CECILY.info

Could it be? Could all my whining about the sorry state of Apple’s product releases in Canada have had an effect (not bloody likely)? First it was the news that the iPhone would soon be available to Canadian customers, and now, thanks to iLounge, we find out that Canadian Apple customers will soon be able to download movies via the iTunes store.

Finally, that video iPod of mine might actually be useful.

I saw this ad in my Yahoo!Mail (apparently Apple thinks I live in Canada and the US at the same time) and I couldn’t help taking a little creative license:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The “I’m avoiding my homework by providing links for you, so you’d better enjoy them!” edition:

• Is this the new MacBook Air? — Wired has their own ideas about what Apple’s newest portable computer might look like. Speculation says that the MacBook air may dispense with a wired Ethernet port, optical CD/DVD drive, and is supposed to be “super thin”. Now if only they can deliver it for under US$1299…
• Jessica Alba talks about race in Hollywood — I’ll be frank — I’m not what you’d call a Jessica Alba fan because (1) I’m not a heterosexual man with traditional taste in women and (2) because she agreed to star in “Good Luck Chuck”, but Alba’s views made me see her in a new light. After the interviewer added Eva Mendes to a (short) list of leading ladies of color that Alba rattled off, Alba replied, “But is Mendes greenlighting movies?”, quickly cutting to the real racial inequality in Hollywood. (via Racialicious)
• You’re never too young for your first Brazilian — via Feministe, an Australian company is marketing Brazilian waxes to ten year old girls, using the argument that “(n)obody really likes hair in their private regions and it has a childlike appeal.” At ten years old, almost *everything* has a childlike appeal, but what squicks is that in this case, childlike = sexually appealing.
• Spaceship-grade aluminum houses available in Canada — because who hasn’t dreamed of living in an escape pod? (via io9)

Cabel Sasser of Panic on the wrongness of the Windows UI:

“It’s almost impossible to feel passion about Windows as a platform. Probably like many of your readers, when I use software or applications, my brain can’t help but subconsciously notice an infinite stream of little things that are weird or out of place or questionably designed that I want to fix. When I try to use Windows, this internal alarm is literally constantly firing. Every window, every dialog, every workflow, my brain trips up on 1 or 5 or 15 things that are hard to comprehend. I can barely even use Vista without wanting to wrap it up, glaze it with a delicious marinade, cook it in an oven, garnish it with a sprig of mint, and toss it out the god-forsaken window.”

I struggled with this daily at my last job, and it’s why, even at the risk of shooting myself in the foot and/or never finding suitable employment ever again, I’ve decided that I never, ever, ever again in life want to work on IxD projects for Windows applications.

(Via Marco.org Tumblelog.)

I thought I’d try something new. Instead of writing a blog entry that details how I fixed a problem, I thought I’d make a video and post it for your viewing enjoyment.

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If you, like me, found yourself unable to upload photos to Flickr using their Flash-based uploader after upgrading to Leopard (OS X 10.5), worry not: Adobe has released an update to Flash Player 9 that fixes an issue with Flash uploads. It’s probably a good idea to uninstall the player before upgrading, unless you’re like me and prefer to live dangerously. I didn’t uninstall first (didn’t see the link initially) and I’m happy to report that I’m able to upload just fine. Still, don’t let my bad practices influence you – uninstall first, then upgrade.

A while back on my tumblrblog I posted a link to a tutorial that shows how to use Textmate to create blog entries. Textmate has completely eradicated any need for BBEdit in my life and has eclipsed Coda for the time being because of PHP syntax completion, but I digress. When I first tried this, I was using WordPress and wasn’t able to get this to work properly, but now that I’ve switched to MT4, I thought it was time to try this once more. I discovered a few things in the process:

• MT has two passwords; the user password and the webservices (API) password; and
• For whatever reason, I had to log in with MarsEdit and use it to fetch posts before Textmate would do it successfully.

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