Growing Up, Falling Down

I’ve started a photoblog using the new template WordPress released—very nice stuff. So far I think it might actually surpass this blog in updates. I am challenging myself to post once a day, with a new picture. We’ll see.

http://growingupfallingdown.wordpress.com/

Things I Don’t Like About Mac: Focus Stealing

In early 2007 I got my first real job and with the money I earned I fulfilled a dream I had had for years: I bought a Mac. One of the newly introduced Intel iMacs, to be specific. It was a big change from the then four-year old Dell laptop I had that was literally falling apart (the hinge broke and the screen fell off). I had expected that all my frustrations from Windows were about to be completely solved. I realize now that was naïve of me.

If you’re considering switching to Mac from Windows, know this:

Switching to Mac from Windows isn’t going to end all your frustrations with your computer; you will merely experience new frustrations.

This is the first of a progressive series of posts about the dark-side of Mac, things which compared to Windows are annoying.

On Windows, I used a small, little-known app called TweakUI which Microsoft actually published on their website apart from Windows. It had many small little ‘tweaks’ you could do to Windows, such as hiding the curled arrow on shortcut icons. One rather obscure setting was called something like ‘Prevent other applications from stealing focus’. What this essentially meant was, while you were using one application, another couldn’t ’steal focus’ and pop up on top of what you were doing. Clicking this one checkbox would prevent that from ever happening in Windows.

In Mac, I haven’t found a quick fix like this, nor have I been able to explain it to a long-time Mac user well enough for them to suggest fixes. And actually, I think Mac applications are worse about stealing focus. With a Mac and its power, you’re tempted to do more things at once than you might have with a PC, and so the problem becomes worse. For instance, plugging in my iPod while talking to someone on Adium. I continue typing, when suddenly iTunes notices the iPod is there and iTunes jumps to the front. Suddenly, I’m typing into iTunes and not Adium. This usually leads to a chorus of error beeps because you’re not supposed to be typing there.

An Impression

I’m a rather observant person usually. I tend to notice more than most others around me. I also tend to notice more in the same things that others do. When I people, a situation, a photograph, etc. I tend to entertain in my mind what it must feel like to be them, be there, experiencing them and their thoughts and emotions.

Some time ago I came upon the following image on Flickr. It struck me as very impressionable, and I started to write down my first impressions of it. Then I thought it would be interesting to hear other people’s first impressions of the same image.

Photo by Ben Hodson

• Looks like you’re waiting for something.
• Looks like you’ve been waiting a while.
• Looks like you’ll be waiting for even longer.
• Looks like you’ve got a lot on your mind
• Looks like you’d rather not think about it
• Looks like you’d rather not think about much of anything

What are your first impressions of this man?

The Worst Actors Fool Us the Most

I got to thinking the other day while watching television (what a shock! I usually don’t) that acting on television is so unrealistic at times. Although there are good and bad actors, I discovered something: you accept it anyway. Often we don’t even recognize that we’re being fooled—we simply blindly accept this contained reality that we know is so obviously unreal.

As just one example of many I could give, I’d like to mention a realization I had where I realized that I had been fooled. Having once been extremely—blindly, even—religious, I had owned and watched the movies based on Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series. In them, actor Brad Johnson plays Rayford Steele, an airline captain who ponders cheating on his wife Irene with one of his flight attendants. Then the rapture happens, taking his wife and son and leaving him and his daughter, Chloe, behind. Rayford feels ashamed and eventually becomes saved and follows God. This was the only time I had ever seen Brad Johnson in anything, and I suppose that, in my mind, I had associated Rayford Steele with Brad Johnson.

Thus when I saw Wild Things 3 (which I wouldn’t recommend), and I saw Johnson as a corrupt man conspiring with two bisexual twenty-somethings—whom he was having affairs with—to steal diamonds worth a lot of money, it just didn’t seem right to me. Surely Brad Johnson wouldn’t lower himself to play such a role as that? That’s just not in his character! Wrong: that wouldn’t be in Rayford Steele’s character.

Now this doesn’t necessarily make Brad Johnson a good actor, but I was—subconsciously, at least—fooled by his act. Thinking more about it, it’s more like that in real life than we think. People generally think they’re fooled by good actors—people who pretend, rather successfully, to be that which they aren’t. However, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the worst actors fool us the most because we see them that way. Sometimes the people you think you know most completely have, in fact, fooled you completely.

I will likely expand upon this topic or similar ones eventually, but as for the moment, I have no time.

Migration Plans

I type this post through an Apple (wired) keyboard hooked to a 1st Gen MacBook. I’ve been severely disappointed in the quality of the MacBook (at least mine, anyway), when compared to the 5th Gen iMac I had before it. I’ve pretty quickly outgrown this machine. Given that later this month I graduate high school, I’ve managed to get my parents to agree in buying me a MacBook Pro for college (which starts in Fall).

Along with switching to a new computer comes data migration. How will I transfer everything over to the new one, and make sure that everything works? Given that I’m a developer, this is especially challenging because I have many things installed and configured just so. I need to get all of my music, photos, movies, and other media over to the MacBook Pro, while at the same time getting Apache configured, Django installed and configured, fighting to get MySQL installed, making sure I’ve got all Python libraries I’ve used in my apps installed,…the list just goes on.

I’ve decided pretty much to migrate as follows:

I have a 160GB external drive currently plugged into my MacBook when it’s at my desk. Of course I take my MacBook out with me, but when I’m at my desk, the external drive is there. I keep some files I don’t use much, but which are large, on the drive, and also share it over my network using SharePoints. I’ve chosen to transfer my files onto it, then plug it to the MacBook Pro and dump them onto the HD that way, rather than sending files over the network (which would go through the air at some point, and thus bottleneck at 54Mbps)

Transferring my media from iLife applications shouldn’t be too hard. I use the same username on all my machines, so the paths on the new machine should be mostly the same unless Apple changed something about the filesystem structure in Leopard (I’m still running Tiger). When I switched from the iMac to the MacBook all I had to do was copy the directories back to where they were. So the paths were still the same, and all the paths in the library files were still correct despite it being a completely different machine (for example, /Users/zacharytamas/Music/iTunes/) iTunes and iPhoto are about the only two iLife apps that I use that regularly enough that migration is that big of an issue. I don’t expect any problems when it comes to that.

However, migrating my development stuff is going to be very interesting. I’m at an advantage, however, as I’ll be starting with a completely new slate. I’ve had to do so much command-line tweaking and hacking to get things to work. When I first got the MacBook I was into Rails development, so I have the whole suite of Rails dev tools (Ruby, mySQL bindings for Ruby, etc.) installed alongside my Python/Django installation. Combined with a botched Apache2 and mod_python installation, I’m sure the underbody of my operating system looks an intertwined, ugly mess. Switching to Mac was the first time I had ever regularly used a UNIX based operating system, so I’ve had a lot of learning to do. This time around things should be much simpler, and more organized. Apart from a Leopard base install, all I really need to install and get working is mySQL and Django, and the bindings between them. I don’t even have to install Subversion now, thanks to Apple’s including it in Leopard. I shouldn’t have to upgrade Python  this time around, either. Last time I had to install Python 2.5, and then recompile other related things and bindings to get my Django installation working as it should. I’m sure it’s all effed up, but it works.

However, I suppose I’m going to have to manually reinstall the Python extensions I’ve installed. I know better than to just copy my site-packages folder to the new system and expect it to work. Unless anyone knows a better way, I’m just going to install them as they’re asked for, hoping that eventually the apps I try to run stop throwing errors. There aren’t many that are absolutely necessary, anyhow.

</geek>

Whenever the MacBook Pro gets here I’m sure I’ll write about how it all ends up.

Stirb nicht ohne mich

Lately I’ve begun to learn German. It’s such a harsh, but beautiful language to me. I’m sure I’ll be blogging my progress along the way.

I’ve still yet to decide just what this blog will be. A blog without a purpose can hardly be a good thing, I know, but with any hope I can find focus and refine it to be something someone might actually want to read.

High hopes in blogging and Deutsches!

Making a Decision

I am a web designer/developer by trade. I have always been somehow talented in creative arts. From photography to design to music. However, I’m also bi-polar and have some serious ADD tendencies. Because of this I hardly ever finish anything really intensive unless I’m pushed—and then I’ll get mad at the pusher. Terrible cycle, but it’s me.

I suppose it’s pride, perhaps, but when it comes to hosted blogging solutions like WordPress I used to think it was cool but ‘not for me’. It was for people who couldn’t setup and design a blog for themselves, right? Whenever I would think about starting a blog hosted on WordPress.com. I would always quickly turn myself down the mental road of “No, I wouldn’t have enough control over it. I couldn’t make it represent my full potential because of the limitations placed on me by WordPress. Before doing that, I should just go get the source code, design my blog from scratch, and deploy it on my own server.” That’s all fine and dandy, however there would be a problem: somewhere along that process I would stop and not finish it. The whole idea of having a blog is to write and get your words out there. With a half-finished blog, I wouldn’t be doing any of that. So, finally, getting a WordPress.com blog cuts to the chase and gets me straight to writing.

I’ve always had an interest in writing. Like other things, it has always came easy to me. I love writing, however the aforementioned tendencies usually cause me to not finish or even start ideas I have for writing. I suppose I need to work on my drive.

Over the past year I’ve changed a lot. Gears and cogs have started turning in my mind, slowly starting a machine that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s refreshing, really, though I wish I knew just the reason why. I believe, however, it’s the natural progression of maturity in my life. In less than a month I graduate from high school and my real life begins. Not that the 18 years I’ve already lived hasn’t counted for anything, but it’s only a precursor to what is ahead of me. Other factors may have stimulated this change, such as my being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called localized sclerosis. I’m currently undergoing chemotherapy for that, although I try to remain in good spirits about it. Sometimes I think hope is all I have, but it’s enough.

I hadn’t intended initially for this post to be this long, however now I feel it should be even longer. But any more should be rambling, and I do aim to not do that. I’ve recently been called an eloquent rambler by a friend, but still I don’t like to.