Zzot!

There aren’t a lot of items in Raves that I would classify as haunting and terrifying, but this is an exception.¹ I only knew one of my grandmothers, and only after she was slipping into dementia,² so this has something of a personal connection to me.

The painting on the right is William Utermohlen’s 1967 self-portrait from a series of self-portraits chronicling his descent into dementia. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1996, so this is the first in the series.

• Wired: The Alzheimer’s Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen
• NY Times: Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s
• NY Times: Slideshow of Utermohlen’s Self-Portraits

1. It actually got mentioned in one of the Wired feeds a while back, so it might not even be anything new to most of my audience (i.e., Erwin). [↩]
2. Not necessarily from Alzheimer’s, but dementia none the less. [↩]

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If you’ve read anything about the Just For You section lately, it’s been about how you can turn it off to see the freebies panel on the iTS home page. I’ve found this to be peculiar advice, personally, because I’ve seen the Just For You panel and the related link at the bottom of the page to turn it on and off exactly once since I upgraded to iTunes 7. It isn’t that I’ve turned it off — I didn’t. I just never seem to hit one of the servers that shows the thing.

Now, I’m assuming that Apple hasn’t canned the feature, if for no other reason than because it’s mentioned explicitly on the iTS Music page. So, what if you actually liked the feature, or like me are just dimly curious what sort of crazy ideas it comes up with? You do the same thing you’d do if you are missing the freebies panel — link to it.

So, assuming the URL for you is the same as it is for me (which might be true outside the US…):

Just For You

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I skipped the whole “first takes on” bandwagon with the last large-ish release of iTunes, but not this time (apparently). So, here’s what jumps out at me:

1. I don’t get why people say the MiniStore is gone. If I show it, there it is (on both Mac OS X and Windows).
2. Apparently, it isn’t enough anymore for every Apple application to have a different splitter widget (and, in iTunes’s case, a different window rounded-corner radius). Maybe they decided that, since the main interface basically looks the same on Mac OS X and Windows, it should look like an alien in both environments, instead of just in one environment or the other.
3. I also saw somewhere that the scroll bars have the arrows together — on Mac OS X it picks up the value for this from your Appearance preference pane (on Windows, as far as I can tell, it always uses the at both ends variety).
4. The every widget looks different than it does anywhere else plan applies only to the main window — the preferences dialog looks like a normal window for whatever OS you’re running it on. This makes me suspicious of the theory that maybe this is a Leopard preview (well, that and having used some recent Apple applications). But theming the OS is still crazy talk.
5. In iTunes preferences, the Show: Podcasts and Show: Radio items on the General pane and the Disable Podcasts and Disable Radio items on the Parental pane apparently set the same two preferences (flip between the two panes, flipping the Podcasts item each time, and you’ll see what I mean).
6. Related to the above, if you want to hide the STORE category in the source list, there’s no check box to hide it, but there is a box for your parents to disable it. Mind you, if either the Purchased or Download item in that category has stuff in it, that item (and therefore the STORE category) will remain, just with fewer items in it.
7. iTunes 6.something has been the current version since I returned to the platform, so I’ve only ever seen the green variant of the iTunes icon on a current version of the software. I keep noticing the blue one in my dock and wondering how I managed to get iTunes 4 or something on my Tiger machine.
8. The only two gapless examples I can think of in my library weren’t detected. And by weren’t detected, I of course mean they now play gapless, but the checkbox that seemingly enables this behavior on each item’s Get Info dialog is not checked.
9. There’s useful newcomer in the Get Info dialog if you’ve been playing with TiVoToGo on your Windows box — some of the TV Show tags on MPEG-4s can now be edited, so you can put your TV Shows in the (*gasp*) TV Shows part of your library.
10. In Finder (and a number of other apps, for that matter), there’s a segmented control in the toolbar to chose from the three different view types, and you can use Command 1–Command 3 to flip between them. iTunes already uses those for zooming videos that you’re playing, and there’s no hint how you might flip between the three view styles from the keyboard, if you even can do it. And that control isn’t in the sequence of controls you can Tab to, so don’t get any ideas there scooter.

Update 1

I’m a dimwit (or shouldn’t write this stuff so late at night). iTunes 4–6 all had the green icon, and I’d actually come back during the iTunes 4 era. iTunes 3 had the purple icon, iTunes 2 had a blue icon, and it looks like iTunes 1 had this spiffy three-colored job that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Update 2

The iTunes 1 link above now points where it’s supposed to.

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The following story is true; the dates have been changed to protect the lazy.

Last night, I heard a sound for the first time, although I still somehow recognized it instantly. I was sitting at my computer working and I heard my wife scream from the living room. Mind you, I’ve known her for a lot longer than I’ve been married to her, and I feel like I’ve heard her shriek more than once in that time…but this one was special.

Someone once said “before you get married, make sure one of you kills bugs.” Usually I just scoot them outside on a scrap of paper or something — assuming we get to it before one of our cats does.¹ This didn’t sound anything like that.²

This time, once my loving wife fetched me, I found a mouse laying in the middle of the living room. Before you get any ideas, I’m not talking about the little plastic numbers with glued-on fur and felt ears and tail. I’m talking a real mouse capable of real bleeding. Oh, and it was bleeding. Fortunately (or is that unfortunately), none of our cats spent enough time feral to know why they can render a mouse into this state so easily.³

The answers to the two questions I remember her asking were both yes. Any guesses? “Do you want a glove?” and “Is he still alive?” — he wasn’t still there the next morning, so either he was playing dead to get the cat to lose interest or something else happened along to finish the job. Welcome to married life, I guess.

1. Anyone with a cat will tell you it’s scientifically impossible for you to notice the bug before the cat does, even if you and the bug are awake in one room and the cat is asleep in another room all the way across the house [↩]
2. If I recall correctly, that event sounds exactly like my wife walking into whatever room I’m in with a sort of tense look on her face [↩]
3. I swear I am not making this up; the most underweight of our cats has been stealing food from the most overweight of our cats, even though the latter is fed separately. I’ve heard of cats preferring one food over another, but the by-prescription-only weight-loss cat food? [↩]

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When I log into my user account on my PowerBook, everything stops for a few minutes. Drops of rain stop in mid-air, the wind falls still, the clock stops ticking, and my cat stops preening himself. I’m tired of this.

Spurred on by these hints, I finally got around to do something about it. I created a folder, ~/Library/Login Items/, dropped aliases to applications formerly in my (very lengthy) list of regular login items, and removed them from the OS’s list. Then I saved the following script as Slow Launch.app in that same directory:

-- Delay before the first launch and between subsequent launches
set firstLaunchDelay to 10
set interLaunchDelay to 5
 
tell application "Finder"
	-- Find my list of launch items
	set loginItemsFolder to (container of (path to me) as alias)
	set loginItemsList to loginItemsFolder's items whose kind is "Alias"
 
	-- Set the initial delay
	set launchDelay to firstLaunchDelay
 
	-- Process the list
	repeat with loginItem in loginItemsList
		-- Hurry up and wait
		delay launchDelay
		set launchDelay to interLaunchDelay
 
		-- Open the item; hide it if requested
		open loginItem
		if (loginItem's comment is "hide") then
			delay launchDelay
			set launchDelay to 0
			set (process ( (loginItem's displayed name) as text) )'s visible to false
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

Add Slow Launch.app to the OS’s login items list, and I’m done. I could swear that it even takes less time to launch everything, in spite of all the waiting the script does. The only drawback is that not everything can taken out of the OS’s list; some apps¹ helpfully put themselves back again if you take them off the list, and others² nag you about not being in that list whenever they’re launched. All that being said, it still feels a lot snappier this way.

1. Witch, for example [↩]
2. Slim Battery Monitor, for example [↩]

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Apparently my About page has been broken for a while. When I killed the Markdown plug-in for my WordPress install and edited all my posts back to straight HTML, I apparently forgot to do the same for my pages (in the WordPress sense of what a Post is versus a Page). So my About page was a holy mess. Now it is legible again.

In other news, I was thinking off-and-on this week about adding some plug-ins that modify the comments system,¹ but decided to hold off until there’s a non-zero likelihood of someone using the comments system other than as a freak accident.

Oh, and I messed around with the PHP engine that WordPress runs in, and as a result things should be a bit peppier.

1. Gravatars come to mind here… [↩]

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I like to think I don’t have many of them, but this is one of them; you just don’t get the same thing from those places where the biggest thing on the sign out front is a dollar sign. Oh, look — it’s the “The 1$ Car Wash”. Does $1 buy me more detergent or dirt from the car in front of me? Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me coming out, but if I’m going to take time out of my life to have paid professionals clean my car, I want it to come out…uh…clean. I mean honestly — one of the managers came out while the guy was scrubbing my mats and said there was a film on it, so he was going to run it through again. I think the exterior was probably cleaner the first time than it would have been if it spent the whole day in one of those places down the street.

Honestly, I like my car’s exterior clean as much as the next guy, but I go to Jax for the job they do on the part of the car I see the most of; the interior. The coupon I had described one part of the service as “extra vacuuming”; two guys crawl into the thing with vacuum hoses when you drop it at the start of the car wash proper. The extra part was blowing dust, crumbs, and whatever out of folds and crevices in the seats, floor, vents, etc. and then vacuuming the car a second time with a crevice tool. Then he went at my mats that he’d already pulled out. I’d just gotten the mat scrub add-on before, so I’d seen them with the air-powered brush and the spray bottle; what I hadn’t seen was the guy getting rid of the blower attachment he’d just used on my interior, grabbing the brush, and then putting it down again because it was the wrong carpet brush. The wrong one.

I drove away trying to remember the last time my car was that clean. The last time I spent an afternoon shampooing my interior (different car, admittedly), it wasn’t this clean when I finished. And I didn’t get the carpet shampooing, just the mat scrub that comes with the package named on my coupon (maybe if we’d had a rougher winter I’d have chosen differently). Even if I had, they’d have finished faster (this is no appointment needed detailing).

Sometimes, you just have to pay a professional to do something right. Damn.¹

1. By the way, the first item on the carpet shampoo checklist is “All Non-Permanent Stains Removed.” [↩]

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This evening, exactly unknown days after adding myself to the waiting list, I received my Google Analytics invitation.

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I went through all my (published) entries last night and changed them from Markdown to straight (X)HTML, and fixed the various attached images while I was at it. There shouldn’t be visible changes, but if something is wonky, let me know.

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Most or all of the PHP on my website is running via FastCGI now. This shouldn’t really effect anyone, but I’m curious whether it shows up in my database usage stats from DreamHost.

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