Concepts in the Paradox

I keep hearing about this third street light rail project, so I thought that I’d take a drive and see what was down that “up and coming” line, as all the realtors put it. Starting from the ball park, I headed south along the rail. I must say, the downtown area is pretty impressive near the ball park. Clean buildings, good transit, plenty of shops and places to eat. Past the bridge is another story though; it is parking lots, empty fields and rotting warehouses for miles.

The light rail stops look modern and clean, something that I was very happy to see compared to the decay that surrounds the street. I’m not entirely sure why there is a light rail track down to Bayview; the whole area consists of closed businesses, cheap and uninspired looking houses, and shady characters passed out on the sidewalk. At one point in my journey I actually came by some shacks that were lined up along the road where obviously people had been living.

My understanding is that on the other side of the 280 near Hunter’s Point there is some nice housing in areas called “Dog Patch”, which I hoped to take a look at it. I was too taken aback by how depressed the area was to go exploring any further. One can only hope that the re-introduction of light rail into the area will be an economic boom to the area. I don’t know how many decades have passed since the rail along third street to Hunter’s Point was removed, but it had to be a crushing blow to an area that also lost it’s now-toxic naval yard.

It’s been two weeks since I bought the iMac with the Intel Duo processor, so I thought I’d share my opinions on how everything is working as a day to day workstation.

The setup: 20″ iMac Core Duo, 512MB Ram, OSX 10.4.5, attached VP201b LCD to DVI-out, standard Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse

First of all, Rosetta, Apple’s G3 processor emulator, works quite well. So far I’ve used Office, VLC, Xjournal, and MenuMeters in their old G3 binary formats and they work well. I had to ditch NeoOffice, since the installer would refuse to run, and DarwinPorts and Fink both haven’t ported to the Intel CPU yet. I had to upgrade MissingSync to the Universal binary format for it to work right, but alas that is only a beta.

On the average, I have iTunes, Safari, X11, ThunderBird, and Xjournal all running at the same time. With only 512MB of memory, the machine tends to come to a crawl when switching applications. Checking out the VM usage shows that 500MB of swap is in use, and after about a week of normal use, the swap climbs to 1.5GB. The CPU is almost always idle, so the main culprit here is memory use.

On the stability front, Rosetta apps tend to be a little on the slow side and crash at startup randomly. VLC and Xjournal tend to crash at startup, but once they are up and going they are stable. Office seems a little slow at times, but Office has always seemed slow to me. I can’t wait for NeoOffice, even being java based, to make it’s return to the Mac with it’s new platform, since it feels snappier than Office.

A new feature of the iMac is the ability to attach an external monitor and do an “extended” desktop, as opposed to the mirrored display you could do on the iMac G5. This has proved to be very useful, since now I can drag apps from the iMac screen to one of my Viewsonic VP201b LCD displays. Now I only wish expose would be more sensible about multi-display systems: having to scurry my cursor around two screens to get to an app can quickly become tedious.

I just ordered two 1GB sticks of Kingston memory, which were $274.09 after tax and shipping. Hopefully this will take care of what is basically my only complaint with this setup, a lack of available RAM! Now if only the iMacs could take more than 2GB of RAM…

This weekend is CodeCon, which features various programming projects and ideas from the employed and unemployed programmers in the Bay Area. Take a look at the program to see if there is anything interesting you’d like to see. I’ve found that CodeCon projects often bear fruit, or give a good indication of where software in the industry is heading.

For example, long before Flickr was hot for photo uploading, there were projects at Codecon showing how to hack Flickr long before Yahoo! stepped in as owner. SCM projects, P2P, and audio hackery are also projects one would expect to find there.

So grab $85, plus some money for food and booze, and everyone for a 3 day coding geekout — and of course all the enjoyment that San Francisco has to offer.

Also, there will be llama-tipping.

Oh Laundry, how you taunt me so. I watch as you slowly pile up in my basket, reaching for the top until finally you spill over the sides. I dig around for all the quarters I can find, take you down the dangerous and twisty stairs behind my apartment, all three flights. I feed you my quarters, my soap, my hopes, my dreams, all in the name of being clean.

This isn’t a perfect existence, no. In a perfect world you’d wash, dry, and fold, all on your own. Alas, the dryer is half broken, so you always come out damp. You can’t be folded the same day you are so damp, so every door, chair, and table becomes a resting place so you can dry. Why must you be so difficult laundry?

Your cousin, the soap and wash just down the street, does a much better job. Alas, she is a far walk and doesn’t share the same interest in the Internet as I do. She goes to bed early, and keeps some questionable company. In many ways I wish she was a lot more like you, but at the end of the day I spend my night with you.

Laundry, if only you could dry for me, or just do yourself, my life would be a lot better. Life isn’t like that these days, and so I’ll keep you for yet another night, and get another roll of quarters next week in expectation of your ultimate arrival next week.