Category: Uncategorized

((You know what else is (sometimes) great about using a Mac? When one application freezes up, stalls, or otherwise is struggling to keep up with me, it doesn’t necessarily prevent me from using other applications. Read: Mail is stalled and I’m typing this.))

So, I’m waiting on a spinning beach ball in another window (ooh, it’s already done), but I’m nearly done going through about a third of the junk mail left on my computer tonight. Which is huge, and has been a multi-hour job. When I started tonight, I had over 29,800 junk mail, and I’m almost down to 20,000. I’ve tried some new tricks (throw a “to” column in, sort by it, anything not to me is definitely junk), and I’ve been switching up working from the present back and from the oldest junk forward. I’ve found over a dozen emails from humans that I’ve apparently never seen. Sadly, about half of those were from 2004 and 2005, and replying would be … inappropriate. I’m not exactly Ringo Star. Another dozen or two have been automated emails I want to keep (signup emails from all the web 2.0 sites I’ve been joining with details, links, passwords…). And the other ~10,000 were actually junk. Sigh. I’m going to try to keep going until I only have 2006 Junk mail left to go through, then I’ll update this and let you know how many junk mail I have hanging around from 2006 alone.

UPDATE: Alright, well, I got to about 2:30AM, and I had from January ’06 through mid-February ’07 left to go through, which is around 17,000 messages. I guess that means I got nearly half of them.

The hard drives in both of my laptop computers (the PC first, then the Mac) have recently begun acting up, making noises, and causing corresponding slowdowns, stalls, and suchlike problems during normal use. The PC hard drive took a couple days work to get so it hasn’t given me trouble since – just a few bad sectors, apparently. The hard drive in my iBook on the other hand … I tried repairing it, it took just about as long as the PC side – would have taken less, but I forgot to use the right tool for the job – and … well, it helped some, but the drive kept giving negative symptoms… Strangely, one of the symptoms was a sort of quacking sound.

Anyway, it was causing enough problems -and the work I do on the machine is important enough to me- that I finally decided a couple of weeks ago to buy a replacement drive. Shopped a bit, around town and online, and bought a drive today. Spent the last seven hours (so far) backing things up, making a last minute run to Home Depot for a tool I thought was in the house but apparently migrated to Pine, taking the thing apart, putting it back together (you basically have to disassemble 65% of the laptop to get at the hard drive), fiddling with almost a dozen different sizes of very tiny screws, taking it partially apart again because something didn’t fit, putting it back together again, installing a clean copy of Tiger on the drive (did I mention I’d wanted to put this off until Leopard came out, since I like to do clean installs of new OS’s? It couldn’t wait), moving my files back over from the backup… re-downloading most of my apps (I figured clean copies would work better).. trying to find a few that are apparently abandonware and uncached anywhere… Whew.

Well, it seems mostly to have gone well. My uhh… my battery doesn’t seem to fit right any more, which is weird, but it seems to be … well, stuck IN, so … it’s okay? I’m torrenting a new copy of Photoshop (on account of I don’t have thousands of dollars to buy it), but maybe I’ll try Acorn as well… Ooh, that reminds me, I need to find my iWork and iLife discs and re-install them. (Or buy the new versions? Ugh, more money.) Oh well, back to work…

Almost forgot my taxes: I’m a one-person rarely-sells-much business (Note to self: try to be a better capitalist), but I have to file taxes with the State of Arizona and the City of Phoenix every month. When I haven’t sold anything, no problem, pop online, file with state, tick the “no business activity this month” box on the Phoenix form and put it in the mail. When I have sold something (sold a painting last month) it’s a different story.

First I pop online, file with the State, and make an electronic payment – all in less than 5 minutes, sometimes less than one. Then I manually fill out the Phoenix tax form and drive half an hour down to downtown phoenix to stand in line and pay with cash. This is because I don’t have a Business Checking Account, so I can’t write a check (this month it would be a check for $1.21) to mail, and because it is illegal (and silly) to send cash in the mail. Actually, with gas to get there and parking fees, paying my $1.21 in Phoenix taxes will cost me about $5 this month. On the other hand, that’s cheaper than the cheapest monthly fee for a Business Checking Account at my bank, and this is only the second month this year I’ve had sales to report.

It’s annoying. Why can’t I pay the City of Phoenix online, or – better still – pay at the same time I pay the state? This seems reasonable to me because when I file and pay state, I’m actually filing and paying both State and County taxes at once… Sigh.

So, I managed to go three whole days owning an iPhone before the web designer/developer in me woke up and started seriously spewing ideas at me about designing my websites for the iPhone. Which is not to say it hadn’t crossed my mind at all in the last few months or the last couple of days (especially as I’d spent some time viewing my own sites on the device), but rather that it had been vague and …well, not really coming from the part of my brain that speaks Web. Simple stuff like “my iPhone will be a great way to show off my art, not just as a slideshow via iPhoto/the photo app on the thing, but by having an iPhone-centric version of my site that anyone could access from their iPhone.” Actually I’ll admit that at first it didn’t occur to me I could just make a slideshow of my art in iPhoto and use that, no bandwidth required – I do tend to think all-things-web.

But today, this afternoon/evening, after three solid days with the device, my brain started exploring the possibilities that most “iPhone specific” versions of sites seem to be totally ignoring. I won’t get into it now, and if you don’t have an iPhone you may never be able to see it, but it should be pretty awesome.

Erg. As I write this I’m having some trouble getting my iPhone to sync. The problem with moving all my music to the PC with USB 2.0 to sync with is no iPhoto on a PC means no slideshow version of the art (or photo syncing at all, really). Gurgle.

Okay, so I got the iPhone to sync up (or, at least to start – it’s working on it as I type this, and going as slow as I expected, considering it’s USB 1.1), and I’d had it set to sync my contact data – so first it warned me that it was going to move 60+ contacts from the iPhone, and that’s more contacts than I had in address book, and am I sure? And then it pops up to let me know there’s one conflict. So, you know, it’s supposed to be for like which phone number is current, or if you’ve got two last names for someone, which one do you want to keep, okay? (Note: I seem to have named my iPhone “Impossible”.) So here’s what mine showed:

Not having looked at my address book in some years, I had no idea she even had a contact set up in there, and it’s weird (to me) that I would have selected the same field, years apart and on separate platforms, to perform the same non-standard descriptive function. Still, you have to appreciate that I manually entered her contact into the iPhone and manually sought out a field to put that extra piece of sentiment (data) in.