I have been lugging around a backpack for a while, and, while is is nice when I have a lot of stuff, I would really like something better for when I just want to carry around my laptop and a book or two. Really, I am looking for a nice messenger bag. Since about every other person I know has one, and they really seem pretty nice. I am looking for something that is around 15×11x4+ inches (that seems standard) and something that I can carry my laptop around in safely. Any ideas? I want to get something cheap ideally, so the army surplus ones look pretty nice. A few of the “paratrooper” style like this one or this one (I found both from a number of sites for about the same price, including on amazon). I am not a 24 fan, but apparently these bags or variants are called “jack sacks” as Jack Bauer uses one. I generally like the look of these bags, and I like the feel of military canvas too, but I just don’t want to get my laptop messed up. I currently have a Swiss army backpack, with a special padded compartment for a laptop, which is nice, but I am guessing excessive. Anyone have any advice on that one? The main other bag that appeals to me is one from Manhattan Portage that looks like their normal bag, but has a padded laptop slot, but it is pricey, at least by my standards. Right now I am leaning towards the military-style. Anyone have any suggestions or thoughts?
Google Street View Map of Hyde Park. The streets without highlighting cannot be viewed.
I noticed recently that many of the streets in Hyde Park lost Google Street View, notably where my current apartment is. I also noticed that many of the streets had darkened. Is it really necessarily to remove the images? There used to be pictures taken inside the quads as well, which are now gone; I thought those might have been removed by request of the university, but I don’t really get why they removed the other ones. If they wanted to update them, fine, but there is no reason to remove images. I suppose it is a free service, so I have no right to complain, but I just think it is screwy when I can see my home in Oak Ridge, but not in Chicago. I did some quick googling, but nothing came up. Any ideas?
In the Maclab today (er… yesterday), my boss was concerned with the virtual memory usage on his computer, as the machine was reporting some mythically high amount (like 36GB), so a few of us checked it out on one of the machines that I had just setup. We discovered that the virtual memory usage was suspiciously close the amount of space used on the disk, which was also 36GB. Not trusting the Apple system monitor utility, I fired up top to see what was up. It wasn’t quite as high as what system monitor was reporting, but it was still around 7GB. According to top, bash had something like 500MB to it. Something was wrong, but I often get that feeling with memory usage reporting, so it might have been something else.
My boss did, however, notice the size of our base install (we use the software radmind to update our machines, so there is a consistent base for what a machine should have on it). 36GB is high for a base install, so this concern is fair, but Leopard is no small operating system. My concept of how bloated a system can has been defined by Leopard, so 36GB seemed on the right scale to me. We first checked out the /Applications folder, since most of what is in there is our own doing. We have some hefty software packages installed like Mathematica, some OSS FPSes I installed, and a SheepShaver (a mac classic emulator; the folder includes the disk images for it!), so there was definitely some sizely stuff to justify the 12GB in the folder. What came as a real surprise though was all of the iBarelyFunction HD applications installed:
For a point of reference, Mathematica is 490MB total. The iWork (hahaha) folder has Pages and Keynote in it, both of which have heavy numbers of templates in them. The same story goes for iPhoto and iWeb. There is just tons and tons of stuff in each of these folders. In iPhoto, templates account for 377MB of its 552MB size; the rest is just Apple’s standard practice. For reference, Microsoft, King Vista of bloat, managed to only squeeze 536MB into the 2004 Office package.
Of course, that was just the Applications folder, if you want to find bulk central, look no farther than /Library, which comes to around 12GB on our systems. I have been learning a fair bit more about the design of Mac OS X design recently, and there are some definite great designs in it, but sometimes I am just amazed it manages to run.
I just got a new cell phone (it is on my facebook profile if don’t have it already and you know me), so I have been dealing with wrong numbers. I can ignore those and let my voicemail deal with them, but what sucks are wrong number texts. I think texting is utterly stupid, but it is definitely right sometimes, but most of the time I don’t understand why someone has to use what has to be the most expensive form of communication (in terms of data size/price) in existence today when e-mail would be more appropriate and cheaper. Anyway, I can live with texts from people I know, but what I hate is when it is from someone with the wrong number. I have been getting a stream of incoherent texts recently, which I feel need documenting. I will obscure no details for reasons that will become obvious:
July 7 - 773-699-6104: Alrite ppl this is k. ken etc… delete my old number n replace it wt this 1
July 12 - 773-699-6104: Watz good
July 17 - 773-699-6104: New muzik dropic soon my pg so b on the look out this weekend
July 17 - me: you have the wrong number. please stop texting me
July 17 - 773-699-6104: Nigga shut up (it’s an exact quotation; sorry if you are horribly offended)
Will I continue to receive texts out of some combination of some ill-conceived form of spit and ineptitude? I guess I will have to find out. I honestly don’t get why I should get a nasty response for a reasonable request. Anyone know of something I can do if I still get texts? I don’t have a texting plan, so I am not so fond of paying for these.
I just got a message from the facebook group for students staying at UofC over the summer; I never go, but I still get the messages. Something just seemed wrong with this one:
Subject: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Party (Open Bar)
SUMMERFEST: benefit for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. There will be everything from:
Free food and drinks (including OPEN BAR)
Games and music
Awesome raffle and silent auction prizes, like gift certificates to high-end restaurants, memberships to museums, tickets to shows at places like Second City and the Metro, airfare and hotel stay at a spa, and so much more.
Maybe is is just the phrasing, but I always think there is something wrong when a disconnect between the charity and the supposed benefactors exist. Sure it’s for college students, but that doesn’t fix it. There is a decent episode of Dilbert that “delves” into this problem:
Really, I just found the message amusing, but something is definitely wrong.
Twitterfeed got me thinking. How long could I get a twitter-twitterfeed infinite recursion loop to go for? I created the infinatwit to put that question to the test by setting twitterfeed to follow infinatwit and post to infinatwit. I think the next step will be to see how many web 2.0 services I can combine to produce this effect. I think feedburner is next…
