My Halloween princesses
Posted on October 31, 2003
Filed Under Kids | 1 Comment
The girls had a Halloween parade at school today. All of the Kindergarten-2nd grade kids got dressed in their costumes and paraded through the halls for the 3rd-5th graders and assembled parents. Yes, I know. I have to get Laini’s bangs trimmed but she keeps fighting me on it.
I don’t remember really getting into Halloween as a kid. I remember throwing costumes together and trick or treating with my friends while it was still light out. But I went a lot further away from home than I let my girls go now. Now the kids are making decisions about what they want to be months in advance. Emily made her decision in the store after seeing this Bratz angel costume. Laini has been into Swan Lake Barbie a lot recently, so she knew exactly what she wanted and would accept no substitutes.
Thank you, MacMall
Posted on October 30, 2003
Filed Under Misc. | Comments Off
About 10 days ago I placed my order with MacMall for the Adobe CS Standard upgrade. It’s priced at $549, same as on Adobe’s site and elsewhere. I ordered with MacMall rather than Adobe to get overnight shipping for only $10 (and not have to pay the tax immediately). Today Macintouch pointed out that Amazon is selling the suite upgrade for 5% off ($523.99). I called MacMall and spoke to Jay, who confirmed that my order was due to ship next week. I told him about Amazon’s price and asked if they could match it, otherwise I would have to cancel as a $26 savings is not trivial. Jay put me on hold a few minutes and then came back and said that they had adjusted the price for me so I’m paying the same $523.99.
I’m blogging this for two reasons. First, to say “thanks” to MacMall for doing the right thing. My online order history with them goes back to 1998 and I’ve generally been pleased. And two, to point out the good deal at Amazon and ask if you do order to use this link to credit Macintouch. It’s a good site and they deserve the referral credit.
A ridiculous argument against web standards
Posted on October 30, 2003
Filed Under Design | Comments Off
This “article” is good for a laugh. He just doesn’t get it, and probably never will. Allow me to rant for a minute.
bq. Are they any benefits to using a full CSS integrated solution?
No. There is no real benefit when you start to replace table tags with DIV tags and attempt to control it all in CSS.
Web Standards (XHTML/CSS) is not, I repeat, not about replacing table tags with div tags. It’s about separating presentation from content. As soon as you can wrap your brain around that, then the stupid arguments like the one this guy raises are over. Maybe it’s because I come from a print background that it’s easy for me to understand. In print design, a client gives you copy, usually in Word. Then you to go InDesign (or QuarkXPress or PageMaker or whatever) and you set up your page. You set the margins, colors, type styles, headings, background graphics, etc. and everything else that separates a designed page from a Word file. Then, when your master sheets are in decent working order you bring in the actual text and massage as necessary. Same thing for the web. How a page looks is different than what it says. How it looks should *enhance* what it says, not drive content or worse, be confused with content.
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Backup 2.0
Posted on October 30, 2003
Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off
I’m sitting here composing my thoughts on another entry and Backup 2.0 auto-launched to do its daily backup. I have it doing a backup every morning at 9:30 am of selected files to my external drive. Once a week or so I burn a CD of the really important files.
I noticed the icon bounce in the dock as the app started, and in about 30 seconds it disappeared. Uh oh, I thought. Something went wrong. Nope, it really managed to scan over 6 GB of data and copy what was changed/added yesterday in less than a minute. Sure enough, I took a look at the “G5backup” file on my external drive and everything I did yesterday was there (you can “Show Package Contents” and see everything in standard files). Not bad, and I think it’s working even faster than it did last week under OS X 10.2.7.
New Panther feature: Address Book
Posted on October 28, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | 1 Comment
Here’s something new in Panther I haven’t seen documented elsewhere: Address Book auto completion! When you create a new address book entry, the application now remembers previous fields (except for phone numbers). Type a few letters and get a matching list, as shown below. This is the way other PIMs work and was sorely needed in Apple’s app:
