“Presidenting is hard!”
– Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live
Monthly Archives: March 2001
In Which Miles Predicts the Future
1
You know, the sheer frustration of having George Bush Jr. as a president is mitigated only in being dwarfed by the knowledge that our economy is slowly and surely headed back into the toilet bowl of the 80s and thence into the sewer of the Great Depression, and that the fear which this generates will play right into the Republicans’ time-old marketing tactics of fear and alienation, spiced with senseless rah-rah.
Then again, he didn’t get the popular vote, so maybe we’ll kick him out in ought four.
Then again, this is a populace that can’t even figure out for itself why its kids are shooting up their schools.
Or is it?
I need to get out more.
New Jobs and Hammerspace
Jill has asked me to watch Gavin (her 1-year old son) a couple days a week, for which she will pay me. This is cool, because we already watch Gavin frequently, so it doesn’t really feel like extra work. Also, Jill is the News Director at the radio station, and her News Producer recently graduated, so she needs someone to fill that spot on a very part-time basis (like six hours a week). But it’s a paid position, and she asked me to do it! (for those who don’t know, producer is not as impressive as it sounds in radio… it means literally the person who does the production… I’m the grunt labor). As with Gavin, I go in and help with the news now and then already, so both of these feel like a little extra money for doing something I don’t mind at all!
Also, I finally got off my ass and posted a new hammerspace comic. The way Annie and I looked in the comic has been bugging me for awhile, so I fixed them. Well, I fixed Annie. I found out that there’s no good way to draw a beard on a hammerspace character so I quit trying and just redid my character without it, which I think works better than the freakishly overextended jaw it had before. But the reason this is exciting is because, as dumb as it sounds, I wasn’t into doing hammerspace because those two characters were bugging me. Now that I got their appearance nailed, I’m hoping to start doing new comics much more regularly… at least once a week, and hopefully more frequently than that. So keep an eye on it!
Macintosh OS X Release
So I’m at The Computer Store.
It’s 8:40 AM.
Saturday.
I’m behind the service counter eating Snak Pak Cheezy Bitz Peanut Butter Crackers.
Wearing an “X… The Future Is Here” T-shirt.
There are like 50 people in this small store milling around for the OS TEN RELEASE.
Floor manager has marked a printer-paper box as a ballot receptacle for the “Win A Copy Of Os X” drawing. He used not just a permanent, but an ultra-permanent marker. I can feel my face, my eyes and lips, burning from the toluene vapors. Neurons sloughing off my medulla and puddling around my brainstem.
So I’m coming live to you from the OS Ten release and I must say I feel sorry for all these people who got up at got knows what hour to queue up in front of the store at 7:45, eighteen deep, to come look at Ten. I mean, we should at least have some carnival clowns or a ferris wheel in here to liven things up, I mean at least a monkey grinder, come on man. OOH LOOK THE “DOCK” and “AQUA” ! THE ICONS RESEMBLE POLISHED GEMS!
My boss just told me he thought it was a bust. We weren’t selling very many copies. He wouldn’t buy OS Ten. It sucks, now. It’ll be great in six months. Shrug. He walked away. Then a gum wrapper came flying through the air, caromed off my thigh and into the trash can. “Ha! Bank shot off the knee!”
My coworker fears the “weenies” who are going to be bringing their sick computers in to us, having hosed the BSD-based installations of MacOS through their insistence on tinkering with THAT WHICH THEY UNDERSTAND NOT. The Terminal (a command-line interface to OS ten’s BSD foundation) provides infinite ways for them to mess up their systems.
With MacOS 9 or earlier, you could fix almost any problem with one of three methods short of a clean install:
- reinstall part of the software
- uninstall part of the software
- run a disk-checking utility
With 10, excuse me, X, it’s going to be like, “Oh you’ve got malformed XML in your mtab which is causing your Zip disk to emit that horrible clicking noise. You need to renice your nohups to 0xfdeadbeef” and blood will start gushing from the customer’s ears. “What?? What are you talking about, you horrible technical person? I can’t understand you!!” Whereas before, we could just say, “reinstall the Zip software.” Well, I hope I’m wrong and you can still deal with things at that high level of installers and control panels, because otherwise the answer to every question is going to be, “bring it in. We’ll fix it.”
Whew… the very thought of building a consumer OS on BSD… it’s like some horror movie where a band of occultists form a corporation and start selling people demon powered cars.. only the customers don’t understand the black creeping power that lurks within their engine compartment and due to their throwing the salt over the wrong shoulder it bursts out one day in tentacular horror and devours them.
So yeah, I’d wait six months.
I Saw On A Website
There is a TV commercial for Excedrin Migrane medicine which bothers me. A woman is speaking about the wonders of this miracle drug, and I swear, she actually says this: “I saw on a website that Excedrin blah blah works wonders blah blah…”
Oh yeah. Not “clinical studies have shown that…” or “four out of five doctors prefer…” or even “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Nope. “I saw on a website that…”
I love that she doesn’t even qualify what kind of website. I bet it was some GeoCities fan page. “NUdE PiX of DReW BaRRyMoRe! And Excedrin works wonders!”
Also, there is a new show on Comedy Central called Sports Night, which is really really cool. It’s funny and I’m really enjoying it, but I have to say that Comedy Central does one thing that bugs me. They don’t play the episodes in order. They jump all over the place. Each week, they play two episodes in a row. But the next week, the two episodes might be four episodes in the future, or six episodes back. It’s like a weird trip through time. From the frame of reference of the first episode I saw, I’ve been to the future, into the past, back to the present, to the future, to the far past, back to the future! It’s very confusing.