Do not try this at home

From time to time I've been asked why it's been awhile since I've had an alcohol-related post on the site, and you'll be pleased to know my non-site related goal for the weekend is to duplicate the above drink at home.

It's sort of a white russian with a hint of mint, but it is going to require me to make my own coffee liquor. Considering my domestic skills are still just one level above baking frozen fish sticks, I'm trying to keep my expectations in check but have high hopes.

There are a few more odds and ends about Tiger and the Mini Mouse and such I don't feel like making entire posts about to take care of...

Get yer Cow on

I ironed out some shirt stuff with David the other day, and spent some time last night touching up some of the test designs. I saw it this morning, and realized "Rub it shiny." may not be an acceptable thing for all genders to wear across their chest...

Dunno know what I was thinking, I wasn't even stoned.

I know, they've been asked about for ages, and I'm not ignoring the interest and it is coming. Just want to make sure it's quality, because I'm not interested in asking someone to pick up something I wouldn't want to wear. The Cow was not necessarily designed with silkscreening in mind, but it deserves better than some heat transfer process on a white shirt.

Plus, I don't wear white shirts.

The Mighty Mouse is kinda weak

I finally got to use one in person, and ripped the amazon link off the site as soon as I got home. The little scroll ball was fine, I didn't really like it any better or worse in the 5 minutes I played with it. *shrugs* Maybe if you hadn't used a tilt-wheel it'll be a revelation, but it just seemed different instead of better or worse.

The much talked about having to not have your finger on the left button when doing a right click was weird, but probably not insurmountable. If you can get over the wanting to click with your finger thing, I'm guessing I could just rock my hand to the side for a right click and get used to it over time.

Unfortunately, while this would probably end up making them serviceable, it would would completely mess me up when it came to using the little scroll ball, but that's just poor design and doesn't make it a terrible product. No, what makes it a terrible product are the side buttons you have to "squeeze".

When I saw where these were in the pictures, I didn't think much of them. I figured at worst you'd just end up not using the side button on the outside very much. Nope, you have to squeeze them both at the same time -- not one or the other. Unfortunately, they're way too far back on the mouse, and you have to rotate your wrist egregiously in order to use really use them.

Design counts, but part of good industrial design is ergonomics, and I have a feeling those buttons just aren't going to get used that much because ergonomics were ignored towards a specific end. This kind of makes me sad, because I think there's just as much beauty in a tool which is engineered to take the user into account as there is in a simple shape.

If the Mighty Mouse existed in a vacuum -- if there was no metric to measure it against -- it might not blow. Since it doesn't, and other companies have to take ergonomics into account in at least a cursory way, it officially kinda blows.

I know some people will dig it, and more power to them, but personally every time I see those side buttons, or try to use them, I'll have a flash of anger. It's not about the buttons, they're trifling little things, but rather what they represent.

Keep your desktop clean in Tiger

Over the last while, I had some major, major performance issues with Tiger. Specifically, I was getting beachballs left and right, in just about every app -- even throwing up Growl alerts was causing a stutter.

Using the Finder became comical: I'd create a new folder and give it a name, yet only after many, many seconds would it show up in the correct order. I.E., I'd change "Untitled Folder" to "Cow", yet it would stay at the end of the list -- way out of alphabetical order -- until the Finder pulled its head out of its ass and put it with the C's thirty seconds later.

I couldn't make much headway into what was going on, as things would work normally, then beachball city for a few minutes, then they'd work normally for awhile. No app was sucking up the CPU to any great degree, but kernel_task and the Window Server would work overtime.

It all went away when I moved the 400+ items I'd collected on my Desktop to a folder to sort later. I haven't really tried to track down the problem, and am just guessing the Finder is just sort of stupid about how it tries to do its "live updating" with kernel notifications, and 432 items on the Desktop was causing it to trip over its quality software engineering.

Either way, if you're having a lot of beachballs, it might be worth trying to clear off the Desktop a bit to see if it helps.

yummy alcohol posted button Posted by drunkenbatman
    August 19, 2005, at 07:31 PM


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