isoglossia

Quarterly report: it’s now been three months since I made the switch back to using a Mac after six years in the Windows world. I’m trying hard to avoid sounding smug or condescending (as so many Mac users are accused of being), but my initial reaction was “what the hell took me so long?” That feeling has only increased in intensity as this change has contributed immensely to my quality of life (where ‘life’ = ‘time spent at the computer’, which value is larger than it probably should be). Each time I have to do something on a Windows machine I am struck ^[1] by the severe contrast. Before sitting down to write this I stopped by isoglossia’s statistical analysis division, and it appears that 25% of you know what I’m talking about.

Not that the other 75% of you can’t get anything out of this. I resisted switching back for years, thinking that I couldn’t afford to; that I wouldn’t be willing to re-learn a different operating system; and that I’d have to give up vital software or shell out hugely for Mac-compatible versions. I was wrong on all counts, and I can now see that reason #1 was by far the silliest — while the Mac laptop I ended up with was more expensive than a comparably-equipped PC^[2], the cost difference has already been more than offset by the absence of downtime, serial re-configuring and associated frustration. If you are considering buying a new computer, don’t let vague concerns like those I’ve listed above keep you from seriously considering a Macintosh, particularly the price. You can hardly afford not to consider it ^[3].

Here are some details that further enhance this new Mac experience for me. What follows are some applications that I can highly recommend for Mac users reading this. Where comparable products exist for Windows, I’ll indicate that.

Quicksilver should always run in the background — here it’s launching from Todos (see below) for show only

Quicksilver seems a natural place to start, though it’s very difficult to describe. It is a highly powerful and configurable (and complicated) launcher for anything anywhere in your computer. Much has been written about this strange and compelling ‘invoker’. I’ll just say that 1) with a modest investment of time it makes your keyboard feel like an extension of your brain and 2) I don’t understand how stuff like this can be so robust, so gorgeously built, and so free of charge. I am using just a tiny fraction of its abilities, but with it I can access any contact’s address, say, in seven keystrokes without moving my hands from the keyboard. It’s revolutionary. Great tutorials for getting started with Quicksilver are out there. If you’re on OS X and not using Quicksilver, you should certainly give it a look. Unfortunately, nothing like it exists for Windows.

Todos delivers launchable thumbnails of all your apps with a keystroke

Although Quicksilver would seem to make it nearly redundant, I also love Todos. The name is descriptive: it delivers all of your apps in eye-pleasing thumbnail form. This happens with a keystroke, definable by you, so the time it takes to locate and start a program is effectively nil in comparison with opening folders and scrolling around until you locate the program you need. Compared with Windows tree searching in “All Programs”, it is the difference between an eyeblink and an eye appointment, so it’s a pity that no comparable product for Windows is out there. It is simple, fast, efficient, and pretty to look at.

With the Mac Uploadr, I love to send pictures to Flickr. With the Windows version, not so much

Flickr’s Uploadr for OS X is far superior to their Windows tool. It makes tagging and adding descriptions much more efficient and is a joy to use. Our Windows version is cumbersome, unreliable, and bug-plagued, causing frequent crashes and much Malkoviching, particularly when pictures fall through cracks opened by its failure. The Windows version does continue to improve, but the differences remain significant.

The above programs are all free but would be worth paying for if they were not. Here are a few that are not free, but are well worth the price many times over. Believe me; the whole internet knows that I am cheap, and I’m also relentless when it comes to finding free software.

TypeIt4Me is a mega-clipboard that takes in all the macros you can throw at it. At one end of its spectrum, I’ve made it so that I will never mis-type the definite article as teh again, along with eliminating many other common finger-gaffes. At the other extreme, it’s got whole form letters pasted into it for über-efficient emailing. It is also great for inserting things you type regularly even when you’re not being a cold, soulless robot (letter closings, for example, or special characters) and particularly for HTML tags; the code I use for most photo borders here looks like this:

style=”border:solid 1px #000000; padding: 8px;”

I love that I will never have to type all that again. Now when I want a border, I tell the keyboard stylpad and it “auto-corrects” this to the tag. (If I want to go back to the original unpadded grey borders, I tell it cdcd.) I have similar macros defined for pretty much everything I might need to do code-wise. This probably means I will forget whatever scraps of HTML I once knew, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice in the name of laziness. Avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome and halving your keystrokes must be worth $27. For a proper review and a link to a similar rig for Windows, see Merlin Mann’s archives here.

NewsFire provides visual and (if you want) audio cues to alert you to new content

NewsFire is the feed reader I’m using. It feels like a hovercar to Bloglines’ serviceable Model-T and to the donkey cart that was bookmarking. It is feature-rich and has made my daily reading addiction an aesthetically gorgeous experience (their marketing does not really exaggerate all that much when they call it “the Angelina Jolie of applications”, although as far as I know it’s not out birthing any kids in Namibia). Like most things in the Mac world, it is highly tweakable. A bargain at $19. Windows and web-based readers abound.

I’ll close with the least glamorous app by far, but one which addresses a common Mac myth, that of the one-button mouse. I don’t know why people still believe that Mac = ‘no right-click’. That said, SteerMouse is a must-have for adjusting the motion of your cursor, speed of scrolling, clicking, and general mouse-feel. Lifelong Mac users may not benefit from it, but switchers almost certainly will. For them, well worth $20, but the free trial gives you ample time to decide whether you need it (you probably do).

Also on the ‘no right-click’ myth: even with the one-button trackpad it’s an option: System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse> Trackpad > Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click.

Problems with this big change-over? Almost none. But if you really must know:

• Safari? Really? Compared to Firefox? I don’t get it.
• I’m still learning The GIMP, which I bitched about previously. I could run Paint Shop Pro via Boot Camp, or wait for Intel-ready versions of it or Photoshop, but I have a feeling I’ll like The GIMP by the time such releases come out next year. The lag in Intel-compatibility has also led me to play with Adobe’s Lightroom beta, which is a nice side effect.
• The mac.com account — are they serious? Can anyone explain this to me?
• Bluetooth, why you gotta be that way? You gonna crash the entire OS like that over a stupid wireless headset ? Get over yourself.

These items really are the extent of my quibbles. For a dissenting view of switching over, listen to this guy, dubbed Jackass of the Week by Daring Fireball. Overall I am extremely pleased with the move. If you’re reading this on a Windows machine, consider looking over the fence. If you’re a Mac user, I am very pissed off that you didn’t proselytize my ass over to your cool world a long time ago and so I’m no longer speaking to you.

I’ve just learned that even the U.S. president is getting in on the act now, and by ‘act’ I mean ‘using The Google’. Early adopters will already know that The Google is a ‘search engine’ that can help you find ‘pages’ on the ‘internets’. Some ‘web surfers’ even use it to find their way here, in focused search of specific reading material, no doubt for vitally important research projects. Here, without further preamble, is the Autumn 2006 version of the

“A few questions…”:
• Does isoglossia perchance feature girly vomit videos?
• Where should I direct my browser for spambot nightmarishness?
• How can I solve the puzzle of the Samorost sleeping taxi?
• Can I read about two tone bandicoots on isoglossia.com? wondered a searcher in Mexico

Economic interests, semantics, and uncertainty about liquid volume bring other searchers to isoglossia, with search strings like:
• twix market share
• meaning of the word segundus
• circus efemera [sic] Did you mean: circus ephemera
• objects that hold about 500 milliliters

The indexing ‘bots of The Google never overlook the strong parenting orientation of isoglossia, returning high results for queries such as:
• drop a coin ask if your [sic] pregnant
• pictures of kids eating and getting dirty (how can I express my deep sense of honor that isoglossia is the #5 hit on The Google, in the same exalted company as The BoingBoing and The History Place: Child Labor in America?)

And of course, with the parenting comes the scatological and, inevitably, the monkey-sexual:
• A reader in Valparaiso, Indiana was interested in finding Gross pictures of steaming pile of shit (with isoglossia ranking #3 of an alarming 105,000 results)
• Starting around 15 October, numerous people searching The Google for images (IMAGES!) of “colostomy bag” (WHY? WHY?) began to be referred to this picture here. This makes me unaccountably happy. Also to see that at least some people out there, even if it’s just colostomy fetishists, know that The Google loves “The Quotes”.
• copulating monkeys pics = isoglossia in The Google UK’s number 5 spot

And speaking of copulating monkeys,

“‘Sweet monkey Jesus!’ I thought to myself. ‘You’re on stage making out with Jane Goodall! Roll with it!’ But the translator failed to roll with it at all. He stared down at his sheaf of papers as if he were trying to ignite them with his mind. The audience, of course, was going nuts.”

“(YouTube is essentially the Great Alexandrian Library of Weird Al videos.) ”

“I may have intended to build a wall, but it was shaping up more like a tower of trash. Like a great number of weblog authors, I had started a mental recycling project.”

“New Years Eve 1998, Chuck Norris and I were at a party, when the clock struck twelve, instead of kissing someone, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked everyone at the party. He then proceeded to roundhouse kick everyone on the street, and the whole city. He has been doing this ever since.”

“Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.”

Previous meta entries: June 2006; February 2006; December 2005

Magda had the foresight to anticipate complications in Adam’s transition from crib to bed. She thought he might be traumatized by the change, or that he might miss the crib, or feel exposed like a mountaineer bivouacking on an exposed ledge high up on the Eiger Nordwand. I was primarily concerned about what mischief he would get up to with the screwdriver during assembly.

As it turned out, there was no need to worry, and in fact Adam was terrifically excited by the prospect of graduating to a big-boy bed. Magda prepped him via the IKEA website, checking in with me as to what bedding I was buying and so forth, so that he had reliable mental images by the time I came home. Here’s his new bed, and through the paired annoying miracles of text messages reading, for example, Barnslig rand in blue and Korall Bubblor, and IKEA’s website, Magda and Adam could see my bedding choices in almost-real-time. So by the time I got home Adam was well used to the idea and a bit over-excited to assist with assembly.

• This bed is in the category of letti estensibili, which means that both headboard and footboard can be lowered to accommodate Adam’s beanpole-like growth, or they can be left up for Procrustean punishments, our choice.
• Yes, he has already discovered that the head- and footboards make excellent baby launchpads.
• The top photograph was actually taken in the dark, and the flash did not wake the little monster up.
• Magda was all saddened at the dismantling of the crib, forgetting apparently that we will be filling it up again all too soon.

Adam’s genuine excitement at having this new bed made all the aqua-ness of its purchase more than worthwhile. The anti-Eiger-ledge-scenario safety bar was sold out, of course, so we have turned to alternate solutions. We loved the idea of Adam being able to clamber out of bed on his own and come padding into our bedroom early in the morning. In practice, our experience has been more oriented toward him howling his way past the wicker linen chest and stomping out into the livingroom at zero-dark-hundred to sit sullenly in front of the blackened television screen waiting for something to happen.

Signs that you married a Polish girl: #77 is your phone’s auto-complete dictionary knows that s + l + e means you must be typing ‘herring’ in your bride’s native tongue.

Saturday morning I left the house and drove west across the isogloss (rather than east, as had also been a possibility). My mission: infiltrate the Padova IKEA and purchase a boy-bed to replace the crib. I was to do this without killing anyone, if humanly possible. (ONLY JUST.)

A Saturday trip to IKEA is apt to bring out the misanthrope in me. Magda and I frequently remark to each other on the topic of how much we hate people, and the more people we are exposed to the more likely we are to be filled with loathing and offensive superciliousness. Although we are equal-opportunity people-haters, we reserve a special disdain for what we call aqua-people. These are the people who move as if they are under water, especially when purchasing furniture. The Padova IKEA was hoatching with aqua-people, perhaps exclusively.

My other task was to bring home as much Swedish herring as the car would hold, at the behest of my pregnant wife.

The overly-red drink is in honor of my misanthropic friend in Alaska.

Other Signs that you married a Polish girl include suitcase contents saturated with pickle juice (#23) and son’s first word is cześć (#11).

Yesterday’s Adam update was the result of three separate drafts, the first two of which were callously cast aside by the server as it pretended to “Save” them. This loss of work doesn’t happen often, but when it does you can bet there’s some gnashing. Often I can recall more or less verbatim what I’d typed, but the monthly Adam updates are usually cobbled together from notes collected over the entire month, so sometimes things that are lost stay lost. It wasn’t until I was in bed last night that I realized I’d mentioned a haircut but there were no pictures to prove it.

This photo was originally intended to go into the monthly update. This was taken on Haircut + 1, after the sobbing had subsided. We’ve cut his hair before, but this month we bought a pair of electric clippers to make the process more efficient. By “process” I mean “the part where I sit on his chest and try to keep his teeth clear of Magda’s face”, and by “efficient” I mean “mentally scarring”. This was the first haircut that reminded me of “Full Metal Jacket” and afterward he looked about that traumatized. His cheeks didn’t return to their normal color for a disturbingly long time and he looked so generally deloused that the photographs we took in the immediate aftermath of the shearing aren’t for public consumption.

The above picture shows him atop the elephant-themed slide at the playground in Nova Gorica’s center. This slide was the site of another great trauma a few weeks ago, when a horrible little troll of a girl was hiding under the slide and thought it would be fun to scream at Adam from the shadows (Magda assumed mental illness). It was not fun and it was some time before he would go near the slide again, so this photo represents a triumph of sorts, a testament to Adam’s resilience.

His hair is almost grown back, too.