Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Hey folks, more booty from my Microsoft departure. Man, did they lay the perks on you!

Microsoft gives out Quick Assistance cards to employees. The idea is that if you meet some random person in your travels and, when learning you work at MS, they start complaining to you about something that doesn’t work, you can say “well, that’s not my area of expertise, but take this card and we’ll make it right.” It’s sort of a grass-roots goodwill-building experiment.

Anyway, it turns out that I have three of these cards left, so if you know me and you need some tech support from MS, let me know. But do it fast - these cards expire June 30th, 2005.

Now that I’ve started working at Apple, I’ve been forced back into the world of MeetingMaker, bane of the existence of anyone unfortunate enough to have to use it. Okay, maybe it’s not *pure* evil, but it’s pretty clear that their focus is not on making a great mac client.

One of my biggest complaints is that MM ignores the Mac-standard shortcut (command-H) for “Hide this application.” I keep all of the applications that stay open (because they do reminders) hidden so my screen isn’t completely cluttered. Having to go choose this from the menu is just awful.

Well, 15 minutes of searching for an alternative turned up a post by Simon Willison that shows how to remap these shortcuts from the Mac OS X preferences panel! I had no idea this functionality was there, but I’ve just fixed MeetingMaker so forever more it will hide with a simple command-H.

Ahhhhhhhh. Thanks, Simon!