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Seemingly, no one at Sky News Wire has read Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Om Malik has started a new meme, this time about freeware or shareware Mac applications “that have helped you get the most out of your Mac.”
Here’s my list:
X-Pad: A notepad with state. No files to save or open, just type and it is saved for you. As an incorrigible note taker this gem has saved my desk from being awash in little, yellow, slightly sticky bits of paper.
Comictastic: The best way to read comics online. Think of it as a Tivo for the funny papers.
Adium: My only chat client. With support for all the major protocols, as well as themes and skins, Adium is simply the best.
Fuzzy Clock: This menu bar add-on displays the time as you would say it out loud (“twenty past eight”). And with numerous dialects (Elmer Fudd any one?) it has permanently replaced the digital and analog clock on my menu.
Palm Reader: As an avid reader of books I have learned to appreciate electronic books. With Palm Reader I can take a book with me anywhere I can take my palm with me.
VLC: For those video formats QuickTime won’t play.
TransLucy: An alternative DVD viewer that turns the movie into a transparent overlay allowing you to watch the movie through your desktop, or your desktop through the movie.
Growl: A notification framework that interacts will any number of other applications. Adium, iTunes, even cron tasks now inform me of their activities in a manner I find pleasing.
SideTrack: This trackpad driver allows me to have outer- and center- button click functionality without a mouse. Scrolling (horizontal and vertical) is also provided.
Witch: An alternative to CMD-TAB, Witch allows you to see all the minimized windows on your machine at once so you can select the one you want. Between CMD-TAB, Quicksilver, and Witch I am able to interact my way with my Mac.
After reading about ClamXav I thought I’d download it and give it a try.
Like most “Switchers I brought with me a whole host of documents, images, music, and zip files. Turns out that there were some parasites in and among the collection.
While my machine maybe safe from the viruses of the Windows world (unless I run one while inside of VirtualPC), I can still pass them on to my friends. Sort of a Typhoid Macintosh situation.
After nearly three years on Mac OS X, with no anti-virus software of any sort running, I am pleased that the newest virus found was on a file in a zip archive from 1998.
Over at “The Intellectual Activist” there’s this story: Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Manmade Disaster of the Welfare State, purporting to explain the “real” reason behind the disaster that has become the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Here is my response:
One of the great problems with welfare as it is carried out in this country is the aspect of learned helplessness. Michele has worked more than once in her career in ‘welfare delivery’ roles. She no longer does this kind of work because she has a fundamental issue with how the welfare agencies deliver their product.
While working for the Oregon Services for Children and Families agency as a foster care case worker she repeatedly ran into issues when she wanted to hold her client responsible for taking care of themselves, rather than doing the work for them. For example: Clients who needed to appear in court or attend counseling would call her for a ride. She provided them with bus passes and a schedule and told them they were responsible for making their commitments. Her bosses actually called her on the carpet for not going and picking them up and ferrying them around. And these were people trying to meet court ordered conditions to regain custody of their biologic children!
Are there people in the world today who need a leg up? Most certainly.
Should we as a society help them? Yes.
Should that help come in the form it currently does? No way.
The agencies have an entirely different goal than emancipating their wards. The agency wants head-count so they can get increased funding and ensure their survival. Michele’s approach, which taught self-reliance and personal responsibility, would ultimately result in lowered head-count and thereby reduced budgets. As long as the agency dispensing aid is measured by head-count, the goal of actually helping people and removing them from the welfare rolls, will never happen.
Michele was part of a team who drafted into law in Florida, requirements that forced domestic violence treatment programs to treat both the victim and the abuser. Treating only one aspect of the problem only prolongs it, and it adds to the victimization of the untreated party. Our welfare systems currently throws money at a problem that can’t be solved solely by money. Until we establish programs that truly teach self-reliance and responsibility, we will have “welfare moms” who are twice victimized. Once by the tipping-point incident that led them to welfare initially, and again by a system that ensures its survival by promoting learned helplessness.
Are all the problems in New Orleans the result of bad planning on the governments part? Of course not. But neither is the situation entirely the fault of people who are already down and out. Blaming them as a group for the troubles in the aftermath is much like blaming the rape victim for getting raped. Like any stress filled situation, Katrina has exposed the weak underbelly of our society. A frightening number of people in this country are only one paycheck away from homelessness. Those who have already sipped beneath the water line of minimum survival are desperate, and, as the hurricane aftermath has shown us, willing to take desperate measures. I would hate to see the resources available to assist people in true need be curtailed because there are some problems with the overall system. I would like to see change happen, fundamental change that forces people to grow. For if we continue to ignore the growing problems created by the increasing gap between those that have and those that have not, there will be revolution and class warfare the likes of which will make New Orleans seem like a walk in the park
In May 2000, Michele got a phone call at home from my employer looking for me. I had taken the day off in celebration of my birthday. She took a message and called me on my cell phone. The sordid details aside, I was “downsized” that day.
In March 2004 after coming home from work for the day I received a call from my project manager asking me to come back to work, and when pressed about the reason he wouldn’t say. This time I was fired; my contract terminated.
So this evening, when we were just sitting down to dinner and my cell phone rang, and the caller was my project manager at work, both of us had a heart-in-the-throat moment. I actually interrupted the guy to tell him that the last two times work had called me at home “after hours” it was to let me go. I point blank asked him if this call had anything to do with getting let go. He assured me that it didn’t. He merely wanted to go over some task he wanted me to work on exclusively in the morning. Details that could have, and should have, been expressed in an email.
Sure, I’m a little gun shy, but when the only calls you get from work precede bad news, I think you are allowed to overreact. From here on out, no more calls from work. Please.
So, on Thursday last week at around 7:30 our primary Tivo died. Efforts to resuscitate it failed. Tivo kindly initiated an exchange for us, sending a refurbished series 2 machine our way.
This morning the DHL guy dropped it off, and Michele immediately started hooking it up. Fresh out of the box it takes a good 4 hours for the initial formatting to complete. Overcoming issues with the phone connection, Michele was able to start the format operation about noon. Once it was completed it was apparent that the wrong set of channels had been set up. Luckily the second pass through to change the channels to the proper set only took 40 minutes.
By 5:30 this evening we had most of our season passes reestablished, and the Tivo was already recording programming for us.
I am happy to say that we survived 128 hours or so of “live” television; mostly by not watching live television, roughly a dozen movies were watched instead.
With the primary Tivo on the fritz we’ve been watching movies. Lots of movies.
The Corporation A very engrossing look at corporations in America and their impact on the lives of people both here and abroad. One of the scariest things this documentary revealed is the use of Prosilac to increase dairy milk production - even though it isn’t needed and it may introduce disease causing pathogens in milk. Highly recommended.
Veronica Guerin Based on the true story of one journalists battle to expose drug corruption in Ireland. A grim, harsh look at the impact drugs have on society.
Sherlock Holmes: Dressed to Kill The last Sherlock Holmes to star Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Not overly long on plot or characterizations, but good fun nonetheless.
The Picture of Dorian Gray The first time I saw this I watched it on a black and white television. It was shot in black and white after all. Except for one or two scenes where color is used to great effect.
Stuart Little Good, clean family safe fun. With the Tivo out of service we sorted all 229 DVD titles and in the process we discovered some we hadn’t watched in a while. This was one. The next three were others that caught our eye in the alphabetizing effort.
Beverly Hills Cop I remember seeing this when it first came out in 1984. At the time I had recently completed college and was working my first programming job. Eddie is only a month older than I, and I was struck by his fame at a tender age. The movie is a little dated now but still enjoyable.
Bringing Down the House A great comedy that allows Queen Latifah to strut her stuff. Steve Martin, as usual, plays the every man caught in over his head role very well.
Ruthless People A great vehicle for both Bette Midler and Danny DeVito. I hadn’t seen this in years and it was funny all over again.
Must Love Dogs A good little romantic comedy, I actually almost cheered when Diane Lane’s character finally takes the plunge and goes after John Cusack. Michele and I discovered that the local theater has an early (before noon) matinee on Sunday’s that is usually deserted. Movies like this are fun again since the theater is largely empty at 11:50 am.
Shadow of a Doubt From the master, Alfred Hitchcock, with a carefully crafted presentation and precise camera angles. When people say that movies aren’t made like they used to be anymore, this is the kind of movie to which they are referring.
In the spring of 2001 Michele and I bought our first Tivo. The series 1 machine soon became an indispensable part of our lives. So much so that in January 2004 we bought a second Tivo, a series 2 with double the recording capacity. The original machine was moved to the bedroom where it collects old sitcoms from Nick@Nite, TVLand, and other cable outlets. While the new machine lives in our office space and records all the reality shows we like as well as movies and “Good Eats.” In all we have over 20 season passes set up, or we did.
Last night the series 2 machine borked. We had just finished watching a Sherlock Holmes movie recorded from Turner Classic Movies and when we tried to delete it from the play list it refused. After trying to delete it a second time with no luck we tried to delete another program, still no luck.
Then the screen went totally black.
After a minute a grey screen with the words, “Welcome. Powering up…” appeared. About three minutes later the Tivo Central screen appeared and we were able to see our “Now Playing” list once again. This time we were successful in deleting Sherlock, but no sooner had that operation completed when the Tivo once again rebooted.
Uh-oh. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
After 5 or 10 minutes of looking at the “Welcome. Powering up…” screen I called Tivo support. The support tech had me unplug the unit and wait 15 seconds and then plug it back in. No change. A second cycle was suggested and still no Tivo. So we initiated an exchange. Tivo is shipping (hopefully today!) a refurbished unit to us and, once it arrives, we’ll return the malfunctioning unit in the same box. Since we are out of our 1-year warranty period we have to but the refurbished unit for $149, which is roughly half of the manufacturers suggested list price for a new series 2 model.
I’m not very good about copying shows we want to keep forever off to tape from the Tivo, so we did lose a couple of things we would have liked to keep. And the Thursday night episode of Big Brother 6 is gone forever, unwatched by us. Mostly we are going to be inconvenienced by having to watch (gasp!) live TV for the next week or so until the new unit arrives.
I have been reading about MythTV for some time now. Having my Tivo die on me is making the prospect of having my own homegrown DVR seem like a better idea.
Forget running Mac OS X on any old Intel processor. I managed to sneak into Apple’s R&D Lab and make off with a soon to be released G5 Powerbook!
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Actually I followed this Mac OS X Hint.
Kinda makes you wonder about the veracity of all these Mac OS X running on x86 machines, doesn’t it.
Kung Fu Hustle A riot of a movie; zany, filled with stunts, and surreal. Think Bugs Bunny meets Matrix meets Jackie Chan.
Alexander Long, slow, tedious. The story plods along and is hard to follow by virtue of flashbacks. The sound quality is such that you can barely understand the lines being spoken by the actors. Did I mention it was long and tedious?
The Upside of Anger Dreary to the point were we turned it off less than thirty minutes after starting it.
Elvis Has Left the Building A very funny light hearted romp. Great cameos by some unlikely people. Good fun all around.
Forrest Gump Every bit as good today as it was when it came out. We own it on VHS tape but I want to get a DVD copy because this movie will always be in my collection. Tom Hanks does an outstanding job in the title role. Certainly he is one of our finest actors today.
Stone Cold A sleeper that was actually made for television, Stone Cold delights. Tom Selleck is perfect in the lead role as a troubled LA cop who has moved to Paradise MA to start over again. Only there is trouble in paradise. A very enjoyable film