Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I just ran across the phrase “a smug of Mac users“. Collective nouns can be a lot of fun to play with. A gaggle of geese. A murder of crows. And so on. Every so often I’ll play with creating other collective nouns, with the goal of being equally descriptive and clever if I can manage it…
A giggle of girls. A scrape of skaters. A mope of goths.
I’m sure I’ve come up with others, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head right now. Anyone have any more suggestions?
So far, I’ve found two (and only two) downsides to the new computer.
Firstly, I need to get used to having a single monitor again. I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for the past few years with my old Mac, using two 17\” CRT monitors. Once was an old Apple monitor that used the old proprietary Apple monitor connector, and the other was a standard VGA monitor attacheched to a VGA port on a second video card.
I can’t do this on the new machine, though. While its video card has two ports, and will drive two monitors quite comfortably, one port is the new ADC port for Apple’s LCD screens, and the other is a DVI port for non-Apple LCD screens. The machine came with a DVI to VGA adaptor, so I can run one of my 17\” monitors, but that’s it. I’ll get used to it, it’s just feeling a bit cramped right now, and I keep losing windows.
Guess what just rocketed to the top of my wish list? ;)
Secondly, after spending the weekend getting things set up and configured on the new machine — and doing a fair amount of playing and marvelling at the new goodies — I’m way behind in reading all of my usual websites. Uff-da.
So, things have been a little slow for the past few days, but I’m working on getting back up to speed. Small prices to pay, really.
(Yes — this means you, Casey.)
Jimmy Buffet has released two of his upcoming live albums exclusively on Apple’s iTunes Music Store nearly a month before the CDs will hit store shelves. “We are happy to announce that Jimmy Buffett will be releasing ‘Live in Auburn, WA’ and ‘Live in Las Vegas,'” notes Buffet’s record company. “Both releases will be available exclusively at Apple’s iTunes Music Store beginning September 30th. The live CD’s will also be available October 28th at your favorite record store, or here online at mailboatrecords.com.”
(via MacMinute)
Saw Underworld yesterday. While I won’t go quite as far as to call it a Big. Steaming. Noxious. Pile. of. shite., I will say that I found it very disappointing and frustrating. There was a lot of promise and potential in the film, which unfortunately was entirely wasted. I’d almost prefer that a film be flat-out bad, but when you can see the seeds of a worthwhile effort in the midst of the crap, it makes it just that much harder to deal with.
First off, the good points (and yes, there are some).
The film is extremely pretty. Lots of worthwhile eye candy — cast, sets, costumes — just about everywhere, there’s something worth looking at.
The writers have concocted a new mythology for the creation of both vampires and werewolves, and included an explanation for the enmity between the two species, that I really liked. I’d have to see the movie again (rent, though, not in the theater) to get it down completely, but it involved a disease that one person had an immunity to which was passed to his children. Those two children were bitten by animals — one by a bat, one by a wolf — and the mutation that allowed their father to survive the disease mixed with the animal’s blood to create the beasties. After years of the werewolves acting as the vampire’s daylight guardians, a conflict between the two set off the years of warring between the clans. It’s a definite step away from the traditional storylines, and I liked the new ideas.
Unfortunately…
The writing, the overall story, and the direction were horrid. So much could have been done with the story to make it coherent, and it never happened. Alliances are formed that don’t make any sense, motiviation is never given for much of what happens, and too much of the plot dissolves into an incoherent mess.
The actors are something of an on-again, off-again mix. Kate Beckinsale does decently with what she has, she just wasn’t really given that much to do — her character is essentially either brooding or fighting during the entire movie. Bill Nighy as Viktor, the recently-resurrected elder of the vampire clan did fine by me up until the end, when a suddenly bleated out, “But I loved my daughter!” line completely destroyed all credibility for the character in my eyes. Sure, it was bad writing, but he played the line so badly that it just made it that much worse. Shane Brolly as Kraven, leader of the vampire clan until Viktor’s appearance was fairly ridiculous, to tell the truth. In fact, the only actor — and character — that I really though much of was Lucien, leader of the werewolves, played by Michael Sheen. Not only did he get the only character in the film given any decent amount of personal backstory and motivation, but he was the only actor to really seem like he fit his part.
Special effects wise, the movie was decent for the most part, with a few sudden moments where it got so astoundingly bad that it surprised me (Celine’s sword-slash-and-floating-jump across the pool of water at the end [which can also be seen in the trailer — it’s the sequence that looks like it could be straight out of a video game] stands out in my mind). The soundtrack, both musically and just as effects, drove me nuts. Apparently the sound designers felt that the best way to make sure that something was interesting and intense was to make it loud, and then they decided that everything in the movie counted as interesting and intense.
So that’s Underworld — some definite promise and potential that was completely pissed away during its two hours on screen. A shame, really — in my minds eye, I can see the same elements creating a film that would have been well worth watching, but it just didn’t happen here.
So I’m in the midst of getting my new machine all configured the way I like it, installing software, drivers, etc. I use a Microsoft Office Keyboard (that’s discontinued), so I hit Microsoft’s keyboard pages to download the software. As I was working my way through the download process (verify system requirements, choose your product, choose your OS, choose your language, and download), I was presented with these choices when choosing my operating system:
Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me just what operating system Microsoft thinks I’m running on my Mac that has a version number equal to or greater than 10.0, and yet excludes OS X?
So today was the big day — new computers for both Prarie and me! Prairie got a new iMac (which came with all sorts of other goodies), and I got my G5. Once we got home and unloaded the car, we had to memorialize the occasion…
I opened mine up first — I’d been waiting for this for a while, and there was only room on the bed for one of us to unpack at a time, so Prairie was kind enough to let me dive in first. After a minor incident with the knife I used to slit the tape on the box (it’s okay, I didn’t really need that part of my fingertip anyway), I got to see in person what I’d been drooling over online for the past few months.
And, just a few minutes later, everything was plugged in and I was up and running. I haven’t installed any really processor intensive applications yet, but even with just poking around at the basic stuff that comes pre-installed, this is so much nicer than my old machine. I’m definitely looking forward to taxing it a bit more in the future — right now, the biggest speed test I’ve had has been with opening iPhoto. On my old G3, with an iPhoto library pushing 2000 photos, it was a good minute or two for the application to open and be ready to use. On the G5? Roughly three seconds.
Oh, and I was highly amused by this. Never having unpacked an iMac before, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but from what we could see when we opened up Prairie’s box — it’s a boy!
I’ve got a big black box sitting on my bed right now, just begging to be opened. More later. I’ve got to go play…
A little over a week ago, I posted about a new blog whose owner was essentially spamming comment threads with links to her site. Out of curiosity I just checked back to Laura’s site, and realized that she issued an apology on the 19th — just a case of a “newbie” getting a little over-excited. In the long run, not that big of a deal.
Yesterday Dad asked for thoughts on possibilities of a Dean/Clark (or Clark/Dean) ticket. I deferred answering right away so that I could bounce it around in the back of my head for a bit.
Well, after letting it bounce around for the past day, I have to say that my only thought right now is that I haven’t got a clue. At this point, I really don’t know all that much about Wesley Clark. I know that he’s well respected by many people, which seems to cross party bounds, after having a strong military career. He apparently had strong ties to the Republican party in the past, and has recently crossed party lines to toss his hat in with the Democrats. It appears that his entrance into the Democratic nomination ring was predicated not so much by wishes of his own (at least at first), but by a grass-roots campaign from his supporters (and apparently he’s now looking to disband those grassroots weblogs, which may be a mistake, if he ticks off the very people that started giving momentum to his campaign before it ever even existed). Apparently during yesterday’s Democratic debate, he said nothing, but said it with style.
He delayed his entrance into the Democratic field until the last possible moment, playing a big “will he or won’t he?” game. That doesn’t seem like a good idea strategically — while there were some people on the ‘net tracking his every step, the major media didn’t bother with him until just a day or two before his official announcement, which gave a lot of press time to the other nine contenders. Delaying his entrance also limited the amount of time he could use to raise money.
Essentially, as I look at it all together, Clark worries me. At least to me, he’s coming off as wishy-washy. He couldn’t decide whether he was Republican or Democrat. He couldn’t decide to run or not. He doesn’t seem to care about the organizations that started his roll towards the nomination race. Most worrying to me is that while he may have had a good military career, he’s not been a player in political fields at all. He strikes me as someone who’d make a very good cabinet member or advisor to the President on military matters, but not someone I’d be terribly thrilled to be voting into office — and that may go for a vice-presidential position as well as a presidential position.
Dean may not be perfect — his campaign’s current “5 million in 10 days” fundraising drive struck me as fairly ludicrous when I saw it (even with the fundraising skills they’ve demonstrated, that’s a lot of money in very little time, and if they don’t make their goal, then no matter how much money they do raise, it will be perceived as a “failure” because for the first time, Dean couldn’t meet or break a fundraising goal…they seem to be setting themselves up for bad press) — but I still believe that he’s by far the best choice, and the only candidate that really gets me excited. As I’ve said before, should he fail to get the nomination, I’ll support whichever Democratic candidate does land it — we need to get Bush out of office, and that’s the bottom line — but none of the others have really struck me as someone I could support as strongly.
Actually, I should amend that. I have liked a lot of what I’ve seen and heard from Carol Mosely-Braun. Unfortunately, I have to concede that I don’t think there’s any way she’d get elected were she to land the nomination — America’s still not about to elect a black woman president, unfortunately. The reports of how chummy she and Dean have been at various points did toss a fun (if completely unfeasible) scenario into my head, though.
Suppose that there’s more to Clark than I’m seeing right now. Bush’s numbers continue to drop, and after Dean picks up the Democratic nomination, he does choose Clark as his VP. America, sick of Bush’s presidency, sees the combination of Dean’s platform and Clark’s military skills and elects them to the White House. Once they’re in, Dean appoints Mosely-Braun to a fairly high-ranking and visible position in his cabinet. Over the next four years, America visibly starts to crawl out of the hole that the Bush administration has dug for us — jobs come back, international relations start improving, etc. As 2008 approaches, it’s clear that we are in a far stronger position that we were in 2003, thanks to the Dean/Clark administration, and it becomes nigh-impossible for any Republican contender to have a realistic chance at getting back into the White House. Suddenly, Clark decides that politics isn’t for him after all, steps down from his VP position — and Dean announces Mosley-Braun as his VP for the 2008 election. He might take a bit of a hit in votes from the ~~more inbred~~ less forward-thinking voters, but if his first term had been strong enough, it might be enough for us to suddenly have a black female Vice President in 2008.
Okay, it’s a pipe dream. But I have to admit, it’s a pipe dream I like.
The White House really doesn’t want to admit that there’s such a thing as global warming. Need proof that they’re doing everything they can to prevent little things like scientific findings from getting in the way of their agenda? A leaked internal memo from the EPA dated April 29th 2003 discussing changes that the White House made to the EPA’s Report on the Environment, and what options they have while dealing with the White House.
- Most important, the ROE no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change. A few examples are:
- Conclusions of the NRC (2001) are discarded, that multiple studies indicate recent warming is unusual. The 1000 year temperature record is deleted…. Emphasis is given to a recent, limited analysis [that] supports the Administration’s favored message….
Natural variability is used to mask scientific consensus that most of the recent temperature increase is likely due to human activities….
Uncertainty is inserted (with “potentially” or “may”) where there is essentially none. For example, the introductory paragraph on climate change…says that changes in the radiative balance of the atmosphere “may” affect weather and climate. EPA had provided numerous scientific citations, and even Congressional testimony by Patrick J. Michaels, to show that this relationship is not disputed….
Repeated references may leave an impression that cooling is as much of an issue as warming….
(via Boing Boinga>)