Colonoscopy

It’s funny how reaction to the massive Mac Power Users podcast with Merlin Mann has been slowly dribbling out in the days since its release. Obviously, it’s taken everyone a while to make their way through its 2½ hours of packed productivity pr0n.

I’ll have some substantive things to say about it when I’m back from vacation, but just two things for right now:

  1. I’m delighted to hear Merlin use my nom de net without context, as if every listener would know who I am. (Google Analytics tells a very different story.)
  2. Merlin’s brief mention to the contrary, I would never advise someone to avoid colons in filenames for fear that they’d cause mischief on the Unix command line; I’d advise against semicolons for that reason. Colons in filenames are a problem in AppleScript because they’re the traditional directory separator character on the Mac, and have been since the introduction of HFS back in ’86 or so. In fact, I’m surprised David Sparks is able to save files with colons; that was simply not allowed back in the day, and it’s something I wouldn’t even consider trying.

    And I’ve now somehow made Merlin’s point by refuting it.