Mac OS(e)X(y) | Hoom

My new Work Machine arrived today: shiny new TiBook. Sweet gord, it's big, and bright, and fills my whole head-and-hand space like nothing else. The battery lasts literally five or six times longer than my iBook's battery (though, granted, it may have been dying, plus my iBook is kind of hosed anyway; see below), and I can have four normal-sized Terminal windows and the Dock on the screen at once with no overlap. Yes, friends, that's what it's all about: More xterms!! Blat. Anyway, it's nice to have a machine that Mac OS X feels at home in. It runs OK on the iBook, but I had gotten used to its constant interface herky-jerkyness. All gone now, with this thin, sexy metal beast. Woo woo.

Now I must install my Apache/MySQL/Perl suite on it so that I can hurry up and damage it irrevocably as I do ICCB hacking whilst lounging in the Diesel and the Someday and other places whose mere mention annoys Leah.

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There are some oddities in ways that the OS and core applications work differently (and, in some cases, better) than they do on my iBook, even though the same versions are present on both.

For example, the pointer on the TiBook has a drop-shadow, which is not present on my iBook's display. Maybe it doesn't bother unless you're using a G4? The pre-release Jaguars I ran on the G4 Cube at home had a drop-shadow too, so after it failed to appear on my iBook's official Jaguar install, I assumed it was a piece of iCandy that Apple dropped from the release. Curious.

The iBook Mail application's handling of remote IMAP mailboxes has been acting insanely for a while, too, and the whole cross-application Keychain system has been generally nya-nya. Since I didn't have any other full-on Jaguar machines in the vicinity, I couldn't tell if Apple had broken all their own software, or if my iBook was just borked. Since all this stuff works great on the TiBook, I must assume the latter. Which is strange, since the applications mostly work, they just have certain individual features that just do the wrong thing on the iBook.

Gee whiz, I wonder if my iBook's whole system setup is just all mutatoxored after all the upgrade/downgrade/sidegrade abuse I gave it some months ago in the name of better book-writing. Ya think? Blah.

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OK, yes, I saw The Movie: Part Two at midnight on Tue/Wed this week, just like you did, so you don't need to hear much else about it. Have some bullet points, anyway.

• My biggest real-time gripe concerned Jar-Jar, son of Gloin. I'd rather that Gimli stay mostly in the background a la Fellowship than come forward as a slapstick goofball. Haw haw, he's short! Look, he's short again! Haw! Yeeeebus.


• The interpretation of Gollum, and the mostly wordless smoldering between Aragorn and Eowyn, were brilliant. (When reading the book, I was fairly certain that the two of em would hook up.)


• For such a ponderous creature, Treebeard sure rushed his way through his scenes, didn't he? He was on the move the whole time! I missed the book's way of introducing him to the Hobbits. (And no ent-draughts? Aw...)


• That said, "HOOM!" was interpreted not as a person literally saying "HOOM!" (as I have heard it before) but *giant old tree creaking, deep and woodenly*, and that was brilliant, too.


• Jaw hanging open through entire opening, up until display of title. Wuuuh.


• Peter Jackson failed to show up and say burp, breaking the only prediction that I had made about the latter two films. Oh well. That, or I didn't notice him. Frame-advance over all the conscripted fighters at Helm's Deep, next time. Sure.

Things that other people have complained about concerned veerings from the book, which I had read only once, four years ago and alone, so I didn't detect the changes, and thus wasn't bothered by them. Yay synchro-creepy elf fighters! Yay Frodo in the blasted city, and Aragorn falling off of a cliff! Duh!! Seriously, I didn't know that I was supposed to see them as needless diversions from the text until I read the Bombadillans on Slashdot moaning and gnashing about it all. It all worked for me.

I liked the movie, but I didn't like it as much as Fellowship, and that's mostly because I know that I tend to like set-up much more than realization. I'm seriously cheesed about Gimli, though. It's like: Let's have a fight between Lt. Worf and movie-Gimli. They'd boast at each other for while and then fumble their weapons anrgily and then a Ferrengi would beam in and shoot both of them. Dumbasses.