Blow, Jobs.

[captainsblog]

Back. Day One of this week's marathon went fine. Home at a decent hour, a good night sleep in my own bed and a beautiful day ahead in (somebody else's) neighborhood.

The only remaining item from yesterday's court hearing- a bankruptcy I filed for a friend of my sister's- was getting copies of the client's deed and mortgage from the county clerk's office. I'd already looked them up and made sure they were there, but this particular clerk uses a wonky system that lets you view very lo-res images of the documents not suitable to be printed. The last trustee I had down there complained about my copies (obtained through print-screen and Paint) and made me go to the clerk in person to get more legible ones, so this time I just told him (a different trustee) that I planned to do that.

Oh, you don't have to do that anymore, he smilingly assured me. We now have a shopping-cart system just like Amazon, where you pick what you want and checkout with a credit card. Couple of dollars max, and then you can print the downloaded documents. Easy peasy.

Right.

Five tries with Mozilla this morning and nuthin'. I got to the links, but the documents themselves wouldn't even preview. Eventually, I realized this clerk, like the others I check regularly, is using some stupidass IE-preferring Java app. So it opened in IE, I found the shopping cart, filled it, paid my $2.70, went to download the first of the Very Pretty Copies, and....

Apple Quicktime opened it and tried to play it as a movie.

Now. I understand that John Grisham has written legal plots turned into major motion pictures. I, the Jury probably made a pretty splashy presentation for the 1950s. Still, ain't nobody gonna go see Quitclaim Deed and a Collateral Home Equity Mortgage unless Angelina Jolie is stripping the libers and pages off her breasts.

A little googling identified the problem. Every time you update iTunes, you also get updates of the full boat of Associated Apple Products, and without asking, without telling, they go in and change your file associations so that they take over EVERYTHING they can get their little green apple-y fingers on. Including .tif images, which is what this particular clerk displays in.

I then had the scathingly brilliant idea to return to Mozilla and see if I could access the downloads through THAT. I could. I clicked the first link. Naturally, I immediately saw this before I could click any download buttons:



Back on the help-this-don't-work websites, I got instructions for changing file associations. They didn't work. Mention was made of MIME. Marcel Marceau was surprisingly unable to explain.

Finally, I checked my Mozilla plug-ins, found one for Quicktime and disabled it. The documents instantly opened in Windows Picture Gallery, still an annoying app but at least it prints.  The items are on the way to the trustee, and I'm on my way to traffic court to do my penance from the beginning my April Week From Hell.

Meanwhile, I already have four court appearances set for the week of July 13th, so that's when it'll be next month.

Comments

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

In'nt the future wonderful?

(I sometimes have to find files through Windows Explorer, right-click, and use "open with" to use a different program to get them to display correctly.)