So periodically I tend to go through my buddy list and delete old names of people that haven’t been online in ages, or whom I don’t speak to anymore, or what have you. Since I’m such a pack rat though I don’t like deleting things without keeping copies somewhere (the utility of remembering what names were once on my buddy list eludes me at the moment, but I’m sure it exists).

In any event, I did a bit of searching and came up with nothing helpful. Exporting a buddy list in Adium is an oft-requested, somewhat contemplated, and ultimately unsupported feature. The new version of AIM for Mac apparently omits this feature, although if you were to search you wouldn’t know it.

I ended up installing Pidgin on my Windows 7 tablet, since I already knew you could export your buddy list as XML using that. But only a brief moment of thought resulted in this helpful nugget of wisdom (one that, I had taken advantage of before, I guess, but had forgotten–hence this post):

cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0/Users/Default/libpurple/blist.xml ~/blist-backup.xml

And your backup is now in your home folder.

On an entirely unrelated note, I finally fixed got fixed the problems that were going on behind the scenes. The end result is you need no longer register to post a comment (not that I would expect anyone to do the latter, much less the former). The curious thing is that even though I had “required” registration to post comments, and no one registered an account in the interim, 1,000+ spam comments still managed to get through. I guess WordPress doesn’t really do much in the way of effective checking for such things. Oh well, I guess?

Comments (0) | Apple, Geekish, Random, Site Stuff

My new Google Voice number is composed of two powers of two. This has the nice effect of making it very easy for me to remember, along with any nerd acquaintances I may share it with.

If that didn’t convince you I’m a geek, how about the fact that I thought this was worth sharing?

Comments (0) | Geekish, Random

AOL is apparently telling some of news blogs under its wing to cut back on posts in order to trim down its budgets. The sites that are impacted by the move fall under AOL’s Weblogs division and include DownloadSquad, Diylife.com, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. All have been asked to stop posting content until July 31, according to paidConent.org.
AOL Cuts Back on Blogs to Save Cash || The Mac Observer

Ironically, it would appear that none of the aforementioned sites have yet posted to announce the fact that they… well, won’t be posting as much.

Comments (0) | Random

Being off from school and all (and refusing to go back until I absolutely have to) has afforded me the much needed opportunity to do nothing productive, all in the comfort of my own seclusion. I decided to ask for DVDs of TV shows this year as gifts, perhaps in spite of the fact that I don’t usually ever get to watching DVDs of anything. (I don’t really need them as room adornments, either.) But the past couple days I sort of forced myself to watch the first season (plus a couple episodes) of The Office, along with the commentaries and such (I played the new Mario game for a little while too, which I guess was kind of fun). It was a nice change of pace, and well worth it—at least until I have to get some actual work done. But I think I can still put that off for a little while.

Happy New Year, folks.

Comments (0) | Random, TV

So today (by which I mean yesterday, since I’m posting after midnight), Mac OS 10.5 (“Leopard,” as they call it) made its triumphant debut to much fanfare. Even here at that university in Cambridge, 6:00 saw a fairly lengthy line stretching out of the main computer center in the Science Center, full of people anxiously awaiting their shiny new OS.

Although I was obviously in the vicinity at the time (as you can tell from my observations of the line), I was not there to obtain Leopard—I had another mission in mind. Some barely circulated flier advertised a raffle, where 100 lucky winners would obtain a free copy of iLife ‘08. I hadn’t planned on upgrading, but since this is something like $40 with a student discount, it seemed like a nice chunk of change to save. Noticing the total lack of visibility of the fliers, I expected that the occasion—an event starting at 6:00, and a promised drawing at 7:30—wouldn’t even draw 100 people to begin with, and if it did, the odds would almost certainly still be overwhelmingly in my favor.

Showtime arrived, and I made my way past the line of Leopard-seekers (taking a few Apple-branded things they had lying around for the taking) in search of this raffle. It was a bit of a stretch, but no matter—an employee shows me a box of entry forms, and I take one. Then, a curiosity: I notice a girl exchanging her entry form for a copy of iLife. I ask whether I’m just supposed to fill out the form (hopefully to be told that they’re just giving it away to anyone who enters), and I hear the bad news: only entry forms with special stickers are winners, and since mine didn’t have a sticker, I wasn’t going to win. I was told that even though I was supposed to fill out the form, there wasn’t any chance I could still win, and he wouldn’t blame me if I didn’t bother.

Frustrated, I gave him back the blank form and left. Of course, this was a giveaway—you could say it’s hard to be annoyed with something so petty as to be free to begin with. But still, the fact that this was hardly a raffle at all—that you could feel around with your hand for a stickered entry form, or that you could come back again and win later, or even that earlier arrivals had an advantage against those who came closer to the 7:30 “drawing” that wasn’t—made it seem awfully unfair.

After attending to other matters that demanded my attention this evening, I made my way back by the Science Center a little after 7:00, aiming to try my hand at getting free stuff again. Surely, the masses would have largely left, and perhaps they still hadn’t gotten 100 people to show up. If, as I overheard, 1 in 4 entry forms were missing a sticker, there was a fair bit of hope.

I put on my glasses, hoping this might at least disorient the employee I saw before, if he was even still there. There were about three customers there, and a number of employees, but I didn’t see the one who I had spoken with before. I approached a man behind the counter, and had a conversation something like this:

“Is there a raffle going on here?”

“Do you have iLife ‘08?”

“No, I don’t.”

(The man hands me a copy.) “You do now.”

Ah, the wonders of free stuff. I still need to figure out what exactly the new iLife has that’ll benefit me, but it’ll probably have at least a couple things I’ll find useful at some point.

Satisfaction is the theme of the night.

Comments (0) | College, Geekish, Random

But it being the last day of another month that has thus far seen no new posts, I thought I should take this opportunity to at least remind you of such.

To express my apologies (perhaps most of all to anyone whose RSS reader informed them that this would be a post worth reading), I extend to my readers this amusing game.

Comments (1) | Geekish, Random