Citrix on a Mac - jiggle the handle to get the bits working

Setting Laura up on her new macbook (which I'm extremely jealous of) has gone somewhat smoothly. The problems always seems to have to be around using citrix. Before I had set up windows on my mac. After I had done that, a friend pointed out that there actually are plug-ins for the mac.

This setup has been working on my machine for months. Now, using the same plugins on the new machine, I couldn't get it to work at all. It would just give me a blank screen.

I found a helpful pdf explaining to change the shortcut that you launch safari with to be "Open in 32-bit mode". I changed the computer to this and lo - it worked. It allowed me to get a step further where safari prompted me that I had downloaded a file and should I allow this? Clicking okay got me past this. When I changed safari back to 64 mode, it still worked. So it appeared to be something were it was choking on that dialog box and couldn't figure out how to get past it.

Problem solved. Happy Laura. Mission accomplished.

So hard to not say anything... just use open office...

We spent a bunch of time in the mac store yesterday and ended up getting Laura a new computer. It was all that I could do while the mac employees were telling people about getting MS Office for Mac or iWork to not interrupt them and tell the customers about open office. I don't want to be that guy that hangs around stores and tells people about free software. But I really wanted to. That's probably really weird. *sigh*

In the beginning there was b & w...

Recently with the passing of my grandmother, I've been given all the slides (mostly trip pictures), some negatives, prints, 8 mm, audio tapes, slide projectors, and probably more mysterious things that I have not yet discovered. It literally filled our vw rabbit. I think that the assumption is that I'll scan them all and provide them to the family - which is a pretty good assumption. It just might take me 10 years. It's a bit crazy going though pictures from the last 60 + years.

I miss my grandparents.

Again, I should have listened

Last night I convinced Laura to allow me to update the OS on her iPhone to the latest and greatest iOS 4. "Don't worry", I said - "it'll create a backup and we can restore to that backup". Laura was a bit nervous because this is one of her core tools to do her job. If the phone doesn't work, she's got a much harder day.

I ran the backup, OS update, ran updates for the apps, played around with it all. Everything worked fine. Until this morning when Laura noticed that her expensive medical software (subscription based) didn't work. It looked like it worked last night, but I didn't try to use the part which required the subscription. "No biggie" I said, "we'll just restore the backup".

So I plugged her phone into iTunes, then went to run the backup. When you plug in the phone, it runs a backup and apparently deletes any other backups. So, no I have a useless backup AND an angry / sad / disappointed wife who now has a lot harder time doing her job. Frack frack frack.... FRACK.

This morning the minute tech support opened I called them and had to leave a message. They contacted Laura and let her know that the app doesn't run correctly in iOS 4, but they've submitted an update to apple. So, that's probably 24 - 48 hours from submitting until it's in the iTunes store.

I thought that updating would make Laura's life a bit easier with threaded mail and the move to having things run in the background. Threaded mail wasn't worth this though.

By far the worse part? I had said that it wouldn't break anything. I had made fun of Laura for thinking that things will be broken.

Frack.

Why everyone hates my coffee maker

There is nothing wrong with my electric coffee maker. It brews coffee just fine, but it makes a beeping noise when it's done brewing or when it's shutting off. For anyone who regularly wears a pager, or the spouse of someone who does, a beeping sound means being woken up in the middle of the night. It means a nice time together is suddenly ending. Without being able to help it, when you hear something that sounds like a pager, your heart starts to beat faster, you get this sinking feeling, and you know that you are going to have to change whatever loose plans that you had.

Needless to say, to make coffee I mostly use a french press and our kettle - which make a clicking sound.

People have babies at the most inconvenient times. Ah well.

Urban Wildlife

I find it funny when people talking about living in the country and how you're so close to nature and how "you can't get that in the city". Riiight. Ottawa might be a big city in Canadian standards, but it's really small with lots of green space. That's a good thing.

On my bike ride home today I had a fox dash out 15' in front of me. Yes, you can probably argue that it was a country fox because it clearly did not ding a bell while on the path and it looked like it was breaking the 20 kph speed limit as well. But my guess is that it's just an bad-ass city fox. You know the kind: no reflectors, no paw signals when turning, no helmet.

I think that I've seen a lot more wildlife living in the city than I ever did in the country. I don't think that means that there is more wildlife in the city, I just think that I'm in a better position to see it. When living in the country, everything so was far away that you had to drive anywhere to see it. While living in the city I travel by bike or walking. Slower, quieter, in more green spaces and less in areas where animals probably call corridors of death.

To counteract the people who talk down about living in the city, I've been practicing looking down my nose and my sneer. Honestly it's not been going so well... it's hard to do that and avoid running over small animals.