Notes In The Margin

I got a new MacBook Pro today. (Long story. I wasn't supposed to get one for another year. Lucky me.)

The screen is, at least initially, the biggest disappointment. It's very glossy, and at the office, under fluorescent light is extremely reflective. On the other hand, here at home, it's not reflective at all, so I guess it has a lot to do with the light. From what I've read, it's pretty good in outdoor sunlight, too, but today hasn't been an outdoor kind of day.

The transition from my old laptop was, as always, painless. This time, I did the transfer from a Time Machine backup, which was even less painful than the FireWire cable transfer last time.

The click-anywhere trackpad took almost no time to get used to. I had heard and expected bad things about it, but it's very nice, and matches the way that I think about a track pad anyways - click where your finger happens to be at that moment. The multi-finger shortcuts are also very cool. I think I'll get used to that pretty quick.

The speakers are considerably louder than the ones on the previous generation. That's nice for us, since our DVD player broke several months ago, and we watch all our movies on the laptop.

Unfortunately, the DVI connector is now a mini-DVI connector, so I need to go buy new widgets to connect to my other widgets. Fortunately, these widgets are all pretty cheap, but it's still annoying. On the plus side, it means that all of the ports are on one side of the laptop, so I will no longer have cables sticking out of both sides when I'm docked at work.

On the whole, very pleased, and I think I'm going to enjoy it.

I received my new MacBook Pro at close of business on Tuesday. I didn't take it home with me. I worked on it briefly yesterday, and am now all the way migrated. The migration was almost disappointingly easy. All my data migrated over firewire, and only stuff that I had installed from source was missing at the end of it - which amounts to Apache, and very little else. I imagine I'll run across things that are missing as I go along, but so far that's been the only one, and I didn't have to turn on the old laptop once today.

I've been using Apple's Mail.app as my primary mail client ever since Thunderbird gave up the ghost about 6 months ago. No, I don't remember what the problem was with Thunderbird.

Lately, and with increasing regularity, messages which I have read get marked unread when I'm off looking in another folder. When this happens, I have to mark them as read multiple times before they stay marked that way.

I'm not sure if this is a problem with the client or with the server, but it happens on two different mail servers, one of which is running Exchange, and the other is running Cyrus imapd, so I tend to lean towards blaming the client.

I've been unable to find reference to anyone else having this problem, but it's pretty hard to know what to search for.

Anyone else seen this?

Clay Shirky has an interesting article about Second Life, and it's gratifying to know that I'm not the only one.

Yes, I tried Second Life. No, I didn't get it. I mean, sure, I got it, but I didn't see what the appeal was. It felt like a MUD, but a lot harder to use, and not nearly as gratifying.

I was a dedicated, perhaps even addicted, LambdaMOO user for a couple years. I spent *hours* there, when I was working at Lexmark. I'd start test scripts, and they'd take 30 minutes to run. While I was waiting, I was building stuff on LambdaMOO. And one or two other MUDs.

But after a while, the only point of it was the people that were there. That's what it always comes down to. The Internet, for me, is about communication. Turning communication into an elaborate game doesn't make communication less the goal. Particularly when the game has no point. MUDs were games, in one sense, but there wasn't an objective, really, other than creating cool stuff. And I got pretty good at creating cool stuff and scripting it to do interesting things.

Second life was interesting while I had a handful of friends there. But now when I log in, there's nobody there I know, and so therefore nothing interesting to do. And because I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to build anything, and I don't have anywhere to build it, there's absolutely nothing of interest to do.

If, as Second Life claims, there are 2 million people there, I have no idea where they are, since I can never find anybody.

Andy Ihnatko, over at the Chicago Sun-Times, has an interesting article about the new Microsoft Zune, and all the reasons to avoid it like the plague. Most compelling of these, to my mind, is that the Zune software - the only way to sync the device - doesn't have any mechanism for subscribing to podcasts. Which leaves me wondering, what's the point?

(Via Cory)