reesesWeb

Man, new G4 iBooks. I spec'd one out, just for liver-eating fun. With the max RAM (640M), AirPort Extreme, and Bluetooth, the 14" LCD version is $1800. Just slightly over half what I paid for my G4 PowerBook a month ago.

So, what would I lose?

• Shiny silver case
  
• 396M of RAM (and over a gig of headroom)
  
• 20GB of HD and probably 4200 vs 5400 RPM spindle speed
  
• 14" 1024x768 instead of 15.2" 1280x854 LCD.
  
• Crappy video instead of awesome video I can't use because there are no wicked 3d games for the Mac
  
• Firewire 800
  
• Cool backlit keyboard.
  
• PCMCIA slot
  
• Dual-head video
  
• DVI out
  
• 256k of L2 cache
  
• 133Mhz bus instead of 167Mhz
  
• DVD writing
  
• 1Ghz vs 1.25Ghz G4 CPU
  
• Panther instead of Jaguar installed (although, my Panther shipped today)
  

What would I get? Most importantly, four more hours of battery life and $1500 in my pocket!

I'm not sure if I am in "D'oh" or "oh well" mode yet. At least the iBook weighs as much or more than my PowerBook, so that reason is no longer an issue.

OMFG. So, I ate a bit of meat tonight. Maybe...too much meat. I don't know if places like this adhere to the concept of the clean plate club, but I do. If I leave food on the plate, I feel guilty. (Yes, guilt is a constant thread in my life. It's what my people get in exchange for our foreskins.)

So, I have a big spinach salad. A meal-sized spinach salad. Then, a 24-oz porterhouse, with the hugest bloody hash brown on earth. Easily 14" in diameter, and 2.5" tall. I didn't even try to finish the potatoes. Then, some "strawberries and whipped cream", which consisted of a bowl of whipped cream (probably about a cool-whip-sized tub of) and a pint and a half of strawberries.

My gut is HUGE. It's swollen, I'm afraid to lie down, and I can't walk fast. The only thing saving me at all was that my stomach was so stuffed, there was no jiggling. It was solid as the ripped six pack it replaced.

If I fast all week, I'll still gain weight. I'd have to go on the Blaine Suspension Diet to offset this culinary debauchery.

I wish it had been tasty enough to be worth it.

One of the defining characteristics of blogs is that they're exposed privacy. If I'm nancying about in frilly lace panties and garter in my living room, and you espy me through my open curtains, that's a blog. I'm not strutting my stuff down the street, I'm not advertising the location of said living room, in fact, I do what I can to tell you to piss off, and not look at my sausage (big sausage, of course -- the size of your arm, like Sade's Bum Cleaver from 120 Days, without as much of a pronounced bent) falling out the leg of the very-unsupportive ladies' undergarments.

Most blogs are the same way, bent shlongs aside. They're usually vapid, because guilt is felt if one falls behind on updates. Little is sadder than a crappy, boring blog that was updated rigorously for years, then left fallow for six months. Unless crippled kids, anorexic teenage girls, or animals in zoos strike you as sad. So, we fill them in with the events of the day, whether we chronicle our effluent, our lunches, or the stupid thing some stupid person said during something stupid at the stupid place I spend every stupid day.

But they're ours. For us. Your seeing them is a curious comment on your empty voyeurism, not our exhibitionism. Sure, we do things for attention, and we like getting a little attention, but not too much. When we worry, we censor, so our boring lives become even more boring blogs.

However, in the past year or two, blogs have grown this crepuscular corpuscle (ok, I just wanted to write that, it doesn't have to make sense) in the form of comments. Comments are not for the author. They're explicitly for a foreign reader. There's a responsibility incumbent upon someone writing for another person. What they write doesn't have to be interesting, but it should be suitable for some audience. If the best you can come up with is an AOLian "ME TOO", or "uh-huh", or "you got that right!" or worse, mere contribution to an avalanche thereof, you're wasting everyone's time. Correcting someone's erroneous facts is mild edification, pedantic tho it may be, and has some value. (Proactive self-justification? I call it self-awareness, you boor.) Make people laugh, and I'll defend your right to comment. Waste my time, and I'll piss your name into the ice in the bar urinal just to watch it melt.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again...and again...and again...

People in Minneapolis are, pound for pound (and pound and pound...), the dumbest people on earth. You thought Newfies were bad.

Holy crap. Kill Bill v.1.

Stuff...happens to me. Especially when I'm sitting alone at a hotel bar, and drinking many glasses of wine and macallan (because there's no Lagavulin, natch*), and someone mentions something random like "anguilla", and I have to (have to!) butt in and say they had a murder there last week, because ct apparently reads the Anguilla news every morning.

Anyway, push comes to shove, and I have this actually quite interesting couple showing me around the bar district, pouring way too much alcohol into me, and I can barely stagger back to my room.

More stories later about Macchu Picchu. And big fuckin' piranhas attacking steel boats.

I love being me, because I have poor impulse control and no concern for that voice in my head that tells me not to do something. Except the h00rs -- I don't do them. But I did duct-tape a squirrel to a tree and shave my name in his back on the fourth of July.

*Does anyone say 'natch' outside comics?

This is why I'm cooler than you.

Have I mentioned that I love my Mac? This took five seconds.

Frickin' killer bees.

So, it was really dusty outside. Really, really dusty. So dusty that I had to go out with a hose and wet down the road outside so that the dust wouldn't completely fill the air when cars drove by.

Unfortunately, the road outside was huge, three lanes in either direction. I didn't have to hose it all down, thankfully, just the bit in front of the house, and, more specifically, just the upwind parts. If I had to do much more, it would have dried and became dusty again before I finished. I think Sysiphus had the wrong metaphor.

I turned around after finishing the far side of the road, and this bee was hanging in the air about six feet from me. When I say,'bee,' I mean,'huge frickin' yellowjacket,' but I may have been exaggerating a bit out of fear. He was definitely pointed at me, and started creeping toward me. Ever one to be afraid of bees, I backed away.

And fell down, driving my elbow into the soft earth at the side of the road. I rolled over and stood up, looking down at the hole I left in the ground. From which rose another frickin' yellowjacket.

Bastards.

The second bee (yes, I know, yellowjackets are hornets, not bees) kind of flew up to flank his buddy. I had read that squished yellowjackets release a pheromone that drives nearby yellowjackets into a stinging frenzy. This generally affects yellowjackets within about 15'. If there were a nest nearby, I really didn't want to smush either, or both, of these.

But, I did have a hose, so I tried to knock them out of the air with the stream of water. Not only did it not finish them or dissuade them, but the bloody things kept flying toward me, creeping really slowly in the air. I don't think I've ever seen bees fly that slowly, and in that controlled a fashion. I was backing away, concentrating on hitting them with the stream of water, when I had the strange notion that they were backing me into something. They weren't after me, but were trying to get me to walk into a big swarm of their buddies, or, as became very, very obvious to me, into the road, in front of a bus.

I turned around to see what I was backing into, and promptly woke up.

I hate bees.

So, for the first time in eight years now, I have written a NeXTSTEP^WCocoa app in Objective C. I had forgotten how easy it is to do decently cool stuff.

In my conversion to the Mac, I noticed a few things that were lacking from the whole experience. Since I claim to be able to code, I built a list, and started working from easiest to hardest. I'm done with the functionality for the first item, and now I have to move on to the most important part of any Macintosh app -- the icon.

One thing that's cool about the Mac community is that there are scores of tiny companies with a few shareware apps that would be free in any other environment. But in the Mac environment, there are lots of $5-10 applications that actually look quite slick. Because Cocoa makes it so easy to build small utilities, that price range is actually fair and reasonable.

So, I'm thinking about trying the water with this, and releasing it as a $5 app. That would involve more testing, better coding, actually writing unit tests, documentation, an installer, and the aforementioned icon. Not to mention any sort of nagware or shareware leveragability, which I don't think would be worth it, frankly.

Ever since switching from NS & OS as my primary development platform back in '95 or '96, I've been nostalgic about Project Builder and Interface Builder. "Back in the day, the NeXT programming environment was better than anything we use now!"

Ouch, I hate having my fond memories of youth shattered. The GUI builder is sweet, of course. It's so easy to build menus, write code to manipulate the GUI elements you drew, etc. But the code editor is the raw sux0r. There's no code completion, it's not simple to navigate to API documentation, it's a pain to jump around in the code, there is no inline error reporting (underlining errors as you type them, for example), no code folding, no live templates, the class browser is primitive, etc. IDEA spanks its hairy little butt.

I really like Objective C, and I really like Cocoa. I hope that Xcode, which will ship with my already-ordered Panther upgrade (which I got for the $20 price, despite ordering my 15.2" G4 PowerBook too early to hit the official qualification date) and will hopefully solve all my problems.

One more PB complaint: The battery life is so substandard as to be insulting. I'd consider taking it back if I didn't love so many other things about it. The battery in this thing is actually much smaller than the previous revision of this same laptop, by about 30% smaller. I think I got about 2.5-3 hours with aggressive power saving (low backlight, etc.) which just isn't acceptable, since I forwent a T40p with a 7-hour battery for this beast.

Has anyone used one of those battery plates that sits under your laptop and feeds the DC-in port? How well do they work, how heavy are they, and would you buy one again? I'd like to be able to at least _watch_ an mpg movie on a flight and not have to shut down the computer halfway through.

One more I just discovered: Safari isn't HTTP/1.1 compliant. No gzip.

One more PowerBook complaint:

I fidget. A lot. I'll burn calories (yeah, that's what it is) by bouncing one or both of my legs while I sit at a desk and type. On my ThinkPads, this isn't a problem with twitching that doesn't register on the Richter scale. However, the screen on this PB is bouncing like mad. It's almost enough that I'm worried about doing damage to the hinge or screen.

Maybe my mother built this Mac, and it's her way of saying,"Sit still!"

Dang it, Ma!

I'm a Mac owner in his third day now, and I have some issues.

You have this great metaphor, derived from two great houses of computer interface design: Macintosh, and NeXT.

So, with this great metaphor, you have the problem that you see with Windows and Weenix all over the place: application inconsistency. It's not as bad as the random Gnome app, but it's annoying in little ways. Mostly because there's this expectation that things will work in a certain way.

Take Transmit, for example. It's apparently one of the elite (S)FTP clients for the Mac. It has cute icons, and the two-pane thing is pretty familiar. You can drag things back and forth between the panes.

One thing you cannot do, as far as I can tell, is drag something from the remote pane to the desktop. You have to retrieve it to the right pane (which, admittedly, could be your desktop), and then drag and drop to the desktop.

The more I use this, the more I want to take the next couple years off and write Mac software. I'd say "again", because it's basically NeXTSTEP 2003, but it's been so long, I'd have to learn all over again.

There are these great NS metaphors that are woefully unexercised by the seeming majority of Mac software I've snarfed so far. No one seems to expose Services, for one. I'm dealing with the inevitable TNEF/Winmail.dat issue with a nice little piece of shareware, and I have to save the attachment, THEN drag and drop the file onto the application, which will do the conversion. WTF? Slap that baby in a Service, and let me pipe it over directly. It'd be even cooler if you could rewrite the message in place, but I'm not sure how the abstracted store would handle that.

It's almost like the Macintosh community is much happier integrating applications with AppleScript (which, admittedly, works pretty darned well) than using Services or judicious NSProxy intervention.

I still frickin' love this thing, though.

Sexy. Supah Sexy.

So, let's out of the way with the bad stuff:

• One mouse button. Trackpad. I knew these would be there. I had hoped to force myself to use them until I got used to them. I lasted about four minutes, and I ripped the free MSFT Notebook Optical Mouse out of the Thinkpad and stuffed it into the USB port.
  
• The Superdrive is really irritating in the way it accepts and ejects discs. It apparently tries for a smooth ejection with a stuttered series of pulses. It just looks crude and jittery.
  
• Moving Outlook XP objects via a file-based mechanism is gross. I bought Outlook2Mac, and it made the general task easier than it should have been, but it was still nasty, hamhanded, and inelegant.
  
• The finish on the keys is coarse, and if one hasn't cut one's nails to the nub, the scratching can drive one up the wall.
  
• Cross-protocol IM client support sucks, especially if you need SOCKS proxy support.
  
• Safari and HTTPS proxying. The Suck.
  
• Proxying in general sucks. The exception is the working application, in this case.
  

The Good Stuff:

• That mouse thing? There are USB ports on both sides of the laptop. This is good.
  
• The UI, of course, makes it difficult to look over at the ThinkPad running XP. XP is nice, and prettier than Windows-That-Came-Before, but it's so...icky.
  
• You know when you look down at a piece of paper in soft lighting, and it looks yellow, but you know it's really white? That yellow is the TP screen, which is one of the best notebook screens, and the really white is the Powerbook screen. And wide!
  
• The Dock is back. I have missed it in the years since I left NeXTStep/OpenStep.
  
• Entourage. This is what Outlook wishes it could be. The Lookout team should be fired and replaced with a team who focuses only on porting Entourage to Windows. They could port it to the new iPoddy Beetle and call it Entouareg. Oh, serendipitous typo.
  
• Bluetooth and the T68i. Love!
  
• Being able to turn on ftpd made it insanely easy to move the files from the TP.
  
• Backlit keyboard.
  
• I am the N3rd L0rd. All geeks pee their pants in my presence.
  

Tomorrow, it shall be mine.

Mine.

I'm going to dress it in red frillies and cuddle with it 'til dawn. And then I will touch it, and kiss it, and call it...Grover.