Patrick Gage Kelley

My laptop is dying a slow, sad death. This is because I normally forget to stop using it ever, and then the left fan died, and then the right fan died, and now everyday it cooks itself a little more. Sometimes programs crash randomly, sometimes really easy things to render like Finder and Safari windows don’t, sometimes I think it is just going to totally stop trying.

The solution to this issue was meant to be presented last week at MWSF 2008 where Mr. Steve Jobs was going to announce a wonderful new MacBook Pro to solve all of my problems and it was going to have more USB ports and maybe come in new and exciting colors and have other magical and secret features. However, this did not occur. That means the current laptop needs to survive another six to twelve months, because I refuse to buy Apple iAnythings when I know a next generation nicer iAnything AirTV 2.0 is right around the metaphorical corner.

However this computer simply is not cutting it (by it – I mean eve, and occasionally raw photographs) so, I need to take money and throw it at my problems. To better understand this process the following Technical Diagram™ provided by my esteemed colleague is presented for your more visual understanding of the situation.

The money will be thrown at a new desktop-like personal computer which I had said I was not going to ever purchase again because I was solely a laptop-kind-of-guy, but maybe I am not quite yet him.

I am obsessed.

The past three months have been waiting, the past two weeks compulsive reading, the past few days have been scanning forums, refreshing feed readers, and searching for news articles I haven’t yet seen, or seen quoted.

This all ends at noon, or maybe that is just the peak. Noon will bring my biannual opening of an irc client, safari with a tab for each blog that will be updating live, and an hour of watching, reading, smiling, and sending out myriad updates to anyone and everyone over aim & email.

I won’t make predictions here, I won’t claim to know what is going to happen, I have my guesses, but I will likely be happier if wrong. Yes, I certainly hope for a new MacBook Pro, which if released will ideally be ordered as soon as I can convince the advisors that I am a very good and deserving graduate student.

People can call me a fanboy or a fanatic or other likely worse things, that don’t even necessarily start with fan, but it really doesn’t matter. This happens twice a year and it is good to know that I can be passionate about something, even if it is the products of a single technology company, a company like every other, which will someday not exist. But as long as it can keep my (seemingly constant) attention I will keep Aluminum-Fruit-In-The-Air Inc. as my obsession, my cherished, my high-school crush.

Late Monday night was the Leopard Install. Tuesday was spent shuffling files between harddrives and the old and never-used desktop, and then setting Time Machine up overnight. So now I have been using Leopard for umm, well two days, but I already feel ready to judge it (actually I have been judging it all day).

The Install

The install went smoothly but took about an hour longer than it should have because I didn’t repairdisk first and so it spent about an hour doing that before it got around to installing. The rest of the install went smoothly.

The Immediately Broken

Peer Guardian does not work (and should be totally uninstalled) it was stopping me from playing DOTA. Growl doesn’t seem to be functioning as it was (like in Mail?) but I think that is just because I need new plugins. Quicksilver needed to be upgraded (manually?) to get its icon out of my dock. Aperture does not play well with Time Machine, and I think they actually have it set up so that it turns off automatic backups when it is run (with the 1.5.6 update)

The Later Broken

Aperture has crashed twice, Safari has crashed once (while I was writing the Halloween post), Photoshop has crashed at least three times, and that seems more unstable than on Tiger.

The Actually Better

Everything feels faster. I am not sure it really is but it feels faster and I like that. I like the unified UI, I think it is better than not, and I am adapting to it pretty quickly.

Spaces is really well integrated, and I have never liked virtual desktops really, but the trick is to get it to switch between them for you, by assigning your programs around. (I am currently using three in a row, loosely fun: adium/twitterific/iTunes; frequent: mail/vienna/ical; work: coda/terminal/photoshop; with Safari following me as I move, and everything else as of yet unassigned)

Time Machine is also just really good. It is of course totally useless right now, but it is real pretty, and I believe that at some point it will actually have benefit. Someday.

The Menubar

The Dock really doesn’t bother me as I have it over on the right, and it isn’t too troublesome over there. However, the menubar in its faded barely there new existance bothers me a lot. A whole lot.

The Menubar was once the solid beacon of program actions, it let you knew what was active, where you were, what you could do. It was a rock. The 22 pixels that it holds were never breached by any program, it was the permanent boundary, the one thing that was always on your screen. Now I can see my background through it, my starry galaxy default has crept behind it and is overpowering it. My windows have become much more prominent (by being darker) when active, and toolbars and shortcuts are covering all of its operations. It is now passive, just to hold my status icons. I fear for its longevity.

The Opinion

I needed Leopard, not getting it was simply not an option. I knew what it was, what benefits it had, and am pleased with the overall package, sure it has some problems, but the things it has fixed and improved are by far worth it.

The Setup

Below is my current desk set up, there are notes on the flickr picture if you click. The Europe game is in the background, Viridian is for Time Machine, Caerulean is for photos/music. Also the new keyboard, is really nice, and gives me a bonus USB port.

(p.s. my camera is super broken!)

At one point in my life I had three iPods. Some people claim I only had two and a half because the little pumpkin shuffle doesn’t count, but I disagree with those people. Also an iPhone is an iPod, it is their best iPod ever, remember?

But, back in July (this time in my life was very short lived, approximately … three weeks) one of these three iPods disappeared from my life forever. Yes, it was Sensuality (the big one on the left–the iPod Photo 60GB). She disappeared from the center console of Amy’s car overnight in a Chicago parking garage (Yes, beware of Travelodge & beware of valet parking, but that is not for this post). We traveled nearly all of our 6000 miles down to a shuffle and a phone (also Tulip. was stolen–Amy’s 20GB iPod 5G). We survived by purchasing CDs: Justice went over really well through Kansas, Justin Timberlake, The Starting Line, The Magic Numbers, Editors, and maybe a few more; though what really got us through was listening to Oh The Glory Of It All –books on tape aren’t so bad.

Either way, because I am a freak, I have a single photograph of the entire family together before the untimely loss of Sensuality. The question now is: With my $100 Apple Store Credit from the iPhone, do I hold onto it for a new MacBookPro in Jan/Feb or do I upgrade to a giant 160GB classic that for the first time ever will be able to hold my entire music collection?

Blingo.com tells me that it is possible to win things. So maybe you should look at it – and sign up because then i get bonus points, and such.

Also, can some one explain this to me:

You will notice this is … about 136 years. (This picture was not doctored, it is just GAIM being cool.)

And finally… I ordered this – Now I just have to wait about a month to get it. (Mine ships February 28th, according to what they sent me, the earliest ship the 15th from what I hear.)

Tomorrow is the big day. The keynote with Steve Jobs that is mysteriously not being broadcast on the internet. And an end to all the rumors we have been hearing over the past week or two about headless macs, littler ipods , bigger littler ipods, applications for word processing, and cheaper big ipods.

Personally, I am waiting for that last one. I have decided that I am willing to buy an ipod with all this money I am going to make from co-op. Not that it even pays that well. But either way, I am going to clean up the music on my computer into neat and tidy folders so I can find everything. Delete the stuff I don’t ever listen to, and put it all on my brand new ipod of a size yet to be determined.

But other than that. Work keeps going, seven weeks left (or less). Joined book club with Carol, reading We The Living for January 25th. Still need to go pick up book at library, which I think I can find. Also reading Adrienne Rich’s new book, The School Among the Ruins, which I picked up at Barnes and Nobles when I was looking for the Ayn Rand book.

I think that is about all I have right now. Still working on that books section, and thinking about the idea of a photo blog .

Have a lovely evening.

I have been taking my computer into work the past few days, and decided today it was time to go talk to my system admin. to see what I need to do to put it on the network.

So, I go in to his office, which is mind you literally four feet away from the computer lab where I have taken up residency of late, and say, “If I have a laptop, I could bring it in, right?”

He answers, yes and that is all fine, he just needs to look at it and make sure there is virus software installed and so forth, and then he will set it up to have network access.

Well, my computer is a 15” Titanium Powerbook, you know old school, no light-up keyboard, wireless reception not so good because it is hard to get signals through a titanium shell, been dropped a few too many times, laptop. It is also a mac.

Does it have virus software? No. Will it get a virus? Probably not, no one cares enough to make viruses, and it is built of linux so the security is decent to start with. So, I bring it in to his office, he looks at it, groans, and says “oh, it’s a mac”.

Why, yes. How kind of you to notice! It is a mac. He decides he doesn’t need to look at it and I am then allowed to return to my desk with double network access.