Office Time

From TidBITS this week: a review of OfficeTime, another time tracking app for OS X (Windows version in beta). From what the review says, it has more features than our current tracking app, On The Job, including iCal integration, report generation, expense tracking, and flexible category pricing (handy when doing tasks with different hourly rates.) The review was good, so I’m going to try it out for a while.

Order of the Phoenix

We went to see the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, and everybody in our party enjoyed it very much. I’m going to have to read all those books after all.

Return of the King.

The Apple Store called yesterday to inform me that IdiotCentral, my MacBook Pro, was finished and ready to be picked up. “We didn’t even need to replace the logic board,” the Genius told me. “It was the LCD.”

I stopped in this morning, weaved past the consumers ogling the iPhone display, and a nice tattooed associate brought my baby back to me. Within two minutes I had signed the paperwork and was ready to leave—with a gentle reminder that AppleCare might be a good idea for a portable.

My new screen is bright and clean, and the hinge is actually a little tighter now. After a failed attempt to migrate my data back onto the machine this afternoon, I rooted out the cause (permission issues) and I’m now 2 minutes away from restarting into my old work environment—not a day too soon. At the client site where I worked on Friday, the guys helping me get up to speed (and the IT guy they sent over) looked at my battered eight year old stunt laptop and shook their heads in amazement. (Apart from a failure to be able to connect to their wireless network, my eight year old laptop worked fine, thank you.)

Overall, besides a week’s wait to have the unit repaired, my customer experience was flawless and professional, something I’ve come to expect from Apple, and something I always recommend to friends.

Music Migration

Last night at 2AM, I finished a month-long project I’ve been working on late nights and on weekends: consolidating, normalizing and archiving my master music library to a backup disc so that I can swap drives around. To make a long story short, the drive in my iMac music server went bad enough that I can’t use it as a boot disc anymore, so I had to compare the music on two separate drives (the working iTunes library and the backup I made a few months ago), make sure the backup was updated, and then get the bad drive ready for its new job. I tried using a couple of utilities for this task, SuperSync and syncOtunes, and found them lacking in many different respects. SyperSync does a pretty fair job of working through two iTunes libraries to find duplicates and differences, but its UI is a nightmare of little icons, buttons, and lists, and the ‘filtering’ features are arcane and nonintuitive. I found myself spending more time reading the manual repeatedly to make sure I didn’t erase anything than I did syncing files, so I gave up on it. syncOtunes semed to work, but my experience was that it didn’t find all the duplicates or missing files. Instead, I resorted to looking through side-by-side folder directories and comparing file sizes to see where I had differences from one side to the other. This was time-consuming and tedious, but it satisfied the anal-retentive part of my brain and helped me prune the duplicates and bad files from the library.

My plan is to build a Smart Folder for the iTunes server, which will import any music file I add into iTunes and then write out a logfile of the additions so that I can keep track of the changes. I had a basic version of this on the old music server I ran at work, but I found it would get backed up as iTunes added the files and cancel itself out, which was unreliable and annoying. I’d also like to make a script that will create a record of which files get metadata additions or changes so that I can update the backup drive, but that’s a little more involved.

New!

Carbibles.com

Carbibles.com, a site written by a non-expert in a normal (and UK-based) tone about, well, car stuff. Interesting reading. (via)

Whoops

Hey, I forgot to send birthday shout-outs to my sister yesterday. Ren, happy birthday!

Applescript and Automator

I’m doing some research on automating workflows for a client, and I figured I’d need to brush up on my Applescript. Here’s a link to the Applescript Sourcebook, a fantastic collection of tips, tricks, and lists of scriptable applications. Through this page I realized I might be able to use the Automator to build my workflow—something I hadn’t even considered. Automatorworld has a pile of workflows and actions, although it’s weighted towards the Apple-authored applications.
Update: FontDoctor, the app I’m trying to automate, crashes with a -609 error (connection is invalid), even when I use the included scripts.
Update: This error simply means the Applescript can’t run because the application crashes.

Classy!

I saw this in a parking lot on a way to a client meeting this morning. It’s a miniature pole dancer that hangs off a car radio antenna.

Brownout.

Our power blinked out at a little before 2PM this afternoon. I hope this is not a common occurrence this summer, because handling conference calls at the local Panera with my backup laptop is not optimal.