After four days of driving, my husband and I arrived at the border crossing into Canada at Coutts, Alberta, on Saturday, January 16. After answering the customary questions from the customs agent (no we don’t have firearms or mace!), we were directed into a parking lot so that we could go inside and speak to an immigration officer about getting our temporary work visas.
When we approached the counter, two Asian gentlemen were already being helped by a young woman. She was having a hard time dealing with them because one of them didn’t speak English, and the other one had to keep translating for her. We were asked what we needed by an older woman, and we told her that we needed temporary work permits. She took our passports and asked us to sit and wait until we were called up. The young woman who was speaking to the Asian men kept saying over and over, “there is no way he could have been here for eight months without a passport!” I don’t know if she was speaking about one of them, or about someone they knew, but apparently she was getting frustrated because at one point she said, “your friend really needs to take English classes. We speak English here in Canada!”
Windows 7 Ultimate installs a ton of non-Western fonts by default, and there’s no way to remove them. Unlike in Mac OS X, there is no option in the installer for leaving these fonts out. The advertised solution is to “hide” the unwanted fonts in the Control Panel, but they appear in applications anyway. Just going alphabetically, one has to scroll through seven non-Western (such as Thai) fonts before getting to Arial, and then another five before getting to Calibri. When you try to delete the unwanted fonts from the Control Panel, a window appears saying that you cannot delete system fonts. Why is Plantagenet Cherokee Regular a system font for a person who doesn’t (and never will) speak Cherokee?
And the real kicker is that this question is posted on a Microsoft answers forum, and a self-described Microsoft employee tried to answer the question by saying, “I’m not sure what fonts you are referring to.” Really. You really aren’t sure. Then what the hell are you doing answering a question in that forum? Have you even used Windows 7? The whole situation is just ridiculous.
I give up! I have reinstalled OS X 10.5 on my Mac Mini because I am sick of the problems caused by Snow Leopard. If you saw my earlier post on the subject, you know I was having problems launching System Preferences. If I restarted the system and then tried to launch System Preferences, the icon would bounce in the dock about ten times, and then stop without the System Preferences pane ever coming up. Opening Activity Monitor or pressing Command-Option-Esc would reveal that System Preferences was running but “not responding”. So I would have to Force Quit it. Then, if I tried to launch it again, it would work fine. (Update: problem solved! Scroll to the end of this post to see how.)
I use several third party apps that have modules that start when the computer is booted. They are Dropbox and 1Password. Thinking that one of these might be the source of the problem, I disabled the components that started at boot time. This did not fix the problem, to my great annoyance and frustration.
I use a Mac because it usually “just works.” I am so not in the mood to sit around tinkering with this OS to try to get it to do what it is supposed to do. If I were, I’d be using Linux. There are other applications I use that are not supported under Snow Leopard. I realize that this is the fault of the developers of those apps and not Apple, but it still reminds me of the launch of Vista, where people were left with a lot of unusable software.
But what about the performance improvements, you ask? Well, there were none. In fact, I feel confident in saying that performance on my Mac actually got worse under Snow Leopard. In particular, graphics events got worse. If I open a Stacks-enabled folder in the dock in Leopard (10.5), it opens quickly and smoothly. Under Snow Leopard, the animation would be jerky, like some of the “frames” of the animation were missing. I realize that my Core Duo Mac Mini is not a performance powerhouse, but it IS a dual-core Intel-based Mac of fairly recent vintage, and I expect it to be able to keep up under an OS that promises performance enhancements. If Snow Leopard is only good for people with 8-core Mac Pros (or PowerMacs or whatever they’re called these days), they might have said so on the box.
Maybe after a few more revisions come out (like 10.6.4), and after third-party developers catch up and are able to get their apps to work properly, I’ll reinstall Snow Leopard. But for now, I’ll happily stick with what works and works well: good ‘ol Leopard 10.5!
UPDATE: I solved the hanging System Preferences issue by removing the 1Password entry from /Library/InputManagers. Incidentally, I also stopped using 1Password in favor of Last Pass.
I bought Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” the day after it came out and enthusiastically installed it. I was not impressed. First, I had to recalibrate my display. I guess this is because they changed the gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. Second, everything actually felt slower and less responsive when it was advertised that everything would be faster! In an attempt to solve this problem, I backed up my hard drive using SuperDuper! and used Disk Utility on the Snow Leopard install disc to erase my hard drive and do a clean install. I spent several hours yesterday restoring all of my data (photos, music, etc.) from my backup. Then I reinstalled my favorite apps. That’s when I started having problems with System Preferences starting! How could something so integral to the OS fail to launch? It turns out that one of the other apps I installed, Dropbox, also installs Growl. Growl is not currently compatible with Snow Leopard (thanks for telling me). I opened up Activity Monitor and manually quit Growl, and then my System Preferences pane was able to open in an instant! If you are encountering problems opening System Preferences under Snow Leopard, you might want to try this. To remove Growl permanently, hold down Ctrl while clicking on the Growl icon in System Preferences. From the menu that pops up, click “remove Growl preference pane”. Voila! Problem solved.
Ikea recently changed the font in their printed catalogs from a modified Futura to Verdana. Many design and font geeks are blogging like crazy to express their dissatisfaction with this move. I want to scream at all these people, “you shouldn’t be shopping at Ikea anyway!” Ikea products may look good (to some people), but at the end of the day, it’s all still a bunch of particle-board crap that’s designed to last barely a year. Their stores are far away from the urban centers they serve causing people to burn more gas and put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to shop at them. Additionally, they source much of their wood from Russia and China where illegal logging is rampant, and they cannot guarantee that none of their wood was obtained by illegal means. All of these issues and more are addressed in a recent piece in The Atlantic, which includes a quote from Wig Zamore, an environmental activist who actually works with Ikea. Wig calls Ikea “the least sustainable retailer on the planet.”
If you want thoughtfully-designed, inexpensive consumer goods, I suggest you try shopping at your local Target. They don’t use Verdana in their sale circulars, so aesthetes need not fear being offended.
With nothing better to do on a recent Saturday afternoon, J. and I went car shopping. Our fantasy is that we would be replacing his Ford Ranger pickup; the reality is that it’s paid for, it’s reliable (enough), and we’d be fools for taking on a car payment at this time. But anyway, it’s fun to look, so we drove to Round Rock where there’s a Toyota dealership right next door to a Honda dealership. I drive a Honda Fit, so I was curious to see what Honda’s small SUV offering was like. Two cars ago, I drove the previous-generation Toyota RAV4, so I was also curious to see what the new RAV4 was like.
The first car we drove was the Honda CR-V. The Honda has a 2.4-liter four-cylinder VTEC engine. Paired with an automatic transmission, I found the car to be a little slow when starting from a stopped position, but once the engine got revved up it had decent acceleration. There was just that annoying pause between pressing down on the pedal and the engine’s subsequent response that made me a little wary. We liked the looks of the CR-V, especially the front. The interior was styled nicely, too, except for a flimsy plastic tray attached to the front passenger seat that acted as a center console. It could fold down to create space ostensibly for a purse or brief case. I would have preferred having a proper center console with cup holders and a lockable storage compartment such as one finds in a Chevy Tahoe. But by far my biggest gripe about the CR-V was the rear seats. Specifically, I didn’t think they were very practical. In my Fit, the rear seats can be folded forward to create a totally flat area in the back for hauling things. Additionally, the bottom cushions can be flipped up so that you can set something tall, like a house plant, on the floor, and it can ride upright behind the front seats. It’s a very flexible, practical, highly-configurable set up. The CR-V’s rear seats were so much the OPPOSITE of that that it really seems like it was made by an entirely different car company. If you want to fold the seats forward to make more room in the back, they basically just “roll up” and rest against the backs of the front seats. They don’t fold down “into” the floor to create a flat space; they just sit there in a lump taking up room. Even the act of folding up the seats is totally inelegant. First you have to pull up on a strap to get the seat back to fold forward. Then you have to reach practically underneath the back of the seat to pull on ANOTHER strap to release the catch to allow the now-folded seat to flip forward, creating a whopping one foot of additional space. My old RAV4 had a very similar arrangement, but even my RAV4 bested the CR-V because the seats in my RAV4 were REMOVABLE. The CR-V’s rear seats are permanently attached at the front mount points, so you can’t even take them out to create more hauling room. This just seems like such a failure of imagination on the part of Honda, it’s almost laughable. The rear seats in the new RAV4, as well as in Hyundai’s two smallest SUVs (the Tucson and the Santa Fe) fold flat. It was absolutely disheartening to see how badly Honda screwed up on that point. The CR-V is gorgeous when you walk up to it, and the interior styling is modern and fresh. It drives reasonably well. But that rear seat situation is inexcusable for a vehicle that purports to offer more utility than a standard sedan.
After shaking our heads in disappointment over the Honda, we wanted to check out the new RAV4. What a world of difference! First of all, the RAV4 looks a little bigger, and it felt bigger on the inside too. J is over six feet tall, and he says the front seats in the RAV4 are much more comfortable for him than the ones in the CR-V (which were in turn slightly more comfortable than the ones in my Fit, though I would have expected that). The rear seat situation is much more elegant in the Toyota. Gone are the weird pull-straps for releasing the seat catches. There’s a large release just inside the rear (cargo) door that allows the rear seat to fold completely forward in one smooth motion. In terms of styling, I have to give the edge to the Honda, but not by much. The Toyota’s interior seems just a tad more masculine and rugged in its appearance, though it had the same level of quality as the Honda.
The RAV4 has two engines to choose from. First we drove one with the 3.5-liter V-6. What a screamer! That was an awesome drive. The engine was responsive and smooth, and it pulled really strong. The four-cylinder wasn’t as much fun as the V-6 of course, but I thought it was still a little more responsive than the Honda. That may have had more to do with the automatic transmission than the engine itself. I would have to try them both with 5-speeds to make a final determination on that point, thought it would be moot since J prefers an automatic.
The Toyota had its niggling issues too. My biggest pet peeve about the RAV4 is something that has remained unchanged since the vehicle was introduced in this country: the rear door is hinged on the side rather than on the top. Rather than swinging up and out of the way, it opens to the side like the back of a hearse. This in itself isn’t such a big deal, except that the hinges are on the right. This makes sense in Japan since people drive on the left side of the road. If you pull up to a curb to load or unload the car, you would likely park on the left side of the street. Having a door hinged on the right is nice because the door swings out of the way. Now put that car on the right hand side of the street, and the door swings out toward the curb and is totally in the way if you have something to load from the sidewalk. If Toyota can move the steering wheel column to the other side of the vehicle for countries where we drive on the right, it seems like they could move the door hinges to the other side of the vehicle as well. Or better yet, move them to the top like every other SUV on the road.
If we were truly serious about buying a car right now, I’d do much more research. I’d also go test drive the vehicles again, and I’d have more to say about other aspects of the cars. From what I’ve seen so far, the Honda wouldn’t even be in the running due to the boneheaded design of the rear seats. Hopefully Honda will correct that glaring design flaw in the next generation of CR-V.
As a guest blogger on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Hanna Rosin shows a dismissive attitude toward those who are upset about the possibility that the Centers For Disease Control may promote circumcision on healthy baby boys as a way to reduce HIV infection later in life. Advocating a surgical procedure on perfectly healthy tissue is offensive in its own right, but considering that this procedure removes up to 50% of the nerve endings in the penis, thus desensitizing the penis and reducing sexual pleasure, is an unconscionable violation of that baby’s rights as a human being. If Ms. Rosin is so comfortable with advocating surgical procedures on healthy tissue for the purpose of preventing future disease, then perhaps she should get a radical mastectomy so that she can eliminate any chance of developing breast cancer in the future. And while she’s at it, she can get a hysterectomy to avoid uterine cancer. To top it off, she can get a circumcision herself. By removing her clitoris and vulva, she won’t be able to have sexual intercourse, thus drastically minimizing her chances of contracting the HIV virus that she seems to dread so much.
Is that offensive? I certainly hope so. It offends me to no end that anyone would advocate this barbaric, senseless procedure on healthy baby boys. There are valid medical reasons for performing male circumcision, and I have no issue with the procedure as a means of treating those conditions. But cutting off part of a baby’s genitals for some supposed health benefit that that boy won’t even realize for another fifteen to twenty years and which can be achieved more effectively through education and the promotion of condom use is outrageous and irresponsible.
I am getting sick of hearing about the so-called Public Option in this health care reform debate. It’s not so much the details that I’m sick of, because the administration hasn’t really given any! It’s not the lies and distortions from the Republicans that I’m sick of either, though they are getting rather tiresome. What I AM getting sick of is the fact that people keep calling it a Public Option! Of all of the reforms being discussed, this one seems to me to be the most essential of the bunch. It’s not optional! It’s not an option, but the Obama administration now seems to be treating it like it is. We should be calling it the Public Plan. Without this Public Plan, there is no reform. There is no point to the other things they are discussing, because all of it is just window-dressing for keeping power solely in the hands of private insurance companies. Obama wants to keep the private insurance companies honest; well, giving people a choice (the option!) between a government-run health insurance plan and a private insurance plan is the best way to do that.
Critics of the Public Plan say that they don’t want some government bureaucrat standing between them and their doctor. So, I guess that means that they’d much rather have some faceless corporate bean counter rationing their care instead. Because that’s what we have now. Let’s stop deluding ourselves: private insurance companies are in the business to MAKE MONEY. Thus they are incentivized to raise your premiums, raise your deductibles, and deny your claims. Their primary goal is to INCREASE SHAREHOLDER VALUE. Trust me, I’ve been to business school. This is the mantra of all corporate entities in America, and I generally don’t fault them for that. On the whole, it’s the best economic system we humans have come up with so far. But it doesn’t work in all situations. What I want to know is: how does increasing shareholder value square with a society’s goal of keeping all its citizens healthy and productive? If this system works so well, then why are half of the personal bankruptcies in this country the result of astronomical health care bills wiping out a family’s savings? We as a country can’t keep going like this. It is simply unsustainable.
I say, let’s forget about all of the insurance reforms that are being discussed. Let’s just let the insurance companies do whatever they want. But let’s also have a Public Plan with affordable premiums, reasonable deductibles, and a broad range of coverage that doesn’t exclude pre-existing conditions. And then let the private insurance companies see what they can come up with to compete. If they can compete, then they’ll do fine. If not, then we’re better off without them.
So let’s stop mincing words. It’s not a Public “Option”; it’s the Public Plan, the one that Obama campaigned on (despite the lawyering that the administration is trying to do now to deny that), and the one that America deserves.
This six-month-old Java vulnerability has been fixed by Sun, but Apple has yet to address it in their JVM (Java Virtual Machine) putting all OS X users at risk. See this excellent article which not only describes the issue, but provides proof-of-concept code which demonstrates ON YOUR MACHINE what the vulnerability can do!
