A couple of notes about Tiger… Damn you Apple for making Spotlight exactly like the little bastard cousin of LaunchBar, then using the same UI paradigm and activation key. I’m going to try keeping Spotlight with the default Cmd-Space hotkey, but that means retraining my brain to hit something else to get LaunchBar… which I now do almost reflexively (today, after installing the new LaunchBar, I hit Cmd-Space to launch LaunchBar… and wondered why nothing happened.)

I’m switching back to Safari on my machines at home, just to see the new features and play around with the RSS integration. I’m curious if Safari is better in this release, but I’m also looking forward to the next update which claims to be ACID2 compliant. Not even Firefox can make that claim, so I’m curious to play around. With some of the DHTML things we want to do at work, I’m hoping we have a solid platform to work off of.

Quick links of things to look at:

• Safari and setting your default feed reader
• Brent Simmons on Automator (and why it’s the best feature of Tiger
• Dan Wood, author of Watson, gives his rundown of Tiger (he’s excited about Quartz Composer, I think )
• John Siracusa’s technical rundown of Tiger in Ars Technica

More on this later. So far so smooth. I did have trouble installing the update on my iMac. Turned out there was minor filesystem corruption on the computer that Disk Utility couldn’t fix (incorrect number of thread records). In fact, the installer just choked and said something like “Installer encountered an error. Please retry installation ” or something. I ended up running Disk Utility off of the installer DVD manually where I saw that Disk Utility was choking on this error. I suggest running Disk Utility and verifying your disk manually if the installer wigs out.

Luckily, I have a copy of DiskWarrior around from my iSight troubles and I was able to use that to fix things right up. BTW, if you have the downloadable copy of DiskWarrior, it’s tough to actually use it because you need to boot from something else. Making a bootable CD/DVD is just annoying enough that I found it easier just to boot my iMac into Target Disk Mode (hold T while booting your Mac). The computer then behaves like a big firewire drive. Just run a firewire cable between the iMac and my PowerBook and I can run DiskWarrior from my PowerBook. After about 30 minutes or so of chugging along, I had a working disk and the installer got moving past the disk check.

Spotlight took a LOT of hours to get through my disks… I have over a half-terrabyte attached to my iMac now (530 GB per mfr), and it’s about a third full. My PowerBook only took a few hours to get indexed, though.

On the whole, though, big thumbs up for Tiger. I’m busy with my own projects right now, but I hope to dive into Automator and the new SDKs soon.

Yeah. I didn’t get it.

Made me laugh, though.

Has anyone used either? If so, how difficult is it to learn? Just curious.

CNN/Money has a good rundown of what Bush said and didn’t say yesterday. I generally agree with the sentiment.

As for the plan itself, I’m not sure what to think. In general, I’m not counting on Social Security to be a bulk of my retirement. I’m also not opposed to sharing my money via a reduction of benefits. I wonder why we don’t talk about raising the cap on social security taxes, which has similar effects without the reduction in benefits… I need to think and read more, but that’s just my initial thoughts.

Instead of looking at conspiracies at the Times and Fox News, maybe we should focus on the apparent laziness at the AP. I swear most of their stories seem lifted directly from press releases. I used to think it was just their political reporting that would skew to whatever direction their interviewee leaned, but man, this article about Apple’s new OS is, well, fawning. And fawning in a “I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is what they told me” kind of way. I don’t think Apple’s marketing department could’ve written the thing better.

Then again, in a world where we have fun things like video news releases (VNRs) produced by CNN, the “Most Trusted Name in News,” maybe I shouldn’t be so glib about the quality of the AP.

Also, I’m not saying that stories can’t be glowingly positive without seeming hackish. It’s the glowingly positive and over-the-top expectations of things like Spotlight that cross the line into hackishness. For example, Spotlight, cool as it is, has costs (e.g. disk, cpu). Also, Apple likes to claim “200 new features” when many of them are, well, not very noteworthy. I don’t think we count new toolbar buttons as a new feature when evaluating, say, Microsoft Office.

Not that I’m poo-pooing Spotlight or Tiger, but I’m just not so excited about articles like this…

OK, can we all just freaking grow up already?

Via Eschaton, I see that our estemed President is holding a prime time press conference tomorrow night to discuss his plans for Social Security and oil prices. Bush’s press conferences are like the proverbial train wreck. You want to turn away but you end up watching just to see what gruesome thing will come up next. The good thing for the President is that he’s gotten much more comfortable since he was reelected. The bad thing is that he still sucks at them.

I’m also interested, as always, in seeing what kind of questions he will get this time around, and which questions the plants in the press pool will ask. The trick is, of course, whether there are any differences between the general questions and the questions from those plants… the press has been extraordinarily deferential to Bush in these things, more so than they ever were under Clinton or G.H.W. Bush.

I, too, want a coal-powered hoverbike.

If you haven’t seen any recent Daily Shows, you should go see some clips. I recommend Bad Snobs and Broomsticks, Gimme Shelter, or Battlefield Earth as starting points. Good segments all.

The best, though, is “The Hall of Same” from Samantha Bee. If you don’t know who Frank Luntz is, this is the clip for you.

I’ve gotta admit that MTV’s new show, Trippin’, makes me uncomfortable when I watch it. I see the show, think, well, at least they’re bringing more cultural awareness to their audience. Thing is, the bits I’ve watched always seem pretty superficial. Hey, it’s MTV, right? What I’ve never done is consider it an environmental show, even though they call what they do “eco-tourism.” Wonkette’s Greg Beato chimes in with some things I’ve missed:

Celebrity Eco-Crappers Despoiling Rainforests

Trippin’, MTV’s new adventure in celebrity-driven eco-justice, is catching some flak for its cluelessness: “The series also showed the celebrities being chauffeured to the airport in a full-size Chevy SUV — despite several on-screen, anti-SUV factoids noting how environmentally unfriendly SUVs are.” Also of note is Trippin’s celebration of primal pooping experiences. “I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome,” exclaims sexy nature-crapper Drew Barrymore. Is the anti-tree brigade, which ought to be delighted at the stars’ naive glamorization of plumbing-free poverty, predictably outraged at such antics? Do millionaire actorvists shit in the woods? — GREG BEATO

[Wonkette]

In the same vein as Sujal’s post below, this also should be required viewing:

Click Here.

I’ll write more about this tonight, but this article by Andrew Sullivan is an absolute must read. It’s worth creating the account (or using BugMeNot.com). Read it.

I’ll say this. I don’t always agree with Andrew Sullivan but I have to admit that he can write. His analysis of the philosophical differences within the Republican party is intelligent and right on.

Once again, the Bush administration forgets that our representatives represent the United States, not the Bush administration. Slashdot highlighted an article showing that the Bush administration is replacing IATC delegates that supported Kerry in the previous election. This is wrong, immoral, and corrupt, the explicit extension of currying favors for contributions. In one particular case, a delegate was removed for a $250 donation to the Kerry campaign.

The Slashdot blurb is short, so give it a read. Then read the article. I can’t believe the Bush administration thinks this is justifiable. They want to legitimize cronyism in politics instead of sending some of our leading technical experts to a technical meeting. From the article:

Says Nokia vice president Bill Plummer: “We do not view sending experts to international meetings on telecom issues to be a partisan matter. We would welcome clarification from the White House.”

Another random Google result ranking for this site. Josh’s post about Maurice Clarett is the 18th search result for “Maurice Clarett” and is the 6th result for “Maurice Clarett Combine,” a term someone just used to arrive at FatMixx. I’ll never understand how Google does it’s page ranking, but all you folks looking for an opinion about Maurice Clarett, welcome to FatMixx. Thanks, Josh.

Oh yeah, traffic is, in general, down from our heyday a few months ago. Not sure why or how, but clearly, we’re not as interesting as we used to be. You can always see the stats by clicking the little rainbow box to the right.

Comes out this week, but Amazon is doing their normal rebate trick. Get it while you can.

Last pick, 3rd round, and the Denver Broncos select:

Maurice Clarrett