I have a habit of getting very little sleep during the week and sleeping excessively on the weekends. It was a system that worked great from the beginning of high school on. At some point though, this changed. If I really cut my sleep short, like less than five hours a night for several nights, my eyes start getting really irritated.
I honestly can’t figure it out. First, my right eye starts to feel really itchy. I rub my eye to try to get rid of what seems to be an eyelash, only nothings really there. Naturally, it gets all red and bloodshot. Super. Naturally everyone notices and feels some kind of irrepressible urge to tell me. Hey, Derik, your eyes are really bloodshot. Gee, thanks, I had no idea. I’ve just been rubbing it all day because it feels so damn good. The next question is Is that pinkeye? Well, I don’t know, but considering I don’t have any of the symptoms other than redness and an itch and that it goes away after a good night’s sleep (or two), I don’t think so.
A few days ago, Dana told me she had 50 Gmail invites. I naturally got a little irked as I was the one that invited her to begin with. That’s the way it goes I guess. Well, I checked today because I read that one Gmail invite spooler had over a million and a half invites to hand out. I had 50! I sent one to Bob who didn’t want to be left out and added 9 to the spooler.
The Mac OS X 10.3.8 update is out and ready for consumption. You know the drill, fire up software update, download the delta updater, or the combo updater. The delta updater weighs in at 27.7 MB and the combo is a hefty 103 MB. Software update will deliver a variable size updater dependent upon the machine you are running.
Update Details # Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.7 in which iChat, Mail, or other network-based applications could take a long time to open. Addresses an issue in which a computer wouldn’t always restart automatically after a power failure, even when the Energy Saver preference option “Restart automatically after a power failure” was selected. Improves the performance of Blizzard World of Warcraft’s “Full Screen Glow” video feature. Improves DVD Player compatibility when playing a movie (using certain ATI Radeon cards) to an external widescreen TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Resolves an issue in which a “flicker” could be seen when navigating DVD menus in DVD Player on certain PowerBook G4 computers. Addresses an issue in which a PowerBook G4 computer would, on rare occasion, wake from sleep with a black screen and not respond to any keyboard, mouse, or trackpad input. Addresses “jumping cursor” issues that might occur when using your portable computer’s trackpad with your thumb, side of thumb, or a “flat” finger. Resolves an issue on certain Power Mac G5 computers where a fan cycles erratically at unexpected times, such as when Seti@home software is running. Speeds up Address Book and Mail LDAP lookups that are performed by a Cisco DistributedDirector DNS server. Addresses an issue that could prevent clients using the Active Directory plugin from binding to their Active Directory server. Observations # Mail.app seemed to load much faster for me, as was described above. I suspect that the difference lies in using a non-blocking network call. The rest largely don’t affect me, especially because I don’t have a “flat” finger.
Google‘s services are growing quickly. Very quickly. First it was just a web search engine. Then they added image searching (of course, it still has its kinks). They added newsgroups, news, and price searching, aka Froogle. That wasn’t enough though. They added a free email service (I have 6 invitations sitting around doing nothing for anyone interested) and desktop searching which still doesn’t support Macs, Firefox, or Thunderbird. I’m still leaving out countless other products and services.
Very recently, their new “local” service added things like finding restaurants and other businesses. As I played with it, I noticed something. They had their own maps embedded in those searches. It wasn’t Yahoo Maps or MapQuest based. I personally preferred the former to the latter. My suspicion was well founded as Google is publically beta testing their new Map service. It uses some very new browser tricks (standards based) to make the maps interactive without any heavy Java or endless page loading. My words can’t do it justice, so check it out for yourself.
Hurrah for the Pats! I managed to survive the Superbowl party I went to. I even posted up some pictures. No pictures of me, for those of you curious.
At any rate, it was a great time and a pretty good game (from what I can remember). Now where’s Freddie Mitchell’s big mouth?
There is only one possibility for a Superbowl win. The Patriots will beat the Philadelphia Eagles. The Pats will soon join the ranks of other great teams like the Cowboys in the 90s.
Go Pats! #
Dana has brought something to my attention. I love churros as much as anyone else, but I think Google might be a little confused.
One of these things is not like the other. Look carefully. I think y’all can figure it out.
Just a quick one today. I’m sure most people have already heard of Flickr and so had I, but up until recently I hadn’t done anything with it. The buzz is well deserved. They fully support RSS, Creative Commons, as well as a million other features. I’ve barely scratched the surface. They’ll always have a free version in addition to premium accounts. I’ll probably stick with Gallery for some time to come, but this is definitely a more than worthy replacement for WebShots. So boys and girls, put up some pictures and let me see the goods.
I thought I’d link the CNET article on G5 Powerbooks as David Becker was kind enough to email me and ask my opinions. Unfortunately, it seems that they couldn’t use any of my ramblings, but I thought it might be of interest to publish what I wrote, considering my rather short, lackluster writeup on the new Powerbooks.
David sent me the below email with questions.
Hi–my name is Dave Becker, and I’m a reporter for CNET News.com. Saw your bloggings on matters Mac and hoped you might be willing to offer your comments on possible/planned G5 PowerBooks.
Dear Web Community,
Hard wrapping is stupid. This is important. Hard wrapping is stupid.
I’m begging everyone to stop doing it. Allow me to be a bit pedantic for a moment and explain what I mean. Essentially one of the first features added to computers when they were being made was to automatically start printing text onto the next line once the current line was overfilled. This is known as wrapping. When people used typewriters, it was necessary to manually wrap and a little bell told one when to do so.