Death to Smoochy

/ movies

Just saw Death to Smoochy. Good movie–clever, sharp dialog, manages to balance sweetness with sharpness pretty well. And I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is always a plus. As usual, they were playing something weird-but-appropriate before the movie started. In this case (unsurprisingly), it was footage of the Evil Purple One, though mercifully without the sound. I asked the guy who came to take my order if he could perhaps bring some “mild hallucinogens to help make Barney easier to stomach.”

Follow-up on censorship

/ tidbit

Follow-up time:

Turns out the blogger I mentioned in this conundrum never asked for the offensive website to be removed, he just mentioned it to the index’s, uh, curator.

The amazing Jenster (who doesn’t have a web page, otherwise I’d point a link at her), who tipped me off to the dating-hell story believes the story to be a fake. She points out in particular A) the time-zone problem in international chat sessions; B) the extreme improbability that the guy would be able to meet her in the baggage-claim area after they had both taken international flights from two different points; C) the improbability that someone who hopes to have any credibility as a tech writer would have ever fallen into a situation like this in the first place. I think she’s on to something, which raises the question (if you’re a linguistic pedant like me, it does not beg the question): why invent such a story?

Language-recognition algorithm

/ language

This is fascinating. Italian researchers have found a way to identify the source language of a text just based on how that text has been treated by a compression algorithm. It gets better:

The scientists performed a further test of their technique by analyzing a single text that has been translated into many different languages — in this case the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The researchers used their method to measure the linguistic “distance” between more than 50 translations of this document. From these distances, they constructed a family tree of languages that is virtually identical to the one constructed by linguists.

Blogging & hate speech

/ tidbit

The kind of conundrum only a blogger could face: Blogdex recently removed a hate-speech website from its index. A discussion ensued, in the course of which the person who originally complained about the website in question accidentally outed himself. Now, here’s the thing: I really want to dislike this guy for being such a cringing pansy that he promotes censorship to protect his delicate sensibilities, but the thing is, he’s got a good blog.

Ultimate bad date…?

/ tidbit

Now this is what I call a bad date. Not to be cruel, but the clue-phone was ringing for a long time before this woman got around to picking it up. I’m signed up on nerve.com too, and I’ve gone on some bad dates (including a comically bad one this past Wednesday), but I haven’t had any experiences remotely like this one.

Eeyore’s Birthday

/ personal

Eeyore’s Birthday was held this past Saturday. I went for a couple hours, saw some of the usual suspects. Big hippie-freak fest.

I debated bringing my own camera, but it’s hard to just enjoy yourself when your trying to document everything.

This whole OS X upgrade

/ personal

This whole OS X upgrade thing is still consuming way too much of my time. I need to go for a bike ride.

Installing the update from 10.1 to 10.1.3 was a huge pain in the ass, since I had had the audacity to move some apps around. The updater couldn’t find them, and so installed “stubs” containing the modified resources (but not necessarily a complete app) where it did expect them. I wound up moving the new resources into the old apps, very carefully (yes, this is possible). Then I had to delete the old stuff, which turned out not to be very easy. Seems that there was an invisible file that really didn’t want to be deleted. I wound up breaking into Terminal and using sudo rm .recalcitrant_file to take care of it. There’s probably an easier way, but I’m not sure what.

Mail clients for OS X are also a pain in the ass. Capsule reviews of the apps I’ve tried:

Eudora

The OS X version of this, for me, is a step backwards because I can’t seem to make it support Japanese, and Steve Dorner’s team hasn’t gotten the internationalization message. Plus the fact that it’s still beta. How long has OS X been out now?

Mulberry

Ugly. Weird. I’m not a UI queen, but sheesh, I spend a lot of time in my mail client, and I don’t want to have to look at that.

Entourage

Slow and gimmicky (it’s from Microsoft, so this is not a surprise). I’ve also read that it starts going haywire when you have a really big mail database. Mine isn’t really big, but why risk it.

Sweetmail

This now has a beta version for OS X, but it won’t boot to my machine. Probably checking for a Japanese OS or something.

Powermail

In theory this does handle Japanese, but it failed to import my old Japanese messages from Eudora correctly, which is a problem. Perhaps it would have better luck extracting them by way of Mail.app.

Mailsmith

I love BBEdit, especially now that it has Japanese capability, but Mailsmith still doesn’t. It has lots of other virtues, but no Japanese=no good for me. I read some criticism somewhere that it’s too expensive. Get real. How much time do we spend on e-mail? Lots. If a product can make your life easier, it’s worth a few bucks.

So that leaves us with Mail.app, which is included. That’s what I’m currently using. It has embarrassingly weak filtering (“rules”) capabilities, and a distinct paucity of keyboard commands. But it seems to be fast and reliable. I’ll switch if I find something better though.

I upgraded to Mac OS

/ personal

I upgraded to Mac OS X today. I have been in maximum geek-mode for about 6 hours now. You know its maximum geek-mode when you forget to eat, then you remember your hungry, and even then decide to defer dining.

OS X is…different. It’s very disorienting in hundreds of little ways, not to mention the fact that the guts are drastically different. I figure it’ll take me a week to come to a modus vivendi with it–getting it to work the way I like, and adjusting to the way it works. There is a lot I like about it already, and despite occasional complaints that it’s slow, I find that it is a) snappy, and b) pretty snappy even when I’m trying to do all kinds of things at once.

So I was making a

/ personal

So I was making a fire-baton a couple days ago, and because I’m a klutz, jammed a phillips-head screwdriver into the web between my index finger and thumb. Ouch. Yesterday I went to the ER at Brackenridge to get a tetanus shot. (Interesting aside–I called a general practitioner’s office to ask if I should have them look at it. The receptionist said I should get a tetanus shot, and since there was a shortage of those right now, they didn’t have any, but the ER would. So I went there.) I waited about two and a half hours to get a shot that some guy practically administered as he walked past me. I asked a few people about the tissue damage, and they all seemed really unconcerned. One of them told me “hands heal up really fast.” So far, I’d have to agree, much to my surprise. The day after, I could barely hold anything in my grasp. Two days after, and I’ve got most of the strength back in my thumb.

Scroll to Top