iBook Woes Wectified

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The iBook failed again today, and is as dead as it was on arrival three weeks ago. This happened without cause, right in the middle of an extremely crucial DC photo shoot for a multimedia piece which is due Wednesday. Panic.

Okay, I’m posting from the Apple Store, and everything’s hunky-dory again. Apparently my hardcore outdoor photo spree (an activity which involved taking sequential kinetic photographs of DC memorials and museums, then transferring those photos at frequent intervals to my hard disk from my pencam) drove the battery to a critical low-power mode, out of which it could only be restored by pressing the Ctrl-Option-Apple-Power button combination.

The guy at the genius bar just told me how to use fsck from the command prompt in single-user mode to run a file system check, and I’ve backed up the important data to V’Ger, so things are running smoothly again.

See, I’m being tested. I had thought at first that I was being subjected to the Job treatment — sunud-sunod na kamalasan — but now I think I’m getting the Abraham test: where I’m Abraham and the iBook is Isaac. If I’m right, then the iBook has been graciously returned to me as the son whom I love, and I should expect to find a big ram caught by its horns outside the Apple Store, to sacrifice to God Almighty.

Except that I’ve already installed some RAM. Hyuk hyuk!

I’m kidding, of course. I do see this incident as a sign from the Father, a gentle tug from him, reminding me that He is the One I should be loving with all my heart and mind and body and soul. It’s so easy to forget that while surrounded by gizmos, gadgets, and a secular culture which prizes them so highly. In other words, Jesus > iBook.

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.