After our last IT dinner, we all watched Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica. A film about a font sounds like a real snore, but it is surprisingly enjoyable, told with ease and fluid coherence. Hustwit interviewed graphic designers from around the world who tell of the font’s Swiss origins, its early implementation, the revolt again its ubiquitous conformity, and the return to its simple eloquence. It’s a fascinating history, told in an unexpectedly entertaining way.

After watching the film it’s amazing to see how pervasive Helvetica actually is. You can’t go a day — you can’t go 10 feet! — without seeing Helvetica: sale tags, parking signs, bus numbers, t-shirts…it’s everywhere! Because of the font’s omnipresence, I highly recommend the film to all.  ZCoBbers, IT has a copy of the film we’d be happy to lend out.

Helvetica A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

The world of IT is different when it comes to giving great service. And not just because IT appears to be a strange cult of mumbo jumbo from the outside. Though the Zingerman’s way of service is world renowned and very, very useful, it does not exactly translate. And this is fine - that’s part of the challenge of great systems is applying them.

When we receive a cry for help from one of our customers (the staff of Zingerman’s) should we take that as an opportunity to provide great customer service or as an opportunity to handle a customer complaint? Should we acknowledge their complaint, apologize, make it right, thank them for letting us know of the problem, and then document the complaint? Or should we figure out what the customer wants, get it for them (accurately, politely, and enthusiastically), and then go the extra mile?

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Keeping it short and sweet this time: + is good, - is…not so good.

[+]The Dictionary application has been improved (Yates, this one’s for you). The Dictionary interface has been updated with tabs for searching dictionary, thesaurus, Apple.com, and…Wikipedia! Now you can get correct spellings, definitions and all the encyclopedic information you’ve ever wanted in one app.  Use it with Quicksilver and keep Wiki at your fingertips.

[-]Connecting to SMB shares…still trying to figure this one out, as are many other users. Sometimes the share is read-only, sometimes not. Sometimes you get a kernel panic just by browsing an SMB share. Apple’s 10.5.1 update for Leopard “addresses an issue in which Microsoft Windows shared folders may be read-only when connected via SMB,” but I don’t think they’ve got it figured out just yet either. I don’t know why they changed Networking in 10.5, it was perfect in 10.4.

[-]Wide reports of poor wireless performance, but thankfully I’ve not experienced it <knock on wood>. I believe this was also fixed with the 10.5.1 update. I did learn a geeky little trick with Airport in 10.5: Alt+click the Airport icon in your menu bar to see the MAC address, channel, and transmit rate of your wireless connection.

[+]Quick View. Click a file, press cmd+y or the space bar and OS X displays the file without opening any application. Wonder what that PDF is on your desktop? Click. Spacebar. Blam! Quick View lets you read the entire document, and you can adjust to full screen. It’s quickly becoming my preferred way for reading PDFs. Quick View works with all files, and plays especially nice with PDFs, Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, and images.