Capricious Me

Well, still no luck yet. I’ve backed up my data and am going to reinstall the OS. Here’s what I tried to do:
1. Boot from install disc and run disk utilities. No luck.
2. Use gParted to create a partition. This worked, but boot camp still refused to work and disk utilities refused to let me merge the two partitions.

Maybe it’s not that OSX is dumb. Maybe this really is a feature, you know, to prevent people from installing Windows on their laptops. Maybe Apple makes its own hardware and so closely guards the secrets because the hardware is PSYCHIC and can recognize intentions. “Detecting WINDOWS and LINUX intentions… throw errors, throw errors!!”

I was THIS close to installing ubuntu over OSX instead. Still can’t think of a good reason not to (except I only had Kubuntu 6.10 instead of 9.10 at home).

UPDATE: I reinstalled Snow Leopard after erasing the drive. Eagerly opened up Boot Camp only to find the increasingly frustrating, “Some Files Could Not Be Moved” error. You’ve sealed your fate, Snow Leopard. Your territory is about to get a lot smaller. Make way for a Karmic Koala! and his frenemy, Windows, courtesy of rEFIt.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001130024 (first read on the Lede Blog at nytimes.com)

I’ll summarize: Pat Robertson claims that the earthquake, which most people believe to be a seismic event that happened because Haiti is located on a fault line, is in fact the result of God punishing them for making a pact with the devil. Oh yes. I kid you not.

Disgusting, right? What an ugly example of religious fervor and self-righteousness.

The lie that is “It Just works!” has struck again. No disk defrag utilities are shipped with OSX because, you know, the Mac OS is brilliant enough to perform its own optimizations in such a way that you don’t have to defrag. Why should the user ever need to manually do such a thing? It’s a Mac… it just works!!!

BULLSHIT.

I need to defrag my hard drive and I don’t want to pay for some 3rd party software when it should be included as a utility, as it is in Windows. I currently have about 80gb of free space and I’m trying to create a rather modestly sized 32gb partition for windows using boot camp. The error message I get is that there are some files which cannot be moved. Which files are these? The oh so minimalist stylish error message could not be bothered to point them out. Googling pointed out that this might be a fragmentation problem. I tried to manually partition the drive using their disk utility as sort of a forced “clear out this continuous block of space for me.” This time, the error message was “Not enough space.” Right. Not enough space in 80gb of free space for a 32gb partition?? REALLY? Wouldn’t you think that the OS would be smart enough to realize that 80 is greater than 32 and that maybe it’s time to do some of that so called built in “optimization” that makes defragmentation unnecessary?? Why doesn’t it just work like that?

Do you know what the official apple page says about what to do if you think you need to defrag? They suggest, and I paraphrase, 1. Reboot. 2. Make a backup of your hard drive and REINSTALL the OS. 3. Use a 3rd party tool.

I’d say that I’ve dualbooted and partitioned many a machine/hard drive on Linux and in Windows, and in the past, on this Mac. Never before have I encountered such a mind-numbingly stupid and completely avoidable situation.

On a related note – if you can think of another solution that doesn’t involve backing up everything and reinstalling, please let me know.

Who the hell do these asshats think they are, charging 200 dollars for floormats? It’s a piece of rubber that you step on. $200. Really?? REALLY? I mean, do these floor mats massage your feet and self clean or something? Are they perhaps coated in teflon and, in an emergency or accident, magically protect you from harm?

No. They’re ordinary pieces of rubber that are meant to catch the dirt. So why… WHY IN THE NAME OF ANYTHING REASONABLE would I pay $200???

As a Macbook pro owner, I do try to use some of the Apple software that they try, not so subtly, to ram down my throat. Some of these include Quicktime, which is a piece of shit, but is apparently crucial to Itunes, yet another pile of steaming turds. When you install Itunes, it inevitably wants to install Bonjour and Mobileme and Quicktime. All I want to do is transfer some music to my iPod. I don’t need those other little floaters that add bloat!! But I digress… after all, the subject of my fury today is Safari.
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I stopped by a Shell station on my way home for gas (as luck would have it, the gas guzzling Acura requires premium only) and had just done the whole credit card, zip code thing when the previously silent screen above me suddenly greeted me. To be honest, I mostly ignored it until I heard someone else’s screen greet them. At that point, I thought about Wall-e.

There’s a scene in Wall-e where he’s wheeling himself home, and every time he passes by a screen it suddenly flickers to life and spouts some advertisement. This benign greeting at Shell is a taste of what’s to come, I’m sure. Wall-e like advertisements with proximity sensors are the future billboards of tomorrow. Perhaps they’ll rely on solar or wind energy to keep themselves fully charged, with some sort of light sensor to alter volume controls. Silence will be a thing of the past.

Hacking these ads will be the next generation of graffiti…

Today, while driving to Safeway I had to wait for a young couple to cross the street. I was absolutely disgusted by what I saw.

The female’s hands were empty. Her apparently well trained boyfriend, however, was not so lucky. He held in his left hand, with no detectable hint of rancor, her small pink purse.

Alright, so let’s play devil’s advocate against myself first. Clearly, if he’s happy to hold her purse as a symbol of affection, who am I to judge? Why shouldn’t he hold her purse? Maybe he volunteered. Isn’t chivalry sweet? That’s where my generosity ends.

That poor guy… my first thought was, “Wow. Totally whipped.” Why humiliate your boyfriend like that? It wasn’t even a semi-respectable tote bag that he could pass off as his environmentally friendly shopping tool. It was full-on girly-pink purse that held little besides a wallet. The judgmental feminist in me wants to ask this female, “Did you injure your hands? Do you have some sort of physical defect that prevents you from carrying this small item? Are you actually carrying several loads of invisible groceries that I cannot see because of my nearsightedness and the glare from the setting sun?” There’s no reason not to carry your own damn bag and it’s the epitome of self-indulgent delusions of grandeur and selfishness to make your boyfriend look ridiculous just so you feel like he reaaaally cares.

I admit to having Mike help me carry things if my hands are full or if they’re too heavy, but I would never make him carry my purse if I had the ability to do so myself and I NEVER WILL. You see, there’s a difference between being helpful or sweet and enabling your girlfriend’s princess syndrome.