Happy July 4th Y’all

Yes, today is independence day – July 4th, the day that teenaged America cut the parental bonds. Celebrated throughout America with fireworks aplenty; the Macys Fireworks in New York, Boston Fireworks, Washington DC Fireworks, San Francisco Fireworks, and the list goes on.

In Coney Island it’s a day of celebration for America, as local boy Joey Chestnut beat reigning champion Takeru Kobayashi to win the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest. The stars and stripes will be flying high tonight f’sure as New Yorkers watch the famous NYC Fireworks down the east river.

In unrelated news – SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read below here if you like Harry Potter…

Seriously, don’t…

Apparently there is some rumor going around that Hermione dies in the next Harry Potter book, released in a few weeks. Hermione dies!! Noooo! Not sure where this has come from, maybe she dies from eating devilled eggs, but that would be a shame – I can think of many other characters I’d rather see killed off before they get their own spin-off series. Guess we’ll all find out f’real soon who JK kills off.. and if you can’t wait that long then there’s the latest movie to distract you for a few weeks. Phew!

Canada Natives Protest Day

As Canada Day weekend kicks off across the provinces, the Canadian Natives have organised a day of protests to draw attention to issues such as unresolved land claims and poverty. This will involve marches in the major cities and blockades on major transport routes. One such blockade, on the 401 highway near Toronto, went into effect about 10pm last night – literally just after we drove past there as we headed over to Oakville for a wedding. It will certainly be interesting to see how this day plays out, with the police promising they will maintain peace and apprehend law breakers, and the natives promising they will ‘meet force with force’. Sounds familiar.

Magic Inflato-Diet Pill

According to the BBC Italian scientists have developed a pill that inflates in the taker’s stomach to make them feel full. The tiny pill is made of cellulose so it can be digested, and the feeling is likened to eating a bowl of spaghetti – cutting out the room in your stomach left for real food. Simple.

Of course this could be argued to be the same effect as drinking a glass of water shortly before you eat, or eating psyllium husks – a form of fiber that expands in water. Most worringly, what if the pill sticks in your throat when you take it? Scary. Although it could make for a great horror movie effect..

How to Slow Down You MacBook Pro: Lesson #1

My new MacBook Pro had been behaving remarkably badly for the last few days, it would start up and get to the login screen quickly – but then once I logged in it would sit do nothing for a good few minutes, perhaps with the search icon showing in the top bar. Once started, many programs apparently hung while loading. This was a bit frustrating, as it’s a brand new Mac so it should be running optimally.

Unsurprisingly it turns out to be ‘my’ fault. I’d loaded my collection of fonts from my PC into the FontBook font management software the other day and it wasn’t handling the few thousand fonts that well. So I went into my user resources and just moved all the fonts out, then restarted the machine, and now everthing is fast again. My next quest is to locate the few key fonts I need regularly and install just those, rather than suffering from font overload.

Of course this is my own stupidity, but I also wonder why the Font Book wasn’t managing the fonts as expected. I had turned off all the fonts except a few, but it seems like the system is still looking at all the fonts before it then cross-checks with the font manager to see which ones are active. This seems a bit daft to me – surely if the integrated font management software says ‘this font is off’ then the system should ignore it until told otherwise? Plus that also raises the question – “How many fonts can my Mac run before slowing down?“. There doesn’t seem to be an answer, but I’ll let you know if I find out.

An Interesting Week Ahead in the U of K

For many folks in the world, or at least in the US, the most important thing happening this week is the imminent release of Paris Hilton. Exciting stuff indeed. Checking the BBC’s weekly planner for this week, we find that for us with a more Brit-focus – Tony Blair is also about to tender his resignation to the Queen, Wimbledon is starting, it’s been ten years since Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese and, at the end of the week, England finally bans smoking in enclosed places. Surprising they didn’t do it this weekend when most smokers where getting wet at Glastonbury…

Oh, and today is the nine year anniversary of when I first moved to New York. Surprised they missed that out.

Hugh Laurie in American Accent Shock

For us Brits there is no surprise that Hugh Laurie is such a big success with his Fox series ‘House’, he’s a talented actor that we’ve enjoyed for many years. However there is some level of amazement that Hugh is doing a series with an American accent, and one that is apparently very good. Well he’s been doing it for years, as you can see from this early ‘rap’ video he did for ‘A Little Bit of Fry & Laurie’

Life on Mac and PC

Having had my new MacBook Pro for a few days I’m finding myself learning more and more of the cute little tips and tricks to make it easier to use. I especially like being able to scroll multi-directionally on the touchpad by using two fingers at once. Very clever. I was also happy to find that once I’d set up a new wireless network, the MacBook found my PC with very few problems – unlike the old days back at Quidnunc in ’96 fighting with third party software.

Of course since I’m not fully migrated over from my PC, I’m having to work on both machines at once and that causes some confusion. Firstly I keep finding myself trying to scroll using two fingers on my PC laptop.. And the other thing that’s really catching me out is using the ‘CTRL’ key for shortcuts rather than the Apple key. The Apple key on my Mac is where the ‘ALT’ key is on my PC – so I keep pressing ‘ALT+C’ to copy instead of ‘CTRL+C’. Although it’s CTRL+A (select all) that’s really bugging me right now…