Quarter Life Crisis

Household goods¶

591 words

• Yesterday I saw Adam Green's Jessica video (referring to Jessica Simpson, classified as pretty dire, teen-pop-by-numbers stuff by Dave and strunzdoof by Charlotte) and The Strokes' 12:51 video for the first time. Both soothing songs and not too exciting videos.
• Philipp made a nice dish with mushrooms he picked himself in the forest for dinner. We're still alive. Not surprisingly, I might add.
• I took photos of a few of the mushrooms, with my SLR camera. In black and white. With a bit of luck I'll find someone to teach me how to use our hall's photo lab, so I can try to do some prints... Someone showing me how to do it 'hands-on' will probably much more useful than written tutorials only.
• Joel Spolsky on his new offices. Very nice offices. I suppose there aren't too many times when being a programmer seems appealing to me. This is one of them.
• Another link to remember – just in case I'm able to get the old PowerMac that's supposed to sit around unused somewhere in our department: XPostFacto. Has anyone got experience with that kind of thing? Are 8500s or 9500s fast enough to run OSX? Apparently 604 processors can't run X.2, so OS 9 may be the better choice anyway.
• As people are saying that OS X.3 is considered finished now by Apple and may hit the shelves by the end of the month, I looked into prices. At first I though the 'family' license that Apple started last year might be a good thing: Get my dad to buy it and everyone can enjoy it... Unfortunately Apple is quite clear that it's not a family license but rather a household license – and hence rather useless for our family, as there are no two of our OSX capable Macs in one place. The €160 or so they charge are quite steep for an update, but at least X.2 starts at €110 with educational pricing.
• decaffeinated (Chris Clark?) on a rip-off that is blatant beyond belief. I am tempted to download and finally use LaunchBar. It's slick and unobtrusive and integrates nicely with many aspects of OSX. The only thing I dislike that I somehow feeld 'bad' about it as it's mainly text and keyboard based.
• The Register has an extensive and wide-ranging report about [a]n extensive and wide-ranging report to the European Commission [which] is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of ENUM, Internet phones, Instant Messaging, mobile phones and the Internet in general. They mention many things that would be very neat to have and probably just require a good thought but no rocket science to do... and that won't ever happen due to the vanity and greed of bureaucrats and corporations.
• A comment in The Guardian on GM food vs. the market: Capitalism is all about customer choice – except when said choice is bad for profits. Simple.
• That anti-pluging patent thing. Scott recaps and comments. The conspiracy thing was the first coming to my mind... What would be the best way to harm the popular plugins like Flash, Java, Quicktime or Real player? Right! Next up: application/ms-media-html, with the media included right into the binary HTML. Fun.
• On the other hand – who'd miss embedded Flash and Quicktime things? Sure, they can look neat but apparently they can't be resizable. The ratio of desirable to undesirable solutions is quite low.
• Now, if some lawyer could please find a patent that covers popup windows...

October 8, 2003, 0:42