Ok, I give up.

People who've never called tech support from a Mac or hate rants can stop reading.

The standard Mac meta-key is the Command key. They're the ones next to the space bar with the funny symbol and an Apple[tm] logo on them. Apple calls 'em the Command key. The documentation calls it a Command key.

Say 'Command-N' to a luser [1]. Blank stare. Say 'Apple-N'. New window. Aaaaaaaaaargh.

Sometime this past weekend something died inside me [2]. I gave up. I'm calling it the Apple key now. Fine.

[1] This nomenclature issue is a really good clue-meter in Apple shops. Anyone who knows this has gotten used to keyboard shortcuts, and that's good on any OS.

[2] Not the worst that coulda happened, I have enough ex-girlfriends to make a maudlin drinking binge really unpleasant for my friends. This one went by in 2 seconds and was unnoticeable to the outside world.

I think I may have just run into a real live Heisenbug.

This showed up on Mac OS X 10.37 and Entourage 11.10. A user called, complaining that a batch of jpegs dragged from the attachment section of an email to Preview.app in the Dock opened in Photoshop instead of in a single window in Preview. He showed me what happened. In his case, the jpegs were tagged as Photoshop files so that makes a certain amount of sense, although I would expect preview to operate through the Dock as it does in the Finder - opening any image it can handle.

The part that does not make sense, is that dragging from Entourage to the Dock isn't supposed to work. Neither I nor a colleague can get it to do that on our machines, and it has now stopped working for the original user. I've told him not to mention it to anyone.

If anyone out there has a Mac with a patched-up Office 2004 running Panther, try it and let me know.

As a Mac user I've suspected it for years.

There's a previously uncataloged meme on Slashdot, and it's spreading. It's the $300 PC meme.

New iMac ? $300 PC

Computer for the kids ? $300 PC

No Linux games ? $300 PC

New tablet computer ? You guessed it...

Frank Stallone !

Ok, that's cool. I note that I now have a fan with a lower userID than mine. This would have taken a disturbingly long time if that sort of thing mattered.

Here's a telemarketing situation where I'm just waiting for the payoff. Our office has several blocks of 100 numbers each, most of which aren't in use and are forwarded to the front desk (because a client may have an old number). Some months ago a mortgage company started autodialing our blocks. Our receptionist went from calm to frothing at the mouth in 60 seconds flat, and eveyone else was getting either a hangup call or a voicemail left for them.

I called the 800 number in the voicemail I personally received, got a manager on the line in record time (it helps if you sound like you want to confirm your satellite recon for the imminent airstrike) and explained that we had a block of numbers, that they were calling ALL of them and to please stop right-fucking-now. I then did the usual bit about do not call lists and a copy of the policy (which I never got). The do not call list was tough, since numbnuts didn't grok the "I have several hundred consecutive numbers" part very well.

The next day they did it again. I got another manager on the line, who was significantly less than understanding about the whole affair. In point of fact, he seemed dismissive of the whole fact that I had complained the day before and tha the was perhaps a bit offended that I was trying to interfere with his attempt to rescue a failing mortgage business. I reminded him about the FCC's $500 per call regulation and he got offended. Go figure. Apaprently the fact that the Federal government might put him out of business wasn't a factor in his worldview. I rang off.

And called the local police department and reported a couple hundred harassing phone calls. I leaned heavily on the second manager's attitude toward my request of the previous day and on his utter disregard for Federal codes covering his business. I named both managers in the complaint. These guys are less than fifty miles from us and in the same state, so it could happen.

We have a case number. Some day they'll screw up, and then a telemarketing manager will do the Perp Walk. I'll be sure to put whatever details I can on a website so we can all share the joy.

Or maybe a -1: No Sense of Humor option.

So I'll just declare a "foe" until then.