YEEEEEEEEE-HAW! It's a rootin' tootin' six-shootin' Bullet Sunday!
• Masked! I am not such a big fan of the new TNT series Franklin & Bash. Nobody likes a smart-ass more than I do, but the lead characters all too often cross the line from smartassery to dumbassery, and I spend much of each episode rolling my eyes back into my head...
Judge: You're asking to bring a corpse into my courtroom?
Franklin: No! That would be ridiculous!
Bash: We want to bring the court to him. Jury field-trip to the morgue!
Prosecutor: A field trip. Really. You sure you got signed permission slips from your moms?
Franklin: Actually, we got one from yours.
Bash: Last night!
Bwah ha ha ha! From your mom... LAST NIGHT! How high-larious is that?!
Who wants to listen to lame, cliche, stupid-ass dialogue like this? However, the show has Malcolm McDowell in it, which is one of my favorite actors, so I keep watching.
This dedication to Franklin & Bash was rewarded in their season finale which featured a guest-appearance by the delicious Tricia Helfer! But the bigger surprise was a guest-star playing a masked Mexican wrestler named "Ultimo" involved in a lawsuit...
Until he removed his mask at the end, I had no idea who it was. And this drives me nuts, because I should have known! I'm a big fan of the actor! (SPOILER! Highlight the inviso-text if you want to know: Danny Trejo). Oh well. The series has been renewed, so I'm hoping that the writers go more "smart-funny" in season two.
• Roar! I finally did a clean install of Lion on my crippled MacBook. I was going to attempt this with the "recovery partition" that Lion makes on your hard drive, but decided instead to start over from scratch by making a bootable Lion Installer on a USB drive. Cut to a half-hour later, and my computer was operating "normally" again. I still have some real problems with the way Lion does certain things and some of the choices that Apple made, but at least I have a useable computer. Now starts the scary task of reinstalling my software in the hopes that one of the programs I rely on wasn't what was causing all the problems.
• Hidden! And speaking of installing my software... I ran into something new in Lion that I can't figure out. Why has Apple decided to hide the "library" folder in a user's home directory? At first I thought it was to protect all the settings, preferences, and support files from being tampered with... which I kinda get... but then why wouldn't they hide the "library" folder for the System? In any event, this makes it tough for people to transfer their prefs or delete faulty prefs when there's a problem. Fortunately, you can show hidden files in the terminal with...
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
killall Finder
And you can hide them again with...
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
killall Finder
• Wrong! Since I haven't installed Photoshop back on my laptop yet, I started up Apple's photo manager/editor Aperture 3. All I needed was to crop that wrestler photo, so it wasn't a big deal. Except it was. I cropped the image to 500 x 330 like I wanted...
But when I open it... not so much...
Which finds me once again wondering who in the hell is beta-testing Apple's shit. The more I use their software lately, the more problems I run across. Problems which should have easily been caught during beta testing. I mean, seriously, if you were in charge testing of testing the crop tool, wouldn't you VERIFY that it actually crops to the size that it said it cropped to? Wouldn't that be job one? This is beyond lame and has me wondering if Apple has gotten too big to give a fuck anymore (see: Microsoft).
• Reed! A while back, a company called "Black Pixel" bought out the awesome feed reader I use, NetNewsWire. They promised to give us a road-map of future released after WWDC back in June... but... nothing. So I decided to check out the Mac version of the feed reader I use on my iPhone, Reeder. It's nice. It's polished. But I couldn't find a "next unread" shortcut when reading through my full list. This is a pretty basic feature, so now I'm looking elsewhere. Sometimes "progress" can really suck.
• Cloud! I have entirely too many computer files. So many that I could never store them all on my laptop. So I went and signed up for DropBox, thinking I would be getting a magical hard drive in the sky where I could remotely access my files without taking up local hard drive space. WRONG! DropBox doesn't have a cloud storage option... anything you put there is mirrored on your hard drive which, while useful in some cases, is the opposite of what I wanted. Sure you have the ability to not sync certain folders, but then you have to either sync them when you want to use them (a huge waste of time and bandwidth) or use their web browser interface (slow and inconvenient). Enter ExpanDrive! Available for both Mac & Windows, this nifty app can mount remote volumes (such as FTP or Amazon S3) as a local drive which acts the exact same as a drive plugged into your computer. It works shockingly well, and assures me that I can have easy access to my files even if I don't have room for all of them on my Mac. If you have a need for such a thing, there's a free 30-day trial available for download.
And, on that happy note, I now get to sort through a batch of crap that I took out of my storage unit a couple months back. That aught to be a boat-load of fun.
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While the dialogue in “Franklin & Bash” has not been stellar, I have kept them in my DVR queue because sometimes I just need something brainless. And as you pointed out, Malcolm McDowell is on the show. I refuse to believe that anything with him could suck completely.
While the dialogue in “Franklin & Bash” has not been stellar, I have kept them in my DVR queue because sometimes I just need something brainless. And as you pointed out, Malcolm McDowell is on the show. I refuse to believe that anything with him could suck completely.
It seems vaguely worth pointing out that the Finder’s “Go” menu will show “Library” if you hold “Option”. No idea why they feel the need to hide it so much.
I’ve realized some more UI changes Apple seems to be pushing with Lion. The fact that Mission Control doesn’t show minimized windows the way Expose did seems to me to be a push towards no longer minimizing windows at all. Which, interestingly, I seem to have stopped doing before I even noticed this change.
Was there anything good in the storage locker?!
I’ve got a 500gb hdd to put a Lion clean install on. But before I do that, I’m doing a Carbon Copy Clone of my Snow Leopard drive to a USB external, just in case I miss something and need to boot back to my older install.
I use Dropbox, but only for often used documents, JPGs and other files. I have 3.8gb of space, but only have about 20% of that full.
One cloud drive I will miss is the iDisk part of my MobileMe. It’s a nice 15gb storage for often used files that are also available to any public users. I need to find a reasonable replacement for that before I switch over to iCloud. Which means, it may be a while before I switch over to iCloud (i have until June 2012)
I actually enjoy the show immensely and am sad there will be no new episodes until next summer. As for Malcolm, I’ll say hi to him for you on Friday at my signing. I could actually tell who Ultimo was immediately by his voice. But I was thrown by the height of the character. I used to think he was like 6’8″ because he looks immense in many roles. But this and his cameo in Modern Family prove him to be less than 6 feet tall which totally ruins perceptions I’ve developed of him. Weird how differently he appears.
Hmm, I also use Reeder on my phone but never thought about the desktop app. I’ve always just used Google Reader in the past. I think I’ll go give the desktop Reeder a try.
I shoulda known by the eyes. No one has eyes like he has eyes.