K&K Popcorn

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I've discovered a new favorite popcorn, K&K Popcorn, grown in Shellsburg, Iowa. Their "Tiny But Mighty" Popcorn has great flavor, and no hulls to get stuck in your teeth (or colon). It has good corn flavor, and is sweeter than your normal bland popcorn, though the kernels pop much smaller. I made a batch last weekend in my Whirley Pop, with just a little peanut oil, and it was tasty. I think I'll have to make some tonight...

Switchers: Beware Macromedia

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I was extremely displeased to discover that even though I own a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, I was unable to install it on my new PowerBook. It turns out that you can only have two copies activated at once, and I already had it on my home and work machines. Well, no big deal, right? I can just deactivate one of those and put it on my PowerBook. Oops, no wait, you can't. You can have two active copies, but they have to be of the same platform, so even though the CD ships with both the Mac and Windows versions of the app, you can only have two active copies of the same platform.

Well, as long as I have my laptop, I don't really need it anywhere else, so I can just deactivate both of my Windows boxes, and put it on my Mac, right? Wrong. Buried in the EULA it tells you that whatever platform you first activate the software on is now your platform for life. So, even if you deactivate those Windows boxes, you still can't install it on your Mac.

Needless to say, this is decidedly user-unfriendly, and not at all the way a company should treat their paying customers. What does Macromedia care what platforms I use, or if I'm switching between them? Apple would be well-served to pressure Macromedia on this, as it's a barrier to people switching platforms if they have to rebuy software they already own, even though the box clearly says that the OS X and Windows versions are included.

Also, needless to say, I won't be giving Macromedia any more money in the future, I'll use something else. And, in the words of our President: "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

More Bugs

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Here are a few more miscellaneous notes about Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 9.0:

The Macintosh client is no longer included on the media, you have to contact Symantec Support via phone, and they'll give you an FTP address from which you can download it.

The packager tool is no longer supported, and even though it's included on the CD, and the documentation included with it tells you where you can locate the .pmi file to build a package, the .pmi file isn't in that location, and you can't actually use it to build a package.  Why they included it, I don't know, but when I called them, they said that the documentation is wrong.

Anyone else getting the sense that they hurried this out the door a bit early?

Master & Commander

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We watched Master & Commander last night, which exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. I thought it was going to be one of those cheesy movies intended to draw a large audience that's completely predictable from the outset, but was surprised at how much originality there was to the movie. If you haven't seen it, it's now available for rental, and is certainly worth your money. The DTS soundtrack is great, when the scenes were down in the lower areas of the ship you can hear people walking or running on the decks above you, and it sounded so real that I thought there was someone upstairs in our house.