saturn return to sender

Tip for anyone hooking up new Comcast broadband on a Mac: you’re going to have to call customer service. Save yourself a frustrating hour of attempting to avoid that fate, and just call.

Even if you get a dhcp-assigned address, Comcast won’t let you through until they “turn it on” on their end. Their default welcome page says you must first have an account and an email address. Sigh. It gives you a link to download some installation software, but the link does not work. You still have that install CD that came with the package. You figured you wouldn’t need it and you are correct, but you try it anyway.

The software install process, which is presumably designed for grandma, and would presumably allow you to set up your account, is useless. First, it “requires” Internet Explorer 5.2 and won’t run unless you let it install it. Soon after you grudgingly allow it to defile your machine, it will ask you for an administrator password to do god-knows what, and then not accept it. The guy who installed the cable said before he left that on Macs, the password it wants “is not what most people think,” and that I’d probably have to call tech support. I bemusedly said, “I think I can figure it out.” Okay. So I even—while sneering with great distaste—enabled the root account to see if they, stupidly, coded their crap to require the root account instead of an administrator account. It still didn’t accept it.

So. I called. The girl was nice, knew what things like DHCP and IP address meant, and flipped the switch for me. Hooking to the wireless router required me to reboot it and the modem, but it all works now. Do yourself a favor and just call.

I just got the keys to a house in Boulder I’m renting for an incredibly affordable price. It’s 3br/1ba (two of the bedrooms are tiny, so it’s more of a 1br/1ba+), with living room, kitchen, deck, backyard, patio, front porch, and it’s an 8-minute walk to downtown. It. Is. Awesome. Walking to my favorite cafe to work just now, gazing upon the flatirons, I felt what I often did living a stone’s throw away from Montara beach on the California coast: I live here?? But this is also the first time I’ll be living without roommates. I am going to be so spoiled now.

DSCF0049

I just got the Fujifilm 40fd. It’s fun and pleasantly small, but I suppose I’ve been spoiled by my big SLR (which ain’t even all that). The 40fd’s picture quality has been underwhelming so far. I suppose for 200-something bucks, it’s hard to complain.

I have kind of been in a cave for the past 4 years, but I think the movie capabilities of the current crop of compacts are awesome. 10 years ago, I’d never have believed that you could get 640×480 30 fps video out of a device this size, and then store 30 minutes of it on a $20 chip the size of my thumbnail. Yay progress.

Anyway, tonight the heavens made this rather striking show of celestial alignment: the crescent moon, Venus, Saturn, and Regulus (in Leo) were all bright and shiny in a line along the ecliptic. Pretty.

Speaking of consistency in UI …

Hi, my name is Eric, and I use Safari.

Hi, Eric.

The reason I still use Safari instead of Firefox as my main browser is, yes, partly that the controls don’t look Mac-native. It’s kind of shallow, but that will be fixed soon enough. No, the real reason—and this was still the case in the daily build I downloaded the other day, but perhaps it will change before FF3 is final—the real reason is that text controls don’t behave like native Mac text controls.

I navigate text fields so often that using the arrow keys with option, command, and other modifiers is thought-free second nature. It’s always faster to move the cursor and select text with the keyboard than with the mouse. Firefox’s text fields do let you navigate and select with the keyboard about as well as you can with standard Cocoa fields, but the modifiers are different, and the standard modifiers are mapped to other things. Down-arrow (or shift-down-arrow to select) on a single line field is the big one for me. Try it in the Safari location bar, then try it in the Firefox location bar. Grr.

Seems like a small thing, but it’s what’s keeping me a Safari addict, despite Firefox’s many benefits.