inessential by Brent Simmons

07/10/2000

How to Log to a Text File.

The How to Get Updates HowTo was updated -- now you can turn on and off root updates logging via the Control Panel.

The Bathhouse Theatre is back! Via Sheila.

My iBook (and Airport station, card, extra memory) came this morning. I'm still excited -- I don't have it all set up yet, but I'm looking forward to working outside.

There's an aspect aside from just the wireless, portability thing -- I feel very keenly the weight of all the towers and giant monitors and industrial-strength furniture required to support computers. It's as if we live on the surface of Jupiter. In the future, people will look back on this era as a kind of '50s era. The '50s: cars were huge, X-Rays were poisonous, and housewives took horse tranquilizers for their nerves. The early '00s: computers were heavy and stationary, monitors were as big and heavy as vacuum-tube TVs. We're transitioning away from the gigantic-ness of computers. I hope.

Perhaps I'm over-sensitive, but all this plastic and metal and glass has always seemed like so much unneccesary ballast.

If you're old enough, do you remember before you had a computer? We don't actually need this big appliance (or several of them) to anchor us to the ground, we'll do fine, we'll do better, with the small and light.

I hate when I can't find something on Napster. Looking for Julee Cruise's cover of "Summer Kisses Winter Tears." Which I actually have on a CD around here, but I want to add it to my Napster playlist. Nuts.

Update: I discovered that the Napster servers aren't connected together. So if you disconnect, then reconnect, you might find things you couldn't find before, because you'll be on a different Napster server. The above is a case in point -- I searched again, couldn't find it, disconnected, reconnected, found it.

Is every made-for-TV movie about people getting terribly sick and then having an angel come rescue them? Watching ads on TV gave me the chance to utter this negative-creep-sounding line: "I hate miracles." Sheila suspects people will start getting sick on purpose just so they can have a heart-warming experience as seen on TV.

Speaking of TV. What part of "this is a clichéd joke that wasn't even funny the first time" don't you understand?

Here's something I'm glad about on TV -- we appear to be coming to the end of those commercials whose slogans always have the form of philosophical pronouncement followed by a command. You know what I mean: "Life is muddy. Wallow in it." Ugh, finally, at last, we're seeing less of this.