Kim Flournoy

I love companies with a personality and sense of humor. It’s something that I need to aspire to in my own business dealings - I tend to fall back on bland and corporate, perhaps due to many years of working in Washington DC where everyone is always being proper and trying to avoid standing out in any way.

For example, I just upgraded to the latest version of BBEdit, and was reading through the features list, when I noticed this item:

Ponies.

That’s it, just “Ponies.” There were some other fun comments in the list, such as:

You can now review and apply sub-line differences individually in the results of Find Differences.
Yeah, you heard that right.

I sent in this message to support:

These two features made it totally worth the price of upgrading:

- You can now review and apply sub-line differences individually in the results of Find Differences.
- Search and replace history is now persistent across runs of the application.

Thank you!!!
-Kim

(PS - am unable to find keyboard shortcut for Ponies, please advise)

A few hours later, I received this message back:

Hi Kim,

Thanks for writing in, and for you very kind words about BBEdit. We’re glad you’re so pleased with the upgrade!

(As for the ponies, they broke free from the corral before we could assign a key to them, but we’ve sent out some TextWranglers to bring them back. :-)

If you have any further questions or comments, or if we may otherwise be of assistance, please let us know.

Nice!

Imagine if Al Bundy, while going through an acrimonious divorce from Peg, decided to conduct a series of bitter Photoshop tutorials - you’d have something akin to “You Suck at Photoshop”.

This morning I learned to use paths, and I feel great about my marriage!

It’s a good thing that I have an extra hour in the day today, because I spent that entire hour trying to figure out why all my calendar items were off this morning. Items on my Palm’s calendar were moved an hour earlier with a notation. For example, my 5pm book group meeting today was in my Palm as 4:00pm (5:00pm PST). Being an hour early isn’t as horrifying as it would (will) be when Daylight Saving time starts and I’m suddenly an hour late for everything.

There only appears to be a problem when creating calendar items in iCal and then synchronizing. For items created on the Palm device, you can change the Calendar application preferences and uncheck “New events use time zones”. But I create calendar items using both methods, and I need to know that my calendar and alerts are totally reliable.

After some trial and error, and sorting through numerous discussion threads, I figured out that there were multiple problems involved:

• iCal does allow for “floating” time zones, which theoretically don’t have any time zone information attached. However, there is not a way to set the default time zone for new events as “floating” (or anything else) so you’d need to change this manually for each new (and preexisting) event.
• Even if an event is set at “floating” in iCal, when synchronized with the Palm’s calendar, the Palm sets a time zone based (I think) on the synchronizing computer’s time zone. So even if you’ve set items as “floating” in iCal, the Palm still adds a time zone to them. I’m not sure which application’s fault this is, although I exported a calendar from iCal to a text editor and it seemed to correctly remove the time zone information for “floating” events, so I’m suspecting it’s Palm’s problem.
• Palm’s date and time server for the Centro does not appear to understand Daylight Saving Time, so while the time automatically updated last night, the device still thinks we are in PDT and not PST.

I read a few blog posts which advocated manually editing your iCal text files (which seems risky and annoying if you have to do it twice a year), or turning off automatic time updating for the device entirely (frustrating if you travel or rely on your phone for correct time). There was a Palm update last year for older devices to alert them to the new DST rules, but according to Palm newer devices including the Centro did not require this update (and I would hope not, since the DST rules changed last year, and I bought this phone just a few months ago), and I don’t think that would have addressed this anyway.

I finally discovered that the fix (at least for me) was to change the Palm’s Date and Time preferences from automatically setting “Date, time and time zone” to just “Date and time”.

So now my phone doesn’t care what time zone it’s in - I’ll need to check it the next time we travel across time zones to make sure it’s not messing things up again, but this seems to correct the issue for now. Based on this discussion thread, I’m also going to be very cautious about changing my laptop’s time zone when we travel - maybe I’ll just leave it alone.

New Microsoft ad actually created on a Mac.

Makes you wonder what kind of meetings they’re having about their creative process this week, and whether the slant is “Don’t use Macs for Microsoft work” or “Make sure you don’t get caught”…

Another day, another browser annoyance. Firefox 3 removed (some would say “fixed”) the ability to bookmark the same page multiple times, allowing the user to save the bookmark in several folders. I rely pretty heavily on this feature, and I didn’t notice that the first few times I tried to do it, I accidentally moved (edited) the bookmark instead of adding a second one. Now I’m digging back through my recent bookmarks and trying to make sure that they’re all in the proper locations.

The new process: Bookmark the link. Now, go to the Bookmarks menu and select Organize Bookmarks. Find the bookmark, copy it and paste it, then move the second bookmark into the second folder. Repeat as needed. (Thanks to this thread for the solution.) Way more convoluted than just hitting Cmd+D again and picking a second folder.

I guess now I can disable my “Bookmark Duplicate Detector” add-on, since I won’t be duplicating any bookmarks accidentally…

I love Firefox, but because I use it for development, I’ve got it so overloaded with extensions that it runs sluggishly and is generally a pain in the neck for everyday use. So I’ve been half-heartedly switching back to Safari as my everyday putzing around browser, and just using Firefox for work.

One of the features I love about Firefox is the very easy keystroke (Shift+Delete on a Mac) to delete an unwanted address from the browser’s location bar. That way, if you mistyped an address once, you’re not haunted by the spector of that incorrect address until your browser finally gets around to clearing it away - you can manually remove it. Or say you checked the weather in North Carolina and Florida before your recent visits, and now every time you start typing the address of the Weather Underground, you have to sift past those other addresses before you get to your local one. Not a big annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but if this happens several times a day, it’s nice to fix it.

Thanks to Jamie, I now have the answer for how to do this on Safari. Not as easy as Firefox, but easier than the answers I found when Googling (mostly variations on “remove your entire history and all saved profile data”):

• In the “View” menu, choose “Show Bookmarks Bar”
• Click on the Bookmarks bar icon to view your bookmarks
• Click on your History to view the list
• In the top right corner, search for the incorrect url(s)
• Select and delete

I still might try creating multiple profiles on Firefox, but for the time being I’m plodding along on Safari. It’s frustrating that I never am confident about which keyboard shortcuts to use without stopping to look at which browser I’m in, but after years of working on Macs and PCs at the same time, I’m kind of used to that sort of problem.

(PS - Hi Mike! :-)

Even though I spent more than a year working on the marketing site for Yahoo! Mobile, now that I have a Centro, I have absolutely no desire to install the application or use Yahoo!’s services. (more…)