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Me, Most Mornings Between 3-4:30 AM

Insomnia is evil. I have no trouble falling asleep; in fact, it’s usually within seconds after my head hits the pillow. But for some reason almost every night between anywhere from 3 to 4:30 am, I wake up (usually from an intense dream) and can’t fall back asleep. I start worrying about what time it is and how soon my fucking alarm is going to go off, or even if I glance over and see I’ve still got over two hours before I have to be awake, my mind starts racing and at that point I’m fucked.

I so envy Ben’s ability to sleep for ten hours at a stretch and immediately fall back asleep if anyone wakes him up.

When I was in my 20s a trick I used on the rare instances I couldn’t get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night was to tell myself that nothing was so important that I needed to fret over it and lose sleep—especially since nothing could be done about whatever it was that was bothering me until morning anyway. If only that still worked…

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And on the Heels of that Last Post…

I found these online today. Learn to drive, morons!

I…I just can’t.

Next time take the elevator.

No, you cannot automatically ignore all traffic signs just because you’re a fucking cop. Asshole.

I would love to hear the explanation for this one.

Proof that stupidity is not limited to Americans.

There’s a reason there’s a “No Driving” rule on beaches, but apparently this driver knew better.

How? I mean, just how?

You missed the target. Next time a little more to the right and down.

She looks rather proud of herself, doesn’t she?

You could’ve just knocked.

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Denver

  1. Asshole drivers
  2. Asshole drivers
  3. Asshole drivers
  4. Asshole drivers
  5. Asshole drivers
  6. Asshole drivers
  7. Asshole drivers
  8. Asshole drivers
  9. Asshole drivers
  10. A really great jazz radio station (because I had to say something positive after running errands today and having to deal with all of the above)

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Movie Review

Intriguing title, no?

On the last day of the first manned mission to Mars, a crew member of Tantalus Base believes he has made an astounding discovery – fossilized evidence of bacterial life. Unwilling to let the relief crew claim all the glory, he disobeys orders to pack up and goes out on an unauthorized expedition to collect further samples. But a routine excavation turns to disaster when the porous ground collapses, and he falls into a deep crevice and near certain death. His devastated colleagues attempt to recover his body. However, when another vanishes they start to suspect that the life-form they have discovered is not yet dead. As the group begins to fall apart it seems their only hope is the imminent arrival of the relief ship Aurora.

Interesting premise, and the trailer was intriguing:

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff, but oh my lord…

We all know Liev Schreiber is a certified hunk and a decent actor. But if I ran into him on the street, I’d have to ask, “Why, Liev? Why?! Were you bored? Needed money? What, for Chrissake prompted you to sign on to this stinker?”

It’s not out in theaters yet, but I read the other day it was available through VOD. There wasn’t anything else on the teevee machine tonight, so I agreed to the $10 charge and ordered it up.

All I can say is at least it wasn’t two ten dollar tickets plus concessions in a theater

Alien meets Ghosts of Mars meets 28 Days Later meets The Thing meets…

You get the idea. To its credit, the visuals were awesome. The Martian landscape shots were beautiful. The story, however…well Zombies in Space would’ve been more apt a title and from the way the characters reacted to the threat, it was painfully obvious none of them had ever seen a zombie apocalypse movie of any kind. If they had they would’ve known instinctively that the only way to stop the damn things is with a steel spike through the head. But no!

 

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One More Reason…

…why you never find me on Facebook again.

From ARS Technica:

“Facebook is considering collecting yet more data from users in the form of tracked mouse movements, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Your scrolls, your hovers, your highlights, your right clicks: Facebook wants them all.

It’s not uncommon for websites to minutely track the items that users click on to see how they interact with different pages. A heat map of a page can show where most people end up clicking, giving sites an idea of how users’ eyes travel and parse the information there.

But Facebook’s tracking would be another level of tracking entirely. According to the WSJ, Facebook will be paying attention to the areas a cursor lingers over, even without a click or other interaction. This seems like a bit of a strange motion to track, as if users are out there lovingly tracing the facial profiles of their family members or ex-crushes like they might do on a photograph. But if there’s meaning to be had, Facebook will have it.

In addition to tracking mouse movements, Facebook will also be gathering mobile data. It can’t track finger-lingers over a touchscreen, thankfully, but the company will be noting when, for instance, ‘a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.'”

What’s next? A little blue FacebookKnowsAll© camera in every room in your home?

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A Short Review of OS X Mavericks

Because I know those of you who care about this shit have already read dozens of other reviews from people who actually get paid for posting their opinions online.

First off, it works. In my opinion, that’s the best compliment any new OS can receive. In my week-long experience with it so far, nothing’s broken. Unlike Windows, which pretty much requires any OS upgrade to be a “clean” install if you don’t want issues, Mavericks just laid over Mountain Lion and came right back up. Which is exactly what I have come to expect from the folks in Cupertino.

There are hundreds of changes, but on the surface it looks pretty much the same as Mountain Lion. There are few subtle visual and functional tweaks here and there, but if you weren’t looking for specific things and just sat down in front of two machines running the different OSes side by side, they’d look almost identical.

I find one of the big advertised features—Tabs in Finder—helpful, because the Finder was one of the things I hated most after switching over from Windows four years ago. Copying and moving files is so much easier now, but still not as easy under Windows. (Did I just say that?) Why there still isn’t an option to simply display a tree structure at the left of the Finder window still amazes me. (If you absolutely must have a Windows Explorer-like file manager, check out MacIntosh Explorer. The program is a little long in the tooth, isn’t optimized for retina displays, and occasionally has issues (it’s no longer in active development), but if you want immediate access to all those files and folders that Apple thinks you don’t need to see without having to go to the Terminal to manually un-hide things, it might be what you’re looking for). I use it only rarely, but when I need to, it does the job with a minimum of fuss.

I haven’t used dual monitors in nearly a year, so I haven’t had a chance to check that bullet feature out.

Likewise, I use 1Password as my password keeper, so iCloud keychain is superfluous to me.

I’m happy to see the faux leather and stitching finally gone from Calendar and Contacts. Also gone is the yellow ruled paper from the Notes program and the gray linen background from the log-in screen.

Having Apple Maps in iOS is pretty much irrelevant to me, although I do keep the icon on my dock in case I just need to look up a quick address. As for the 3D flyovers and the satellite imagery, the visuals aren’t any better than they are on iOS. “Only as good as the data” is still true here. Since they now have Maps on the desktop and Find my i-Whatever available through iCloud, I’m hoping that at some point they integrate Find My Friends into OS X as well, although at this point I’d be just as happy if they simply ditched the stitched leather interface of the program in iOS and brought it in line with the rest of Apple’s iOS apps.

I don’t use iBooks, so that was removed from the dock within seconds of the post-upgrade reboot.

The only things that don’t work for any more are two third-party screensavers (Fliqlo and Colour Clock) I had installed, and that’s because they relied on Flash in order to run. And if I don’t absolutely need to have that resource hog installed, I won’t install it. Not a huge loss; I’ve found suitable replacements.

I also received the iWork and iLife updates. Unlike a lot of the fanboys, I’m not grousing about the changes they made to the iWork apps—probably because even after four years I have yet to fully embrace them as my main productivity tools. Believe me, I’ve tried on more than one occasion to do it, but with twenty years experience under my belt, whenever I need to sit down and do real work, I fire up Word and Excel. As much as I have come to despise all things Microsoft, sometimes it’s easier to just go with what you know.

So that’s my two cents. As I said, I’m sure there are hundreds of improvements behind the scenes, but nothing that has really leapt out at me or intruded upon my consciousness. I guess that’s a good thing, no?

 

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