This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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August 2009
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Snowed In

So, I spent the last few hours identifying a few incompatible things* I had starting automatically which therefore caused me trouble and a few other random minor issues that required some troubleshooting, but I seem to now be happily running Snow Leopard. Woo! I wouldn’t be surprised though if a few other random issues turn up over the next few days. But for the most part, so far this is living up to the “snappier” promise. I gained back almost 40 gig of space after the update, and everything just seems to be running more quickly and smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.

A couple of the enhancements to the dock and expose and such are nice too, but so far the main thing I am happy with is just that I can navigate around my daily tasks more quickly. My poor 3.5 year old machine had gotten pretty bogged down. (Look, I have it running lots of crap in the background pretty much non-stop, although I used this as an excuse to kill some things I had running, and I’ll probably kill more before I am done.) Anyway, it feels much more actually usable than it did a few hours ago. This should make our decision to hold off to 2010 to replace this aging machine a bit easier to live with. :-)

* The nasty one was iStat Menus. They say 2.0 (not yet released) will be Snow Leopard compatible, but the current version, 1.3, caused a royal mess when I first booted after upgrading. If you have this installed, you would be well advised to uninstall it before doing the Snow Leopard upgrade.

AppStoreHQ

Scoble interviews Ian Sefferman, someone who used to work at my current employer in a group closely related to my own group. He talks about his new venture AppStoreHQ.

(via Made in Detroit, Ian’s blog)

Yum, Yum, Gimme Some

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • More Birthers
  • Afghanistan
  • Pirate Bay Update
  • Apple App Store
  • AT&T’s Network
  • Display Technology
  • Lockerbie Release
  • Healthy Foods

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20090824.mp3″ text=”CC recorded 24 Aug 2009″]

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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

GijoemovieposterI’m going to stop putting things like “Cinema:” in the titles, as anybody who cares can see the category or tags, or just figure it out. Just sayin.

Anyway, first of all, I just want to emphasize… Brandy and I did NOT want to see this movie. We did not choose it, we would never choose it, etc. However, Amy wanted to see a movie with a couple of her friends. And, well, due to some unpleasantness earlier this summer, for the moment she is no longer allowed to see movies without at least one parent also present. But we wanted to be nice and let her go out anyway. So we agreed to let her go with the condition that we would be sitting in the theater too, although not right next to her and her friends. And of course the movie this group of three kids chose was this one. I had heard nothing but bad things about it. I did not have high expectations.

Brandy’s reactions on leaving the theater were all along the lines of “This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen”, “How do I get those two hours back”, “That was horrible”, etc. So we know how she feels.

For me, it was pretty stupid and worthless, but given the negative hype, I actually expected worse. So I was actually mostly OK with it. There were random people running around and things blowing up and stuff. There were people who if they can act were not showing it here. There was awful dialog. But, you know, whatever. I ate a bunch of buttered popcorn, so all was OK in the world I guess. Was it good? No. Not even close. Was it pretty bad, yes, OK, it was. But it wasn’t the painful kind of bad, it was just the waste of time sort of bad. And lets be honest, if I’d been at home would I have done anything really useful? No, probably not. So, you know, whatever.

Except of course that it cost money. OK, now I’m mad. This cost money. Ouch. OK, that sucks. OK, if this ever comes on TV and you are completely bored and have absolutely nothing else to do, OK, feel free to leave it on and watch. But under no circumstances watch this in any way that requires you to pay for it. That’s about right.

Video: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3: Disk 1

btvs-s3So last week’s family video night ended up being one of the “something we own but have never watched” category, and we picked randomly from the shelf full of available such things. What came out was a Buffy. I had to look up in the archives where we left off, as it had been so long, but we had finished Season 2, but hadn’t yet started Season 3. So Disk 1 went into the DVD player and off we went.

There were four episodes on this disk: “Anne“, “Dead Man’s Party“, “Faith, Hope & Trick” and “Beauty and the Beasts“. The highlights of these were basically Buffy coming back from LA, Faith arriving, and Angel coming back a hell dimension (probably something like LA).

They were all decent episodes, but for me the main fun here was watching Amy watch them. She was getting all excited and into it, and it seems like every few minutes she was capturing more quotes into a quotes file thing she is keeping these days of memorable quotes she wants to remember. And of course Buffy is just full of those.

We were going to just watch two episodes, then save the other two for the following week, but Amy begged, so we watched more. And for that matter she has been asking for more Buffy almost every day since then. We’ll see. There is a pattern that has to be followed for family movie night after all! But I’m sure there will be more Buffy soon enough. :-)

1976 Sam Tantrum


(Via an email from my mom recently, to remind me what I’m in for I
presume. :-) )

Overall Fred

OverallFred

(Doodle by Amy)

Mike Drinks

A Week on the Beach

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Turning Off
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Work Efficiency
  • The Pirate Bay
  • Hudson Crash
  • Healthcare Again

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20090817.mp3″ text=”CC recorded 17 Aug 2009″]

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As Per Tradition


The first picture from the new camera, is of the old camera. Although
in this case the old camera hasn’t been functional in years.