Waiting for More Snow...

It's been raining constantly since sometime last night. It's not been an especially heavy rain, and it's not even all that warm out (mid-forties), but it's been enough to clear most of the accumulated snow. Oh, the power of thermodynamics. Heat transfer is a wonderful thing. The downside to all this is that the ground is still frozen, so the water is pooling on the surface. A cold front is on the way, bringing heavy snow and temperatures in the teens, so all that water is going to freeze and then get covered with snow. Should be loads of fun.

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Our new Mac G5 keeps giving me agita. Today I discovered that the current iteration of OS X seems to have changed the way it handles font names, which may mean we'll have to go through all of our catalog files to rename the fonts so they match what OS X is calling them. I didn't have this problem with our old OS X system. I've tried Googling, but have come up empty. I'm sure it's something simple and stupid, but I'm damned if I can find it. (Which reminds me that earlier today I wasted a bunch of time searching through Outlook's menus trying to do something that was simple and stupid. It was simple, just incredibly well hidden.) I hate modern technology...

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I caved and bought the MLB audio package, which means I'm listening to the Dodgers-Marlins game as I type this. I love modern technology...

( More baseball notes... )

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And in what is possibly the weirdest story of the spring so far, ten minor leaguers from the Dominican have been banned from obtaining visas because they participated in a bizarre scheme to obtain fraudlent visas, and more are being investigated. From the story:

The scheme involved players being paid $5,000-$7,000 to get married, with the new wife receiving a visa. The newlyweds do not know each other and divorce soon after arriving on U.S. soil.

The woman would be left with a visa -- possibly to be sold again on the black market -- while the player was supposed to just go on with his life.

What a way to throw away a career.

Steve Jobs Can Bite Me...

That is to say, I figured out the problem I was having with the G5. Some of the font suitcases, which on the Mac are the files that contain the screen fonts that correspond with your printer fonts, were refusing to transfer to the new computer. It's the suitcases that the applications access for their fonts, and then Postscript matches those up with the printer fonts. For whatever reason, certain suitcases refused to be transferred from the iBook over the network to the G5.

Not that there was ever any error message to this effect. When I first noticed that the suitcases weren't installed, I assumed I'd somehow missed them when I was transferring stuff. Then I tried again, and nothing happened. Finally, I tried just copying one of them to the G5's desktop. The file showed up on the desktop for a second, then vanished. WTF? At the very least, Windows pops up a useless message when something like that happens.

I checked to make sure the file wasn't in use on the laptop, and I restarted both computers. Still no dice. I finally wound up burning the missing suitcases on a cd, and transferring them that way. That worked.

I hate computers.