Technology marches on
Thanks to Jaguar, QuickTime 6, and DivX for Mac 5.0 Alpha 3, I can finally watch DivX .avi files now. Time to catch up on those “Chobits” episodes I was loaned!
Build-your-own panic attack
Had to install some printer drivers today at work during our big production day, and the installer dropped a directory full of useless documentation at the root level of the drive. So I went to move it, but said installer had placed it there as the root user. So I fired up a terminal and told the machine to “sudo rm -r” the directory (in non geek-speak, pretend I am the master user and delete this directory and its contents). As always after doing that kind of thing, I double-check what I’ve done by getting a fresh directory listing.
The terminal reports that the disk is completely empty. Completely. Not a single file.
Well, to say I was freaking out was one way of putting things. Now, the GUI insisted the files were all still there, and my running apps were all still functioning, but the terminal insisted on showing a blank listing. So, finally, I logged out of the whole shebang and logged right back in.
The GUI still says everything is where it should be. Check the terminal… which has recovered from its amnesia and confirms that all is well. *heavy sigh*
I think I need a cookie.
Stuff
We got pizza for lunch, Humble Pie. But I accidentally ate a slice of the pepperoni pizza (’cause all the cheese was on top) and now my stomach’s badly unsettled.
The people who programmed the spell checker for this client weren’t real hackers… the spell checker doesn’t recognize the word “pepperoni”.
Someone is advertising miniature cattle in this week’s issue of the paper… I keep flashing back to the conversation about “raising albino lesbian micro-beefalo in a windowbox” that came up during kittykatya‘s Roanoke TFOS game from years ago. The beefalo weren’t part of the game, you understand, just part of our gaming conversation.
The Australian government, responding to the RIAA’s “we can hack your computer when we feel like it bill”, has said that such activity may make US executives criminals under Australian law, and expose them to charges and possible arrests if they enter the country. There’s more info here. Good for them! “Australia, Australia, Australia, we love you, amen!”
Hi to rubinpdf – say, do you think I could actually film the Commissioner Horton part this time?
Borgus Reviews of Literature
Finally caught up on my reading this weeked… finished re-reading “The Barsoom Project”, read “Idoru” and “Snow Crash”, and checked out some half-remembered passages in “1984”.
“Barsoom Project” is one of my favorite books – it’s set at a Disneyish corporation that runs incredibly realistic Live-Action Role Playing games in a pair of titanic Star Trek-style holodecks. (Paid for by the movie they’ll edit out of the footage, the home game cassettes, and the novels and tie-ins.) It’s three stories at once – you want to find out how the LARP will work out, who commited the act of industrial espionage that drove one of the last group of players insane, and what the game controllers will do when that player inexplicably pops up again in this run-through of the LARP.
“Idoru” is the sixth William Gibson book I’ve read, and the third in a row that I just didn’t like. In “Difference Engine”, “Virtual Light”, and “Idoru”, he writes of helpless characters who mostly stand around open-mouthed as the book happens around them. It’s kind of dull, and uninteresting… you finish the book thinking, “what was that about, and why would I care?” It’s a darn shame, ’cause “Neuromancer” was so good.
“Snow Crash”, on the other hand, more than made up for that. Excellent humor, interesting characters who matter greatly to the plot, intelligent writing, and intriguing speculation about the fragmentation of human language. I just told a friend that the story “begins with a guy who delivers pizza for the Mafia, and ends with a futuristic Ted Turner’s attempts to enslave the population of the world”. If this is the quality of the author’s work, then I am absolutely picking up “Cryptonomicon” as my friends have been advising me.
Finally, after looking at the portions of “1984” where George Orwell (as Emmanuel Goldstein) describes the method by which the Party came to power and maintains it, I have arrived at the uneasy conclusion that the world is still traveling smoothly in that direction, just a lot of years behind schedule. However, I can’t think of a dang thing I can do about it, so I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about it.
Oh yeah, and I finally beat a sub-boss in the fifth act of Diablo 2 that has been giving me serious trouble on “Nightmare” difficulty. So that’s good.
Adventures in Operating Systems
Well, I finally took the plunge – this is being posted from the new installation of OS 10.1 on my machine. I’m still getting used to a lot of it – it takes me longer to find stuff at the moment; some of my favorite applications haven’t been “carbonized” to run under the new OS yet, while at least one game will run but insists on setting my monitor to a size it can’t handle (cheap monitor’s fault, not the OS), and there are other teething troubles. On the other hand, text looks really good and very readable on here; once I install X Windows, I can find a nice mailreader and read my mail directly off Elfie, bypassing Adelphia’s bogus servers; and, the best part about this installtion, is that it’s not Windows ME or XP. I fought with ME for hours this afternoon just trying to get it to acknowldge a LAN connection to the Internet; and I’m hearing so many bad things about XP right now that I’m glad I own some Apple stock. Wonder what RedHat stock’s going for right now? 🙂
It’s a weird Thursday night. I *still* don’t have the hang of Thursdays.
“I just love scanning for lifeforms!”
All right! I’ve made it into the top 20 members of the SETI @ VTSFFC project! (Okay, so there are only 26 members in the first place… but I’m making progress!)
