dsandler.org

Video: white screen of death; endlessly scrolling menus.

As you can see, my beloved Z520a’s screen is broken; probably a fatigued connector in the hinge. Apparently, this just happens to Sony-Ericsson phones. [Good timing, too: I’ve had the phone for 18 months, which is out of the 1-year warranty but still six months shy of an upgrade discount.]

I just updated my copy of Adobe Reader so I’d be able to add fancy annotations to PDFs (one of the side-effects of your advisor being halfway across the country is that it’s harder to pass marked-up drafts back and forth).

I officially hate it in all ways. RAM eater? Check. (The reader takes up gobs of memory as you’d expect, and even the Safari plugin chews up an additional 40MB when it first loads.) Interface? Uglier than the dog poop left in my parking spot by the neighbors in the next building.

But what’s really driving me nuts is the text rendering. This is Adobe, for pete’s sake—you’d think they’d have gotten it down! But, no, the anti-aliased type display is a disaster. The ClearType (or CoolType, or MyType, or ZOMGtyp3!, or whatever Adobe calls it) is worse—a plague visited upon the Earth. There’s also some kind of horrible spasm going on inside the hinting engine, visible especially at small point sizes:

So I’m thinking I’ll shelve Reader until I absolutely positively need to do some annotation that can’t be handled by Preview. But does anyone know of an easy, reversible way to switch on and off Reader’s control of PDF viewing in Safari? (Online documentation seems to indicate that Reader will “heal” Safari if it notices that the PDF viewer plugin has been deleted.)

Update 2/1: Well, at least Adobe lets you turn off the Web plugin (in the Reader app’s preferences):

Houston Chronicle, Jan. 10, 2007: Rice extends Todd Graham’s contract through 2012.

Houston Chronicle, Jan. 12, 2007: Rice coach Graham heads back to Tulsa.

Elsewhere, the Chronicle bloggers are ruthless: “While Rice fans will always remember the magical ride to their first bowl appearance in 45 years, I’ll remember the luscious coachspeak Graham gave in a state-that-he-never-meant a few days ago, after he accepted a contract extension” … “Those football players at Rice learned an important lesson this week. They learned that college football isn’t really about the kids. Never has been. Never will be. College football is about the schools raking in millions and the coaches jumping at the next opportunity.” … “And just like that, Todd Graham is gone. We’ve been told that he will sign an 8-year deal worth $1.1 million per with Tulsa. He left for the money, plain and simple. Everything he said about Rice, its supporters, its players and its future was bologna. We can’t help but wonder where he stashed his Dale Lloyd pin.”

Here’s a snapshot, for posterity, of the GrahamFootball.com promo site that Rice Athletics put together.

Update 1/19: Chronicle: Rice hires Texas State’s David Bailiff.

OK, I’ve finally given up on the Dock. It’s always irritated me for a number of little brain-nibbling reasons:

1. Muscle memory or real estate: Pick one. I really, really like things to stay in one spot over a long period of time; it’s not even muscle memory so much as spatial memory. (I use Virtue to keep major concurrent tasks on separate workspaces; in my head I have a 4096×768 monitor, workspaces side-by-side, and the GL effects I use to switch workspaces reinforce that topology.) So it bugs me that if I want apps to show up in a recognizable place, I need to pin them to the Dock, taking up valuable real estate when they’re not running.
2. No real estate? No feedback. How many emails do I have? No idea; the icon’s too small for me to read the little red badge on the Mail.app icon. Why are the icons so small? Because I have too many of them pinned in there; see #1.
3. No muscle memory for you, anyway. The Dock is centered, so it’s not like pinned applications stay in one place anyway; as soon as you open an app not on the Dock, everything shifts to accommodate. (This is “easily” addressed by magnetizing the Dock to one side of your screen, using some defaults write command I’ve used and long since forgotten.)

So, yeah, the Dock and I never really got on well. You may recall that Dave tamed the Dock; that solution never really worked for me (real estate; $ for DragThing), and I don’t know if he still uses it like that, anyway.

I finally gave up on the Dock entirely. Here’s what it looks like now:

That’s right, everything’s unpinned, and the icons (snapped to 32×32) are large enough that I can read the feedback badges.

So what about all that spatial memory crap? I gave up on that, too, at least as far as the Dock is concerned; it’s purely a status/feedback region for me now—I don’t click on it anymore. All my app-launching and open-file-with-app needs are now satisfied by Quicksilver, which is usually faster than (spatial-memory-accelerated) mousing anyway.

Now if only QS were faster on my poor little PowerBook. I know, I know, I’m never satisfied.

So, apparently, Verizon CSRs do not understand decimals.

G: [big sigh] Okay, I think I have to do this again. Do you recognize that there’s a difference between one dollar and one cent?
A: Definitely.
G: Do you recognize there’s a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?
A: Definitely
G: Then, do you therefore recognize there’s a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents
A: No.

The short version is, this guy was quoted a rate of two thousandths of a cent per KB for data usage, and was (of course) charged two tenths of a cent. Many, many calls and letters confirmed that nobody seems to realize that “point oh oh two cents” is not the same as “point oh oh two dollars,” so it’s a good thing these people aren’t doing stoichiometry. The xkcd recommendation? Just pay the bill.

Fig. 1. Taken from Yahoo!’s documentation. (Recommended, my ass.)

OK, I have to take a break from writing my paper to complain about the new “Fully Featured” Yahoo! Groups email style, which was just turned on by default for everyone. Oh, but it’s got features, you say. Bah! My nice little plain-text emails have all been replaced by ugly, web-bugged, bulky HTML.

I had originally feared that you needed a Yahoo! ID to opt out of this monstrosity, but apparently you can switch back to “traditional” (read: plain text) emails by firing off a message to groupname-traditional@yahoogroups.com.

Amar recalls:

Five years ago I was living with Angi in the Inner Richmond. I think she woke me up, I can’t remember for sure. We watched the towers collapse on TV. It was like watching a movie. Sapient called and told us not to come in.

The last sentence reminds me of the contrasting reaction I experienced at the office.

There was a big product group meeting scheduled later that day (or was it the next day?) that was very sparsely attended. I was there, the junior PM was there, and the Big-Shot VP in charge of the team, in addition to maybe one or two other engineers.

(Aside: The Big-Shot VP used to be very friendly with the engineering team, back in 2000 when he started as a Much More Reasonably-Sized Shot Project Manager. A year later, things were not going so well for Be; our big project had just imploded, our stock was in the toilet, and—although there was at least a chance of continued employment for the surviving employees—the office laser printers were seen to spit out résumés more and more frequently. Thus our VP wasn’t quite as empowering as he used to be.)

Right. So, we’re at the meeting.

Big-Shot VP: Where the hell is everybody?

[Silence.]

BSVP: Well?

Dan: I … um, I think people are probably a little freaked out and, you know, maybe they’re just staying home today.

BSVP: That’s ridiculous. I don’t see any airplanes sticking out of this building.

[Shocked silence.]

Classy!

Ugh. This is what the Slashdot homepage looked like this morning:

Fig. 1.   Advertisements for nerds; stuff you can buy.