Last week I learned a lot about Mac OS X just by noticing what Randal was doing while we were in meetings. Someday I want to famous enough be able to openly surf the web in meetings and have the client thank me for it. And, I realized, he does things differently than I do, and a lot of them get the job done better.
This situation is described in The Social Life of Information. We do not learn everything by reading books---we learn most of what we know because we see other people do or say it. Since you cannot sit in my office and watch me (that's by policy, not geography :), today I kept a list of the things I picked up on.
I started making a list of ten things, but then I wanted to throw in a bonus item, and then I lost control.
- My use.perl reader gets confused with unicode because Sean Burke has fancy looking quotes in his entries. Those explain the rest of the warnings I get from Text::Autoformat.
- Running while it is snowing isn't bad---it's the day after when it is icy that I should worry about breaking an ankle.
- If I am going to run while it's cold, I should route my Camelback hose down my sleeve to keep the water in the tube warm.
- AppleScript can talk to other machines with
tell application "Foo" of machine "Bar"
- RealOne Player will not accept remote AppleEvents (as documented), so I have to find another way to do that.
- GeekCruises is leading a digital photography cruise to Alaska. Imagine going on vacation and beign able to get expert help with your spiffy new camera. Sadly I already have plans.
- Derrick Story's Digital Photography Pocket Guide has some great tips.
- O'Reilly's ThinkGeek gift shop is public, and it does not have the Gone Green logo (yet).
- My kitten has learned how to open cabinets by standing on the microwave. So that's how that's happening.
- I can get volume names with Mac::Carbon, so I do not need Mac::AppleScript.
- Mac::Path::Util sucks (and I wrote it).
- Weapons inspectors made their first inspections today and nobody called me. No war this week.
- USB Printer Sharing between Mac System 9 and Mac OS X does not work. Now I am in a bind---might have to revert to FreeBSD for printer sharing.
- An alias in the Dock does not necessarily do what an alias in the Finder does, but I can just drag the original application icon into the Dock anyway.
- A single "f" in Welsh is pronounced as a "v", so I have been pronouncing a name incorrectly for a month.
- IMAX Star Wars Attack of the Clones has scenes missing, but the production of Die Walkure I saw does not (and stops for dinner).
- Walgreen's sells blank CDs at a good price.
- PAUSE uses mod_perl. I should have known that, but I have never really thought about it.
- CPANPLUS is still too young for automated testing.
- Test::More's like() is better than is() is better than ok(), for what I do.
- Telemarkers now leave recorded messages on answering machines. I need to block calls that do not expose caller-id.
- CGI.pm make new style query strings using semicolons as the default (since version 2.64).
- Intel sells the SpringPort cheaper than retail---a lot cheaper.
- Mozilla 1.2 sucks. I thought it was just me, but other people have the same problems.
- Chris Nandor has a SourceForge project.
- According to the Geneva Convention, enemy prisoners of war can receive as many letters as they like, but the Detaining Power may set a quota on the number they send.
- Major League baseball owns the Montreal Expos---the team I did not care about when I collected baseball cards (back in the day).
- Spike, the character on Buffy, got his name from something to do with railroad spikes.
- Rafael gets to sync the perlfaq trees.
- Nat is working on Ram 2.
- There are teeth marks on one of my monitor cables, and neither of the cats is owning up to it.
