Black Friday shaping up to be a mixed bag

November 17, 2008

The Idaho Statesman reports today that Boise Town Square mall won't open at crazy hours on Black Friday. Last year the largest shopping center in Bosie was among several shopping centers nationally which opened near midnight for sales that were billed as extraordinary. While there were some problems with last year's 1 AM opening it would not take much to imagine that the austere consumer spending reports figure into the decision as well. Read more about Black Friday shaping up to be a mixed bag

Boise needs an Apple store

July 31, 2008

An Apple store is so very desperately needed in Boise. Please Apple if you're listening don't leave us stuck between long drives and our unsatisfactory local choices. Sure we have Boise Mac Life which looks like a great store. When you look a little deeper, though, the advice has been suspect (should one really wait six months to start using Leopard?), the prices are inflated (the "cash discount" price is the list price and the list price shown is higher) and the service leaves us wanting.

Earlier this week we returned home and the MacBook hard drive promptly died. When it came back today it had the wrong OS on it -- a problem I've never encountered with Apple's service directly. Sure it had a nice embroidered Marware keyboard cover, but the time I'm left looking at that waiting to reinstall the operating system on a blank disk just so I can then do the file recovery is making me not like it so much. (Though I sense there are some Drupal keyboard covers in the offing).

Trip down memory lane

February 7, 2008

Reading through my RSS queue this morning this set of photos sent me back to days of yore. Instantly I was transported from the modern hotel lobby to the Laser 128 sitting in my childhood home and all of the amazing things we managed to do with AppleSoft.

Software mashups get all the glory

January 31, 2008

Certainly software mashups are more prevalent but it seems like cool hardware mashups get less coverage than they should.

Problems combining PDF's in Automator in 10.5

November 25, 2007

Recently getting into job looking mode has led me to brush off the Automator routines for combining PDF documents into one document. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5 (or 10.5.1). A Apple Discussion Forum post suggests I'm not the only one encountering the problem.

When you run the action in Automator it works like a charm. When running the action as a plug-in in the Finder the action swirls for a moment and then nothing happens. From my testing it does not seem to matter what is done with the output of "Combine PDF Pages" nothing happens from there on.

Apple to ship macs with Windows installed 'very soon'

November 8, 2007

It is a day early for Friday funnies but this email from Examsoft today was too good to pass up:

Dear Administrator,

SofTest was certified to run on Mac OS X running Windows XP with the beta version of Boot Camp in the spring of 2006. August 31, 2007 marked completion of our first complete academic year (9/1/06 - 8/31/07) supporting this platform. Over this past academic year no issues have been reported to us running SofTest on this platform with either XP or Vista. We purchased the new Leopard OS (with the now supported version of Boot Camp) and have tested SofTest running XP and Vista on this platform without incident. SofTest is now certified to run on Leopard through Boot Camp. We will continue to support SofTest's use on this platform moving forward.