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October 13, 2004

Bill!

So, Bill has now explained that his situation is basically what mine was with Nikki and Kim; he can “date” Erin and still be with Talia. So I guess I have to eat my words again. :-P Fuck you Bill, for making me eat my words. You just can’t win.

I discovered today that KDE isn’t as good as I remember. I’m using 3.3, the newest version. Having basically been using nothing but a Mac for the past six months or so, this sucks. Every app has it’s own weird quirks, there is no UI cohesion, a complete lack of polish. I got Harry to use Firefox, because it’s really good, and he was asking me tonight if he needed to put a disk in to save something, because Firefox says “Save to Disk?” instead of, well, “Save.” I tried to drag an icon off the task bar to get rid of it, and it was like “you want to make a link on the desktop?” The most annoying has been telling Alex how she changes to her login: you hold down control, alt and F10, but they have to be left control and left alt. On the Mac, you go to the upper right corner with the mouse and pick your name

This is annoying me even more, because these little touches are easy to program—trivial, compared to (I don’t know) the browser they’re sitting in. The X-windows switching thing wouldn’t be very hard either, but we don’t implement it. Why not?

I think we aren’t doing it for several reasons:

• We don’t want to copy Mac because it sticks out. If we copy Windows, everyone takes it for granted, and we aren’t seen as cloning anything.
• The nice thing about copying Windows is that if you completely blow it, nobody notices, because there isn’t any consistency in Windows either.
• UI polishing is annoying to write and has less glory in it than networking godhood or security or whatever.

So I’m looking at needing a new computer, potentially very soon but hopefully not for a while, and I’m thinking “Gee, I could build me a sexy mini-ITX form factor computer for like $1000 or spend $3000 on a Mac desktop or notebook.” But I’m starting to see that when you buy a Mac, you aren’t getting “a computer.” You’re getting a computer with no heartache and no headaches, in which actual thought has gone into just about every step of the process. I’m a professional programmer, I have no difficulty using pure Unix. It’s just such a hassle for day-to-day life. Isn’t that why we have these personal computers anyway?

Today there was rain and snow. I hoped it would calm down these fucking Españolan fucksack drivers, but no, they’re quite happy to go 15 over the limit through puddles of water in fog with zero visibility. And you know, I can understand driving that way—to get out of Española, but not to get into Española. How can you be in such a hurry, you don’t care if you survive to get where you’re going? At least in Albuquerque and Socorro, people go ~5 miles over the limit. Up here, people go ~15-20 miles over the limit. Frankly, it’s frightening and exasperating.

So now I’m installing some new fonts so that I can look at my screen and not have my eyes bleed. It looks like it’s going to take a while.

I’m not sure if I mentioned it already or not but the laptop’s logic board is fried. This is considered a known issue, Apple’s sending the box overnight, we should get it tomorrow. We put the computer in the box, get it back in three weeks with the board fixed. I’m glad I don’t have to pay for it, but otherwise, I’m pretty let down about the whole thing. I guess that’s life. Even Apple makes shit from time to time.

Posted by FusionGyro at October 13, 2004 11:50 PM

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Posted by: alphamajor at October 14, 2004 10:15 AM

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