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White Christmas

We’re ready to fly down to Florida for a visit to Liz’s parents tomorrow morning (a.k.a. Christmas). But the way the weather is looking in Central Pennsylvania right now, there might be a delay waiting for us along the way.

Happy Holidays to everyone. And for those who are actually able to enjoy a white Christmas… enjoy!

A Visit from Santa

A mysterious visitor showed up at my cubicle during lunch today. Dressed in velvet red and a big white beard, he thanked me with a gift of chocolate, then seemingly vanished.

I’m pretty sure that this was a client of mine, and one in particular, which makes me think that it’s not such a thankless world after all. In fact, at times we can be reminded of how grateful we are just to live and work together—each getting something out of the problem/solution scenario.

Not all client relationships are like this in technology, obviously. But I’m grateful for the one’s, like this, that have stood out among the herd.

He Saw the Velvet Underground & Stuck His Thumb Out

The potential of art is vast and limitless, yet at the same time invisible. Cary Tennis attempts to articulate “how genius can reach across space” or, more specifically, how an experimental rock band from New York rearranged his psyche in 1968 “like a piece of beef with a blue stamp on it.”

Listen to him rant.

Unplugged

Just as I was getting out of the shower tonight the lights went out along with all of the electricity in my neighborhood. The power was only down for a total of 50 minutes—due credit to the electrical company, I think.

Anyway, it’s good every now and then to be unplugged in such a fashion, which is to be torn away from that not-so-important episode of 24. I’d much rather spend more candlelit moments with my wife anyway.

Dreamweaver MX 6.1 Update Woes

This work week has been mired by bugs I’ve found in Dreamweaver MX, ever since I decided to update to 6.1. I feel like a Macromedia beta tester. Problem is, the update is supposed to fix all of the “outstanding issues” from the 6.0 version. I’ll be reverting back shortly, under the advisement of the support guy at Macromedia, but in case you’re on Mac OS X (can’t speak for any other platforms) and considering this seemingly harmless upgrade, take a look at the issues I’ve been experiencing since the install, which was a pain to begin with (but could have been avoided if I took the time to actually read the ReadMe file).

• Copy and paste does not work properly in “Code View” – The technician I spoke to was not able to reproduce this problem, but I am definitely experiencing it intermittently on my setup at home and consistently at work. Basically, if I copy text from, say the source of Internet Explorer, and try to paste it into the Code View, it never happens. Somehow, pasting into the Design View works fine, but not at all how I want it to since the WYSIWYG view converts HTML code into ASCII equivalents. To work around this annoyance, I had to launch PageSpinner.
• Uploading files from the Dreamweaver file browser reverts some files to an earlier date – This one drove me bonkers as I was doing some modifications to a page’s behavior using ASP. When it didn’t work, I just assumed after a few hours that my programming skills sucked. But further observation showed that the file on both the local and remote side were carrying a modified date of 10 months ago! My changes were never being put on the server despite my confidence lacking assumptions. The work around here was not to use the Dreamweaver file browser. Since Mac OS X connects to regular Windows shares, I was able to save the file in another program, copy the file to the server, and retain the actual present date.

Phew! Both of these issues have been reported to Macromedia. Unfortunately, as of this writing, only the second one was able to be reproduced and only on a remote server using Mac OS X Server. For me, though, the exact same behavior turned up in IIS during a job at work, which is why a wrote to support in the first place. Luckily, the two incident support policy that Macromedia will not strike against me.

Fortunately, they do recognize a bug (or two) when they see it.