Archive for April, 2006
Bullshit Flag
April 22
Have you guys seen the commerical for the movie Stick It (I’m not linking it ’cause it bugs me)? Have you noticed a shirt that one of the girls is wearing? You might not have ’cause it’s only on for a few seconds, maybe only one. I caught it, though, ’cause I’m all eagle-eyed ninja like that. It has me really pissed off, though, ’cause they fucking tried to pass something off. Here’s the shirt: 
I shouldn’t even have to point you to the fact that it’s a Black Flag shirt with the word “Flag” removed and the white lines between the black bars filled in.
You know, Henry Rollins was in Black Flag. I wouldn’t want him pissed off at me.
So some shit went seriously belly-up on my ibook yesterday, so i’m going to have to reformat and start over. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal operations in a day or so. Wish me luck. Details at eleven.
Aaaaaand wwweee’rre baaack!
OK, maybe some of you remember that sketch from SNL. If not, you’re not missing much.
Well, we did finally get completely moved into the new place (some still-un-packed boxes, but we can get by in our day-to-day lives) and everything is alright here, aside from the neighbors constantly clomping up and down their stairs like a heard of elephants. And there’s no baby yet, so I was lucky in that regard to be able to pay attention to the iBook when it gave itself a lobotomy.
I’ve been using an awesome Finder replacement named Path Finder for the past few weeks and I really like it. I plan on getting a license as soon as I can (probably for my birthday in a few weeks). It’s fast and it holds onto my NFS shares better than Finder does (as in, PF actually does hold onto them, instead of dropping them and making me restart every 20 minutes). But the version I was using, which was a couple of revisions back (4.0.1, I think, as opposed to 4.1) had a fun little glitch that I wasn’t the first to find.
When you did Get Info on an item, any item, you had the option to specify what application you wanted to open it with. Normally this is a good thing; maybe you have a JPEG that constantly opens in Preview but you always want it to open in Photoshop. No problem; change that file to open with Photoshop and you’re good to go. The problem came from the fact that you could do that same ‘open with’ magic on applications. So you could make Fireworks open in Photoshop.
Yeah, I’ll let that sink in for a second.
So, trying to get an application I had downloaded whose name happened to end in ‘.5′ (which is apparently associated with Script Editor) ended up with me looking at it’s Info. It was definitely marked with an APPL type (denoting to OS X that it’s an Applictation), and the file type was listed as ‘application’, but it still opened in Script Editor.
One of the kind of annoying things about the ‘open with’ part is that it’s kind of insistent. If it doesn’t agree with what you’ve changed it to (i.e. it’s not a logical choice like opening an image in a text editor), it’ll switch back. I didn’t know this at the time. That’s important later.
Applications in OS X open with themselves. They all contain a little bit of system-scripting that runs the appropriate code. So I set this little .5 app to open with itself and in the blink of an eye clicked ‘Apply to all’. Yeah, I just heard you gasp.
So it say that the file type was an Application and in that split second switched from opening with itself to opening with Script Editor. And set all applications to do the same.
Again, I’ll pause for full effect.
Still breathing? Good. So now all apps were opening in Script Editor, everything from Photoshop to Mail to Path Finder itself. I went digging in the system, on Google, in the MacOSXHints IRC channel, and on the Cocoatech forum. Where I found out I wasn’t the first to encounter this. And, looky-looky, a solution!
So I restored the LaunchServices daemon. Something like 20 times, restarting randomly in that span. I updated Path Finder, thinking that could have been the problem. I cleared my cache two or three times at the advice of one of the Cocoatech employees/troubleshooters. Nothing.
So, I thought, I’ll back up and format and reinstall and then just bring over what I need. Yeah, that would have worked great except that my USB drive isn’t formatted as Mac Extended. It’s Fat32 so I can take it anywhere. And I can’t just copy it’s data to the iBook, reformat it, and then continue with my plan, ’cause the music library on it alone is almost three times the size of my entire iBook’s hard drive.
So I did it manually, moving everything I though might be important over to Puma (the USB drive) and then I crossed my fingers and reformatted.
It went a lot faster and smoother than I thought it would. I had most stuff up and running pretty well the same day. I’m still adding things back in as I find I need them, but everything seems to be working fairly well. The hard drive is still nice and open so the machine runs pretty fast. I didn’t even lose the iTunes library (thank god!) so I can sit here and listen to pretty music while I type this (currently listening to the newest episode of radiotelepathy).
Anyway, be careful of that. The newest version of Path Finder has fixed that problem, but it might still pop up later.
You know what’s really annoying? That the GoodTimes release of Bruce Lee’s The Chinese Connection has a “GT” imprinted on the image in the corner. I freakin’ hate branding, and it’s even worse when it’s on a great movie like that.
Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been online since about this past Wednesday (4/5). Well, we got a fun phone call on the Thursday before that (3/30). Seems the guy that actually owns our townhouse needs to move into it. Something to do with his mother or something. In any case, we have to move out by May 1st.
Well, no one wants to move with a baby, so we got started as soon as we could. Meaning we went out that day to look at available properties.
First was a house not too far from our townhouse. Ugly bastard sitting crooked in the lot with no real yards. No storage, either. The kitchen “pantry” was all of three inches thick. So like one-and-a-half cans. Yeah. We left there quickly.
Next was one of a pair of townhouses right next to each other. This one was in the middle. OK, let’s see, the good points. It had a nice enough view of the golf course and tennis courts. Other than that, it was dark, dank, and smelled funky. No windows except on the front and back, linoleum over a lot of the house, which is just nasty, and the place seemed so small compared the house we were already in. We exited post haste.
Luckily the next place was right next door. So this one was on the end, more windows, and had more carpet. Same view, by the way, if you were wondering. Still seemed kinda small, but it wasn’t horrible. We left, but not really quickly.
Back to the property management offices. “Hold that one for us, but do you have any other places? Maybe even in another of the nearby cities?” There was one other. We pulled into its driveway and sat there, looking at the kids sitting in the garage of the other house (duplex). Now, I’m not one to judge based on appearance. I’ve often looked kinda rough and anyone who knows me knows that I’m a mild as the cat. Hell, I probably have him beat on a few things; I rarely throw up wads of hair or lick my own ass.
Anyway, back to the house. Or rather the kids next door. Three kids, two of ‘em guys, all looking stoned to high heaven (no pun intended). The also had a big black dog standing at the opening of the garage. They were lolling on a couch out in the garage, one of the kids wearing a Misfits t-shirt. Despite the positive feelings coming from a common band, I wasn’t too comfortable with them. Elaine wasn’t either, so we sat there for a minute. The kids stared, we sat, and eventually we decided we didn’t care to check this house out. The rest of the neighborhood was kind of skanky and whitetrashy. We pulled out of the driveway and went back to the PM office to tell them we didn’t like it and to keep holding the other.
The next day, Friday, found me calling the hell out of realty places. No one had anything. Well, I take that back. One place had a house for the top-end of our price range, but wasn’t sure it’d be available for rent. So that was a no go, obviously.
We thought about it over the weekend and decided that second townhouse would have to do for us. We could deal with having a bit less room. We had to get into the new place ASAP because we wanted to move before Monkey came. So we called the Property Manager and told her we wanted the house. And that we’d like to move in the next weekend.
Of course I wouldn’t need to tell all of this if there wasn’t some shit with which to hit a fan. So that’s what Tuesday was about.
When we moved into the first townhouse, the Realtor who showed us the place knew we had a cat. She told us not to mention him, as the owner apparently wasn’t happy about them. So we got the house and never mentioned him, not that we had any chance to mention or avoid, since we never really talked to the Property Management for the whole year we were there, and we never talked to the owner. So we didn’t hide anything.
Tuesday, however, found them claiming that we had withheld information on having the cat and they just weren’t sure they could help us with anything, I guess thinking they couldn’t trust us. Remember, we needed to tell people when we were moving if they were gonna help us move. And move the utilities. And hire a truck for the move (we’ve done it in the back of a car…never again (and that sounds dirty)). But do they care? No.
Wednesday was Monkey’s baby shower and the day we finally got the word that the PM was willing to “let bygone be bygones” and let us move into the new place. My parent’s had come up to help us and were as glad as we were that we got the house.
So Thursday was solid packing, Friday was two U-Haul trips of boxes and furniture, and Saturday (when I’m writing this without Internet access) was cleaning and moving whatever small stuff was left over. We’re still inundated with boxes, but we can get by for a day or two. Hopefully we get some more of this crap out of boxes tomorrow (Sunday) and be comfortable enough to live without moving boxes for a few days.
Oh, the new place is two-story, so my legs have started circling a petition to secede from the rest of my body. I think my hands have signed, having grown tired of clutching dirty brown boxes. My back has definitely signed, and started passing out flyers to increase support.
I should have Internet again on Monday, Tuesday at the latest. Then you can all tell me your horror stories of moving. Hope I make it through.
EDIT: Isn’t it great when neighbors leave their wi-fi connections open and turned all the way up?