A few weeks ago, I was a friend's house who had made this really good soup. She roughly outlined the recipe and a few days later, I tried it. It was great! Then yesterday, I was at lunch with some colleagues and mentioned the recipe and how easy and delicious it was. Today, when I popped into the office, two different people told me they had gone home and made the soup. Then they had brought some and shared it with the office. Everyone was raving about it.
Busy days! Been wrapping up two semesters, finishing up a big project and Thursday I start working at that new Quebec company. But after Friday, the next two weeks should be smooth sailing. Looking forward to it. All I have to do is work a bit, write a book review, and watch some movies.
Caroline successfully reoriented her carrier from psychologist (in France) to lactaction counselor and post-partum doula here in San Francisco (we live on Potrero Hill).
It's been a couple of weeks since I got the new Toshiba Satellite and I have to say that I'm really impressed with Windows 7 - no major glitches, bugs or crashes so far and the user interface is certainly a step in the right direction. True, it's no Aqua (or even as slick as NextStep or SGI's IndigoMagic in some ways), but it's as transparent a UI that I have ever seen on a Microsoft product and, once you get used to it, it gets on with things pretty well.
One thing that is nice is that, so far, I haven't had to tinker with the Control Panel or regedit, or Device Manager in order to make things work - Windows has done a pretty good job of getting things sorted on its own. As this is mainly a home machine, I'm not too concerned about anything other than the web access, media playing and burning DVDs, but the media server just worked and I was able to stream movies to the PS3 without having to touch anything. One other nice experience (especially compared to some other laptops I have owned and used) was the ease with which I was able to install Sun's VirtualBox and then install Ubuntu 9.10 (a.k.a "Jaunty Jackalope"). I did this so that I can do some serious work when I have to without needing a dual-boot system - this way, my wife can use the laptop to check her facebook, etc, without having to worry whether the thing is going to drop her into an OS she doesn't know how to use. Another benefit to me is that I can play with coding and security tools in Linux and not risk messing us the host machine, as the whole thing is Virtual and runs in RAM. It's also nice to be able to run two OSes without having to reboot. The fact that both VirtualBox and the OS being hosted are totally free is just another positive - yet the nicest thing is that the host OS hasn't missed a beat. Seriously, other than an inability to play an old game, which is no big deal-breaker, I haven't had a problem with hibernating, getting the laptop out of standby, running intensive apps (Visual Studio, etc) and the system feels a whole lot slicker than Vista. Yes, I still think XP Pro was pretty good, but that was the ultimate evolution of Windows NT, essentially - which means that by the time Vista arrived in 2008, the basic skeleton of XP had been around since 1992, so it really should have been amazing.
I know a lot of people hate Microsoft and, for a lot of things, I find myself wishing we could go back to the days of wider ranges of Operating Systems, etc - I truly pine for the old MIPS/Irix days of Silicon Graphics and honestly regret the passing of NeXT and the demise of things like Acorn's RiscOS as a viable alternative, as I think that diversity is no bad thing - especially as things like web-based applications mean a lot of work can be done platform-independently (in fact, the whole cloud computing thing is very reminiscent of the old-school disk-less terminal setup). However, the stark truth is that Microsoft is not going anywhere and, given their global monopoly, it would be really easy for them to have ignored the criticism and flogged the Vista horse for all it was worth, despite its obvious still-born status. Credit where it's due, the team at Redmond have stripped out the junk, made the user experience slicker and taken the first major step in their technology since 1992, when they first built a version of Windows (NT) that was the OS and that didn't just sit on top of DOS (unlike the Windows 9x series).
In a similar jump from legacy platforms, I finally got round to getting Leopard for my Power Mac G5 (and it's soon-to-arrive sibling), which means that I'll no longer be able to run Classic on it. However, as mentioned in a previous post, I have ScummVM installed to allow me to play old point and click adventures and that's probably all I'd be worrying about - I'm not exactly desperate to use my 1999 copy of Dreamweaver or AppleWorks, or to protect my network using an install of Norton that predates the Millenium, after all. That being said, I still have the G3 iMac and my beloved Pismo powerbook running Tiger, so I can always dig out Falcon 4 or Deus Ex and play it on them if I get the sudden urge. As far as work goes, I use iWork for most document-type things nowadays, with web-based apps and the occassional foray into Office when required. I use Keynote for my presentations and the only Office app I use regularly is Excel, so legacy support for things like Appleworks is not needed.
I will say, though, that I'm not as keen on Leopard as I am on Tiger (or even Panther) - despite the obvious streamlining by removing Classic, the OS doesn't feel as snappy as it should, even with 6GB of RAM to play with and, on a more persoanl point, I find the look of the GUI is a bit too willfully shiny - it's like Apple went "it may not be great, but let's give it a shiny 3D Dock and a space-themed desktop background and it'll scream tech". From the original OS X all the way through to Tiger, the changes to the UI were always in the interests of making things easier, or more efficient, or...well, better. Some of the UI changes to Leopard seem to have been made, just because they could, which is a very un-Apple like strategy.
However, networking is, as ever, utterly idiot-proof (for some reason the WiFi also seems to get a better signal, but that's likely to be coincidence), security is good and this OS continues to prove that you can support a fully proprietary build of Unix with a custom user interface if the damn thing is good enough - unlike when installing Ubuntu (when the resolution stuck itself at 800*600 and refused to change until I gave in and trawled the internet for a fix - it's hard to edit xorg.conf when it doesn't exist!), Leopard went on as smooth as butter and whislt my dual 2.0GHz tower isn't going to break any speed records, it's extended it's longevity by another couple of years no doubt. There is a dual 2.3GHz machine on it's way to me, too, courtesy of eBay, and once I've maxxed out the RAM, I think that will be my workhorse, with the other G5 being a more general purpose office machine/PC for my wife.
Incidentally, my wife is a total convert to iLife - she adores the way she can create nice videos of our baby or photo slideshows of days out without needing to take a degree to learn Final Cut Pro or Photoshop and yet the end results are 10x better than the equivalent output from Windows Movie Maker, etc. At some point I'll get an eight-core Mac Pro, my wife will get the newer G5 and my mother can get the older G5 handed-down, as these things just stay useful for some much longer than a PC - it's a mix of good hardware design and build and a truly great OS.
The final part in my trifecta of Operating Systems this month has been Ubuntu 9.1, or Jaunty Jackalope, which has not exactly gone out of it's way to disprove the sterotype that Linux is for tech nerds and isn't a viable desktop OS. Despite a slick install (probably more down tot he lack of exotic hardware in the Toshiba laptop's case), it refused to let me change screen resolution, ignore the volume control quite often and is just generally not a great user journey - in fact, some things (like adding in components are counter-intuitive). Anytime I have to click to mark something for installation, yet there is no direct way to install there and then is a real pain and an example of what can happen when there is no single voice driving an OS's development - bits of Linux distributions are coded piecemeal then cobbled together into something resembling a coherent product, but without the bonus of actually being a coherent product. Still, for something that's free, it's great and I am looking forward to testing out KDE 4 (Plasma) as it attempts to get an OS X/Vista-like polish to the Linux GUI. I'm still not sure that it'll make a serious inroad onto the desktops of the world, but it's certainly useful to have around, even if I am more likely to end up porting GCC applications to OS X...
My friend Meredith haz my mug.
This made me smile.
OK. Bad pictures (our digital camera broke a while back so we only have the iPhone camera), but this gives an idea of some progress our kitchen is making.
Union jobs: what a waste!
I have mixed feelings about unions. On the one hand, when workers were/are truly exploited, they save lives and prevent suffering. We wouldn't be where we are as a society (vacation time, five day work weeks, maternity leave options) without unions and all the work they have done in the past.
On the other hand, when one lives in a developed country, they spoil people rotten. They can make people lazy. And selfish. And unproductive. They take the competition out of many fields, I think.
Case in point: this college I work for. I have to come in today, bill for seven hours, though I have less than 40 minutes of actual work today. I mean, I can find SOMETHING to do, but since everyone's job title is very specific and clear, the union I belong to has very clear rules about what can and can't be done in the position I have. God forbid I accidentally do part of someone else's job.
So I surf the internet, read books for fun, write emails, text, make phone calls and annoy people I know (who wants to chat on the phone in the middle of the day on a Monday?). And get paid for it!
Basically, I was told that since they have this position budgeted until the middle of this month, I need to keep coming in, even if there are no students.
I'm not complaining. But it sure is a waste. Somehow doing work for another company (which I could easily do today) feels like crossing a line (and I'm sure it violates the union rules somehow anyway), so I don't dare do that.
So I write a blog post instead.
OK so we're having our first party tomorrow night. It kind of happened by accident: a good friend of ours is headed back to Tokyo for the holidays and will miss another mutual friend's Christmas party in two weeks, so I said "Oh, we should have a party for you before you go" and suddenly, that's what was happening. Then she invited some other mutual friends and I invited a couple of people and now it's a party. It's not dinner (we have no dining room table yet) but we're going to get some snacks, get a Christmas tree and some wine, and just decorate our tree, drink, snack and hang out. Should be fun, but I have to admit that I'm a little nervous. Our house is FAR from done but it's definitely coming along. We haven't ever had more than two people over to our place, even in our old place. So it will be a new experience.
This story shocked me.
