Month: May 2005

When is Wednesday not Wednesday?

Or when is 21st Century not 21st Century? They are not what they are when information have to be dumbed down to the lowest denominator!

Apparently the Star Wars Episode III preview tickets that we have for May 18th, Wednesday 12:01 a.m. is not for tonight. It is for tomorrow night, i.e. Thursday 12:01 a.m. Why? Apparently it is because it is Wednesday evening so it is Wednesday 12:01 a.m. I would have given them the benefit of my doubt if they had used 12:00 a.m. but 12:01 a.m.?

Look at Fandango or MovieTickets.com and see for yourself.

Oh and the millennium thing? The year 2000 is still in the 20th Century. January 1st, 2001 is the first day of the 21st Century. Just like if you are born on January 1st, 0000, you are not one year old until January 1st, 0001. Or two thousands years old until January 1st, 20001. Stupid!

I am sorry? Did I lose you on my logical explanation of the concerpt of the forth dimension?

So, no Star Wars tonight due to the population inability to discern date time. I hate stupid people and the dumbing down to accommodate them. How about this for an idea? Let’s educate people so they understand simple concept as date and time?

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15 Hours to Go

Until the scrolling text to infinity starts for Star Wars Episode III for us. We have the tickets for the preview showing at 12:01 am tonight. Can’t wait…

0

Disaster of the Year

It seems that I always have one electronic disaster a year. In 2003 it was my PowerBook display hinge broke and required an expensive repair. Last year, it was Leah spilling water on her iBook so she ended up saving for the whole summer and got a 12″ PowerBook.

And today I dropped my Treo when I took it out of my jean pocket. It landed on the hard kitchen floor and the result was a cracked LCD screen. No dents, no scratches, everything works, just a broken screen! I am so ready to trade either of those two for a broken screen. The touchscreen is working fine though. Here is a picture of the damage.

Picture of my Treo and the cracked screen

Unfortunately I didn’t have any phone insurance for the Treo, since Cingular does not provide insurance for a fair large number of their phones including the Treo. Possibly due to their high cost? Anyhow, I was on PalmOne’s website filling out a out-of-warranty repair form (which will cost me $175 to repair the cracked screen) when I remembered that my AMEX card has purchase protection. I called them up and low and behold, AMEX covers accidental damage for 90 days after purchase! It would take them around 2 weeks to come to a decision on how to compensate me but it will be either of these three options: 1) replace my phone, 2) repair the screen, or 3) reimburse the original cost of the phone so I can get a new (perhaps better) one. I am hoping for #1 but #2 is fine with me.

In the mean time I’ll have to put up with a half working screen. Not so bad for most normal use but text messaging is a bit, shall we say, challenging since I have to guess what I type for about half of the time!

Hopefully with this out of the way, there won’t be any more electronic disaster for the reminding year. I am off to play some Halo 2 to vent my frustration…

2

American owned Man U?

I love my American life et al, but the idea of Manchester United being owned by an American is just absurd! What then? Is the club going to change name to Manchester (U.K.) United, just in case American football (I am sorry, soccer) fans going to mistaken Manchester as one the ten different towns in the U.S.?

2

Not automatically installing Dashboard Widgets

Call me paranoid but I set my Safari to not automatically open a downloaded item when downloading is completed. However, this play havoc with installing Dashboard widgets. To install them properly you need to unzip the file (if it is in zipped form, which normal it is), copy the file to /Library/Widgets/ and then either trash the zip file or archive it.

This is fine for trying out one or two widgets but after the third one, I decided to play with the new Automator in Tiger and see if I can automate this process. The result is this “Install Dashboard Widgets” Automator actions.

This actions will search for any files with file name ending with wdgt.zip and unzip it, copy the .wdgt file to /Library/Widgets/, and then move the original zip file to my archive folder. Obviously you may have a different archive folder or not even want to archive the zip file. In that case, you just need to change the last action to either move the file to the folder that you want, or swap the last action to the “Move To Trash” action.

To get this actions to show up in the Finder’s contextual menu, you will need to open the actions in Automator and then select File->Save As Plug-in… and then choose Finder for the “Plug-in for” list.

Anyway, have fun with this Automator actions!

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