Happy 2007

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2007/01/

I rang in the new year with a fairly mellow evening. It started at our place, eating little squares of meats and cheeses, waiting for pizza to be delivered. After pizza, Kim shuttled all of us over to Dave & Christie’s house, where there was a nice crowd of nice people. It was a bit weird in that many of them were roughly our same age, but had kids at home or kids on the way. Since we don’t have any interest in making babies, there was a bit of conversational disconnect at times. Still, everything was great, and we rang in the new year with lots of cheering and glass clinking. And cupcakes. Yum. Eventually, we returned home and everyone drank more and played with my Wii. It turns out that in Wii Sports Bowling, you can accidentally-on-purpose throw the ball into a neighbor’s lane, but it goes straight through the pins without touching them. Connolly discovered that you can play both sides of tennis, with a controller in each hand and one set to left-handed play. At the conclusion of the night, it was discovered that (1) Radio Cab’s phone line actually can be busy and (2) after 3am, there was still a 1-2 hour wait for a cab.

This morning… well, noon actually… I discovered that I was not hungover, not still drunk, but was strangely “out of it.” I only had about 4 beers, some apple cider, and some tea over the course of 6-8 hours, so it wasn’t hangoverish. Maybe I was just tired. I also discovered The Argyle Pimps, an argyle sweater-vest and golf-cap wearing white-guy hip-hop band from Fresno. I highly recommend “Buy Us A Drink.”

This afternoon, I switched from LaunchBar to Quicksilver. I tried this once or twice before, but couldn’t stick with it. The two are effectively the same application–both Quicksilver and Spotlight were spawned from LaunchBar–except LaunchBar has a price tag and the others are free, making Quicksilver more popular in recent years. In trying Quicksilver before, something about the interface just didn’t click correctly for me. Watching MacBreak episode 12 has shown me it isn’t the visual interface, but the keyboard interface, that tripped me up. I’m used to selecting an application or action and going to “the next state” (e.g. “dictionary” and then the word to look up) by hitting spacebar or right-arrow. Quicksilver resets the search(?) on spacebar and does other stuff with right-arrow. For some reason, tab never occurred to me as the way to switch to the next entry thinger. Now that I’ve figured out that fundamental difference, they’re once again the very same application, with Quicksilver being a bit more visually obtrusive (which is okay and can be changed with plugins.) It will take a little time to train my fingers to use tab instead of space, but that’s not an overly complex hurdle.

Edit: A Quicksilver question for those that are currently using it: how do I set default priorities or exclude things from being indexed? For instance, with LaunchBar, I can exclude folders and reorder scans so that, say, the Address Book results come up before filesystem results. With Quicksilver, if I want to compose an email to Brian C, I hit Cmd-Space, type “brian,” arrow-down a whole bunch to skip past the iChat logs stored in ~/Documents/iChats, but don’t arrow-down too far or it skips past the address book card and on to other stuff, then tab, then “Compose email.” I know it eventually learns, but I’d rather not have to train it for every single contact in my address book. So with Quicksilver, is there a way to say “DON’T scan ~/Library/iChats” or say “put Address Book search results above filesystem search results?”

Edit2: Question asked at Quicksilver help forums.

Posted in: Dear Diary Software

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