So, it turns out that there are people who are really, really enthusiastic about Mac OS X, as I discovered at the Tiger launch party in Shadyside last night.
And now, I have photos to prove it.
Archive for April, 2005
Tiger Launch Party
April 30th, 2005 by peterbWelcome, Ineffable Tiger Wu
April 29th, 2005 by peterbNow that Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) has been unleashed, it is only right and proper that I make available The Inscrutable Denominator of Heaven’s Dashboard, ready for your Dashboard-using pleasure. It requires, of course, Mac OS X 10.4. Download, unzip, and double-click to install and run.
On the one hand, it’s still the same garbage code, and the random number generator doesn’t quite work right. On the other hand, I ported it in to Dashboard in just about 10 minutes, and most of that was spent dorking around with the background image. I didn’t edit the code at all — it was a straight cut and paste job.
That, I think, convinces me of Dashboard’s worth. It is so incredibly trivial to get something useful(*) in to Dashboard, that I have no doubt that there are going to more cool widgets than we can possibly imagine at this point.
(*) Yes, I understand that this particular widget is, in fact, not at all useful.
DISH
April 28th, 2005 by psuIn the South Side of Pittsburgh, on 17th about a block and a half south of Carson Street is a small house with a green awning. Under the awning is a door and a sign that reads: DISH Osteria and Bar. From the outside, the door is just another door in another blue collar Pittsburgh neighborhood. It’s a skinny street with a beat up sidewalk lined with cheap looking row houses as far as the eye can see. But, if you walk through the door, you are transported to another place entirely. The place on the other side of the door is not of Pittsburgh at all. It is DISH, and it is fabulous.
(more…)
GT4: Final Notes
April 27th, 2005 by peterb
Now that I have finally obtained a USB jump drive, I have been able to try out “photo mode,” which means I have now tried everything Gran Turismo 4 has to offer.
My review remains the same: “meh.”
Nonexistent Games, Reappearing
April 26th, 2005 by peterbLast October I wrote about a Star Trek game for the Apple II that I remembered playing in the early 1980s. It had the somewhat disconcerting habit of spewing out page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. It was so incongruous that I wasn’t sure if the game actually existed, or if I was just remembering some sort of odd dream. The other week, to my surprise, someone wrote me saying: “Hey. I remember that game. In fact, I have it on a disk.”
(more…)
The Breakfast Problem
April 25th, 2005 by psuIn the almost 15 years that I’ve been back in Pittsburgh, the food scene here has for the most part expanded and improved in ways that I would not have imagined possible. I personally would not have believed that our humble city could now be the home of a Chinese place as good as Rose Tea Cafe, an honest-to-god Taqueria (Taco Loco in the South Side), or a Moule Frites place (Point Brugge Cafe in Point Breeze) in addition to several regional Italian establishments (Piccolo Forno, La cucina Flegrea, Lidia’s). It seems to me that at this point in Pittsburgh’s food history, we are finally seeing a growth period in great places specializing in excellent and authentic regional food.
So my question is: Why can’t I get a decent “American” style breakfast?
(more…)
What's Your Jade Empire Name?
April 24th, 2005 by peterbLike everyone else, we’re currently absorbed in Jade Empire. A little while ago, my friend Nat was heard to say: “I could say Sagacious Zu over and over all day,” to which I replied, “I need to write a little Javascript app for my blog that generates your Jade Empire Name. ”
So I did. Without any further ado, I present What’s Your Jade Empire Name (update: now, The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory), the result of a good, oh, 10 or 15 minutes “work” writing some simple Javascript (don’t look at the source. You’ll go blind.)
Spread the meme!
Friday's Questions
April 22nd, 2005 by peterbMore musings on unanswerable questions that aren’t actually significant enough to warrant their own long article:
- Am I the only person who thinks that aspirin, chewed, tastes kinda good? I want aspirin-flavored soda.
- Who are all these people that are still buying $2500 gaming PC rigs, and what is wrong with them?
- What happened to my copy of the Tank Girl soundtrack, along with maybe 5% of all the CDs I’ve ever owned? Is there some sort of collective of shame I can join where I can reacquire mp3s of songs I paid for, but lost?
(more…)
Evil in Residence
April 21st, 2005 by psuI never played any of the Resident Evil games before Resident Evil 4. From what I can gather, they were slow-paced with a weird camera system that made combat nearly impossible and a fairly bizarre story centered around an evil virus and zombies. The hype around RE4 was that it was different. Most of the rather enthusiastic press waxes lyrical about the new graphics engine and camera, the new combat system, and the interactive cutscenes. Every review also seems to make a point to claim that the game has no zombies. After playing through most of the game, I can agree with some of this, but anyone who thinks there are no zombies in this game must be partially undead in the brain.
(more…)
Signs of the Food Apocalypse, Part 1
April 20th, 2005 by peterbA real conversation I had at the grocery store yesterday:
Me: “Hi. Do you have any heavy cream?”Employee: “Heavy cream? What’s that?”
And that was when I crumpled to the floor and wept like a jilted cheerleader. I know it was just one employee, but it’s still depressing.