wheatblog

Barnes discusses his novel, Arthur & George:

Nuby, originally uploaded by wheat.

Gina posted a few new pix of our boy, Haden, mostly from the recent Arkansas trip.  You can see the lot of them via this handy shortcut:  hadenmartin.com.

My new iMac arrived last week, so I’ve been busy porting over files, installing software, and learning about OS X and all things iMac (that’s Haden an me, playing around with Photo Booth).  

Back in the day, I was a Mac guy.  My dad bought me a nice Mac Classic II toward the end of my undergraduate studies.  I love it and got very familiar with its ins and outs.  I learned how to program HyperCard and even did some MIDI work with it, though it was mostly a word processing machine (via MacWrite II and Claris Works).  After that, I upgraded to a Mac Performa 631CD, which was a 68040-based machine with a CD drive (rare at the time) and a color monitor (now I feel old).  

When the Performa died, I was in grad school and had access to some nice Quadras via the media production lab.  I could access those at any hour of the day or night.  And I was broke anyway, so I didn’t bother to replace it. 

Since then, I’ve had two Windows laptops (both Dells).  The first ran Windows 98, which I later upgraded to Windows 2000.  My most recent one, which I still have, came with Windows XP Home, which I later upgraded to Windows XP Professional.  

And, you know, Windows XP is fine.  It’s a pretty solid and easy to use operating system.  But my laptop was just too slow and old.  And, since I can run XP on Mac hardware (for those times when I need it), I figured, why not see if the grass is greener?  There’s never been any love lost between me and Microsoft, even though a big part of what I do, professionally, is teach people how to use their products.  

So, since last week, I’ve been busy.  I’ve ported all my photographs from Adobe Photoshop Elements (I was still using version 3.0) to iPhoto.  I ported all my iTunes music, but the external drive where it lives took a dive (thanks for nothing, LaCie), so I’ll have to reinstall that from backups (thank to you, SyncBack) and port it again (the media is the same, but the paths are specified differently on WinXP compared to OS X).  My photos also lived on that drive that went down (and were also backed up, thankfully).  And I had set up WMware Fusion (running WinXP as the guest OS), so I could keep editing them as I had in the past.  But, after the drive died, I pulled everything from backups and dropped it all into iPhoto.  I’ll still need Fusion to run some WinXP-only apps like Sony Acid Pro, but that’s just for legacy audio production files.  

So far, so good.  I’ve been really enjoying OS X, the extra screen real estate, and the overall speed and performance boost.  Thanks to lots of chatting with my Mac friends, I’ve been getting my box lined out with the software I need.  So far, that means TextWrangler, NeoOffice, Skype, plus the aforementioned VMware Fusion and nice built-in apps like iChat.  

And, since I can’t sleep at night without a decent automated backup solution (and since I no longer have any confidence in my other–still working–LaCie drive), I bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book drive and have Time Machine saving all my stuff to it.  

Today’s Krugman is not to be missed:  ”Know-Nothing Politics.”  The term “anti-intellectualism” covers the same ground, but it probably has too many syllables for the people who need to understand it.  Though his words be immediately taken out of context (hell, I’ve done it in the title of this post), the point isn’t that Republicans are stupid.  The point is that the Republican party has earned a lot of political clout by repeatedly asserting that every problem has an overtly simple solution and that thinking things through is both effeminate and ineffective (you could extrapolate this to politicians in general, but it’s currently the stock-in-trade of the GOP).  BushCo’s reign of error has certainly shown the flaw in that “logic.”  But that doesn’t seem to shake people’s faith in the (toxic) idea.   

Because life is incredibly busy at the moment, here’s a capsule summary of recent events, which I may or may not expand upon in later posts (time allowing):

1. We’re back from our Arkansas trip.  Haden’s Christening/Baptism went well, as did the big family brunch afterwards, which was the first time most of my family and Gina’s have come together for one big event.  Pix to follow.
2. I finished William James’ Pragmatism, which I’d long wanted to read.  Highly recommended, both for substance and style.  
3. I finally got to see No Country For Old Men, which I enjoyed, especially Tommy Lee Jones’ character.

That’s the quick rundown.  I’ll expand upon each when I can find the time.      

It doesn’t seem like five years have gone by.  Cheers, Pop.  

Google Docs has long had the ability to publish documents to the web, either to a select group of fellow viewers and editors, or for general consumption.  But two additional features make it a potentially useful and simple way to publish all manner of complicated documents.  First is the ability to easily create links from one document to the other.  And the other is the ability to control the rather lackluster layout of the publish documents via the new “Edit CSS” feature.  

For instance, I’ve been tinkering with putting together some grammar guides for my students, as a little extra help on topics with which they have the most trouble.  So I created this one on possessive nouns and pronouns (you’d be amazed how many college students have trouble with these).  I was pretty happy with that, so I decided to do one on another common problem, pronoun case.  Then I realized I might as well create a table of contents and link these to it (and link out to any new ones I create).  

(I’m still working on the title. The current one seems too stuffy.  I’m tempted to call it “Wheat’s Grammar Book,” but I don’t want my students calling me “Wheat.”)

I use a tiny bit of CSS to make the published versions look more like they do in Google Doc’s word processor’s fairly new “fixed-width page view” (it’s an option on the “View” menu).  You can add it via the “Edit CSS…” command (which is on the “Edit” menu):

body { width: 800px; margin: 32px; padding: 32px; border: 1px solid gray; }

I look for them every summer.  South Carolina doesn’t have a helmet law, so most riders don’t bother with one.  That’s bad enough, of course.  But the hot Carolina summer also encourages light clothing.  Yet, until yesterday, I hadn’t seen the ultimate idiot clothing combination–that rare complete disregard for any sort of safety equipment.  Well, I finally saw it:  no helmet, shorts, tank top, and flip flops!  

You see quite a lot of riders in in t-shirts and jeans.  But they usually have the good sense to wear decent shoes or boots.  Even those dumb enough to opt for shorts rarely go the whole hog and ride with nothing but flip flops.  But, there you have it.  To be fair, the idiot in question did have some aviator shades on.  I guess that counts for something.  

Hey, congressional “Democrats,” here’s another chance to roll over ”compromise” with your fiends across the isle: President Bush to Lift Executive Ban on Offshore Drilling.  Go ahead, you hypocrites.  Time to jump up (again) into Bush’s lap like the good little lapdogs you are.  Otherwise, you’ll be painted as in favor of four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline.  Hurry!  See if you can be first to sell out your party for a short-term, political gain!

In a Zen garden sort of way:  thisissand.com (via MeFi).