The perils of VOIP and cluelessness!

David Rostenne

OK, so it’s really not VOIP’s fault.. here’s my clueless CSR story of the day:

My mom called to let me know that everything was fine, and that they would be offline until they come back from their home-away-from-home in Florida. What happened? Well, it turns out that when your phone is VOIP and you call Comcast (their local cableco) and tell them to disable the internet in a week, they just hear “disconnect”. The call dropped about 15 seconds later.

After a day of calling on their cell phone and trying to get the service reinstated *for just one week*, and not getting anywhere they gave up.

fun, eh?

“Introduction to Mac” Workshop coming up on January 26th

David Rostenne

I will only quote part of the announcement regarding the Workshop Tom and I are offering next weekend… all the details are on Tom’s site: Introduction to Mac course, in Ottawa, Ontario, on January 26th, 2008.

As you can guess from the course title, we will be doing an introduction to the Mac, from the outside in!

Some of the major applications which will be covered include; Mail, Safari, Address Book, iCal, iChat, and the iLife suite of applications. There will be time at the end to address specific questions, which we expect will arise!

As Tom says:

Now that the details are (finally) worked out, I can safely announce that Dave Rostenne and I are offering our first combined course for users who are new to Macs, or have just "switched". The course will take place over at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), and you can find details on their special events page or in this printable PDF file.

When

Saturday, January 26th, 2008 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM, with an additional hour afterwards (4:00 PM to 5:00 PM) for questions and answers.

The cost and how to register

The cost is a very reasonable $79, and to register, you can either call (613) 562-3824 or email ADMIN@SPAO.CA. Register soon, because seating is limited to 20 people!

We hope to see you there!

AppleScript 2.0!

David Rostenne

Thanks to df for pointing out that Apple has posted release notes for AppleScript in Leopard.We can now ask if an application is running, without AppleScript launching it to find out. ;-)Some nice additions to running AppleScript on the Command Line:

  • use # to comment out a line
  • start the script with #!/usr/bin/osascript, and make it executable, will enable it to be run in the shell
  • osadecompile is a command line script to display compiled scripts as text

Now osascript also supports additional arguments on the command line, so now you can run a script and provide strings for it to use. see the osascript man page for details, and an example. This feature was available in Tiger, I just never noticed until now!

StuffIT download

stany 2 Comments

StuffIT, that became Allume, that became digital river is becoming less and less relevant on Mac OS platform. Part of the reason for that, of course, is the policy of the manufacturer, that requires signing up, buying things, etc. It’s nearly impossible to find the free StuffIT expander, for those rare moments when you need it.

In any event, here is a direct link to the StuffIT download page. I had to give out a throw-away e-mail address to get it.

SCIFI’s Fiction Archive is going offline! WGET your copy today!

David Rostenne 1 Comment

To be honest, I did not do any research to figure out why the archive is going offline in 2 days. I took a quick look, decided there was tons of great content, and…

wget -m -np -p --include-directories=/scifiction/classics/,/scifiction/originals/ http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html

Which gave me about 13 Megabytes of files.. and since I know I don’t have time to read them now:

tar jcv www.scifi.com -f scifi.com_archive

And tossed the resulting 5.5 Mb file into *my* archive folder.

Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing it out!

Parenting 101

David Rostenne

Some of the things that made our lives easier after having our first, and second child;

A Sling to carry her in, which keeps her cuddled up against mom or dad and leaves us with our hands free.

“What to expect the first year“ something to read when baby is keeping you awake at odd hours of the night.

Night time feedings go a lot easier if you change the diaper *before* feeding the baby. We learned that the hard way!

Sleep when the baby sleeps. Nobody cares if you vacuumed, but they will notice that you look like a zombie.

When you read to your children, tell them the Title, Author and Illustrator of the book… it didn’t take long before he figured out he liked Jan Brett’s books!

Get a library card, and use the online system to reserve and remind you to return books. We take out several books every week, and have found some were so good that they were worth buying from our local independent bookstore!