Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Book of the Day: Conventions of War, the third and final volume of Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire’s Fall series is out! I snagged it at Borders yesterday.

My desktop was getting cluttered with too many windows at work, so I went looking for Windows software to simulate multiple desktops. The Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager (a powertoy) was far too buggy to use, but AltDesk turned out to be wonderful. I may even have to pay for it when the demo expires.

For my Mac, though, I prefer free software, so I went with Desktop Manager, rather than the promising you control: desktops or the traditional CodeTek Virtual Desktops. Right now I’m using the stable 0.5.3 version of Desktop Manager, but I may upgrade to the developer build for more fun and excitement.

I thought they didn’t exist, but then I found some TNG transcripts.

Filk of the day: Mineral Rights by Bob Kanefsky

You can download some filk classics at Prometheus Music and hear some others streamed. I highly recommend Dog on the Moon [realaudio] by Garry Novikoff.

For Seema, who broke #2 and reminded me about #6:

1. Don’t live below sea level.
2. Don’t live on a flood plain.
3. Don’t live with poultry. (a.k.a. Don’t kiss the chickens.)
4. Lather, rinse, repeat.
5. Doctors are never single.
6. If you can’t remember the last time you changed the sheets, it’s time to change the sheets.

Filk of the day: Hope Eyrie by Leslie Fish (1975)

I just downloaded a free preference panel called Textpander. I had been using Quicksilver for some simple text insertion (especially a hrefs), but it annoyed me to no end because it used the clipboard to paste in the html code, nuking the URL I had saved in the clipboard to put into the hyperlink. Textpander (optionally) gives you your clipboard contents back again.

This was the other half of the ActiveWords functionality that I didn’t really need for my Mac, but it is handy in some cases.

Update: Either Textpander or the latest security/QuickTime update (2005-008/7.0.2, respectively) killed Emacs. I tried reinstalling–no luck. So I checked out the latest from cvs and rebuilt. (I’m still building the self-contained installer, just to be safe.) After a long, long build, Emacs is back, if a little funky on the font settings. Whew!

Update #2: Some days are good CVS days, some days are bad CVS days. My home-built emacs turned out to be funkier than I thought (lots of issues with tex-verbatim, so I downloaded a pre-built emacs from Japan. So far, so good.

Veronica found a new demotivational poster at despair.com: Wishes. It’s a classic!

Today’s filk of the day isn’t really a filk. It’s the lyrics to the TOS theme, by the Great Bird himself. Note the karaoke image; you can just see Khan’s red pajamas under the blacked-out part of the viewscreen.

Just in case anyone out there still cares…I stumbled across a page of Star Trek: Voyager transcripts. Many thanks to Chakoteya for the effort.

I was introduced to the Sudoku fad through the ever-disposable Metro, the newspaper of choice for Boston commuters. But you can also play on the web.

Fun link of the day: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme (Daring Fireball)

Loyal readers (and I know I’m running out of them) know that I appreciate the occasional educational video. BitTorrent, however, is a den of thieves just waiting for the next big police raid. So I decided to move on with the technology to eDonkey. I checked out likely eDonkey clients for the Mac and decided on the cross-platform aMule, even though their mac client is just an experimental daily build.

To set up aMule I followed the directions in their wiki, with some bandwidth-setting advice from their ED2K faq. Other things I’ve heard about the network are that it’s not as fast as BitTorrent, but has more stuff available. I’ll find out either way.