And yes, even though I've seen the trailer online, I still want to see it in the theatre.

To be honest, I didn't really want to go to the concert, but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed some of the pieces by the uNL University Singers and the Nebraska Wesleyan University Choir. The York College Concert Choir did a decent job (although none of their pieces were anything that really appealed to me) and the UNL Varsity Men's Chorus sang a song that I sang back in my college days as part of a Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia concert.

Good job to everyone that participated in the concert!

Of course, although I enjoyed the previous film, the real reason I want to go see the new one is because I want to see the new Star Trek trailer. Does that make me sad or what?

But in this case, I have to say something about last night's election results:

Uh-oh.

Bravo!

They have implemented, over the last year, several changes that make me wonder they are sniffing in their corporate offices. It really seems that they are making changes that will not help the eBay community.

The first of these was the ill-advised change in policy that no longer allows sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. I understand their point about being worried about retaliatory negative feedback from sellers, but what are sellers who get legitimately screwed supposed to do? For example, I recently had an item bid on and won. The "buyer" never paid for the item. Repeated attempts to contact the buyer were ignored. I relisted (and sold) the item, but this buyer, for whatever reason, didn't pay and no consequences occurred.

Second, the mandatory requirement to include shipping charges in the auction. Okay...sounds good, right? Well, the problem is, their automatic calculation tools only work for USPS and UPS. For a variety of reasons (the biggest being, I've had BAD, BAD experiences with UPS), I'd prefer to ship via FedEx. eBay offers no option to automatically calculate FedEx shipping, so I need to pre-calculate shipping costs to include it in the auction. The problem with that is, I have no way of knowing exactly what shipping costs will be until I know who the winner will be. Therefore, because eBay requires that shipping costs be included in the auction, I'm required to use to services that I really don't want to use because of the bad experiences I've had before. This just smells of both those services putting pressure on eBay to force their services to be used, rather than the competition.

Now, eBay is going to mandate PayPal payments (or credit cards if the seller has a merchant account), rather than allow mailed payments. Granted, most payments sent to me were via PayPal, but I've had buyers who absolutely REFUSED to use PayPal and wanted to mail a money order or cashier's check. Plus, consider that PayPal is OWNED by eBay. That doesn't smell at all...

eBay seems bent on making sure that they do what they can to alienate their sellers, and in some ways, their buyers. I understand wanting to try to eliminate fraud and whatnot, but they have gone way overboard and many of their decisions seem more directed at lining eBay's pockets rather than keeping their user's best interest in mind.

eBay is still the number one auction site, but will this continue?

Can I truly describe just how happy I am that the Cubs are pretty much looking like a team that will win their division (even though the last three games haven't looked that great).

September this year looks as though it's going to be very, very exciting! I can't wait for October!

Although it's been a mixed bag so far, it's been an overall positive experience. I say it's been a mixed bag because there have been aspects of my new position that have been frustrating. But, in reality, they are nothing that I hadn't been expecting when I applied for my new position.

I'm not allowed to talk about where I work in a forum such as this, so I can't be very specific, but I can say that I'm now the manager of a staff of fourteen people, all of whom are very good at their jobs. There have been some frustrations for them, however, over the past several years, so they have been going through some major burnout. My number one priority so far has been to make their working experiences much more positive and showing them that their new manager does care about them and wants the best for them. So far, I think I'm being successful, but not as successful as I would like. But, again, I knew that would happen.

It's involved some very long hours (again, something I knew would happen) and being very tired at the end of the day (something that has actually ended up being worse than I thought it would be). But at the same time, I've seen some of my team's attitudes begin to get better. I've seen laughter and camaraderie become much more obvious in the few months I've been with them. And, that makes it all worth it.

I'm in a position now that I wanted. I have been experiencing some challenges, but I'm hopeful that things will continue to get better and that I'll be able to slow down a little here sometime soon.

I'm glad I went after this opportunity.

I have a folder full of iMovie source files that I want to archive. The folder itself is just over 7 GB in size. I won't need these files anymore, but don't want to get rid of them. Normally what I do in this situation is simply create a .zip file from the folder and move it to an archive's directory.

However, in this case, when I select "Create Archive" from the Finder's contextual menu, I get the dialog indicating that it is archiving the folder with a note that it is expected to take about one hour to complete. The progress bar moves very slowly for about five minutes and then, suddenly, the dialog disappears. When I check, I do have a .zip file that is just under 6 GB in size. However, when I double-click on it to re-expand it (to test to make sure it was created successfully), nothing happens.

So, it appears that the .zip file is not being created successfully.

I'm wondering if this might have something to do with the size of the folder or the size of the individual files within the folder.

Although the movie does have a message (and a fairly deep one at that), it still makes with the light-heartedness, gentle humor and, as the title indicates, wonder that kept us smiling through the entire film. I had never heard of the movie until we picked it up on DVD, and I have no idea how it did in the theaters, but I am beyond glad I watched it. It really reminded me that not all good movies need to be PG-13 or R-rated, have a hard, driving story-line or require sex and violence to be entertaining and worthwhile.

Although we just rented the DVD, we may just have to pick up our own copy. It's that worthwhile.

Soon. Oh so soon...

UPDATE: And it's arrived.

And because the news media can make completely inappropriate decisions in an effort to scoop everyone else, I've had to take this post down.

Suffice it to say, the folks a CBS News crossed a line and obviously did not read into the meaning of the post that was originally posted here. Way to go. Oh, and don't ever call me at midnight again. Not only is it rude, but it was also completely unnecessary.

I had originally planned to release sometime in November, but shortly before the release was ready, I found a nasty little bug that was caused by Leopard. Although Print Window 4 worked just fine under Tiger, a change made in Leopard made Print Window not ready for release. Since Leopard is obviously the new big thing, I made the decision to make sure that Print Window was Leopard-ready before release.

I know what's causing the bug and have a good idea on how to fix it. I'm hoping to still release in December, but it may not be until January. Unfortunately, my time this month is very limited and I want this to be a quality release, so I'm not going to release until it's ready. If that means a January release, then so be it.

Of course, I will still be honoring the offer that was previously made of getting a free Print Window 4 Advanced license for those who purchase a Print Window 3 Advanced license after October 1. This means there is still time to get Print Window 4 Advanced for the same price as Print Window 3 Advanced!