Substance Abuse

Those who know me know I enjoy ingesting a little caffeine now and then. Just a tad, mind you. I also enjoy consuming the substance in other ways. Absorbing it through my pores, for example.

Some may claim that my fascination with caffeine is unhealthy or unnatural. Hardly. It's simply a hobby; a way to pass the time, if you will. In any case, I was feeling serious enough about this hobby recently to invest in a professional La Valentina full-automatic heat-exchange espresso machine:

My baby

Just a hobby. Really. I'm trying to keep a straight face right now. Yes, it's hard.

Macs

pphaneuf: You mean to tell me that you actually like the blurry-as-hell anti-aliasing in OS X? To me it looks like garbage, way worse than xft on Linux. I guess it's a very subjective thing, though.

Other annoying Mac quirks:

• If you have a Mac laptop and you use it with an external display, you cannot simultaneously play a movie on the external display while doing stuff on the internal LCD. DVD player goes out of fullscreen mode.
• Try convincing QuickTime to play DivX files. Really, try. I did. I failed after a very frustrating hour. This makes FrontRow next to useless.
• New iTunes cover art downloader thing is way worse than Rhythmbox and Banshee.

I really don't get why hackers are getting so into Macs these days. How do you guys do actual hacking work on them? I don't get it! The window management is so awful, and if you're not developing stuff for OS X, is Xcode even helpful?

I guess people are shelling out for fancy text editors or something to get around the window management problems. I dunno. I feel like I already have a perfectly good text editor, and it's free, it just sucks to use it (in any of its various incantations) on OS X, due to the complete hideousness of managing 5-10 windows in the same application.

Plus, I've had good, reliable suspend-to-RAM working in Linux for over a year now. Maybe I'm just lucky or something? Working suspend in Linux hasn't exactly been big news for a while, though...

Pictures!

Yep, I finally got my lazy self organised and posted a bunch of pictures! In reverse chronological order, for no particularly good reason:

Thailand

Hong Kong

Korea

Taiwan

Japan

October 24, 2006 (link)

On Macs

apenwarr: Oops. I should have been more specific. I did not mean to say my complaints with playing movies were reasons why I find it difficult to do serious hacking on a Mac. I have documented a lot of the reasons I find worknig on OS X annoying.

I do find it strange that your solution to the "how to get stuff done on OS X" problem is to run Linux on OS X. Ummm, ok. I would rather just run Linux and be done with it. Plus then you can avoid being stuck with a 1-button mouse in X11.

On Linux Power Management

apenwarr tells, in his usually entertaining manner, a very riveting story. I know that ACPI sucks, and that APM sucked less. I understand that making ACPI work on Linux was very hard. It was broken for years (unlike hub, I do not maintain that suspend in Linux has worked since 1999. It worked in 1999, then it broke for a few years, and now it works again). I guess you still think it's broken. My experience has been otherwise. It has been many months since resuming on my laptop failed. I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop a few months ago and suspend/resume worked flawlessy out of the box.

Personally, I'd rather deal with slightly less efficient (but still perfectly functional) suspend/resume than running X11 in a virtual machine and coping with a 1-button mouse. How often do I suspend? Maybe twice a day at most. How often do I middle-click? All the freaking time!

October 30, 2006 (link)

Perspective

I just spent a delightful weekend with slatepelican in Montréal. We walked around in the ridiculously cold and wet but oh-so-Montréal weather, ate ridiculous quantities of unbelievably unhealthy food and saw some friends. So it was a great time.

But I found it a little odd being back. I remember when I first visited Montréal I thought it was such a big, modern city. And of course it still is a big, modern city. But after New York I feel "dirty" somehow, because the wonder was lost on me this time. Or if not lost, it was at least different. This time Montréal felt like a small, quaint town. Which is not really a bad thing; in some ways that's what Montréal's going for. But I was somewhat stunned with my own changing perception.

Nickel and Diming

In Montréal, slatepelican and I stayed in a fancy hotel. The room was very nice, and we enjoyed it a lot.

However, they charged ridiculously for lots of things. Access to the Internets, for example, would set you back $15 per day. The bottles of water in the room: $8.

Now I find myself in a somewhat less fancy (but still quite nice) hotel in Palo Alto. Fast Internet is included in the room, and the bottled water is free.

andukar and I had a similar experience in Seoul. We stayed at a hostel for a few nights and then moved to a fancy hotel. The hostel had free Internet access, lots of channels on TV (including a Starcraft channel!) and a modest, but free breakfast. The fancy hotel had neither free Internet nor free breakfast, and had a downright awful selection on TV.

Why is it that when you pay more for a place to stay, you get less? In both these cases it is true that the more expensive option had better location and better accomodation, but on the other hand there already is a price premium, so the nickel and diming seems obnoxious.

Random (potentially NY-related) Tangent

Ok, what is it with the giant sunglasses, people? The 70s are calling and asking if we got the memo that giant freakin' glasses are ugly. That is all.

Back: September 2006

Next: November 2006