Leopard rant on cut and paste

I love macs, but there are a few inherent annoyances from a Windows
user perspective.

Cut and paste a file is one of them.

I can not tell you the number of times I have sat here, completely
inundated with sheer frustration over trying to drag a couple of files
from one place to another in order to move them. Typically I go to
drag them, and the highlighting goes away so I have to REhighlight
them and then very gently ease the mouse off the files and into the
folder so they actually go this time. DAMMIT!! Tonight is even
worse, because I want to drag and drop and get this... you click and
drag, and pull down, and you know what? It doesn't scroll to the
folder at the bottom of the pile, out of sight. So, I have to open
two Finder windows of the same damned thing to get them in there.

To pile more crap into my OS and potentially slow it down (everyone
knows you want to slow your OS down) I installed QuickSilver. The
premise was that you can create a workaround for cut and paste. I
couldn't figure out until I ran through the instructions for real by
actually doing them. You want to know how? You don't.

I want: Right-click a file, or control-click, whichever, and click
"CUT" or "MOVE."
Then: Right-click a folder, and click "paste" or "move here."

Currently OS X Leopard only does "copy" which is completely useless
because I don't WANT a gazillion copies cluttering my hard drive. I
want ONE with the exception of the Time Machine backups on the external.

Rant over. I'm gonna go cuss and swear while I use two finders.

Moral of the story: Put things in the right place when you first get
them. Otherwise, OS X will punish you.

Apple: I love your products and overall consider them a vast
improvement over much of your competition's efforts. However, some
very basic functionality such as outlined above would be nice for
those of us who LIKE to be organized and not depend on Finder all the
time.

~nv

green efficient geek

Heh, this struck my funny bone. I just responded to an email from
Dale's mom and at the end I had a thought for Dale so I mentioned it
there since I did a "respond to all" and he was included in that.

So I mentioned my thought to him and then said:

[you might be a green efficient geek if you email your next-room-over-
husband within a response to his mom's email]

First, it's funny for the aforementioned reason - conserving a couple
small keystrokes, my voice, a few steps, all by emailing within an
email. Second, I thought, "Gee, this also saves a small amount of
server space!" and then started laughing when I began to say "you
might be a green efficient..." because NOW I'm taking up more server
space than if I'd simply done another email - as you can see, I'm now
emailing my blog with more text than ever surmised with two simple
emails. Or with one email and a quick jog over the stairs.

But, in the event that my family or whomever reads this blog actually
finds it amusing, perhaps it was worth it - a tiny smile is better
than none and worth far more than a few KB of server space.

In the meantime, "Hazard" by Richard Marx is on, and I just had the
creepy crawlies go up my spine as he belted out "I /think/ about my
life gone by..." At the concert last March, I recall him saying that
his wife thought Hazard was a good song and he'd be nuts to not do it,
so he did it despite his own thoughts on it. "I hate it when she's
right," he grumbled, much to the amusement of the audience. I can't
believe someone as talented as Richard Marx could have actually
thought to NOT do that song. Good thing he paired up with that girl.
LOL Now, if he would just release "Blood In My Veins" or whatever he
calls it, that would rock. I suspect I'd have a lot of writing to do
if I had that song to listen to.

~nv

Precision M6400 Covet

Yesterday my M6400 arrived for me at work.

I waited four weeks for this.

First impression: Bright orange. My eyes!! My eyes!!
Second impression: Holy God this thing is heavy
Third impression: Ooooh... perty... and it looks like there's some
battery juice already!!
Fourth impression: Ooooh!! Backlit keyboard!!!!
From there, I appreciated the glass screen, the tactile
responsiveness of the touchpad, and the pretty blue colours as well as
the slot-loading DVD-RW.
I also began noticing that the way the touchpad was moved over to stay
centered with the alpha portion of the keyboard made it so my left
hand is dug into by the corner of the laptop. It's got quite the
square edge on it.

I brought it home and played with it some more. The PSU weighs almost
as much as my UPS does, but I discovered an unexpected benefit to
having a 10 amp psu to lug around: You can put your cold feet on it
and it's toasty warm. So I lowered my home office chair, put my feet
on the PSU, and the laptop (which is wider than me) kept my lap warm.
I was as snug as a bug in a rug with the exception of the fact the
laptop's so heavy that after a couple hours, my left knee beging to
get annoyed with my ergonomic decisions. Whups. But I didn't have
any intentions of sitting that way in the first place at work, and I
wasn't intending to use it AS a laptop most of the time. MY intention
was to let it sit in its docking station at my desk 99 percent of the
time. I might bring it home only on special occasions, or if I get
sent away for training... Yeah. Otherwise, it sits.

Anywho, I digress. Google Desktop (specifically, gadgets, although
I'm still not sure if this is Vista or Google or a combination) is
pretty cool. Windows version of the Mac's "dashboard." I like the
notepad and the tasklist the best. The weather is nice.

My laptop has 4GB of RAM and 2.54GHz core 2 duo. I ordered with Vista
Ultimate 32 bit preinstalled so I've been playing with that.

I spent three hours with it this morning trying to get the boot time
from 1m 20s to under 30s. A guy at work told me he once got his
laptop (Vista, different model laptop though) down to 17s. I clocked
my BIOS boot at between 8 and 12 seconds, probably closer to 8, so
despite a desire to beat his number I didn't hold high aspirations,
but I admit I did feel a pull to attempt it anyway. I also don't know
if he started with a clean install, or a pre-installed version.
Obviously there could be differences there. And, which version of
Vista? Business or Ultimate? So for the most part, I decided to see
what I could do on my own for my particular situation. If I happened
to beat his number, great. LOL

First and foremost, I grabbed Process Explorer and Autoruns off the
'net and began disabling the obvious crap - bloatware, etc. Over the
course of 2 hours I got it down to 48 seconds. The shutdown time was
19 seconds, mostly. Then I installed Tweak UI, which I'd never tried
before. They make it for Vista now. I used the f/w version. With
that, I got it down to only 38 seconds. But there was a problem.
Shutdown started taking 1 minute 47 seconds!! I rebooted at least
five times and kept seeing it over and over. It was relentless. So I
undid my changes by using the snapshots I'd taken. NO CHANGE. So I
used the system restore point I'd made. THAT was interesting... the
shutdown went to between 16 and 21 seconds (mostly 19 again) and yet
the boot time remained at 38 seconds. I uninstalled Tweak UI and
tried a few more times. The same.

Then I readded my touchpad and a few small items from Dell and the
numbers have not changed.

Other than poking around services and such, which I'm not familiar
with on Vista yet and don't feel like spending hours researching just
for a few more potential seconds, I'd say I'm done.

Anywho, that's all on that for now... except... I want to add that I'm
amazed at the time it takes to open IE after logging in. It takes all
of four seconds after entering your password to get to a point where
you can launch something from the QL bar. I also can launch from the
run command in maybe six seconds.

AND I discovered that it can start itself up every weekday morning for
me, too. I like that... :)

~nv

Cow Tax

I just found out that the EPA is trying to get some bill put in that
taxes cows. $175 per dairy cow per year, $87 per beef cow, plus some
smaller amount per hog. The intent is to help control methane
emissions.

Yeah, by having farmers kill off all their animals so they can survive
on grass themselves.

I say they might as well try to tax farts while they're at it. Trans-
Orifice Ozone Turbulences (as defined by the Royal Canadian Air Farce)
are responsible for a lot of methane in our atmosphere, you know.
They could segregate TOOTers and non-TOOTers into separate sections in
restaurants and other public places, beans would be labelled with a
TOOT factor of 10 while bread would get 2, and pudding shall be
outlawed so it must be made in large steins in people's basements and
shared amongst the addicted criminals who still make it anyway.

While we're at it, let's build houses out of cars and grow a giant
beanstalk into the methane clouds to see if Jack lives up there.
Isn't methane green? It's a greenhouse gas, right? Maybe it's Jack
who's doing all the real TOOTing and we only THINK it's the cows.

Pardon my methane mouth, but folks looking to fuck over one of the
hardest-working types of people on earth should get a shellacked
cowpie shoved up their wanker rather than the overflow of cash they'd
be generating for themselves by acting like white supremacists looking
out for the better good of us poor stupid idiots.

~nv

low speed internet

I was just writing back to Michelle about a product we've been
researching. I did some of the research knowing full well that her
internet connection is DIALUP. Yes, DIALUP. GAH!! So I sent her the
info and etc and so forth. But as I just closed my email to her a few
moments ago, I wrote "you low speed internet people you" and almost
added, "Yanno I would have come up with Dale last night but egads, I
can't live without my internet connection!"

I didn't write that, but I jokingly thought it. Truth be told, I've
lived days without a connection in the past couple years. It wasn't
easy but I made it through just fine. So I wouldn't never say "I
can't spend the night up there without a high-speed 'net connection."

Still, I could easily picture that scenario. Low-speed internet (or
lack of any net connection whatsoever) could theoretically be deemed a
social issue. "No net? We won't visit." Hahahaha, lol. Funny...
man, I feel for those two, though. Apparently they can't even GET
high-speed there.

I'd move.

~nv

Christmas is coming

And with it, I have both excitement and questions.

Excitement: Giving all the gifts I've found for people. Spending
time with family. Eating. Watching Dale's eyes light up as we turn
on the tree for the first time this year. Taking pictures. Watching
the cats play with the cloth-covered balls.

Not so exciting: TRYING to find gifts for people (some are hard to
buy for!). Going out in the cold to get the tree. Keeping the cats
away from the cloth-covered balls. LOL. Driving so far to SEE the
family.

Downright questionable: Wrapping gifts in paper that will then be
ripped to shreds and thrown in a landfill. The bags of trash on the
side of the street. Potentially getting gifts that I will treasure
due to whom they're from yet will never get used or will keep taking
up space and/or cluttering up the house. Killing a tree so we can
enjoy it inside for a few weeks, then toss it. The commercialism
that's so prevalent around the holidays.

The funny thing is that these days I'd rather have a nice visit with
family than receive gifts from them. Not to say I don't LIKE gifts,
but why must we concentrate gift-giving into one or two special days
each year? (Birthdays are the other, but those are far less obvious
to everyone so sometimes you can slip past folks and they'll never
know they "should" get you something.) Dale's mom has the right idea
- she sees something she thinks we'd like and she gets it then and
there. The only problem with that is that then she STILL feels the
need to shower us at Christmastime, too. She's just a really giving
person. Me, I can find things for her really easily because she likes
just about everything. Dale's reasonably easy, too. But for everyone
else I wander around going, "Is that them? Is that them? Would they
like that? Dammit, why can't they just spell out what they want?!"

I have a wishlist to make it easier for people who are caught in the
same sort of situation. Surprises are nice, but I know how it feels
to not be sure if someone likes your taste or just their taste. Such
a guessing game...

Anywho, the paper thing, though, that's really bothering me. I
presume it's intended to not just make things pretty, but to separate
gifts so there's a nice surprise when you finally get to what's
beneath. After all, duct-taping around the gift is intended to be
fun. I know. I've done it. But wrapping should either be banned or
downright merciless. It's such a waste of our earth's resources. And
so is gift-giving for the sheer sake of giving because it's Christmas
time.

Hm. I just thought of something I can get my mother, though. I can't
mention what in case she reads this... LOL

~nv

Outlook 2007

I realize it's almost 2009 and I'm JUST getting to use this, but OMG
it's so cool. If you flag an email, it plops it into your "to do"
list. Way customizable, too. I love it. But I'm at work so this
must stay short. :)

~nv