Geek On The Mountain

Milenka’s mom is having a gastric bypass tomorrow morning. She’s actually having it done by the same doctor that Milenka had do hers, so she’ll be staying with us for a while. It’s scheduled to start at like 7:00 am, so we have to be up way early, which sucks. Not a huge deal though really…

Milenka is worried that she’s going to die. But then, she’s always paranoid about stuff like that. The risk of that happening is very small….about the same as any other major surgery, from my understanding. I myself am not worried at all…I’m sure everything will be fine. Then again, I’m usually not worried about much. Perhaps a middle ground between the two of us would be more appropriate. But I’ll still stick with my opinion….there really is very little chance anything will go wrong, so there’s not a whole lot of reason to worry.

Besides, I think the surgery will be really good for her. She’s borderline diabetic and has high blood pressure as is, among other things. These things should get better if not go away all together after the weight comes off. I have to believe that a year from now she’ll be in much much better health.

On the downside though, she brought 3 dogs with her. I actually like all of the dogs. The problem is though, once you add them to the two dogs we already have, it’s just too much. Five dogs is beyond this household’s proper capacity, if you ask me.. Plus, they like to fight. That is to say, they like to play, but this involves running around and growling and such….fighting. Oh well. It’ll be fun in some way or another at least.

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People around here like to call crazy weather “Michigan weather”. Or else, when commenting on crazy weather, they’ll say something like “Well, this is Michigan..” This label applies to crazy weather in general, like when you get a bad snowstorm one day, and then it’s sunny and warm out the next (or later in the same day even…). Or those days when it’s warmer when you get up in the morning when it was when you went to bed the night before. Or any other strange weather really….

Seeing as though I don’t get out of state much, I wouldn’t exactly know, but I imagine that this kind of weather happens in most places really. Is there “Wisconsin weather” and “Idaho weather” and “Texas weather” out there as well? Do people in your state say the same type of thing about their own state? I’m just curious…

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A while back, Milenka started subscribing to multiple mailing lists that send out tons of images in various formats. Initially, she had all the mail coming in through one Gmail account. Between all the lists, they send out 500 - 1000 MB’s per day. After a short while, Milenka had missed going through the mail for a short period, and the account filled up. A Gmail account of all things….2.6 GB’s and counting. After that, she split the mailing lists up so that they go into 6 or 8 different accounts. This gave her a lot more leeway, but then she had to deal with switching between different accounts, and some accounts were still hit rather heavily causing some of them to run rather on the high side at times.

It occurred to me that an easy solution would be to utilize Gmail’s ability to permit access via POP3. This allowed me to setup a regular email client (Outlook, OE, Thunderbird, etc) to download all of the mail. Since I just put in a 250GB hard drive (on top of the 80 and 160 we already had), I have plenty of space to do as I like.

I use T-bird for all of my email, but my first thought was that Outlook (XP, 2002) would be better at handling gigabytes of mail. So I started to set it up to download all of the mail. It quickly became apparent, however, that something was wrong. It seemed to stop downloading at some point. It just wouldn’t get any new mail, even though there was still some left on the server. I started digging around and I found that Outlook has a maximum mailbox size of 2GB….not even enough to empty out a single Gmail account. Not enough for our needs by any means. And sure enough, I checked out the file and it was indeed maxed out. Obviously, Outlook wasn’t up to the task.

So I went to the other client I already had installed, Thunderbird. Before I wasted my time setting everything up and downloading huge amounts of data, I googled T-Bird’s maximum mailbox size. It tops out at 4GB, a much more reasonable number. Once setup, everything seems to work great. Some operations can be a bit pokey, but on the all and all I think going from mail to mail it’s faster than using the web interface.

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Our great weather started out on Wednesday night when it started snowing. Although, come to think of it, it may have been raining briefly first….at any rate, it was pretty warm out, so it was a wet snow. We only got a couple of inches, but the precipitation more or less continued into the morning at which time it warmed up enough for it to turn into rain. It rained pretty much all day and the roads turned into a slushy mess, though they weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been. The forecast was for it to continue and for temperatures to drop back below freezing. Fortunately, it stopped raining before it got cold enough for the roads to completely freeze over, so they weren’t too bad (at least when I was out).

The important thing here though is electricity. Around 5:00, when I was at work, the lights dimmed a couple of times, which is almost always a precursor to an outage a few seconds later, but nothing happened. Then, just before 7, the whole place went dark. This is always fun because the power rarely goes out for any period of time. It isn’t terribly uncommon for it to flash, but 95% of the time we have power right back again (which is all still quite disruptive as every machine has to be reset and our overhead lights need 10 minutes of downtime before they cycle back on, so we’re still in the dark except for some fluorescent lights here and there). It’s exceptionally dark when there’s really no power though. Also, with the air handlers and all other machines down, and even more so after a while, once all the air has leaked out of the compressed air lines, it’s really, really quiet. It’s kind of funny because I could even hear the water running down the drain pipes that go up to the roof.

Unfortunately, the only light we had at all was those emergency light things on some of the walls. On the up side, I managed to find one in a hallway that lended itself very nicely to reading once I dragged a chair underneath it. Naturally as well, this all started around lunch time and instead of bringing something edible, like a sandwich, I had soup, which wasn’t doing much for me without a microwave. The really nice thing was that after an hour and a half or so, and the power company having no idea when they could restore power, they sent everyone home (they always pay everyone in situations like this as well, btw). After some ice-chipping on my car, I was home about 2.5 hours early.

And what did I do with my free time? After I’d been home maybe 10 minutes, one of Milenka’s friends called and said she was out of gas…whoops. She’d just gotten off the highway and was all of a mile away from a gas station. I would have filled up 5 miles back at the last town myself, but hey….

We spent the rest of the night watching some TV….we also finished the last 2 episodes of Firefly and watched Serenity. The show sparked the response I knew it would out of Milenka….she wondered why she hadn’t watched it before and of course, after seeing the last episode (which nicely just ends with Early (the bounty hunter) floating in space with one line: “Well, here I am.”) saying “That’s it?” It all ends kind of abruptly.

I should have known, but she didn’t like Serenity at all. The characters are slightly different, of course, and I still can’t believe that Joss killed off Wash, but I think it’s kind of understandable in the setting of a movie. Milenka’s not quite as forgiving though and thought it was more or less a disgrace to the show.

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Have you seen the Apple commercial that lets everyone know that they’re switching to Intel? It’s been out for a while now, though I never really paid any attention to it as I don’t pay much attention to boring commercials and I already knew long before they started showing them that the change was happening. When I saw it last night though, I couldn’t hep but notice how terribly snobbish it is.

The commercial says, about Intel chips: “For years, it’s been trapped inside PCs…dull little boxes…performing dull little tasks.” It then says that now that they’re in a Mac, there’s a whole world of new possibilities.

Now, if you could tell me exactly what a Mac can do that a PC can’t, then I’d be amazed. They’re both computers. They can both perform all of the same functions. In fact, they’re pretty much using the same hardware. That’s not to say that mac and PC hardware are completely interchangeable, but it’s mostly the same stuff made slightly differently to interface with the different system. The only thing that’s really different between the two right now is the CPU architecture. This is a big one, mind you….software won’t execute across different architectures. But they’re still both just computers at heart.

That leads to the only real difference that the end user sees….the software. There is certainly a difference there. But the software does lend an argument about how much better Intel chips will be in Macs…

If the only real difference right now is architecture, then obviously that difference will no longer exist with Macs running Intel chips. What you essentially end up with is a PC branded with the Mac name. Don’t get me wrong, it’s running mac software, in a mac box, and using those funky mac keyboards and mice. But it’s still pretty much a PC on the inside. Not that I imagine hardware will be compatible between the two even now. But then, I heard they’re even using a standard Intel chipset, so maybe…

Which means really…..who the hell cares? It doesn’t really matter much to most people what exactly is inside. Their switch to Intel really means they’re getting a dual core chip which (they claim) gives them a whole lot more processing power than they used to have. But it doesn’t particularly matter who makes that chip…just that it work.

Speaking of which, Apple had a great opportunity to relive their glory days (when they lost the home computer race) and make all of their old software completely incompatible with their new Mac. They didn’t do it though. They’ve got some piece of software set up to “convert the programs on the fly”…. Realistically, if they have enough power, they can just emulate everything if they want to. At least they learned their lesson about compatability.

The only amazing new possibilities here is that macs may now be able to run PC software and PCs may be able to run Mac software. That should distinguish the Mac…

Their site explaining the switch even throws out more hype saying “Powered by the most advanced Intel chip, your new Mac will do all those things that only Macs can do.” But when a Mac is essentially a PC, what does that mean exactly?

And “What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.” Sure, now it can do things like browse the web, and do word processing, and watch and edit video, and playback music and… It’s all rather ridiculous.

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