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A post on the JSonar blog pointed me at this thread on the Cakewalk forum comparing Sonar and Pro Tools. I find it surprising that Sonar's poor audio scrubbing functionality (versus Pro Tools's reportedly excellent scrubbing) is not mentioned at all! I keep hearing that many good sound engineers still prefer to "use their ears" a great deal and I'd figure they would therefore use scrubbing a lot, but the opinion from Cakewalk seems to be that scrubbing isn't used by most users and thus isn't a priority. The forum thread does discuss Pro Tools's strength in sound engineering and post production and its relative lack of popularity with composers, which I guess might explain this. If Sonar's primary market is composers and the like, there might certainly be less of a demand for features such as scrubbing. This is a damned shame for me (and I suspect many other blind users), as decent scrubbing (i.e. better accuracy and the ability to play faster than 1x) would make my life a hell of a lot easier, not to mention more fun!
Jen: "Watch the door... it's ajar."
Jamie: (casually, without pause) "No it's not! It's a door!"
... I thought it was kinda clever, personally, but perhaps I've been awake too long...
So we're in the process of finalising the purchase of our house, which is all very exciting. However, the administrivia is quite the opposite, as illustrated in the following series of events:
- A few weeks ago: Our mortgage broker sent our First Home Owners grant documents to St George, our bank. Our mortgage broker then called to confirm that they had been received.
- A couple of weeks ago: I called NRMA (our insurance company) to ask them to raise the building insurance amount to the amount specified by the bank. (My original figure was obviously an underestimate.) They told me that this was all done, no worries.
- Early last week: Jen sent the insurance documents to St George. She also emailed our solicitor with a request to settle a few days earlier.
- Last Friday: No contact yet from our solicitor, so I called his office to confirm that the request was received and actioned. He's not in the office; apparently, he'll call me back on Monday morning.
- Monday afternoon: No call from our solicitor. I called him late afternoon. I noted that he mustn't be receiving our calls and emails. He noteably neglects to mention the email, but was surprised about the call on Friday. He told me that St George apparently haven't received our insurance documents (see 1), nor our First Home Owners Grant documents (see 3).
- Tuesday: Jen had to drive to visit our mortgage broker to sign new First Home Owners Grant documents.
- Wednesday morning: Jen called NRMA to ask them to fax our updated insurance documents to St George. She discovered that apparently, our record states the old insurance amount instead of the updated amount (see 2). Our solicitor called me to tell me that the received fax was missing some information. Jen subsequently called NRMA and they said that the information was correct in the records but that the fax was somehow incorrectly generated.
All is now finally sorted, but.... aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggg!
The new Bazaar 1.13rc1 release is codenamed paraskavedekatriaphobia. Having no idea what the hell that was, I decided to look it up, and as usual, Wikipedia furnished me with the answer: the fear of Friday the 13th. If I knew the smiley for rolling eyes, I'd be using it here...
Well, you learn something new every day.
Jen and I noticed a fascinating glitch in the laws of probability recently. If we are eating something containing pitted olives - home made pizza, for example - I end up with all of the olives which mistakenly contain pits, while Jen encounters none. We're not just talking one, here. It's usually at least three or four. This has happened a few times now. To prove the point even more, after happily enjoying pizza free of olive pits (while laughing at my somewhat less peaceful pizza experience), Jen gave hungry me a piece of her pizza... and guess what I found when I ate it? Yup... more olive pits. I guess a more logical explanation might be that Jen is consciously or unconsciously doing this...
Actually, this title is rather unsuitable. If I am the lord of olive pits, surely I could convince them to cower and run away or something...
I found this quite amusing and satisfying:
Fed-up bus driver 'drove kids to police'
Until a few days ago, the From, To, Cc, etc. header fields in the Thunderbird message reader pane were inaccessible (or at least extremely painful) for those using screen readers. Using NVDA, I was sometimes able to read them with a lot of messing around, but I often found myself viewing the message source because it was so much easier to search for the header names in the raw message. In the few years that I have been using Thunderbird, this has probably been one of my biggest gripes with its accessibility. However, this has now been fixed thanks to Jason Lim Yuen Hoe, a student from a university in Singapore doing a course focused on developing for Mozilla. When I move to the header fields with tab or shift+tab, both the header name and its content is now announced instead of a whole load of nothing. It might seem trivial, but it makes my life a hell of a lot easier, and once again demonstrates the beauty of open source development. Thanks, Jason!
The folder selection tree in Mozilla Thunderbird can be a bit of a nuisance for keyboard users. You cannot jump to a folder by typing the first few letters of its name. In addition, when you move between folders with the cursor keys, Thunderbird opens the newly selected folder immediately. IF you have several accounts and many folders in some of those accounts like I do, this means that moving between folders which are quite far apart will cause Thunderbird to try to open every folder you visit on the way. This is not only slow, but also probably wasteful of bandwidth.
I've just discovered a way to solve this second problem, which I'm posting in case others didn't know about it. To move between folders without opening every folder in between:
- Move to the folder selection tree.
- Press ctrl+space to deselect the current folder.
- Rather than using the up and down arrows to find the desired folder, use ctrl+up and ctrl+down, respectively. You can of course keep your finger on the control key. Notice that Thunderbird does not open each folder.
- When you reach the desired folder, press ctrl+space to select it. Thunderbird opens the selected folder.
There is also the Nostalgy extension, which, among other keyboard productivity enhancements, allows you to jump to a folder by typing all or part of its name. However, I use Thunderbird 3 nightlies and there have been a few compatibility issues recently. Also, Nostalgy overrides the functionality in the quick search bar and it makes the quick search menu inaccessible, so I don't use it anymore. (I should really report a bug, but I can't quite figure out what's going on.)
I've now imported my blog into Facebook, so posts to this blog now also appear as notes on Facebook. This way, those of you who live primarily in the land of Facebook can't so easily avoid them. :) If you want to know how to do this yourself, see this post.
It seems I'm using Google services more and more as time goes on.
First, several years ago, I started using Google (the search engine) and never looked back at other search engines. Like many others, I use Google search an absurdly ridiculous amount and find myself using Google and its derivatives (Googled, Googling, etc.) as verbs far too often. Then, I started using Google search to perform calculations and conversions (which I still think is a very cool feature). It's so convenient to be able to type "50 aud in usd" into Google search. I keep wishing that Google would allow me to perform quick searches of the Australian White Pages so I don't have to use its annoying interface and deal with its often suboptimal search logic.
Then, I experimented with using Google Calendar. I quite like its features, although it has some serious accessibility problems which make it rather frustrating to use, so I don't use it much now. I probably would if these were fixed, though.
Last year, I got sick of the amount of email spam I was receiving. I could probably have found ways to improve it, but I got sick of maintaining it all myself. I used to love fiddling with all of this stuff, but these days, I just want essential things like email to damned well work. I then discovered the joys of the free Google Apps Standard Edition and subsequently moved email hosting for jantrid.net to that. I still get the nice benefits of having my own email domain like being able to create multiple email accounts if I wish. (I've never really done this, but it's the principle!) I'll also be able to use Google Calendar on this if the accessibility improves.
I've recently started using Google News on a daily basis to keep abreast of the latest news. I was previously somewhat notorious for not watching t.v. or listening to the radio very often and thus being horribly out of touch, so this is great.
As anyone who has followed my previous blog incarnations can attest, I update them for a little while and then can't be bothered anymore. (Time will tell whether this will happen once again. It probably will. :)) However, i started to realise that part of the problem was that it was too much effort to post new entries with my previous blogging platforms. Again, I could have done something to improve this, but in the spirit of laziness that made me switch to Google Apps, I decided to switch to a service which hosted my blog for me and allowed me to use jantrid.net. There were a few candidates, but as you know, I ended up using Blogger, which is yet another Google service.
The scary truth is that all of this really has made my life much easier and I'm not particularly inclined to change it, despite my zest for open platforms and solutions, as well as my general wariness and cynicism of large, world dominating corporations. I don't like being locked into a service running on a proprietary platform which doesn't allow me to export my data, but Google does allow data to be exported in open formats, so this isn't such a problem.
Nevertheless, I have to wonder: what next? How much more of my life will involve Google in some way? What if it fell apart and died? Could I stop using it, even if I found out that it was becoming an awful, anti-competitive, privacy invading, unethical corporation which squashed all in its path to world domination? :) Okay, so that last bit might have been a bit melodramatic, but it does give one pause for thought even so.