Category: Revelation

Cool toy OTD

The new Google Maps service is very nicely interactive. You can drag maps around with the mouse instead of clicking and waiting for a refresh. Plus the directions search works extremely well, as does the “nearby business” search. Unfortunately it only supports Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers and IE, but then again why would anybody want a browser other than Firefox?

One interesting quirk – if you ask for directions to ROC (it takes airport identifiers as well as addresses), it gives you directions to the general aviation area at the south end of the field off Scottsville Rd, instead of to the passenger terminal at the north end off Brooks Ave. I’m not sure why that would happen, since a web search for the airport’s name finds my flying club’s web page ranked well below the airport’s own web page, and the airport’s official address is on Brooks Ave, not on Scottsville Rd.

In other news, GMail must be about to come out of beta, because I suddenly have 50 invites to give out, instead of the usual 4-5. If you want a gmail invite, email ptomblin at gmail.com.

Weird flight last night

Last night’s commercial flight from Chicago to Rochester, there were a few strange things:

  • When they said we were over Buffalo, I looked out the window and I swear we were only about 8,000 feet up. I didn’t know jets got such gradual descents.
  • A few seconds before landing, we did a fairly abrupt left turn, about 30 degrees. It looked like it was well inside the outer marker, so I don’t think it was a turn to join the ILS. We landed on 4 and it seemed like we got to the 10-28 runway crossing pretty quickly. I wonder if they accidentally lined up on 7 and realized the mistake and turned to 4 as they crossed it? I hope not, because that would lose them about 3,000 feet of landing room.
  • And as I mentioned earlier, our baggage went missing. It showed up about 9:30 this morning. The agent in Rochester mentioned that over 10 bags missed the flight. Since there were two later direct flights, I’m not sure why our bags didn’t arrive later that night though.

I hate flying commercial.

An oldie but a baddie

One of the headlines in today’s Slashdot:

Your Rights Online: US ISP Terminates Iranian News Website

My first thought: “You’re not missing anything, the whole site was pure shite”.

Ba-da-dum.

Ok, it helps me not obsess over the two fucking annoying SUV drivers (but I repeat myself) who double teamed me when I tried to get into a parking space this morning. You know, if every SUV driver were to vanish from the face of the earth, I don’t think we’d miss them. (Steve Cherry doesn’t count, he drives a mini-SUV (an CRX or Rav4 or Suziki or something of that nature).)

Best feature ever

My new 17″ PowerBook arrived today. Vicki knew I couldn’t wait, so she phoned me while the FedEx guy was still there and I rushed home to get it. It’s the most beautiful piece of computing hardware I’ve ever seen in my life.

Apple has put the coolest feature ever in it, because the beauty of their OS. After I’d decided to order it, I was making mental notes of what to do to transfer everything I need off the old one onto this one. But a friend clued me in: I didn’t need to bother. Instead, when I booted it up, it asked me if I was upgrading from a previous computer. I clicked “Yes”, and it said to connect a firewire cable betwen the two computers. I did, and then it said to boot the old computer with the “T” key held down. It took me three tries, because the first two times I did a “Restart” from the menu – when I took Rob’s advice and powered it down and then booted with the “T” key, I got the Firewire logo on the screen on the old Powerbook, and the new Powerbook recognized it. It showed me all the user accounts and gave me the choice to transfer any and all of them, settings, applications, and “other files”. I chose them all, and went to lunch. When I came back, the transfer was done, and it’s amazing – even the files are arranged the same way on my desktop.

I’ve tried a few of the most important applications and they work fine – Quickbooks has all my account information, Photoshop Elements works, Firefox complains that it can’t reach my home pages (no network connection here at work). A couple of problems – PostgresSQL seems to be installed but not started up (and I can’t remember the PostgresSQL password), jikes isn’t installed at all (although fink is, amazingly enough), the kernel module that maps the caps lock to control doesn’t load, and X11 doesn’t start. Shouldn’t take long to fix those things up.

All I can say is SWEEEEEET. I’ll probably put some pictures of it up on my picture gallery soon.