soapbox

Kirsten was flying from Dallas to Buenos Aires yesterday. Her flight took off at 7:30 Texas time and she was supposed to arrive and give me a call in the morning at about 8 am.

So I was a little bit surprised when I got a call at midnight.

Check out where her plane actually went:
Transponder Path of AAL997 Yesterday.

You can see that they said, ok, we’re flying, now lets turn towards South America. Hmm, there’s something wrong with the pressurization system. Ok, STRAIGHT line to Miami.

It ended up being not that big of an issue other than the police car fire truck escort to the gate once they landed. American had a new plane ready to go in about an hour and the new plane had fold-flat sleeper seats in business class. She said that’s the most rested she’s ever been after a flight.

Not only is their stock down ~5% in the last couple weeks, but OSX has thoroughly made me irritated.

Ok, so fer serious though. I have been having trouble with my conputer slowing down and my hard drive being constantly fuller than it ought to be. So, I bought a backup drive for my machine and of the supposed 72GB on my HD, only 52 shows up on the backup. Now, I went through and added up the contribution of things on my drive and … surprisingly enough it actually adds up to just about what is on the backup drive. Now, in windows, when you defrag if it finds a corrupted or dammaged portion of the drive it will quarantine it and not let you write to it, but will always tell you. Does OSX do it automatically? Would 20GB of my disk really be fukt? I’m debating just buying a new bigger drive anyway, and reloading all my stuff on it…

This previously blank post has been brought to you by the un-Tim-friendly standard operating mode of the WordPress interface that allowed him to accidentally post an empty message after he saved his concert post, which is what he actually wanted to post. Yeah, that’s definitely it. Yeah, that, and the letters W, T, and F, and the number ?

I should’ve thought of this for “Khaki Day”, but alas, I’ve not been thinking of my xterms much lately. For those of you daring enough to have installed x11 on their Mac (and presumably it’d work just as well on a Linux box), I offer the following info on customizing their xterm to honor the Croc Hunter.

1) Open a file called .Xdefaults in your home directory - if you don’t have one by that name, create one.

2) Copy/Paste the following lines of text into the file, save the file, open a new terminal, et voila! Your terminal is all decked out in khaki. (P.S. If you prefer more colorful colors, substitute your colors from the list found in /usr/lib/x11/rgb.txt. You may also need to modify your .bashrc if you’re not set up to display colors.)
xterm*foreground: khaki4
xterm*background: khaki1
xterm*cursorColor: khaki4
xterm*pointerColor: khaki4
xterm*pointerColorBackground: khaki1

While I’m posting nerdy stuff, I’ve got some questions for people with experience using iLife and LaTex in OSX. I have tried to get LaTex to work on my machine, but I am convinced I am retarded and it refuses to cooperate. Forget where I got it from, but I guess the installation instructions etc were unclear.

As for iLife, do people have positive feelings? Thought it could be cool to build websites the lazy way (simple code is fine, but trying fancy things gets annoying with text). Just not sure if it’s worth the $40 if I’m just going to screw around with it, and not necessarily use it …

So my G4 has been fairly slow for a while, of which I always chalked up to iTunes and other programs being pissed off at my damn near full hard drive. I recently got a new 250GB backup drive, and partitioned it to store some shit, as well as make a back-up of my Powerbook disk. Cleaning things up and making some free space did help for a while, but things have gotten slower than ever. Now, I realize the new iTunes is a bit slower than the last, but it certainly doesn’t account for all of my recent shit. You don’t really need to defragment a Mac (like you would a PC if it decided it start slowing down like this) because of the file management (or that’s what I hear). I was looking at Top the other day in the terminal, and noticed that I have 65 processes open, with only a few actually running. I assume it is this giant number of open programs eating up my RAM, but most of this shit seems reasonable to have open or the abreviation doesn’t make sense to me. Anybody ever had this problem? Advice? Trying kill -9 on random shit could get interesting trying to figure it out …

Did any of y’all know this page was floating around out there on the Inter-web?

I dunno, maybe I’m just a big ol’ dweeb, but I think having a special page dedicated to categorizing all your school’s experts is pretty sweet.

I hope the frantic journalist-types who look to some of our experts for that last-minute, deadline-nipping-at-their-heels opinion or quote find this service useful.