I watched another food-focused documentary this past weeked called King Corn.  It’s the story of two friends from Boston who decide to grow one acre of corn in Greene, Iowa and follow it from seed to plate.  They quickly realize farming isn’t as romantic as they had thought, learning the sad irony that a farmer with 7,000 acres of corn can’t feed himself; the corn he grows is inedible and barely profitable.  King Corn examines the pervasive nature of corn,especially genetically modified corn in the US economy and diet.

King Corn was written, photographed, produced, and directed by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who drew huge inspiration from Michael Pollan.  Pollan is featured in the film, along with other notable food writers and reseachers.  I don’t think Cheney and Ellis are film students, and cinematically it shows at times, but they tell a very informative and enjoyable, if even a little upsetting, story of the most abundant grain in our country.

King Corn is available on DVD and slated to air on PBS stations across the country.

This weekend I watched The Future of Food, a documentary about genetically modified/engineered foods. The synopsis from the film’s website describes it best:

…an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade…The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply…THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world’s food system.

I was completely fascinated by the film, and particularly disturbed by how many genes and organisms have now been patented - a thought that has lingered since watching. If you’re at all concerned about what you put on your table and in your body, I consider The Future of Food mandatory viewing.

The Future of Food was written, directed, and produced by Deborah Koons Garcia, and is available on DVD. Watch the trailer

We ran into an issue with a user who’s Exchange mailbox had grown to a size that was very large, too large in fact. We needed to find a way to shrink it and usually this means to archive a significant portion of the messages. But as we were about to find out, this wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought.

Outlook users have many options when it comes to managing email archives and even ExMerge can run fairly selective archive routines, but this person was an Entourage user. Those other programs all have one thing in common, they output in PST, of which Entourage cannot handle natively. Yes there were other options, I could export to PST and then import to Thunderbird and then export to mbox format and then import to Entourage. What I would have been left with is a heap of ugly plain text email that wasn’t easily searchable nor sortable. I could also try and just move everything manually using click/drag but the folder structure was too complex and there was just too much mail.

What I really needed for this user was a way to have their somewhat complex email structure replicated in their local Entourage folders. Then we could move messages that were older than say, 6 months, into those corresponding locations. After a short and frustrating effort to do this manually, I spent some more time looking for a script that could possibly automate the action. I didn’t find a script but what I did end up finding was a program called the Entourage Exchange Accounts Optimizer. I know, the name could use some work but the program is brilliant.

For just $15 It does exactly what I needed it to do. Replicates the Exchange folder structure onto the local machine, moves the email that is older than the date specified, and is able to be scheduled to run daily. Why MS decided to leave this out, I can only guess but this program is certainly the bee’s knees.

Overdue post…

I’ve been using 10.5 since it came out in November. In that time there have been 2 major (10.5.x) updates and handfuls of software, firmware, and security updates, all of which have steadied the ship (sorry to mix metaphors). Some have criticized, some are still complaining. But guess what? *ding!* It’s ready. Serve it up! For the masses, consume!

Until recently I would end up in travel situations, that were otherwise going along swimmingly, sitting in frustration in a hotel room, or a friend’s guest room, trying to figure out where to plug in my various electronic gear to charge. Then I spotted one of these mini power strips from Monster called Outlets To Go. The first one I ran across had four outlets but they make them in 3 and 6 outlets as well. My favorite is the 3 - it is the smallest and lightest and I rarely have more than three items to plug in. I was so happy with it that I bought one for both Jillian and for my Mom. They run around $12 at Amazon. I think we may carry a few in the IT “store” with our USB flash drives and extra power supplies that staff can pick up from us.Oh, and I’m not sure whether to share this last part or leave it as a surprise, but the connector that goes into the wall has a soft blue nightlight built-in.

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

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.

As promised IT is giving a review of the latest release of OS X, 10.5 aka Leopard. Here’s my (very) rough take on a couple of favorite features, in no order whatsoever.

First, the Look & Feel. Aesthetically Leopard is very pleasing, but not radically different from the previous version. There are some variations on the Aqua theme: new dock, translucent menu bar, new icons. Summed up, it’s all still glossy and gorgeous.

Spaces: I used VitrueDesktops with 10.4 to give me multiple desktops. Spaces is the built-in desktop manager that gives you as many desktops or “spaces” as you’d like. It’s a real improvement for the OS and a nod to it’s Debian heritage (multiple desktops/desktop management has been a feature of most Linux systems for years). You can assign an application to a specific desktop or to every desktop. For example, I’ve assigned Parallels to space 4, so when I first launch Parallels OS X automatically moves to 4 and then keeps the app there. I keep my web browsing on another desktop and NeoOffice on yet another.

One thing I had to tweak was the way Finder plays with Spaces. If I opened a Finder window on space 1, every time I cmd+tab’ed to Finder I’d be moved back to 1. I prefer to be able to open a Finder window on any and all spaces. In the Spaces pref pane you can assign applications to a desktop(s), so I added Finder to the list and assigned it to “every space,” which gave me the desired behavior. (You can finder Finder.app in the CoreServices folder.) IMO, I think this should be the default setting for Finder’s role in Spaces, but to each his own.

Preview: Preview, the all-purpose PDF and image viewer, has been dramatically revamped: Easier navigation between pages — you used to only be able to scroll one page, then click either ‘next page’ or click the next page in the drawer — now you can scroll an entire document; adjustable thumbnails; image cropping & capturing; and bookmarks. I don’t know if bookmarks were part of the old Preview, but now you can bookmark images and documents like you would a webpage so you quickly bring it up later.

I’ve been enjoying practicing Inbox Zero as described by Merlin Mann at 43Folders. For the last couple of weeks I have kept my inbox close to or at zero and WOW, it’s an amazing feeling.

Merlin’s got quite a rant going on the subject which is well worth reading.

Get yourself over to www.inboxzero.com and then let us know in the comments what you think about it.

The latest revision of Ubuntu, 7.10 aka ‘Gutsy Gibbon’, came out this week. I updated my home computer last night and am very pleased: Flash and Java are now included, both of which used to be huge hurdles. Also included in the new distro is Compiz Fusion which gives a slightly new aesthetic, 3-D effects, and some advanced desktop features (this Fusion demo will blow your mind!). Fusion requires a newer video card, but it plays very nice with older hardware. Most exciting, IMO, about Gutsy Gibbon is that you can print. Finally. It’s the simple things in life that make me happy, and successfully printing a page is a joyous event that has been absent in my previous experiences with Ubuntu.

Check out Brian DeLancy’s history and review of the new Ubuntu at O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com