Last week I bought and installed Office 2008 on our new iMac … and immediately had a 400+ MB download to update it. Tonight I started up PowerPoint … and am immediately confronted with a 158 MB to update it again.
I can only assume that Microsoft screwed up something in the initial update horribly, and needs to rectify its error with yet another massive update.
Not cool!
To date I have spent more time updating Office 2008 than actually using it.
I’m back in the office after a week’s vacation, and after clearing a mini-mountain of email and other assorted work, I feel energized.
Oddly, over the past 5 years I have never actually taken all my allotted vacation time … but I intend to this year. The benefits are just too great, and the costs too high, to take less. I’m not only talking about the most important reasons to take vacations: spending time with family and friends. I’m also talking about the renewed vigor and changed perspectives that you can take back with you to the office.
Resolution: to take my vacation time in the future. (I have another 2 weeks coming up later this year.)
On a related note, a vacation-oriented quote I recently saw:
If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Vacation is also a valuable time to sort out priorities and goals …
Gotta love this new quote of the day:
“Pardon him … he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
- George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
Saw it on Bruce Byfield’s blog …
Did you catch the Mac start-up sounds in WALL-E?
Teresa and I took the kids to see WALL-E last night (great movie, paradigm-breaker, lots of fun). One particularly interesting part for long-time Mac users are the Mac start-up sounds that accompany WALL-E’s and EVE’s reboot cycles. Notcot has already noticed that EVE is an iPod of the future (can’t wait to get that incredible laser attachment) but you never would have guess that the rusty, clunky WALL-E runs Mac OS X.
There weren’t wholesale signs of recognition among the crowd in the theatre that I could recognize, but I’m sure that the levels will rise in future years …
My son Ethan’s baseball team won a city-wide championship today, ending their current season and extending a unbeaten win streak to three complete years.
The game was tough – the Mariners were down 8-1 and 12-5 in early innings, but managed to tighten up the defense and tune up the bats to squeak out a nail-biting heart-stopping 14-13 win in the final inning.
Richard Schorn (second from left in the back) and I coached the team this year, and the team probably needed more coaching today than any time in the past year. Winning is great but it doesn’t always prepare you for challenges, and the kids were having a tough time early, getting down on themselves for playing beneath their potential. But they pulled it out in the mid to late innings and won the game with a RBI home run.
Ethan had a good game, getting on base 3 out of 4 at-bats, with a couple RBI.
The most amazing stat is the 3 solid unbeaten seasons. That’s hard to believe, even for me – and I’ve help coach the team all those years. Somehow, we’ve always found a way to win. It’s been a good run, but it’s now over: next year all teams get broken up and new teams will be formed.
Congrats Ethan and the rest of the Mariners!
You gotta love this quote:
“It’s so disappointing,” said Linda Wilmesherr as she peered through binoculars at water pouring through a gap that appeared to be 30 feet wide. “With all the guns in this county, couldn’t we kill a muskrat?”
The poor woman is of course dealing with the possibility of her house disappearing in floodwaters …
Teresa, the kids and I just got home from the Apple store in Pacific Centre, where we picked up a new iMac.
First impression: wow! The screen is amazing and the speed is great.
Second impression: Apple Migration Assistant failed to assist, and all our user accounts, data, and applications are still on the old iMac.
Time to do some research …
I’m supposed to be in Hartford tonight prepping for a DVD shoot … but thunderstorms have closed the airport.
Which means I’m cooling my heels in a Toronto airport hotel (not literally, it’s muggy here) until tomorrow …
The cameras will have to wait.
I just bought the G4010 and am having the exact same problems as this poster on Apple’s support forums … which leads me to believe that the G4010 is not actually Mac compatible, as HP claims it is.
1. If I power-up the scanner while the iMac is running, the mouse pointer freezes, and the only way out I have found is to restart the computer. Bluetooth mouse or USB mouse are the same. This is very irritating.
2. If I leave the scanner powered up all the time, whenever I wake the iMac from sleep it causes the HP scanner application to launch and a blank scan is started. I have to abort the scan and quit the application. However, I use the scanner only occasionally, so really don’t want to leave it powered up.
And, of course, that HP’s software is a steaming pile of you know what.
When I see this Ford skyscraper ad, I’m assuming that mousing over the ad will show me something about the people.
After all, it says “rollover to see their stories.” So that’s the expectation I have – that I can find something out about two real people who really bought a Ford who really had some experiences with it and really are telling them to me.
It looks like an instance of social media marketing: marketing that uses connecting web technologies and real stories from real people to demonstrate how a product or service might be something that I might want to buy.
So far so good …
But when I rollover the ad and see this, everything changes:
Suddenly I feel misled, even lied to. Instead of a story, I’m looking at an ad. A very standard, old-school ad.
Score -1 for Ford.
The moral: don’t mislead customers, and most importantly, don’t raise expectations of A but provide B.
(Unless, of course, B is obviously better and more wonderful in every way than A. And even then, be careful.)
I feel good. Really good.
Reason? I worked out last night … even though it was a crazy, crazy day with a full 9 or so hours at work, an hour coaching baseball for my son’s team, and a coffee with friends.
I think it was Penelope Trunk who said it a few months ago … something along the lines of: you should work out if you want to be successful in your profession? Why? Most successful people work out.
That’s a correlational as opposed to a causal relationship. But it’s still significant.
Feeling better, feeling stronger, feeling more alert, just generally feeling physically better is going to translate, most of the time, to acting better, performing better, and simply being better.
I haven’t been able to work out regularly lately due to a crazy sports schedule (I signed up for two ice hockey teams – big mistake) and a neck injury (probably unrelated but its hard to tell). But in the past 5 days I’ve worked out twice, and I feel incredible already.
Here’s to the gym!
I would like someone to create a new Facebook app, based on the myriads of Likeness quizzes. But instead of likenesses based on fruits, movies, books, cars, friends, or anything else, it would be based on the degree to which you dislike likeness quizzes.
Bah. Humbug.
The flowers were blooming last Sunday at Blue Heron Reserve in Chilliwack, BC.
Here’s one that caught my eye …
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
