Tao of Mac

Jan 19th 2005 · 3 min read

Workshop Day

This hasn't been a particularly good day productivity-wise, with both halves taken over by vendor meetings/workshops/demos. I can usually take this in stride, but not being fully cognizant of portions of the subject matter (during the morning) and having seen it all before umpteen times (during the afternoon) tends to degrade both your attention span and your patience threshold. On top of it all we're nearing evaluation time, and this comic was a bit too near the mark, too.

Michael was kind enough enough to mention , and my inbox is seeing quite a bit of traffic (I will try to reply to everyone, I promise). My thanks to all that have tried to help me so far - there's no solution in sight yet, but I guess I can't do much at this point but wait.

English readers can check the comments on Michael's post and Nuno's views on the whole matter. I'm sure there are plenty other portuguese users that share our views at this point.

Ah well. In an effort to restore normality, here are a few news items that I managed to notice out of the tremendous backlog I have by now:

  • Delicious Library was updated. One of my suggestions (right-click context menus) is part of the changes. I haven't scrolled through the full list yet (just packed the file away for the weekend).
  • Loads of people sent me links to this colocation service. The Cobalt Qube reborn? (And yeah, I know that the Qube was for SMEs and the RAQ was the hosting platform, but cubes are so much neater...)
  • Loads more sent me links to stories about delays, hacks and inside shots, but the most interesting thing is that I was apparently linked in from posts discussing European pricing of the as well (the spool, again, knows better - and figures VAT in). And yes, retailers did say "wait until Easter or so" when I asked. I have half a mind to call them all up again and do a neat summary table of the results, but this looks like it's going to be one hell of a work week... Maybe someone else here in Portugal will do it and post the results.
  • It turns out that I was wrong when I mentioned Forbes as the source for the fact that the G5 does not ship with a "world" power supply in the US. It was actually the Wall Street Journal, and Aaron (one of my current correspondents) had already hinted at it. The article also mentions HP's recent "region coding" attempts for print cartridges (which are sure to get it into trouble again here in the EU), and a few other interesting aspects of global manufacturing.
  • Of more interest to me was SonyEricsson's 28% rise in profits, which was a bit shy, actually. I was hoping they would do better, but their phone launches in Europe did tend to be a bit on the late side (mental note: try to find their annual report this weekend).
  • People are, apparently, starting to complain about web-based aggregators that re-publish RSS feeds. My take on it? I wouldn't like people inserting banner ads in my RSS feed for their sole profit. AdSense provides me with pocket change, but I can offset it against my (puny) site maintenance "costs". It kind of "makes up" for the time spent around my design tweaks. But using my RSS content (which does not have advertising, by the way) to increase their pocket money? Sorry, that's just not right.
  • OpenOffice is not going to have an Aqua port. Period. Okay, so I guess it's either , (which I dub "Slomo Office") or... . Guess what everyone's going to pick? (By the way, my copy is on its way - at least sells software in Portugal...)
  • Oh, you mean Toshiba never heard about and ? Tsk tsk. A major example of utterly clueless marketing aimed at tech geeks - anyone who has the slightest interest in doing stuff like that has already figured it out for ages (I've also figured out that even with speeds a small phone screen is useless to control a PC, but that's another story).

And no, I won't comment on these photos. People forced to do this at such an early age must have very strong reasons...

And now, off to read something to clear my head and get in my usual five hours of sleep - I have a reasonably important presentation to review and deliver tomorrow, and the best way to go about it is to forget it exists until I arrive at the office...