It was a pretty scary way to start the day.
Kat was in bed when the tree came crashing in. She got a bump on her head and on he knee, but that was all. Oh, and the scare of her life — and mine.
Offers of assistance have come flooding in, and for that we will be eternally grateful.
We are in a holding pattern right now as nothing can really be done until the tree is completely removed from the house, and that will hopefully happen tomorrow. Then the “fun” will begin. I’ll try and keep the progress updates coming. But you can count on updates on Flickr and Twitter.
It’s been a very quiet year on Vertical Hold. For those that only know me or follow my adventures via this site it must have seemed like 2007 was a year of quiet introspection, or something. Not really.
Movable Type is a good platform for writing. I just don’t do a whole lot of writing these days. I think that I should, but when I take time to sit down and try and say something, the ideas evaporate. I also feel that I have nothing original to add. There are 18 quadtrillion sites out there saying things. I’m sure at least one of them covered what I was going to say.
Maybe 2007 is the year I concede defeat. I am not an information producer, only a consumer.
The year was good for making new friends and strengthening bonds with existing friends. For that, I’m very grateful.
I hope it was a good year for you as well. Here’s to making 2008 even better. /drinks
Here at Pat and Kat central we try to be sustainable. We recycle, although not as thorough as some. We try to keep energy consumption down, although not as much as others. The point is that we try to do the right thing.
The other day our cheap-o Panasonic DVD player stopped working. The power light would blink and that was it. No eject. No nothing. Just blinking. Less than optimal for a DVD player. The good news is that if you google for the model and the problem you find out that you have a blown capacitor. If you, or a good friend, have a soldiering iron, you are about $0.10 away from fixing your DVD player and saving some space in a landfill.
The good news is that our DVD player is fixed. The bad news is that I bet a lot of these relatively easy to fix problems are going unfixed due to the disposable nature of electronics today.
At one point, McCain promised if elected to hold weekly televised briefings to the nation on Iraq as long as there are U.S. combat troops there, “even if only C-SPAN carries it.”
That may not rank with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge to go to Korea to end that war. But it does underline McCain’s determination to break with what he repeatedly described as “four years of failed strategy” in Iraq by the Bush administration. He believes that the 2007 “surge” tactics long resisted by Bush have put Iraq in position to achieve a modest goal of no longer being “a killing ground for young Americans.” As a decorated war hero, McCain has the credibility to settle for modest goals that a New York mayor, or a Texas governor, might not have.
Jim Hoagland
Republican Role Reversal
The Washington Post
Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain reiterated his support for the war in Iraq on Monday when he spoke to a crowd of about 200 at Blackstone’s Café in downtown Beaufort.
“Despite what you may see from other sources, we are winning in Iraq,” he said.
McCain: ‘We are winning in Iraq’
Jeremy Hsieh
The Beaufort Gazette
Mark Pilgrim used to like helping people. Then Movable Type pissed him off and he went to Wordpress, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then Apple pissed him off, and he eventually made his way to Ubuntu, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then OS X Leopard (10.5) came out and a bunch of people like it, bought it, installed it, and the world…you get the idea.
Mark thought these people were fucking stupid. Hell, he was using Ubuntu and it worked for him. He had his Freedom 0 and that’s all that mattered. What more could anybody want? He even made a video once using Ubuntu and it had captions! Mark was still confused at how people could like getting fucked by companies so much.
Then one day Dan Benjamin wrote a guide on how to compile and install MySQL on 10.5 just in case they couldn’t wait for the official installer from MySQL. Mark seemed to think that anybody who needed that guide was fucking stupid. Only stupid people compile software these days! Even though compiling software is probably part of Freedom 0, you shouldn’t do it because you’re fucking stupid. At least, that’s the impression I get from Mark. I think you’re awesome and amazingly intelligent. Even if you do like paying for an operating system that makes it hard to make movies with captions.
I wonder if too many people threw rocks at Mark when he used to help people? Maybe Steve Jobs kicked his puppy?
The “new” version of Gmail is pretty nice. Chat finally works in Safari 3. Contacts are way screwed. That’s okay. Gmail contacts don’t work. The idea of auto-populating contacts is interesting, but in my case, deeply flawed.
Gmail wants to treat contacts the same as e-mail. Keep everything and just use search to find it. Which, okay, that fine…until you do something like silly like use Plaxo (a service that will sync up address books).
So I decided I wanted to start fresh. I have 523 “contacts” in Gmail. I have 166 entries in my local address book. So, are those extra 357 entries really contacts? At some point I must have sent them mail. It’s very likely it was a thread started by a group I know that don’t understand the concept of mailing lists. So, every message has a To header with 35 addresses in it and everybody just hits ‘reply all.’ Some of these people even have college degrees. But, I appear to be finding a tangent in my rant.
So, tabla rasa. I’ll just nuke all the Gmail contacts and import my local address book. Right?
Wrong. First there was some issues that were completely my fault. Contacts are screwing in Safari. Okay, fire up the Fox. Firebug is mean to Gmail. Okay, disabled. Still, nothing. Not even a screwed up rendering like in Safari. Just, nothing. Ah, Better Gmail for Firefox breaks it. Disabled. Okay, select all and delete. Right? Again, you couldn’t be more wrong. Gmail will only let you delete 20 contacts at a time. The only way to select 20 contacts is to individually click 20 checkboxes.
Oh hell no. It’s frustrating because storing all those contacts for use in Gmail is fine. But, it’s my data and I do have other places where it would be useful. Having limited control is hard to deal with.
The decision to upgrade was pretty easy. We have two “must not break ever” apps, Aperture (for me) and World of Warcraft (for kat). Everything else is just the standard stuff that should never break from an OS upgrade (Firefox, Adium, etc.).
The Install
I was totally fooled at first (because I didn’t actually read the screen) by the DVD integrity check. That took forever. It took longer than a trip to Trader Joe’s. Literally. I went to TJ’s and got provisions for dinner and when I got back it was still only at 91%. I wasn’t going to take the chance after hearing about a bum DVD that somebody got. Sure, it was a long-shot that I got a bum DVD, but these upgrades come along so infrequently, what’s another 30 minutes?
After that I’m not sure what happened because I was off watching Samurai Champloo. If you like Cowboy Bebop and The Boondocks, you’ll dig this. Except for this random squirrel creature that shows up as a plot convenience device, it’s pretty awesome.
First Impressions
I’d like to change the login screen background. Google and ye shall receive. I mean, it’s a awesome shot. I’m just not a big purple kind of guy. That’s all.
Safari is much faster on the web apps that I use. I live on the web, so a fast, stable browser is very important to me. I’ll have to give Firefox another chance to see if my crashing problems have gone away.
Mail will be interesting. The biggest upgrade to Mail for me came from GMail opening up IMAP. So, I’ll see how that goes. I know I’ll be using it a lot more at home now. At work, Outlook is still the Boom King.
Address Book is still in need of a cleaning after a failed experiment with Plaxo. I strongly recommend against syncing Plaxo with GMail contacts and then Plaxo with your local address book. Google has a funny way of counting somebody a contact and it doesn’t yet jive with my own ideas. Time Machine would have saved my bacon on that one.
Time Machine I have yet to try. I need to buy a new external HDD. It would be interesting to see somebody try and track drives sales with the Leopard release. I’m betting Time Machine will cause a little surge in sales.
Spaces I’m just getting used to. I think they will be more useful on the laptop than the iMac. Although, depending on how it plays with WoW, kat might find it very handy.
The other 8 trillion features that I haven’t seen or used are all awesome and well worth the upgrade, or something like that.
