As you’ve probably gathered, I’m an OS X user, and I’m pleased with my operating system of choice. At work, though, I’m on a Win2k box - there are worse situations, to be sure, but there are a few things I can’t help but notice.

Today, for example, I wanted to show Spencer a psd I was working on for one of our sites. So since I already had a window open to that directory, I just dragged the file onto the Photoshop process in my taskbar - something that intuitively makes sense to me, and I don’t think it’s just because you can do that with the Dock. As you Windows folk are aware, however, that’s not something you can do under Win2k. Windows was even helpful enough to pop open an error message, explaining my mistake.

Here’s the thing. If the fact that I would want to drag Photoshop documents onto the Photoshop process in my taskbar was predictable enough that a specific error message could be tailored for just such an instance, why on earth wouldn’t you just go the extra mile and actually include the functionality? If it’s obvious that it’s something I’m going to want to do, why not just let me do it instead of explaining that I can’t?

I’d never really realized before how much OS X bends over backwards to figure out what it is you want to do whenever you do anything, no matter how apparently odd. The icon next to a filename in a window’s titlebar serves as an alias for the file itself - you can drag it anywhere as if it were the actual file, rather than just its title. You can’t do stuff like this under Windows, and I wonder why.

Update: I’m aware you can drag the file to the taskbar and hold it there until Photoshop maximizes itself. That’s not the behavior I’m talking about, but thanks for pointing it out. I’m also aware that you can double click a file icon and it will open in the app with which it’s associated - it’s shocking, I know, but double clicking isn’t purely the provenance of the Windows world. Perhaps I should have emphasized that I wasn’t asking for instructions on how to open a file in Windows - OS X may be the operating system I choose when given the opportunity, but that doesn’t mean I’m a helpless ephebe when faced with a Start menu.

A brief update on the Useless Bastard Home Depot front: getting the first order refunded will take eight business days, even if I cancel the order completely. If I don’t cancel, it will take a further week to two weeks for the new order to ship. At this rate, it looks like I’ll have my air conditioning just in time for Halloween.

Since it’s thanks to some of you fine folks that I had funding for it in the first place, I thought I’d give you a little update on the State of the Air Conditioner. The trouble is, it’s nearly a month later - and I don’t have it yet. Let me tell you how it went down.

I decided to order a slightly more powerful unit with better customer reviews, and the place at which I found the lowest price was Home Depot. None of the local HD stores stock air conditioners - but that’s not a big deal, as you can order online from their site. Which I did, and savored the thought of spending the 4th of July weekend in climate-controlled bliss.

A couple days later, I received an email from HD saying that the unit was out of stock, but that they expected it to ship by 8 July. I was disappointed, but not overly so, so I decided to wait it out. The next week, I received a shipping confirmation - but I noticed that the shipping address listed was not the one I had entered on the site, and as it had a different zip code I was concerned enough to call and correct the error. I spoke to someone from their Customer Service department who explained that they’d recently switched shipping software and were experiencing some problems with the migration. I was sympathetic, since this was around the time that we had done a big software migration at my job, and I’d been helping clients with the resulting problems all week.

The next day, I received an updated shipping confirmation - but it still contained the wrong zip code. I called back and had someone correct it again, and was irritated but not excessively so. I thought nothing of it for another week or so, when I began to wonder what had happened - I hadn’t received a tracking number, so I had no way to tell where my package was or when it would arrive. I called HD again to see if they’d give me a tracking number, but the customer service person I spoke to said that it looked like UPS hadn’t updated it in over a week. She apologized and promised to call UPS for me, and then call me back with the tracking number.

She did call back, but with the bad news that UPS had no idea what had happened to the package. I was told that HD would reship my order for free, and as an apology for my trouble, they’d refund me all the original shipping charges - amounting to about $30 off the total price of the unit. I was annoyed at the delay, but thought the refunded shipping made up for it, and once again thought nothing of it for about a week.

Then today I get an email from customercare@homedepot.com, telling me that unfortunately they weren’t able to ship my order as my debit card had insufficient funds. Here’s the problem: they’d already charged me for the unit, way back on 9 July. I’d been refunded the shipping charges a few days earlier, but I certainly didn’t have enough left over to pay for an entire second air conditioner. I called my bank and found out they’d tried to charge me for it again not once but three separate times today.

So: now it’s just shy of a month later, and my fucking order hasn’t even shipped yet, although I’ve been lacking the cost of it for weeks now. I sent off a furious email to HD just now, detailing the entire sordid order history and desiring someone to call me at my office tomorrow to straighten things out. At this point, I want from HD an assurance that I’ll have my order within a week or ten days, or I want my (your!) money back so I can buy something locally. I’ve also contacted the Better Business Bureau, who have informed me that if HD doesn’t contact me within the next day or two that they’ll take over the complaint on my behalf.

The moral of the story is: don’t ever, ever order from Home Depot’s site.

1. Played the little Flash mini-games at the Pirates of the Caribbean site. This includes playing enough Warrrrr that I collected all five of the super special desktops you get for winning. And seriously, my little Flash pirate ship will sink your little Flash pirate ship before you know what hit you. (It was a little Flash cannonball.)

2. Watched part of the Yankees game, and mused with Chris on why nobody ever seems to point out how incredibly offensive is the logo for the Cleveland Indians. Similarly, although I’m even less of a football person than I am a baseball person, the Redskins seem due for a dash of righteous indignation.

3. Tried briefly to switch to iChat and decided I still prefer Adium. iChat lacks tabbed windows, still, not to mention any real degree of customizability. My Adium messages are contained entirely within one tabbed window, along with my list, and absolutely everything is inoffensively greyscale (except for my Domo Kun icons).

4. Tried briefly to switch to Safari and decided I still prefer Mozilla, although I’m less adamant about this than I am about Adium. Safari’s getting better all the time, and when I’m prompted for a place to save things rather than having everything go automatically to one preferred folder, I may make the move for good.

5. Incidentally, I’ve finally converted to iTunes for everything except my morning alarm, but that’s not really part of this list.

6. Considered making an actual dinner tonight instead of just going across the street to Subway. But I think I’ll end up just going across the street to Subway - I mean, it’s right across the street.

Normally I don’t bother pointing out people ripping off my site, if only because it’s not usually that interesting - someone using one of my camstills for their hot-or-not profile, that sort of thing. I have to make an exception in this case, though, because it’s just so funny - in the amount of time this girl spent carefully plagiarizing my site, she could have created her own without much more trouble. Hers is usually annie.antithesis.net, but as the domain is having DNS woes, qat helpfully mirrored the content here. The photos are funny, of course (all of them being lifted from my camstills archive), but to me it’s the blog that’s funniest - you mean this Annie girl has a crazy downstairs neighbor, too?!? Amazing. Just for giggles, here’s a list of the original entries of mine that she’s lifted (and sometimes edited) for her own blog, starting with the second most recent on her page: Things That Make Emma Happy, It’s Like A Fox Special Right At My Home, Zug Zug, Observations, Show And Tell, Underwhelmed, and I Would Not Be Much Of A Jouster. And here’s some excerpts from when I got to talk to Annie herself! I’m honored, really.

Caught Pirates for that promised second time last night. Johan and I hit up the Union Square theatre, accompanied by a somewhat rowdier crowd than had shown up on Wednesday, but it wasn’t obnoxious-rowdy. Lots of enthusiastic ARRRRRR-ing, a few scattered AVASTs, but not the kind of constant chatter that makes me throw popcorn at people. There were even a few folks with fake swords and eyepatches - apparently a little late for opening night, but I’m sure their enthusiasm is to be applauded. As for the film itself, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it much more the second time around. All the plot and pacing problems I mentioned before just sort of melted away - when you don’t have to keep track of who’s a zombie when and exactly which side that monkey is on, you’re free to bask in two and a half hours of Geoffrey and Johnny, and it’s massively entertaining. Usually I find that when I’m not sure about a movie, its flaws become much more obvious on a second or third viewing, but that wasn’t the case at all here, which was pleasantly unexpected. I don’t expect to see it again on the big screen, but it’s probably a DVD I’ll pick up when it comes out later on (or when they start selling it on the street outside my office, where you can already get Reloaded and T3).

Spencer and I have been on a quest for the past month or so to discover the best place from which to order Italian food for delivery to our office, which is just off Canal Street. That being the case, we aren’t far from Little Italy, so you’d think this wouldn’t be a tricky thing at all, but it’s harder than you might think to find a single restaurant that has good food, reasonable lunch prices, and speedy delivery.

For a while, our compromise was Cha Cha’s on Mulberry. They don’t deliver, but the first and second times we stopped by to pick up takeout orders we were pleased with the food, and their lunch specials are all around six bucks. We stopped in yesterday, however, for the last time. The staff we spoke to weren’t people we’d seen previously, and I had to explain what manicotti was - in Little Italy, and at a restaurant that has it on their own specials board! Then came the waiting, and some more waiting, and even more waiting. All told, it took over forty minutes for them to prepare an order of manicotti and some pizza to go. I mentioned to Spencer as we walked out that my bag felt awfully light, and as it turned out there was a reason. Upon returning to the office, we discovered that my manicotti had been microwaved rather than baked, and had shrunk to about half of its usual size, becoming rubbery and just generally vile in the process. I threw it out.

However, all is not lost. Our current preferred pasta provider is Pomodoro. I haven’t been to the restaurant itself, so I can’t say whether it’s a pleasant dining experience, but their delivery is fast, their prices aren’t outrageous, and the food is just about as perfect as you can get for a lunch special. I’ve had their stuffed shells, which I can’t complain about, and today I tried one of their tiny pizzas - delicious. So the moral of the story is: if you’re looking for takeout or delivery Italian food in or around Chinatown, avoid Cha Cha’s like the plague and go straight for Pomodoro.

If I had to summarize my thoughts on Pirates of the Caribbean in one sentence, it would be this one: while it’s a movie with several flaws of varying degrees of severity, it’s also enormously entertaining and will have me paying to see it a second time. And if I didn’t have to summarize my thoughts on the film in one sentence, I would probably ramble on for a paragraph or two about its flaws and why it’s still enormously entertaining. And I don’t, so I will.

One of the things that bothered me but that will probably bother very few other people is that it seems as though the filmmakers could have done their homework a tad more thoroughly. There are silly, unnecessary historical inaccuracies - it’s not that it’s a movie that really wants to be a perfect period piece, but this is simple stuff to correct. I find it hard to believe that during the entire production process, nobody pointed out the fact that the Royal Navy during the nebulous time period portrayed did not have such a thing as a permanent rank of commodore - much less a ceremony of promotion when one was created. (Mister Fancypants should probably have been an admiral, although he was a little young to be either.) And was HMS Dauntless supposed to be the Dauntless, the one that actually existed around eighteen-mumblemumble? It’s difficult to say, since there wasn’t an HMS Interceptor (nor a black-sailed ship of the damned, but that’s not really an issue of anachronism).

But okay, back in the land of people who don’t read Patrick O’Brian - there were other problems with the film, some of them minor (and some of them less so). Some troublesome pacing, some painful dialogue, and a whole lot of pirates made awfully tame by the constraints of appearing in a PG-13 Disney flick. If all the pirates really behaved the way they do in the film, it’s hard to see why poor Captain Jack merited a hanging - after all, they plunder very rarely and never so much as swear. It’s not that I’m not satisfied without seeing entrails flying and blood spurting every which way, but it is a movie about pirates. However, keeping in mind that it’s a Disney movie, it’s not nearly as squeaky-clean as I’d feared. Their particular brand of heavy-handed morality is relegated to more of a backseat role than usual, which is a relief.

Orlando Bloom is good, although his lovably sheltered character smacks very much of Legolas recast as a blacksmith. But I like Legolas, and Bloom does his job quite well. He’s vastly overshadowed, however, by both Geoffrey Rush and especially Johnny Depp - either one of them is capable of upstaging just about everyone else in the film, and they frequently do. Depp in particular steals the show, and I have a feeling that very little of the script would have worked even as well as it did without him. Luckily, it didn’t have to. He’s perfect for the role and for the movie, with his eyeliner and his dreads and his swaggering (or staggering). If I see it again, it will probably be because his Captain Jack is entirely and deliciously entertaining, and I hope they keep that in mind for the sequel(s).

I’ve bitched fairly extensively about bits of the film, but I want to emphasize that I did like it, very much so. It’s this summer’s Spider-Man - it’s just as goofily light but fantastic. Plus, there’s a zombie monkey.

Since today is the birthday of my most-fabulous father, I invite you all to spend some time looking at his sculpture. Even if you’ve taken a peek at the gallery before, you might want to stop by again - new pieces are added all the time, and they’re all pretty spectacular. The photos really don’t do them justice, but they’re enough to give you a sense of the work, anyway. The last time I was in Massachusetts, I got to visit the Cape Ann Historical Museum, which is home to one of the largest of the birds - its wingspan is just about fifteen feet. The pictures are great, of course, but nothing really compares to walking around and underneath the pieces themselves. If location permits, you’d do well to go check out one of the places where they’re exhibited. Right now Gloucester or Freeport is your best bet, but it looks like there will be more shows this fall.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean, which in fact I’ll be seeing tomorrow night. Of course the previews look goofy, it’s a pirate movie. But it’s got Johnny Depp (who has clearly sold his soul to the devil if he can turn forty while looking twenty four) and Orlando Bloom and that Keira Knightley person who is undeniably cute. And I like pirates, anyway. How can you not like pirates? I guess it might be possible, but you couldn’t really go up to a pirate and tell him you didn’t like him, because he’s probably get offended and make you walk the plank.

2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, on the other hand, looked moderately interesting in previews and is getting absolutely abysmal reviews. But I’ll probably see it anyway, but this might be one I end up renting - my enthusiasm was dampened a bit after I saw one of those horrible behind the scenes specials. They showed all the best parts of the movie and they weren’t all that great.

3. Terminator 3 looks ridiculous, and silly, and I hate Arnold with an undying passion. But I liked the second one (the first being another one of those holy-crud-how-can-you-not-have-seen-that movies I’ve mentioned before), and I’ll end up seeing it because… well.

4. Johnny English will disappoint me. I’m aware of this. The Mr Bean movie disappointed me, after all, but I still can’t bring myself to hate Rowan Atkinson. I loved Black Adder and I loved the Mr Bean series and I giggled like a schoolgirl when I saw the Johnny English trailer. Even though I know that the movie itself will end up being painful and unfortunate and, yes, disappointing.