So, what have I learned in those months?

And so I've come to a conclusion: I like being on my own site. While technically it's Ritchie's site, the important bit is that it's not part of a giant conglomerate which passes around intellectual property like Monopoly street cards, casually discarding the bits that they could care less about, regardless of how important they felt they were six months earlier.

So, I'm back here, in my own quiet little corner of the internet where I can write for my own enjoyment and periodically whack the spambots who want to keep me company. It's an audience of about none, but that's enough. I should probably remind Ritchie to upgrade the software to something a bit newer though...

I say "withdrew" since I didn't delete the account; it's still there but deactivated. I didn't want to delete it in case a namesquatter opted to move in; is that likely? Dunno -- there's a lot of odd people out there who do utterly bizarre things for the LULs, or perhaps just an opportunity to make a buck or go phishing.

So, in the last year, what's been the general feeling of going Facebookless, having used it for years prior to that point. Well, apparently a bunch of my family and friends don't realize I've been gone so a lot of conversations and events happen without my knowledge or participation. I suppose that could be a blow to the ego. There was definitely a period of about a month where I wanted to log back in, and, y'know, just check in (every few minutes) so there is a degree of addictiveness there; fortunately it passes. Other than that, there's been so much going on that it's hard to say whether the stress levels are lower or not, whether I'm more focused on the things that matter. To a certain degree, it's a bit like quitting Ingress; you're definitely no longer spending a lot of time worrying about it but have you managed to reclaim all that time and put it to good use? Probably not; there's always something else to soak up those spare cycles.

Will I go back and reactivate the account after de-toxing? I did pop in briefly as there was a friend I needed to get in contact with several months ago and Facebook was, ironically, the only way I knew how to contact him. And, then, after dealing with that, I deactivated it again. I guess the answer to that question is "Yeah, if I need to" but I won't be making it a regular hangout again.

Anyway, as part of my attempting to not leave trivially easy-to-follow trails on the internet, I'm not referencing my Twitter username here; if you know who I am anyway, it'll be easy enough to find my Twitter feed. See you there!

Lovely collection of Beatles covers by the Muppets, including a superb "Let It Be" rework from Sesame Street.

(Via BoingBoing)

Anyway, eventually I got the following query back:

How do I print an address book entry? Print just prints the street address in an envelope format with no other choice. So far the only way I could get a printout is to do a screen capture.

This resulted in a bit of headscratching, 'cause I couldn't figure it out either. After a bit of Googling, I found a few similar questions which were answered with "Hey, just change the style from the print requestor". Excellent, except there's no style option actually on the print requestor.

Well, there is. In an uncharacteristic bit of crappy UI design, Apple hid the options needed wanted with a very non-obvious arrow.

So, here's the process of printing a group of addresses from the OSX addressbook app:

- Create a new group with all of the attendees in it (create group, drag each address into it)
- Select the group and choose print
- This brings up the print requestor. To the right of the printer selection is a little down arrow. Press it
- This brings up a much larger option screen. Under "Style" choose "Mailing Labels"
- This will produce a page of addresses. The bonus is that they're formatted appropriately for address labels if you have the right sticky label pages.

Under the "style" dropdown there's also the option to print out selected fields from the address book for a more traditional style address dump.

As they say, "Don't do this".

(Via Warren Kinsella)

Back in 2006, I posed a question on the blog of how to identify music without knowing its name. Ritchie pointed me at Shazam shortly after correctly identifying the specific track via its lyrics instead. Since that time, Shazam has been ported to the iPhone and I'm pleased to report that it really does a sterling job. There remain a couple of recordings in my collection that even Shazam has problems with and, alas, they're mostly instrumental pieces so the old lyric fallback won't work there.

But, hey, this really is progress!