The Wacky World of Chris Knight – Page 98 – Life is an adventure. A good life is worth selling the movie rights. These are my story notes.

2005/07/112005/07/19

To support, or not support… They answered that question.

My ignorance regarding the nature of the OSX/X11 integration has been cured, thanks to comments below, and if you are looking for tips regarding copy-and-paste in X11 under OS X, read on. Regardless, I’m still irked that Apple Care couldn’t so much as point me in the right direction. I leave this posting here in the hopes that it helps someone else who had the same issues.

I know I’m going to buy the Apple Care support package. After all the problems I had with my Sony during its third year I would have to be nuts not to buy a three year support package on my shiny new PowerBook. But, damn it, I won’t be buying it today! I’m too irked at Apple’s support policies. They apparently only marginally support some of the applications that come on the 10.4 (Tiger) install DVD, and of course that would be the application currently giving me a headache…

My PowerBook came with OS X 10.4 pre-installed. Basic install, none of the optional packages. During the course of installing all my favorite applications I found that Visual SlickEdit requires X11 be installed. (I would not be having this problem if they wrote a native OS X implementation; but given OS X supposed flexibility, porting one of their unix versions to use X11 on OS X seems reasonable. Seems…)

I installed X11 off of 10.4 disk 1. It launches. An xterm window opens. As far as Apple is concerned, their support stops here. It matters not to them that copy-and-paste doesn’t work. I can select text in this xterm window, go to Edit/Copy and when I go back to Edit the Paste option is greyed out. Nothing made it to the buffer when I did my Copy. Apple doesn’t support X11 beyond launch because they don’t want to support third party X11 applications. Completely reasonable, except my problem exhibits itself in the xterm application that came with X11 that came with Tiger on a DVD with the Apple logo. That didn’t sway the position of the Apple Care support person, Elliot, with whom I spoke. It launches, so he is off the hook as far as supplying a useful hint or suggestion or, gods forbid, a solution. Elliot did offer to email me a URL to a support page regarding X11. I gave him my email address but the email never arrived.

I’ll buy Apple Care later, because Apple doesn’t Care today.

-Chris

ps. Please DO NOT reply to this posting on the LJ feed account (tampagypsy_feed). Follow the links back to my webite and reply there if you feel the need. There is no way to easily integrate comments from the LJ site back into my own weblog, so the effort of posting to the LJ site is wasted as I will never read itâ€¦

2005/06/282005/06/28

Doom 3

Finally…

I’m not a point A to point B to point C kinda person. I like to do it all and experience it all and I don’t feel the need to try to impose any particular order to it. Chaos is my friend, family, and frequently my savior. Chaos also makes it a bitch to finish a video game…

When Doom 3 came out I played for hours. Then I got unhappy with the speed of my PC and bought a new video card, just to play this game. Then I realized that my new video card didn’t play any faster than my old one because of a CPU bottleneck, so I upgraded my PC. You’d think afer a thousand dollars in upgrades I would sit at the game non-stop… Then I got caught up in a short lived relationship, and then a new job, and then a move to California; and Doom 3 got left to the wayside. Ultimately ironic is that I now run the servers for a large gamers site and I couldn’t find the time to finish Doom 3. As a perk of being the BOFH of 1UP I scored an unopened copy of Doom 3: Ressurection of Evil off one of the editors, and I still hadn’t finished the first part of the game.

Tonight is the night though. I finished Doom 3. Yippee.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled banality.

-Chris

2005/06/082005/06/08

Two wheels of my own…

The past six months have been odd. I don’t think I’ve ever gone so long without my own transportation since I was 14. At 14 my transportation was a bicycle, but my ‘home turf’ was a bit smaller back then. Since college I’ve always had my own car or motorcycle, and I have been taking the freedom that represented for granted. Back in December I suddenly found myself relocated back to San Francisco, while my car and motorcycle were left behind in Tampa. (The car was eventually donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It was just plain time to cut that chord.) From that point until now I’ve been pretty much dependant on the kindness of friends and Family. I haven’t been staying close enough to a point of mass transit that I could be completely dependant on such, so even getting to BART has required wheels. Being dependant on friends isn’t bad, especially considering how great my friends are; but I am ever cautious for fear that I might become a burden.
Tomorrow, though, things change a bit. My motorcycle is sitting in a cargo container at the local ABF shipping yard, and it is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. (Along with almost everything else I own, but somehow little of that matters as much this evening as the thought of my Shadow.) I don’t think I’ve had my personal motorcycle so closely intertwined with my definition of Freedom since my cross country wanderings in 1991.
It is good to be home. Tomorrow it will be good to be home, and good to be free to wander again.