Month: April 2005

what I learned this week

  • that you can eat a banana without working front teeth, as long as you have a knife
  • that you can lose weight this way
  • that I was very lucky not to come off worse: jaw injuries — broken or extremely concussed — are very common cycling injuries
  • I learned how strong my school community is
  • as a result of that and feeling the need to contribute, I set up a drupal community server

want to try DarwinPorts?

Clickable installer for DarwinPorts 1.0 release:

For those who want a _really_ easy bootstrap into 1.0 land, please
download:

http://packages.opendarwin.org/DarwinPorts-1.0.dmg

In this image, you’ll find a clickable package file that installs a
ready-to-go, pre-synched copy of DarwinPorts 1.0. There are even
some setup instructions in the installer, so if naive users don’t
click through the screens too fast, they’ll see what they need to do
to set things up after the installation completes. I originally
wanted to put a shell startup-file munging script into the
postflight, but thought better of it after I thought of all the ways
it might go wrong.

guess I better go Tiger-hunting

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (37):

Mac OS X started its life as the most ambitious consumer operating system ever produced. Apple abandoned its existing, 16-year-old code base for something entirely new. Out of the gate, Mac OS X was a technical curiosity with few applications, and a performance dog. A scant four years later, Tiger is a powerhouse that combines the best Unix has to offer with a feature-rich, user-friendly interface. The increasingly capable bundled applications are just icing on the cake. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Looks awfully good.

getting their attention

We invited our school board members and administrators to a meeting tonight to hear what we have to say about their proposed school closures. 233 people came from the school community and the neighborhood, with presentations and open comment.

I think it went extremely well: the board members et al who came should now understand that we are not a building, but a community. It’s up to us to further their education and ensure they understand why closing a school like ours is not an option.

now that’s what I call a deal: a Mac mini for US$370

If you’re a mac geek thinking of buying Tiger as soon as it’s available…..:

Backup Brain:

If that’s you, wait a second, and think about it this way: if you buy just Tiger, its list price is $129. But if (after Friday) you buy a Mac mini instead, it’s $499 — which means that you’re really only paying $370 for the mini.
Think about that for a second: $370 for a Mac. Does anyone still say that Macs are too expensive?



The only caveat here is make sure what you’re buying has tiger on it, so you avoid the track-down-get-upgrade-shipped-delay-install hassle.

Well, now, that makes it all very interesting.

fighting city hall (or at least the school board)

Looks like we have almost all the school board members and several of the upper echelon administrators coming out to meet with us tomorrow night. We’ll calmly but forcefully explain why their conclusions are wrong, and more to the point, where the underlying analysis is flawed.

Basing the disposition of a school’s population on the age of the building when its location and the strength of the community around the students are powerful positives is just wrong-headed. The phrase “we had to burn the village to save it” seems apropos here: to remove any component from an interconnected system is to damage it. And what’s the good of that?

I don’t know if I will be at tomorrow’s meeting — depends on how my dental business goes tomorrow AM — but I hope to see this pure democratic exercise on action. The setup sounds like the FCC hearings I was involved in 2 years ago: some statements, and then public comment.

^&^$%%^ Comcast

I have a lot going on at the moment, but I do need to call Speakeasy. This ^%^&(& cable modem went south again: same drill as usual — drop the dhcp lease on the server, unplug the cable modem for a minute, plug in it, power it up, then request a new lease.

Does that sound anything but Comcast’s problem?