This has been a weekend full of surprises: mostly good, a few bad, and one simply baffling. Much as I am inclined to respond publicly to a certain recent provocation, I know it will be wiser to simply submerge it, and allow the author to float back to sanity of their own volition, or simply remain out of sight. Not to let that dominate the paragraph, it should be strongly affirmed that life is proving satisfying and interesting at the moment – if also quite tiring. Given my 6:30am projected wake-up time tomorrow, the plan is to be asleep by midnight, at the latest. Hopefully, my neighbour with the passion for early-morning chain-sawing (seriously) won’t be to to their wood-destroying ways tomorrow.
Writingandmacgeekery
For the first time, I found a reason to consider upgrading the operating system on my iBook from 10.3.9 to some version of Tiger (10.4). Namely, a program called WriteRoom that consists quite simply of a completely black screen, onto which you type basic green text. No fonts, no spell checking, no instant messenger windows popping up. Ironic as it might be to upgrade my operating system so as to use a program with fewer features than any text editor I have ever used, there is still a certain appeal. I already use TextEdit almost exclusively for writing on the Mac; Word uses too much RAM and does idiotic things like automatically trying to insert the last names of anyone in my Entourage contact list whenever I type their first names. I type: “He drew… a blank” and it ‘helpfully’ suggests “He Drew Sexmith a blank.” Much as I like to be reminded about friends from high school, this feature is much more trouble than it could possibly be worth.
That said, a new version of OS X is meant to be coming out sometime in the next few months (Leopard). As such, I think I will probably wait until it is possible to move forward by two bounds instead of just one. Of course, doing so will probably require that I get the extra 1GB of RAM that I have been considering. Initially, I was annoyed that I would need to remove the 256MB RAM upgrade that Apple overcharged me for when I bought this computer, but it seems that the mobo of the 1.3GHz 14″ iBook can handle a maximum of 1256MB of RAM anyhow.
Have you ever thought that you may be missing out on life? I reckon that you need to broaden your horizons and meet people out of the academic sphere. From reading this blog I would deduce that you seldom meet anyone unconnected with academia. Try and meet people who actually work for a living.
Living in Oxford, while enrolled in a graduate program and while working in several academic capacities, one meets a lot of academically inclined people. That might constitute “missing out on life” if it was all I was ever to do, but it seems to me supremely unlikely that such will be the case.
That said, I am always glad to meet new people, as well as new commenters (even somewhat enigmatic ones).
Oh, and given the number of my close friends who seem destined to end up in academic careers, it seems suitable to remind you that academics also “actually work for a living,” though perhaps not in the same way as architects or coal miners.
I have the panther to tiger upgrade disc. I could mail it to you if you wish.
If that’s the upgrade course you’re taking, it would be much easier to make an OS X disc image of the CD, then send that electronically.