Of which there are several:

• While I was on my last trip (to New Orleans), I discovered that the 12-inch Powerbook G4 that I’ve been attached to for the last three years suddenly had a battery life of about 20 minutes. I’d been planning on replacing it before this summer’s travels anyhow, so I stepped up the timeline a bit, and this Sunday came home from the Apple store with one of these. I’m almost completely, perfectly in love.
• I’m running a bit of an experiment on that machine, trying to see how long I can go before I’m forced to install anything related to this. I’ve left instructions for those files to open in this; we’ll see how long that works.
• This weekend, I’m in San Francisco. Yesterday, Bryan Alexander actually managed to convince me to start doing this. I’m as surprised as anyone; I was convinced that this was one of the two recent technologies that I’d never see the value in. (I’ll save the other one for another time.)
• This morning, I upgraded my system to the new version of this. So far, I really like the look and feel of it, though I’ve got the sense that it’s going to take me a while to find everything.

I think that’s all of them, for now, at least…

I’m still processing my responses to yesterday’s Macworld Stevenote and the announcement of the MacBook Air. On the one hand, a super-lightweight portable computer seems to me a great niche for Apple to move into. On the other hand, this one is almost too focused on lightweight portability for me. It would be a fantastic travel machine, but not so great for working on day in and day out: not enough storage, not enough ports, not enough screen real estate.

Which makes me begin to suspect that Apple has opened a new front in consumer electronics marketing, as of yesterday: not upgrade-your-current-computer but instead buy-a-second-machine. After all, if you’re going to take advantage of things like Remote Disc, you’ve got to have another machine nearby. And if you’re going to use wireless networking for everything including backups, you’ve got to have a Time Capsule. So the digital hub seems increasingly to be throwing out new spokes, producing not a convergence of appliances but instead appliance proliferation.

I held off on replacing my 12″ PowerBook G4 until now, hoping that I’d want to replace it with something new and sexy. And I do, as it turns out: I want to replace it with a 24″ iMac and a MacBook Air. But until I get some grant that will allow me to do so, it looks like I’m going to be getting the same MacBook Pro I’d have gotten last month instead. Ah, well.

Okay, I’m in the middle of reading today’s Chronicle Careers column, and have just hit a paragraph (or two) that has me positively gobsmacked. The column is about ostensible faculty misuse of campus computing resources, and begins with a fairly reasonable anecdote about a faculty member being denied the ability to distribute news about an anti-war rally via an official campus announcements listserv, because policy clearly stated that the listserv was for official business only. Fair enough: as I can note from my own institution, anti-war rallies lead to puppies that need adoption and furniture for sale, and if your institution is big enough, that kind of thing would be fairly insupportable. But then there’s this:

Broader ethical principles are at play as well. For example, while it is generally considered unethical to use university e-mail accounts to engage in personal communication, most institutions are tolerant when it comes to minor personal usage, such as inviting friends to lunch or cocktails.

But institutions frown on extensive personal use, such as carrying on lengthy private exchanges or selling personal property on eBay, not to mention engaging in day trading or political advocacy. Those are all abuses to one degree or another.

I’m sorry; am I understanding that correctly? It’s considered unethical for me to use my campus email account to engage in non-official-business-related dialogue with my friend across the country, or across the hall, and my institution is merely being “tolerant” of such violations?

I suppose I understand the latter concerns, though frankly, as long as they’re not taking up work time or extensive network resources, I’m not sure I see the harm there, either. But I’m absolutely stunned by the general-principle separation of the official from the personal that the author seems to advocate here. Granted, these days, with free full-service email accounts to be had all over the place, it’s little hardship for an academic computing user to have a second personal account. But most of us in the profession came of computer-using age during the period when the only access that most of us could get — and certainly the only access worth anything — was through our institutions. Of course we use our email accounts for personal purposes; they’re our accounts.

I take the author’s overall point,* that maintaining a non-university email account can help faculty avoid any unwarranted investigations into one’s personal communications, but to intimate that the use of such an account for things other than official business is unethical seems to me a bit over the top, and more than a little impossible to support. No academic life is so clearly separable, it seems to me — work over here, personal stuff over there. God knows what he’d say about my using my work computer to write blog posts…

—–

*On the email question, that is; the column later goes on to insist that any attempt to install non-officially-sanctioned software on your university-provided computer is also a misuse of campus resources. The lunacy of this claim — particularly for Mac users — is not even worth exploring.

That would be this hint on how to force Apple Mail.app to display messages in plain-text. Even those annoying messages from the assistant who insists on using an image as background for the message. And forcing plain-text also forces re-wrapping of HTML messages with lines that are too long for Mail’s window.

The only drawback is that there are certain messages that I don’t mind getting in HTML, but it seems to be an all-or-nothing thing. What I’d really like is a set of well-crafted rules: if mail is from person X, then force plain-text. Unfortunately, Mail allows for the “if” part of the statement, but not the “then”; you can flag, or mark as read, or move to a folder, or delete messages that qualify under some if-statement, but you can’t force plain-text upon them, alas…

In which I attempt to figure out whether my computer, or WordPress, or the internet more generally has a problem with the 31st of July. I posted an entry on the MediaCommons blog earlier this morning, but for whatever reason the permalinks to that entry totally fail. And Quicken was very wonky this morning when I asked it for some data over the last year (i.e., 31 July 2006 to 31 July 2007). There isn’t something going on no one’s told me about, right, like 31 July is the new 29 February? Or could it be the Y2K bug, just forestalled for seven years and seven months?

What I know about music honestly (as George once said here) would not fill the thimble of a small-fingered seamstress.  But this is an astonishingly cool visualization, which makes clear something about the relationship of music and math that I’ve always known was there, but never really got.  And which makes me wish I knew more.  (Hat tip: Ezster.)

This is just to say that my usage of precious CPU seconds is down from a peak of 7460.44 a week ago to 29.29 yesterday.

Now to reconstruct my embedded templates.

That is all.

I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites.  And I’m having a hard time making myself stop and do the things I actually need to be doing this weekend.  Like grading.  This is in no small part because dealing with these technical problems looks like work without really feeling like it, allowing me to spend hours and hours goofing off while still maintaining the appearance of productivity.

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Today has begun the summer’s intended mad spending of money.  There is, as with everything, an up side and a down side to these expenditures.  The up side is that it isn’t wholly my money I’ve been spending; I’ve got a collection of small grants that are supporting the purchase of some books, some software, and some equipment this summer, all in preparation both for the new media class I’m teaching in the fall and for the new project I’ll be working on in the spring.

Some of the money is mine, though.  The IT folks are about to replace my three-year-old college-owned Powerbook with a gorgeous, high-end G5 and a big-ass Cinema Display (the cost of which is heavily subsidized by one of those grants), so I’m replacing my home iMac (the original flat panel) with one of these.  So a little switcho-change-o here, from office portability and home desktop to home portability and office desktop.  Which only makes sense as I rarely work anywhere but my desk in the office, but I have a lovely wireless network in the house.  (This will also help me avoid those late-night runs to the office to pick up the Powerbook the night before a trip, after a last-minute decision that yes, maybe I will bring the computer after all.)

The down side is, of course, that all this ordering was done over these here internets, and that coupled with the knowledge that the charges will hit my credit card long before the reimbursement check hits my inbox leaves me feeling a bit like I’ve spent all this money for the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from looking at pictures of stuff you might like.  Internet shopping is mighty convenient, yes, but I do miss the instant gratification factor of walking out of the store with new toy in hand.

The other slight bummer is knowing that I waited a couple of days too long in ordering the Powerbook; I’m leaving town again on Thursday, and there’s only a snowball’s chance that the thing will be here before I go.  Ah, but it’ll be here on my return, and that will cut the end-of-trip bitterness just a bit.

There are more expenditures yet to come:  I haven’t ordered all of the software yet, and there are a few peripherals I need.  Oh yes, and one of these days I’m finally going to have to pay someone to come put blinds in my damn windows…

[UPDATE, 6.25.05, 6.07 pm:  Holy moly!  I placed the Powerbook order exactly three hours ago, and along with it ordered a new laptop sleeve and a networkable all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine (there was a great rebate deal, and I have no home printer).  And I just got an email message saying that sleeve and printer have shipped!  On a Saturday!  Alas, though, no Powerbook:  I upgraded the RAM and the hard drive, and so there are probably a couple of days yet before that one hits the shipper.  Sigh.]

[UPDATE, 6.25.05, 9.03 pm:  Good gravy, I love these guys!  I just got home from dinner out to discover an email message, time stamped 6.49 pm today, precisely 3 hours and 45 minutes after the receipt of my order, telling me that my specially configured Powerbook has shipped.  Here’s hoping everybody else is half this efficient.  (I’m looking at you, FedEx Ground.)]

[UPDATE, 6.27.05, 7.34 am:  FedEx now has tracking info up, and estimates that delivery of these items will take place on Wednesday, which at least in theory puts me traveling this weekend with lovely new computer, one that I bet gets more than 40 minutes out of its battery...]

So, my first-generation flat-panel iMac at home crashed this morning, for the first time in at least a year.  I’d rebooted the machine about three weeks ago, but only because of the move; unless I’m updating software, there’s never any reason for me to restart.  Needless to say, I was not expecting a kernel panic.

And, frankly, have never witnessed one like this.  The old 10.2 kernel panics were terrifying to behold:  the screen image would suddenly shatter and sort of melt, and there wasn’t any real sense of what was going on.  The 10.3 panics are eerily calm:  the screen greys out, from top to bottom, as if a shade were being drawn, and a soothing message appears on-screen informing you that the operating system has become unstable and needs to be rebooted.  I’ve only gotten a couple of those since upgrading to 10.3, but while they lack the sheer terror of the old schizoid panics, their very calmness instills a different kind of fear, as if your secretary were to call you and announce, in a too-even tone of voice, that the Department of Homeland Security wished to have a word with you.

This morning’s was something else entirely.  I’m still stuck with my dial-up connection, as Verizon hasn’t gotten its DSL act together for me yet, and so I passed by the computer on my way out of the room, selected “connect” from the modem menu, and went off to take care of something else.  When I returned, a minute or so later, my screen had turned into a PC, circa 1990—pre GUI, black screen, white pixellated text scrolling up and up and up, as if DOS had gotten caught in some mid-boot loop.  On the screen, the kernel panic info:

Exception state (sv=0×00337230)
PC=0×00337380; MSR=0×0001030; DAR=0×003373D8; DSISR=0×003373E0; LR=0×003373C8; R1=0×003372B8; XCP=0×003373E8 (Unknown code)

Backtrace:  backtrace terminated—unaligned frame address: 0×003372B8

Yes, I wrote the whole thing down.  Something about it seriously creeped me out:  the thing I love about OS X is that I can see the machine’s command-line guts if I want to, but I don’t have to.  I felt weirdly like my computer had suddenly opened its raincoat to show me something I most distinctly did not want to see.