Idle State

Well I'm now relocated to Dubai - more or less - in the fantastic suburb of Greens in Apartment 1304. Not being a superstitious type at all - living on the thirteenth floor and all... Couldn't help noticing this in the lift though:

I can't help but to imagine some giant cartoon spring attached to the bottom of the lift - that Wyle E. Coyote might buy from Acme.

I can't recall ever having seen a notice like this before... I'm wondering if there is a higher incidence of free-falling lifts in the UAE. Should I be worried?

Stacks in the Dock on Leopard are great - incredibly useful and easy to use. But subfolders in stacks revert back to the Finder which I find quite frustrating.

If Apple wanted to be even more cunning, I have two idle thoughts...

First: I would be able to click or hover over a subfolder and see it's contents - but stay in the Stack view of things. The modal change is too quick at the moment - it's like Stacks were only half implemented and you have to do the rest with Finder.

The second problem is that - whilst they're great for finding stuff and dragging stuff around - filing a copy back to Stack from a Save Dialogue is just as slow as it has always been. I often use Stacks to access deeply-buried-folders - so they can stay sitting in their rightful place - but readily available as a Stack for quick and frequent access.

When I use an application and I want to, say, save a new copy back to the location of the Stack I still need to navigate to the location of my deeply-buried-folder. What would be ideal would be a "Stacks" group in Finder (and File Open and Save dialogues) - which always shows me which Stacks I have on the Dock. So then I'd have quick access for both retrieving and creating.

A friend of mine, Andrew Yoole, recently showed me a Music Video that he had been working on for Angus & Julie Stone. Andrew did the animation components of the clip. Here's the clip:

It's pretty cool. Andrew works freelance in Sydney and seems to spend all his life creating these kinds of things. They impress me every time I get to seem them.

The other Music Video that Andrew made for Angus & Julie Stone was for The Beast. I particularly love this one. It's beautifully emotive...

Kudos, Andrew!

My two year old passport is just about full and I've realised why. In the last 7 days I've been to three other countries besides Dubai - racked up about 20 hours and 10000 nautical miles and been through about what must be about 20 security checkpoints.

What I've realised is that this has become normal for me - hence the full passport.

So - frustration with waiting, queueing, being "screened" and flight safety videos abounds.

Been meaning to take photos of this for quite a while now (several years, in fact) and actually had my camera with me yesterday.

One of the Apple Dealer's in Qatar clearly didn't receive the memo from 1998 when the logo changed...

I have had an ongoing argument with Skype for over a month now.

Skype chose to cancel a transaction I made with a credit card for SkypeOut credit - sometime after the fact. However, they still charged my card and are claiming that it is just an authorisation on card and not a real charge.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.