If you can believe it, I’ve never listed anything on eBay before….
To break that streak, I’ve gone ahead and listed two Apple posters. I figured instead of throwing them away, I can spend the 20 cents each, and see if someone else might want them.
Go check out my listings page here. If I can part with them, I might sell some Newton stuff at some point. (That’ll be harder for me to do though – some of it brings back fond memories when I look at it).
Our article on QuickBooks transition to a Cocoa App (among other things) is now up on the ADC web site.
I am not quoted in it. 
I think I was on vacation when they asked for quotes, or they forgot about asking me cause I’m remote.
However, Peggy’s very nice comment about one of the features I wrote last year is pretty cool:
“It’s really a beautiful thing,” says Chang, “to have this as an automatic process in the background. It’s a major benefit for customers who no longer have to copy and paste.”
My favourite thing that we have right now is our build machine stuff, coded by Chad. It sounds easy, but it’s very powerful (although not as powerful as the Newton build farm, but we’ll get there):
The list of Mac-only benefits in QuickBooks for Mac goes on. Here’s a final example: have you ever considered using iChat in your build process? Probably not. But the team creating QuickBooks for Mac did, and they’ve found it to be a useful tool. Here’s what they do. The build server is on the iChat buddy list for the team. An AppleScript process on the server checks for incoming iChat messages. When someone on the team sends a message (any message – “Hey there!”), the server automatically starts the build. The server then uses iChat status messages to reflect the status of the build—in process, complete, and so on. The team can easily keep track of what’s going wherever they are—in a meeting, in a cubicle, or in the Intuit cafeteria.
In any case, if anyone has any technical questions on what we’ve done, feel free to post a comment, and I’ll try to reply.
And go read Keith’s blog, he’s another developer on the team. Far more technical elegant in his blog than I.
I had a very interesting class tonight – I am taking some business classes, to get me out of the house, and help me learn more about the business side of things (vs the technical side).
My current class is International Business, and tonight part of the class we talked about peoples opinions of one another, and how that could affect international business.
The professor, who is the director of emergency response at Northwest Medical Teams, asked me, as a Canadian, what my thoughts on Americans overseas were. And I expect I had the typical response that people have heard, that there is the stereotypical view of an American as a very loud, arrogant person who wants other cultures to bend to their view and beliefs, vs trying to fit in to a particular place or culture.
Another student also related an experience of being in the Louvre, very quietly viewing paintings with other art lovers. And he came upon 4 guys, drinking beer and being loud.. and they were Americans.
I think the problem is that all it takes is one poor experience to reinforce that view of Americans. There are a lot of people in America who are calm, quiet and respectful when the travel overseas. One can only hope that those people will help change that perception at some point in the future.
Over the weekend, my Mail in Tiger started showing that I had 610 messages in my in Box, vs the 2800 or so I really had (ya, don’t harp on me about keeping that many messages in my in Box). The web interface showed the 2800 messages.
I posted a support message to the discussion boards, and some guy mentioned it’s not .Mac’s problem, but a Tiger email problem (which isn’t the case, as I’ve been running with about 2000 messages in my in box for a good 3 years now with no issues).
Now, both the web interface and Mail are showing the 610 messages. I think I just lost about 2200 messages. Which, well isn’t that big a deal, because I kept meaning to clean those out, and I saved the important ones locally on my PowerBook hard drive..
But – it’s going to be really hard to trust .Mac email from now on, you know? If I can lost my oldest 2200 emails, what says I couldn’t lose the last 610 messages? Scary.. it’s the first time ever I’ve thought about switching my email off of .Mac.
Update: It might be my PowerBook. I created a rule to copy all messages to a new folder I created this morning. Tonight when I opened up the PowerBook, the folder in Mail is gone. Weird things like this always suggest to me hardware problems. My disk checks out according to Disk Utility. Thoughts?
Update 2 (3/16/05): I am an idiot. I apologize to Apple and the .Mac team. I had a rule that I was setting up to copy certain messages to a folder after a certain number of days, and I had somehow screwed that up, because I just found the 2200 messages in a folder. Sigh.
We are getting a ton of snow today in Oregon, and about 8 inches last night. At least we are at our new home, which is about 780 feet above sea level.
I’ll try and take some video of the snow, but I’m super sick (I hate being sick, btw), so I might not have the energy to get up again..
Update: I managed to take a video of a bit of the snow. It’s dumping even worse now, after a few hour break. Excuse the bobbles in the video, turns out my 12″ PowerBook can’t handle importing HD video.
How to be an expert: ”
The only thing standing between you-as-amateur and you-as-expert is dedication.
(Via Creating Passionate Users.)
I’ve been reading this web log for a while now, and this post is particularly good. It’s something I need to work on, go read it, slowly and thoughtfully.
