argh!

It never occurred to me that after upgrading the Mac from Leopard to Snow Leopard, my printer (HP Laserjet 1020) might no longer work. I had to download a special driver to get it to work with Leopard, and I guess I assumed that driver would still work. Sigh. If I'd actually thought about it, I would have done some research before taking the OS upgrade.

My choices seem to be: (1) revert to Leopard (I don't even know if that's possible without doing damage), (2) wait for a fix (prognosis unclear), or (3) buy a new printer. I wasted a lot of time under Leopard trying (4), network the printer using my PC, so I probably won't try that again. (The Mac still needs a driver, whether the printer is local or remote, so that's not likely to help.) I'll continue with Google research tomorrow; so far the only solution I've found involves downloading a 750MB package, compiling code, and doing lots of fussing.

I realize that this is HP's fault, not Apple's. It's frustrating because I've been using HP printers for more than 15 years without issues and when I bought this one I never thought to check for Mac compatibility. (At the time I wasn't planning to buy a Mac.) It's a peripheral; at some level I expect it to just work.

On the other hand, it's worth noting how easy the OS upgrade was otherwise. Insert disc, confirm intent, leave for an hour, and there it was. I was never willing to attempt an OS change under Windows. This is the only major problem I've seen so far. (There's one minor one that I'll probably just have to get used to; they changed a color that I'd rather they not have, but there doesn't appear to be a user setting for it.)

link round-up

Today is clean-out-the-browser-tabs day.

Wrong tomorrow tracks testable predictions made by public figures to see how they turned out. (Link from nancylebov.)

The next weird financial gimmick -- life-insurance futures. I can see all sorts of ways this could go wrong; do they? (Link from sethg.)

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF), aka the incompetence study. It's 76 pages long so I haven't read it yet, but I don't want to lose it. (Link from siderea.)

We've just finished mid-year performance reviews at my company, so No Surprises from Rands in Repose caught my eye. "The surprise has nothing to do with money. We’re not talking about compensation here. Yes, you did a splendid job this year and I think they should be throwing raises, bonuses, and stock your way. But it’s even better if it’s clear why you think you did a splendid job. Can you articulate it? And you might know, but does your boss? Can he explain to you, in detail, how well you kicked ass? I didn’t think so."

"Dear Old People. We don't want to kill you. You're our parents and grandparents and we love you. But if you throw a cranky fit and keep us from getting decent, affordable health care, you can figure out how to work your own [damn] PCs and cable boxes and remote controls from now on." (From Reddit via brokengoose.)

The history of time travel as a pretty visualization. It's missing a lot of important data; maybe someday they'll fill it out while keeping the format. (Link from dagonell.)

A different kind of visualization: This is why you are fat. I find the KFC Quadruple Down Sandwich particularly shudder-worthy. (Link from ralphmelton, who found it on the way to looking up something else.)

And a whole site full of light-hearted graphs (most recent reminder from cayeux). For example, difficulty of task as perceived by the average person speaks to one of my peeves.

John Scalzi's guide to epic design failures in Star Wars (link from a coworker).

Rabbi's shofar demo turns into a duet. I don't think that's what he had in mind when he decided to teach people about Rosh Hashana in a public setting... (Link from thnidu.)