The Mac’s character palette has been driving me crazy. I poke around it vainly looking for the accented character or superscripted punctuation mark that I need at the moment, but it’s all symbols, no labels, which might strike Apple as appropriate but strikes me as maddening since as time goes on I understand fewer and fewer of the new symbols. Amirite, , Yellow Face Puking Up a Heart It Just Ate ?

Well, it turns out that there’s been a bug in my palette so that it has displayed itself like this:

It turns out that if I scroll all the way to the tippy-top, a magic icon comes into view:

And if I click on that, I get this:

I say this is a bug because I cannot now get the window to go back to the state in which it has been since an OS X upgrade or two ago. So perhaps I and the cause of this anomaly should be D’oh-slapping each other.

Amirite, , Needs a Butt Flap?

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Erred watching is like bird watching: You get excitedly happy when you spot a new, rare error message.

I’ve spotted two in the past twenty-four hours.

One was a problem with PDAnet (which turned out to be trivial to solve) that put a line into the Console for which there were zero Google hits: “CDaemonCon 2 exits”

This morning, my Mac refused to boot. Instead of showing me a gray apple on a gray background, it displayed a circle with a line through it (“prohibitory sign”) on the gray background. It did this even when I tried to boot from an external disk. Apple seems to think this is a software problem, although I would have thought that it would have booted from the external disk. But maybe there’s something wrong with the external one.

Anyway, I’m very excited to have spotted these two rarities in their native habitats. Of course, when I have to reinstall all my software and realize all the stuff I had not backed up, I may be warbling a different tune. (It’s a new machine supplied by work, and I have been keeping all my files in the cloud. I think.)

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