Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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…

Free the keys! The Dvorak Zine is a handy introduction to the One True Keyboard Layout. Your wrists will thank you…

I feel like I should provide content. Here’s a cool video game preview from YouTube:

Spore is a Sim Everything game—from amoeba to galactic conquest to fanfic. Read more about it from the NYT.

I can’t resist blogging about weird new sudoku variants and the perpetual accident that is the T, so the blog is back. The website is also back at the ficml.org domain, although some links may be broken.

More news to follow at a more decent hour.

As of this post, the blog is officially petrified. I don’t have WordPress running here at freeshell.org; instead I have static copies of all the pages up for future reference. Future news will be posted in my LiveJournal, I suppose: jemimap.livejournal.com.

I was doing a database backup in order to upgrade WordPress to the latest and greatest when I saw that my hosting service will be closing up shop on July 31st. So instead of upgrading, I closed all comments to keep the spammers at bay for the interim.

Where will I go? What will I do?

I haven’t been blogging much lately, so I may just close down the blog and slink back to freeshell.org, my former host. They have some PHP support now, or so I hear (but not a free database for WordPress).

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.

I downloaded the latest Carbon Emacs for MacOS X, with about as little success as I had last time. I think it’s time to roll my own again…

Here’s hoping that the site is back up after its long disappearance…