X-Men Movie and Computer Woes
Amy dragged me out to see the new X-Men movie on Friday. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Maybe it's just because I went with low expectations, but I don't understand why reviews for the movie have been so lukewarm. Is it great cinema? No, but neither were the first two. I understand that the character development and dialogue were not quite as sharp as in the first two movies, but I found the plot at least passable rich, and I felt that the conflict between the X-Men and the Brotherhood exhibited a moral ambiguity and complexity largely lacking in the first film.
We had the joy of sitting in front of about 12 people from Yorkdale Mall's Apple Store. Amy's commentary on this situation is better than I could come up with. To be fair, my experiences with Apple support at the "Genius Bar," have been incredibly positive. These particular fan-boys were most likely sales droids, which from my experience are largely under-qualified automata whose existence consists almost entirely of waiting for Steve Jobs to pull the string coming out of their backs so they can spout disingenuous Apple propaganda.
This brings to me the first of my computer woes. I love my Mac. I even had a disturbing moment there when I almost turned around to enter an argument the sales droids were having about Apple hardware being overpriced. You know you've become a zealot when you start arguing with Apple employees because they don't like Macs enough. Anyhow, one of the things I love about OS X is the fact that all of the text boxes in every Cocoa application have built in spell checking capabilities and, more importantly, Emacs keybindings. Years of using Emacs have pretty much crippled me when it comes to editing text on a computer. Here we come to the problem: neither Firefox nor Camino use the standard Cocoa text widgets for text-entry boxes. This means that my keybindings no longer work! I've been (grudgingly) using Safari, but I've recently discovered that Blogger's support for Safari is sketchy at best. As a result, I am currently writing this post in Camino. I know that I can easily simulate the Emacs bindings in any Mozilla browser, but they're just not quite as slick as with Safari, which even supports multi-line kill/yank with CTRL-K and CTRL-Y.
Much more irritating is the ongoing saga of my video card (a rapidly aging Tyan-manufactured Radeon 9800 Pro). Essentially, it continues to lock up after about 15 minutes of Rise of Legends. I've tried every combination of driver/software fixes. Finally, this afternoon I yanked the little bastard out of my computer, and removed its heatsink. The fine folks at Tyan had applied thermal grease to the GPU with all the meticulous care of your typical Taco-Bell-sour -cream-gun-operator. I fixed it up as best I could without a spare tube of thermal paste, and then reassembled it. The card seems to run about 10 degrees C cooler now, and I think I may have finally fixed my lockups. Strangely, I've never had any issues with Half Life 2, so I still suspect that there may be a Direct 3D related software bug lurking somewhere in my drivers. Next time, I'm buying nVidia.
We had the joy of sitting in front of about 12 people from Yorkdale Mall's Apple Store. Amy's commentary on this situation is better than I could come up with. To be fair, my experiences with Apple support at the "Genius Bar," have been incredibly positive. These particular fan-boys were most likely sales droids, which from my experience are largely under-qualified automata whose existence consists almost entirely of waiting for Steve Jobs to pull the string coming out of their backs so they can spout disingenuous Apple propaganda.
This brings to me the first of my computer woes. I love my Mac. I even had a disturbing moment there when I almost turned around to enter an argument the sales droids were having about Apple hardware being overpriced. You know you've become a zealot when you start arguing with Apple employees because they don't like Macs enough. Anyhow, one of the things I love about OS X is the fact that all of the text boxes in every Cocoa application have built in spell checking capabilities and, more importantly, Emacs keybindings. Years of using Emacs have pretty much crippled me when it comes to editing text on a computer. Here we come to the problem: neither Firefox nor Camino use the standard Cocoa text widgets for text-entry boxes. This means that my keybindings no longer work! I've been (grudgingly) using Safari, but I've recently discovered that Blogger's support for Safari is sketchy at best. As a result, I am currently writing this post in Camino. I know that I can easily simulate the Emacs bindings in any Mozilla browser, but they're just not quite as slick as with Safari, which even supports multi-line kill/yank with CTRL-K and CTRL-Y.
Much more irritating is the ongoing saga of my video card (a rapidly aging Tyan-manufactured Radeon 9800 Pro). Essentially, it continues to lock up after about 15 minutes of Rise of Legends. I've tried every combination of driver/software fixes. Finally, this afternoon I yanked the little bastard out of my computer, and removed its heatsink. The fine folks at Tyan had applied thermal grease to the GPU with all the meticulous care of your typical Taco-Bell-sour -cream-gun-operator. I fixed it up as best I could without a spare tube of thermal paste, and then reassembled it. The card seems to run about 10 degrees C cooler now, and I think I may have finally fixed my lockups. Strangely, I've never had any issues with Half Life 2, so I still suspect that there may be a Direct 3D related software bug lurking somewhere in my drivers. Next time, I'm buying nVidia.
posted by Justin at 10:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home