I searched around a bit today and found a few forums that recommended removing all the .plist files related to networking at the /Library level, but I didn't want to go that route as it seemed overkill. I did find one suggestion that was more pointed and suggested removing the com.apple.airport.preferences.plist located at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/. I tried that, but it only resulted in my having to re-add the wireless networks I use and no resolution to the problem.

Another post and long list of comments I found suggested:

2) Delete all instances of "Preferred Networks" in "Network Preferences".
3) Delete all "Airport network password" instances in "Keychain Access".
4) Restart your Mac.

Of course, doing so will cause some future headaches, in that I will have to re-add all of the credentials for friends and families wireless networks, but it did help me to find what I think was the main problem. After removing the secure wireless network that the instructors use at Full Sail and attempting to add it back, I found that some of the Airport settings had changed from when I had previously set it up at the release of Snow Leopard (10.6). After I removed the above and then also removed the certificate associated with this specific network (also found in the 'Keychain Access' application), I was able to restart my machine, re-confirm the certificate and now the wireless has been correctly connecting on every relaunch.

For good measure, I still need to confirm this with several other networks (home, friends, etc.), but for now, it's nice not having to turn off and turn back on the Airport connection every time I wake up my laptop. Yay.

Ivoryline put out their new "Vessels" album in the middle of last year and I was finally able to pick up a couple of weeks ago. Just like their previous album, "There Came a Lion" (the cover art of which I adore), I simply love this new one.

Here are lyrics from the second cut ...

With The Daylight
Ivoryline

For now you will deal with heartache,
And for now you will face some pain.
But now release all of your buried grief,
You don't know how inside it lies your healing.

Letting grace make a way,
Letting love take a place inside your heart now,
You don't have to grasp,
You just have to ask and peace will find you out.

The peace is heavy tonight,
Your will breaks out with the daylight.

Even now you are being restored,
And for now you don't fully understand.
Even now your whole life's being bought for,
By the one who calls himself "I am".

Letting grace make a way,
Letting love take a place inside your heart now,
You don't have to grasp,
You just have to ask and peace will find you out.

The peace is heavy tonight,
Your will breaks out with the daylight.

All over the world darkness is pierced by light.
All over the world, all over the world, darkness succumbs to light.

Letting grace make a wave,
Letting love take a place inside your heart now,
You don't have to grasp,
You just have to ask and peace will find you out.

Your heart feels it now,
The grief is heavy tonight,
Your will breaks out with the daylight.
You heart feels it now.

Jodie, Brittany and I were talking the other day about how I hardly use straws any more and I realized it is because 5 or so years ago someone told me that if I use straws too much, my face would get all wrinkly when I get old. You know, something like this.

Thankfully, the girls set me straight and I'm back to using straws again. Which means I'm also back to visiting Burger Kings and Wendys to replenish my straw stash. ;)

... or "Why backup up, both often and diversely, is so important."

The Lead-in

If you know Jodie and I, you know we enjoy movies, own quite a few and often fall into the role of being-a-local-BLOCKBUSTER-to-our-friends. It is for those reasons that we use the amazing Delicious Library application that Wil Shipley and his grass-roots team have developed for the Mac. With barcode scanning, Address Book-based check-in/out and a wifi-synced iPhone application, it is way better than any on paper setup we have had in the past.

The only thing missing from Delicious, however, is a way to keep one library in sync between multiple computers ... allowing either Jodie or myself to add, check out or update movie information. Thanks to Dropbox, the "go to" cloud-based backup solution, and a few handy symbolic links, I managed a nice workaround for what Delicious lacks.

The Drama

A couple of days ago, Jodie attempted to opened Delicious Library and add a few new movies, but because of some issue with a broken/corrupt/finicky database file (located in the Application Support directory), the app wouldn't launch without immediately and "unexpectedly" quitting.

The Solution (or so I thought)

Using Dropbox's restore capabilities, I planned to simply push my copy of the library to Jodie's machine and fix the issue ... but like many applications, when Delicious Library initially tried to launch for Jodie, it updated its database files. This update caused Dropbox to see a newer modification date and immediately sync those files to the cloud and in the process, render my copy of the library broken as well.

Even worse, trying to use the "Previous versions" option for the files on Dropbox failed because Delicious' .library files weren't being recognized by the system correctly as storage and were downloading as empty folders instead.

The Failsafe

Thankfully, Jodie and I have both lost enough data in the past to know that backing up to one location/media is not really backing up at all and I was able to successfully restore a previous copy of the library files from a Time Machine backup that had occurred only a few days prior.

It was also comforting to know that if, for some reason or another, one of our Time Machine drives had died, each of our MacBook's has the unobtrusive BackBlaze service running as well. Theirs isn't a perfect solution, but has saved me plenty of times in a pinch.

Just like I tell all of my students, the lesson here is to backup ... everything, often and to as many different media/locations/services as possible. There are never too many options for restoring when you are missing that "one important file".

Here is my entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme of "dip" ... it goes out to my wife, Jodie, who is convinced the time is right for swimming, sun-ing and in general heading to the beach. I say it's still spring.

This is all vector, mixing some Brush strokes, the Blob Brush, the new (but still lame) in-line Gradient tool and a tad bit of Illustrator's Raster Effects thrown in for fun.

One only has to sit in on my DFP Icon lecture, perused my Flickr uploads tagged osx, or (for you privileged few) use my Mac for a few minutes to realize that I am very particular AND very protective of the way my Finder windows look. I have nice sidebar separators, several essential tool bar application launchers, Windows 7-like window snapping, and a fairly even background image to grid layout ratio ... and that's not even going into all the folder and app icon customization that I do.

Now, once I have a been using a new Mac for a few days and have I become successfully habituated to these preferred settings, it is slightly annoying to exponentially frustrating to have Finder present the file system in different view. Sometimes it is an old "as Icons" view I initially set up but have adjusted slightly and other times he'll switch it up with a complete change to the "as Columns" view, seemingly out of no where.

The Problem

I am probably right in thinking that the original UX pattern assumed by the designers at Apple, from way back in the OS 7 days, was "if the User changes the view, remember it ... forever ... unless they specify otherwise". In the limited scope of a Desktop world where I only have my Music, Movies and Documents folders to interact with, this was probably an okay choice. I, as the User, could essentially "set 'em and forget 'em".

As this is now a much more power and connected Desktop environment that continues to scale, the concept does not ... especially in my own frequent use case of occasionally needing a different view, but not remembering the need to change it back after I am done.

The Ideal Solution

Although this is a seemingly minor issue, finding resolutions for these are what makes the difference between an efficient designer/developer/human being and those that are not (Man, does that sound snooty!). How I would love to see this issue remedied would be with one global setting in the Finder Preferences window that is only temporarily affected by the User's manual change in view.

From the few times I have tested using a Finder-replacement like Path Finder, I have found this to be the default behavior ... but really, should I be forced to use a third-party alternative just to fix what is clearly a broken concept?

Also, this preferred behavior would make much more sense than what the current "Use as Defaults" button (in the 'View Options' panel) does ... apply the settings to any newly created windows, but absolutely nothing to previously-viewed folders.

The Stop Gap

Up until this point, I have suffered through having to manually correcting the settings in the "View Options" window; choosing "Always open in icon view", dragging the icon slider, arranging by "Name", choosing the background image, etc. Yeah ... a really pain.

Just today, I off-handedly tried holding down the Option key when adjusting the settings (a well-known way to 'Reset' the panels for filters, adjustments and such in several of the Adobe apps) and sure enough ... the "Use as Defaults" button updated to read "Restore to Defaults". While that labeling doesn't necessarily make me feel comfortable about pressing it the very first time (it kinda sounds like it is going to perform a Factory Restore on my Finder, right?), it actually did something entirely useful.

"Restore to Defaults" removes any of your previous View settings for that view/window combo and applies the settings you defined when the button read "Define as Defaults". You still will have to manually hold down Option and press that button for any offending windows, but it's still pretty handy, right? Anyways ... that is the end of my rant. Enjoy the find. Now ... Command+Tab back to work, kids.

You may have missed the announcement a few weeks ago, but one of my favorite games, Plants vs. Zombies, from one of my favorite Mac game developers, Pop Cap, has just spouted up on the iPhone. Now you can continue to quell some beautifully illustrated zombie madness on the go!

I know Jodie didn't install this on her iPhone, for fear of losing her life to it ... but I had no such qualms. Parcelling out one or two bite-size pea-shooter and mushroom-filled levels every day works perfect for me. Plus, if you were hesitant about purchasing the $19.95 desktop version (though, it is well worth it), you really can't beat the $2.99 price point for almost an identical game.

Check it out, you're bound to love it, but, of course, it has the same disclaimer as my last recommendation ... it's addictive. The music, the sound effects, the funny flower dossiers ... pretty much all of it. Addictive like yummy brain flesh.

I just thought I would share part of the Valentine's Day gift I made for Jodie this year ... 24 different designs and pop-culture references for 24 different ways to say "I Love You". If my math is right, then that should be about one per hour of the day and if your guess is right, these were sized perfectly for her iPhone screen. So in spite of AT&T's at-times finicky MMS network, she still received one of these every hour, on the hour.

The last couple of weeks I have been going back and forth between Firefox and Safari as my default web browser, trying to appreciate their full-featured nature over the fact that they are both so sluggish in comparison to the lovely Chrome Beta. Thankfully, Google announced support for two of the things that have really kept me from making it my preferred choice ... Extensions and Bookmark Management.

Extensions

Installing extensions through the browser is super-easy, doesn't require a restart and there are plenty to choose from. Here are just a few of the ones I am already finding essential:

• Delicious Tools - Not a direct match to its great Firefox equivalent, but it works nicely for what I need.
• Downloads - Easy access to Chrome's "Downloads" page from a toolbar button.
• Go Extensions - Same deal, but with the Extensions page.
• Google Mail Checker - For those of you still checking Gmail outside of the Mail.app, this extensions offers quick access to your mail and nicely sports notification badges.
• Google Voice - Not only quickly get to your Google Voice account, but you can also initiate a call or send a SMS right from the toolbar.
• Google Wave Notifier - It kinda seems likes some of these should be built right in, huh? Maybe that is what Chrome OS will bring.
• History Button - I'm actually thinking this is one of those extensions that will become obsolete once Chrome goes Release, but for now, it is handy.
• RSS Subscriptions with FEED: Handler Support - RSS feeds are really important to me and this lil' guy is exactly what I needed to get feeds from Chrome to the external aggregator I am partial to right now (Socialite). If all you want to do is add feeds to your iGoogle or Google Reader accounts, there are a few other options.
• Speed Dial - This one is the cherry-on-the-top for me. A start page thumbnail display that is better than the weak Firefox counterpart (Fast Dial), more versatile than the built-in 2-row setup that Chrome provides and it's even similar enough to Safari to appease my visual needs. Seriously ... it is simple, but I am really excited about this extension.
• StumbleUpon - I'm still not sold on the whole SU use case, but since a lot of sites are dropping Digg buttons, I need another easy way to keep track of articles I like.

*Extensions Organization Tip

As of right now, Chrome doesn't take advantage of the typical Command+drag UI convention for re-arranging the icons for extensions in the toolbar, but you can easily get around this by "Enabling" and "Disabling" the extensions in the order you want them to appear.

Bookmarks

Not only does the Bookmark manager work exactly as would you expect for being built on WebKit (including support for dragging bookmarks directly from Safari's 'Bookmarks' window), but Google has also added "Bookmark Syncing" support. This will make it really easy for those of you with multiple machines/devices that want to keep things in sync. I personally keep all but a few essential bookmarks on Delicious, but I still set up the syncing, since it was so easy.

Alright, that's enough talking of Chrome for a bit. We can all go back to eagerly awaiting anything new on Google's OS front. Until then ... if you find any more great extensions, be sure to post links below.

Thanks to an equally relaxing and productive morning, I managed to wrangled up my earlier drawing into this fun vector. It's sized just perfect for your iPhone, but I am thinking it would make for a great poster print. What do you think? Anyone got recommendations on a place to print them at? I've only ever used Cafepress, which is slightly pricey.

Although it doesn't directly relate to the drawing, this is what I read today to start my morning:

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." - Romans 1:20