Auto-Width for Column View in OS X Finder

At work lately, I’ve been using the column view in Finder on my Mac OS X laptop. I’ve never used it very much before, and I quickly discovered a frustration. All of the folders and document names for this project are very long, and have similar names. As a result, I would see an entire column with items like ProjectAlph...rison.shtml – not very useful, when the indentifying bit is in the middle of the file name.

Now, I quickly discovered that I can resize the columns by hand using the little “grabber” at the bottom of the column, but I hate having to do it by hand for each column. I wished there was something like the “auto-width columns” from Excel. Lucky for me, there’s a simple, if non-intuitive answer, courtesy of OSX FAQ.

Adjust the width of each column by dragging the ‘Re-size Column’ widget. Option dragging re-sizes all columns together. Double-click the widget to re-size the column to an optimal size, and option-double-click to resize all columns together.

Jeopardy Categories 2005

No post today, because I’m still working on my about page. But here’s a quick excerpt, my updated ideal Jeopardy categories.

  • Public transportation (not just for jerks and lesbians)
  • Web standards and CSS (not just for jerks and lesbians)
  • Comic books (not just for… you get the point)
  • Cheesy movies (blues brothers, barbarella, etc)
  • Science fiction (from asimov to heinlein to niven)
  • Video Games (freeman vs. master chief)
  • The Pen Is Mightier (you’re sitting on a gold mine!)

It turns out that writing a good about page is tricky. I don’t want it to be too brief, but I also don’t want to yammer on endlessly. In the end, it will probably be something like the one from Binary Bonsai or Kottke. I’m also finding myself drawn to High Fidelity and Microserfs for inspiration.

My shop is called Championship Vinyl. I sell punk, blues, soul, and R&B, a bit of ska, some indie stuff, some sixties pop—everything for the serious record collector, as the ironically old-fashioned writing in the window says. We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the bare minimum of window-shoppers; there’s no reason to come here at all, unless you live here, and the people that live here don’t seem terribly interested in my Stiff Little Fingers white label (twenty-five quid to you—I paid seventeen for it in 1986) or my mono copy of Blonde on Blonde.
High Fidelity

That quote is the kind of thing that would be great to write for the site itself.

I am a tester—a bug checker in Building Seven. I worked my way up the ladder from Product Support Services (PSS) where I spent six months in phone purgatory in 1991 helping little old ladies format their Christmas mailing lists in Microsoft Works.

Like most Microsoft employees, I consider myself too well adjusted to be working here, even though I am 26 and my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco.

I am originally from Bellingham, up just near the border, but my parents live in Palo Alto now. I live in a group house with five other Microsoft employees: Todd, Susan, Bug Barbecue, Michael, and Abe.

We call ourselves “The Channel Three News Team.”
Microserfs

That quote is the way I would love to be able to write about myself. Which is why this is taking me forever. I want to get it right, and I’m just not sure I’m up to the task. Maybe it’s time to put down the stuff other people wrote and try to write something of my own instead.

Followup: I’ve finished writing the about page – Check it out!

How I got my PS2

It’s been a full week since I had my miscarriage, so I guess I can talk about it now. It feels weird to actually write about what happened but we also feel like it’s important to share our story since miscarriage is one of those topics that people only seem to talk about in the abstract. Obviously, the subject is painful for most people who have been through a miscarriage so you don’t hear a lot of stories. Once it happens to you though, the stories come out of the woodwork. Far too many women I know have had at least one miscarriage. Fortunately, they all went on to have healthy children (in some cases, several).

So, in the spirit of unburdening yourself on the internet, this is my story.
I like to call it, “How I got my PS2.”

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Enron Logo In The New York Times

Scott's Enron logo on the front page of the New York Times business section.

If you pick up a copy of the Sunday New York Times from yesterday, you’ll be able to see an illustration of mine on the front page of the business section! My new rusted version of the Enron logo was worked into a photomontage to accompany a followup story about the company. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get credited for the work, due to red tape about the number of people involved in the final image, but I got permission to use it in my portfolio, and my work is in the paper, so I’m still counting it as a victory.

This whole thing was a total fluke. I got a phone call from a guy at the Times who was working on the story, and was doing a google image search for Enron, and stumbled across a link to my old rusted version of the Enron Logo, which I had created for a Viridian design contest. Unfortunately, I had lost the source files, and even if I hadn’t, I didn’t have permission to use the rust photo-textures in the original in a commercial project. So I recreated the logo from scratch, and I think the new version looks even better. I handed the source files for the new version off to the Times, and they incorporated it into their photomontage to make it look like the Enron logo is made of prison bars.