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Carey and I are on a little vacation (today and part of tomorrow). We're staying at the Lodge at Turning Stone Resort and Casino. There's a pool tournament here, so I'll be watching a bit of that, and a casino, some dining, etc. It's good to get away.

This trip was paid for by the sale of one of my old golf clubs, so, that's nice. 🙂

Apple has the QuickTime trailer for Enigmo 2. Unfortunately, the trailer misspells the word "pangea" in the URL at the end. This flaw is in both the online and the "iPod" version of the movie.

I'll write more about the game after I play a little. For now I wanted to email this blog entry to Pangea's support.

That's how the kiddo pronounces "Golf Dome." We went two nights ago after what started out as a hellacious trip to Pizza Hut. She's got a pretty good swing. I could go on about how she's laid off at the top, has a horrible grip, doesn't maintain her spine angle, and so forth but that can wait. My first task is trying to get her to actually look at the ball instead of at Carey and I watching her hit the ball. 😀

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I used to spend hours playing entrepreneur as a child. The culprit? Lemonade Stand. And now it's available for Mac OS X. Woohooo!

That's the title of an entry at MacGeekery. I've long operated as the administrator, but on the urging of this article I've decided to demote myself a bit. After all, what's the harm in entering a username and password now and then? We shall see, because I do a lot of "admin" type duties.

I did implement a few other things, too, including using secure VM, disabling automatic login, checking on my firewall (no changes necessary), and locking the Keychain after five minutes (despite the fact that I already required a password to get back from the screen saver).

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Question: Kasia is asking whether TrackBacks are dead or not, so I'm asking you too: are they?

My Answer: For the most part, they seem to be. That's unfortunate, because TrackBack was great. I still use it quite heavily on this site and The Sand Trap as a way of linking between related articles within the same site. I miss the days of getting TrackBacks from others, following the links and seeing what someone else had to say. Damn SpamBackers.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Can someone with Mac OS X 10.4.5 tell me what version Safari is? I ask because I've been holding off on upgrading because Saft is not yet ready for 10.4.5, it would seem, but if Safari is still 2.0.3 (417.8) it may work.

I'm not sure what's taking the Saft guy so long this time. It's become quite annoying.

Scott Stevenson writes about it here, and I'm not going to give Dvorak the pleasure of another incoming link. The title says it all, and I also don't want to give Dvorak the pleasure of knowing I've wasted any more than this brief slice of time thinking about him.

P.S. Dvorak is just an attention whore. I still don't believe he actually believes all he writes. But he used to know how to get attention. This latest one simply shows you how bad at it he's gotten. The "angry Mac crowd" ain't what it used to be any more, Johnny.

I'm not gonna link to it because it's old news, but how frickin' dumb do you have to be to shoot a man? I was explaining to someone that you can't shoot anyone quail hunting unless one (or both) of two things happen:

1. You don't walk in a straight line.
2. You shoot outside of your safety angle.

In other words, when you're hunting like this, you typically walk in a straight line: _ _ _ _ _ (where each "_" is one person, and they're walking straight up in this case). If you limit yourself to shooting 30° on each side of "straight ahead," there's no way you can shoot anyone. You should also only shoot a certain height and higher, too, if you're hunting with dogs. You don't want to kill your best pointer or flusher (or retriever), after all.

So, one or both of those things had to go wrong. And that's part of the point: guns don't kill people, stupid people (or violent people) kill people. Thankfully, Cheney didn't actually kill the guy, but someone had to have been pretty darn stupid.

I still have an Apple Developer Hardware discount available. It's got to be used by the end of February. It expires March 1, 2006.

Oh, and btw, any Apple Developer account (even the free online ones) can get an Apple hardware discount, an Apple seed key, etc. Almost any asset can be transferred.

Uh, yeah. And that's all I'll say on this blog about that. My contact address is on the right, though, and AIM is a good way to get ahold of me.

This, while being cool and helpful, is also kinda creepy. Isn't it? I mean, just look at this Windows window inside a Mac window. It goes beyond even Virtual PC creepiness.

Regardless, very cool of wisc.edu. I almost typed "misc.edu." That'd be a fun domain name…

Question: What are you doing this Valentine's Day?

My Answer: Nothing special. "Bumpy" is the kiddo's valentine, so he's visiting her at school today. Carey and I don't get much into Valentine's Day.

I talked with a friend at the health center today and he called "V Day" "Venereal Day." She said the need to have one-off sex and thus to increase the raw number of venereal diseases is highest on Valentine's day. In other words, lonely people hook up more on Valentine's Day than any other day of the year (in this person's view, anyway).

So hey, if you're lonely, look on the bright side: you're more likely to get laid today than any other day of the year!

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

A local college, Gannon University, is having a Computer Programming Contest. The contest rules say that "Entries can be written in any programming language," which is great, but they continue the sentence "as long as they are executable on a PC running a LINUX or Windows operating system."

While I'd like to think that they figure programming on a Mac (or with Cocoa) is too easy, I know that's not the case. I am not sure whether they're actively discriminating against Mac users because they don't offer any classes on Mac OS X, because the administrator has a dislike for Macs, because they didn't think of it, because they don't have a Mac OS X machine to test the app on, or what… but I've written a letter to the director of the contest.

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A few years ago when I was taking Flint to the dog park in Delray Beach every day, I'd occasionally meet new people. You're stuck at a dog park for an hour, otherwise bored, so it's gonna happen. Of course, most of the "regulars" knew each other by their dogs, not their first names, but that's neither here nor there…

One day a new person was there. She had a pretty sedate Boxer. Flint and her Boxer started playing as there were very few other dogs there. Seems this gal was in town visiting her parents or her grandparents (the dog was theirs). She had to "go back to California in a week to go back to work." I never really asked her what work was. As she was leaving, she asked if I'd like to hang out later that night. I had other plans (a rare occurrence), so I begged off.

A few weeks later I saw a video on MTV. The gal with her grandparents' Boxer was none other than Willa Ford… and now she's nude in Playboy. D'oh!

P.S. Not a big fan of the butterfly tattoo.

Yet another dope has seen fit to call out Mac OS X's annoyances. Let's have a look.

1. Separating Menu Bar from Window Is Stupid. No, you are if you think the Windows way is in any way better. Location consistency doesn't trump having something infinitely high. Usability studies and common sense tell you that.
2. Apps Don't Really Close When You Close Them. Some do. The ones that don't either take little or no processor time and/or memory or may run tasks in the background. And if you're gonna nit-pick on "annoyances," don't say "when you close them." Say "when you close all of their windows. Duh. And command-Q isn't dangerous, as nearly every Mac app will let you save or cancel if there's a modified document or if it's performing some task.
3. Maximizing Is Broken. No, you're just used to the MDI or whatever it's called on Windows. Apps that need to be full-screen on Mac OS X are full-screen.
4. Alt-Tab to a Minimized App, and It Stays Minimized. Because you may want to make use of cmd-N to make a new window (or cmd-Q, or any number of other menu items and commands. Still, this is the most valid point he's had this far.
5. Too Many Option Keys. It was only ever called "open apple" by dumbasses like yourself. Which ones do you use to right-click? How about the right button on your mouse. Seriously, "too many option keys"? Don't use 'em!
6. No Dedicated Page Up, Page Down, Home, or End Keys. He must be using a laptop, in which case he can simply press the function (fn) key to get page up/down/etc. Or plug in nearly any USB keyboard.
7. Only One Desktop. Uhh, can you do this in Windows? Not that I know of. You can add this - if you'd like - via shareware. I'm fine with Apple keeping this one out of their software. Imagine the number of calls tech support people would get when some mom somewhere can't find that document she was working on because she switched desktops.
8. The Clock Sucks. I guess he hasn't found "View in Window" yet. But c'mon, if "the clock sucks" is in your top 100 annoyances, let alone your top 10, you've got a pretty darn good OS. Especially since, with 30 seconds of research, you can figure out how to change this.
9. iPhoto Sucks. Uhh, okay. That's got nothing to do with Mac OS X. So not only does Mac OS X not annoy him so much he has to talk about the clock, but now he's talking about apps that aren't even part of the OS.
10. Safari Sucks. Not part of the OS. Bzzzzzzt. Sorry, try again.

If I made a list of Windows annoyances, you can darn well bet things like "the clock sucks" wouldn't even come close to making the top ten.