Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Weird thing of the day 18 May 2005/9 'Iyyar 5765 (Day 24 of the `Omer/International Museum Day)

Greetings.

I managed to get my copy of Mac OS X 10.4 today and have installed it. Right now trying to get the glitches out of it. I already had to modify my desktop picture-changing script so it would work and reinstall my Hebrew system folder name file.

Today’s weird thing is something I had no warning about whatsoever. The hint macosxhints - 10.4: Easily add the date to the menubar seemed a great idea; it’s always nice to have information like that always visible. However, when I went to implement it, I discovered a “Calendar” pop-up menu with a number of choices: “Gregorian”, “Buddhist”, “Hebrew”, “Islamic”, “Islamic, Civil”, and “Japanese”. I promptly chose “Hebrew”, and not only do I have the Jewish date in the menu bar now, but all the program-generated dates seem to be on the Jewish calendar, with no built-in method of translating the dates to Gregorian. Since computers have been so adamantly Gregorian all my life, even more adamant than they are about being English, the effect is downright surreal. For the moment I’ve opened up Jewish Calendar to be able to translate dates manually, and I plan on investigating what can be done about using this unique feature in a dual-calendar system environment later.

Surreally yours,

Aaron

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