Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for the ‘Techie Gadget Boy’ Category

Some of my recent responsibilities have been to gather profile pictures of our language cluster project team for a collaborative branch poster.  Those posters are displayed at conference and each office location takes one back with them.  So, I gathered all the photos I could and began sending them to our communications guy, a PC guy.  He replies, “The emails labeled MICP Photos 2, and MICP Photos 3 came with the photos embedded in the email, which makes things problematic. The first one is fine. You’ll have to resend the photos as attachments. How many emails did you send?”  Huh?  Didn’t I send them as attachments?  If he had a Mac, the answer would be yes.  He has a PC, so the answer is no.  We worked around the problem when we examined the ‘first one’ to which his reply referred.  That e-mail was different in that it included a list sent as a text file attached along with the photos.  So, we used that method to get him all the poster shots he needed, but talk about going around your elbow.

Fast forward to today.  Dana asked for a picture I have of her and Asher in Kenya.  I send it to her.  She can’t save it.  Using Outlook 2007.  What the crap?  So, I research.  Low and behold, there is some kind of ‘bug’ when sending picture-as-only-attachments e-mails from Apple Mail to a PC.  Aside from the work around described above, another relatively quick one is to change the message format to Plain Text.  If you have Mail set to this as default, you’ve completely wasted 3 minutes of your life by reading this post. Pole! (‘pole’ is Swahili for “sorry for ya!”)  But for all of us HTMLers, guess the elbow is still in office.

P.S. Selecting this doesn’t make a difference:

… and even though I’m a Mac guy, I ain’t scared to say that Apple needs to fix this.

Last Wednesday, I was going here, going there, trying to deal with the theft we experienced the night before. While we were out, I stopped at the office to drop something off for a friend. Joey M., a Tanzanian pastor working with the language project in the area of partnership, told me of a planned trip the next day about an hour away down into the Sangu plains. They were going to have a Sangu language committee (all Sangu mother tongue speakers) meeting and he wanted to take 20 copies of RUTH and JONAH on cassette tapes. So, I made the copies and took them to him the next morning before they left. That was Thursday.

Friday came and it was a day of final recording for the Nyakyusa language for the same two books as above. While picking up Gordon M. (Nyakyusa) at the office, one of our team leaders gave me a special thanks for sending the cassettes with them. All 20 sold in less than 10 minutes! That’s amazing considering the economic struggles that people group has due to their geographical location. Then, the other team leader e-mailed me that afternoon and said another Sangu pastor wanted 10 himself! That’s on top of another 20 the translation team leader asked for!

I also have noticed while I’ve been out and about in Mbeya that every recorded cassette tape being sold, be it songs, preaching, or whatever, have color covers. What were mine in? Grayscale. I don’t even like the word now. Grayscale. Sounds like a gloomy disease. So, with the belief that our produced materials should at least reach local standards for those items, I redesigned the cassette labels and case covers with some color.

I chose yellow and green because those are the colors of the covers of RUTH and JONAH, respectively, for the eight language groups in which the books have been printed. We are a team, after all!

The doorbell rang late this morning and the best looking delivery man I’ve ever seen was standing at the door because in his arms was my repaired laptop fresh off a trip to the Apple repair facility in Texas.  I had to send it off last week to have the logic board repaired.  So, now I feel connected again.  Can you hear my big sigh?

is NOT

If you’ve experienced any of the same frustrations I have over the past 24 hours, you’ll be glad to read the resolution I’ve reached.

I bought a Wireless Mighty Mouse yesterday and immediately installed the included software/drivers. Minutes later my disappointment exploded as I discovered the extra buttons could only be designated to open applications. I am extremely disappointed in Apple’s design as a Back function has become an integral part of my workflow in both ministry and hobby. I searched and searched for instructions on how to uninstall the software, all to no avail.

Finally, I read on a forum that Steermouse software can operate on top of the driver, thus resolving the need to uninstall. I’ve tried Steermouse’s fully-functional trial offer this evening and have already decided (don’t necessarily like investing a considerable amount of $ to operate a new mouse) to purchase the $20 license. I love that it is bluetooth; no dongle sticking out of my USB port. I like that it is laser precise. The scroll ball is cool but not so amazingly better than a wheel that I wet my pants or anything. Sorry for the visual.

Today’s good: I made my mom’s Mother’s Day presents. Trying to use my creative gifts to give thoughtfully. I’ll show you after M’s Day what I gave her. Also, Dana and I got a LOT of rest today. That was nice.