The iPhone Post (Part the First)

This was the fifth day in a row, and it was starting to get ludicrous. iPhone 3GSs were still out of stock at the Apple store, just like they had been for the last week. Across the street, two girls in smart black shirts and beige skirts presided over a forlorn looking Telstra store, empty even at the lunchtime rush. Knowing it was out of stock, I was hanging around to idle away the time, in no rush to return to work earlier than the full allotted hour.

Playing with the display model, I suddenly realised a shortcoming – there was no character count in the SMS composer, an absurd oversight given the number of Twitter apps that did exactly the same thing on the same device for a slightly different purpose. Did Apple think iPhone users didn’t care how many messages they sent? The seamlessness of the conversation layout made it all too easy to ramble on a little. The spell of the perfect phone was broken – how could I ever think to give up the speed that I had with the physical keys and the T9 dictionary on my two-and-a-half year old Sony Ericsson? Perhaps it was time to reconsider, to go for a Nokia N96, with its brilliant camera and physical keys.

That was when I noticed a rush – well, an orderly but high-speed stream – of people downstairs, away from where they’d been similarly playing with iPhones. I glanced at a store employee, who surely knew who I was by now, that same guy who came in on a late lunch every day and asked if there was stock in yet. He grinned, nodded, and said, “Stock just came in – go downstairs to grab it.”

Any lingering doubts were extinguished by the little boy inside screaming for his new toy now now now.

The queue was already across the entry, and snaking around. There were 5 tills ringing up sales of the unlocked phones at the same time, but even that wasn’t enough to get through the people waiting. Two additional tills were made available for those signing up for a plan, but the line for that was only 4 long. The line for people spending nine hundred, a thousand dollars, for a shiny new toy was at least 20 deep already, and we were being told that we could only get two to a customer, to the disappointment of at least one customer. Recession? What recession?

While I told of my story of coming in every day for a week, others told of waiting two weeks, the top of the range having sold out on the day of the launch. As we inched forward in the line, the music played an endless series of cheesy pop, and an security guard taunted by idly playing with his iPhone. A ripple stirred as someone wondered if there would be enough stock for the whole queue, to which we were assured that there was sufficient stock, “at least for today.” The salt in the wound was another employee placing a brand new poster by the entry of the retail availability page, finally deployed to Australia. Some had their old phones out, as though feeling the heft of a device soon to be made redundant. Still we waited.

An hour and a half into my hour long lunch-break, I had a compact little black brick in my hand, small but unbelievably heavy for its size. Alas and alack, I needed to get home to activate it. This would be the longest Friday afternoon ever.

Tuesday Afternoon

It’s only Tuesday and it’s already a slow week. Here’s a couple of links for you:

Somali Cruises – the hot new cruise/adventure holiday destination!

We sail up and down the coast of Somalia waiting to get hijacked by pirates. We encourage you to bring your ‘High powered weapons’ along on the cruise. If you don’t have weapons of your own, you can rent them on the boat.

We guarantee that you will experience at least two hijacking attempts by pirates or we will refund half your money back, including gun rental charges and any unused ammo (mini gun charges not included).

Unfortunately we’ve missed the June 29th deadline for getting a 100 free rounds of tracer ammo.

And not at all related: did you know June was Goat Trauma Awareness Month? Why does nobody tell me about these things? How is the awareness going to spread?

The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation was created in 1982 by a small group that originally came together as a an informal support group for problems that were the result of traumatic experiences at petting zoos as children. This group realized that there were many others out there who were afraid to come forward with their horrific stories and wanted to find some way to help as many people as they could. The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation is the result of their dream.

Check out the Goat Trauma News and Goat Trauma in Action sections. It’s a serious issue people.

LOLrio Kart

The difference between you and someone who got into MIT? You were satisfied with just pushing your shopping trolley around:

That thing can clock 45 miles per hour, or 72km/h! Dude, you frigging kidding me?! (more info here) (via)

The Thriller

If there was one bit of news I didn’t expect to wake up to yesterday, it was that Michael Jackson had died.

At first, I heard that “reports out of the US” were saying he died, or was in a coma. I didn’t want to believe it, but over the next half hour, the news was confirmed by more reliable sources, and so it was that a special artist’s life ended.

Michael Jackson was many things to many people, but it was his Black or White that was my very first pop song; it was the first one I can recall being a fan of, of racing to the radio to listen to. I had a tape of the album, Dangerous, that is probably one of the world’s most worn tapes around, particularly around the Black or White part. I watched the video clip a hundred times, as it stayed in the charts for weeks on end. Saturday mornings finished with Video Hits showing Black or White, and on Sundays it was up early to see it again on rage, which usually showed the whole clip, not just the music.

In short, I thought he was a genius, and given the outpouring of grief, emotion and the reactions of the last two days, I don’t think I was the only one. Jackson’s active career spanned 4 of his 5 decades, and at his height in the 80s the monkier “The King of Pop”, first said by his friend Elizabeth Taylor, stuck, and there are no heirs to the throne. From his start in the Jackson 5 to his best-selling solo album Thriller, and even to the mixed Invincible which never the less contained the hit You Rock My World, Jackson did what a performing artist should do best: entertain and thrill the public.

The name Jackson lives in the same echelon as Presley and Lennon, a genius in the musical world, as a singer, songwriter and perhaps foremost as a dancer. MJ’s sublime ability to control his body made perhaps his signature move, the moonwalk, somehow magical and special; no-one quite does it like he did.

I guess I was too young to know what was going on during the first accusations of child molestation levelled against him, but I certainly did when the issue reared its ugly head again in the early part of this decade. You got the feeling watching the documentary that raised the issue that Michael Jackson was really just a bit lost outside of the music world, never having grown up or being allowed to do so in a normal manner. It was the ultimate Peter Pan complex – he wanted to be a kid forever.

Whether the accusations were true or not, acquittal not withstanding, the damage to Jackson’s reputation and his continual strange behaviour led to his fall from grace, as seems inevitable for all child stars. For many though, as is abundantly clear today, this did not diminish his achievements as an artist, and so I would represent him – one of the most brilliant performers we had for years. It is a pity that his life should end so early.

I don’t know whether we’ll see the like of Jackson ever again – the celebrities with a genuine reason to be celebrated, the entertainers that achieve so much on a global scale; one would hope that perhaps someone will be inspired enough to produce music that appeals to so many. It would be a pity too if his music were to be overshadowed by his later days, and I would sincerely hope his music is held up as a shining example of popular entertainment.

Vale, Michael Joseph Jackson, 1958 – 2009.

Can’t talk

It’s amazing how a sense of an unspoken privacy policy holds you back. You can’t blog about work, because that’s naturally privileged information, but then when you’re unemployed and looking for work, you can’t talk about the interviews you’re taking because that too isn’t something you want to broadcast. Rock and a hard place.

I’ve now gone through about 6 books in the last 3 weeks. I thought this would be a chance to catch up on movie watching, but my attention span is so skittish right now I’ve been only reading books, which I can in theory put down at any time. But usually end up reading for hours on end before realising it’s 3 PM (again) and I’ve forgotten to do X, Y and Z. Again. But then you think, oh, I can just do that tomorrow, right?

Wrong. But you saw that coming.

You won’t do it tomorrow any more than you did it today. Tomorrow adds another four items to your to-do list, but since you haven’t got any structured activity scheduled, you end up skipping that anyway. I’m thankful that I’ve had a few interviews at semi-regular intervals simply for the target that it gives me at some point during the day.

It’s also simply amazing how much stuff there is out there on the net. I think I spent half of yesterday watching TED talks on topics as far ranging as the role of language in framing our thoughts to card tricks. There’s a fascinating universe of things that you never touch in your day to day existence, and if I had the time, talent and money I would attempt to get as broad an education as possible, following threads of interest until the interest dies and I must switch to a new field. (Yay for mixed metaphors, eh?)

In other news, it’s freaking freezing here in Sydney. Sydney’s not supposed to be cold! Even in winter!

How to set the default language in Mac OSX or Pages to be Australian or British English

How hard is it to find this somewhere straight-forward on the net? Very hard evidently, because how many people come here.

Edit: now updated for Yosemite. Older version below.

Step 1: Open Language & Region:Screenshot 2014-10-25 11.47.13

Step 2: Go to the language list and click +:
Screenshot 2014-10-25 11.47.59Step 3: Select the language desired – in this case English (Australia) and click Add:Screenshot 2014-10-25 11.48.42

Step 4 – Mac OS X Yosemite prompts you to use the new one as your primary language – select this and you’re good to go:
Screenshot 2014-10-25 11.48.56This is what it should look like:
Screenshot 2014-10-25 11.49.10

Now for spelling dictionaries – Yosemite has system-wide spell-checking, so we need to order it there. Pages (and other apps) will pick this up automatically. This time, we go to the Keyboard pref pane:Screenshot 2014-10-25 12.05.10

Click over to the Text tab, and we’ll see the spelling drop-down over on the right – usually this is set to auto, but let’s go through setup to confirm what we need:Screenshot 2014-10-25 12.06.10In the setup window, you can pick which dictionaries apply – so if you’re not going to type in Russian or Polish, for instance, you can remove these: Screenshot 2014-10-25 12.08.10

You can drag to re-order, and click Done to save your preference: Screenshot 2014-10-25 12.09.41

And there you have it!


 

For Mac OS X Snow Lion and Pages 8 and earlier:

Step 1: Open International pref pane in System Preferences

system-preferences

Step 2: On the Languages tab, click on “Edit List”

international-lang-1

Your list of languages already in the list might be longer – e.g., it’ll usually have most of the European languages.

Step 3: Select the language(s) you wish to add and click OK.

international-lang-add

Here I’ve chosen both Australian English and British English – generally speaking though, these are virtually identical and you only need the one you prefer.

Step 3: The newly selected languages should now be in the list. Order the list to your preference by dragging list items around.

international-lang-2

As it says under “Edit List”, the changes will take effect next time you start the application (in the case of Finder, that’s obviously when you restart). Generally speaking, I’d say leave English (i.e., the American one) in there somewhere.

Now you’re done for most of the system stuff. Pages will now create new documents with the top language as the default. However, for existing documents you’ll need to do the following:

pages1

Select all text, and then (1) click on Inspector, (2) click on the text tab, (3) select “More” tab, and (4) set the language.