Thursday, October 24, 2002

Earlier today I fixed a problem with Entourage, where my passwords stopped being stored in and retrieved from my keychain. Turns out that PGP 8 beta was the culprit. After a week of mundane frustration, it feels good that have that scratch itched. But the itching continues... tonight i have experienced all sorts of computer troubles. First, I was ordering prints in iPhoto and listening to iTunes when I decided to turn on the visuals... and the computer hard locked. Then, after rebooting (which took forever), I launched iPhoto again, only to see that many of the sharing services had disappeared from the sharing button bar (this has occured before on a crash, where file permissions became corrupted and the services stopped working!). Fortunately, i quit and relaunched iPhoto again, and the services re-appeared. Then, I decided to try my luck and launch iTunes again, this time with the aim of burning a CD of new music for my daily commute across the bay bridge. After meticulously picking a dozen songs, I inserted a blank CD into my external burner, and chose "Burn from the iTunes menu, only to have iTunes freeze. Now it won't launch because some unnamed file doesn't have the proper state (thanks for the helpful dialog box: it doesn't annoy me with a cryptic error number, but rather with an obtuse description of your own failing). So, now I'm wrapping up my photo purchases (gosh, wouldn't be great to order a set of prints for several recipients at one time, hint hint) and writing up my experiences. iPhoto is a pig, and I can't believe engineers ship this marde. Is it the apps team or the frameworks team that doesn't understand performance testing? Here's hoping Ando can get on the right team and show them how we ship good software. The point of all this is, this is really frustration stuff, and this is as good as it gets! No one is going to dare suggest that some other OS/platform can give me a better experience, and this one still has some serious deficiencies. Just the other day Paulette came to tears because Mail wouldn't recognize her photos in the Insert Image dialog box. Absurd!!! We finally figured out that one can DRAG images from the desktop into a new Mail message, but importing from the MENU command doesn't work. How can I encourage her to utilize computers when there are these little gotcha's planted all around us, these productivity killers, like landmines waiting to ruin her train of thought, her mood, and her expectations? lessThan /RANT greaterThan wheh, where did all that come from? 11:38:21 PM