Reading really is fundamental. I saw a post on Lifehacker about Syncplicity finally opening their beta to Mac users, and so, having never heard of this software, I read on. The post mentioned something about file sharing, and I was intrigued. I don’t really do the whole file-sharing thing anymore, and I think a lot of other people have moved away from it, too, so I was interested in what Lifehacker recommended.

I downloaded the program, and was initially confused as to how it worked. Where was the interfact? How could I see what other people were offering? Since it was a private beta, I was willing to be a little more trusting and was hoping that I’d find some good and/or rare music. So I read the guide on how to get started, but still wasn’t seeing anything relevant to file-sharing. I went back to Lifehacker to reread the post, and lo and behold, it’s a file SYNCing program, to sync files and content across two (free) or more (paid subscription) computers.

I’m such a dummy. I can’t believe I misread that so many times. If I’d been thinking, which I clearly wasn’t even the program’s name would have tipped me off.

And, just having checked, it seems that MOST of my multitouch gestures are not working with Opera. The only thing that works right off the bat is navigating up and down a page. Bummer.

All things Opera

The last time I thought that Opera was working with Multi-Touch/Multiclutch gestures, I closed it down completely (carrying over no windows between sessions), only to find that I had been mistaken. Again. I was so disappointed that I didn’t open the program for over a week. I hear that lots of Mac users don’t like Safari, but I’m finding that it suits my needs pretty nicely (although I do still also use Firefox on occasion).

Today, though, I wanted to use a fresh browser to check for airfare, and didn’t feel like going through and deleting all of my travel-related cookies from Safari and Firefox. I opened Opera, and was informed that new build was fixed. I downloaded it, and HUZZAH!! It does work with Multi-touch gestures. Immediately, with no dumb luck involved. Unfortunately, my bookmarks didn’t make it from one version to the next, but that was easy enough to remedy. It seems like such a stupid thing to dump a browser over, but I’m so used to this now, that I hate maneuvering without my gestures, and I think my windows laptop is little more than a lapwarmer.

Speaking of opera, I just realized that I didn’t speak about my trip to see Aida last week. Eyes are floating shut, more on that later.

Windows 7? On my PC? It’s less likely than you think!

Because it was so easy to put Windows 7 on my MacBook, I was sure that it would be at least as simple to do so on my Gateway pc. I mean, Gateways are native Microsoft environments, so what could possibly be so difficult, right? WRONG. It turns out that Vista sucks every bit as much as you may have heard, and so, instead of being able to partition my hard drive and make space for Windows 7, I have just spent large chunks of the last three days figuring out how to partition my hard drive. I had 113 GB of free space on the drive, and Vista said that a grand total of 98 MB of that was available to be partitioned.

So what was the problem? Vista has built-in software to do partition drives, but the way that it stores system files means that all my free space is basically worthless. Vista’s default storage area for system files is at the very end of the hard drive, which means that you can’t lop off any part of the drive until you’ve moved those system files further in. It’s not hard to fix, but you can’t do it with tools provided within Vista.

Here’s the tutorial that I used to figure out what to do. Some notes: I used PerfectDisk2008 with no problem (there are many versions of PerfectDisk to choose from when you get to that web site). When you’ve finished the regular defrags, choose the System Files option in PerfectDisk. This will require a restart of your system, but took less than 5 minutes on my system. I went from seeing 3 GB of space (after I deleted my pagefile) to over 100 GB.

I’m having some of the same trackpad issues with Windows 7 on my MacBook that others have had, which is one of the reasons I wanted to try Windows 7 on my pc laptop. I’ll use it for a couple of days and then give my thoughts on both experiences.

I’m really disturbed by how hard I laughed at this Fark thread.

Just how big a nerd am I?

I dual-booted OS X and Windows 7, just to see if I could.

Windows 7 is pretty interesting so far, but I finished the install and played with the whole setup for about 20 minutes before I had to go to bed. Will explore more later.

There are few things in this world that I find as relaxing as sifting dry ingredients.

There are few things in this world that I find as stress-inducing as trying to clean the remnants of dry ingredients from my sifter…

Drat

Movie popcorn, with all of its butter (I know it’s actually butter-flavored oil, because my friend Elizabeth, who used to work at the movies, always calls it oil, but I’d like to pretend that it’s butter) has ruined me for regular popcorn out of the microwave. And I can’t bring myself to add butter to this stuff when I know how not good for me it already is, so now I’m stuck eating dry, dissatisfying popcorn. Oy.

The only saving grace is that my microwave’s popcorn setting somehow sucks, and managed not to pop a good quarter of the kernels, so at least I’m eating less crappy popcorn than I could be…

Museum of Natural History

As I mentioned yesterday, on Monday I took my nephew to the American Museum of Natural History. I had no idea what to expect of a 3-year-old in a museum, and I really wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d wanted to leave after an hour. When we went to see Madagascar 2, he pretty much hated the experience after 10 minutes, and I kind of thought that I might be crazy to try to take him to the museum, but I hadn’t been in over a decade and thought it was time. Here are a couple of pictures, but I took a passel and they can be seen here on Flickr.

Well! Satanski had a great time, and we ended up staying for five hours. We made it there in time to join the storytime group that meets in the morning. From there, we went to the butterfly exhibit. Note to self: 3-year-olds don’t seem to like things that fly around and threaten to land on them, even when said flying things are gorgeous. One butterfly actually did land on the kid, but (mercifully) it was on his shoulder, and he didn’t notice. A kind girl of about 8 attempted to let him know, but I quietly asked her not to, and she complied. She did immediately request of her father and brother, though, that they let her know if any of the butterflies landed on her.

When we left, the guards ask Satanski if he’d had a good time, and he told them, “No, the butterflies are scary.” It was pretty cute. The rest of the day was spent on lunch, dinosaurs, various realistic-dead (or fake) animals, and more play, and then we called it a day and came home. The kid fell asleep on the bus, and if there’d been somebody to carry me, I would have joined him.

A side of WTF with my OMG

Okay, Obama. Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? Seriously? This is troublesome, unless of course you would like to consider Press Secretary Jon Stewart, and then all will be forgiven (until the next boneheaded cabinet appointment). I know that Dr. Gupta really is a surgeon, but do we really need to resort to selecting our Cabinet members from basic cable? Were there no other authoritative, intelligent, reasonable surgeons in the whole country? This is not going to help matters with those who find Obama’s worldview to be drastically different than their own.

In good news, Al Franken is now the governor of Minnesota. I know! Even when I was rooting for him, I didn’t think that he had any sort of chance. The results were close enough that Coleman is definitely going to pursue a legal challenge, but for now, we have a former Saturday Night Live actor as a state’s governor. Of course, Minnesota famously elected Jesse Ventura, so it’s not like Franken is even the most interesting television performer elected in the Gopher State.

If you’re wondering why I’m more okay with Franken being senator than Sanjay Gupta Surgeon General, here’s a short list:

• Shut up.

My knitblog is now located at http://aimlessknitter.com. I have nothing but fondness for Google and Blogger, but Dreamhost was having a sale that was too good to pass up. I got the domain, plus two years of hosting, for a grand total of $22. Can’t beat that.

I’m on vacation this week, and had actually considered going somewhere, before I realized that I just wanted to relax. Yeah, right. First, my nephew’s school was unexpectedly closed yesterday, and I was the only adult not working, so I got to hang out with him. We actually had a blast, and went to the American Museum of Natural history, but relaxing my day was not.

Then, today, my brother needed me to go to his house and stay while the gas people installed a new boiler. Did I mention that I had to be there by 7:45? That’s earlier than I even awaken on those days that I am working. Un. Fair. Then, depending on who you believe, he may or may not have informed his girlfriend that I was going to wait for the repairdudes, so she was there and had intended to stay. So I probably didn’t even really need to be up and over there so early.

The best part of boiler installation is that it involves turning off all heat for two and a half hours. They did have space heaters there, but that place is like an obstacle course, and it wasn’t worth risking my life to locate, extricate, and plug in said heaters. The repair was over around 1, so I got lunch, went home, and promptly turned up my own heat to 74 (just for a little while).

I spent this afternoon warming up and taking all of my pictures off of Google’s server and bringing them over the to new domain. I refuse to pay Google for more storage, so I’ll do anything to save a few megs (of course, I could take smaller pictures, but I haven’t gotten that desperate yet). I’ve already created on extra gmail account to get more picture space, but now that I have MobileMe and a pro Flickr account, I don’t expect that I’ll be jumping through many more hoops regarding photo storage space. [Although it may seem counterintuitive to pay for Flickr and MobileMe, but not Google space, it’s just the principle of the thing. I have a gazillion unused gigs in my Gmail accounts, and Google still expects me to fork over cash to have a place to store my pictures? No way.] While in a photo-manipulating mood, I also uploaded several albums to Flickr and MobileMe. I must say, I have accomplished more this vacation than I have on some genuine work weeks.