Being Amber Rhea

Tonight I packed up my iBook and “Linux in a Nutshell” book and went to Cups Coffee to work on my Web Programming homework. I figured it would be nice and quiet what with everyone being at the game. I didn’t think about the fact that being at Cups meant no internet connection. So when I got absolutely stuck (after trying to RTFM) there was no Google to refer to.

We’re supposed to write two shell scripts. The first one seems like it should be easy enough. I mean, I know conceptually how it would work. What I *don’t* know is the proper syntax and variables and other command-line hoo-hah. I know that UNIX types are all elitist and uppity about their beloved arcane commands, but sometimes I get fed up and find all that rigamarole unnecessary. But there I go again, silly Mac user…

Anyway. I tried my best to figure out how to do the damn thing. And couldn’t. Just plain couldn’t. I want to do this myself; I don’t want to ask Chris or anyone to help me. But I feel like my brain is beating itself against a brick wall.

I’ll try not to get too discouraged. And speaking of internet connections (well, I was in the first paragraph) I ordered an Airport card – Other World Computing had them for $59.99. Supposedly there is some sort of wireless network over on the east side (where Cups is located), originating from some CHUGALUG person’s house. And of course there is the WAG ‘cloud’ downtown. -I like Blue Sky, but Cups is quieter and generally cleaner. (I’m almost obsessive about keeping my iBook clean. Wouldn’t you be?)

Also while I was at Cups tonight, some random guy came up to me and asked, “So how do you like your laptop? It’s an Apple…” The last part was said with more than a hint of condescension in his voice. I told him I loved it. After his initial tone, I was surprised to here him say that he was debating about whether to buy an Apple or a Toshiba. I said, “Do yourself a favor… buy an Apple.” He said he wanted to, that it was his wife who didn’t. He said, “She doesn’t want to have to learn a whole new operating system and everything…” I said, “Come on. If you can use Windows, you can use a Mac.” Then he said he has a DVD burner and he doesn’t know if it’ll be compatible… I told him it should be. (Not sure if he was talking about the burnt DVDs or the drive itself, but either way my answer applies.) Then he said something about Macs being about 20% more expensive than PCs. I told him that was just plain false, and told him that iBooks start at around $1100. He seemed surprised to hear that. ([sigh]… they always are.) We talked a few more minutes, and then he said, “Thanks for your advice” and said he was leaning more towards the Apple. Success! Another switcher! Hell yes. One of my fellow TAs is also a recent switcher. HELL YES. Ditch the bitch and make the switch.

I have been zoned out since I entered this class at 9:30, but I just overheard the instructor say, “It’s going to be worse on a Macintosh.” Not sure what he was talking about, but I think it was something about appearance of web pages. Goddamn it!! What is *wrong* with people?? This is why the myths are propogated no matter what the truth might be.

Happy Mac is dead!! :( Not only am I not going to use Jaguar because it costs $120, but now I am *definitely* not going to use it… at least, not until someone comes up with a hack to bring Happy Mac back. In System 7 you could change your startup screen… but I wonder what sort of anti-ResEdit implementations have been made in OS X?

Steve Jobs… it’s really a love/hate type thing I’ve got going for him. He pulled Apple out of the muck and mire of the Gil Amelio days and restored the company to its former glory. I don’t think anyone else should be leading Apple. BUT, first he held a funeral for OS 9, and has now killed Happy Mac! Check the newsgroups… Mac users everywhere are mourning.

La de da, sitting in HTML class… (I mean, “Internet Design and Production”) Much to my chagrine, I am forced to use an IBM Stinkpad because they haven’t gotten all our MAC addresses registered for their wireless network yet. (And not only do I not yet have an Airport card, but they don’t have many ethernet jacks in the walls either.) My iBook is in my bookbag and I hope it isn’t too jealous. I plugged my Logitech scroll mouse (which I carry with me because I hate trackpads) into this godforsaken hunk of plastic, but it didn’t work. Well, that’s what I get for being so accustomed to Macs, expecting things to “just work”… silly me. How could I forget that in Windows the world revolves around drivers, drivers, drivers! Even for mice.

On Tuesday I taught my first section of UNIV 1120, with Betsy. Betsy is really cool and we see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I’m happy to be working with her this semester. We passed out the obligatory first-day-of-class surveys (to see how much the students already know about certain things) and to no one’s surprise, most people are already quite familiar with OASIS, Word, and web search engines. Most have some knowledge of Excel and Powerpoint too. So we are going to spend most of the semester teaching HTML (just like this class!) and doing web design. I was so relieved to hear Betsy say that she always teaches HTML first, and does FTP on the first day, and isn’t fond of Frontpage. Hallelujah! So it should be a fun semester. And all but one of the students said that they had no experience with creating web pages, so that means I can instill good design principles in them from the get-go. The fewer people there are learning Frontpage or any other “WYSIWYG” editor with no knowledge of HTML, the better!

Campaign for 100% Hand-Coded HTML

Yesterday in Web Programming Dr. Dan assigned our third exercise, due next week. It looks like it will be significantly more challenging than the first two (though I’m not going to lie about the fact that I got quite frustrated working on exercise 2… ahh, Unix…) Time to write some shell scripts. Deep breaths… Wish me luck!!

Campaign for a Non-Browser Specfic WWW

My shameless promotion of such shocking ideas as open standards and non-browser-specific design

I want to leave this class… :P

I’ve been having weird dreams the past few nights. I am still enjoying my program… but in the mornings I feel weird for a while after those dreams. WTF?

(Sitting in Networking class right now. The joys of traceroute! I need breakfast.)

It’s my bedtime. But just one quick post…

Adrian asked about New York City and where Chris and I would live when we move back up there, and so on and so forth. I felt it was a topic worthy of sharing with a broader audience (read: the 3 or 4 people who actually read this – one of whom is Adrian) so here ya go, a cut-and-paste job from the email I sent him:

“I realized I never answered your question, and it is something about which I feel the need to briefly pontificate (contradiction in terms?) Yes, there are huge variances in housing costs in NYC. Living in Manhattan is pretty much out of the question – an apartment the size of our bedroom would cost around $2000/month. (I’m not kidding.) I kind of got spoiled living in Manhattan when I was at NYU, but I was in the dorms, which is the only reason it was doable. Instead, Chris and I would live in either Brooklyn or Queens. I have friends who live in both. Within every borough there are good and bad neighborhoods. You may have heard of Bedford-Stuyvesant; that’s the notoriously bad neighborhood in Brooklyn. It’s just a matter of knowing what’s what. As for the Bronx and Staten Island? They hardly count. (Sorry, New York humor there… kidding…) Another possibility is living right across the river in Jersey. The PATH trains go there.

“I can see how you would feel lost in an urban forest when visiting NYC. The thing about living there is, you quickly find out that it’s not just one big huge 8-million-people city. It’s lots and lots of individual neighborhoods. So when people ask where you live, you don’t say “I live in New York City”, you say the Village, or Soho, or Astoria, and so on. While I was at NYU, I rarely ventured above Times Square, and when I did I felt like I was entering unfamiliar territory.

“As for the legal definition of a borough? I don’t know. I’ve often wondered that myself. Mirriam-Webster online says:

Etymology: Middle English burgh, from Old English burg fortified town; akin to Old High German burg fortified place, and probably to Old English beorg hill — more at BARROW
Date: before 12th century
1 a : a medieval fortified group of houses forming a town with special duties and privileges b : a town or urban constituency in Great Britain that sends a member to Parliament c : an urban area in Great Britain incorporated for purposes of self-government
2 a : a municipal corporation proper in some states (as New Jersey and Minnesota) corresponding to the incorporated town or village of the other states b : one of the five constituent political divisions of New York City
3 : a civil division of the state of Alaska corresponding to a county in most other states

“So there you go. That didn’t really clear anything up now, did it?”

I have started using OmniWeb again. I had stopped using it a while ago because I was tired of its nagging me to register. But I do admit, for nagware, it’s very ignorable (is that a word?) But I was getting impatient with Opera… for a browser that claims to be “the world’s fastest browser”, it certainly isn’t. One thing I do miss about Opera is the little “Search with Google” box in the upper right corner. But I’ll deal. OmniWeb just makes things look so *nice*. It gives this brushed, stylish look to all text. It is by far the most aesthetically pleasing browser. (And for those of you who don’t know, OmniWeb was the browser that was built into NeXTSTeP 10 years ago. Furthermore [and not really related], rumor has it that the WWW was invented on a NeXT [though not by Al Gore]).

Today was a pretty good day (I didn’t have to use my AK.) I dropped my elective, so I feel somewhat un-burdened, at least in the academic area. But I’m a little nervous, because tomorrow is my first day teaching. I teach with Betsy tomorrow and she and I haven’t been in contact. I probably shouldn’t worry – that’s what Eric, my co-TA on Thursdays, said – but I just like having some sort of rough plan. Well, it will probably all go fine. It’ll certainly be different from this summer, with 13 people in the class instead of just 5!

So, yeah, today was good, and hopefully tomorrow will continue in goodness. Even so, I feel kind of weird. Perhaps it’s just that I’m still getting settled in to grad school? I dunno what it is. But I do know one thing: I need to go to bed. I must make myself diurnal, dammit!!

Conspiracy? Think I’m just some crazy Mac cultist? Take a look at the view from the corporate underground.

Interesting tidbit from my E-Commerce class on Wednesdsay. (That’s my least favorite class. It’s all so conceptual, and it just really does not interest me… it’s so “yay capitalism”. He goes on and on about value chains and vertical integration and all these other terms that I don’t know if anyone really understands.) The discussion was about business models, and somehow Dell came up. The professor said, “Okay, what is Dell’s business model?” Someone answered, “You can only buy a Dell online. When you purchase it, they custom-build it for you. They avoid dealing with retailers. They also focus a lot on sales to large institutions.” The professor said, “Right! And that’s one of the best business models.” He went on to detail why it was one of the best business models, and that it’s been Dell’s business model for some time now, and that’s why they’re doing so much better than most other PC makers.

Now, I’m sitting there, and I almost had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I’m thinking, yeah, that’s Dell’s business model, but who else’s is it…? APPLE, of course! So why is it that when it’s Apple in question, these pundits go on and on about how Apple is limiting itself as a company by not making its products more widely available, how they need to expand their customer base, how if they don’t change their approach they’ll never make it… and so on and so forth. But when it’s Dell, it’s YAY! Isn’t this a great business model! Dell is so smart! Dell is so great!

It’s interesting how people are still to this day saying that “Apple won’t make it” and “Apple’s going down” and such. Wouldn’t they realize that the fact that they’ve been saying those SAME things for almost a DECADE now is evidence of Apple’s SUCCESS? It’s especially ridiculous when companies like Packard Bell, DEC, and other beige-box players have gone under. Apple contines to post profits and have billions in the bank when most of the peecee makers are struggling to turn a profit. And it’s like Chas was saying at work yesterday… that thing about Apple expanding its customer base? Well, first of all, Apple is always expanding its customer base, just gradually. And secondly and more importantly, what people don’t understand is that Apple will *always* have a customer base, because Mac users are devoted. It’s like that T-shirt says, “Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back.” Mac users will always continue to buy Macs. On the other hand, plop a PC user in front of a Dell, a Gateway, an HP, whatever – it’s all the same. There’s no brand loyalty because there’s nothing remarkable. The fact that Mac users can be so passionate about a *computer* is a testament to Apple’s success and longevity.

Tonight we went to see Signs. It was *really* good. I don’t understand why so many people wrote in to Newsweeek and were so scandalized by them calling M. Night Shyamalan “the next Steven Speilberg”. Several people said his movies weren’t anything remarkable, that the plotlines were rip-offs of other movies, and so on. I don’t get that. His movies are unlike anything else I’ve seen. (And there are lots of movies with *similar* plot lines… how many war movies have we had this year alone?) And one critic in Newsweek was saying Signs wasn’t very good because it wasn’t really a scary movie and was too focused on the characters’ emotions, and the aliens weren’t the central part of the movie. And I’m thinking, GOOD! There are enough stupid “scary movies” about alien invasions. At least someone did something different for a change!

Before that, I spent a good portion of the afternoon re-doing my resume (especially the HTML version) and working on my website as a whole. I added Cascading Style Sheets to my entire site (mostly – haven’t done the Networking page yet). I ended up rambling in the update log. I don’t think anyone actually looks at that page (not like tons of people look at this one) so here’s what I wrote: “Finally finished added CSS to my site. I’m sure I could do more with it than what I have done, but I’m not going for anything fancy here. The main thing that inspired me to start using CSS was Tom Cona’s mention of sans-serif fonts being easier to read on the web. Plus, I have an HTML resume due in his class. Yes, I already had an HTML resume, but I figured I should change it from Times New Roman to Arial just like the rest of my site. (I left the RTF and PDF versions as Times New Roman. I think that font looks more professional in print.) I had never really thought about the serif vs. sans-serif issue before, but it makes sense – serifs may make things more difficult to read, especially if the size is small. So, in keeping with my philosophy of usability and compatibility above all else, I made the change. The good thing about Cascading Style Sheets is that older browsers that don’t support them can still view the page – just using the browser’s default font instead of the one specified in the style sheet. And the W3C looooves CSS.”

I’ve decided to drop my elective. I went to it Thursday night (it meets only once a week) and afterward I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. Let’s just say it’s insane how much work is required for that class. I know that graduate classes have a lot of work just by their very nature, but seriously, this one has enough to be considered a full courseload in and of itself. I started wondering if I would have the time to do all the work for that class, *and* the work for the program classes. Because the program itself is a lot of work. And even though I already know some of the topics, like HTML and TCP/IP, it still takes *time* to do all the assignments. Then I remembered that I haven’t even started teaching yet – that doesn’t start until next week. I don’t think there’s any possible way I could do all of this and still keep my sanity and make good grades. Dropping my elective will delay my graduation until summer, but I don’t care. Expecting us to take 13 credits in the program (which is time-consuming enough) and then fit in electives is just unrealistic for grad school. Plus, I know that this particular class is offered in the summer, so it’s not like I wouldn’t have a chance to take it ever again. I think Matt Steward is going to drop his elective, too. Somehow I have a feeling we won’t be the only ones. And I found out that an MIT student from last year graduated this summer. Dr. Aronson neglected to mention that before! He was so dead-set on us graduating in May… and I don’t understand why! Why does it matter to him?

Tomorrow I have to work on another assignment for Dr. Dan’s class. This one’s about the vi editor. I *think* I know how to do most of it. I got a 10 out of 10 on the first assignment, so that gives me some confidence.

Website housekeeping note: I’ve decided I don’t like the <tt> tag; I’ll have to find some other way to differentiate when I post excerpts from emails.