Monday to Thursday?
So you’ve gone to call us here at plusminus and it’s a friday, you swoosh on over to the contact us page, you read the number, then directly underneath there’s a weird thing
Office hours: 9am-5pm Monday to Thursday
So what’s up with the no working on Fridays? Is it because I’m slack, is it because I’m are only doing this this part time, why why why? Well, to tell you the truth, it’s to balance out my life. Work has a habit of taking over more of lives than it should, and a large part of the work I do is outside of plusminus for the Uniting Church. The problem, of course, in starting my own business is that free work which used to be relegated to the out-of-hours and snuck in the actual-hours at work, can now stop me getting actual work done. So the cunning plan is this: Monday through Thursday I work work work and ignore everyone who’s not paying me money with the useful answer of “let’s talk on Friday”. Outside of work hours I live my life with my family – good idea. Fridays, I ignore everyone who pays me money, and do everything I wish to volunteer my time for.
So far, so good, I’ve only had to work one Friday and it was mainly due to some Friday work seeping into a Tuesday. Let’s hope it works out – I can say I’m probably getting just as much work done Monday – Thursday than I would Monday – Friday, and my after-work time is far less stressed.
AppleTV + Movie Rentals = Good
So not long ago for my birthday I was fortunate enough to receive an AppleTV or TV for those of you on a mac. This was an odd device to own in Australia due to Apple’s lack of iTunes video content in our continent, but nonetheless, I wanted one and quite happily got it. Then, the realisation that video podcasts were all I was ever going to watch dawned upon me.
Now I’m all for Good News Week and Diggnation, but there’s really only so much short form content you can watch and I found myself really wanting more. I looked into hacking the little thing, but all seemed too complex especially considering that I wanted a clean box for updates etc. when they come from Apple.
Then – then – the miracle happened, Australian TV shows on iTunes – this would be great, this would be marvellous, I could subscribe to season passes to all my favourite shows that we watch all the time (which admittedly isn’t many), so I crank open iTunes and look. But hang on, I’m not a 5 year old – why is 99% of this content Disney cartoon crap? Where’s the good shows? Where’s the good AMERICAN shows even? So TV shows = let down.
Fast forward a few months, this last week Apple decided to allow us poor Australians to have Movie purchase/rentals. Sceptically I looked at the list of movies – and quite frankly, they’re not that half bad. There’s nothing I’d purchase, but sure, I’d rent a bunch of them and surely this is easier than going to Blockbuster. And right I was, last night for the first time the Wife and I sat down, fired up the AppleTV and clicked our way to movie watching.
This AppleTV thing is going to catch on – and it’s going to be awesome. And even if it doesn’t catch on, stuff the rest of you, I love it.
You’d better believe this is true.
Who would have thought
Alas, my hands – even for a young chap like me – are certainly not what they used to be. All this computerin’ has sent them to hell and back and thus, some days I can barely type. Which is a problem, typing being what I do.
Of course, I try to pay attention all day as to when my hands get better or worse, and it would seem that the keyboard I was using, the lovely (semi-retired) Apple Bluetooth Keyboard has being partly at fault. It has the classic heavy ‘kuthenka’ keys happening and that is where the problem seems to be. You see, my hands have become accustomed to the new little ‘chiclet’ keys of the new Apple keyboards and now they’re weak.
So I stole my wife’s keyboard today, and wham, two websites and a blog post later – hands still working.
A great article from A List apart in regards to deaf people, Deaf people, and the internet with an especially useful tidbit that most of us forget sometimes:
- Captioning is the transcription of speech and important sound effects.
- Subtitling is a written translation of dialogue
Time Machine + Time Capsule, thank God
.!.
Last Friday I had the unfortunate experience of my hard-drive frying itself. Now, this isn’t exactly something I haven’t experienced before, but it is the first time I’ve been threatened with downtime and data loss since going solo in the land of employment. Needless to say it’s a jarring experience that I will, choice being involved of course, choose to never have again. The only shining light in the entire process was the Time Capsule sitting in the corner of my office.1
Since getting the Time Capsule (a wonderful birthday present from my wife) I have been understandably sceptical about its core function of continuously backing up, wirelessly, from my laptop, all the time – with the easy ability to restore things when I stuff up. Only having to test its abilities once with an accidental email account deletion, when my hard-drive flopped on Friday I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the possibilities of getting my data back from it fully.
But, as I write this, my machine is essentially back to normal. All I had to do was, grab a new hard-drive, have a friend help me get it in my MacBook Pro, whack in the Leopard installer disk, pick the “restore from backup” menu item and then go to bed. Woke up the next day and my machine was looking at me as if to say “What? How long was I asleep?” – everything back to normal.
Also to note, anyone who’s having an issue with their Time Capsule backups becoming “Read only” which mine did a few weeks ago (and thankfully I fixed this before my ‘event’ happened) – the solutions can be found here: Time Capsule errors | Luckyspin.org.
1. The uselessness of the location of my backup being sitting essentially next to the machine that it’s backing up can be a topic of discussion at another point in time.
