New Concerns

For me, this blog has for a very long time now been my source of outlet when life gets difficult or frustrating. I've talked about everything from Americanism, to job and life disappointments, family tragedy, anime translation, music copyright issues, ancient relationship hangups, responding to ancient relationship hangups, circumsicion, the state of copyright law, and recently cancer.
One thing that has made this quite appealing has been the level to which I can be honest about how I feel. I've offended the occasional person in doing so, but for the most part I have written how I honestly feel, and no ill has come of displaying that level of honestly.
However, for the first time now, I'm starting to be careful what I say. You may have noticed the recent lack of content, and following slew of random photos, and this is all because I've started to feel uneasy about being honest in a forum that is so open. Actually, I've started feeling uncomfortable about being proactively honest in general. My "safe people" that I could confide in when I was feeling stressed and distressed have become fewer and further between, and so I think that's resulted in a bunch more just keeping things to myself. It's just easier that way. While there were always things that I wouldn't publish on my blog, the threshold has just dropped across the board, meaning that now the stuff that fueled my enraged blog posts of the past I don't really feel like I can share on here.
However, this isn't a close to this blog. More just an explanation of why there's less stuff on here of late, and perhaps more uninteresting or less meaningful posts. This may change - who knows? Just thought I'd fill you all in...

Redefining "updates"

So I'm working on a staff member's computer today, and they've got this older CD based program that requires Quicktime in order to use, but the version on the CD is too old to work with Vista. OK, no worries, we'll install the latest version and hopefully it'll fix it up. Which is what I do. I grab the Quicktime only installer (that is, the one that isn't bundled with iTunes) and install it. When it asks about Apple Updater, I think "yeah, that'd be useful" and so install it also. That way, he'll be kept up-to-date.
Later on, I'm working on the machine doing some other stuff, and up jumps Apple Update. It has 3 updates for me to install - an update for itself, and update for Quicktime, and... iTunes. As in, it has the iTunes+Quicktime installer listed, with a check in the checkbox ready for me to obediently click "Install".
Now, last time I checked "update" meant to take a piece of software you've already chosen to install and replace the required files to bring it into line with the latest version. Not to install a piece of software that I've purposefully avoided installing onto this person's laptop. Your average user probably wouldn't even check - they'd just install whatever Apple Update told them they needed. Can you imagine the kind of fall out Microsoft would get if they tried something like this? A pre-selected Windows update installs their prefered brand of picture viewer? They've already had to pull Media Player out of the EU version of Windows because apparently bundling a media player with your OS is anti-competitive.

Anyway, gripe of the day. Enjoy.

zOMG! A black Mac Mini?!

Seems some crafty Chinese PC company likes the Mac Mini form factor.