Toby's Log page 107

Plumbing break

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I had my first split pipe a little over a week ago. The pipes froze for maybe the fifth time this year, on what might have been the coldest day of the year. I had put a lightbulb under the house, but it was no match for that cold and wind. I had shut off the water and opened the valves during the cold. After it warmed up, I put my space heater below the house to unthaw the lines (I had done this once before with fast results). It unthawed them, but I found one hot water line spraying out water.

I shut off the hot water side. Something made me think I had a leak in a cold water line as well. I think my toilet, which has a long delay for its valve to open after flushing, must have opened and when I heard the loud water rushing, I thought I had another leak. So I shut off all my water at my filter, which is inside the house.

For over a week I got my water from the filter: I had removed the filter part and was getting water from the hole that went through it. I boiled water for baths, filled jugs to use for teeth brushing, dish washing, and cooking. The water looked kinda junky, so I got my drinking water from my parents house.

Then one night I came home to find water dripping from the filter. When I went to shut it off, it fell apart and water was pouring out. I shut off my water at the main valve and had absolutely no water for a while. Luckily, the filter was not especially damaged, and I was able to just put it all back together. Evidently, the filter part holds a plastic plate against the valve part, preventing it from being pushed out. So I need to keep the filter on there.

Then I went underneath to fix the break. It was maybe a 1 inch break in the hot water line going to my kitchen. After some time of looking and crawling under my house, I determined that there was in fact no break in the cold water lines. I could have had cold running water that whole time. Without too much trouble, other than getting rather cold, I was able to cut out the old broken bit and put in a new bit with a junction. It held water just fine and finally I had all my water running again. I took a shower that night in celebration.

A few days later (yesterday) it got rather cold again. I put my space heater underneath the house just to make sure nothing froze up again. Unfortunately, a leak has developed, probably just at one of the soldered joints. I was worried about the one that had been there before, with how much heat I used to do some of the new joints. I’ll have to take care of that when the weather gets better. For now, I’m just shutting the valve till I need hot water.

New roommate

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Toby Manor will soon have a new employee. Dwight Henson, my roommate and bandmate for several years in the past, will be living here temporarily for a few months or so. He wants to stay to look for a job in his desired field (TV or film). He’s had no luck in the two years or whatever it’s been since he graduated, so who knows how long that’ll take.

The preparation for the move has been very rough for me. I’ve had to move all of the junk from my back bedroom to my living room to allow it to become his bedroom. I have a lot of junk, and it really fills up the living room. There is a narrow walkway between stacked boxes and piles of stuff. This of course took a while to do. I’m intending on having a large and long series of garage sales once the weather turns nice to get rid of a lot of this, and hopefully pare my stuff down to a much more minimal amount.

I’ve also had to clean up the bathroom, kitchen, and hallway, known as the communal areas. These have taken a good bit of time and are still not especially ready for their planned roles.

And of course, as is a tradition here at Toby Manor, I’ve had plumbing problems. I went more than a week without water because a pipe burst after freezing for maybe the 5th time this year. That plumbing is a pain and takes some time, since it is outside and underneath my house.

I’ve got lots of schoolwork to do as well. It seems quite overwhelming. I’m feeling enticed toward dropping a class or something.

Anyway, I’m worried that the new employee will want me to do all sorts of work to get the house up to his germophobic and more normal person standards. I won’t be able to do much at least till school is out. We will no doubt get into arguments about how to run things. Living with two people should theoretically be less work than one, but I fear the opposite will be the case.

There are bright notes of the move, though. This will provide me with some much needed social interaction, even if just with Dwight and his girlfriend. It could be cool playing cards and the like. The costs of living here will hopefully go down a good bit. I’m expecting utility usage to go up noticeably, but it shouldn’t overtake the savings of splitting the costs in half. And this whole thing will hopefully motivate me more to do things to get out of this rut I have dug myself into. It’s getting harder and harder to stay in this rut.

the opennest market

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In democracy, each person gets one vote equal to every other. The votes are basically free, but some rules must be set up to ensure this. The free or open market is somewhat considered to be democracy of commerce. To take this to the extreme:

There would be a number of businesses equal to the number of citizens, each business owned and run by exactly one citizen. There would be no employees. All needs of the business that could not be completed by the owner would be outsourced to other businesses, surely creating the need for a lot of very specialized businesses. Government oversight would be needed to ensure that no mergers or pseudo mergers occur. Every business runs on its own, with no collusion, and any interactions with other businesses must be proper business transactions with dollars exchanged for goods or services and the best value chosen from multiple candidates. Each business would be required to turn, or attempt to turn, a profit, and that profit would be the sole income of the owner. Oversight would also ensure that there were a number of a given type of businesses in a given geographical region.

All of this should create somewhere near the largest amount of competition possible, and really test competition’s ability to create low costs, innovation, and good quality.

This system would certainly have many problems, especially in enforcement, but can serve for analysis of the openness of markets and the rules affecting them.

An interesting modification of this system would be to force all of this at the initialization of the system, but then remove all oversight. This would somewhat mirror the entire human history relating to economic issues, except that it would certainly go very fast. Mergers would happen all over until large companies would be formed.

WordPress and SVN

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I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I finally decided to use subversion to update my wordpress instead of the download, copy over to server, copy in all old files method. Details on using SVN with wordpress can be found on WordPress.org.

Since it was my first time, I had to do an initial install so that all the subversion tracking data would be there. The command for installation, which would be used for a new install, was just a simple one line thing with the url of the install and a few flags. Then I had to copy over my htaccess, wp-config, and wp-content, all simple and easy.

Because this brought me up to date, I was unable to try the update type commands. But it seems extremely easy, just a one line command again, plus the web based upgrade script.

This should make my upgrading much faster and easier, and so lessen the delay between upgrades.

[Update 09/01/10]The steps, which I should have included before:
$ cd blogpath
# for trunk versions you can simply update
$ svn up
# OR for full point revisions, you must use the switch command to change versions
$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7/ .
[browser]updgrade.php

[/update]

[Update 2/13]I’ve now done an update via subversion. It was in fact extremely easy, just one simple command line command followed by the upgrade.php script. Everything works fine, no copying and moving files and what not, although a backup is a good idea.[/update]

Force multiple candidates

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Each party must field in final election a number of candidates based on the percentage of support the party recieved in the previous election for that race. It could be that a candidate must be fielded for each 105 of support. This would be a minimum. Larger elections that can field more candidates, such as presidential elections, would have a higher number of required candidates than smaller ones, such as local elections in small towns, which may be able to field only one per party or not even have party affiliations.

This would give a wider range of choices in the final election. It would also force the big two to divide their forces, giving independent candidates a better chance while keeping the same elections style.

Fully entering the cell phone world

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I had stayed out of the cell phone world for quite some time. I don’t use the phone much, and cell phones cost a lot. A few years back I got a pay-as-you-go type phone, but it was quite expensive to actually call from: I rarely used it, and gave up on it when I accidently missed a payment date and lost all my minutes. Last Christmas, my Mom gave me another pay-as-you-go, with a bunch of minutes. I decided I’d try actually using this one. The first batch of minutes were all free for me, but even with a lot of them, I was able to go through them pretty quickly. When I ran out, it came time to make a choice.

Cousin Paul told me he could get me on his family plan at Alltel for $10 a month. I compared that with Tracfone’s prices. Tracfone would have had a slightly lower minimum price once I paid for their double minutes for life thing, but that wouldn’t be for a lot of minutes. I decided that, if I wanted to actually use it, I should just go with the Alltel. The contract worried me a bit, especially when I found out it was for the crappily ridiculously long two years, but I figured I’d live with that.

I bought a relatively cheap phone from Alltel, new. It’ll have cost me $60 if I get the rebate back with activation and all. It was a flip phone. It had a screen on the outside and mp3 buttons. It could play mp3s and movies. It had a camera. It could browse the web, though I had no interest in that bit because of cost. It worked pretty well, and I was relatively happy with it, except for some UI problems. I had it for about two weeks, then lost it during a trip to Seattle.

Buying a new phone with a contract already in place was ridiculously expensive. The one I had before suddenly became $250. The cheapest at that store was $150, and it was pretty crappy. Elsewhere, I could find down to about $100. So I decided I’d have to go used. I soon found online was the only reasonable place to find used.

In deciding what to buy, I found used phones still weren’t that cheap, though much more so than the new ones. For some reason, I thought perhaps I should just buy a combination PDA and cell phone. I had always wanted a PDA. I’m also very interested in touch-screen stuff. I figured one of the older models would be going for pretty cheap. I found that there weren’t that many models from far in the past, so I had relatively few choices. The newer ones were certainly quite expensive, no iphone or the like for sure (especially since none seemed to be made for Alltel). I always liked the Palm OS, wanted handwriting recognition for sure.

I found the Palm Treo 650 had all the features newer phones had, was available for Alltel, and wasn’t all that expensive. There was one locally on Craigslist, but it was from long enough ago that I didn’t even try for it. I returned, after many years, to eBay. I watched carefully, checked out all the ones available, picked the few I was willing to go for. I bid on several, sometimes going a little above what I wanted to pay and still didn’t get one. I almost gave up and went for the buy it now option. But I managed to win one. It ran $110 with shipping. Not too bad for a “smartphone”.

It shipped extremely fast, got here in a few days with standard shipping. I was quite happy to get my new toy, and played with it quite a bit for the following two days. I was extremely disappointed that Graffiti did not work with it. Stupid that a Palm PDA wouldn’t have that. I was extremely relieved when I found third party freeware to enable it. I also found that there was no way to directly sync Apple’s Address Book and iCal with it, outside of buying a utility just for that purpose. Palm’s Desktop software was rather outdated (hasn’t been updated in 2+ years) but it installed fine. It took a little while to get working, but once I did, it works just fine. The utility does use a bit of constant CPU power, so I turn it off sometimes. It has a calendar and address book app, so I should be able to at least import into those and copy that version to the Palm.

It took me a while to find good apps for it. Palm’s site had a software bank, but much of that stuff cost money. VersionTracker, though, has a good depository, and I found an even better one at softonic. I found some good freeware apps. They were remarkably easy to install. Just a double click in the finder set up a transfer for the next sync. I installed the Graffiti enabling app, a better alarm clock (the default one only had one alarm and wasn’t that good), and a few games. It’s sweet that there is a gameboy emulator for it. I’m still having trouble getting it working well, and haven’t figured out how to get my games over to it, but this could mean I can have phone, PDA type device, mp3 player, crappy camera, and gameboy all in one device.

Hopefully I won’t lose this one. I figured its larger size would help with that. I have full plans to get a silicone type skin with a belt clip for it. That should help a lot, and make it easier to carry as well.

So I called to get it activated. I had to have Paul authorize me to do so. Then, after attempting to activate it the way the guy told me to, it hung up to me and said activation failed. I then told the guy it was a Palm Treo. He said I needed to update my plan to their Smart Choice plan. They started at $69.99. I would obviously need to okay this with Paul anyway, since it’s actually his plan, so I said I’d hold off. Looking on the website, it looked like the Smart Choice plan would be $30 a month more for the main line plus $10 more for each other person. I have no idea why the other people would have to pay more. Since I’d be paying this increase, that’d take my $10 up to $60 a month, almost enough to pay for my own plan.

I was rather distraught with this and mad that Alltel would make me change plans when all I wanted was to use my device as a phone. After I calmed down, I figured that I’d call to verify the cost difference. If it was only like $30, I would probably go for it. It did, after all, have free unlimited data. If it was any more than that, though, that’d quickly overrun the cost of just buying a used regular phone. So I’d have to get another phone, and probably be able to sell this one for what I got it for, maybe even a little more. I finally called back Alltel, and got a different guy this time. I said I heard I needed to upgrade to the Smart Choice plan for my ‘smartphone’. He asked if I had bought it with a contract or used. When I said used, he said I didn’t need the smart choice for it. I was excited, though a little worried that it might not actually work, especially since dialing the setup number hadn’t last time. It took him a while (I guess he was trying to figure out a way for me to use minutes for data). He had my dial a different setup number. After two test calls, we verified: It had worked! After ending the call, I made sure by calling my own house. It worked. I was elated, elated enough to write out this ridiculously long post.

So now I have phone service again, plus a little electronic toy that I can carry around with me. I’ll have to verify that it is good over several days here, but I think it should be fine. I better not lose it though.

versatile home: an ideal

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The versatile home is a type of home which can be changed easily to fit any needs of the user. Ideally,

  • Quick and easy: anything can be changed quickly and easily enough that it can be changed for testing purposes, and changed back if need be.
  • Non-destructive: should require no materials to be wasted in the process.

Layout

Layout of anything and everything ideally would be able to be changed.

  • Rooms: the walls in the house should be easily movable and removable to create any floorplan. Any given room should be expandable or shrinkable depending on the needs for it and adjacent rooms.
  • Utilities: any sort of appliance should be placable anywhere in the house, regardless of utility needs. Electricity would be the easiest to deal with, and should be easily accessible anywhere on the floor, walls, ceiling, or outside walls. Phone and the like wouldn’t be hard either. Water and gas would pose quite a challenge, especially with water requiring sewer connections as well. But ideally you could put a toilet, shower, heater, whatever anywhere in the house, even move them around in a room, without much more consideration than moving a table.
  • Outside walls: these go along with the layout, but pose far greater challenges than interior layout. Any expansion or subtraction of total area of the house would require addition or subtraction of both floor and ceiling in addition to the walls. Also, utility hookups would need to be expanded or subtracted, as would heating ducts or pipes. This type of modification would probably be left as the hardest to do. Still, changing needs deem it important for a versatile house, so it must be left with the capabilities of doing so, preferably non-destructively as well.

Modules

It would probably be easiest if every part of the house could be created and then installed and removed as easily connecting modules. Utilities would connect from one module to the next. Structural modules (structure of walls and ceilings, subfloor) would be seperate from the visible facings (wall and ceiling painting, carpet or wood on floor) of them, allowing easy change in appearance of area or the ability to change the size and shape of a room without having mismatched visible facings.

It would be good if companies produced these modules, standardized. The companies would deliver or take them back as the users added or removed them. This would eliminate much wasted materials, make the system more cost effective, and also make it much easier for the user.

With company produced modules, there would have to be industry standards so that no user would be stuck buying modules from any given company, especially with the possibility of companies going out of business. With changing technology, new versions of the modules would need to be created. This should happen at a relatively slow pace, and the new versions should be relatively backwards compatible with old versions. All modules should be designed for relatively easy upgrades to possible future versions.

Need

The need for versatile housing is evident in the variety of ways and things people use houses for, the changing needs of a user, and the need to be able to accommodate multiple users over the lifespan of the house.

The operating systems of the user should not be dictated by the layout and setup of the house: Rather, the operations should be set up to be as efficient or comfortable (or whatever other criteria you want) as possible, then the layout and setup should be modified to best fit these needs. If a layout doesn’t fit these needs as good as it was thought, it should be modifiable to better accommodate.

Vacation to Seattle

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I recently got back from my visit to Washington State. It was a pretty good trip, with lots of mountains, trees, and water, as well as sitting in a car. I managed to take 1050 photos there, and to lose my brand new cell phone, purchased just before the trip. And I got to see brother Jamie for the first time since perhaps March when he left for Seattle. I had to skip my classes for the week, but it was at a not so important time in them.

Saturday
My mom and I both flew up, separately, on the Saturday before last. I felt very cramped on the flight, but luckily the seat next to me was empty, giving me extra space. I had a small dinner of a microwave type fried chicken sandwich with tiny salad and M & Ms. I read my psychology book (for class) for a while, and somewhat watched without sound one and part of another movie. I think I dozed off briefly. I also watched out the window quite a bit. It was dark out for much of the flight, but seeing the small splotches of lights on the ground here and there was interesting. The clouds near Seattle were quite lit up, which was quite a site.

Mom flew up well before me and had to get to the condo we were staying at before I arrived, so I had to stay in Seattle for the night. I stayed at Jamie’s house (it took some time before the trip to convince him this was the way to go). It took some time to meet up with him, hauling all my stuff on the bus and then around the city looking for him. My new cell phone helped greatly with our meeting. We took the bus down to his house. It’s a small trailer, a large towable camping kind retrofitted to sort of have the normal fittings of a house, but somewhat crappily. I was skeptical when he said it would be hard to sleep more than two people there, but he was right. We ate pizza and I was introduced to the TV show the Office.

Sunday
I slept poorly and for a short period of time before hauling my gear back to the bus. Jamie had to stay and work the next two days, so it was just me leaving. I asked the bus driver how to get to the Amtrak station, and luckily it was the last stop on that line. Unfortunately, when I got off, there was no clear indication where it was. It took me some time of walking around, but I found it in a small, nearly not labeled building a little ways away. My mom called me as I was looking for it: she thought the train left an hour before it actually did, and that I should already be on it. She called just as a bum looking guy was approaching me, and he said something like have a good trip and walked away after I had been talking for a little while. I had to take the train to get nearer to the condo, a two and a half hour drive away. The train ride was quite comfortable, much more spacious than the plane, and there were not so many people in it. We picked up more at other stops, but I still was able to keep my whole two seats to myself. I slept for a while. I also watched the scenery. A man near me hadn’t payed for a ticket, and then was caught smoking in the bathroom, much to the consternation of the train workers. At our destination, he was seen sitting with a guard, apparently awaiting the arrival of the police, who showed up just as I left.My mom was there in Bellingham waiting for me. She had gotten lost on the way and had to buy a $5 map just to find the place. She brought her GPS unit, named Yoda, but he was of no help. She had rented an SUV, and we left in that.

We went back to the condo, about a half hour away, near the small and isolated town of Glacier. It was in the mountains, primarily a ski area. The area is remote enough that not only did our cell phones not work, our GPS units didn’t either. The satellite radio in the car cut in and out, though it did this even in places nearer Seattle. We spent the day staying in the area, going around the mountains. Many of the roads going up the mountains were one lane, and after a while they often turned into rough dirt/stone roads. We had to turn around the first one we went up because it was washed out at one point. It was quite hard turning the car around in the narrow one lane road. It was very cloudy, the clouds engulfing the mountain tops. We were quick to get above the level of some of the clouds. Much of these mountains were covered by trees, mostly conifers. But at the tops of some of them was snow and rock. This was my first good view of some snow capped peaks: I had been up top of one in New Mexico, but it had been at night, and I had seen some from planes before as well. There weren’t a lot of them, just a at most a few visible at a time. Later that day, when we drove up near the skiing area, we came to a small lake that had a nice reflection of some mountain tops. It’s called Picture Lake or something like that, and is supposedly the most photographed of that sort of lake. There were little birds near us that flew quite close. We also saw a decently sized waterfalls, evidently where many people had died.

Unfortunately, it got dark before 1700, so we didn’t have much time to see things. It and the clouds also made for slow shutter speeds on many the photos throughout my trip.

We ate dinner at a local restaurant called Graham’s, somewhat famous for having been in an early movie. It was a somewhat interesting place. The menu was part of a newspaper that told the history of the restaurant and some other informational tidbits. It had a small variety of somewhat strange items. I went with a stir-fry like dish which my mom had the night before and recommended. It was pretty good.

We called my dad, as we did every night. We lost cell phone service near a strange tree with blue christmas lights in the middle of nowhere at the side of the road on the way to the condo, so we usually tried to call before that. There was a phone at the condo area, a regular phone put in a payphone like terminal for the whole condo to use. We had to use a long distance card with it the couple of times we called from there.

Synopsis of rest of trip, perhaps to be filled in later
Monday
Long drive to shore. Saw Deception Pass, a passage of a river through a narrow gorge, with turbulence that turns over kayaks. Saw a few beach areas, view over bay.

TuesdayDrove to Seattle to pick up Jamie. Took ferry to Orcas Island. Drove up tallest mountain on the islands there. Nice view around, across bay. Could see many big snow capped mountains off in distance. Tried to get into rec room at condo for quite some time, but must have closed early.

Wednesday
Showed Jamie mountain area, mostly what we had seen already, but a bit more. Went up Twin Lakes road. Made it over several rough washed out spots of road, but had to turn around at one very bad one. Got somewhat good views, but was cloudy and of and on raining, preventing good mountain-top views. Jamie and I played ping-pong and swam in pool.

Thursday
Were going into town, so I brought my cell phone. Set it in car next to me, was last I saw of it. Went through Canada to a small bit of the US on a peninsula off of Canada. Got stopped at first crossing, didn’t hear what guy said, so waited in car for a long while before I went into the nearby building, at which point I was told that we were supposed to have come in. The cop guy there seemed to have a strange air of importance, and told me to keep my distance when I got close to him to point out our vehicle. Soon after we were let leave. Other three crossings much less eventful. All had long waits, especially last one, with long lines of cars. Bought no MSG ramen soup at gas station that Jamie ended up getting. Rocky beach on peninsula with lots of seaweed, giant driftwood, plenty of birds on water, decent view over bay of some islands. Not very worth trip through border crossings though.

Friday
Power went out, so woke up 45 minutes late on big driving day. Checked out of condo, drove down past Deception Point towards Olympic Peninsula. Saw sea lions or something in water as drove past, but construction plus missed exit prevented our stopping. Took ferry (much shorter ride) to Olympic peninsula. Walked short way onto 6 mile long sand dune thing with light house on its end. Saw seaweed, giant driftwood. Drove up mountain road to dam, small and uneventful, turned around. Went toward another mountain road, road closed, had to turn around. Dark, had to head to Seattle. Long lines with huge number of cars took ferry to Seattle. Dropped Jamie at home, went to hotel. Briefly used free internet, slept well in bed.

Saturday
Dropped my luggage at Jamie’s. Had pancake breakfast with Jamie. Mom left for early flight, dropping Jamie and I at REI store. Spent much time there looking at ultralight rain garb and the many, many other camping items. Very nice place. Bought small duffel I later used in place of another, slightly smaller and less handled bag, for the flight. Also some camping soap and a durable reflective blanket. Walked around town. Tower had too long lines, though view would have been nice, passed on it. Took space train further downtown, saw Pikes Market. Top floor had food with lots of fresh fish, fruit, also crafts. Narrow lane very very crowded, difficult to walk. Maybe four other floors with antique and other type shops in old-time mall-like setting. Played instruments for a while at Lark in the Morning store. Walked for a good while till found Teriyaki restaurant, ate large meal that I couldn’t finish. Walked good deal more looking for wooden boat place, couldn’t find it. Dark. Went to coffee shop to use internet to find best bus schedule for me to catch my flight. Also looked for shop with used camping gear, but was too late to visit it. Went back to Jamie’s home for a while via bus. Didn’t get to do much other than repack my gear better before I had to leave for my bus. Bus was rather late. Gear easier to carry with better packing, still rather difficult, especially first one which ended up fairly crowded. Second one, guy saw my transfer slip was old, had to pay but couldn’t find money with all my stuff, had to pay on exit.

Plenty of time waiting in airport for flight, read psychology book. Flight boarded slightly late. Rather empty, after women moved, had my row of three seats to myself. Looked out window at darkness a bit. Soon lay down across three seats, fell asleep. Slept till descent approaching Cleveland airport. Woke with sharp pain in ears, like they really needed to have popped many times over the flight, but couldn’t because I was asleep. Every once in a while the right would make strange, loud noises. Ears didn’t pop till after got home and slept. Arrived early. Dad picked up, drove me straight home. Stay awake for a bit unpacking and looking for cell phone. Fell asleep and slept till 1500 or so when parents called. Invited me over for dinner of chili. Looked completely through Mom’s luggage, still couldn’t find phone.

Workshop Paradigm

in

apps + files organized by job/workshop

example: music making workshop has music creation apps + users personal (and other’s shared?) music files

different users have same apps (tools) but their own files (works)

different jobs/workshops may use same tools ie music making and music listening workshop may both need some listening tools

Leopard:Mac OS X.5 first impressions

in

***finder:
yay, finally can save default view settings, including column width and sort column, to be applied to all folders. this is huge for me
quickview thing awesome. been wanting something like that for a long time.
-plays movies and sounds
–movies pop up fairly small, must press full screen button to see big
-text documents readable, probably much better for just reading them than using textedit
-excel spreadsheets even viewable, though formatting severely messed up at times, sometimes unreadable, very slow to open
-ichat logs even viewable
-easy, just hit space to open, space to close again.
-can navigate to other images in same folder with arrow keys
-can put in full screen via button, no apparent keyboard method. in full screen, hit unintuitive tab or shift tab to move to next or previous items in same folder. arrow keys do nothing, why not use them just as they were used in regular quicklook
slideshows seem to have disappeared completely. can view images, one at a time only, in full screen
icon set nicer, easier on eyes
coverflow somewhat interesting for image folders, though probably won’t use it.
-makes windows bigger if smaller than certain minimum size
-movies get first frame view, sounds get nothing special
sidebar thing too wide, can’t go by just icons anymore.
-search thing seems interesting, but doesn’t provide very useful results, as they don’t appear in a normal find type dialog where you can refine the results or group items. crashed the finder once
feels a bit more solid and streamlined
trash – finally one can view items in the trash. they cannot be opened, but previewed by icon or in quickview
can turn off warning when changing file extension, a very annoying thing unalterable in previous versions
-also, finder highlights all of name but extension (except via second click) when editing name
***spotlight
must reindex upon install, index manages to miss some things such as iphotos
new search results windows finally part of an application, the finder, so they no longer get lost
new search results window not nearly as nice, no arrangements by kind whatsoever, results all bungled together in one of standard finder views (except columns). no simple buttons for limiting search either.
-image results not nearly as nice, must type “kind:image” after query to limit to images, then use standard finder view
***System
guest user accounts, been wanting that for a long time too. just concerned about it deleting the guest account every time, may limit its usefulness: if let people login as guest to create a project, they’ll need to put it somewhere special so it won’t get deleted, as I understand it.
can finally work with groups without downloading server utilities. is in accounts pane. seems quite easy to create a group and assign users (from GUI users only) to them
all preference panes more streamlined, often fitting on one screen now. except that a lot of the functionality for some things, like network settings, must be accessed in a seperate “advanced” screen
***Network
not sure about new placement of firewall settings, hopefully the appropriate firewall activates when related port opened in Networks
***Textedit
autosave feature nice, but defaults to every 30 seconds. Items on desktop then refresh their icon every 30 seconds.
search highlighting is nifty, caches eye quite well. should highlight all occurrences and keep highlight on for a while so you can see them while perusing document
***spotlight
must reindex everything
***install
takes forever, much longer than it should. the dvd media verification really took forever in itself, though I figured I should run it through for the first go. xcode install takes quite forever itself, not done through normal installer.
preserved many, though not all, of my preferences that have corresponding preferences in the new system
***Safari
so slow. pages take noticably longer to load. app itself slow. has improved greatly after several uses
some pages functionality broken. my online banking doesn’t work
bookmarks menu – submenu items pop into awful places, sometimes covering up the items below the parent so you can’t continue to the rest of menu, can’t access items it covers without closing entire menu and starting over
return doesn’t allow editing of bookmark names as it does items in finder, elsewhere
find much nicer, inline bar at top doesn’t open popup, highlights items brightly, highlights all occurrences, should highlight all brightly (only does one at a time)
javascript seems much faster, at least to select all comments for deletion in wordpress

***iCal
noticeable problem, info pane seems to have been removed. get info by double clicking which brings up small popup near item. not as readable.
-not nearly as quick for people like me who leave the info pane open.I have virtually no reason to click on an item unless I want info on it.
-opens in view mode first, must click edit button to edit or Command E
-is somewhat more concise though, leaving out extra info for items without it
must now hit return to edit name instead of double clicking. more consistent with finder behavior, but slower
***Terminal
ls: colors no longer automatically provided with color output
>console: still works, font seems weirder, perhaps harder to read
-often has some error messages near top when first entering
-still no multiple screens
less: new less much slower, does weirrd scrolling thing
***etc
quicksilver dock icon appears now
drop shadow seems more significant, makes things look further behind current window
computer runs hotter it seems
computer runs noticably slower overall.
inconsistencies continue in command keys used in different applications, often unintuitive and arbitrary. Command L in AddressBook and Command E in iCal edit entries.