(well, I like it better than the actual title, anyway.)

I never liked you much, Gopher :), but it's kind of fun to see you still makin' trouble.  1:24:22 PM  (comments [])   

I found the text on the page confusing, but it turns out that the 1.1 download contains both the new "for pay" version (with five day weather forecasts, additional info like humidity, and snazzy color icons) and also the older "free" version. In a nice touch, it's the same app -- you can switch between free and pay version via a menu item. That's a nice and graceful way to handle when your unregistered demo version expires, too. Go go Glucose!  1:15:45 PM  (comments [])   

A fascinating article on how Sesame Street is adapting to competition in children's programming, and to new knowledge about the attention span and patterns of young children.  11:49:48 AM  (comments [])   

It's a complete load of crap (even at the age of 14, I recognized it as a complete load of crap, although at the time I figured I must be missing something... but I wasn't), but it -- against all hope -- actually serves as a useful allegory for the surgery I just did on Carrie's computer.

See, I just replaced the 1GB disk on the machine (which regularly tanks out because the virtual memory easily grows to fill the disk) with a new 20GB drive.

It's amazing how much faster an "old" 500MHz Celeron can fly if it's not hitting the disk all the time.

However, I'd like to take this opportunity to contribute in my own small way to Apple's new Switch campaign. Here's how to move your shit from small wimpy "no one will ever need more than this pathetic amount of storage" disk A to large mofo disk B:

Platform	Pain & Suffering
Windows	Attach new drive via IDE, regardless of whether or not you're actually transferring to a new computer. Leave guts of machine all over the place all night long while running ScanDisk, etc, because there's no good way to attach a drive externally. Buy (admittedly excellent) $50 program called DriveCopy 4.0 which will copy your partition from A to B, even accounting for different sizes between partitions. Wait about an hour to copy 1GB of data.
Mac OS X	If you're transferring to a new machine, put the new machine in FireWire target disk mode and attach to the old computer by cable. New machine shows up as disk. If you're transferring to a new disk, go through above described IDE irritation, or else just dump the disk into a FireWire enclosure and attach it that way. (In all fairness, a FireWire enclosure can cost $100-$150, but it's also useful far beyond this one exercise.) Bring up a terminal. Type "ditto -rsrc /Users/tilt /Volumes/New Machine/Users/tilt". Wait about a minute per gigabyte.

Obviously I'm being completely unfair, since there are other factors (like my desire to not install a fresh OS on the new hard drive and then just copy over the applications & user data; and the fact that the speed difference is also due to processor speed differences, and the fact that the old drive wasn't running in DMA mode). But nevertheless, ubiquitous FireWire connectivity has made every Mac-based data migration I've done in the past year super-painless. (And I use a lot of different laptops, so I'm not just whistling dixie). And I also appreciate the fact that all user data is stored in your home directory.

(Yes, I'm aware that more recent iterations of Windows have been more aggressive in having your data stored in a profile directory, but there's one small missing piece -- all of that CRAP in the registry. The equivalent of the registry in OS X is a collection of XML files that live in ~/Library/Preferences, and they get copied over just like everything else by that ditto command.)

* Note there is still vestigial lameness in the disk world (on older motherboards and operating systems) limiting disks to only 2GB without crossing your eyes and holding your breath. So it's not like a 1GB disk is actually that small.  10:50:31 AM  (comments [])   

Also, it kind of cracked me up to re-read how "Deety the computer genius" talks about computers in a book written in 1980. C'mon, Heinlein, you're supposed to be predicting the future, and you're still talking about time sharing and mainframes. Let's ignore the personal computer groundswell that had been going on for seven years by that point; because even if you regarded those as toys (more fool you), there were still examples of the coming future at Xerox PARC and other places. And you kind of half-assed got it yourself, since you were willing to put a computer powerful enough to, well, become sentient as the freaking autopilot in a personal vehicle. So why all of this garbage about the time sharing, the university mainframe, and things "running faster at night"?

GEE-zus.

(Of course, shame-full confession: I now recognize it's complete and utter crap... and yet I still enjoy reading it. Argh! The spiral of trendy self-introspective cynicism continues!)  11:14:53 AM  (comments [])