This can usually be found on Twitter.
Okay, here we go. Spent moneys on MacOS X Leopard - at long last!
The plan is to get it installed by this weekend, doing a complete backup one night, and then taking my Mac in for repairs once it becomes impossible to start my laptop when I want. So far, it takes about six times before the screen comes up. Hopefully, it'll stay below ten for a while.
Good news: today (well, yesterday, now) was an incredibly productive day. Well, okay, not that great, but everything was working and things were coming together and fitting into place and all that, so I'm happy. Finally started writing that Internet-Draft I wanted to. Got editing a book chapter (!!!) I'm co-author on, which was fun too.
Bad news - apart from a week without my beloved Sinhgadh, maybe sometime soon - is that it's 3:15am right now, which means tomorrow is going to be a bad, bad day to wake up to.
Labels: backups, good day, mac os x leopard, macintosh, productive
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Labels: links, macintosh, poem, zx spectrum
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So, I impulse-bought Civilization IV today. My first Civ game in *ages*, literally years.
And how does it feel?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghbutitfeels GOOD!
:D
Don't have much to say. The game itself is so-so: jumping from X to Y and back to X gives me headaches (I was organizing a campaign just now: omg it was a pain! It was like playing an RTS game without features like "rally points" and queues and so on: you had to keep ordering your cities to produce more, and after your queues were depleted, you had to go back 'round and give everybody orders again, and if you were in the middle of a major action while you were doing it. And, err, can you not destroy buildings any more? Other than that, things which are new - city placement, unit characteristics (how do you deal with Civ when there's no Phalanx? No caravels? No triremes? Omg!), and style of combat are taking me some time to get used to, but it's not too bad, i guess. It's still a lot of fun, although it feels really different in many ways.
Sigh. What a lot of crap. I spew. Still, it is so incredibly amazingly cool to be doing this stuff again :).
Whee!
Labels: civ4, civilization iv, games, macintosh, whee
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My old computer, Karanth, is finally(!) starting to show his age. At almost five years of age (with pretty much continuous use throughout - he's still my check-mail-and-blog computer, after Bathgadhtsey has been put away for the night), he hadn't yet shown any problem I couldn't blame on Linux compatibility (i.e. CD drive stopped working, sound stopped working, Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) stopped working). At long last, and after much overwork, the "," key on my keyboard has finally given out. And by given out, I mean *gone* out. Like, fallen off. Literally. How cool is that?
Am finally getting a hang of Objective C. Man, it's quite something. I can't figure out if it's amazingly *good* or amazingly *bad* yet, though. I mean, outlets instead of getDlgItem()? On the other hand, I can get over neither Objective C's own prettiness, nor the way IB manages window resizings.
Was chatting with Rohit today, and he made the very good point that it's not much use going the whole publish-my-own-software route if I really wanted out of programming, which makes sense. Hmmm.
Have just realised that the "," key cover is on the key NEXT to the "," key. I can't remember switching that around today! Did that happen today at all, or has it been around forever and I just never noticed? Creepy!
Labels: karanth, keyboard, macintosh, objective c, programming
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'tis in the slightest exactly as was suppos'd: the mind and shape of the machine is as a wonder to behold, a beauty it has, a certain grace and bearing, that puts one in mind of awe as one approacheth, and that keeps one entranc'd long past the first contact. 'Tis naught but the work of a master designer, and yet in this day and age of consum'r and dirtyquick tools and technique that one so rarely sees such a masterpiece. Truely am I entranced, and 'twas the witness of my own eyes which convinced met.
And yet, and yet. Almost unconsciously - for the beauty of it, perhap - I reach for Alt-1, Alt-2. Naught do I reach for, but still wish for, the simplicity of Ctrl-Z (open new xterm). For a million reasons such as this will I keep my belov'd Karanth, five years old if a day, until he be living no more.
Such thoughts, though, bring forth to me hope, not despair. Such imperfections within this masterpiece are verily the instigator, the niche into which perhaps I could slip and hide, and code and wait. Let us see - there's so little to do, and so much time to do it in. No, wait. Reverse it. Okay, much better. Thank you.
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For no apparent reason, Blogger is not letting me log in on Opera/Macintosh. So now I need Firefox/Mac for both Organizr and Blogger. What a pain.
If I'm lucky, though, it'll just be a temporary, user-side glitch, and when I log in next time, it'll "just work". Well. Let's see, I guess?
In other news, John Backus just died. That's Backus as in Backus-Naur Form, also the creator of Fortran, so he's one of the Greats, all right. Rest in peace, John.
Labels: blogger, john backus, macintosh, rip
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"A beach house," he said, "doesn't even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate," he went on, "at boundary conditions". "Really?" said Arthur. "Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."