Wednesday I moved all of my bookmarks, RSS feeds, and favorites over to Firefox 3.0 after getting bogged down by Safari’s memory leaks and slow response times once too often. Firefox has a nice new interface (much improved from 2.0) and seems to be zippy enough, but it’s got a nagging annoyance I’m not sure I’m cool with yet: the bookmarks bar allows for folders of links and RSS feeds, but doesn’t display the number of new RSS entries like Safari does. This, and some other minor differences, will take getting used to.

Meanwhile, the drive I spent an afternoon archiving ten years of digital pictures on started to go wonky, so I did some musical chairs with hard drives and servers and now I’m backing that up to a secondary drive, even though I don’t have much faith in either of them. Looks like I need to seriously consider yet another storage solution for all of our digital media. The need is increasing daily, too, because I’ve taken over 2 gigs of video of Finley since she was born, and I’m terrified of losing any of it. It’s all backed up on DVD, but given the uneven predictions for the lifespan of that media, I’m thinking I need to shoot some Super-8 film of her so that we’ll have physical media in 50 years. (I’ve already shot some medium-format film of her with the Rolleicord, but that’s a small amount relative to the digital format).

I consider myself a pretty technologically savvy idiot. I’ve had a weblog for eight years, I’ve been working on the internet for over ten; but I’ve resisted jumping on the social networking train, with one exception. It seems like everybody’s on the Facebook these days, and in the last two weeks, I’ve had three different people tell me I should join. I’ve made my reservations about social networking pretty plain here before, which basically boils down to avoiding the same crap I dealt with in high school, but this evening I decided to stick my toe in the pool, for reasons I don’t quite understand yet.

After making the decision to keep the Scout, I decided to revive the old /scout/ directory on my work server. (For a time in the early part of this decade, that directory was the most popular destination on that domain). After reviewing a page I’d last edited in 2003, I decided to install WordPress in that directory and document my progress with a simple weblog. Installation was a snap, and within minutes I’d changed the template to something cleaner and more useful—a process that would have taken hours in Movable Type.

I’ve been wanting to update/upgrade/redesign this site for about a year now, and the technical and logistical realities of working with Movable Type have been the thing that holds me back. I don’t really want to spend hours fighting with a clunky template interface just to change a color sitewide, or have to wrestle with MySQL to upgrade the database using lousy installation instructions. The WordPress interface is smooth, there are a million plugins to make life easier, the PHP is cleaner, as are the templates, and it just feels better.

So, at the crossroads, I’m considering a switch of allegiance. Doing some preliminary research, I found some pages that talk about migrating data, which doesn’t sound easy but could be harder. I think what I’ll have to do is set up a subdirectory here on idiotking.org, export the data from MT and then import it into WP to get the guts in place. Then it’s going to be a lot of tweaking to get all the old URLs working correctly (this seems to be the biggest hassle) and stuff where it belongs. Where I’ll find the time for this I don’t know, but it will be nice to have a change of scenery around these parts again.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve had a total of about ten all-in-one iMacs come through Idiot Central in assorted models and colors. I’ve kept my eye out for them here and there because they are usually very cheap, mostly bombproof, and will still run OS X at a reasonable enough speed to be useful. However, ten-year-old circuitry gets finicky after awhile, and like anything else, exhibits personality quirks. I’ve had a handful of first-generation colored versions with wonky old hard drives and dead CD-ROM drives, and slot-loading models with twitchy video and fragile power units just waiting for a brief hiccup in current to fry the motherboard. All have been purchased from Craigslist and flea markets and rummage sales, all were put to good use for various projects (or resold), and over the years they’ve finally bit the dust in one way or another, except for one.

I bought Purple—named for its case color—through an ad in the Pennysaver (yeah, that’s right, this was before Craigslist made it to Mobtown) from a chain-smoking dude in Glen Burnie, who may or may not have acquired it by means illegal, and who certainly sketched me out. Before I had a music server set up on it, it first ran home-automation software here at the house. Then, it was a production webserver. For a while it was my mother’s stand-in iMac when her original blueberry model bit the dust, until we got her a laptop. For the next four years, I stuffed it to the gills with my music collection, and it sat under my desk, dutifully hosting my music library. It’s been opened and closed so many times, I can’t remember what the original configuration ever was. A few weeks ago I humped it into idfive and booted it up after a year of retirement, and it cheerfully resumed its duties without complaint.

Like the proverbial Timex, it kept ticking, until this week, when it suddenly refused to wake up from sleep. Several attempts to get it to boot from an emergency disk failed, and finally it offered the weirdest possible sign of trouble I’ve ever seen: a shifted, half-blank display of pixels all running for the edges like animals escaping from a zoo. I pulled the drive the other night and booted it from a spare enclosure; it came up immediately and with no problems, which pointed back to problems within the machine itself. Sadly, I pulled the RAM and clock battery out, then buttoned it back up in preparation for a trip to the dump. I have one last iMac in the basement that’s available for a heart transplant; strangely enough, I’ve been meaning to get rid of that one for the last few months every time I trip over it, but providence made sure I was too busy to ever get around to it.

So, farewell, old friend. It’s been a good five years, and you’ve certainly paid for yourself.

Why does Dreamweaver continue to be such a giant bag of dicks? I mean, it was shite eight years ago; it’s still shite now. God, how fucking annoying it is.

Slashdot ran an article this week about CodeWeavers, a company whose main product has been porting windows apps to the Linux environment. Their primary application is CrossOver, a tool which allows an OS X user like myself to run a Windows app without emulation on an Intel Mac, and they were giving it away, free, for one day.

I was very interested whem I read the description. Instead of having to boot up an entire virtual environment (in this case, an entire install of Windows XP) just to run one program, CrossOver builds a version of the PC app that runs on its own, saving CPU resources and memory. For anyone running a 1st-gen MacBook Pro like me, which caps out at 2GB of RAM, this is important, because my typical workday involves running Photoshop, two web browsers, a mail client, an FTP client, iTunes, several smaller utilities, and XP under emulation with several Windows applications; RAM gets scarce and the machine bogs down.

I downloaded and installed the app, and followed a helpful wizard to install a fresh copy of HomeSite (my authoring environment), which wasn’t actually on their list of supported software. Everything ran smoothly, and within minutes I had it working. After installing a copy of Explorer 6 inside the “bottle” (their term for a virtual partition), I had everything I needed to work with, minus the hassle of booting up XP.

Comparing the footprint of the two approaches, Parallels/XP (at rest) uses 209 MB of RAM, plus 12.86 for HomeSite. CrossOver uses a mere 69MB, plus an equal amount for HomeSite, which should make things zippier in theory.

So: on the surface, it looks great; I’ll try it out for a week and see if it supplants Parallels as my Windows alternative and report back here.

So they’ve announced that the Seinfeld/Gates ads for Microsoft are officially ending. While I understand the underlying concept of the two ads I’ve seen (are there more?) I’m still puzzled by the execution.

They are using Bill Gates to personalize Microsoft, making it less of a monolith and more into a friendly, cheerful entity. Seinfeld is there to be the comic foil and provide the yuks, showing how Gates can be an everyman like the rest of us. Seems simple, right? It would be, if the jokes and execution weren’t so oblique. It’s like the writers tried so hard to be hip and self-aware that they forgot the concept completely, so the situations and dialogue become a 30-second riff on shopping and “Real America”, subjugating the message behind “We’re stinking rich and look how funny it is to live with the little people” jokes. Yeah, so we all have a bitchy grandmother who lives with us, and we eat leftovers, and we have lousy taste. I’m sure you have an ugly lamp somewhere on your estate too, Mr. Gates.

So what does this say about the brand? To me it emphasizes the divide between the huge, wealthy corporation (Gates) and the customers it services (the family), and the tone of the jokes highlight how it looks down on the rest of us. Seinfeld is there for some unknown reason; his presence is pretty much superfluous in the context of the setup. The same effect could have been achieved without paying him millions to show up, and could have humanized the Gates character even more.

Let’s examine the Gates character for a minute, too. I’m calling him a character because he is there to portray the human side of the company, and the in-joke is that he’s “just like the rest of us”, even though he could buy and sell any country on earth. He does get humanized, and they even show his sense of humor, something the Microsoft PR machine was never really able to achieve. But no amount of kidding around will change the fact that he is one of the five wealthiest men on the planet, and that he will never be “one of us.” When his Vista install crashes, he has five of the smartest men at Microsoft immediately parachute into his billion-dollar estate to fix it, while we all have to sit on hold with the Geek Squad for three hours. They also never made a visceral connection between Microsoft and Gates. It’s implied, but it doesn’t go any further than that, and his reason for being in the commercials is never really explored or explained. Finally, and this is the most obvious and perplexing point of fact: He doesn’t work there anymore. He works for a foundation he started which tries to find creative ways to give away billions of his dollars in aid. Yes, he will always be the figurehead for the company, but that just underlines their most serious problem: They have no real brand identity.

So what does this million-dollar marketing effort achieve? Absolutely nothing. It leaves us all scratching our heads attempting to divine the message. Is it about Seinfeld? Is it about shoes? What is it supposed to mean? The end result is an ambiguous celebrity endorsement that showcases the failure of Microsoft to be able to connect, on an individual level, with the billions of people it touches every day. My guess is that a lot of people are in big trouble as a result of this campaign, and that there is a scramble to reshoot new ads which will be as bland and cold as the previous attempts to promote the company.