reesesWeb

Let me give you two bits of advice. Let's say that your company is a vendor to one of my clients, and I cause a shitstorm up to my client's (in the upper septile of the Fortune 500) Board of Directors, and up to your CEO, because I discover one of your products sucks fatally about ten minutes after you deliver it. You offer up a solution based on a similar product that you actually wrote instead of licensed from some JV software team. I demand an architectural walkthrough of this other product, at your site, with your engineers, to do due diligence before accepting this proposal, my rejection of which will cause the cancellation of your multi-million dollar contract, and will absolutely cost you hundreds of millions of dollars of lost sales in my market.

The Bar exam is held in the Oakland Convention Center, of all places, rather than some place that might make sense. Oakland is to San Francisco as Tacoma is to Seattle, or Newark is to New York City. It's a short distance away, in sight actually, but it's about 100 times grittier, crime and vandalism is about 100 times more visible, and it's much more obviously a working town, with industrial sounds filling the air. I have no problem walking through the Tenderloin at night, but I would think twice before walking around much here after dark.

I have never ever done something so completely stupid in my life.

I had difficulty going to sleep last night, so I didn't nod off until about 3:00-3:20am, about two hours before my alarm. I normally wake up much closer to my flight time (in this case, 8:22am), but I didn't want to give the already-nearly-terminal Kat the feeling that she'd have to rush. I hate being at the airport ninety minutes or more ahead of the flight time, but I could have slept anywhere at that point.

It's as if I'm prescient.

I never trust the iCal Dock item today, because 17 July is the date displayed by default if iCal is not running. Those of you who are Mac users are nodding right now, and the rest of you are thinking WTF?

See, instead of displaying a generic logo, the iCal application instead displays a misleading date that is wrong at least 99.726% of the time. As you see, the month is written quite small, so the chance of catching it is less than 100%.

Bloody hell I'm sick of web browsers. I've been using the damned things for eleven or twelve years, and they still stink.

I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since at least 2002, and I've been reasonably happy with it. However, when Tiger came out with Safari 2.0, I switched, and I made a real effort to make it stick.

I've been playing with WebKit, trying to get a better, faster, more stable Safari, and for the most part it's ok. Occasionally, I'll get a dud build, but that's the problem fo snarfing from CVS. They don't really have nightly builds going yet, and it's too much for my lazy ass to manage them on my side. That said, Safari is brittle. With PithHelmet and Saft installed, I can easily knock it into a cocked hat, requiring a restart. I have to restart Safari an average of once every two or three days.

I'm sure you've heard of the guy who was arrested and charged for stealing wireless network access. Big deal, we've all done it, right? I may or may not have done it when in the Hyatt in Minneapolis, because some of the rooms have godawful reception of the in-house 802.11b.

Part of it is a problem with access points and their default configuration. People can't lock them because they don't know that there are locks, they don't know how to get through the locks with their computers, and they don't know why they have to deal with locking it since their neighbors are good eggs anyway. I don't think there's a really good way to deal with this, other than shipping access points with a pack of four or five USB dongles.

As I've mentioned before, Kat's taking the California Bar exam in a couple weeks. The California exam is the most difficult of it's kind in the country, with an insanely low pass rate, somewhere around 45%. The New York State exam is of similar difficulty, but with a much higher pass rate. The accepted theory on this is that a lot of "nontraditional" applicants take the test in CA. By nontraditional, I mean people who don't have a law degree.

Thanks for the hotel suggestions in Dublin. I've decided to stay at the Merrion, and not just because of the amazing things they're doing with their website.

I was looking through the offerings at the hotel spa and one service caught my eye.

Stimulating Hip And Thigh Treatment 55 mins €90

An hour of action! This specialised treatment stimulates the circulatory and lymphatic systems, concentrating on the areas of the body prone to "blockages"

Apparently, I can solve the same problem I mentioned earlier by selecting a mailbox, and clicking "Rebuild" under the "Mailbox" menu.

This forces me to ask the question -- why does the object context menu only include a subset of the options available in the application menu of the same name? Why are "Use this mailbox for..." and "Rebuild" the only significant (and very significant when necessary) menu items that are not represented in both places?

Good design, my ass.

(That's my neighbor's car. Envy, envy.)

I'm posting this entry primarily because a) I felt like a slacker for not posting much at all lately, and b) so that I might wedge this bit of info into Google for some other poor bastard.

I've been using UW-IMAP for years. Not because it's a good piece of software -- all software that has come out of the UW is just a little bit...off. I say this with much affection, but having to use UWIN and Pine while at school there led me to believe that any officially-sponsored software had to have some fatal flaw and violate either standards or conventions.

I'll be in SFO the week of 24 July-30 July, and Kat will be consumed by the Bar exam the 26-28 for people who want to grab lunch. Since all my friends are slackers, this shouldn't be a problem. I'm tempted to hit Irish Bank for curry fries, so bring your Guinness jones.

Speaking of Guinness and the Irish, I'll be in Dublin 6 August-14 August, and I'm having some difficulty deciding on a place to stay. Nota Bene has some less-than-great things to say about the Four Seasons (which is apparently badly located, so my no-brainer plan turned out to be exactly that), The Merrion, The Clarence, or The Morrison, so I'm a bit adrift on picking a place to stay. If you have a solid recommendation for a great hotel in Dublin (preferably near the center), I'd love to hear it. Itinerary suggestions that can be comfortably accomodated in a week are also quite welcome.