Whoa man. So much to cover. So not sufficient time.
I have Part 3 of the “Box in the Living Room” series coming, including thoughts on returning shows, but that will have to wait. Instead, I have bullets. A veritable shower of bullets.

• Much of what I’m passing on here relates to an event that occurred Friday. My contracting job paid its dividends with a bounty of goodness including: An AirPort Express, a copy of OS X Tiger, a RAM upgrade for the laptop, a powered USB hub for the mini and a new printer/copier/scanner. This will give you the appropriate reference later.
• So I finally installed Tiger over the weekend. Here’s the thing about installing stuff… really about upgrades in general. My rule of upgrades is that you have to give some in order to get some. As an example, the RAM upgrade I got turned out to be faulty. That is, the stick of RAM is bad and causes my computer to display badness instead of, you know, computery stuff. Since the RAM did not display its corrupt, vile intentions until after the upgrade process had begun, the result was that instead of doing a nice “OS Upgrade” which would leave my system largely intact, I wiped the whole thing clean and started over. In theory, not so bad since I did lots of backups before I started upgrading away. However, here’s some things you forget about when you’re backing stuff up:
  • Caches, cookies and site-specific logins.
  • Application-specific settings that aren’t stored in the usual places like ~/User/Library
  • Registered software that uses weird hashes to verify registration status.
  • How incredibly large of a pain it is to set up a system the way you like.

  I discovered that I have 21 months invested into this laptop. That’s very close to two years of custom tweaks, installations and upgrades that have to be meticulously re-created if I want to get things back the way they were. Of course the point of upgrading in some cases is to not go back to the way things were, but to say that I’m running a bit behind due to this is an understatement.

• My Tiger impressions: Wonderful. Spotlight: Good. Dashboard: Very Good. Safari RSS: Nifty. RSS Screensaver: Super Nifty. Command-Control-D: Hotness. New Mail.app: Actually, I dig it. Overall the new features are cool but perhaps only worth the $129 if you, like me, are constantly losing files or you, like me, have a specific need for the Dashboard. In my case I use a Dictionary every single day. Dictionary.com is a good site but it is dog slow, even on a fast connection. That kills me. System-level dictionary: Lifesaver. Also, I managed to delete my Calculator.app out of Panther like, the first day I got it. Even later OS Upgrades didn’t bring it back. I use calculators a lot (because I suck at math) so I downloaded an app called Calculator+ which was okay, but not nearly as handy as the Dashboard calculator widget, which I’ve used five times just today. Maybe that’s only because I could, but then again, that’s the point. Right?
• Setting up the AirPort Express was, in typical Apple fashion, cake. Carrot cake. I got some of them Monster cables to connect it to the stereo system in the living room and seconds later: iTunes-in-Living-Room bliss. I talked a while back about the logic of this kind of system. On one hand, TiVo lets you do something like this already, and control the whole works with the remote for the TV. Which is cool, but TiVo likes to claim to support Macs and then promptly not so lots and lots of my files are in AAC which TiVo ignores like a child having a meltdown in the middle of a department store. I could re-encode my files into TiVo-friendly mp3, but that’s annoying to have to do each time I buy something from iTunes. There are other ancillary benefits as well. The wireless connection we have at home is courtesy of SBC at the moment. Their modem includes an access point. But since the demise of the old HP Wireless Switch some time ago, if we ever did something besides SBC, we’d be back to the wired stone ages. Now, this is no concern. Also, the APE is portable so I’m already kind of thinking that for Gin and Nikki’s birthday BBQ this weekend I may DJ it up right with my laptop and the APE over at HB and Gin’s place. Convenience, not provided by TiVo. Check and check.
• Speaking of TiVo, you know how I was all on your case a few weeks ago like, “Hey buy a TiVo and if you don’t like it I’ll give you money?” Well, nevermind. It’s not that TiVo isn’t good. It is. But TiVo is also struggling. Struggling companies do dumb stuff. In this case TiVo has now managed to deliver an underwhelming feature improvement (TiVo2Go, which still doesn’t work with Macs), promise to slap ads all over the screen while you’re fast forwarding through commercials (wrap your head around that one, I dare ya!) and now their new thing is they have content flags which could allow copyright holders to prevent shows from being marked as “Keep Until I Delete.” So far they aren’t doing it that I can tell (a few mistaken instances notwithstanding), but the fact that they’re bending to pressure from the entertainment industry to cripple key features in their product shows that they don’t have the spine or intestinal fortitude to do what’s right for their customers because they think their best bet for staying alive right now is to do whatever they have to such that they might avoid ticking off the TV moguls. Also, they’re so worried about losing money that their new service agreement doesn’t let you do less than one year’s worth of service. Dumb, dumb and more dumb. So put it this way, TiVos are $50 now. That’s a good price. At $12.95/month for one year, you get the whole package for a little more than $200. I think it’s worth it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend something that is this consumer-unfriendly, at least not at personal cost to myself.
• What I can recommend without reservation is Serenity. I con(vinc)ed Nik to see the Firefly movie with me on Friday morning, and was not disappointed in the least. Having watched and very much enjoyed the TV series, I was afraid that it might be hard to follow the plot for people like Nik who hadn’t seen even one Firefly episode. Not so, she said she had no problem picking everything up (even if her assumptions about certain characters such as Shepherd were off because of his movie portrayal). They did a rather masterful job of getting the sometimes complex relationships between the characters to shine through in only two hours (Nik even picked up on some of the nuance between Mal and Inara that took me many episodes to grasp) and while they had to push some of the events into hyperdrive (the revelations to fans of the show about River, the Federation and the Reavers come fast and furious) for the sake of the plot, but it worked extremely well. Someone else sagely said that this movie makes the Star Wars prequels look like Amateur Hour and that is a very fine way of looking at it. While I would have preferred the show remain on the air (Joss Whedon does episodic television better than 99.99% of all other humans), having some kind of continuation/closure sure was nice as an alternative to the premature death and gradual memory fade at the hands of the idiots at Fox. If you have any inclination towards SF flicks, trust me this once and go check it out. Maybe we can help show studio execs that people really like well done SF adventures and we will pay to see well executed, well written stuff.
• You know what’s not cool? Cleaning a cat litter box. Like, dumping the litter, getting in there with paper towels and hot soapy water and disinfectant cleaning. Yeah, that’s pants.
• As a side effect of my losing lots and lots of stuff from my laptop, I’ve once again killed my Amazon account. I don’t know what it is about that site and my accounts, but we don’t get along. Anyway, the only reason I still use the stupid site is because of the Wish List which, as others such as Bosslady have pointed out, is a real help to people like me who love to wait until the last possible nanosecond to do any kind of shopping. But I’m sick of re-doing it at Amazon so I switched mine to a different site (which, conveniently, also allows me to include stuff that Amazon doesn’t carry). So for those doing some early shopping (94 days until my birthday, FYI) my new list is now and forever more at Confusticate’s Wishlist.