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Saturday, 24 August 2002 |
Yawn, yet another major security hole the size of Manhattan in various Microsoft products.
“The Office-related programs vulnerable to attacks include Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, Money 2002, Money 2003, Project 2002, as well as server software related to such client software,” Microsoft said.
11:59:16 PM 
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The Diamondsoft website states that “Font Reserve 3.1 adds auto-activation for Adobe InDesign 2.0, Illustrator 10, Quark XPress 5, as well as support for OpenType, Windows TrueType, double-byte, and dFont fonts.
In addition, the System Font Handler now provides a completely automated method for removing non-essential fonts from the many Mac OS X Font Folders.”
Yes, yes, yes! OpenType support! Just what I wanted to hear! Ah luurrvvve OpenType. Especially in conjunction with InDesign 2.0. The best font manager just got better.
11:46:43 PM
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No doubt about it. Wellington Surplus is the closest thing to the best menswear store. Forrest Boutique, formerly in Forrest Place, used to be a damned good place to shop where you could get a reasonable selection of Hugo by Hugo Boss, and Versace. The owner knew his stuff, and the prices were surprisingly good.
But then he sold it. Wellington Surplus, although it carries the usual surplus store lines like camping goods and knives and cookware, also has jeans and casual clothing. There is one thing they do that makes them stand out against all other local stores of whatever kind—when Wellington Surplus has a particular brand, it carries as much as possible in that brand. You want Lee jeans? They have all the different Lee jeans you can get in Oz. Ditto Levi’s.
I would love them to stock Patagonia clothing (great for this cold weather), as nobody does here. But you know that if Wellington Surplus did stock Patagonia then they would have all of what Patagonia makes. Well, that is my fantasy anyway. Meantime I emailed Patagonia to get them to post a catalog.
11:23:44 PM
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If I really needed a car, and I am not really a fan of cars (gimme a Segway!), then this is the car I would get. Of course, I like these too. I like small, zippy, fast, safe good-looking city cars. I had one once—it was terrific.
The West Australian newspaper reports today that Mercedes-Benz Australia will begin importing the smart city-coupe and cabrio cars next autumn. The city-coupe will cost about AUD25,000, and the cabrio will be about AUD30,000. The smart roadster and the smart 4-seater will follow later.
Think of the smart car as the iMac of automobiles. Time to start saving.
10:38:06 PM
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I dropped in to the Joondalup AppleCentre, to clap my eyes on a 17-inch SuperDrive iMac and Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and to see what is said to be the biggest AppleCentre in Perth. The guy there told me he had already sold all his copies of Jaguar. It was pretty quiet though.
Here is a report from MacCentral on some of the Jaguar launch events in the United States.
10:13:34 PM
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There is a company in the Sydney suburb of Asquith named Sheldon & Hammond Pty Ltd that owns a trademark named Avanti.
Avanti is a line of stainless steel hollow wares made in China. Whether they are Australian-designed, or simply edited by Sheldon & Hammond from amongst pre-existing products I do not know. A search on the web has turned up nothing on the company or the trademark. I am not a fan of everything the firm puts out, but they do have some rather good things from time to time—there is a 3-legged teapot I like, a terrific mug I saw at the infamous Wellington Surplus store in Perth, and their double-walled espresso cups with saucers are the best of their kind.
And I really like a new line they have in double-walled plunger coffee pots. Like everything in Perth, none of the stores here has a decent range of Avanti products. But if you search store after store after store, in total you will come across a reasonable cross-section of Avanti stainless steel. This cumulative collection is nothing like what you would find in a typical David Jones or Myers store in the other states, however.
The choice here for just about everything— books, music, movies, clothes—is pretty impoverished. There are no stores that are the best for any of the above—no big comprehensive bookstore where you know can find anything you might want, no record store where you will find the entire back catalog, or any back catalog, of your favourite artist so you can finally replace all that vinyl you sold off cheap when CDs arrived, no decent menswear shop.
The city has been so thoroughly suburbanised that all you have to choose from is dozens of nearly identical stores of the same name with tiny differences in the inventory each one carries. So you roam from store to store to store, shopping centre to shopping centre to shopping centre searching for something that is interesting.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, you find it. And whether you can afford it or not at the time, you better damned well grab it at once because you never know if you will ever see anything interesting again. I had better go down to Wellington Surplus and grab that Avanti double-walled stainless steel mug as soon as the store opens Monday morning. I have seen that particular product nowhere else in this city.
9:22:39 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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