19 December 2008

Hairy Kiss Miss

Been workin' lots, ecco my excuse for not posting for a while. Not "showreel" work, "paying the bills" work.

Flying out to the motherland tomorrow to kiss the nieces.

Mr Barack Obama has won the US presidential election (maybe you've heard?) since i'd last posted. Everyone asks me "are you happy [about that]?" My reply is, "Ask me in three to six months." The elaborated answer is, "After eight years of literally running the nation into the ground, not only in financial debt but in spirit as well, just to line the already-deep pockets of 1% of the world population, yes, i'm very happy that that frontline madness has ended. I'm also glad that Mr Obama seems to have the power to inspire and hope that he at least continues such." Congratulations, Mr Obama. Please, give me a reason not to be so jaded in 2009.

More Mac bitching: so far, i've compained about OS X spawning new windows under the Dock when placed on the left side of the screen. It also seems that Finder temporarily forgets window placement on the initial opening of a folder on the Desktop. There are folders on my Desktop that when i open them via the standard double-click they launch not only under the Dock (at the left) but also at the (i suppose) default Finder-window geometry, that is shorter in width than how i have them placed. The invisible .DS_Store files are not instantly updating as they should.

Now let's talk OS X audio. Since its inception, all Macs power on with the Macintosh chime. Previously, if you'd left your headphones or external speakers plugged in but switched off, you would hear no chime, which is nice when you need to power up your Mac at 3 am. Not so with the new iMac! The only way to kill that chime is to power down with volume set at zero.

And speaking of volume at zero, in its previous incarnation, a password-locked screensaver would allow you to control the volume, convenient for someone whose colleague left iTunes plugging away while they went for a coffee. Not so with the new iMac! If it's password-protected and the screensaver has kicked in, you're fucked! Or for those who use the Mac as a stereo. If you have to lower the volume, you have to unlock the screen first.

More bitching to come! Ciao!