OSX Mavericks

After successfully getting 99% of my legacy .csv files created in Excel working with OpenOffice Calc, I accidentally double-clicked on one, which launched Excel.

Guess what? Excel opened without error!

But better that after a couple of hours of learning the ins-and-outs of OO Calc, than before learning what I now know. Now I know I can save $9.99/month, by canceling my Office 365 subscription.

So far, the only thing I don't like about OO Calc vs Excel- when you import data from a .xls document created by someone else, and they saved it with Quotes surrounding data fields, you can't filter out those Quotes. You can filter out Quoted fields when saving, not when loading.

I can Find/Replace each time, or add a str_replace statement to my PHP script that analyses the data.


With one vendor's Stats, OO Calc misinterprets a field as two fields... so I had to fiddle with my PHP script to look for the dollar amount in a different field. It worked.

So far, the two things abut Mavericks I dislike:

1) The font it uses for EVERYTHING, from Finder, to Mail, to Facebook, is a "narrow" font. My eyes are dizzy from living in a land of TALL words.

2) In Finder, for decades we have been able to color highlight file names. Now, instead of putting color highlight behind all the letters of the file name, it places a teeeeeeeny colored dot at the right of the line.

Like that's helpful to be able to visually spot what you are looking for, from 3 feet away!

I took my iPhone and iPad to the Apple Store on the Las Vegas Strip this afternoon, to meet the new addition to the family: my new MacBook Pro 13.

Attachment 4944

As I posted before, I really need a laptop in Europe, where hotels turn out NOT to have WiFi in rooms as advertised, which leaves me with my macMini to have to set up in the Lobby. Now, I can use a flash drive to port files from Mini to MacBook and head to the Lobby to FTP to my web host in Germany.

I was going to get a $300 Chrome Book, but there's so many new free Apps with OSX Mavericks, that I decided to spend a little extra on the MacBook Pro 13, and have portability and interoperability between all of my machines and devices. It's an Aluminum machine, with black keys, just beautiful.

That, and a couple of my movies have done well lately.

I'm probably going to switch from FCP 7 (never did do FCP X) to iMovie 10! I watched a 90-minute webinar sponsored by Moviola yesterday. Looks like iMovie 10 will be most of FCP X, with a "consumer" interface. With iMovie 10 free on my Mini and MacBook Pro 13 because it comes as part of Mavericks (along with iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, to name a handful), it is kind of a no-brainer.

Spent 3 hours at the Apple Store, picking up my MacBook Pro 13, cracking it open, updating to Mavericks on their ethernet, and in between, sitting in on a Workshop on iCloud.

I bought the machine as a "refurb", at 20% discount ($999 + tax), with one-year warranty, plus free shipping, shipped directly to the Apple Store, where I spent 3 hours in Personal Setup's ethernet and the iCloud Workshop. Plus, I clicked-through to Apple via my Bank's virtual mall, so I earn 2% cash back next statement cycle. For you Europeans, in the US, tax is added on at checkout, depending on the State, and sometimes the City, you live in. We don't have national Sales Tax (VAT) as you do, and product prices are before tax. Tax was 8.1%.

10 point Trivia Question: What color is the ethernet cable at the Apple Store?