thing to go, and I forget the first.) plus C.’s friend “Rusty” who was there for the poetry reading in the back room.
Interesting night. Fun discussion. After some initial effort, we kept from talking about the RSS wars, though it was hard–I don’t think anyone had met a former Userland employee before. But poor C.–the rest of us spent most of the time talking about different weblog packages and programming languages. There is a difference between techbloggers and other bloggers, and I am starting to suspect that for me, at least, it’s the same difference that got me beat up in elementary school. C. was the only one who had the presence of mind to write down everyone’s URL; I’m sure that I’ve gotten at least one of the links above wrong.
Other note: I’m sure glad that Anita posted her picture on her blog; I don’t know how we would have figured out how to find each other otherwise.
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Happy birthday today to my wife Lisa. She has put up with me and has made some very stressful years of school and moving not just bearable but enjoyable because of her continual wit, humor, and energy. Plus she makes sure that I keep on my toes!