Out of Cheese

I’ll never be able remember the exact date from year to year, but it was three years ago on Martin Luther King Day that I started at Apple[1]. It’s certainly been an interesting three years.

I should bring in three pounds of apples, but they’re free in the cafeteria. Or maybe I should bake something with three pounds of apples, but since I’ve never baked anything with as much as three individual apples, that might be dangerous. I could bring in three pounds of apple juice, but that seems silly. Plus there are the looks you get from the fine folks at Albertson’s when you try to weigh the bottles of apple juice in the supermarket aisle. You’d think they’d never seen anyone trying to celebrate their work-anniversary holiday before….

[1] That was actually the third time I’d gone through employee orientation at Apple, since I went through it twice as an intern. I wonder what the record is, and whether if I go through it enough times I get the next one free.

Our team’s project shipped to customers today. As in June when it shipped to developers, you might have heard the news.

These are terrific systems, and I’m really excited that everyone will finally have a chance to use them.

On a semi-related note, Apple’s stock closed at $80.86 today. Somehow that seems appropriate, in a way that, say, $80.85 wouldn’t be.

In the “you learn something new every day” category, I just learned that you can insert Unicode characters into printf-style format strings by using %C. I was trying to insert an emdash — Unicode character 0×2014 — into an NSString and couldn’t find a good way to do it until I found some other code that did it with %C.

It’s documented, too — the man page for printf(3) says this for ‘C’ and ‘c’:

C
Treated as c with the l (ell) modifier.
…
c
…
If the l (ell) modifier is used, the wint_t argument shall be converted to a wchar_t, and the (potentially multi-byte) sequence representing the single wide character is written, including any shift sequences. If a shift sequence is used, the shift state is also restored to the original state after the character.