Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

• OSXplanet is up to version 0.78, but I haven’t risked running it since my initial dock-killing experience.
• CherryOS - …you have a choice! That choice is actually PearPC, a mac emulator that can run slower than any Mac ever made.
• Humor from the Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Apple Blocks Older Patrons From Retail Stores.
• Daring Fireball on the lack of mac viruses: For Whatever Reasons. Slashdot on a study recommending Mac OS X as safest OS. Here’s a mac virus for you, but you’ll have to install and propagate it yourself.
• Delicious Library - even if you don’t need personal library software (and who does?) the website is cool.
• Lately I’ve been sucking sites with SiteSucker, but I may go back to wget.
• iPod troubles? Defrag your iPod. Contemplate some rejected limited edition iPods.
• What Do I Know OS X tip: spelling suggestions
• Need to zip? YemuZip for Mac OS X - The Missing (Free) Zip Tool didn’t actually work for me. I could zip, but Seema couldn’t unzip on the PC end.
• Late at night, Mail.app scares codepoetry.
• The ifo Apple Store provides news and information about Apple’s retail stores
• Safari and If-Modified-Since is an old caching issue that may or may not have been fixed. All I can say is that my Safari wasn’t caching my stylesheets (for this site) until I upgraded to 10.3.6. Now it’s all better!

[Update] And how could I forget? VLC 0.8.0 is out. I’m downloading it now.

The title is from Brent Simmons, who encourages his fellow Democrats to buck up and get back to the beginning. He’s still a bit political for someone who makes his living selling stuff to people of unknown party affiliation. He says, “I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral.” Allow me to translate that as 51% of NetNewsWire users are homophobes. (See my previous entry for more about the translation.)

SFF.org has more to say about the nonsensical ravings of lunatic minds: “These Internet fantasies about how evil democrats are and how evil republicans are are getting out of hand.” The candidates weren’t all that different. Most notably, they agreed on the allegedly divisive gay marriage issue. There’s no reason, therefore, to kill yourself over the election results.

Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty’s blog

Jade wrote a very restrained post on the general mockery of American voters (specifically of the 51% who voted for Bush) in fandom blogging circles. Since I live in Boston, I get to hear that sort of thing all the time. If people don’t know you’re Republican, they’ll say all sorts of things about the evil of the W and the poor fools far away in the Midwest who voted for him. It doesn’t surprise me (much) to see it on LiveJournal, too.

Here in Massachusetts, only 13% of voters are registered Republicans, so the casual attitude that everyone is anti-Bush has some statistical backing. No one expects my state to go red, ever. It’s socially acceptable to mock Bush and to make dire predictions about his second term that, back in Peoria, would play like the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. Such is life in Boston.

But when addressing Americans in general, the basic assumption should be that 51% of us are pro-Bush (or at least 51% of those responsible enough to go out and vote). So it’s odd to see people talking like they’re in a virtual Massachusetts when really, they’re in a virtual Ohio. There’s no way to tell which sort of voter you’re talking to online without prior knowledge of their political opinions.

(more…)

I’m on the no-call list here in Massachusetts (and thus the federal one), but I still get calls from telebeggars, politicians, and other organisms that have rushed in to fill the environmental vacuum left behind by the telemarketers. So I still have some use for this highly entertaining EGBG anti-telemarketing counterscript. It’s available in several languages.

If it’s not one branch, it’s another. The B line was still broken at the end this morning, but as of now Bad Transit lists it as running on time. It took four days, but the sinkhole has apparently been filled. (Veronica heard that the sinkhole was caused by a water main break, but I hadn’t heard that one.) However,

There is in-and-outbound busing between Reservoir and Riverside on the D branch of the Green Line due to operational difficulties. Allow plenty of time for your ride. We apologize for the inconvenience.

According to my sources in Newton, the “operational difficulty” was two D-line trains crashing into each other in Newton Center this morning, with resulting injuries to passengers. How exactly this happened on a two-track train line is beyond me, but my sources speculate one of the trains rear-ended the other.

I bet at least one Breda train was involved.

[Update] The Metro reports that the B line problems were caused by a sewer line break.

I should blog now while the site is up. Like the B Line (on its third day out of commission), the website has been running less that smoothly lately. Maybe the spammers are getting it down, or maybe Potholes Attacked.

My sympathies to those of you distraught over the election results. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was as the electoral college swung back and forth all night. I just can’t get all riled up about these things like you young’uns. My greatest disappointment was that now I'’ll never find out what John Kerry’s plan was.

I’ll spare Jerie the wordcount updates, but I’ve kept to my NaNo schedule so far.

…not that it matters. The outcome of every Massachusetts election for the next 100 years was determined back in 1963. Most of the seats on my ballot weren’t even contested. It would be much easier for all the Democrats in the city if we still used the old lever voting machines, where just one flip votes the party line. Instead, the devout had to fill in a bunch of little ovals. (I didn’t bother voting for uncontested seats.)

In subway news, the end of the B line has been shut down for two days now. At first I thought it was the usual—a Breda train derailment or fallen power lines, but those things don’t take two days to fix. It turns out that a long-neglected sinkhole near the B line suddenly expanded to the tracks yesterday. It must be deep if they’re still filling it in.

It’s that time of year again. This year I’ll be writing a fanfic novel for NaNoWriMo. As Seema says, the stuff just writes itself. It hasn’t yet written my quota for the day, though…