Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

« ? Blogging Brians # »

Book Plug:

Buy it and I get
money. I think.
BSD Mall

10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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4/28/2003 -   5/4/2003
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3/31/2003 -   4/6/2003
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12/2/2002 -  12/8/2002
11/25/2002 -  12/1/2002
11/18/2002 - 11/24/2002
11/11/2002 - 11/17/2002
11/4/2002 - 11/10/2002
10/28/2002 -  11/3/2002
10/21/2002 - 10/27/2002
10/14/2002 - 10/20/2002
10/7/2002 - 10/13/2002
9/30/2002 -  10/6/2002
9/23/2002 -  9/29/2002
9/16/2002 -  9/22/2002
  9/9/2002 -  9/15/2002
  9/2/2002 -   9/8/2002
8/26/2002 -   9/1/2002
8/19/2002 -  8/25/2002
8/12/2002 -  8/18/2002
  8/5/2002 -  8/11/2002
7/29/2002 -   8/4/2002
7/22/2002 -  7/28/2002
7/15/2002 -  7/21/2002
  7/8/2002 -  7/14/2002
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4/29/2002 -   5/5/2002
4/22/2002 -  4/28/2002
4/15/2002 -  4/21/2002
  4/8/2002 -  4/14/2002
  4/1/2002 -   4/7/2002
3/25/2002 -  3/31/2002
3/18/2002 -  3/24/2002
3/11/2002 -  3/17/2002
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1/28/2002 -   2/3/2002
1/21/2002 -  1/27/2002
1/14/2002 -  1/20/2002
  1/7/2002 -  1/13/2002
12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Tuesday, August 27, 2002
19:45 - Wow-- this place looks deserted...	(top)
Well, I'm back from my week-long annual romp through the wilds of rural Ontario, bookended by wild bouts of carousing through the suburbs of Toronto (lemme tell you, Jack Astor's makes one kickass cranberry lemonade). Those whom I was spending the time with know how good a time I had, and everybody else would likely find a recounting of the whole affair to be tedious beyond mortal words, so I won't try. I'm also just now passing my 36th hour of awakeness, so I implore your forgiveness for any residual addlepatedness. I had a lot of fascinating conversations with Torontonian friends about Canadian history, their view of "American culture" (a concept which I only seem to hear about when I'm in Canada-- to us, it's just "stuff"), socialism, federalism, patriotism-- you know, the usual stuff a bunch of guys in a rental car talk about on their way to a Toys 'R' Us in quest for an exceptionally rare re-released Generation-1 Optimus Prime that's being held on reserve by some kindly but bemused toymonger. But that will all have to wait for another time, when I'm feeling less like I've just driven four hours from Toronto to Detroit, watched movies all night to keep from having to succumb to less than three hours of pointless sleep, then returned the car in the wee hours and puddle-jumped to Chicago and then run bleary and bag-laden through the underground passageway between O'Hare's B and C terminals (it's a law of nature: the more your first-leg flight is delayed getting into Chicago, the higher the probability that your connecting flight will be on the other side of that jangling subterranean neon tubule), and then found myself luxuriating in gape-mouthed glee at the LCD screens in the back of every single seat throughout coach on a United Boeing 777 to San Francisco-- after which ending up waiting for no less than three hours on the sidewalk while my car-equipped savior made the circuit through the airport's interior no less than four times before completely fortuitously bumping into me in the cavernous new SFO international terminal because I happened to be inside making a raspy phone call of defeated despair to another friend to come get me, just as he-- the aforementioned savior-- walked past on the way out to his car. So, yeah. I'm a little loopy at the moment. But I did have the presence of mind to pick up a nice fresh boxed copy of Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar; since installing it on my work iMac, I've been giggling in helpless glee at the new features that are of the nature typical only of the most recent of Apple design: a single keystroke that makes the screen zoom smoothly (with what should be a swoooosh sound, but isn't, dammit) to a prescribed magnification level, which centers on the magnified mouse cursor as it moves-- it has to be experienced, honestly. And the smooth white swish of the flash-and-fade screen-blink upon alert errors that is also new amongst Jaguar's accessibility features. And the recently discovered hack (now neatly encapsulated, within hours of its discovery, in a compact GUI tool by Pliris) which lets anybody with Jaguar and a hardware-accelerated OpenGL video card run the OpenGL screen savers (like Flurry or the gorgeous zooming/panning/cross-fading slideshows) as your desktop background. I'm telling you right now, run the Beach slideshow as your Desktop image and let it shine through a red-tinted Terminal window at 43% transparency, point it at your typical hard-core UNIX geek, and just watch his lip start to quiver and his skin peel away like Goldmember in Waikiki. And to say nothing of the vastly improved Mail, which has so far displayed an uncanny accuracy with the pieces of wildly disparate spam I get-- and as I fine-tune it by correcting its rare (less than 1 in 20) missteps, it's visibly improving its accuracy. This stuff just makes me want to roll around on the floor weeping. I'm serious. iTunes' UI honestly brings tears to my eyes, and this stuff is all just more of the same, if not better. Geek candy. Nerd crack. Ah well. It'll be a few days yet before I have a cheapo Wacom tablet with which to try out Inkwell, and I have yet to see what Rendezvous can do with the playlists full of sonorous Tolkien readings with which the upstairs iMac is laden. But as compelling as that prospect is, the bed beckons me. But so do ten-day backlogs of Lileks and den Beste. Dammit.