Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Well that was an interesting little exercise. The previous post (Traffic Woes) was written by pen on my Dell Pocket PC in its Notes app. Rather than go through several steps to export the note as text I simply dragged a copy of the actual Note which has the extension PWI to the Mac’s desktop.

I dropped it into Tofu and there was all of my text as I had written it, along with some XML-style code. I dropped it into an editor (Scrivener) and removed the spurious code, then tidied it up before posting it to the blog. There it was, pasted into the blog’s online editor. Great. I post and there’s nothing in the entry.

Mmm. Paste as plain text. Still nothing. Go back and save the text as plain text, then re-open it and copy and paste. Still nothing. I guess there was more to that PWI file than simple ASCI. Damn those Microsoft files!

In the end I went back to the Dell and pasted the text into Pocket Word and saved as plain text. That worked.

I know it wasn’t a virus, or even nefarious, but I still feel infected.

Why use the Pocket PC in the first place? Let’s just say that when they were writing the Transcriber handwriting recognition software for this thing: they were using MY handwriting! If you saw my writing you’d say it looked exactly like Marker Felt in iPhone Notes, and Transcriber “transcribes” it flawlessly. Credit where credit’s due.

Not being in control; that’s one of the major causes of stress. One of the great and pleasurable aspects of owning a computer (particularly a Mac) is that you are in effect the master of this one small part of your life. Set things up to reflect your tastes, assign your shortcuts, arrange windows just how you like them etc. But when it comes time to connect to the outside world, now someone else is in the driving seat.

One day or hour or minute you’re getting great down load speeds, the next, you’re not. It’s all so seemingly random. No wonder that the internet is compared so often to traffic and transportation; in most areas of your life you can assert control, or buy control if you have the means — but when it comes to driving from here to there, or downloading from there to here, well, tough.

I have one thing that I repeat to myself whenever I am having a particularly kludgey down load session: It’s not me, it’s them.

In the past I’d dive in and start to adjust my network settings in the vein hope of curing this latest slow down, when half an hour ago everything was running along nicely. What had changed in the last half hour? Nothing at this end. Like I said, and forgot, it’s not me, it’s them…

I used to get really angry on my drive to work each day. There was one particular intersection where traffic (including me) waiting to turn would be held up for what seemed like forever. Certain folks would feint driving straight through, and at the last moment, make the turn from inside the intersection, around the legitimately turning traffic, and holding up that traffic even more.

My blood would boil, and then I taught myself a little game; I imagined that I lived in Viet Nam where everyone is a terrible driver. Rather than fume and cuss at the bad drivers I calmly accepted the fact that they were all bad drivers and instead, quietly celebrated whenever I might spot someone actually driving well.

Finally that idea didn’t hold either, and I ended up taking an all together different, and longer route. I had to leave home five minutes earlier but those five minutes saved my sanity. I know there’s a lesson in there somewhere; one that I can migrate to the internet and downloading woes. Wish I knew what it was.

Maybe it’s just this: Relax.

Recently, Apple released Safari for Windows to broaden their user base, and that of standards compliant browsers in general. At about the same time they released the guidelines for creating web pages that could be optimized for the iPhone.

They stressed the concept of conformance to web standards and the use of the simplier forms of enhancements, like javascript and CSS, rather than full blown Java or Flash applets. So, theoretically, we would have pages that are viewable on any modern browser and platform, including the iPhone.

For a long time there were articles complaining about the number of websites that could only be viewed properly using Microsoft Internet Explorer; while Firefox and Safari followed the rules, they couldn’t always display pages tested only for the cludgy Microsoft browser.

Now there is no excuse for lazy web developers who use IE as their primary browser not to at least see how their new pages would look in Safari, and then fix them so that they’ll look as good and be as functional — in any browser.

All fine and good — and yet… Now we are seeing lots of sites that look great in iPhone, and are geared towards the iPhone user, but try to look at them with the gold standard of compliance, namely Safari, and you get kicked right off.

What went wrong here?