I went to the Apple store and took some screen shots to show just how much more space I’ll have with this monitor

Squeak laid out nicely

17″ laid on top of 23″

My Mirra has arrived It has everything but the forward tilt, which I did not realize was on option (and not even available from Design Within Reach) but the chair is still awesome

Mirra One

Mirra Two

As a blogger, I’ve often wanted the URL from the current website I am browsing put onto the clipboard in HTML format so I can quickly paste it into a blog entry. I wrote a simple Applescript to share.

To use:

• If you don’t have the AppleScript menu installed, install it by running the Install Script Menu application in /Applications/Applescript/
• In your home directory, open Library. If there is not a Scripts folder, create one. Inside the Scripts folder, if there is no Safari folder, create one.
• Open Script Editor in /Applications and paste the script at the end of this entry. Save the file to ~/Library/Scripts/Safari/ as any name you like, such as Copy To Clip

That’s it. Now you can be in safari, choose your script from the Safari Applescript menu item and have your URL in HTML format!

The Script:

Safari

tell application "Safari"
    tell document 1
        set the clipboard to "<a HREF=\"" & my escapeURL(url) & "\" target=\"_blank\"></a>"
    end tell
end tell

on escapeURL(aURL)
    set newURL to ""
    set savedDelimiters to AppleScript's text item delimiters
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"&"}
    
    set aCount to count text item of aURL
    repeat with index from 1 to (aCount - 1)
        set newURL to newURL & (text item index of aURL) & "&"
    end repeat
    set newURL to newURL & last text item of aURL
    
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to savedDelimiters
    return newURL
end escapeURL

Omniweb

tell application "OmniWeb"
    tell browser 1
        set the clipboard to "<a HREF=\"" & my escapeURL(address) & "\" target=\"_blank\"></a>"
    end tell
end tell

on escapeURL(aURL)
    set newURL to ""
    set savedDelimiters to AppleScript's text item delimiters
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"&"}
    
    set aCount to count text item of aURL
    repeat with index from 1 to (aCount - 1)
        set newURL to newURL & (text item index of aURL) & "&"
    end repeat
    set newURL to newURL & last text item of aURL
    
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to savedDelimiters
    return newURL
end escapeURL

My index page is finally HTML 4.01 validated. I have some older entries that have bad URLs, but I’ll weed those out.

As a result, look for a new CopyURL applescript that encodes ampersands properly

Well with all of the crappy customer service I have had this week, I ordered an upgrade to my phone valet which will let me record my calls. I don’t need the voice mail system, I don’t think, but I will start recording my calls and logging employee numbers from now on, just to get quicker solutions to problems and also make sure I am hearing people properly after I get off the phone.

And when issues arise, I’ll post the phone calls here as well as my entries. Maybe customers exposing companies poor training and support will get them to start taking notice that this could affect their bottom lines.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention. The phone valet messaging system is backordered. They sold many more than they ever hoped to. I wonder if a lot of other people are thinking along the same lines as me?

After the Office Depot mess, Fed Ex, which had an estimated shipping date of today, stood me up. Well, it could come up until 9. Wait, but they didn’t have the data that it arrived in portland at 4:09pm until hmm 5pm. So the people all say long saying it was “in route” even tho tracking data was 2 days old just plain lied. They didn’t have a clue where it was, I knew it, but they would not admit to it. Why can’t people just tell the truth anymore?

So now it might come tomorrow. Anytime between 9am and 9pm. nice eh, spend my Saturday, all 12 hours, waiting for something that may or may not come. What has happened to service in this country? You’d think with all of the technology that we could track a package within 10 mins of where it is. Then people would not have to end up missing lunch and having a late dinner because some yoho at Federal Express said it was coming.

OMUG posted my report about my morning at OSCON this week.

According to this story, Microsoft is planning to market its own anti-virus software. Nice!

So let’s see – they sell you (not me) the crappy, bug ridden OS that has so many holes it is hard to not get a virus or to get hacked, and then they sell you software to remove those viruses.

Doesn’t this alarm anyone other than me as a conflict of interest? And I’m a Mac user!

wow.

Scroll down the forum page for the images.

I want a larger chair mat for my work area, as I move between three machines and the one i got at office depot, while nice, is too small.

Nobody carries larger mats that I can find, so I ordered one from Office Depot online. It ships and the site says it will be delivered by 5. By 6 I check the site and now it is scheduled for redelivery on Wed. What?

So I call Office Depot:

me: “I was home all day waiting for this and I won’t be here tomorrow, what happened?” (forget that I work at home, I did stay in and have Elizabeth get lunch for us so I would not miss it) OD: “they ran out of time, so will deliver tomorrow. I am very, very sorry for this.” me:”I wont’ be here tomorrow. Can I pick it up now?” OD: “No. We deliver from the warehouse directly” me: “Where is the warehouse?” OD: “In seattle.” (I live in Portland, OR 3 hours away on a good day) me: “So where is it now?” OD:”At the warehouse” me: “But it is 6pm are you saying they gave up at 2?” OD: “We’re very sorry, would you like to reschedule for a later date?” me:”No, this is a principles thing now. If you tell me today by a certain date and time you better mean it. And if not, give me a chance to go get it, just like UPS and Fed Ex. I really need it, but I am going to cancel this order based on your poor customer service and not order from OD online again.” OD:”We’re very sorry. If the chair mat comes tomorrow just refuse it” me:”What part about me not being here tomorrow don’t you understand?”

Sigh.

As it turns out, I WILL be here in and out tomorrow, but the principle still stands. I won’t order from a place that ships form 3 hours away and expects to be anywhere near their delivery promises.

Update: 11:32am

So i end up waking up late. On a lark I check the Office Depot site for my order. It is out for delivery still. Well ok, maybe I’ll take it. So I call their number, speak my order number twice and it tells me the guy is on stop 1 of 60 (it is 11:30am) and that I am stop 3. Then I ask to speak to a customer representative, and after 2 minutes of music and beeps, the computer tells me it cannot complete the call at this time. Rofl. Nice service.

Update: 1:10pm

I called the automated system again since the woman who said she would call me back 90 minutes ago has not done so yet. The computer still says the delivery guy is on order #1. ROFL. These guys just don’t have a clue.

Update: 1:20pm

Spoke with a different customer representative. She confirmed they have no pick up system but that there is probably a warehouse in my area. She said that though the order is marked cancelled, there was no refund given, so she is having customer service level 2 call me back within 3 hours. She showed the same information, on delivery 1 of 60, and said they had no way to communicate with the driver directly other than via ‘notes’. Also, she said she didn’t know how the previous representative (11:30am) could contact shipping because they have no way to do that. Nice, eh?

Update: 4:30pm

Chair mat arrived. No call from customer service yet. Mat is too thin it seems. sigh. More to deal with

Update: 4:40pm

I called customer support and told them it was too thin and asked what to do. After several minutes we decided to just return it. She said they could pick it up or I could return it to my store. I chose the latter. Bundled the huge thing up and hauled it to the store.

So the guy, Scott, tells me he can’t take it back because I ordered it online. I told him that under no uncertain terms was I walking out of the store with this mat that I hauled down on the advice of the person on the phone. He said he was not sure why she told me that, but because I ordered it online it had to go back via delivery. Only had I ordered it from the store could it go back to the store.

He went on to inform me that the people in Fl didn’t have a clue what happened on the west coast and that doing business online was risky. I said “What? Doing business with your company is a risk?” which got the looks of many customers around heh, and he said any online order is a risk. lol.

So after a pretty good exchange, which is not usual for me, I got him to write me a note that I had left it there with all of the info on the note. He was cool enough to do that, and while I like the store, I’ll never deal with Office Depot online again other than to see what the store offers.

I got home and called the online dept, told them the horror story and they have arranged for a credit and to pick up the mat at the store.

Amazing what you have to go through to roll a chair around isn’t it?

Update: 7/30/2004

Office Depot Florida called to apologize. The guy said he got an email this morning to call me and see if my mat had come and that he had gotten my horror story. I guess he didn’t read the part about me returning it. Seriously, what is up with this company? Anyway, he offered to make sure I got my refund, so that was nice.

Then 1 hour later, Office Depot called. Was on the caller ID. The guy asked “Is this Office Depot dispatch?” I answered “No” He hung up. LOL. I should almost pay them for the entertainment and lesson on how not to run a company.

Update: 8/17/2004

It has been a few weeks. My refund showed up last week on my credit card. I also got a nice apologetic letter from Office Depot and they sent me a $50 gift card for the store. That was nice of them!

Well the last cavity is filled and I have a brand spanking new gold crown, or they say I do. It is way back there

Ugh, I hope this is the last of the drilling for this year!

AdiumX is my new favorite chat client for the Mac. Open source, free, actively worked on, can theme the contacts list, message window and dock icons.

So speaking of themes, they are all simple bundles. Inside the bundle (control click, Show Contents) is a set of images and a plist (text file of XML goodness) that defines say the dock icon. So this iPod dock icon I downloaded was blinking way too fast and making me go nuts. I opened the icon pack and changed the delay to 10 seconds and it worked! Check this out:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Description</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Creator</key>
        <string>Created by Quincy</string>
        <key>Title</key>
        <string>iPod Adiumy Remix v3.0 (motionless)</string>
    </dict>
    <key>State</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Alert</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Animated</key>
            <true/>
            <key>Delay</key>
            <real>10.0</real>
            <key>Images</key>
            <array>
                <string>Flap.png</string>
                <string>Awake.png</string>
            </array>

Very nice design by the engineers. So while there is no user interface for this, a simple edit in BBEdit and then double clicking the icon set to load it slowed my icon way down. Thanks, guys.

This document from NIST covers some cd/dvd basics. Like don’t use markers! The solvents actually eat through the label side and ruin the disc.

You can mark on the little clear spindle area. No adhesive labels either. Ouch.

I decided to finally buy and upgrade to MovableType 3.0 today. That lead me into the hell of the tool I was using to manage all of my pages with templates and decided to ditch it once and for all. On a stroke of luck, I found that BBEdit supports includes, so now my entire site is generated by BBEdit. Sweet. very fast, clean and the MT template files sync up quicker due to less bloat in the files.

BBEdit for the Mac – The only text editor to have.

Turning video gaming into performance art, Dance, Voldo, Dance is a performance piece created with the amazing Soul Caliber video game.

Creativity is the saviour of this world.

The milkandcookies mirror worked best for me.

Went to coffee and dinner with Katie, a woman I met on craigslist. What a fascinating person. Really deep thinker, bright spirit, giving and positive. I think we’re going to make good friends.

Ordered my new office chair today, a Herman Miller Mirra chair. Wow it is so comfortable. I liked it much more than the Aeron even.

been really busy, so if anyone has not seen me much, that is why. Work, life, all that good stuff. Miss those I have not seen in awhile!

Suddenly I am a avid fan of Omniweb I bought a version 3 license but never used it, because well OmniWeb sucked.

I skipped 4 and 4.5 for the same reasons. Now with 5, they are here.

5 is behind on it’s webkit integration, which has caused a few errors, but the features are so stunning!

For example:

• Workspaces – You can save off sets of windows and switch with F-keys
• Per Site Preferences – For my bank, I set up the prefs for just that domain to download files to a folder other than the desktop. Now my banking downloads go into their own folder for saving and other needs.
• Resumable http downloads – Just stop a download if you need to and resume it later
• iTunes searching on bookmarks – While confusing at first, now it is really powerful
• Safari bookmark syncing – Still use safari for some sites? No problem, add the Safari collection and it is updated each time you open Omniweb
• Bookmark syncing – To .mac or any webdav server, each time you quit Omniweb it syncs your personal bookmarks. Open up Omniweb on another machine and it syncs. I have even had Omniweb running on both machines at once, made dissimilar changes to bookmarks, quit both copies and relaunched them to find the bookmark changes reflected on both machines. Nice.
• Per page ad blocking, popup blocking, etc. Turn popups off for all sites except that one that really needs to open popups.
• Gazillions of preferences
• Support has been responsive to the bugs I have been finding.
• Tabs can either be a vertical list of site names or a list of page icons from those sites the tabs
• Control when and where autofill is used (manually or automatically)
• Delete cookies from all sites on close, or just some sites
• Tell Omniweb to not open a new window when you click it’s dock icon, so minimize web pages stay minimized.

The list goes on. Check it out for free.

Mount a remote disk Sleep remote machine Control Click on icon Wait a minute while Finder spins looking for disk. Sigh. Can’t they figure this out sooner?

Carolyn popped into town this weekend on last minutes notice. I wasn’t sure how I would handle that, but it went swimmingly well. We went to the rose garden, I took her to Reo’s, we watched Network (amazing) and then were up until 3:30 figuring out where we went wrong and why we go wrong. Was really healthy and I appreciated her being here.

So here is a pic of me in the famous shirt:

And I posted pics from the garden. I made the pics larger, which broke my BHE template, so I’ll fix that later, but the pics were worth the size.

I had never heard of siping your tires until I was forced into a new set last week when one decided to go bye bye.

I read the pamphlet, it made sense, and the tires are quiet and they worked well in the rain on 101.

Others can explain it better, but if you drive in rain and ice, check out this procedure for your tires:

Tire Siping

Les Schwab siping (where I had mine done)

Toyota Siping