Category: Annoyances

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When I was a kid, I remember the last few months of the year broke down like this:

  • Back to School in early-to-mid September
  • Halloween for the second half of October
  • Thanksgiving for the second half of November
  • Christmas in December
  • New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

These days it seems more like this:

  • Back to school in August (July, really — as soon as the Independence Day merchandise goes on clearance.)
  • Some weird mix of Oktoberfest, Halloween, and Thanksgiving as “Autumn” or “Harvest” or some such thing covering all of September and October, resolving into Halloween specifically for the last week.
  • Christmas from November through December, with a short break for Thanksgiving
  • New Year’s

Everything’s crept earlier.  There aren’t any breaks between seasons.  And Christmas has swallowed up Thanksgiving as if it were merely an appetizer for the main meal.

Seriously… can’t we let Halloween be Halloween? And let Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving? And let Christmas be something special instead of taking up 1/6 of the year?

When Christmas starts showing up before Thanksgiving — never mind before Halloween! — I always find myself thinking of the story about the little girl who wished it would be Christmas Every Day, and found out why that wasn’t so appealing after all.

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Spotted this in mid-August, during the height of Back to School sales. It’s a school bus-shaped display with shelves on the sides and back. Katie’s fairly certain that the other shelves weren’t all Rice Krispies treats — they were Pop Tarts and the like.

So, yeah, send your kids to school with a ton of these. Their teachers will just love it.

<voice=”cranky old man”>Of course, back in my day, we didn’t have those pre-made Rice Krispies Treats. We had to buy the cereal and marshmallows and make them ourselves. (And frankly, without all the extra preservatives, it was probably more healthy. Or less unhealthy, in any event.)</voice>

(Yeah, still catching up on photo posts.)

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It’s always something.

Last month it was my computer that needed rebuilding. This month it was Katie’s. It’s an old G4 PowerMac, but it’s still plenty for iTunes, web, email, word processing, etc., and we’ve got a newer Windows box for things like games. It failed to boot after a system upgrade, and subsequent troubleshooting determined that the drive was going bad. (This time I ran some more diagnostics, confirming that the rest of the hardware was fine, and Tech Tool Pro found dozens of bad blocks before I stopped the surface scan.)

So: New drive, reinstall system, transfer the data and apps that we can. Which led to this question:

The Leopard or the Tiger?

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist phrasing it that way!)

Last fall I bought the multi-license pack of Leopard so that we could put it on both Macs. We ended up not upgrading the desktop. She was under the impression that the hardware was too old, and I only remembered that Leopard had dropped support for Classic apps. The first problem was easy: I’d checked the specs before ordering, and would only have bought the single-license box if it hadn’t been supported. The second was also easy: in the past year, she’d converted all her documents from old classic-only apps, and wasn’t playing the classic-only games anymore.

So: Installed Leopard, transferred data from old drive & backups.

Side annoyance: transferring a user with the Migration Assistant did not work. First it wouldn’t copy over her account, so I had to create another account, log in, delete her (new) account, then do the transfer. Then, every time it ran into one of the 5 or so corrupted but inconsequential files, it would freak out and remove everything it had copied. Drag and drop copy didn’t work because the alternate account didn’t have permission to read everything. (Remember: admin != root.) I finally resorted to the UNIX commandline, which worked. For reference: sudo cp -rp oldpath newpath Prob. should’ve used tar instead of cp, but I’m not sure how much Mac OS X uses symbolic links in user accounts. In any case, it’s been working, so I’m not going to worry about that.

The real problem: A week later, while doing link maintenance on this site, I stumbled across my blog post about upgrading the laptop, which mentioned the fact that Photoshop 7 won’t run on Leopard.

*facepalm*

Cue Spamusement:

Screaming figure running from a ghost crying, $150...just to UPGRADE

So, what are the options?

  1. Shell out $200 to upgrade to Photoshop CS3. I don’t think so. Not after doing major surgery on two computers, not in this economy. (Incidentally, it took forever to find the system requirements on Adobe’s website and verify that CS3 would actually run on that machine, since everything is focused on CS4…even though it isn’t available yet.)
  2. Downgrade to Tiger. Might just be Archive & Install, might require wiping the new drive and reinstalling. (Reports are mixed.) I don’t think any of the built-in apps she uses have changed data formats, so that’s probably OK.
  3. Find something cheaper or free. Katie pointed out that it has to be able to read PSD files accurately.

We’re going with (c) for now, starting with the OSX version of GIMP.

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I’ve been putting off getting my car washed for several weeks. Over the weekend, I decided I was going to take it to a nearby car wash Monday morning before work. So I did. It was sunny and clear, with a few clouds off to the south that had made for a very nice sunrise earlier this morning.

As I sat there reading, I noticed the sky was getting darker, clouds moving in front of the sun so that I no longer needed my sunglasses. As I got in the car, I realized it had become overcast, and the owner’s remark about “Enjoy this beautiful weather while it lasts” took on an entirely new context.

As I got on the freeway to go to work, I could see rain falling in the distance straight ahead. A few minutes later, I actually saw a bolt of lightning. I don’t think I’ve seen lightning directly in several years. The occasional flashes out of the corner of my eye, sure (and I saw another of those as I pulled off of the exit), but actually seeing the bolt? It’s been a while.

When I got to work, it wasn’t raining, but it was cold and windy. (And here I was in short-sleeved business casual with no jacket.) It clearly had rained, and looked like it might again. Off to the north maybe 1/4 of the sky at most was still blue.

I could swear that when I looked at the weather report yesterday there was no indication of rain.

Current Location: Irvine, California