Potatoland and Guinness

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That was fun. Mark Napier displayed a few of his net art pieces up on an overhead projector, including a couple of live interactive pieces: P-Soup, a dynamically updating java painter which could take multiple simultaneous user input; and net.flag, a collaborative user-generated graphic project using elements of flags from countries around the world.

In both cases, while he was demoing each piece, I discreetly whipped out my iBook, connected to MICA Wireless, and started fooling around with the project as he explained it to the audience. He was, of course, somewhat surprised to see another user painting onto the project live as he spoke, not knowing that it was someone in that very same auditorium. Heh heh!

But I came clean at the end of the talk and told him it was me. He wasn’t mad. Wireless totally rocks, man.

(Napier is probably best known for The Shredder, an “alternative browser” which takes the code of any given site and redisplays it in chaotically deconstructed form. Try it. It’s… um… interesting.)

Afterward, I joined my classmates for a jaunt over to Dougherty’s, an excellent little Irish Pub near the Rite Aid on Howard Street. I finally got to try some Guinness for the first time (under $4/pint at Dougherty’s!), and I must say, it’s good stuff. (I’m such a baaad Baptist.)

Hopping OS X Email Clients

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My main beef with OS X’s native email client is that it has no message queue: mail gets sent immediately from the Compose window, without a one-click “Send Later” function. Moz gives you a “Send Later” and a message queue, but it’s nestled in the File menu without any kind of quick access. Opera (which had exactly what I needed, and was my primary web-and-email client in Windows) looks nowhere near a decent full release for OS X, with no guarantee that a new version will have what I’m looking for; so I’m wondering what’s left. Eudora, perhaps?

“Glazed” and “Jaded”

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Whoops. I just realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve been using the word “glazed” where I actually meant “jaded.” If I commented the word in your blog or used it in conversation, please replace “glazed” with “jaded.” Unless I was talking about donuts.

Mmmm, donuts.

Lamentations 3

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Lamentations 3:

My soul is bereft of peace;

I have forgotten what happiness is;

so I say, “My endurance has perished;

so has my hope from the LORD.”

Remember my affliction and my wanderings,

the wormwood and the gall!

My soul continually remembers it

and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind,

and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in him.”

The LORD is good to those who wait for him,

to the soul who seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly

for the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for a man that he bear

the yoke in his youth.

Slight Nomenclatural Shift

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I’ve changed my mind: I’ve transferred the name of “V’ger” to my new 128MB Thumbdrive, which is more appropriate for a pocket hard disk going out and bringing data back to the creator. My iBook now has a more eponymous designation: “iPau.”

That’s all. I’m getting off this cutesy techie nomenclature fetish before it gets too far out of hand.

(The Thumbdrive is an excellent little tool: you need only plug it into a USB port to have it pop up on your desktop as a new drive. And it’s no bigger than my pinky finger.)

iBook/OSX software

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Most of my priority-purpose software has now been installed on the iBook:

VirtualPC creates a virtual drive on your Mac which emulates a PC environment, in a window or fullscreen. I was about to buy VirtualPC with Win98, but I found that you could just buy the DOS version at half the price, and just install a licensed copy of WinNT/9x/XP onto it anyway. I needed this for three things: run Windows apps if needed, test websites on Windows browsers, and download images from my pencam, which has no MacOS drivers. Bad news, though: VirtualPC hangs when connecting to the pencam, no matter how much RAM you have. Not feasible.

Fortunately, I remembered macam, which works like a charm, downloading photos from the camera to TIF images in any folder you wish, at a decent speed. Even the support rep at Aiptek suggested it.

(TIF. Sniff.) :(

I had initially intended to use the full Mozilla suite for all my email and web browsing needs, but it suffered from plodding speeds and some UI cruft. I settled instead for the lightweight Gecko-based Chimera, and OS X’s own native mail app suffices for email, though I detest the lack of a “Send Later” message queue. Hopefully a new Opera for OS X will be out soon, with all the functionality I desire from it.

iChat, while cute and functional, is AIM-only, so I downloaded Fire, an excellent little universal IM client for OS X. Not quite as tight as Trillian on the PC, but again, it suffices.

Of course, what digital artist can be without Photoshop? I borrowed my landlord’s Photoshop 7 CD, which he wasn’t using, though I intend to buy my own licensed copy when the money presents itself.

For text and coding, BBEdit Lite and JEdit. The latter looks very, very promising as a GNU programmer’s editor, but being Java-based, it’s a bit slow.

Palm Desktop, of course, to keep my Palm synced. I would use iSync, but my Serial-USB adapter only works with OS9. I may just buy a new PDA in the near future. Again, if the money presents itself. Not likely.

I’m still wondering about FTP GUI apps, but it looks like you can just use the Go to Server function in the Finder. Besides, I really should get down to learning how to do it from the CLI.

Okay, it’s late/early, and I need to work on a multimedia project tomorrow. I’m soooo swamped. Good night/morning.