When I feel most alive … go ahead, take your shoes off!

I recently ran across some very good thoughts on blogging and protecting children. First there’s this post on a blog called ” Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless” and then there’s
this article that asks, “Blogs are a fun forum of self-expression for adolescents. But might blogging be dangerous?”

I won’t repeat everything said in those two links, but I want to add my personal thoughts on the matter. I think that the Internet can be a very dangerous thing, and that parents and adults need to protect children from those dangers.

The interesting thing about these articles is that they bring to light a new point that I hadn’t thought about, the effects of children posting personal information about themselves on the Internet that could make them easy targets of kidnapping or other such acts.

I’ve definitely thought about the fact that we need to keep foul content out of our homes through the Internet, but I hadn’t thought about how careful parents also need to be in what they or their children are sending out of their home for others to read.

Blogs are published for the whole world to read. If I had children, I don’t know if I would want the world knowing what my kid looks like, what his name is, and where he lives, and what he does on a Tuesday night (because he posted it on his personal blog for anyone to read). That’s just scary. I mean I might post some of those sort of things on my blog (the one you are reading right now, in fact!), but I am an adult and I can protect myself — children can’t really. That’s why they have parents!

But unfortunately, parents are stupid today. They let their kids become smarter than they are when it comes to technology. In this digital age, parents need to learn, or they are going to start learning the hard way, as they and their children suffer such abuses of the Internet as identity theft and kidnapping. We don’t need any more missing or harmed children.

I don’t ever want my kid to be smarter than I am when it comes to how technology affects our lives and the risks it poses to them. I am glad that I am as aware of the potential dangers that come with the Internet so that when I am a father someday (I know, I gotta get married first, and before that I gotta have a girlfriend, but hey… someday maybe) I can protect my children and my home from those dangers and let my kids enjoy and learn about technology without exposing themselves to potential harm.

Damien: “Scott, is there some reason your car is parked in the place it is??”
Scott: [walks outside and sees his car 20 feet back from where he parked it the night before] “Umm… I have no idea!”

So it turns out that somehow I was able to stop my car in my parking spot and stop the engine and take out my key with the car still in drive. Ridiculous!!

Ned: Can’t we just do this later? I mean, you know how he gets in the morning.
Girlfriend: Ned, aren’t you tired of letting people push you around?
Ned: Yes.
Girlfriend: Then get in there and do it.

They then kick Dewey (shown left, played by Jack Black) out of their house. Thus Dewey’s days of mooching off his pushover friend Ned, having no job, and playing in a failing rock band come to an end and he is faced with real life. Even though he claims that “I serve our society by rocking… I’m out there on the frontlines liberating people with my music. Rockin’ aint no walk in the park!”, he knows rockin’ doesn’t pay the rent, so he’s forced to get a job as a school music teacher… at the “School of Rock”!If you haven’t seen the movie, check it out! It’s awesome!

There are two crucial applications that I’m waiting for Tiger compatibility with, so I can get back to using them.

1. Carbon Copy Cloner - I use this one to clone my Powerbook’s hard drive every night (back-ups are your friend!)

2. Double Command - I use this little app to change up some of the keys on my Powerbook keyboard. For example, my Powerbook doesn’t have a PC-style forward delete key, so I use Double Command to make Shift-Delete do that for me. I find that there are certain times when, depending on where the cursor is, a forward delete is quicker than moving the cursor and using backward delete. I have gotten quite used to using it (that is until I upgraded to Tiger… hopefully I’ll get it back soon)

I wanted to give some thanks to Matt over at Life According to Matt for his help both direct and indirect after I moved over to Blogsome from Blogger this past week. I got some great tips from him on using Blogsome, templates, and Ecto. So thanks Matt! Maybe one of these days I will discover or make something that might be of use to you!

I was pretty excited when I saw this widget posted on dashboardwidgets.com. So I downloaded it and tried it out and I didn’t like it a whole lot.

I love the idea though, so here are some suggestions for the author:

1. Make it more responsive, less slow. When I tried to scroll the scroll bar it hangs 1 out of every 3 or 4 times I use it.
2. Make it look nicer: The corners are ugly and I’m not a huge fan of the bright blue. How about a little bit of transparency just to have a little more of a dashboard widget feel.
3. Enable the scroll wheel for scrolling.
4. Add some kind of lyrics submission to one of these databases in case it can’t find the lyrics, but I have them already.

Other than that, it’s a great idea! This is the perfect kind of thing for a widget because it makes it easier than loading a web page or having to search multiple lyrics sites. And I probably wouldn’t want to spend a long time at a site reading the lyrics, just remember what that one line I couldn’t pick out of the song was.

Keep up the good work!

SAME DAY UPDATE: Just a few hours after writing the original posting, I found out that a new version of this widget was released! It’s much prettier so I don’t have to have the ugly duckling widget on my dashboard! Keep on comin’ with the good updates to this one!

In my first post about metadata in Address Book, I think I forgot to mention that the real benefit in adding tags to your contacts individually is that they can then be indexed using spotlight on those tags. You don’t need to tag your contacts to be able to put them in groups together. You can just use regular Groups and manually drag the contacts you want into them, instead of using smart groups, but if you put tags in the Note section, you might as well use Smart Groups, and then you also get the power of Spotlight knowing about that information as well!

So today I just wanted to add some contacts to my Address Book. I had a list in an excel document with all their contact info that was sent to me, so I figured that I could simply export the Excel spreadsheet to CSV (comma separated values) or a tab delimited text file, and then Address Book’s import text file feature could handle it from there.

So I exported to a CSV and TXT file with no problem from Excel. Then I pulled up the import in Address Book and it really nicely let me match up the fields in Address Book with those in the text file using the headers in the first row and ignore the first record. I could even click forward and backwards through the contacts I was about to import. It seemed nice and dandy until I went to click “OK” and NOTHING HAPPENED! It just sat there like it had no idea I had just clicked “OK”!

Why is there an import feature if it doesn’t work??? How hard can it be to import a text file? I could write a program to do this! In 9th grade!

Apparently I’m not the only one to have some problems with Address Book’s import “feature”. Paul Thurrott experienced similar difficulties and mentioned them in his very thorough and good review of Tiger

Apple, I love Tiger and the Update to the iApps, but please, please give me a reason to stick around and use them instead of running off to software that actually does what it claims to do, and does what I need it to do!

It would be pretty sad if I had to figure out and write an apple script or Automator workflow to simply import some contacts (something that Address should definitely be able to do!)

Anyone else had bad luck importing into Address Book? Let me know about it.

Here is a script I wrote, the Contact Tagger

Contact Tagger.scpt

This is my first test post with Ecto to my new WP based blog on Blogsome! Here goes! All the posts before this are ones that I imported from Blogger. Here’s a nice picture of us hanging out at the beach a few weeks ago!

With such power in Spotlight to search metadata, why wouldn’t Apple not allow easy entry of metadata into contacts? You can easily add a tag like [Family] to the Note section one by one to all your family members contact cards, but why not be able to select them all and do it at once. Since I know that Address Book is scriptable and I wanted to play around with Automator I decided that this was a suitable problem worth attacking.

So I go into Automator and find out that none of the Automator actions for Address Book let you EDIT contact info, only search, filter, and show contacts. SO I had to venture into another world of scripting, one slightly more complicated: AppleScript.

After a little help from someone on the MacScripters forums I got a working piece of code. Here it is; it works just like it should! Feel free to copy this and use it yourself!

–*************************
— Multiple Contact Tagger
— How to use this script: Select multiple contacts in Address Book, then run this script (via the script menu or Quicksilver are the best ways), and it will let you enter the tag (ex: [Family] ) you want and then apply it to the selected contacts by appending it into the Note section of each contact. You may then want to create Smart Groups that search for that tag in its criteria, and then Smart Folders in Mail that use the Smart Groups in its criteria

— Author: Scott Paulis
— Last Modified: May 17, 2005

tell application “Address Book”
set thePeople to selection
display dialog “What tag would you like to apply to the selected contacts?” buttons {”Cancel”, “Apply”} default button “Apply” default answer “[tag]”
set dialogInfo to result

set selectedButton to button returned of dialogInfo
set tagString to text returned of dialogInfo

if selectedButton is “Apply” then
repeat with aPerson in thePeople
set currentNote to the note of aPerson
if currentNote is missing value then set currentNote to “”
set newNote to currentNote & tagString
set note of aPerson to newNote
end repeat
end if
end tell
–**************************

I got my copy of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger this week and I very pleased, overall. But there are a few gripes I have, they mostly have to do with Address Book and Mail.

I decided since I was upgrading to Tiger, I might as well start using the upgraded versions of Apple’s Mail and Address Book applications, especially since they are free and I don’t have to pay to upgrade them (unlike Microsoft’s Entourage)

I was able to easily enough, using Mail’s built-in import functionalities, import my mail from Entourage. I also drag-and-drop imported all my contacts to Address Book fairly painlessly, although I did lose the categories attached to them somehow (and hadn’t backed them up first … idiot!)

My main complaint about Mail/Address Book is it’s lack of categories support. I’ll touch on this in my next post.

I’ve made it so hard on myself, turning my back on how You felt
Seeing a lie that led me on, leaving a love that did no wrong
That’s what it took for me to say

That You simply love
Despite all the stupid things I’ve done
It’s hard to remember
That You simply love
Even though I know not what I’ve done
It’s hard to remember
That You simply love

I’ve tried to do all this on my own
Not thinking once of what You’ve shown
All that I’ve done has blinded me
To everything that You have for me
I want You to know that I finally see

I don’t know why I can’t understand
I don’t know why I can’t comprehend

These are the words to a Pillar song called “Simply”. I really like this song, and I feel like I can often relate to it. Sometimes I just do stupid things, and it’s so hard to remember that God simply loves me, even though I have wronged him in such great ways.

I am so thankful for God’s love, in spite of my stupidity! He’s so good!

Oh, that this love would drive me to joyful obedience!

I’m almost 1,000 miles overdue for my getting my oil changed!

You are probably wondering why I haven’t posted to my blog in like a month. Well I’m not dead, if that’s what you were hoping! (Besides I don’t really have much money for anyone to get from my death… I do have an iPod though! .. I can picture the relatives fighting over it .. while I lay dead with a big grin on my face)

I have been very busy, mostly trying to figure out what I want to do next year, and find potential jobs. Let me tell you, job search is HARD WORK! I feel like I am working two jobs. In the morning, I wake up and head to the office to do web development for Crusade. Then I come home and spend 4 hours or so searching for jobs online, writing cover letters, retouching my resume, writing emails to contacts, and sending my resume out, etc… It is pretty tough work. So I have found very little time for blogging, unfortunately.

I will try to be more regular about writing again, but until the end of July, I will be going strong in the job search, unless God provides something out of the blue for me before then! Please pray for me! That I would trust God with my career decisions and follow where He is leading me! Thanks!