Author Archives: brad

My Slashdot post today, regarding the article A Brief History of ClarisWorks:

ClarisWorks/AppleWorks is still my favorite productivity tool. When I work on files I need to share, I’m forced to use Office, but when it’s just for me, I use AppleWorks every time. The word processor doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as Word, but that’s fine, because all I want to do is write. I don’t need Clippy offering me all sorts of idiotic advice. I know how to write a letter!

The spreadsheet is not as nice as Excel, but it’s adequate for most people’s needs. The database is lame, I’ll admit. But the drawing tools are awesome. And the whole thing is object-oriented and integrated, just like the article says. Want a text box in your draw document? You have the full power of the word processor. Want a spreadsheet in your word processing document? You have the full spreadsheet right there.

It’s a shame that the product seems to be languishing in Version 6. I hope that we see a Version 7 soon. The product still has so much potential.

Went back to Innabah (doesn’t look like the site is quite complete yet) this weekend. Wow, we haven’t been there since before we got married. The last time Jen and I were there together was in 1992 for a reunion dinner for the 1991 summer staff. I’d been there a few times since then to do computer work. It was fun to show Gracie the place we had worked years ago. She thought that was pretty neat.

We were there to help build up a Praise Band for Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church in Mountville, PA. What a great time. I spent Saturday teaching their musicians and singers a bunch of my favorite praise and worship songs. I must have been driving them harder than I thought, because by evening, they looked like a bunch of zombies.

Saturday night was a commitment service for the team. It wasn’t what I expected. We wanted to present salvation to each of the kids on the team (the praise band is mostly kids from the youth group). But, as it turns out, I don’t think any of them needed that. They were very mature, and they impressed me very much with their dedication to the Lord and their desire to serve.

But we got to see some real brokenness on Saturday night. A lot of walls fell down; some were torn down. There were tears of sorrow and tears of joy. It ended with the members of the praise band laying hands on Charlie, the worship leader, and praying over him. It was very moving, even for those of us who were really just along for the ride, so to speak, and not part of the team.

This morning, Jen and I spent about an hour leading an intimate time of worship for them. I don’t usually like to talk when I’m leading worship; I’m more music-oriented. But this morning I found myself talking about various scriptures and stories, really tying a lot of things together. When we were done with the worship time, I was really and truly exhausted.

Gee, maybe this web site should be nominated for “Most Neglected Weblog in December” for this year. Yeesh. But at least it’s more up-to-date than this one.

but it will have to wait since we had to buy a furnace a few weeks ago and Christmas is coming. We’ll probably get an iBook. The new ones are sweet. We got one in at school and it’s very nice. And it comes with Jaguar. I wonder how Jen will take to OS X…

Curly died this week.

Curly was the Mac OS 9 drive in my graphite G4 at work. I have three drives in it: Curly (OS 9), Larry (OS X 10.1.5), and Moe (OS X 10.2.2). That’s so I can run Network Assistant 3.5.2, Remote Desktop 1.0, and Remote Desktop 1.1 at need. It’s a nice setup.

But then Curly died. I tried as hard as I could, but I was unable to bring him back to life. So I replaced the now-defunct Quantum driver with a nice, shiny Seagate named (of course) Shemp.

(Now, if I really wanted to be true to the spirit of the stooges, I would have put in a cloned image of Curly and named it Joe, but that would have been a bit too weird. Besides, it would have died pretty quickly if history is any indication.)

Then today, I backed up Scooby, my PowerBook, and blew it away. A clean install of Jaguar later, I’m back in business. The only thing I forgot to restore before I left work is my games. Doh! But fortunately I carry my Tony Hawk Pro Skater CD in my computer bag, so I can re-install that if I need a fix.

Roxio to acquire Napster. Holy crap!

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…
-William Butler Yeats

Grace looked at a woman’s picture in the paper on Sunday and said, “Daddy, look at her. She’s so ugly!“

Now, I don’t talk like that, especially around her, so I said, “Gracie, that’s not a nice thing to say.”

She looked at the picture, then looked at me, then pointed to the picture. She said, “But, Daddy, she’s really ugly.”

Having a three year old is definitely an adventure.

Tonight I actually got to rock her and sing to her (selections included “Lullabye” by Ben Folds Five, “St. Judy’s Comet” by Paul Simon, and “Blackbird” by The Beatles). Haven’t done that for a long, long time.

Not that she actually fell asleep, mind you.

Step away from the TV, and nobody gets brainwashed.

Why can’t we divide by zero? Here’s a good explanation.

“It’s just my luck that I’d miss those two days.” – PHB.

Dave’s laptop tanked yesterday. No amount of coaxing could get it to boot up again. So we threw a FireWire cable on it and backed up his Users folder to Moe on my trusty ole graphite G4 (Moe had more free space than either Larry or Curly). He re-installed Jaguar and now all is well again. He thinks QuickMail caused the crash. I tend to agree, but I haven’t ruled out Chimera yet. I’m sticking with Mozilla anyway.

By the way, I read an interesting blurb about the name Mozilla. The original browser was, as many are aware, Mosaic. Mozilla is short for Mosiac-killer.

HelpDesk 2 should be in beta around Christmastime. Yeeha!