I became a Mac user about four months ago.

$700 on eBay got me a 15-inch widescreen 400Mhz G4 PowerBook with an 80GB harddrive. I've since swapped out the include 256MB RAM for 512MB from my 2GHz P4 laptop.

Downsides:
* It has trouble playing high definition Divx and XviD videos without some trickery. I figured out that they play a lot better if I watch the video from an external firewire drive rather than the internal drive so it sounds like the fault is in the laptop harddrive.
* Not all Gentoo packages compile on it.
* Firefox is a memory hog I don't want to deal with so I don't. Safari is a great replacement though I haven't been able to get ad-blocking programs to work.

Upsides:
* Many Gentoo packages compile on it. Gentoo on OSX is decent. There's also Fink and DarwinPorts, but I'm a Gentooer.
* It came with my bitch language, Python, as well as Java and GCC.
* Civilization 3 plays twice as fast on this machine as it did on my 2GHz P4 when I had Windows installed a few years ago.
* iTunes is way better than gtkpod.
* I can run Quicktime, WMP, RealPlayer, Cisco VPN client, Remote Desktop Connection, Maya PLE, and Macromedia Studio. And I do.
* Apple provides X11 for OSX so I can run GIMP and Inkscape.
* NeoOffice == OpenOffice for OSX, which is nice.

Oh, another downside: With all this stuff simply working (Have you seen how installation works on a Mac? It's almost disgusting!) I feel like I'm getting stupider every day. At the same time I can still pull up my Bash prompt and geek out whenever I want, which is pretty often. It's basically all the functionality I got out of Linux and still being leaps and bounds better than Windows.

I don't know if many are familiar with it, but I could never use Windows for long without replacing the shell with Litestep. I nearly require a clean interface to get anything done. OSX is where that action is at.

Economic Left/Right: 1.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.85

via politicalcompass.org

What happens when a friend turns pitiful? I added GMontag as a friend a while back because he said a lot of stuff I generally agreed with and browsing through his posts didn't show any stupidity.

Today he made me his foe. To be fair, I posted this in response to one of his rather uneducated journal entries.

At the same time though, no discourse? No questioning the validity of my statements? What exactly is he disagreeing with? Surely it's not that some facts run counter to his point. Is this enough to "foe" someone when before they were a "friend"?

And then I saw his current posting history. GMontag has become an outright loser. I've heard of getting old, but getting stupid?

I posted this comment in the latest women in gaming articles. So far it's gone unmodded and uncommented, likely unnoticed.

I was being a sneaky bastard when I wrote it. Let me repost it here with proper emphasis on certain words and phrases. I've stated these points before in women in gaming articles so by the time this one rolled around I was bored of the topic. I had to have fun with it.

ExEx, but no "Why?"

the real questions that will be answered are how can the industry create a demand for computer games beyond the traditional demographic of males between the age of 14-24,

Ok, so that's the "How?" of it. Where's the "Why?" Did we skip that step?

and what role can women play in this seemingly-epic task.

Oh, I get why now. It's the money. You mean it might be difficult to suck as much money out of women as they've been getting from men?

As a male I'm insulted to think women could possibly waste as much money on gaming as the industry has already managed to suck off from men. As a half-assed feminist I'm also insulted that they're using sexual equality to veil an obvious attempt to lure women into blowing loads on video games. They're just trying tap women in order to produce more releases.

I just spent the afternoon reading through the comments on the London bombing watching N3WBI3 and stinerman bat around some real fuckles. They managed to cover every point I could think of.

N3WBI3 seemed to chase a lot of people down in threads which was fun to watch. I wanted to respond to each of his posts with "Get 'em." Meanwhile stinerman whipped out a handful of interesting posts that soaked up a lot of mod points.

It was a good show, a shame about the context.

I'm a poor judge of Slashdot article worthiness so I'll just put this up here.

Apparently this guy Matt Cooper was told by a secret informer that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. This information gets from Cooper to Bob Novak who then proceeds to blurt it out on national television. It's treason to reveal stuff like that, and it seems natural that they'd go after Novak as well as the secret informer, but Cooper is so far the only person to see jail time and it's very likely that the secret informer won't.

Because the secret informer was Karl Rove.

I tried to respond to the article about Rio fighting back against apple. I got this message:

You can't see this story because it's scheduled in the future, where only subscribers can see it.

Weird, but I'm pretty sure I *always* see the articles at subscriber times. Bully for me then.

Why are so many Firefly fans libertarian?

I found this LiveJournal entry by Jamie Zawinski (wrote xscreensaver, helped start Mozilla, and now owns DNA Lounge) declaring his hatred for Linux and love for OSX.

I found the footnote particularly hilarious. I'm hoping a Slashdot journal isn't quite what he meant.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys. --JWZ

reference

I used that silly little "pictu^H^H^H^H^Hdocuments" meme that's been spread around for what seems like ages. This was a mistake. I received about five responses mostly commenting about why anyone would ever encrypt porn. I don't encrypt porn. I never said I did. I implied that I encrypted pictures.

Bitten in the ass by a meme that doesn't die.

True, the picture of are naked people. Specifically: naked people I have personally taken naked pictures of. But they're tasteful. We would show our friends and they'd say "ooo, pretty". One the less revealing ones was framed in the living room.

But no, got to be porn.

Goemon won me with "Goverments are not good nannies."

Tom and Garcia are two people I've seen bouncing arount this site saying things I generally agree with.

I changed my little "homepage" link because I hadn't been updating my Clemson site for quite a while (new blog thingy is an LJ: st_arbirix).

I saw that my Clemson site was getting upwards of 500 hits a week even though the content was stale, so I decided to channel all that energy into more narcissistic ends. Yes, that is my shower curtain. No, those aren't my pajamas.

This is the 8th time in five weeks that I've gotten mod points. Anyone else get it so often? I'm really kinda bothered by this.

It's Tuesday so guess what that means?
I get mod points again!!

Seriously though, does anyone else get so many so quickly?

I just got mod powers again today. In three weeks this is the fifth time. Am I doing something special? It seems a little freaky to keep getting this, especially since the last time around two of my moderations were counted unfair.