Nate Knows Nada

Some of us from the bike shop went over to Independent Fabrications, a custom bike-frame manufacturer, for a tour this morning. We’re lucky to have one of the country’s high-end, highest-quality custom frame builders right here in the Boston area.Totally awesome.They showed us all the stages of building custom titanium, steel, carbon, and mixed frames. Design, tube cutting, tacking, welding, brazing, painting, and finishing. These are beautiful bicycles they’ve got going there.

Now, if I only had $2000 to spare.

Here’s the dance we chaperone tonight….

No pictures allowed, because of the scandal that might create.

Although, I don’t think our students care if people see them doing almost anything. Someone recently pointed out to us some photos of some of our students, on facebook.com, wherein they are dancing about their common room in their underwear. Hardly the most revealing thing one can find on the facebook, to be honest. But it gives some idea of what goes on behind closed doors around here.

Tonight we’re just opening the doors, I guess.

This is us with the president of the university, Dr. Controversey, Larry Summers.

The poor guy didn’t seem to get the joke of the costume.

So I’ve had the new Powerbook for a couple of days now.  Some quick impressions:

• The size is actually pretty nice.  It can feel a bit small
  at times, but for about the same price as the difference between the
  two models I was considering, I can get a 17″ or 19″ monitor and
  external keyboard (already having an external wired mouse).  But
  once I get  a little carrying case, the portability seems quite
  nice.  That said, if Apple released a 14″ PB when the intels come
  out (same size as the big iBook), I’d be interested….
• OS X is better than I thought.  I love Spotlight.  This
  is the feature that’s like Google Desktop on WinXP.  Type in a
  word or phrase, and it pulls up every file where that occurs, not just
  in the title but also in the actual contents….  For example,
  “jelly” brings up 9 files.  Weird and totally cool.
• The transfer to OS X was prety easy.  All my documents came
  right over, since much of my work is on MS Office.  My Eudora data
  was a bit harder, but I found a set of programs at Andreas Amann’s site to deal with the transition from Eudora (even Windows Eudora) to Apple Mail.  Specifically, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
  not only converts Eudora mailboxes, but it also converts the nickname
  database into a format that Address Book in OS X can easily deal with.
  (BTW, is Apple Mail in an interchageable format?  Does any reader
  know?)
• In essence, I got most of my stuff moved off my external hard
  drive to the Powerbook AND set up most of how I want to work in about
  three or four hours.  Not hard at all.

More to come as I encounter it.

I did it.  I ordered a new computer.  A 12″ Macintosh Powerbook. 
I have to admit that I am still unsure whether I should have this one
or the “old” 15″ model (“old”, as in there was a slightly updated one
released last Wednesday).  But the $300 difference was a
consideration.

So was portability.  I’ve had this desktop-in-a-laptop Windows
machine for a while, and I never take it anywhere because of its weight
and size.  And the lovely young woman I spoke with in the Apple
store noted that she loved her 15″(especially ’cause she has no room
for an external monitor), but that it felt a bit large at times for
lugging around.

(And just so it’s clear, I’m perfectly adept in Windows.  I have
configured drivers, I routinely search out and use funky little obscure
utilities to monitor things like process usage, and I have edited my
registry.  I play computer guy for many family and friends. 
But it seems like in the last few months, that’s been less of a hobby and
more of a task to keep the computer running.  I want to geek
around, but on my own terms.)

My thought is, if I need more screen real estate (especially when I
need to do spreadsheet work), I can get an external monitor.  For
about the same as the price difference between the two models.

I’m still dithering a bit, but if I really decide that I should have gotten a 15, I can always sell on Ebay.

Like all things in the Mac world, some people are really partisan about
the size of their computers.  Ask a group of real Mac fanatics
about the 12 v. 15, and they will go to the mat for their choice.

I’ve had problems with my Windows XP machine for the last little while. and it seems like (although they are small) they keep popping up just when I’ve fixed the last one. Today’s is that the startup routine now takes two to three times longer than it used to, just two days ago. And there’s a lot of disk use going on there. I’ve run the spyware and virus stuff with all applicable updates, but nothing. In fact, the only change I made to the computer was to update the spyware and virus software.

I’ve only had this thing for two and a half years, but I wonder if it’s time to take the plunge and buy the powerbook. It’s annoying, because I got four years out of my last computer, and I was hoping to eke out a few more months at least. And it makes me afraid to work on my work, because who’s to know if the machine is on the verge of konking out and losing what I’ve done. (And, yes, I do backup my Docs folder, along with e-mail boxes and browser bookmarks.)

Any ideas? Is it prematurely dying? Time to switch?

I am actually alive.  Just that we moved to our new Harvard digs, and we’ve sort of been unpacking.  This is where we live now.

I think I’ll be back blogging this weekend, after my “road rash” from a biking spill yesterday heals up a bit.

Excellent post summing up exactly the way I feel about Boston’s Gay Pride this weekend.

As the New Yorker cartoon of a couple of years ago put it, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re over it.”

It’s not that I am gone.  But I am involved in writing a large
paper for my work that prevaricates heavy blogging.  Also, I’m
blogging out a longer essay on some articles in yesterday’s paper
that’s more than just getting a few lines off.  So there should be
something really new here in a couple of days….

We went out for dinner last night, to a local pub named Bukowski’s that
I had heard good things about.  It was so dreadful that I posted
this review to several art and entertainment sites.

Miserable, miserable food.  I’ve been to a lot of pubs, and
this one was the worst.  I had the “Buk” sandwich — dry turkey,
inoffensively bland cheese, Wonder-quality bread, and french fries (*in
the sandwich*).  The burger was only average.  And although
the beer selection was good, the price was about a buck higher than
other local places; the beer did have about an inch of head, and in
some countries, that much head is against the law.  Combined with
the noise — music as loud as a rock concert, but I didn’t enjoy
myself–I would have preferred to stay home and have Cheerios for
dinner.

Service was so-so.  We had three different servers in our
hour there. They weren’t bad, but not exactly attentive, either. 
it took a while to get anything.

You can get much better than this for the same money.

I didn’t mention that there’s a double irony in a generic-upscale,
catering-to-the-wrong-PBR-crowd (sorry, Andrew, but I think you would
have been offended by $4-5 cans and bottles of PBR, Ballantine, and
Lone Star) naming itself after a man who spent his life in dive bars
and loathing the clientele of his namesake pub.