My MacBook Pro has developed a weird behavior. It spontaneously turns on when plugged in to the power adapter. Each time it’s plugged in there’s about a 60% chance of it happening. It happens not only when it’s asleep, but when the thing has been previously properly shut down.

At first I figured it was the “Wake for Ethernet administrator access” feature, but I’ve since ruled that out; yesterday I opened the lid and waited about thirty seconds. I knew I’d shut it down the night before, and that AirPort had also been turned off, but I wanted to make doubly sure. No sign of life. Next, I plugged only the power cable into the thing, and it started right up, chime and everything. It’s something I can live with, I guess, but I have no idea why it’s doing this, and that’s irritating.

Like many people, I had an Apple Mighty Mouse that stopped scrolling downwards. Actually, I had two problem mice: one at home, the other at work. Initially, the cleaning technique of rolling the ball upside down after gingerly dabbing some isopropyl alcohol onto it offered temporary relief, but eventually nothing could dislodge the buildup.

Finally, the mouse at work stopped scrolling altogether. Based on the results of a Google search, the only option left was, apparently, to tear it apart so that I could clean it out by hand. (A former colleague came up with the absurd suggestion of threading a thin strip of adhesive tape around the ball to pick up the gunk, an idea which I dismissed out of hand as both impractical and unwieldy.) I didn’t feel like going to all that trouble to work around Apple’s design flaw resurrect a mouse, and I didn’t have any superglue on hand to put the scrollball collar back together.

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It seems Uncle Steve has suffered another fit of generosity, doling out free iPhones to all employees, a little over a year after Apple kicked my PowerSchool colleagues and I to the curb.

I was initially going to dismiss the report when I saw a former colleague’s postscript to one of his recent blog posts corroborating the story, and quickly found that other sites like Engadget had also picked up the story..

I would just like to take this opportunity, as a former Apple employee, to state for the record that while this is awesome, and that I had not been particularly interested in owning an iPhone, you current Apple employees are all fuckers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish my bowl of sour grapes.

One of our Apple reps informed us yesterday that the "highly anticipated" Security Configuration Guides for OS X and OS X Server 10.4 are now available.

Let’s see. OS X 10.4 has been out for almost a year, and 10.5 is close to shipping (supposedly available by June), and and only just now the security docs are getting published. "Highly anticipated" is just Marketing jargon for "long overdue" or "really fucking late", I guess.

One thing that always seems to impress less savvy computer users is Alt-Tabbing to switch between open windows and applications. Truly, it is a thing of unquestionable utility. I was overjoyed when OS X finally enabled Macs to do this right out of the box. It’s always bugged me, though, that while Windows lets you cycle through each open window, OS X only lets you Command-Tab through open applications.

I should have guessed that there is indeed a keystroke to switch between open windows of a particular application. Why Apple doesn’t do more to push this sort of knowledge is beyond me. But it exists! Command-backtick ("backtick" (`) being the left-hand single quote mark under the tilde (~). I’m told that not every application supports this behavior, but Mail, Firefox, Safar, Terminal, Fireworks, BBEdit, Textwrangler, and the Microsoft Office suite all do, according to my quick testing, and that’s a pretty solid list of functional workaday applications. Command-`. Who knew? Now you do.

To lock my OS X 10.4 desktop, I’ve always used either OS X’s screensaver or sent my machine to sleep. The latter isn’t always desirable because sometimes I want my machine to process tasks while I’m away, and the former is sometimes a pain because I don’t like defining hot corners; I always manage to somehow trigger them as I work, no matter which corner I select, and end up locking myself out of my session right in the middle of my work.

It turns out that there is a better way to quickly lock one’s desktop, through the Keychain Access utility:

1. Open Keychain Access (It lives in Applications:Utilities).
2. From the Keychain Access menu, select Preferences.
3. Under the General "tab" (I’ve never known what to call those Aqua bar segments), check the box labeled Show Status in Menu Bar. A lock icon will appear on the menu bar.
4. Click the lock icon on the menu bar and select Lock Screen.

Voilà!