Beckism.com

yFlicks 3.2 just came out. This is why you should care: supplemental library folders. Basically, you can stick videos in a supplemental library folder that’s stored on another volume. Then when the volume isn’t connected, the videos are hidden. Read more about it in the blog announcement.

Take that in the eye, iTunes. This is the feature that all the media organizing programs that I use have been missing out on. I’m kind of excited.

Freeverse is one of the software companies I love, if only for brilliant gems like Kill Monty, and they just released a new game called Neon Tango. I took a peek at it at MacWorld (couldn’t get close enough to play it) and it looks very entertaining. Downloading its surprisingly huge demo now.

Just so you know, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is a really great game for DS. I needed a game that wasn’t fiendishly difficult (goddam Final Fantasy III for DS and it’s freaking neverending final battles and no way to save), and Revenant Wings was an excellent choice. A light RPG meets a light Myth-style RTS (no resource management!) and it works beautifully.

ViewIt, a great little program for viewing large quantities of images, has been updated to version 2.24, bringing a number of Leopard improvements to the program. ViewIt doesn’t even compare with Aperture or Lightroom, but for people who don’t need the power (or expense) of such programs, it’s a great way to quickly browse through and manage large numbers of images without resorting to more bloated programs like Bridge or iPhoto.

Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring by Alex Bischoff and published over at A List Apart is an excellent article introducing a Javascript library for mimicking CSS pseudo classes such as :first-child, :last-child, and so forth.

An excellent resource considering the number of browsers (including Firefox) that have spotty support for some of these selectors.

Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko (trans. Andrew Bromfield) is excellent. Buy it. Read it. Love it. I should have picked this book up months ago when I first noticed it, but I was leery because I keep getting burned by good-looking fantasy and urban fantasy that turns out to be total crap.

Bastard publishers have been dressing up some really cheap whores of books in diamond dresses. But Nightwatch is a classy Russian lady.

(By the way, I’m going to start using Amazon.com affiliate links for products; I hate the thought of ads on Beckism.com — it’s never had them — but hosting doesn’t pay for itself.)

The day after Thanksgiving, I stumbled across a deal that seemed too good to be true: Office 2004 had a $100 rebate that day only, and if you bought any version of Office 2004 you could get Office 2008 for the price of shipping. With Amazon markdowns and the student/home version of Office 2004, that came out to around $40 for Office 2008.

I only need Microsoft Office every now and again, so I couldn’t pass this up. My girlfriend has never owned Office for Mac (and also doesn’t need it very often), so I had someone to give the extraneous 2004 install to; life seemed perfect.

At the time, the promotional materials claimed that Office 2008 would arrive sometime in early February. I figured they wouldn’t be prioritizing these copies of Office (they’re certainly not getting any profit out of them), so this seemed reasonable.

But like all things having to do with ridiculously good deals and rebates, things haven’t been quite so easy.

The other day, I got an absolute jewel of an email (excerpted because for most of the email, you really shouldn’t care):

Thank you for your recent order. The product listed below is currently out of stock. [...] The new expected ship date for your product is 2/25/2008.

If you still wish to receive this product, if available by the new expected ship date shown above, please let us know by responding to this e-mail and placing an X in front of option #1 below [...] If you do not respond to this e-mail or contact our customer service department within 30 days, your order will be cancelled and a refund issued, if applicable.

If you wish to receive the product when it becomes available, even if after the expected ship date, you may update your order by responding to this e-mail and placing an X in front of option #2 below.

Delayed shipping date? Okay, I can handle that. I use Office maybe once a week, if that. It’s mostly future compatibility that I’m worried about, and so far no clients have been sending me .docx files that Pages can’t handle.

But the latter two paragraphs are real jewels. Although I have ordered the product, filed all the forms correctly, and paid them the cost of shipping, I still need to actively respond in order for them to actually send me my copy of Office 2008. Not only that, but if I’m in a hurry and just “check” the first option, they’ll only send the product to me if they meet the Feb. 25th shipping date.

When I asked my Magic 8 ball whether they’d make the Feb. 25th shipping date, it’s response was “Don’t be such a fucking idiot.”

I certainly don’t think I’m entitled to all that much in this particular transaction with Microsoft (after all, it’s practically theft; I’m not sure why they created the deal in the first place), but the underhanded ways corporations try to exploit people’s inattention to detail is still pretty sickening to me. What do they gain by this, anyway? A small amount of positive press when the deal was around, and then the hope that they can trick the people who took advantage of it into passively opting out by forgetting to respond to an email?

Microsoft, consider this a bit of bad press to try and offset anything you originally gained. If you’re going to delay the shipping date, fine. Regardless of whether the product is actually back-ordered, I can understand why you’d want to deliver it to the people who are forking over several hundred dollars first. But cheap tricks like the above email aren’t doing you any favors.

Then again, since when did Microsoft care about what people think? I really should stop expecting to be treated like a human when I’m interacting with Microsoft. It just brings me grief.

Update: it finally arrived! See my opinion of Office 2008 now that I’ve got it in my grubby little mitts.

For whatever reason my girlfriend was a big anime fan growing up, and the other day she decided to revisit her formative years by watching Sailor Moon. Sometime during college she had obtained a season or two of Sailor Moon that weren’t aired in the U.S. (some guy in Canada evidently translated them and then sold them on the sly), so she pops one in and starts watching. Since my desk is right next to the TV, I’ve been halfway watching some of them, too.

I knew that anime could get pretty strange, but I wasn’t prepared. This is my favorite part:

Feminine-looking man (part of a trio of rock stars) wanders onto the scene of a teacher-cum-villain trying to discipline his erstwhile student. Rock star is justifiably pissed off, and decides to do something about it. Fortunately, he has the ability to turn into a Sailor Soldier.

I don’t know how familiar you are with the series, but from what I can gather, Sailor Soldiers are all female. So the dude transforms into a lady. A rather skimpily clad lady. Whatever, I can dig it.

And then he performs his (that is, her) super-power:

If you’re not sure you’re reading that subtitle right, feel free to click the image for a bigger look. And it’s not a funny translation, either. All the super-powers are English words, subtitled because the Japanese don’t really have the same sounds in their repetoire (”Sta Gentarue Utaras!”).

That Sailor Moon follows this up with a Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss seems like a bit of an anticlimax. Once you’ve been hit in the teeth by the gentle uterus, a honeymoon therapy kiss is a walk in the park.

Beckism.com has gone a long time without regular updates. Why? Because it was bloated and bored me. This needed to change. And now it has.

I thought I’d just remove the cruft from the navigation, but it wasn’t enough. Beckism.com needed a bit more attitude. A better layout. The word “gallimaufry” in the sidebar. In short, the design equivalent of a defibrillation.

I invite you to explore the newly revitalized Beckism.com, and keep an eye on this space for opinions, web design tips/tricks/rants, Mac software commentary, short fiction, Dirt Man, and all other things Ian Beck. Hey, you could even subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s good for the soul.

Enjoy the new design, and please let me know if you find anything that doesn’t quite work! This was a big update, so I may well have broken things without realizing it.