Apple Safari team, take note!

Safari is a fine browser, but has one irksome failing: When you quit and relaunch Safari, none of the previously-open pages relaunch. (Unlike Apple Mail, for example.)

Yes, you can go to History and "open all previous windows." But this is an unnecessarily irritating step.

And if you should relaunch Safari and subsequently open a few new windows, and then have to quit for some reason, only those last few windows will be re-open using that command.

To get all your previous windows open, you will have to ploddingly go and re-open every one of them individually through the History window.

I know it's not good practice, but since I have tons of RAM, I often have two dozen or more windows open. Sort of having lots of papers on my desk.

What I'm asking for is not rocket science. Omniweb, for example, does this automatically.

Apple, are you listening?

Probably not.

EPA Decision 'Obligates' Action on Greenhouse Gases

A note sent to a meat-loving friend:

Obama doesn't need legislation now. His EPA enforcers will be free to run amok.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2009/12/epa-decision-obligates-action-on-greenhouse-gases.html

And wait till they start dealing with all those flatulent cows!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/05/tech/main4651448.shtml

Either the taxes will be passed on, raising your meat prices, or frustrated farmers will kill them off, so you might profit from a bumper crop of steaks.

I'd suggest you install a big walk-in freezer in your house either way. I'm sure Al Gore has one.

Obama's transparency

You can't make this stuff up:

Today the Obama administration had a meeting on openness, which was closed to the public.

If you wrote this in a book, it would be judged as bizarre comedy and a rip-off of Catch-22. But such flagrant flouting of steely campaign promises is quite routine in this administration, as this AP article notes:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5joOOsTVD57lFwm_InpZY_nRbg4KQD9CE3SEG0

One can't help but be reminded of Clinton's promise to "be the most ethical administration ever."

If someday a candidate promised to do business as usual and be duplicitous whenever it was convenient, maybe we'd actually get a President that we could have faith in.

Type expander utilities compared.

I spent a lot of time evaluating type expander applications. I meticulously went through six or eight, most of which were marginal. Here's my shootout result, in case you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

It finally came down to Typinator and TextExpander. I paid for both, and would recommend only the latter if I’d researched even more. (One major squawk: Typinator wants you to pay a separate fee for every single household Mac you have.)

I find the interface of TextExpander much more pleasing, and its capabilities superior. Here’s a feature comparison:

http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/compare.html

But since I paid for both of them, I have them both active. So how do I keep them from conflicting with each other? (This is a problem if you’re not careful.)

Basically, I let Typinator do auto-corrections of spelling, using their libraries.

But I use TextExpander for critical, graphical, and most of my custom expansions.

Apple has a system-wide spell checker, but less comprehensive and transparent than Microsoft’s. (A countervailing benefit is that it works almost everywhere, including web page forms, not just in MS apps.)

Not surprisingly, I like it better when these words can be auto-corrected. Unfortunately, Typinator auto-corrects only when you misspell a word in one of the ways it expects. (If this sounds somewhat irrational, it is; and it limits its usability.)

As my separation of powers, besides using TextExpander for most of my custom expansions, I was absolutely blown away when they added libraries for diacritical marks.

(I’m one of those purists who want words like naïve or bête noire marked correctly. I can never remember keyboard commands to insert diacriticals, even when I remember what they’re supposed to be.

I assign different sounds to each of the applications so I know where the correction is coming from. But that’s probably far more anal-retentive than most people would be.

One of these utilities will become a "must-have" once you get used to it.

Assignment for the Apple Mail team.

After many years of devoted use, I dumped Microsoft Entourage after it managed to lose months’ worth of emails.

And I switched to Apple Mail. It’s a great time saver in the way it tightly integrates address book, iCal, and allows painless downloading attachments to iPhoto.

(Entourage integrates with other Office products, but only in their little walled garden of Microsoft monopoly.)

However:

1) We desperately need a way to color-code a recipient without jumping through the hoops of adding it to a "rule." Entourage has made this absurdly simple for years. It's one of the most important things I miss, and consider it a major drawback of Apple Mail.

For example, when I get un-categorized emails, I usually want to add the sender to my various color lists for friends, work, politics, technology, or whatever. This way, one can scan subsequent incoming messages and separate the wheat from the chaff. (Especially important if you get five dozen new messages a day, as I do.)

To do this with Apple Mail using Rules is an irritating, confusing two-minute job — so most of the time, you don't do it.

With Entourage, it’s a matter of just clicking the “categories” pane at the top.

2) Though Apple emails that you've forwarded have an arrow next to them in the message pane, if these or other messages are sitting open on the desktop (and I often have dozens of like this), there's nothing on them to show their status.

Look at the illustration to see how Entourage elegantly handles these needs.

Apple, is there some reason your programmers can’t manage to adopt these crucial features?

How to cope with rising college costs: send your kid somewhere else.

For sixty years, blue-collar Americans have beavered away with the assumption that “my kid’s gonna go to college.”

And for all too many, the punishment has been a dream achieved.

As a result, we have more home-equity loans and college-educated waiters than any other country on the planet.

This is not like the WW2 vets who flooded the universities under the GI bill, a social revolution that ensured that college would no longer be the refuge of rudderless twits with wealthy parents. (Luckily, many of those vets would become teachers to accommodate the flooding of baby boomers into the elementary schools.)

Today’s notion of college as a passageway to a higher class is as much a chimera as an exclusive club that anyone can join.

Pundits endlessly debate whether colleges should be glorified trade schools or monasterial institutes where pure knowledge can be pursued for its own sake.

Too often they are neither, serving as remedial camps for high school graduates who are largely illiterate, innumerate, and crashingly ignorant of elementary geography, let alone skills in reasoning and rhetoric that were once learned from McGuffey’s Readers by eighth-grade students.

When I was in business, I had a procession of highly-educated secretaries, from Yale English majors to holders of master’s degrees. But what I really needed was a Katherine Gibbs graduate.

Of course, nobody aspires to be “just a secretary” anymore. But even as the position has been gussied up to administrative assistant, it has been dumbed down. Try finding someone who can properly format a letter to a senator, or consult a secretary’s book of letters so a boss doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in writing a condolence letter.

It may offend our democratic yearnings to emulate Japan or Germany, separating secondary students onto different tracks to produce better trade-school graduates and fewer mal-educated college grads.

But do we want a better, more adaptable workforce? Or more purchased vanity?

As to those non-college graduates who fret about their lack of academic knowledge, my advice is simple: sell your television and buy an old set of Britannica, which can be had for a peppercorn.

You’ll be more educated than the average college graduate before you get out of the B’s.

Bob Hope and Jimmy Cagney

From one of my Far Flung Correspondents:

We tend to forget how talented these guys were.

—Gibson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28

You must watch this to see what performers could do in bygone Hollywood, before one-shot wonders complained that "my trailer [Winnebago] isn't bigger than X's."

I read that Cagney endured a lot of physical pain in doing this scene. This film ("Seven Little Foys") was done 13 years after his rousing "Yankee Doodle Dandy," which showed him at his best stiff-legged dance style.

Although only four years older than Hope, who here is at his absolute best in dancing, the years had taken more of a toll on Cagney. Probably because he worked at this so long in vaudeville, whereas Hope went into comedy much sooner.

A tragedy is that Hope stayed in the limelight* too long. He outlived Jimmy (100 vs.. 87), but he should have retired more gracefully.

An even less flattering depiction of Hope is in the biography by Arthur Marx (yes, Groucho's son) of Hope and Crosby.

Mister K

* and BTW, if you ask me , as a former cinematographer I can tell you the derivation of "Limelight."

I wish my memory was filled with more important things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWpU8sX10_4&NR=1

The real hard times

"Bound for Glory" ran last night. I hadn't seen it for years.

A film buff can't help but admire Hal Ashby's direction, Haskell Wexler's cinematography, and David Carradine as star — the latter having beat out many high-profile actors for the role, including Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, and even Robert Dylan.

It's a work that shows what Depression times really were like —at least for Okies— as opposed to today's proclaimed woes, where not getting enough cheese on your pizza is viewed as penury.

But as is often the case, it's a Hollywood Version of actuality, making Guthrie seem irritatingly noble, albeit self-destructive in his behavior.

In actuality, Guthrie was a pedictable liberal/radical/collectivist and naif who followed the Party Line and wrote weekly columns for The Daily Worker.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanacs Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that WWII was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union the topics of their songs became anti-fascist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie

Anyhow, it's a fine film, so long as you don't confuse it with reality.