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Apple's design is the envy of the computer industry, but I really have to wonder about the sense of making keyboards and mice white.
No matter how clean you keep your hands, white keyboards and mice inevitably attract discoloration. Admittedly it's a lot worse if you keep your hands buried in a bag of Cheetos in between mouse clicks, but still, through normal day-to-day use, your mouse and keyboard will get positively scrungy-looking after a few months.
Today's the first day in a while we've been able to sit comfortably inside with the windows open. It's not that we've been belted with ridiculously high heat, but, at the risk of evoking a cliche, it's been the humidity.
Enough so that we've kept the house hermetically sealed with the window AC units going full blast.
A few days ago we got a little break from it and we turned them off and opened up the windows. We were all okay, except for the cat, whose girth and heavy coat still made it uncomfortable for him.
He was lying on his side in the living room, looking like a lion baking in the sun of the African savannah, when he decided he'd expose his belly to the air to radiate more heat. Up went one paw, then the other, and he began to arch his back as if to roll onto it.
After a moment he decided that it just wasn't worth the effort and collapsed again on his side, letting out a resigned snuff.
Bob's birthday is the 27th -- Thursday -- and I will uncustomarily be away for it. I'm taking off on Tuesday for a left coast trip to visit my father, Benny and some of his family, who will gather for a memorial service for a senior member who passed away. I'm looking forward to it, as it'll be the first chance I've had to meet any of these folks besides Ron and Benny, although I have to say that my head isn't quite in the game.
It really doesn't have anything to do with going out there, or missing Bob's birthday. Coincidence has conspired to make the next three weeks ridiculously busy ones for me: I'm coming back home next weekend, then my boss flies into town for a few days for my annual review; the Woods Hole Film Festival is the same week, and I'd *really* like to meet some folks there about digital filmmaking on the Mac; SIGGRAPH, the annual graphics show, has come to Boston (I've already written this one off, however, as something I can participate in); then on Saturday I'm flying back out to San Francisco for Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
All in all, I'm expecting the next three weeks to disappear in a complete blur.
YouTube is actually a pretty good resource if you want video clips of the obscure or comical. I find myself looking there more and more first if someone mentions something funny or memorable to me that they've seen on TV recently, and more often than not I can find it.
It's also a great resource for people who have creative energy -- maybe it's just lip-synching to their favorite song, maybe it's a short video clip of their buddy getting his nutsack slammed when he was skateboarding that day. Maybe it's a complete short movie or TV show-style production. Whatever. I admire that, because it takes some planning, some shooting and editing skills, and, even if it's really low-rent, usually has some admirable production value. Sort of the video equivalent of listening to garage bands play on open mike night at the local club.
Sadly, YouTube's other big use -- as a Web resource for vloggers to post their thoughts -- is about as banal a waste of bandwidth as I can possibly imagine.
The site's already generated a cult following for a group of vapid attention whores -- both male and female, predominantly teenaged, and typically photogenic but without much of anything to say. And it's proven the axiom that has been proven over and over again since the dawn of desktop computing when the Mac was young -- just because technology lowers the bar to doing something (in this case, recording video) doesn't mean that it "democratizes" it in such a way that everyone who can do it should do it.
A lot of these kids would be wasting bandwidth (and surely are) just with MySpace pages, coming out with their endless streams of logorrhea about who kissed who at school, and what so-and-so thinks of me or what I think of them. Seeing them do it on video astonishes me -- it astonishes me that they're so blissfully unaware of how fucking retarded them come across on camera, and that they're not self-censoring enough to not hit the Upload button.
It also, frankly, makes me wonder what the hell these kids' parents are doing. Because if I caught any of my own kids doing this sort of uncreative, narcissistic, masturbatory crap, their computers would be gone from their room in a second.
Don't get me wrong: Just like with blogs, some vlogs are interesting, useful and insightful. But just as with blogs, the signal to noise ratio is absolutely frightful.
It's an occupational hazard: I test a lot of electronic equipment, and I have a ton of electronic stuff in the house. A lot of the gear uses external power supplies that have bulky transformer packs that plug into walls.
Another problem is that almost all of these external power supplies are sourced from cheap Chinese suppliers, and they're not labeled for the equipment they're designed to be used with. The labels denote the power supply's basic characters, such as voltage and amperage, and manufacturing details, but nothing else.
The problem I'm left with is that I have boxes of these power supplies and I have no idea what they connect to.
I've realized the problem too late to label most of them, and now am trying to figure out what to do.
Anyone have suggestions?
A while back I'd bought a Pioneer DVR-111 for a ridiculously low price from an online vendor, with the expectation that I'd upgrade the internal SuperDrive on my Power Mac G5 from an 8x single-layer DVD burner to a 16x Dual Layer DVD burner . I got it out of the box a few days after it arrived only to discover that the drive's bezel knocked against the top of the G5's tray opening.
It missed by maybe a quarter of an inch. But the tray bezel was just a bit too high for the narrow opening of the G5, which made it wholly unsuitable. I noticed that the OEM drive, manufactured by Hitachi/LG, used a much smaller bezel -- one that didn't cover the entire front of the tray opening, just the edge of the tray.
Ah well, I figured. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I'd find a new use for it eventually.
Well, I was tooling around with the bare drive today and it struck me that the bezel must be removable somehow. Sure enough, it comes right off if you twist it the right way (rotating upwards).
Long story short -- I've got the DVR-111 in my drive now. Tiger recognizes the drive, and I'm happily burning dual-layer discs as we speak.
We have a really nice coffee maker, which we received as a gift. It has its own built-in grinder, so we get to start each morning with fresh-ground coffee. It's a Cuisinart model. It's rather intricately arranged -- it has a built-in reservoir for water, and the bean grinder is made of two parts that fit into the top, where you pour the water in.
They're connected to the basket where the water passes through the filter using a small downspout; the basket itself has a top cover that helps to guide the ground beans into the filter within. The basket is held in place behind a spring-loaded door that you have to give a solid push to in order to get it to lock in place. A bulb on the underside keeps the brewed coffee from going into the carafe underneath unless the carafe is in place -- presumably to stop the flow of coffee to the carafe, for impatient users who want to pour a cup before the pot is completely brewed (a mistake, in my opinion, as the coffee brewed at the start of the batch tastes different from the coffee that comes out at the end; one should mix the entire pot to get the optimal flavor).
A thermal carafe is underneath, equipped with a one-way lid to keep the coffee at an optimal temperature (because thermal plates burn coffee and foul the taste, there's no burner -- the hottest the coffee gets is when it's first brewed).
So in order to brew a cup of coffee, there are no less than seven individual parts you need to keep track of: the carafe, its lid, the two pieces of the basket and the filter and the top and bottom of the bean grinding mechanism.
When it works, our coffee machine brews a fine cup of coffee, but as you can see, it's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. And inevitably I do this in the morning, when I'm not fully awake, rather than the night before.
This is partly by design: The first morning we tried to make coffee in it, I used the timer and set it up the night before. Something went horribly wrong, and it went everywhere. There were coffee grinds all over the counter and hot, brownish water spilling everywhere. Emmeline woke me up to tell me there was a huge mess in the kitchen.
This is also partly by schedule: Usually the coffee pot and the other assorted dishwasher-safe accessories are washed in the dishwasher along with the rest of the daily load, which usually isn't washed until the evening, after supper. As a result, the coffee machine isn't usually ready for setup until very late. More often than not, after I've already turned in for the night.
Well, every once in a while, I'll screw up the setup. This was one of those mornings.
I'm not sure what went wrong, but my guess is that somehow the plug that keeps the brewed coffee in the basket when the carafe is removed was blocked somehow, and there was a torrent of coffee and ground beans all over the counter this morning. Bob spotted it a few minutes after I'd started brewing it, but not fast enough to avoid the damage. It was about a half an hour's worth of cleanup and sanitization of the coffee maker before I could try again.
Must be Monday.
Cartoon Network has this great show called Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends. The premise is that there is a halfway house out there for imaginary friends who aren't wanted anymore -- sort of like the Island of Misfit Toys. And, being imaginary friends, they come in all shapes and sizes you can imagine, from a giant hare who's a proper English gentleman to a bizarre bird-like creature who lays plastic eggs.
My favorite, though, is Eduardo. He's huge, he has horns, sharp pointy teeth and he's covered in fur. He also has a belt that has a huge skull for a buckle. He's also terrified of everything that moves.
I want an Eduardo plushie.
We're watching TV tonight and on comes an ad for dog food. The ad goes on and on about how healthy the food is and how great it tastes.
"How do they know?" asks James.
"How do they know what, honey?"
"How do they know it tastes good? Did they taste it?"
This is the same kid who asked who killed Ken Lay when the news broke that he'd died the other day.
He's a sweet boy, but the kid's got a cynical streak a mile wide, I swear.
It's two in the morning. I'm fast asleep when I hear Bonnie scream. I turn over and look, and see James standing there, staring at her.
"I had a bad dream," he said.
She reassured him then tucked him back in.
This morning she told me that between James' big head, bleariness from being asleep and her own poor eyesight, James looked like a grey alien getting ready to abduct her when she woke up.
I just thought of something really stupid today.
For a household that uses nothing but Macs, isn't it a bit coincidental that my initials are PC?