O’Reilly is running an article about the contents of various peoples docks. Being a switcher from Windows I tend to think of the dock as a the task bar. I keep my most frequently used applications and folders there, and in order from most used to least, left to right. I have slight magnification and bounce turned on, and the dock is at the bottom of the screen.
Here then is my dock and its contents:
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “mydock.png” }}
Finder, Safari, iTunes, Mail, iCal, NetNewsWire, Proteus, iChat AV, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Calculator, Comictastic, Sherlock, Address Book, System Preferences, Terminal, BBEdit, Transmit, CSSEdit, Word, Excel, Mozilla Firebird, Camino, Enigmo, DropZip, iPulse, harddrive, Home folder, Applications folder, TitanTV shortcut, MT Blog Entry shortcut, and the Trash can.
Whew!
I have Proteus, and the 4 native chat clients as I am unable to use Proteus behind my client’s proxy server. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to eliminate the 4 native clients from my dock and use just one application for chatting.
Update: (10.10.2003) All the attention towards the dock got me thinking about the menu bar. In addition to all the goodies I access from my dock I have a dozen or so icons in the menu bar that keep me informed and give me access to other applications. So I started a thread on my site about menu bars.
Okay. I order a lot of stuff online. Books, DVDs, software, linens, you-name-it. No lines, shop when I want, wonderful convenience. That is until some pez-head company finds a way to make this process fail.
One month ago I ordered a keyboard skin for my wife’s iMac. We still don’t have it. After lunch today I called the company and asked if they could track my purchase down for me. It seems it was “shipped” within days of my order. Further discussion uncovered the fact that a signature was required for delivery.
When I asked why, the customer service representative said “to ensure that our customers get their products.” I asked her if I had my package she said, “No.” Hrm.
Guess your plan to ensure that I got my package failed then, huh?
I have to send the company (iSkin) an e-mail requesting that I be allowed to leave a letter to the delivery person indicating that the package can be left without a signature. Give me a break!
The kicker in all of this is that my wife works out of the house… if the delivery person rang the bell or knocked she’d have gotten the package. I suspect that they drove by, and assumed no one was home, and returned the package as not signed for.
It just shouldn’t be this hard to get a $24 piece of moulded plastic mailed to your house. Believe me I’ve had far more expensive and valuable things delivered with no signature woes.
How pez-headed.
Last night Michele and I had the great good fortune to attend a talk given by columnist Molly Ivins. It was invigorating to be in the company of so many like minded people. Ms. Ivins’ talk was at times funny, at time serious. But through out her message was clear: we, the ordinary citizens of the United States are the owners of this country. The elected officials in Washington are just the hired help.
Some tidbits from her talk:
Good mothers will make the best politicians. They know what to do when there are two children on only one cookie. They also know how to handle two children fighting in the back seat. Most of the this nation’s problems and be reduced to one of those two paradigms.
You should have fun above all else when involved in politics. Otherwise you’ll get burnt out long before accomplishing your goal.
Decisions aren’t made by the best or brightest people, but by the ones who show up. Don’t think your vote or voice doesn’t count, it does.
Campaign finance reform shouldn’t be about limiting soft money, but rather about energizing donations from regular citizens so that campaigns can be run without ties to special interests.
As a relative new-comer to the whole politically active scene I was inspired by hearing Ms. Ivins talk in plain English about our political process. I think the most important new understanding for me was learning what it felt like to be among a group of people who are all motivated and headed in the same direction.
As Ms. Ivins would say, “get out there and raise some hell.”
This evening, in my inbox, there was an email notification of some new postings on the Illinois state procurement web site. I pointed my browser at the site and started down through the list of posting. Second from the end was DHS, my client agency.
Downloading the PDF file of awards, I was thrilled, excited, immensely pleased, and relieved to see the name of the company I subcontract through listed. And further relieved to see the same rate as I have been billing.
How do I spell relief? C-o-n-t-r-a-c-t
This morning I sent an e-mail to my wife about the Survivor pool here at work. She likes to participate so I picked a name out of the hat for her too. As the e-mail was written, misconstruing ‘hot’ for ‘hat’ made it sound like I thought her player was hot.
When she teased me about this I had a bit of an over-reaction. After a few minutes of going at it I was able to talk about how it felt to be teased as a child. And worse, to have my parents response be, ’to just ignore it.’ I grew up feeling like I was somehow worthy of being teased, and that there was nothing I could do about it. Furthermore, I should never have any feelings about it afterwards, I should be able to just ignore it and move on to other things.
I quickly learned not to share stories about my having been teased as I wasn’t ever given a place to explore and vent the hurt associated with the tease. I turn all of my hurt feelings inward, and over time this has produced a couple of behaviors that aren’t good for me.
I have some anger about being teased, and I use this anger to shutdown people who tease me. I make it so uncomfortable for them that they move on to other people. Where this hurts me is that I end up feeling cut off and alone, since no one wants to be around someone who is so nasty all the time.
It has also made me wary of sharing bit of my life with others, as I am afraid of being teased. This also leaves me feeling cut off and alone.
Only by facing my issues about having been teased and never having dealt with the aftermath of that teasing, will I be able to let go of the anger and wariness that I developed to survive. Only by giving voice to the old hurts and pains that little Mark experienced can I get rid of these old, and now toxic, emotions.
This is too good to pass up: http://www.ooblick.com/text/tomordor/
Michele and I had a excellent discussion this evening. It started out being about our upcoming mortgage refinance. Both of us are feeling a little apprehensive about this and we needed to air out our feelings. This is only the third mortgage process we have been through.
Buying groceries happens every week so we are comfortable with the process. Buying a car is something we have done more than a couple of times, so we feel fairly secure in that situation as well. Buying, or refinancing, a house is not an everyday occurrence. We both feel a bit out of our depth. Talking about things that have a horizon that extends out 30 years forced us to consider our future.
Where are going? What do we want when we get there? Originally when we moved here our plan was to stay roughly 6 to 9 years. Preparing to refinance the house has made us question our plans. It helped me to refocus on what I want out of my life.
I want to be able to live in mild comfort, and share the remainder of my days with Michele. Where that happens is less important than its happening. Seen in the light of this goal, the stress of refinancing for some temporary financial relief seems less something to get excited about and more something to just move past.
Today, Michele pointed me to this article about the current situation that exits between the Western world, and the Islamic world. It is very important to read this with an open mind. This is the most coherent and cohesive description of the underpinnings to the attacks against this country, and the gulf of misunderstanding that now prevents us from resolving the situation those attacks created.
This is a Religious War by Andrew Sullivan.
Periodically when we clean out our refrigerator we discover various tupperware containers whose contents have become biology science experiments. I spent a couple of hours this morning cleaning out my emotional deep freeze and ridding myself of a particularly smelly bit of emotional tupperware.
In talking to Michele about some of the issues we are both dealing with these days I discovered, quite to my dismay, that I am willing to emotionally manipulate her into taking action where I am afraid to act. This typically happens when I am faced with authority figures. Growing up I was never given a real chance to face authority figures on my own. My parents, through the best of intentions, often stepped in and dealt with situations I had created. Over time I came to expect that someone else would do the heavy lifting, or at least go first down the path.
In dealing with my family now, as and adult, I still fall into the habit of letting someone else go first. When that doesn’t happen I try and manipulate the situation so that I don’t have to be first. This is not something I am overly proud of, and my hope is now that I see it clearly I will be able to stop myself from doing it again.
The process to unearth this putrid bit of tupperware was exhausting. I came into work afterwards and I have felt almost feverish every since I arrived. My thoughts are sharp enough, but my response times are dulled and slow, and physically I feel like I’ve been tossed over a waterfall in a barrel. I did manage to complete a rather lengthy and tedious task on my to-do list so I feel good about the day. But now I am thinking I’d be taking better care of myself if I just went home and took a nap.
One of the few pieces of software that I miss from Windows was the multi-protocol chat client Trillian. This free gem allowed me to be simultaneously connected to the 4 major chat services: AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. Having been an early chat adopter (ICQ: 292099) I have enjoyed using instant messaging for several years now.
Trillian was nice because it worked. Sure there were skins and nifty non-chat related extras included, but at the end of the day it was a solid IM chat client.
On Mac OS X there are two multi-protocol chat clients: Fire and Proteus. I have tried both, and found both to be lacking. Fire has promise, but it doesn’t support any kind of proxy connection ability so I am unable to use it from my work location. Also it has seen no releases or improvements in months.
Proteus has some very nice features, including a tabbed approach to handling multiple chats in one window. Version 2.x didn’t support proxy connections, but the recently released version 3.0 did. However it is a partial solution supporting HTTPS only, and not HTTP. Again, I am unable to connect from my work location.
I think the real problem is that Proteus is almost good enough for all people for all situations. Developers who might want to develop a competing product would have to go a long way to equal what Proteus already has in place. And without competition, Proteus is motivated to step up their production rate.
Proteus would be the tool if they would refocus on pure chat functionality first, and adding extras later. Just because the developer is intimidated by the complexities of HTTP proxy coding is no reason to skip this vital component of a truly good chat tool.
There maybe a bright spot on the horizon in the form of the 2.0 release of Adium. The developers there have a good AIM clone going, and have expressed a desire to include gaim (the open source multi-chat tool) in their code base. Now if they just would add proxy support, they would have the ultimate Mac OS multi-protocol chat tool.