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Rest in peace, Digital Bill

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of William Douthett, much better known as Digital Bill from Wizards of Technology. I had the pleasure to meet Bill at Macworld each of the last two years, where he interviewed me for a Wizards podcast. While I can't say I knew Bill well, he struck me as a kind, intelligent, and very Mac-knowledgeable person who also loved technology in general -- and he clearly loved to talk about both subjects. Bill died last Friday of a heart attack at the young age of 47.

As I'm approaching that age in a few years, the news of Bill's passing had quite an affect on me this morning. It served as a reminder that I need to get my butt out of this seat long enough each day to get my exercise done, to try to eat better, and to be thankful for each day I have to spend with my wife and daughters. As someone much wiser than me once wrote (and I'm paraphrasing badly), don't take today for granted as you can never be sure you're going to have a tomorrow.

Rest in peace, Bill; you will be missed greatly by your friends, family, and acquaintances. (There's a memorial fund donation button on the Wizards of Technology page in case you'd like to donate to help cover his funeral arrangements; any excess donations will be given to a charity.)

-rob.



The Steve and Phil show, circa 1999

I don't normally post links to interesting things on other sites as stories here, just because I figure there are about 210 other places out there that already do just that. But someone sent me a link today to an absolutely amazing video from Macworld New York in July of 1999.

Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller were demoing AirPort, and the way they did it simply must be seen to be believed. I would have lost a lot of money had someone bet me that someone did what they did in this clip--"no way, he's not going to do that!" But, as you'll see, he did.

I had no idea they were that wild and crazy "back in the day..."



The dealer does the right thing

  • Auto

Here's the promised update to the bad auto service call. I took the car back to the dealer last Friday to look at. I was glad I happened to have taken a picture of the passenger seat after purchasing the car--I printed that, as well as new pictures I took of the damaged area, and took printouts with me. The hole in the seat wasn't even an issue; he saw clearly that it was new based on the photos, and they gave me no grief. On the stain, he asked me how I knew it was from the service, as it could have happened any time. I then ran my finger through it, and showed him the still-moist residue that came up with it. That was the end of that; they agreed to repair the seat for no charge.

Repairing perforated leather is far from simple, from what I understand. Our dealer outsources such repairs to a company that comes in once a week, so the car went back to the dealer this morning. When I picked the car up this afternoon, I was duly impressed--although I can see where the repair was made, it really takes a big photograph to make it obvious. From any distance at all, it looks completely normal. Compare the images below; the one on the left is the damaged post-service shot; the one on the right was taken tonight, about 20 minutes ago.

after-small  after-big

Certainly at that size, the repair is invisible. Click the image on the right, though (caution - huge image!), and you can see the fix. It's not nearly that obvious in reality; the flash and close up really bring it out. I was amazed they were able to repair it that well--especially given the age of the leather seats. They also cleaned it up quite nicely. If I look very closely, I can see just a small bit of remaining discoloration, but nothing like what was there before, and there's no more residue when I run my finger across the area.

So thank you, Beaverton Toyota, for doing the right thing, and doing it well. The fact that they have a to/from free shuttle service made taking the car back about as painless as possible, too. Fun fact: the shuttles (Toyota Sienna minivans) serve a 10-mile radius, and they have two of them. Through September, they've racked up a total of 65,000 miles doing nothing but short local-hop round trips!



This is going to take not quite as long…

Back in February, I wrote about the incredibly lengthy time estimate that Stuffit gave me for an expansion. Well, it happened again today, but with QuickTime:

estimate

I was thinking about including a 1920x1200 movie capture of Redline Racing in my Pick of the Week writeup, so I had captured a couple minutes of the high-res stuff--the raw movie file was 8.6GB in size, in fact! After it opened, I had trimmed it down and then wanted to convert the format. When the export dialog appeared, the above was the initial estimate. It should be noted that at "only" 1,491,308 days, this is about 84 times faster than the Stuffit expansion!

What I also found humorous was the "7 minutes" bit -- it's not enough that I wait over 1.4 million days, but don't forget about those extra seven minutes! And yes, the dialog cleared itself up (unlike the Stuffit dialog, which never changed), and the actual export took only five minutes or so. In the end, I chose not to use the movie, but the funny dialog was worth seeing.



Milestones…

For the first time in 158 days, I had a full night's sleep last night. Yes, our daughter Erica (at just over five months) slept from 8:30pm all the way through to 6:30am. Even though I typically wake up quite early, I had forgotten just how much more restful sleep is without one or two wakeup calls in the middle of the night. Ahhhh.

We were quite lucky with Kylie, as she was sleeping through the night within three months, and we had lots of help around for much of that. Not quite the same experience this time around!

-rob.



How not to buy a new inkjet printer…

The other day, I was trying to print some shots of our kids on our Epson Stylus Photo 890, and having nothing but issues--first it was clogged print heads, then it was trailing dots and splats at random spots on the page. I literally cleaned and aligned the heads probably 15 times over the course of a couple hours, trying to get a reasonable print out of the thing.

Finally, I gave up, and decided to lower my blood pressure by blasting over to my favorite local independent Mac dealer, The Mac Store, to check on the availability of the new 80GB iPod (more on that in another article). While I was there, grousing due to the iPods not yet being in stock, I happened to notice a Canon Pixma iP6600D (say that three times quickly!) sitting there, with a gorgeous borderless 8.5x11 photo glossy printout sitting there in its output tray. Of course, every sample print from every printer in any store looks great. With my Epson troubles fresh in my mind, I was definitely tempted, though, by the beauty of the print staring me in the face. I wanted to buy the thing, take it home, and beat the Epson to a pulp with a rubber mallet, basically.

But I had done zero research on any replacements for our Epson (which we had purchased over five years ago, I learned later when checking our records). And I'm not normally one to just purchase without doing the requisite research...what to do, what to do. So I moved over to a new 24" iMac (oooh, very nice machine!) and brought up Google. Canon Pixma iP6600D went into the search box, and up popped the results. That's when I was hit with the obvious stick--the first match was for a review at, of all places, Macworld. My employer. Duh! I didn't even think to look at Macworld's review section first.
[continue reading…]



When good service goes bad…

  • Auto

Don't you just hate it when you get unexpected surprises after having a vehicle serviced? Consider for a moment my MCV (that'd be short for Midlife Crisis Vehicle), a 13-year old Toyota MR2 Turbo. I owned a couple of these cars earlier in my single-guy existence, and I recently found an amazingly pristine 1994 example at a reasonable cost. After some discussion with my wife, she OK'd the purchase, and I've had it in the garage for a couple of months now. For a car with 100K miles on it, it's in great shape--no dents, door dings, rust, or interior damage. Looking at it, you'd never guess the vintage or the mileage; the previous owners were meticulous in their care, it seems. About the only thing wrong with it was the airbag warning light on the dash was constantly lit.

So I finally made an appointment with our local dealer to get that problem fixed, and to do some other routine maintenance activities (I had them give the car a good once over, as it was its first trip to service under my ownership). They had the car for two days, waiting on a part to fix the airbag problem; they called me tonight and let me know everything was done and running fine.

Just before closing, I got to the dealership, paid the bill (ouch), and started driving the car home. As promised, it was running fine, and all seemed good. It was then I noticed that the previously-pristine interior was no longer. The passenger seat, whose leather was in showroom condition, now sported an oily stain and a puncture wound! Below, the image on the left is the "before" shot; on the right, the "after" shot I took tonight. Click either image for the large version, which will make the damage plainly apparent.

before-small  after-small

The "before" image is a bit blurry, as I wasn't intentionally shooting the passenger seat when I took those pictures. Still, it's plain to see that there wasn't a puncture in the leather, and it's somewhat obvious that there's no stain in the "before" shots.

Needless to say, I'm quite irked with the dealer at the moment. I called and left a polite but firm message with my service advisor, who had seen and commented on the quality of the interior when I dropped the car off. Hopefully they'll do the right thing tomorrow and agree to have the seat repaired or replaced as necessary. I realize the car is nothing but a physical object, but when I pay someone to provide a service, I clearly don't expect that they will damage other things in the process of handling whatever the original scope of work covered. To me, that screams of a lack of attention to detail, and it makes me quite scared about what other "little things" they may have overlooked in working on the car.

No real moral to this story, other than to always carefully inspect your vehicles after a service stop--preferably with the service advisor at your side, making sure things are as you expect them. I'll post an update (not that any of you necessarily care, but I feel better venting about this kind of thing! :) ) once I hear back from the dealer tomorrow. Grrrrrr.





When good cache goes bad…

OS X uses a multitude of cache files--as an example, my user's Library/Caches folder contains 164 top-level items, most of which are folders containing more folders. In total, there's presently 1.18GB of cached data, just for my user. Wow.

Most of the time, this is a Good Thing, as it makes the system more responsive, as it's quicker to retrieve something from cache than to calculate or redownload it. However, it can also be troublesome at times. Like this morning, in my case.

I fired up Mail, and despite the fact that it was running perfectly last night, it was glacial. Folders took multiple minutes to open. Moving a message was a 15 minute process, if it worked at all. Even worse, though, was that when Mail was having its fits, the Finder was completely unresponsive. I could click on some folders, but others would bring the Finder to the land of permanent spinning rainbows. Trying to mount a disk image resulted in more spinning rainbows.

So I restarted, and tried again--it had been quite a while since the last restart. But I had the exact same symptoms. Unresponsive Mail and flakey Finder. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if I'd changed anything or not, even though I was positive I hadn't touched the system while sleeping :).

Then, after another restart and repeat of issues, I thought I'd try deleting Mail's cache folders. Inside my user's Library/Caches folder, I opened the Mail folder and deleted everything, then emptied the trash. Launched Mail again, and...voila, it was perfect! Speedy as its ever been, and the Finder didn't have fits while Mail was running. Everything was basically back to normal--all because I deleted a series of temporary files that are supposed to do nothing more than make data access quicker. Go figure!

This is the first real cache trouble I've had on OS X, but it is a relatively common source of issues for others. Since cache folders exist in many spots (your user, the top-level Library folder, and the System folder), you might want to look into one of the cache cleaners, such as Cache Out X or Tiger Cache Cleaner (among many others), to make the job simpler.

I think I may add a general cache emptying routine to my crontab, just to make sure it happens somewhat regularly, given how much trouble this one incident caused.