Adventures on the Journey
Explain why a Macintosh pull-down menu can be accessed at least five times faster than a typical Windows pull-down menu. For extra credit, suggest at least two reasons why Microsoft made such an apparently stupid decision.
I ran across this question on AskTog and finally know the answer. It’s one of those things I have known for years, but did not understand, “why?” The answer is here: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
I added a Texas joke to my humor section.
“If you had only a few minutes to live, what would you do with them? What if you had only a few days? Twenty years?”
From The Big Questions by Robert C. Solomon, pg 30.
If you enjoy thinking, this is already quite a good book.
We are in Kansas, with only a few miles left before we cross into Oklahoma. With any luck, we shall be home in about 5 more hours.
We have departed Salt Lake City.
I hereby issue a caution for lodgers in SLC when the temperatures are high (above 90°). Do not expect that because the Hilton is a 4-star rated hotel that they will have adequate air conditioning in the rooms. Silly us, for having such lofty expectations.
We checked in nice and early at about 6pm. The room a little on the warm side (about 75°). I checked the thermostat and it was set for 68° but the A/C wasn’t on. Strange. So I adjusted the thermostat down to 60° and we went out for dinner. We got back around 10 and the room was cooled to about 72°. I was not ideal but it was good enough. We went to sleep.
At 2:30AM Jen and I both awoke sweating and with parched mouths. The room was around 80° and the A/C was not running. We called the front desk who sent up a maintenance man. He checked the thermostat, pulled the little A/C vent off, peered inside, reset the thermostat, and when the little unit began spitting out cool (not cold, cool) air, declared all to be well.
A half hour after he left the room was no cooler than before so I walked down to the front desk and asked for another room. We moved down the hall from room 514 to 517. Upon entering the room I noticed that it too was about 75° in the room and the temp setting on the thermometer was at 68°. Being an engineer with a mimimum of moderate intelligence, I began putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Continue reading “Salt Lake City – Hot as Hades at the Hilton”
Yesterday we drove to Portland to say hi to Matt Meehan. Then we drove over to Boise and spent the night at a Red Lion. While a Red Lion is not bad (certainly better than your $23/$39 hotels with big signs), it is not nearly as nice as the DoubleTree Riverside in Boise. We’re off to eat breakfast at a wonderful little diner we found here last time.
| 621 | 627 |
One is a fish that has a reputation for eating people, the other is a people that has a reputation for eating fish. Guess what we are having for dinner? (hint, not the shark)
So many people, with so many questions. We have been so short with answers. It is time to finally confess.
Will we ever return to Texas? I can give you a few details that narrows down our timeline. We have a long tradition of making blackberry pies while in Seattle. We discussed blackberries on the way up here, again while here, and the state of blackberry ripeness before Jen went to Michigan.
There is good news to be had. Eight days ago, I picked 3 ripe blackberries and fed them to Kayla. She enjoyed them very much. This morning, all three of us went on blackberry patrol. This time we picked handfuls of plump black berries and munched on them. Quite soon, we will pick bowls full of blackberries and there will be blackberry pie a la mode. Then, at long last, we can contemplate the journey back to Texas.
Oh, and the salmon are starting to bite.
Thank you myspace, for providing your users with a simple mechanism for stealing not just my images, but also my bandwidth. After perusing my web server logs to find the root of another problem, I noticed a significant amount of my images being served for myspace profile pages.
With a glint in my eye and a small grin, I have just single-handedly caused a rash of 403 Forbidden errors to appear on the pages of many myspace users. I doubt having broken images on a myspace profile is cool nor would having a random sysadmin expose your thievery to your fan base.
I can’t stop them from stealing my images, but I can stop them from stealing my bandwidth.
On June 13th, two 1GB RAM chips arrived. I got my cart before the horse.
Two days later, my new white MacBook showed up. I bought the 512MB/80GB/SD configuration from Apple. The free iPod deal for students made it irresistable. I ordered the 2GB of RAM from NewEgg, for a $300 savings. Unfortunately, I did not have the screwdriver required to remove several screws from the RAM slot covers so I used the MacBook in its standard config for a couple days. While being fast at certain operations, it was no speed demon. It doesn’t take a computing genius to discover that at 512MB, it was starved for RAM.
The video card is integrated providing 64MB of VRAM by pilfering 86MB from the system RAM. Combine that loss with Rosetta and the RAM required for OS X itself and your system will enter the land of swap and sluggish performance in a hurry. If you love your MacBook, do not use it with only 512MB of RAM. Be kind to your hard drive (buy enough RAM that the system rarely swaps) and it will in turn be kind to your data. Apple’s upgrade to 1GB is reasonably priced and will suffice for most users. I regularly have Address Book, Mail.app, FireFox, Safari, iChat, iTunes, iCal, Terminal, and a random assortment of other apps all running so I can rapidly jump back and forth between them. This can be nicely accomplished with the PowerPC based Macs with 1.5GB of RAM, but on the Intel systems, I find 2GB is just right.
After Google maps helped me locate a Radio Shack, I bought yet another miniature tool set and installed my RAM. Since then, I have only one other complaint about the MacBook. While the display is nice and bright, the field of view is quite poor. When Jen and I watched a DVD in bed, we could not get it situated so that both of us could see it well. You could consider this a security feature, but I suspect that more often than not, it’ll be annoying when you want to share what is on your screen with someone else. Personally, I prefer my PowerBook screen where colors are what they are, even after shifting your head an inch in any direction.
Now that I’m done complaining, it’s time to extoll the virtues of this little beauty. For starters, there is no longer a “latch.” A magnet holds the iBook closed so it is very easy to open one handed. Once opened, the screen really is quite nice. Colors are rich and vibrant and text is nice and sharp, so long as you are directly in front of it, don’t move about much, and are not in the sun. My fingers love the keyboard. They have a longer throw than the PowerBook keyboard so I make fewer typing mistakes. I cannot imagine a touch typist who would not like it…but I do miss the backlighting.
After sticking in the extra RAM, the slowdowns all went away. Now everything runs really, really fast. I have been working on a few web development projects so I edit the pages locally (vi and TextMate), serve them via Apache, and view them in Firefox. On several occasions I synced the site from my iMac to the MacBook and continued to work while Jen drove us away. Did I mention that the MacBook is really fast? Speed has been my primary dissatisfaction with the aging PowerBook and I’m happy to report that the issue has been resolved completely. The Core Duo is a smokin’ fast chip.
The rest of its virtues are nearly identical to the features I enjoy on my Core Duo iMac: better quality iSight, built in speakers and mic, airport & bluetooth, slot loading SuperDrive, remote control for Front Row, etc. I won’t miss the modem as I rarely used it except when trying to send a fax. The battery life is much better than a PowerBook (or a MacBook Pro) for that matter. I really do prefer the larger screen but having the extra battery life from the MacBook could quickly endear me to it. The new larger trackpad is very nice and I like being able to right click and scroll with it.
Finally, a requisite application for any laptop of mine is GPS and mapping. Route 66 still works, but via Rosetta which is not terribly fast. I was able to pair my GPS receiver up with Mac OS X, and then share it to Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop. XP saw it as a serial device and MS Mappoint saw it and it immediately worked. Now that I can run Windows quickly and get XP to see my bluetooth GPS, I have a lot of choices for mapping software. Very, very, nice.
Speaking of Windows, XP installed just fine under Boot Camp. It runs just like Windows does on any good hardware. However, certain things are missing, such as the ability to right click. The driver for the trackpad is a generic Microsoft one, so it doesn’t support all the drag, scroll, and right click features, yet. The built-in iSight has no XP driver yet. I expect the final version of Boot Camp will address device issues like that.