Let 'em eat pie!

Yesterday was Bietz’s birthday. If I had known, I would have had some cake. Instead, I did what anyone would do to cap off an unexpected debate-free weekend: I discovered a fly in the iPhone ointment, pissed and moaned and then stumbled onto a solution, all the while misprinting endless 8x10 photos until finally giving up completely, and meanwhile making some travel arrangements for the next vacation.

I could have used some cake.

Apparently the OS upgrade to the iPhone disconnects it from iCal on one’s Mac. Nice. That means that, for all practical purposes, I would be maintaining either rogue calendars on every device (iPad, iPhone and Mac) or not using one at all (after gelding it) or simply never doing anything anymore out of lack of focus. This bug is real. You can apparently erase your entire iPhone calendar and take a shot overwriting it with the Mac’s iCal, but that is a true mug’s game. The thing is, for the longest time I’ve wished I had a totally synced setup of calendars for all the devices everywhere, including the DJ Mac with is so rogue it makes Sarah Palin look like—eh, forget it; some analogies aren’t worth even asking you to fill them in for me. Anyhow, it turns out that I was already, albeit inadvertently, syncing from the iPhone to Yahoo, home of my email account. Yahoo calendars was activated to replicate all calendar entries on my iPhone. Really? With the tiniest bit of waking up and smelling the coffee, I realized that I could link everything everywhere to Yahoo and turn off attempts to sync between devices. In other words, let Yahoo do the heavy lifting. I gather you can also do this with Google, but I tend to use Google calendars for other things (Disney Debate Adventures and Tournaments and the like), so Yahoo had the virtue of being clean. And now I sit happy and contented, with my Yahoo calendar syncing like some wonderfully little syncing thing to every device known to man Menick. That is good.

On the photography front, on the other hand, things are in disarray. I want to print some pictures to hang on the wall. I’ve had trouble sorting out the borders using my little home color printer, which, no matter how hard I try, are never symmetric. This is frustrating, especially as you plunge into the fray spewing expensive photo papers and inks in all directions. I tried getting a print from Apple out of iPhoto, but predictably they went for the overall color balance, meaning that the backlit object that dominates the picture was now a black hole, but then again, sending that kind of photo was the sort of test that was needed. I went back in and reworked the balance, which is a bit deep into it, if you ask me, but I could probably get it fixed in a new print, but an automatic darkroom is an automatic darkroom and you takes your chances and it’s not my favorite solution. Meanwhile, all the printing I tried either gave me half a picture (saying that the size of the paper was wrong—baffling) or one of those screwy asymmetric border situations. Solution? Very white normal paper and handmade mattes. I mean, it’s not necessary to get archival museum quality, after all. Ansel Adams I ain’t. Still, this was one bothersome timesuck yesterday, and I can’t imagine how the printer/photo business survives so well among amateurs as I have never, on any machine, ever gotten consistently acceptable results. Don’t even ask about printing on some special canvas papers I wanted to use…

Finally, on the other other hand, making travel arrangements for the main trip this year was as peachy as pie. I now have hotels in 4 cities in 3 countries, plus plane tickets. Next up is getting some theater and railway tix. London, Bruges, Brussels and Paris. More details later, but the original plan had been northeastern Italy, and I’m sure you can see how easy it was for that plan to morph into this one! Whatever. Of course, if we don’t debate anymore because of all the snow, I probably won’t even need a vacation. So it goes.

In other words, happy belated birthday, Bietz!