A couple weeks ago I finally upgraded to Leopard. I wanted to document some problems I’ve had.
Transparency
I have a G4 Powerbook and the dock and menubar transparency do not work. I tried editing some plist files, but that didn’t work. It actually really messed stuff up. I had to boot into single user mode and fix it. Don’t do this. Transparency is not worth it.
LastFMHelper
Force quit that sucka in Activity Monitor (located in Applications > Utilities). Makes my CPU run high. Quitting this won’t affect Last.fm app in any way. From what I gather, its main purpose is to automatically recognize your iPod when you plug it in.
Adium
Adium got painfully slow. I tried different Message Styles, but it still hung a lot. It stressed me out for it not to keep up with my typing. No fun. I love Adium, but I’m back using iChat. iChat isn’t awful, especially in Leopard because it has tabs.
Camino
Camino! My love! Slowed down a lot since I upgraded. I feel so sad about this. Having a bunch of tabs open makes my fan turn on. I still use it occasionally, but Safari is now my default browser. I do like Find being in the same window and also find-as-you-type in Safari 3.
Flash
Infamously bad in Leopard. Works on 90% of things in Safari. I had to uninstall and reninstall even though I was up-to-date in Tiger. Persistent problems include Google Street View (not all of Google Maps), the audio player for Tumblr, and a few others I can’t think of right now. These both work in Camino though, which is weird. Other weird things, watching Fox online only works in Safari, but watching NBC only works on Camino.
MAXIMUM EDIT:
DOY! My problems with Flash were all my own. I tried going through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling Flash again and I found that the Adobe site showed be the INTEL version instead of the PPC version. So I downloaded the PPC version and everything works well. My bad. Sorry.
Panic
On a positive note, Coda, Transmit, and Unison work perfectly. I was really worried about these because they are so much a part of my daily computer existence (apart from web browsing and IM).
These problems are not all encompassing. They are few and far between. I would definitely recommend Leopard. It works better on newer computers, but what doesn’t?
Posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008
While looking for our book club books at Counterpoint I came across Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke for $3. I really like this guy, Arthur C. Clarke. This is the third (fourth?) book I’ve read that he has written. Okay, the others were 2001: A Space Odyssey (obviously) and Islands in the Sky. I watched the film adaptation of 2010, but that doesn’t count. Also, the film wasn’t that good. Though it was made 16 years after 2001 the special effects are far more primitive. But that’s not the point. I read Rendezvous with Rama and it was very good. I liked it very much. I read it in (essentially) two sittings. You should really read it.
This book has it all, all the elements. It’s really the perfect representation for its genre. It has adventure (Wild at Heart hahahah), it has uncertainty, it has the unknown. That’s one thing I really like about Arthur C. Clarke. It is a theme in all his works I’ve read. The uncertainty, the unknown. No matter how advanced and futuristic society becomes, we never know more than our Solar System firsthand. Our Solar System is quite large, and colonization of planets happens, but we still are always curious. There is always the infinite universe. It is pretty darn overwhelming.
To explain the plot briefly, Rama is a 31 mile long spacecraft. It has been traveling for perhaps millions of years. The closest it has been to any star was more than 200,000 years ago. It is an enigma. It is unknown. As it is traveling through our Solar System the crew of the Endeavour has 3 weeks to explore it. That process represents the core of this book. There are many surprises. If you read this book, keep in mind that the Ramans do everything in threes.
Posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008
I’m a firm believer in RSS. It has done me well. I’ve come out in support of different feed readers in the past and I would like to tell you why I’ve made my current decision (Newsfire).
Safari RSS
Pros: Built in to Safari, easy, straightforward, free
Cons: Feature-less, only available on your computer, no opml support
Google Reader
Pros: Available on any computer, nice keyboard shortcuts, free
Cons: Slow, web application, doesn’t display embedded content (except youtube)
NewsFire
Pros: Beautiful, fast update of feeds, auto-discovery of feeds, now free
Cons: Only available for OS X, not accessible from any computer
What is your default RSS reader?
UPDATE: Lifehacker ran a poll, and I went back to Google Reader.
Posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008
If there was something that you really believed and knew that if acted upon it could save humanity, what would it look like to dedicate your life to this cause? What if you were wrong? What if people criticized you for it? Would it still matter? You would never know whether you were right until you knew. Over the past week I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change. What sparked this current thread was a news story I read about Dan Bloom and his plan for the climate crisis. He has dedicated himself to this project in a vulnerable and uninhibited way. Dan Bloom’s idea is to prepare for the looming climate disaster by building Polar Cities. I totally geeked out on the idea of Polar Cities and I was able to interview Dan Bloom about himself and his plans.
Tell me a little about yourself. How did you become interested in climate change and polar cities?
I was interested in climate change and global warming before 2007, in other words from 1971 to 2006, just as a normal newspaper reader, aware of the situation, but not deeply aware, nor very concerned, just normal low-frequency awareness from newspaper and magazine articles I had read from college graduation in 1971 to life in the real world of the early 21st Century. THEN one day, I read two articles in the newspaper here in Taiwan: one was about the upcoming IPCC report on climate change, released in February 2007, and then two was an interview with James Lovelock the UK scientist who said that in his view in the future, there might be only “breeding pairs in the Arctic” to continue the human species after global warming “events” cause mass migration north and mass die offs of humans, from a population of 10 billion to maybe just 200,000 left. When I read this, I had a eureka moment, I woke up at the moment. At first I was depressed. I wrote a long essay on my blog about how things are really screwed. But after re-reading what I wrote, which was basically depressing and sad writing, I woke up again and said to myself: Hey, you can’t go around moping about and feeling sad for the world, try to do something positive, something to give you and others hope. So I visualized humans living in polar cities in the northern areas in the year 2500 or so, and that is how I began this quixotic adventure. Via the blogosphere. And 12 months later I found an artist, in Taiwan, where I live, Deng Cheng-hong, who agreed to make some illustrations for me, on commission. I paid him for his work and two months later he gave me these amazing illustrations. He is genius. In fact, his visual images have made this project leap off the page and into people’s imaginations, so all credit goes to him. James Lovelock has seen these images and said to me via email: “It may very well happen and soon.”
Are polar cities your response to the climate crisis?
Yes, this project is my personal response to the climate crisis, my small contribution to the ongoing global discussion. It’s my way of taking part in what I think is a positive way in the debate.
Are the aims of polar cities to accommodate a lucky few or all of humanity?
The aim of the polar cities project is to accommodate all of surviving humanity, in an open democratic humanitarian way. These cities are not just for the lucky few or the rich or the powerful. My philosophy and aim is to start planning for these adaptation cities now, in 2008, so that by the time we need them, humankind has figured out how to make them open and democratic. But if things get really bad in the future, out of a world population of maybe 15 billion people in 2500, there might be only 200,000 survivors. In that case, these people will be the lucky few. Or unlucky few, some might say. But they will be the breeding pairs who keep the human species alive for many generations inside these polar cities and then come out and repopulate the Earth again when the time is right. The polar city era might last 100 years or 1000 years or even 10,000 years. So these polar cities are lifeboats for humankind, for the human species, not just for the lucky few. I have no children, so there is no personal intent here for me. I am doing this because I have compassion for the future. A deep compassion for the future, and this is now my life’s work. Unpaid. On my own time. On my own dime. My contribution, in a small minor way, to the ongoing debate, pro and con, about climate change.
In a recent Guardian article, James Lovelock is quoted as saying “Enjoy life while you can” in regards to the climate crisis. Do you see ideas like recycling and carbon offsetting as useless?
Lovelock is my mentor in all this, and that recent Guardian interview was very insightful, I thought. I agree with him on many of the things he said. However, he is 88 and I am 58, so being 30 years younger I still have more hope and optimism that we can solve this climate crisis problem with real solutions. So yes, recycling and carbon offsetting are important ideas and I agree we should implement them as best we can, and do all we can NOW to try to mitigate global warming in the here and now. I have not given up hope. I still think we can solve this Long Emergency, but there will have to be some sacrifices.
Is technology part of the problem?
It is a part of the problem and a possible solution to the problem, too. My fingers are crossed. I hope someone can come up with a technological fix for the climate crisis. That is where my hope lies. Yes, but in the case that worst come to worst, I feel that polar cities can be our lifeboats to get us through a long period of northern life, maybe for 30 generations of humans.
The polar cities have been likened to fallout shelters, how would you respond to this?
I never thought of polar cities as fallout shelters. But we could call them global warming shelters. Lifeboats. I see them more as lifeboats. The cold war mentality of fallout shelters is not really appropriate for polar cities. But headline writers have wild imaginations and I appreciate all headline writers attempts to grapple with these issues.
Do we need a sense of impending disaster to give ourselves something to work towards?
You are right. Yes, we need a real deep sense of impending disaster to wake us up. Lovelock and Hansen and others are important in issuing wake up calls to humanity. I am just a soldier in the trenches launching my polar cities idea as a non-threatening thought experiment to wake people up in another way, visually. I remain an eternal optimist and I wake up every day full of energy to fight this climate crisis. This IS the fight of humanity, all humanity. We need all the ideas we can get.
Posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008
In my growing fascination in outer space I’ve decided I want to visit a lot of observatories and planetariums in 2008. I’m not sure how many I will actually get to go to, but it’s happening. The idea came to me when I learned that Dr. Bronner donated 1,000 acres of land at the base of Mount Palomar to the Boys and Girls Club of San Diego. I realized I have never been to the Palomar Observatory. I’ve lived in San Diego since I was 5 and never have gone. It’s a crying shame. I would have gone there first, but their tours don’t happen until April.
Last week we went to ((Griffith Observatory** because the Total Lunar Eclipse was happening and because Julie and Johanna gave me passes for my birthday, which was a profoundly thoughtful gift (thank you so much). It was amazing and beautiful and moving, but first, a little history on the observatory.
Griffith Observatory is named after a man named Griffith Griffith. Griffith Griffith gave the land to the city of Los Angeles for the creation an observatory and park because he believed all great cities need a great park. “[Griffith Griffith] believed that an individual gained an enlightened perspective when looking at the skies.” I really dig this outlook. That somehow we will all be better more whole people if we look at the sky. Whoa. This guy is rad! Listen to what he said: “If all [humankind] could look through that telescope, it would change the world!”1
Although it was cold and windy and rainy the sky was clear enough for us to see the Total Lunar Eclipse. It was red and darkened. I kept thinking about how it was happening and that space exists. I didn’t get any good photos with my tiny camera though. And they had telescopes setup on the lawn that we didn’t use because it was packed out. Star party!
The planetarium show was particularly moving. It’s called “Centered in the Universe.” It is really hopeful and inspiring and I think I cried. Sort of the “we are all in this together” vibe. We sat directly next to the star projector and when it rose up it sort of blew me away, the device itself, not just the star projections. It’s so great and massive and accurate. I sight to see. Also, as a side note, the Griffith Observatory has a Tesla Coil, which is worth the trip in itself.
Next Up: Palomar Observatory
Posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Yesterday I got a coupon in the mail for REI reminding me I had dividend to spend. Today I took that coupon and dividend spending spirit to REI, and bought the 40 oz. Klean Kanteen with Loop-Top Cap. I’ve been dreaming of getting a Klean Kanteen since I found out my Nalgene was killing me. I am very excited about my new water bottle. It taste cleaner. It probably doesn’t really, but I thought and stressed out about it so much. I mean Nalgene is probably not killing me. (They are killing baby bunnies.) But I’ve thought about this damn water bottle situation for many hours. I like Klean Kanteen because it doesn’t have a coating inside like Sigg and the cap is even metal. No more leaching for me. Or less leaching I guess. Also, another plus for Klean Kanteen over Sigg is that Sigg says no hot liquid. I guess that’s a plus. I don’t think I would put a hot beverage in a steel bottle thought. It’s 8 oz. more than my bunny killing Nalgene though.
On a side note, as I was writing this post, this came up on my feeds: #76 Bottles of Water. (Also, if you haven’t heard of Stuff White People Like, there was a good interview with the blogger on Talk on the Nation.)
Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
I told Patrick I would write about this before Pitchfork, but I didn’t get to it in time. Thinking about High Places makes me feel very sentimental. I first heard High Places when they played with Lucky Dragons, Bobby Birdman, and YACHT at il corral. I went with Jon and we got there too early and met Jennifer Fodor of G-RAD (this was before G-RAD beat us) and went to an arcade. I really like High Places. They had already run out of CDRs when we saw them so I subsisted on downloads from their myspace. (Later I bought this seven inch on Ancient Almanac.) But my point is that they needed to put out a legit album and the rad cuties at eMusic just did, 03/07 - 09/07 on eMusic Selects. Ok, here is the scoop. eMusic Selects is “a brand-new monthly program featuring exclusive music from handpicked, unsigned new artists.” Whoa! To me this sounds heartfelt. They really want to help out new artists. It benefits the artist and it benefits eMusic. So far I think it has worked. And guess what? February’s releases? Not only High Places, but also Breathe Owl Breathe. I’ve been really digging both albums a lot and I’m going to tell you why. Or why you should buy them right now to support these rad artists.
Now the music. High Places consists of Rob’s sweet beats and Mary’s ethereal singing. Rob only uses tiny drums and shakers, but the sound is so full you would think there was more. There is no more! Well, there is. There is Mary’s singing. You can’t have one without the other. They sort of just move in your mind to be one solid noise and you forget that shakers can’t sing. Or I do. Mary’s voice is always echoed in this perfect way. You can imagine it. When they play she moves and dances around singing with bells around her wrist. When I say ethereal I don’t mean ethereal like Lavender Diamond, the pace and the attitude is different. Lavender Diamond ethereal feels delicate and light. High Places ethereal feels light, but full. Full in a lofi way or in a low treble way. The best way to understand is to hear:
03 Banana Slugs/Cosmonaut
(Plus High Places always favorites my photos of the Margot and Travis.)
Breathe Owl Breathe is not an artist I was terribly familiar with before I got Ghost Glacier EP. I knew those Michigan folks were deep into it, but otherwise no. Ok. Immediate reaction: familiarity. Not familiarity like “I think I’ve heard this before”, but familiarity in the way “I think I’ve ALWAYS heard this.” It feels like a distant memory. A fond distant memory. Probably from your childhood. But like a positive experience. Not like when you were chubby and were bad at sports. More like a sunset or a Sunday afternoon. I suppose also sentimental. Their music feels like a fond memory. That’s the best I can say it.
Breathe Owl Breathe would be filed under “folk” I suppose because they play folky instruments. Their voices are comforting and make me weepy. Such mellow vibes!
04 Ghost In The Morning Moon
Posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Laura and I were flipping through channels last night and came across the Big Bang. It was that or Puppy Bowl IV so we decided to watch it. I really enjoyed the movie. It was bizarre at times and it clearly was made in 1990. The little synopsis provided by Cox said: “Filmmaker James Toback conducts radical interviews with various people on subjects like sex, death, God.” Basically the movie is the director James Toback interviewing people, asking all sorts of people the same questions. There is the Girl, the Mother, the Boy, the Basketball Star, the Violinist, the Artiste, the Humorist, the Jazz Man, the Astronomer, the Restauranteuse, the Model, the Philosopher, the Painter, the Medical Student, the Writer, the Filmmaker, the Gangster, the Boxer, and the Survivor.
James Toback asked them how they thought the Universe began, what they believed about God, about sex. It was great. It was amusing at times and it was really intense at other times. I was mesmerized by Fred Hess, the Astronomer, because the way he spoke about the big bang, about the conception of the universe, about our star, the sun, was very much like a Baptist preacher. It seemed wrong. The content of what he was saying vs. the way he was saying it. It was moving and confusing. Apparently, that’s his thing. He is often called the Evangelist for Astronomy. Barbara Traub, the Survivor, Holocaust survivor, Auschwitz survivor, was quite intense. She talked about losing her sense of identity. HEAVY. The Little Girl, Emma Astner, says about the conception of the universe, “First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat.” It is inspired and bizarre, but it holds up just as soundly as the other responses. The Basketball Star talked about having sex with so many women. The Mother talked about almost losing her mind when her daughter was killed. Don Simpson, producer of Top Gun, talked about his conservative upbringing in Alaska and how he became a humanist.
The Big Bang was an unexpected gem. It was the random outcome of a night of channel surfing. I’m a sucker for interviews. It was exactly what I needed.
The New York Times hated it. “What kind of people want to reveal their most profound thoughts and fears on screen? As it turns out, people who ultimately say very little, who are at best amusing, occasionally affecting and more often simply bland.” Well then.
Each person had their own environment that matched their context. The Evangelist for Astronomy was in a large dark room with a single light focused on him. The children were sitting on the carpet in a living room. The Mother seemed to be in a dark closet with only half of her face lit. The Artist was in a loft. The Philosopher is sitting a table next to a bright open window. The problem with the environments was that they lacked an overall cohesion. They almost seemed overly intentional and somewhat annoying.
Posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
I’m in a good mood. A stupid good mood. A good mood that I’m afraid will end with this cup of coffee. I finally started reading A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY . That helped my good mood. Also I made a really spicy dinner. Let me describe to you my space right now. I’m at my parents house in my room. I have sketches of the ZINE website I’m working on for the PF, Kurt V. book, ash from the incense, cables, boxes, little papers, check lists. It’s a weird in between time. Not long enough to fully unpack. But disorganized. I keep thinking about this song from This American Life by Mark Robinson . My eyes get moist when it comes on. Every time. Right now I’m listening to the Sun Song , which is also a good song.
I’m in a pretty good mood, but my coffee is getting cold so I need to hurry. I wanted to write a post because a) I haven’t, and b) I’m in the mood. Apparently it’s February and tomorrow’s the Super Bowl. Will someone hire me? I will work hard. I like to. Maybe I should work on my portfolio website. The problem is I don’t want to design things straightforward right now. The worst part about graduating from college is not being constantly busy. I like doing different projects. The other worst part is I have no where to go. I like to ride my bike to places, but I have no destination. I’m not required to be anywhere. Oh well. Maybe that will be my part. THE DANCE . I’m really nervous about doing this and it’s soon and there’s that.
I LOVE THE INTERNET:
Posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
I’d like to account for my time.
The Prescott Family
I’ve been deep into posting Events lately. I’m happy to say we have 8 upcoming events 12!!!!! The most ever! This is how we roll in 2008. Indeed, 2008. I foresee great things happen for the Prescott Family in 2008. More tours, more albums, more writing, more organization. We are no longer babies. We are becoming more established (especially in our own eyes). “Now other people are mentioning our names.”
fcgi
Since I’m going to be living at my parent’s house for a little while I need to keep busy. Along with working on our wedding and looking for a job I have been working relentlessly on websites. I’ve been especially into the “backend” stuff, making the whole experience run smoother. I decided to try out running Movable Type with FastCGI again. It’s easy enough to setup and everything is running well. The major problem I had before was with my templates, I had done things weirdly and there was a ton of broken links. The templates as they are now are feeling very MT4 so we are good to run our scripts fast.
webelongtoeachother
AKA our wedding website. It’s going to be sooo dope. I don’t want to make it “live” until we get the date because that’s a huge part of the design. Think registry, blog, interviews, and more!
Existential Media
Redesigned that shit. More javascript! “Random” header image! SLICK.
Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
