The evening wasn’t a total loss… The USA Eagles finally won! The Eagles defeated Japan 39-26 to snap a sixteen-year losing streak. And we got a bonus point! How sweet is that?!
Month: October 2003
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Aussie Idol
Gah. Australian Idol is a friggin’ tragedy. The two best singers scored the least votes, and the amazingly talented Paulini got booted. Meanwhile the two big bland white dorks go through for another week. I give up. I’m not voting anymore and I’m not watching. The Australian public has let me down in a big way.
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Kung Tunes
Just so you know, I don’t think OS X 10.3 actually broke Kung Tunes. I downloaded the latest version from the site and it works fine. I think I just had an old copy.
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Quiz time
It’s time again for another brain-wracking, soul-sucking, time-wasting beeatch of a quiz! Can you identify these bands and TV personalities? Download this spreadsheet and save it to your hard drive. How many can you get? I’m up to twenty right now. I figure we can get them all if we collaborate. Post your answers in the comments.
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Knee Defender
Got legroom? Add that to my Christmas list.
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Aussie Idol
I actually broke down and voted for Australian Idol today. I wasn’t going to, but my co-workers were talking about it this morning and their opinions were all wrong. They actually liked Shannon’s performance! He’s got a decent voice, I’ll admit, but the boy doesn’t even make eye contact or open his mouth when he sings! Everybody was like, “Wow, his movement and rhythm are really coming along, aren’t they?” just because he managed to snap his fingers in time to the music. He’s a great karaoke singer but the Idol he is not. Guy and Paulini are the true talents and I’ll be damned if I let some pretty boy farmer and his squealing teenage fans knock one of them out. (Cosima deserves to go too, of course. She looks like Cherie Blair and she sings like Celine Dion. *shudder* A truly lethal combination.)
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Gardening
The Snook and I spent the best part of the afternoon today gardening. Yes, gardening. We needed to transplant our baby tomatoes and I’ve got lots of other veggies we need to start. (I found sweetcorn seedlings at Kmart! I told the Snook we had to get them. They’ll probably be hopelessly oversized for the space, but I like the idea of growing a little bit of Indiana here.) Anyway, we’ve got a triangular flower bed in the backyard that we thought would be perfect. Unfortunately all the rain we’ve had lately turned it into a total weed jungle! So we bought a hoe and the Snook did his best farmer imitation. Within an hour we had it clear. We planted my sweetcorn, ten tomato plants, and a jalapeno chili plant and then gave them all a good drink. (I also went berzerk on about two dozen slugs I found in the worm farm. But the less said about my slug rage, the better.) Here are some pictures…
So that’s the before picture, Snookums the triumphant farmer, and the after version. Then a closeup of our sweetcorn and our chili plant. It’s not the greatest garden in the world, but it’s a pretty big accomplishment for two computer geeks!
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Panther
What’s New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Ninety percent of this stuff is “under the hood” as far as I’m concerned, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
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Panther
Woohoo! I have officially upgraded to Panther. I got my copy this morning – along with a complimentary T-shirt! – and managed to save a hundred bucks courtesy of the educational discount. (Shh!) The upgrade itself went much more smoothly than I expected. I cleared off the iPod and used it to back up the stuff I wanted to keep: applications, documents, bookmarks, my iPhoto library, mailboxes, etc. Then I reformatted the drive and did a clean install from scratch (removing the partitions I set up last time). The install process probably took twenty minutes from start to finish. Then it was just a lot of busy work – setting up accounts, importing the old stuff off the iPod, etc. I think it’s all done except for downloading the latest Gimp release.
Initial impressions: Things definitely seem zippier. Not a lot, but I didn’t think OS X ran very slow on my machine before. I’m loving the new Exposé thing; I’ve got a hot corner set on the upper-right that clears the desktop. Very useful. Snooky and I tried the fast user switching which works just fine, but as I don’t have Quartz Extreme we couldn’t see the ultra-cool rotating cube effect. The Font Book is pretty sweet; I’m hoping that I’ll have access to the system fonts once I get the Gimp going. (We couldn’t get ’em to work before but I had a dodgy installation, I think.) So far I’ve had two applications break after the upgrade: Kung-Tunes and icWord. Everything else seems to be working okay. Oh, and I got rid of Classic! No more OS9; I’ve taken the leap. (I never used it much anyway.) More updates to follow once I’ve played around some more…
