I have refreshed my photo collection. Included are the following new collections:
- Pre and Post Haircut
- New Apartment first look (plus a bit of the CS Picnic)
- A KGB Meeting and my new place as I'm moving in
- A subset of my memory boxen. I have excluded the photos I took of some letters and other perhaps-too-personal things to show the web at large. There's also a photo of the contents of one of my bookshelves at the end
- First experiment with my beard
- And more..
- Much cat cuteness, plus my new TV and its computer
At work today, I ordered a Macbook Pro for a coworker, and it arrived (CMU's Computer Store is pretty quick) in my office around 2 hours later. While booting it up to get some basic software installed on it, I discovered that the power adapter suffers the misfeature of connecting to the system via a magnet. This is incredibly stupid. While talking to a friend, he provided a wonderful quote from the manual: The MacBook Pro power adapter port contains a magnet that can erase data on a credit card, iPod, or other device. To preserve your data, keep these and other magnetic media away from the power adapter port. .. He then recalled how a friend of his lost data on a thumbdrive and wiped their credit card because they got too close to the corner of their MacBook. Nice one there, Apple! He said that the regular MacBooks suffer Apple's love of magnets even worse, also having powerful magnets on the front of the case to keep the lid shut. Apple is like your typical teenage girl -- it does some very stupid things in the name of fashion. Sure, magnets are cool -- I remember playing with them a lot when I was younger, but as soon as I got any sense, I began to follow my dad's warning to always keep them very distant from the computers. This makes sense. It is a very bad idea to make computer products that might easily damage other computer products in normal, expected use, regardless of what the manual says. Apple should know better.
All that said, the MacBook Pro's built-in camera is fun to play with, and Apple provides some neat software that screams "play with me!". The camera was also used to set up my usericon, which somehow makes me irrationally happy. I played around with the included software, and found this theme continued. Apple is great at bundling software that looks and feels fun to use, and because their development environment is so nice, people don't need to get entirely into the programming mindset to make some rather nice software. There was a lot of software that I wanted to play with (like a webcomic-making software bundled with the system) that I had never heard of before. OSX's main interface doesn't give the raw power of traditional Unix, but it does an incredible job at providing a very personal and fun computer interface.
I am enthused about Wikimania. I hope that there arn't too many irritating people there. In the past I have, out of politeness, allowed Asperger's, stinky, and otherwise irritating-oh-god-I-wish-I-hadn't-come people to sit near me and ruin social things. I resolve to now join the type of person who will simply get up and sit near the people I want to talk to, no matter how rude I must be in telling people to STFU and stop talking to me when they can't get the loud visual cues that I would sooner pull out my toenails with pliers than talk to them. (Yes, maybe I'm getting overly ranty about this recently.. if so, hopefully I'm at least amusing too)
Some amusements:
- Apple has ancient software for free download
- Brand clash. I don't sympathise with either side. People who are pathetic enough to brand themselves and care versus others who want to control what brands people are wearing..
- WTF? NOT SAFE FOR WORK AND PRETTY NASTY. Someone posted this to an IRC channel I was on.
- More on psychologists aiding in torture
- Hamas is upset it won't get aid money.. I guess they're shocked that the western world would not want to subsidise Islamic theocracy. IMO, Europe should not provide aid in any form to Palestine until Hamas is out of power, because even if they aid in basic civilisation, Hamas will not need to spend those equivalent dollars to do the same thing, giving it indirect support either way.
- Theocracy elsewhere...
- Read this bug report all the way through. It's amusing and sad.
- More on Apple's breaking off its engagement with the opensource community
- Hawking versus Pope
- There's an Anarchist Picnic, and they are amusingly ready to tell us Reds not to show up. No selling or distribution of state socialist materials please.. heh
- Gnome needs women? Sounds like a very bad personals ad
- China banned all door-to-door selling in the 1990s? Cool.
