About the new theme

I liked my previous theme, whose monochromatic look really made me happy, but I got sick of the lack of line returns. It looked like I was bunching my text and photos, which wasn’t. Promise! So I’m going to find a theme that I like and that looks good and that lets you know when I pressed enter during a post. This current theme is temporary.

More on Snow Leopard

Hmm. So I’ve had a bit more time to play with it, and it seems like the backspace/delete thing cleared up on its own after I restarted the computer again. Saft is still NOT showing up in Safari, although the software update says that I have the newest version. Multiclutch commands are still not working with me in Safari, so I’m not sure what’s going on with that program. I know that a new version was included with Snow Leopard, but if this isn’t fixed soon, I am going to downgrade to a previous version and see if that makes a difference.

Update: Yay! I was reading TUAW today, and it seems that the problem may be that Safari 4 is now running in 64 bit mode, and the plugins I was talking about only work in 32 bit. Here’s the post. Whew. I’m not at home, so I have to wait until after work to check, but I really hope this is the solution.

On the plus side, I’ve noticed that my computer seems to charge more quickly.

Snow Leopard

I upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard over the weekend. I’d read all sorts of favorable reviews (TUAW offers a roundup), and I found them convincing enough to plunk down $30 bucks. On the whole, the changes to OS X are small (at least for my purposes). Aside from manipulating my photos, and sometimes editings mp3s and videos, I don’t do a whole lot of media-related stuff on my computer. I do find a couple of the new features in Snow Leopard to be awesome. I like being able to view pdfs right from the folder without having to open preview and I love that transferring data is appreciably faster. Still, and I don’t know if it’s just my computer, I discovered that a few things are not working the way I’d hoped they would.

• Saft doesn’t give me an error about not working with Safari 4, but I don’t see the Saft menu when I go to options.
• Function + delete isn’t working as a Wind0ws-style delete for me, and it’s driving me nuts.
• Some of the Multiclutch functions that I programmed for Safari 4 in Leopard don’t seem to be working.

I actually only noticed most of these things last night, and I didn’t look into them too much, because I was finishing up a pair of socks (which came out beautifully, I know you were wondering). I’m not going to be home tonight until late, so I probably won’t get to it until tomorrow at the earliest. A quick glance at some Mac blogs showed that while people are definitely having problems related to upgrading , nobody has mentioned the problems that I’m having. Yay for being uniquely troubled!

In case you have already upgraded to Snow Leopard, MacLife offers a list of 100 tips, tricks, and features that are new to this version of OS X.

Not the kind of time machine I meant

Oh allergies. Why must you ruin my Thursday?

My Time Machine backup drive died suddenly last week. I don’t know if it was age (two years) or the heat, but it just stopped working in the middle of the day, and wouldn’t come back on. I got a 1.5 TB drive (Newegg’s having a sale on external HDs, if anybody is interested), and made my previous backup drive into my new Time Machine. I was searching online to see what other people do when their time machine goes kaput. The search string “Time Machine failed” wasn’t very promising, so I switched to “Time Machine Died.”

I love (LOVE!) how the first result is some “article” on figuring out whether it’s possible to travel to the past and, say, shoot and kill your grandfather. Ooo-kay. It’s a little “how is babby formed,” but kind of a fun way to waste a couple of minutes.

I still haven’t figured out what the deal is with my dead dead HD, but I’ll worry about that later. I’m home sick today, so I think I’m going to take some allergy meds, motrin, and sleep til I know no more.

Wait for it…

I have taken an insane number of pictures here in California, and will upload them to my various services (Facabook, Flickr, etc.) on Thursday. My hotel charges for internet, so technically it is available, but since I think it’s a disgrace for such a nice hotel to charge for something as basic as internet connectivity, I absolutely refuse to pay for it. It’s a good thing I can tether my phone to my computer, right? I feel so smart every time I connect. Still, that connection isn’t really fast enough to transmit large files, so I’ll wait until I get home.

Still working on it

I’m still working out the kinks with this site; I am in search of a theme that 1) doesn’t make me want to retch and 2) doesn’t have a lot of extraneous BS. I want nice, but not busy, interesting, but not insane. It’s a fine line, I guess. I’m not saying anything amazing on this site, so I don’t actually want to have to pay for a theme that will be worth more than all the words I’m saying here. I guess I shall keep looking.

Getting there

Okay. The domain transfer is finally completed, although it certainly took longer than Dreamhost estimated. WordPress, are you in denial over my abandonment? Get over it.

So now I’ve transferred my settings, plugins, posts, and attachments. I also got a new theme and changed the domain where my blog resides. I’m feeling pretty good about myself (aside from my yoga-related aches).

But I just noticed that every category came over about six times, which means I’ve got some deleting to do. Oy.

Update: Okay, I fixed the category BS, but now I see that comment counts aren’t showing up. Hardly anybody ever comments here, which is fine, but if I ever do get a freaking comment, I want to know it!

Hmmm

I requested that my domain be transferred to Dreamhost from WordPress last Wednesday, and as of yet, I’ve received no notification from WordPress that the process is complete. I’m not sure what the deal is with the holdup, but I do not appreciate it!

Moving

I will soon be moving to a new host, so this web site may look a little wonky over the next few days. I’ll update when things are all settled over at my new host.

Stupid Apple

Oh Apple, why must you break my heart? As anybody who has ever seen me with my laptop knows, I am in lurve with my MacBook. It’s pretty, it’s cool, it’s fast, and it has opened up a different world of computing. My geeky soul finds this deeply satisfying. So why did Apple have to go and release pretty much MY computer with an updated screen, built-in card reader, and lower price? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

That is so not cool. Right now, I’m weighing my options. Should I make a fuss with Apple? I do enjoy my computer, and I just bought the MacUpdate bundle, so for the last day I’ve been playing around with Parallels 4 and Windows 7. (As an aside, I cannot say enough good things about this bundle. Even if the rest of the apps sucked, which they don’t, Parallels 4 would make the whole thing worthwhile, as it retails for $79.99 and the bundle was only $49.99.) It’s been nice to use my multitouch gestures on the Windows platform, or switch back and forth between Leopard and Windows 7.

But why in the name of all that is holy did Apple have to do this to me? Couldn’t they have waited at least one year? I’m finding it different to read the reactions on Engadget and Gizmodo. The commenters at the former seem more down on Apple, while people more fanboyish seem to frequent the latter.

Really, I was looking forward to today’s announcements because I thought they were going to announce a new iPhone. They did, the iPhone 3GS, and it’s totally underwhelming. It’s faster, but it still lacks a camera, AT&T is being slow to add MMS support, and they’ve said nothing about officially sanctioned tethering, even though other international iPhone carriers are supporting it immediately. Wake me when the HTC Touch Pro 2 is released. Also of interest is the announcement that Snow Leopard will be available starting in September, and that the upgrade will cost only $29.