A few clarifications

[mdlbear]

1. This bear has been stupid in a lot of ways recently, including procrastinating necessary phone calls to strangers, but the proximal cause of yesterday's post was the discovery that I had put my underwear on backwards. Just seemed to put the crowning touch on a chain of mostly-minor stupidities. (Earlier stupidities are more serious, but can't be fixed now.)

2. When I title a post "I hate Macs", I mean it literallty: I hate Macs. This is a statement of personal preference, akin to the statement "I hate bananas". In the latter case it's because I nearly choked to death on one when I was four years old. In the former, it's because deep and unfixable design decisions render it incompatible with a working style and keyboard habits I have developed over two decades of Unix use, and see no good reason to change.

Things would be different if I actually had to use a Mac (or Windows) computer at work for any extended period of time -- in that case, I would have to either change my habits or figure out long-term workarounds. It probably wouldn't change the fact that the Macbook Pro's keyboard makes my hands hurt, and it wouldn't change my resentment over having to give up an environment in which I've been happy and productive for over two decades.

Fortunately, I don't have any compelling reason to give up Linux, so I will put up with the inevitable but temporary hassles of using a Mac during the occasional meeting, business trip, or software-testing cycle, and continue to write grumpy blog posts about it.

3. As long as I'm here, allow me to complain about an internal alarm clock that gets me up at 7:30 after going to bed at 3:00.

Comments

[julesong.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated to your post... :)

Just wanted to thank you for being at Conflikt this weekend, and for taking the time to speak with me! I really appreciate it. :) It was my first filk con and I only knew Jeffrey and Jeri Lynn, and I was feeling pretty shy overall.

It was wonderful to watch and hear you play my Rover - thank you! :)

Relative Stupidity

[harmonyheifer.livejournal.com]

It has been my personal experience that the most brilliant folk in the world can also do some of the stupidest things. I actually had to explain to Leonard Zubkoff once why he couldn't take the lid off the crock pot every half hour to taste his chili. My darling husband, who seems to be an emotional twin of yours, occasionally leaves me slack jawed with astonishment when I see him grinding to a total helpless halt over something I consider to be a no-brainer. Patrick and Leonard probably beat me by about 50 IQ points each, conservative estimate. The same goes for my lovely daughter, who was outwitting me by the time she was two. My theory is that some brains are so busy being brilliant, they just tend to skip over the more mundane stuff like how crock pots work or which way the underwear goes. It is the only explanation that really makes any sense to me.

Albert Einstein had to be rushed to the hospital on numerous occasions with stomach pain because he was forgetting to eat. My friend, you are in really g good company on this one, and you know only Colleen would ever notice the underwear, and my guess is it wouldn't leave her with her jaw agape in surprise. She is smarter than me too. *Hug*

[mneme]

I can't say I like macs myself much either. They've got some snazzy features, and are full of eye candy, but overall, I find the UI experience far inferior to a customized linux/X setup for me.

Re the case problem, why not distribute a loopback filesystem rather than a tarball for macs? Apparently, the mac will automount filesystem images when double-clicked in the finder -- so this would allow a case sensitive submount without repartitioning. Though this depends on whether an unencrypted, uncompressed loopback filesystem will be read-write on a mac.

[mdlbear]

That would work, but I'd also have to worry about the same brokenness on Windows, where it wouldn't. I really want to be able to tell somebody to unzip a file or check out a tree from version control and have it work.