BrockLi Soup

Quicksilver is one of the most useful Mac apps available, hands down. I don’t even know how to find things on a Mac without it anymore - which makes it distressing when it doesn’t work the way I expect it to.

I keep a list of project ideas and things like that at Documents/GTD/Someday.txt under my home directory. Straightforward enough, but I can never remember where it is, and thanks to Quicksilver, I shouldn’t need to. But Quicksilver couldn’t find it this afternoon, and a little digging proved that Quicksilver wasn’t cataloging any subdirectories in Documents. I’m pretty sure it used to - I’ve been using it for a few years and never noticed any problems like this before, so I imagine that this bug was introduced when I updated to ß54 a week or two ago, and I just hadn’t noticed yet.

Now, I call it a bug, but it’s entirely possible that the developers made the change on purpose. Even so, here’s what I did to fix it:

1. Open the Quicksilver Catalog.
2. Click User in the list on the left.
3. Select Documents.
4. Click on the i icon at the bottom left. This will open an information drawer. Notice that the Depth slider in the drawer is set to 1, but it’s disabled.
5. At the bottom of the drawer, click on the Attributes tab.
6. Click the Create A Copy button.
7. A copy will be created, and you are now editing that copy. Click back to the Source Options tab in the drawer and change the Depth slider to infinite (or lower, if you want it to catalog faster).
8. Click on User in the list at the left again. The checkbox next to Documents should have been automatically unchecked, since your new item overrides it. Uncheck it if it wasn’t done automatically.
9. If you want to update your catalog immediately, click the refresh button at the bottom right corner of the window.

- I didn’t even realize - this bouquet I got has snap dragons in it.

- Snap dragons?

- Yeah, you squeeze them and they pop open.

- Oh, touch-me-nots.

- Snap dragons.

- Touch-me-nots.

- Snap dragons!

- Fried dough!

- Elephant ears!

- Soda!

- Pop!

- Rasberries!

- Zerbirds!

I don’t want to post it publicly, but if you want my updated vCard (.vcf file) with my phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and mailing address, leave a comment here with your e-mail address, or drop me a note.

At the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, [Earl] Butz made fun of Pope Paul VI’s opposition to “population control” by quipping, in a mock Italian accent: “He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.”

Phone Fumble ‘08 is turning into a real kick in the crotch. More glass has fallen out of the screen, but it still works OK. I had hoped that prices of used iPhones would drop on Craigslist, but if anything, they’ve gone up - the cheapest ones have gone from $200ish to about $350, and there are still a ton of want ads on there. That may be the worst part - I could have turned a profit on the damn thing if I could have kept it off the sidewalk.

It would cost me $200 to cancel my iPhone plan contract and go back to a boring regular phone, and at that price, I may as well just get a new one. Then I find out that 3G is sold out pretty much everywhere, and then I walked home in the rain.

Add all that to the carnival of incompetence on display in the DC bureaucracy throughout the course of changing my name, and some other unpleasantness, and it’s been a crappy week. At this point, I’m really just looking forward to getting out of town for a few days for the Doherty/Friedlander union next weekend.

I don’t really have an opinion of McDonald’s one way or the other, but I’ll probably start eating there more now that the American Family Association doesn’t like them.

Upon consideration of the application for the change of name filed herein and no objections having been made and proof of publication having been made and filed herein, and all other requirements appear having been met, it is this 15th day of July, 2008, ORDERED BY THE COURT that the said application be and hereby is granted, and it is further, ORDERED BY THE COURT that henceforth and hereafter Randy Charles Boland be known as Brock Drummond Boland.

For real. I still need to get it changed with Social Security, and then on my driver’s license and everywhere else, but check it out - my name is Brock.

I fumbled my iPhone good today.

Erin and I were waiting for the bus to go kayaking. I had just put on sunscreen, so my hands were all slippery when I went to text Aubri, and it just spilled out and landed face-down on the sidewalk. We both kind of looked at it for a second, not daring to pick it up and see the damage.

My first thought was, “Well, I guess I’m upgrading after all.” I had no intentions of getting the 3G version any time soon - what little money I have is much needed elsewhere. But then I realized that thousands of OTHER people are upgrading - and selling of their old ones in the process. I could just get a used one and drop in my SIM card.

Unfortunately, used first-gen iPhones are running about $250 on Craigslist here, and my search for “iPhone” returned a lot more want ads than sale ads, so it’s safe to say that demand is high enough to keep prices higher than I want to pay. Or I could pay $200 to get a brand-new 3G, at an extra $10/month for the data plan - an extra $70 over the course of the next year.

Either way, it sucks. I really don’t want to spend money on a phone right now. I suppose I could just get a super-cheap regular phone, but after having an iPhone for 10 months, could I ever go back? On the other hand, I’ll bet I would be able to receive MMS.

The screen is hard to read, but it still works, so I think I’m going to give it a week. I’m just hoping that prices on used phones will fall a bit, which might be a little too optimistic, but we’ll see what happens.