Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • It's Frrrrrriday the 13th: What Are We Afraid Of Today?

    Every Friday the 13th, we tend to start thinking about phobias and superstitions. For example, I came into the office today with half-dried hair, so I joked that I had a phobia of hair dryers (maybe a combination of “Electrophobia”:http://www.phobia-fear-release.com/electrophobia.html and “Thermophobia?”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophobia). Ed just got a haircut, so it seems he could have a phobia of either long hair (an extension __(no pun intended)__ of “Trichopathophobia,”:http://www.answers.com/topic/trichopathophobia perhaps?) or a phobia of scissors (“Metallophobia?”:http://www.panphobia.com/things/metallophobia.htm) that he was able to get over?

    I thought it was pretty interesting to research some superstitions, though. I think most of us do at least __something__ superstitious to an extent to be feel “lucky”; how many cross their fingers or make a wish on a fallen eyelash?

    And regarding the idea of Friday the 13th being unlucky? Check out some thoughts:

    bq. “Fear of Friday the 13th is rooted in ancient, separate bad-luck associations with the number 13 and the day Friday. The two unlucky entities combine to make one super unlucky day.”

    bq. “There is a Norse myth about 12 gods having a dinner party at Valhalla, their heaven. In walked the uninvited 13th guest, the mischievous Loki. Once there, Loki arranged for Hoder, the blind god of darkness, to shoot Balder the Beautiful, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. Balder died and the Earth got dark. The whole Earth mourned.”

    bq. “There is a Biblical reference to the unlucky number 13. Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th guest to the Last Supper.”

    bq. “A particularly bad Friday the 13th occurred in the middle ages. On a Friday the 13th in 1306, King Philip of France arrested the revered Knights Templar and began torturing them, marking the occasion as a day of evil.”

    bq. “In ancient Rome, witches reportedly gathered in groups of 12. The 13th was believed to be the devil.”

    bq. “Both Friday and the number 13 were once closely associated with capital punishment. In British tradition, Friday was the conventional day for public hangings, and there were supposedly 13 steps leading up to the noose.”

    bq. “It is traditionally believed that Eve tempted Adam with the apple on a Friday. Tradition also has it that the Flood in the Bible, the confusion at the Tower of Babel, and the death of Jesus Christ all took place on Friday.”

    bq. “Numerologists consider 12 a “complete” number. There are 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, and 12 apostles of Jesus. In exceeding 12 by 1, 13’s association with bad luck has to do with just being a little beyond completeness.”

    And how does this fear manifest?

    * More than 80 percent of high-rises lack a 13th floor.
    * Many airports skip the 13th gate.
    * Airplanes have no 13th aisle.
    * Hospitals and hotels regularly have no room number 13.
    * Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery.
    * On streets in Florence, Italy, the house between number 12 and 14 is addressed as 12 and a half.
    * Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue
    * In France, socialites known as the quatorziens (fourteeners) once made themselves available as 14th guests to keep a dinner party from an unlucky fate.
    * Many triskaidekaphobes, as those who fear the unlucky integer are known, point to the ill-fated mission to the moon, Apollo 13.
    * If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil’s luck . Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their names.

    “Find more at the source here.”:http://www.corsinet.com/trivia/scary.html

    Happy Friday the 13th–stay safe and sane!

  • Everything You Wanted To Know About Software Updates *But Were Afraid To Ask

    Apple frequently releases free software updates for all of applications along with OS X. The Software Update feature in Mac OS X makes it very easy to determine and get what you need. There are a few tips that make keeping your Mac up-to-date especially convenient and easy, including setting an update schedule.

    Apple has posted a Support article detailing the procedure. I think it’s worth reading. For example, I didn’t know that it was possible to “hide select updates”:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2357, if you don’t want to install them.

    “Click here to read the entire support article!”:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1338?viewlocale=en_US

  • Security Update for 10.5 Leopard

    Along with the 10.6.2 update, Apple released a Security Update for 10.5. This Update is recommended for all users and improves the security of Mac OS X. Previous security updates have been incorporated into this security update, so if you’ve skipped some updates, this one will catch you up quickly.

    If you have 10.5, you can download the update by running Software Update, which is found under the Apple button in the upper left corner of your screen (this is the recommended method). You can manually install the update by “clicking here.”:http://support.apple.com/kb/DL963

  • Snow Leopard Updated to OS 10.6.2

    Earlier this week, Apple released the second update for Snow Leopard, bringing it to OS X 10.6.2. This update features a security update, as well as a substantial list of bug fixes for Safari, Mail, MobileMe, network file systems, graphics, fonts, Front Row, and much more.

    The 10.6.2 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Read more “by clicking here.”:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 Read about the security aspect of the update “by clicking here.”:”http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3874

    You can download the update by running *Software Update*, which is found under the Apple button in the upper left corner of your screen (this is the recommended method). You can manually install the update “by clicking here.”:http://support.apple.com/downloads/#macosx106

    Of note, this update removes support for Intel Intel Atom processors, disabling “hacked” non-Apple netbooks running OS X. The update fixes a critical issue with guest accounts and the accidental erasure of entire home directories.

  • MAC TREAT #105: Change the Default Color Of Highlighted Text in OS X

    A friend recently asked if it was possible to change the default color of highlighted text in OS X. He is working on a research project, and frequently needs to highlight text, especially in Safari. The standard basic grey color of highlighted text in OS X made it difficult to find highlighted text on the screen.

    Fortunately, it is very easy to change the default color of highlighted text. Simply open System Preferences (found by clicking on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen), then click on the *Appearance* button. In the Appearance pane, you will see a drop-down menu for *Highlight Color*. You can choose from several options, or create your own color.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    We are in the midst of Indian summer here in the Green Mountains with sunny skies and warm days, setting a few record warm temperatures and definitely extending the motorcycle season a bit. I know we are going to pay for this. I met with my new plow man yesterday to talk about the upcoming winter. I found a new plow guy because the young man doing it for the past couple of years is not a morning person, and sometimes we would not be plowed out until the afternoon. Real plow guys get excited when it snows and are up at 3AM to make sure their customers are happy and able to get to work!

    Customer satisfaction is the key to any successful business, snow plowing or Apple-selling. I often tell my employees that customer service doesn’t cost–it pays. We take customer satisfaction very seriously; in fact, much of our incentive compensation is based upon our customer satisfaction scores as measured by NPS (Net Promoter Score). If you want to learn more about this means of measuring customer satisfaction, “click here.”:http://www.netpromoter.com/np/index.jsp

    We do not pay commissions at Small Dog Electronics because we feel that the person that packs the box or sweeps the floors is just as important as the person that happens to take the order. We provide incentives to our employees based upon certain key performance indicators for the company, each department and the individual. In each case, a very large percentage of this incentive compensation is based upon customer satisfaction.

    We track our NPS scores like someone monitoring their temperature when they have the flu. When we see a decline, I can walk around the company and overhear comments about how to get he score back up. It is just that important to our company. The other thing that Hapy and I have done from the very start is to empower our employees to directly deal with customer service issues. Hapy is much better than I am at deflecting requests for customer service decisions back to the employee with the question, “what do you think we should do for this customer?” Ultimately, we want our employees to make these decisions.

    We will be having a special customer appreciation pre-holiday sale at our retail stores here in Vermont next weekend that will help some to beat the holiday rush. We are offering our local customers some special deals that will make you wish you lived in Vermont!

    I had the pleasure of awarding the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility Legislator of the Year award to Speaker of the House, Shap Smith. During lunch with the Speaker, he talked about the huge challenges of the upcoming legislative session with a lame duck governor, many leaders running for governor and a big fiscal budget crisis for the state in addition to the lingering problems of health care reform, sustainable energy and transportation.

    It was a lot of work on his plate, but then he told me that he felt privileged to be in his position to roll up his sleeves and tackle the heavy-lifting. It was very inspirational and I was very honored to present the award to him. “See a photo here!”:http://blog.smalldog.com/images/1433.jpg

  • Adobe CS3 Update Problem Resolved

    Small Dog is a well-loved institution in Vermont, and we help take care of some other signature Vermont companies. One of my favorites is Ben & Jerry’s, where we help support their graphic design and web design staff. They are a great group of talented designers who are responsible for all the clever ice cream packaging as well as the graphics you see in any Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shop, or on their http://benjerry.com/ website.

    One of the designers has been having issues running Adobe CS3 updates. Adobe provides an update mechanism to keep all the software up-to-date, and it downloads updates from the Adobe servers and installs them, much like Apple’s software update does. This client kept having update failures for new versions of VersionCue and some Adobe Asset stuff. I tried all sorts of trouble-shooting on the machine, repairing permissions, doing all Apple updates, and then manually downloading the updates and trying to install them. The other Adobe apps would update, but not these few components. They would simply stall and just sit there with half a progress bar until I quit.

    After some searching on the internet, I found my answer. Like many products, Adobe installs a folder for itself in the Library/Application Support folder. These folders are normally owned by the system user and the admin group, but this Mac’s Library/Application Support/Adobe folder was owned by the user itself.

    Several folders within there are used by the Adobe Update application to do its updates, so with the folder owned by the user, those update apps are run with the user’s authorization, not the system. Furthermore, some of the files those updates need to modify are in those folders. The solution is to change the ownership of that folder to the root user, and then the updates can complete!

    To do it, go to and run Terminal (Applications/Utilties/Terminal), and type in the following command:

    sudo chown -R root:admin “/Library/Application Support/Adobe”

    It will ask for your password and then change the ownership of that folder and all folders inside it. Wait for it to complete, quit Terminal and you’re done! The Adobe updates should now run properly.

    Please let us know if our Consulting staff can help solve a problem for you or your business!

  • Repair of the Week: 27-inch iMac

    Small Dog took delivery of a giant pile of 27-inch iMacs shortly after they were announced, and the one we stationed on the South Burlington store’s showroom floor decided it wouldn’t handle Cover Flow very well. When “flowing” through album art in iTunes or a folder’s contents in a Finder window, flashing perfectly horizontal anomalies would appear on the screen. Oddly, we could not find another situation that would produce the anomalies. We played Warcraft, stressed the graphics card with the Grapher application, and ran all the diagnostics available to us, and could not come up with a definitive diagnosis.

    The first step in any troubleshooting is to start the computer from a known-good startup disk, and the best tool for this is the Mac OS X install disk that comes with every Mac. Since there isn’t Cover Flow in the installer, that disk wouldn’t help us. Instead, we used our NetBoot system to boot the computer off the network. The symptom appeared that way, so we knew the issue wasn’t related to software. With any video issue, it’s always productive to plug in an external display to determine whether the issue is with the internal display. In this case, the issue could be duplicated on the external display.

    At this point, we suspected the graphics card, so one was ordered and installed with no luck. The immediate reaction was that the video card was dead on arrival, but the exact same symptom was present with this card. The video card clearly was not the issue with this machine.

    The service manual suggests swapping RAM at this point, but we’d already tried that. Next up is main logic board, which didn’t fix the issue either. Thinking ahead, we also ordered up the display’s cable just in case. Neither fixed the issue.

    Curious, I opened up another iMac to see if it had the same issue. It did. I did some creative Googling and found plenty of similar reports, and still believe the issue to be related to the graphics card. We were able to swap parts from one iMac to the other without the need to order service parts as needed, and still the issue remained. Apple was kind enough to offer the customer a replacement machine, and it arrived the other day in perfect working order.

  • From the Archives: Email Etiquette

    With everyone from your grandmother to your five-year-old sending emails, many people assume that they innately know how to properly use email. But email, a modern from of letter writing, is a practice that deserves its own set of guidelines. From casual emails to business correspondence, everyone can benefit from knowing the dos and don’ts of sending email.

    As an employee at Small Dog Electronics, email is a big part of my life. My job and personal habits have turned me into a heavy email user. I spend a lot of time writing and responding to emails, many of them to large groups of readers and customers.

    Writing emails and electronic newsletters is notably different from writing a letter or a print newsletter. Some of the available resources on etiquette provide more than 30 basic rules for emails, from replying promptly and checking spelling to ditching formatting. These suggestions are all valid, but for many years I operated under just five simple rules for email communication. Recent personal experiences and discussions about email have prompted me to expand these basic rules to nine. If these rules seem simple, that’s because they are, but a surprising number of people are breaking them without knowing it!

    Basic Email Etiquette

    1. Never type in ALL CAPS unless you are very angry.

    2. Provide white space. Reading small type without some white space can be very hard on the eyes.

    3. Be brief. People who read hundreds of emails each day tend to skim over the very long ones.

    4. Always remember that people take the written word very seriously. I often find it difficult not to sound too extreme when I’m sending emails. Trying not to sound too clinical or terse after responding to 40 emails can be hard.

    5. Try to include the message thread and at least the pertinent thread. This makes it a lot easier to recall the original question. Also, include a meaningful subject line. When inboxes are overflowing with spam, it’s easy to miss an important email if it has a lame subject like “file” or “meeting.”

    Expanded Rules

    6. Pause before hitting send. Have you sent email to the wrong person with dire consequences? It is easy to misaddress an email. Be careful. Never send something by email that you don’t want the world to read, or be prepared to face the consequences.

    7. When sending to a list, it doesn’t hurt to be completely obsessed with the details. It’s my responsibility to send electronic newsletters to Small Dog Electronics’s lists. This is something that I tend to rush through rather than being a stickler for details. This past week, I incorrectly pasted information into the subject line of our Tech Tails newsletter. As I watched it leave my outbox, I felt ready to die of dishonor. I’ve developed a checklist to make sure that I don’t continue to screw up. I advise a similar action if you frequently send newsletters or announcements to large groups.

    8. Determine when to include carbon copies and when to reply all. My rules are:

    CC: Used when no action is needed by the reader, but you want him or her to be party to the conversation. If any action is needed by the reader, don’t CC, but put him or her in the “To” field.

    Reply All (which sends the message to everyone–the sender and all other recipients): Only use Reply All when your answer has some effect on all the readers. Do not reply all when the answer is only for the sender. An example of when not to reply all would be when you receive a reminder for an upcoming meeting that was sent to 100 people and you want to tell the sender that you will be there with a quick “I’ll see you then!” This doesn’t need to go to 100 people.

    BCC: Use when sending to a group of people, since many may not want their email addresses publicized.

    9. It is not necessary to respond with just “Thank you.” When I first starting working at a computer company, I sent what I thought was a polite response to a coworker that simply said “Thank you!” after he answered a question. Boy, did I get told off for what I thought was a nice gesture. As I learned more, I realized what a pain it is to stop what you’re doing to open an email and then read nothing more than “OK, thanks!” A simple thank you became an annoying inconvenience for the receiver. Now, I thank people in advance to avoid a second interruption.

  • Free MacHeist Software nanoBundle!

    *Only two days left!*

    In years past, “Macheist”:http://www.macheist.com has grown famous for offering incredible bundles of high-quality, independent Mac software, usually priced for just $49. This is a savings of literally hundreds of dollars. I’ve personally discovered and downloaded some great software from these bundles in the past–software I continue to use daily.

    This year, “Macheist.com”:http://www.macheist.com has outdone themselves by offering a FREE bundle of six great software titles. It’s worth checking this out, even if you’re only likely to use one or two of the titles.

    Say hello to the “MacHeist nanoBundle”:http://www.macheist.com:

    * “ShoveBox”:http://www.macheist.com/#shovebox – ($25) – Catch all the little scraps of information that you can’t immediately act on, but don’t want to forget. ShoveBox sits up in your menu bar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.

    * “WriteRoom”:http://www.macheist.com/#writeroom – ($25) – Writeroom is a simple, but powerful app that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom does one main thing and does it incredibly well: It’s all about writing…

    * “Twitterrific”:http://www.macheist.com/#twitterrific – $14.99 – Twitterrific is an exquisite app that enables you to make the most out of your Twitter experience. It has a clean user interface that’s designed to take up little of your precious desktop space. Twitterrific is packed with features, so that you’ll feel like you’re in total control over everything you do on Twitter.

    * “TinyGrab”:http://www.macheist.com/#tinygrab – ($14) – TinyGrab is a simple, powerful app that enables you to quickly share screenshots of everything on your Mac. TinyGrab quickly uploads the screenshot and puts the URL for it on your Clipboard so you can easily share it via email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

    * “Hordes of Orcs”:http://www.macheist.com/#hordes – ($25) – Hordes of Orcs is a Tower Defense strategy game where you build walls and towers to defend your village from orcs gone rogue. There are several different towers, each with its own unique abilities. Build Arrow Towers, Radiation Towers, Fire Towers, and more to keep your village safe from the deadly clutches of green meanies.

    * “Mariner Write”:http://www.macheist.com/#marinerwrite – ($50) – Unlocked for everyone when Macheist reaches 500,000 participants! Mariner Write is a fast, streamlined word processor that’s useful for everyone… professional writers, educators, students, casual computer users, and everyone in-between. It has a simple, elegant user interface so that you can create beautiful documents the very first time you start using it. If you’re tied to using Microsoft Word, then don’t fret… Mariner Write has the power to open and edit Word documents with ease. And it can save your documents in many different formats including RTF, PDF, and various other formats. You stay compatible.

    Click here to visit “MacHeist”:http://www.macheist.com to learn more and download all the great apps!

  • Meet the Consultants!

    One of the best things about my job at Small Dog Electronics is that my days are never boring and no two weeks are ever alike! This past week alone I’ve helped a small business owner switch from PC to his new Mac, taught an Au Pair how to video chat with her relatives in the Czech Republic, helped a large business upgrade to Snow Leopard Server and recovered baby pictures from a failed hard drive. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to help clients through frustrating situations and empower them with the tools they need to help themselves in the future.

    Our Consulting department is constantly growing and we offer endless solutions and education opportunities to our clients. With in-store, in-home and remote consults available, we offer flexible ways to truly be “always by your side.”

    To showcase the limitless offerings of our Consulting department, *we’re hosting a special Meet the Consultants Day this Thursday (11/12) in our South Burlington store.* Feel free to come in with your questions! We’re offering *free 15-minute consultations from 11am to 4pm* as well as coupons and goodies.

    Join us and see what out team can do for you!