Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I figured I’d be like the Boston media and report the flaming B train as late as possible. The train jumped the tracks and knocked down some power lines on the last outbound run Tuesday night (technically, very early Wednesday morning).

Service on my lines was unaffected, but rumor has it that the E-line was disrupted, probably because there was no way to get trains from the trainyards around Cleveland Circle onto the B-line, and whatever trains were running from downtown to Washington Street Wednesday morning had to have come from somewhere.

In other late-breaking news, the Giant G3 Cube on Boylston opened tonight. I was thinking of going, but I chose dinner instead.

The NaNo Distraction of the Day is brought to you by Veronica:

There’s also a little one:

Here’s a bonus Mac quiz:

UniversalHub has a photo of the line for iPhones at the Apple Store in the Cambridgeside Galleria.

By a series of unlikely links I came across Tofu, a nifty Mac application for reading text horizontally in columns. For some reason I’m not seeing the associated View in Columns service, but I’m not a big user of Services anyway.

Now if only it handled PDFs…

[Update]: I updated to Tofu 2.0 alpha, which does handle simple PDFs, and also noticed this in the Help:

The “View In Columns” service is only available if Tofu is in your Applications folder and you have logged out and back in since installing it. Also, not all applications support Services.

MacRumors says we’re getting a shiny new Apple store in Boston to go with the one across the river in Cambridge. It’s going to be on Boylston near the public library. (Check out the GoogleMap.)

Color Schemer Studio is a fun Mac program for playing with color. Unfortunately it’s only free for the first 15 days.

I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 today at work. I didn’t care for the new new tab button, so I went looking for themes.

I found a bunch of Safari-like themes, but most of them are OS X-only, e.g., GrApple. I wasn’t pleased with iFOX or GrayModern; Phoenity Modern was pretty good, but I ended up going with the new, slim Orbit Blue.

After sixty days of uptime, I rebooted my mac recently to do some updates. I noticed when it came back up that it connected to an open network in the building rather than to my network. I looked in System Preferences, and my Network location was very confused about how I was connected; it said I was using “PCI Ethernet Slot 2″ instead of my Airport card, but I think I would have noticed an ethernet cable hanging out of my mac.

So I went into the Network Port Configurations and turned off everything but Airport and the internal modem—not that I’ll be going back to dialup anytime soon. That shocked the system into admitting it was connected with Airport. However, this made the original problem worse: now every time I put the mac to sleep it reconnected to the weaker open network rather than my network.

When in doubt, google. I found this macosxhints thread which recommended deleting all preferred networks and starting over. So I did, sad though I was to see Yersina, Veronica’s wireless network, go. Now the airport connects to my network, although it could just mean that the open network has faded out completely…

I downloaded GrandPerspective on a whim, and ended up finding and deleting about 3 GB of cruft from my hard drive. There’s no Universal Binary yet, but then who’s had an Intel Mac long enough to fill it with large, forgotten files that have to be tracked down and deleted with a graphical disk usage viewer?

Wired has an interesting article on the unexpected success and The Genius of Apple’s Stores.