Month: August 2007

More KAte-FItore-CELine-ANne pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaficelan/

Why I still use mutt:

I just tried to delete 16,000 messages in thunderbird, and had to wait 5 minutes for it to move them to the trash.

While I was waiting, I opened a shell on the same machine, opened a copy of the same 500-megabyte mailbox in mutt, ran a command to delete all duplicate messages (D, ~=, enter), and quit mutt (which writes out the modified mailbox to disk). This took approximately 20 seconds.

The moules are that good.

The frites are that good. Especially at 5am. Someone seriously needs let the california burrito people know about the frites people.

The beer is that good, and there is that much of it.

They really do have the waffles, except they’re sweeter and gooeyer. More of a dessert than a breakfast snack.

The chocolate is, well, mostly untried. I bought some but have no idea how representational it is. Not as excited as I was the first time I had Reubens or Chuao, but I live where they have kickass chocolate at every grocery store.

They have a sandwich called a mitraillette, which literally means machine gun, and can best be described to my Normal friends as a sandwich from Subconscious but with fries and a fried hamburger INSIDE the sandwich. To my non-Normal friends, it is a huge piece of french bread cut in half with the following inside:

• The aforementioned burger patty & fries.
• An entire head of lettuce, shredded.
• About a pint of your choice of 5 spice-enhanced mayonnaises.
• One Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure machine.
• Aux herbes aux spices.
• Unidentified other meat thing(s).
• The blood of the innocent.
• One Croc, the rubber shoe that is taking my feet by storm.

God damn why can’t the University of Zürich be in Belgium?

I make photo here. In unprecedented move of actually paying for something, I have upgrade to pro account. I not know what it does good for other than support service I like, but sheeee.

Does anyone know how to get download all your flickr photos in full size in batch? In other words, can I just upload every photo I have ever had for archival purposes and download them all later if my local copy explodes?

News of AppleWorks nee ClarisWorks being officially dead. Not that it wasn’t already because there hasn’t been an update in forever, but it got me all sniffly for my old G3 powerbook. I had mostly forgotten about AW but it was one of the reasons I switched to mac (before os x even existed). It was the first computer I bought completely with my own money. 2000 bucks–that was a lot a the time–I had to get a loan from the bank.

After about 2 weeks I realized that the user interface of OS 9 was way better than win or linux (though comparing macos to blackbox is a little weird) or solaris, and it’s still superior to the current OS X interface. Back then they didn’t have this crazy idea that everything had to look lickable and/or fucking brushed metal and whatever they call this new thing… brushed dick? Shaded-for-no-reason-porcelin? My itunes is a stylish toilet bowl. OS 9 on my 400mhz powerbook was, for the most part, more responsive and snappy than OS X on my 1.5ghz powerbook. The new intel ones are pretty good but still occasionally laggier than I would like or expect.

Other things that were awesome about that Powerbook:

• First laptop I ever used that seemed like it could be used for a whole day without breaking your hands or eyes (i.e. good screen & good keyboard; pretty rare in those days.
• It was made of plastic and that tough rubbery stuff that thinkpads are covered in. It seemed more solid and durable than current models.
• The hinge was such that the screen is not sunk down as far as on the new ones; creating a more favourable viewing angle which is noticible after a while.
• You could hold it in one hand without risk of dropping (as opposed to the slippery metal ones).
• It had two bays that could be used for batteries, external drives, etc. You could get like 10 hours out of the thing with 2 batteries.
• Two firewire ports! Remember this back when all other computers had maybe 2 USB v1 ports, so data transfer > 2 MB was a pain in the ass.
• Sleep-on-lid-close and wake-on-lid-open worked perfectly even then.
• Networking just worked. I could move to a different network (wired or wireless) and just pick it up, without rebooting. That was truly unprecedented at the time. And after some recent unsolicited XP experience I’d say it’s actually still unprecedented. Combined with the lid thing I had weeks of uptime even though I took it everywhere in my backpack on my bike.

Anyway, I remember Appleworks fondly as a non-autocorrecting, non-clippy, not-menubar-ridden, simple and responsive wordprocessor/spreadsheet/drawing program. Not too fancy but it had everything a young lad needed to get his compute on. When I had to switch to Word for work I was saddened because Word is slow, expensive, and has about 200 features I don’t care about. That’s why I write my journal in vi now. The drawing program was the best; you could quickly make diagrams of anything, which I did ALL THE FREAKING TIME.

—

Excerpt from my journal, written in Appleworks, circa 6 years ago yesterday:

Aside: The guy from the Old Main Record Store just came by and said “It’s
not as fun as operating a turntable” is it? What stupid thing to say. Of
course, it’s the kind of stupid thing *I* would say… I wonder if I’m going to
end up like that guy. Old and still awkward around people. That’s what it
is, just being awkward around people.

—

The next computer I buy with my own money will be Linux Thinkpad, methinks.

not. that. great.

I suddenly have an urge to listen to the Harry Potter audio books. How do I do that? Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

1: Go to www.google.com.
2: Type in “harry potter”.
3: Click on “I’m feeling lucky”.
4: Click on “buy the audiobook on mp3”.
5: Put it my credit card shit.
6: Download.

How does it really work?

1: Try steps above; can’t find mp3s or even link to where i can buy mp3s.
2: Try itunes: 33 dollars for just the first book and I can only play it on certain computers using Apple’s crummy client and only when they give me permission? Suck my balls.
3: Get the feeling this is going to take a while; find about 10 different torrent in 10 seconds on google; start downloading in case nothing else works.
4: Googling….
5: Find Random House audio book site; they appear to be selling the books on CD for… $49.95. For 1 fucking book. Suck my balls.
6: Fuck this, I’m ranting to LJ and listening to a free NPR podcast or something while the torrent downloads. I’ve just lost 20 minutes of my life, which is already worth more than the cost of the book even at itune’s preposterous prices.

Look, people who set this up: I am willing to pay for you simply for the convenience of not having to deal with this bullshit. Sell me your warez properly or I will download them for free.

Made it back to zürich just in time for august 1, swiss national day, whereupon all citizens are encouraged to set off weapons-grade fireworks for about 5 hours straight.