Macworld 2007 :: Day 3 | Insomniac

A funny thing happened to me on the way to macworld today… actually, it wasn’t very funny, but it turned out okay. I couldn’t get any parking at BART and ended up driving to the city. Got to Moscone Center with 1 minute to spare before the first conference session started; Mac OS X Hints. I parked in a garage on 3rd st. and was in such a rush, i didn’t even see what the prices were. I hope they take credit cards! The session was too full and i couldn’t get in. I tried a couple of others, but wasn’t really into it. Luckily, tons of other people didn’t get in either, so they are repeating it before the next round starts. I am in the hallway waiting for that now.

I got up at 2:45 am last night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m not sure what woke me up, but I am pretty sure I had visions of iphones dancing in my head upon waking. i was wide awake and there was nowhere to go. D was asleep in the office and Adriene was sleeping on the couch. It probably would have been okay to go use the computer in D’s room, but I really didn’t want to wake her up and I also really wanted to sleep more. Of course, I couldn’t stay still, and ended up waking K. Sorry K. She was a very good sport about it and put a couple of Pink Floyd disks in the player to calm my busy mind. It helped a lot.

I never got back to sleep, but I was enjoying resting and listening to music. I had a stoner moment while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently I don’t require drugs for that type of thing anymore. I decided, as many before me have, that the line in ‘Eclipse’ that says, “…everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” explained life, the universe, and the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Everything DOES all make sense and work together! It’s just that dang eclipse messing things up! Yep. There is a reason why people sleep at night.

There was a really long line for the encore of this session too. I was near the front of it, and am in the room now with a very good seat. Aisle. Good distance and angle from the screen. Excited to learn new things. Being here can give one the impression that paper note taking devices are obsolete. That is another thing I was pondering in the middle of the night.

So much data is kept on computers and so much effort is made to back up those computers onto other types of media that is readable by computers. I’m sure big corporations still use plenty of paper for these types of things, but I wonder about the rest of us. Occasionally, my mind takes a turn for the post-apocalyptic. What if electronic devices stop working? What good are backups that need to be accessed through electronic devices? At least with paper backups, all you need is sight and an encryption key, which in most cases is just knowing how to read and understand the language that the backup is written in. I don’t backup anything onto paper or anything else that doesn’t require a computer to retrieve. It occurs to me at times like this that my life must be pretty good if I have nothing better to worry about than what will become of my data after the apocalypse. Go to sleep Lori.

First session was ‘The Best of Mac OS X Hints’ w/ Rob Griffiths, founder macosxhints.com and senior editor of macworld magazine. Lots of cool tips. Some highlights:

  • When switching through apps w/cmd-tab (or cmd-`), hit H or Q while hovering over app to hide or quit.
  • Get a list of word completions in cocoa apps by hitting escape after you start typing the word
  • Definitions of words in cocoa apps -> ctrl-cmd-D while mousing over them
  • Right click on whitespace in Preview drawer for sorting options.
  • Hold down cmd and option when clicking on a widget file and ‘install’ changes to ‘run’ so you can try a widget without installing it.
  • To customize the login window background, change the name of the ‘Aqua Blue.jpg’ File in your HD/Library/Desktop Pictures folder (to create a backup of it) and save any other picture with that exact filename into that folder. Works best if the picture size matches your screen resolution size. A tip for laptops is to create an image with a message in case it is lost and found.
  • To quickly open a Spotlight match in the Finder, hold cmd while clicking the item.

1 thought on “Macworld 2007 :: Day 3 | Insomniac”

  1. My wife is a big geek and I love it 🙂 – I also love your wee hours ponderings! No worries about waking up – don’t even remember hearing the second Floyd CD. thanks for rescuing me from my nightmare!

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