Aldoblog

When I went optical I thought my problems with cat hair and other gunk getting into my mouse would be over. Today, while checking out why clicking and scrolling had started acting weird, I learned different.

Just this last week I had two great customer service experiences, with Speakeasy and Bare Bones Software. With all the horrible customer service most companies provide, via outsourced call centers or worse, the great companies deserve to be noticed and praised, and patronized.

So, with the end of the first half of the year, I thought break my silence by taking another look at the level of spam flowing into my mailboxes, and how well my tools are coping with it.

With Q1-2004 coming to a close, I thought I’d take a look at my spam situation, which has been escalating out of control. Since 12:01am January 1, 2004 I have received 22,255 spam messages via e-mail. That’s more than 250 a day, every day, for the last 89 days. Earlier in the year, the daily average was lower, which means that in the last couple weeks it’s gone well above 250 per day. In spite of these numbers, I have two things that give me hope.

Last week we had a reunion of our group that went to Tequila. (Actually, it wasn’t so much a reunion as a reenactment; five people passed out at the host’s house, two of them were Rochelle and I.) A couple of days before the party, I put together a terrific DVD of the trip, using photos from all the participants, and iPhoto and iDVD for Mac OS X.

When choosing which of the dozen mobile phones offered by Verizon that we should get as our new phone, I spent (too?) much time researching the issue. I had a few criteria that were important, but making the final selection came down to just one thing: full connectivity with my Mac.

Rochelle and I recently tested the early waters on mobile phone number portability, by switching our mobile phones from AT&T Wireless to Verizon Wireless while keeping our existing mobile numbers, in the third week that it was possible to port the numbers.

I woke up this morning at 3am, and after 30 minutes of trying to relax back into sleep, I gave up, and started thinking again about where to find my errant ADB cable. A few minutes later the answer came to me, plain as day.

So I am, as part of my effort to get rid of crap around the house, working on resuscitating my old Mac, a Beige G3, in order to sell it. The system has been sitting in the corner of our office, completely disconnected. Indeed, I’d unplugged everything from it, and stored the cables, mouse, keyboard, etc., elsewhere. Heh, to reduce clutter. Now there’s just one piece I can’t find…

A deceptively frivolous article on MacDevCenter has inspired a lot of people to show their Docks in public. (The Dock is an application launcher / current applications list / application switcher in Mac OS X, analogous to the Taskbar + Start Menu in Windows.) I noticed a particular commonality among many of the Docks posted, and wanted to ask about it. But before I asked people about their Docks, I thought I ought to show mine.