I’ve noticed that more and more people are now asking for photo ID, supposedly for my security. This afternoon it was my apartment complex management, so I could exchange my old ‘X’ key for a new one (they changed the locks last week).

I was told the ID check was needed for my security. The key in question opens a few perimeter gates, the pool gates and the laundry room. The perimeter is not even fully fenced – there is even an open walkway right past the leasing office front door, and a driveway for cars behind it. The few gates that have locks rarely close on their own, so the key is not really needed (I don’t think I’ve used the locked perimeter gates more than a couple of times in the 8 years I’ve been here). If you forget the key, you only have to walk 50 yards to a gate-free entrance. The pool wall is low enough that kids climb over it all the time. That leaves the laundry room… hardly a threat to my security (and often propped open anyway during the day to ventilate it).

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Taken last week on my weekend ferry ride from Alameda into San Francisco, this is one of the San Francisco Bar Pilots‘ launches. It was leaving the Alameda-Oakland channel, entering the bay, around the same time that MV Zalinsky was. From the top deck I got a series of shots of this bright orange boat against the somewhat dull colours of the bay, including one with part of the city skyline and the bay bridge in the background.

Devicescape has moved its headquarters to a new office building in San Bruno. Opposite our new home is a small strip mall area called the Bayhill Shopping Center, in which there is a Mollie Stone’s supermarket. In the Mollie Stone’s supermarket, there is a small area that sells British foods, as well as some other international foods. And, in there I found Marmite; something that I had been able to get at Albertsons until fairly recently when they dropped it. (For any Australian ex-pats in the SF Bay Area, they also stock Vegemite.)

They had a lot more things from home too, including Quorn which I had previously only found in Whole Foods Market stores.

So, I have been playing with IM a little this weekend, trying to reconcile the many IM accounts I seem to have acquired recently (mostly with something else). I now have a Google Talk IM for work use, my Yahoo! account that I’ve been using for a long time, my GizmoProject account and a test account I setup at Jabber.org (though I don’t use that for much). I also wanted to play with iChat‘s video conferencing.

But how to deal with all these different IM systems without running them all (if that was even an option, which it is not since Google haven’t learnt to support Linux and Mac OS X yet).

So, on my Linux box I am using Gaim. It works, though it is not exactly the most advanced client out there. On the Mac though I found Adium X. Now this is cool, and yet more evidence of how far Linux desktops have to go before they come close to Mac OS. It looks good and it works well. Gaim works OK, but does not have the looks of Adium X.

Finally, I used the iChat video conferencing system for a trans-Atlantic video conference and it worked pretty well. Was a little fussy getting connected once or twice (gave a very strange error message saying I didn’t respond when I was the person initiating the call), but when it worked the video looked good and the sound worked using the builtin mic & speakers (no headset needed).

So, for reasons I won’t go into, I needed to install the latest version of ActiveSync on my old Windows XP Home system. Seems that there is a problem though with InstallShield and SP2 on some systems. Rather than installing the software, it justs exits with an error about a wizard being interrupted. Should send it to Hogwarts I guess. What annoys me more than anything is that this is a Microsoft product, downloaded from their own website.

In an attempt to solve this I have tried uninstalling everything I’ve added recently, uninstalling SP2 (which was recommended by MS in one of the pages I found) and even a whole array of command line options for the setup tool. None of these work. Even worse, this has been a known problem for over a year now. How come software that is being released in the last few months by Microsoft is still doing this. Are they incapable of fixing errors in their own products? Of course not, they simply do not care.