thought of the day: one holiday we need is “calendar day”; a day you can mark on your calendar with utter redundancy and superfluity.
ok strangely enough, i had been working on a little opinion diatribe about how the world seems to be on a hedonistic binge of gorging itself with stupid people, and that has in turn distorted the modern higher education system into a dysfunctional, ineffective, if not completely obsolete relic which has creeped into our economy and perverted what used to be a capable and robust professional workforce. the college degree is now nearly a parody of itself, becoming the thing it was originally created to do: certify that you in fact have intelligence and skills worthy of positive contribution to society.
as it turns out, someone already went to the trouble of writing such a piece, mostly. it focuses more on the problems of the higher education system and how the “pursuit of a college degree” part of the contemporary american dream is becoming increasing futile, and less on stupid people and their effects on the economy, and without my cute attempts at humour that writing about idiots ought to invoke.
a shot of the front and back; showing a more inspired style that i’d ultimately like to roll out to this site. front side (with contact info) is high-gloss, reverse is matte and writable, with blank space to actually write 🙂
madness or genius? it’s probably a blend of both, but you have to give the guy credit for doing something different. using his mother’s 1968 high school annual, he lovingly caricatured over a thousand faces now for us to marvel upon. why? who knows, but it’s bloody intriguing if nothing else!
thought of the day: why don’t we call last week ‘yesterweek’, or yesteday ‘last day’?
oh, and kids say the darnedest things. this is one of the most adorable girls i’ve ever seen.. at first she’s a bit unsure of herself but then in bold confidence takes full credit and pride in her eloquence. “quit bothering me. i SAID ‘frog’!!”
quicktime 7.4: the slowest time i’ve ever spent at my computer
good thing i don’t operate my mac from inside a kinkos, or i’d be sodding penniless. having to pay by the hour to use the computer after apple’s recent update of quicktime to version 7.4 is about the scariest thing i can conceive short of being suffocated under the arse of someone who’s typically asked to purchase two seats for their flight to the nude beaches of southern france.
as if i’m ever suffering from some wealth of free time, apple made sure i twittered away that bank this past weekend as my computer slowed to approximately the same pace as any movie starring both matthew mcconaughey and kate hudson; something likely showing near the precise centre of any given black hole. not entirely sure why my normally pacified mac was grinding away like a spoon in the garbage disposal, some troubleshooting revealed that the new quicktime update was in fact either a) so ‘quick’ that ‘time’ bent backward on itself and thus perceivably inert or b) an utter failure.
i don’t claim to understand the technical gibberish embedded deep within the program files, but it is sufficient to say that i understand when itunes balks at my unreasonable request that it play a tune…or anything for that matter, and instead opts to dazzle me with the hypnotic beach ball of death; perhaps its brains now powered by 7.4 only understand commands in said gibberish? it turns out the issue lies with a newly introduced ‘feature’ within the update to embolden DRM in support of the new movie rentals via itunes but also ironically gums up playback of most any other video you may have on your machine–legitimate or slightly less so–including video podcasts, which poor itunes was left befuddled trying to decipher. chalk up one more in the WIN column for DRM. now i can’t even watch that ten year old mpeg of the dancing baby cleverly synced to the tribal grunting of ‘hooked on a feeling’ that i had archived for just such a rainy day. youtube, i love you.
after hours of poring through mostly useless google searches and battling the black magic of os x’s unix underpinnings within the terminal, i decided to embark on the dangerous journey of reverting an installed system component to a version that allowed me to cuddle with itunes and the dancing baby in multimedia bliss. many thanks to pacifist for helping me dismantle the beast that is quicktime 7.4 to burn its unholy remains in my nifty metal trash can, and use its empty cave to reinstall my old friend, quicktime 7.3.1.
all said and done without all the minced words: avoid the quicktime 7.4 update as if it means to infect your human body with some terminal germ, as it’ll definitely happen to your poor mac, and squelch the voice of itunes.
