eXtra Notes
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Graham K. Rogers |
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In an unusual display of generosity, under the guise of providing hardware for teachers (to help improve our efficiency) my department handed us each a couple of items last week. First was a Kingston flash drive. At 512MB this beats the old 64MB that I bought a couple of years back; and the price was a clear demonstration of how hardware prices are coming down. My old drive was 1400 baht, while the new one -- at eight times the capacity -- cost 1900 baht.
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The second item was an optical mouse. Those of us who have been using desktop Macs for the last few seasons, are no strangers to such devices. But one cannot look a .gif horse in the mouth, so to speak.
The mouse, from Microsoft, no less, plugged straight into my PowerBoook and I had a play with two button mousing for the first time in ages. I seem to remember that I had a mouse with my 386 but that must be over 10 years ago, and anyway that was a DOS only machine -- the mouse was there for games like Civilisation.
The mouse is OK: it works, the cursor moves, the scroll wheel is fine, and we can move stuff about; but it feels so cheap and tacky after the Apple mouse. If you are using one of the latest PowerBooks, if you put one finger on the mouse pad, the cursor moves; if you put two fingers on the pad, it has the same effect as a scroll wheel.
What I was interested to see were functions that appears with the right mouse click, particularly in the Finder. Click on the desktop with the right mouse button or, with the Apple mouse, adding the Control key to the click, and Folder Actions Setup is activated. This is an application script (or is that script application?) in the Applications > AppleScript folder. These functions are there for the Apple mouse, but we perhaps forget about them. I certainly use them in Safari and other browsers for opening links but this is built into other applications, for example, Mail.
Like all applications, when active, its icon appears in the Dock. Activity Monitor has a couple of other tricks that use the Dock icon. In the "Monitor" menu there is an item marked, Dock. By selecting one of the alternatives offered here, data from the five items above can be viewed in the Dock. This is useful when downloading as one can keep track of progress.
I am afraid that the ten that are shown are bland. OSX hints, however, points out that there are eleven colours, not ten. Clicking to the right of the last block will set the desktop to white. After the Kandinsky, however, even Apple's whites look drab.
That was weird enough, but one that is certainly not a joke has all the venom behind it that the Christian Right can summon, and the target is Microsoft. The NYTimes reports that the Beast of Redmond was alegedly arm-twisted by a local church into withdrawing support for "a state bill that would have barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation."
Microsoft have supported such a bill before, and were strong in the vanguard of providing rights for same-sex couples. Microsoft have been denying it all, of course, but do not deny that Dr. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of the Antioch Bible Church did come a-visiting and HE says "he threatened in those meetings to organize a national boycott of Microsoft products."
According to the Times article, Microsoft did not, as was demanded by the Christian minister, fire employees who testified for the bill. So much for rights of free speech: guaranteed by the US Consitution, but not by the Church, eh? The Bill did not, sadly, pass.
Although M$ had supported the Bill in the past (it has come up before) and has a positive attitude on couples' rights, this time they decided to go "neutral." Companies who do have the courage not to be "Neutral" and who supported the Bill, included Nike (which has a lovely start page), Boeing, Coors (the first site I have seen that demands proof that one is over 21) and Hewlett-Packard.
Those hiding behind Christianity (which I thought was a charitable religion) think that because a few folks voted for Bush in the last US presidential election, they have a mandate. As yet, they do not have a mandate world-wide.
All materials ©copyright G.K. Rogers. Free for individual use.
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For further information, e-mail to Graham K. Rogers.
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