Knocked Up

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Very funny, very warm, very nicely observed.

The criticisms of this movie seem mainly based around the central premise: that a beautiful, successful, etc. woman should in the first place hook up with a slobbish, chubby, Seth-Rogen-esque man. Given that the last film I watched was Transformers*, in which giant alien robots duke it out of control of a magical power-cube, this complaint seems mean-spirited.

Interestingly, both reviews on S1Play.com, from The Herald and The Evening Times, state that “two hours is too long for a comedy”. This is apparently a law of filmic nature of which I’d been hitherto unaware. Note that they don’t state that this film is too long (okay, they imply it), merely that it breaks the comedy-2-hour rule. It didn’t feel too long to me.

*Actually, in that film too, the hero is a spunky, but un-cool youth, who wins the way-out-of-his-league girl. Of course, he had a cool car which transformed into a giant robot and, I believe, some girls go for that sort of thing.

iCal woes

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It is an article of faith amongst Mac users that their system of choice is inherently superior to (spit) Windows. Not only that, but it never crashes, loses data or does flaky, unpredictable things.

I’m here to tell you that they are deluded. Apple software generally is not bad, but it’s not infallible. In particular iCal and Address Book have over the years caused me endless hassle and pain.

Anyway, this post is an aide-memoire for me, if nothing else, about how to fix infuriating iCal issues.

De-Dup

Firstly download and install the brilliant iCal Dup Deleter. Various iCal issues, including duplicate entries, missing entries, the appearance of things which you thought had been deleted, and general flakiness, can be solved by running this tool on each of your calendars.

Download it here: http://www.nhoj.co.uk/icaldupedeleter/

I’ve even seen my calendars go completely blank—all the entries disappear—and that’s a bit frightening the first time you see it, if you depend on iCal to keep track of your appointments—and it can often be fixed quickly and easily by iCal Dup Deleter. Loverly.

Restoring from backup

On recent versions of OS X, calendars are stored in “~/Library/Calendars” (not in “~/Library/Application Support/iCal”, though if you’ve upgraded through several versions, that directory may still exist).

In addition, the program preferences are stored in “~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.*” You can safely delete the preference files. Sometimes that flushes out problems.

Hang on startup (iCal and AddressBook)

Had an issue today whereby I lost all my events, but iCal Dup Deleter didn’t work either.

Tried restoring the directory from backup, and that failed: iCal would hang on startup. I had a nightmare attempting to restore individual calendars, deleting lock files; nothing worked.

Turned out to be a problem with AddressBook(!). AddressBook hung on startup and (I’m hypothesising), iCal hung waiting for AddressBook. Deleted the various lock files:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook
rm .database.lock
rm .skIndex.ABPerson.lockN
rm .nfs.20051025.00d1
rm .AddressBook-v22*

…and AddressBook started normally and so did iCal. Hurrah!

Prince: brilliant musician; funked-up brain

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In other news, Prince is apparently actually my grandmother:

“They [computers and digital media] just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

His new album is available only on CD, and not iTunes, Amazon, eBay… and he’s closing (closed) down his own website (presumably because he doesn’t want to fill other people’s heads with numbers and thus contribute to the problem). So he’s promoting it on MTV? Ah, probably not, since MTV is ‘outdated’ the same way the Internets are.

So expect his ship-to-ship–semaphore–(or possibly telegram)–based marketing campaign to commence in 3… 2… 1…

(Good thing noone’s told him that CDs are digital.)

Incidentally, his cover of Radiohead’s Creep is brilliant.

Moral Philosophy

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There is a wonderful interview with the redoubtable, wonky-nosed, English genius Stephen Fry at bigthink.com. Among other things he argues for not believing in an afterlife so that you don’t waste time on Earth, and that it’s nonsense that, “Mankind needs a god in order to have a moral framework.”

One of the commenters, by the wonderfully named Quinn Detweiler cannot buy the idea that morality can exist without a god:

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