16 February 2000
Monday I had one of those wish-I-had-a-camera moments in Schnucks: Picture a grocery store's well-lit, 12-foot-wide greeting card section with red trim all across the top. It's 6:15pm on Valentine's Day. Crowded in front of it are seven men, almost in an evenly spaced row, surveying the selection of cards with a variety of urgency, bafflement and bemusement. The best caption I can come up with right now is "We, like sheep". (I wasn't one of the seven card guys; I'd picked up an adorable little plush St. Bernard and a bit of high-quality fudge elsewhere in the store. Baaaa.) Lots of new Apple announcements from Tokyo: The Piker Alumni Underpass Sing (wherein we gather whoever's showed up for Jammin' Toast from the old gangs and revisit the material from days gone by) will be at 4:30pm Saturday at Wash U's Forsyth Blvd. underpass, just east of Big Bend. By rights we should pay people to come listen to us given the lack of rehearsal going in, but alas it is merely free. Come be amused and serenaded. Mac OS X Developer Preview 3 is out; some new commentary on and screenshots of the new Aqua interface are up:
For the ladies: If you succeeded at getting Harrison Ford drunk [The Big Sell Out] Eudora Pro 4.3 is out, with the option of not paying for it but agreeing to receive ads instead. It's not too obnoxious for me, so I'm going with that as my e-mail client (I've been using the beta on my PowerBook for a bit.) However, the installer I downloaded (several times) was broken, giving an error -199 and not opening. Qualcomm says they're fixing it. The reason I bring it up isn't to rag on Qualcomm, it's to rag on Apple. Why, in all the years the Mac has been around, haven't they ever implemented a basic lookup table in their error-trapping routines so that instead of receiving "Error -199" we would get "Error -199: Map inconsistent with operation"? Presenting nothing but a numeric error code is pretty user-hostile. Even web browsers say 'File not found' when they receive a 404 error. Sure, most of the errors' text explanations are not at all helpful in helping the user actually do anything about the error, but they provide much more of a clue to what happened than just a number, and more information is better where errors are concerned. As it is now, when I get an error code I don't recognize, I go on the web to look for a list of the numeric error codes, track down that specific error and then find that it's a pretty unhelpful description, so I get doubly frustrated. I'm still on OS 8.6; is it better in OS 9? How about OS X? There are plenty of places to find this info, but this is a nice one I'm keeping around for reference:
What's up with ABC showing a Drew Carey repeat instead of Sports Night last night? Grrr. And what's with showing two new NYPD Blues on two nights next week? What, did they make too many new episodes for ABC to show normally? I've got a lot to take care of in the next few days; I'll be back Monday (after Jammin' Toast & the crucial S.C. primary...) You may now click.
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