Dangerous Dave's Dlog

I quite often find myself ignoring posts from GMC users (by clicking the ignore button). I only block PMs from people who spam me (but on the same note, I always block PMs from people who spam me, regardless of the content of the spam). Posts, on the other hand, I frequenty block. It's not that I don't want to see these posts, that's not the reason at all.

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In Mac OS X, there are two types of what I will call "windows" (that I know of ). There are regular windows, and there are panels. Panels do not behave like normal windows, for example when you run expose (the program that shows all of your windows on the screen at once, allowing you to choose which window to give focus to), panels are not shown.

I have been thinking about the windows in GM, the ones that pop up when you double click on an object, a sprite, a room; a resource. Should these be panels or regular windows?

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One of my flatmates got up yesterday morning to see why the chicks were making so much noise, and found that they weren't in their cage. He followed the noise and found Fellofaloaf in the jaws of Stalk, our neighbour's cat. Mary was nowhere to be seen.

Fellofaloaf is fine, and even a little friendlier than before, as if she* realised that those massive bipedal creatures are the only think stopping the evil quadpedal creature from ripping her* apart. We haven't seen Mary since, but she* is presumed dead.

It just goes to show, if you are looked after by a household containing two training vets, it can't stop you dying from Stalk's Disease.

-Dave

* As you may know, it is extremely difficult to know the gender of a chicken at a young age.

I have spent the better part of today trying to fix my MacBook. I was trying to be cool, so I edited some preference files and changed a few permissions. Mostly stuff I shouldn't touch, and with good reason.

The purpose was to get my transparent menu bar back. Since it first appeared in Leopard, there have been people trying to get rid of it, change back to the way things used to be. Well I like it, so I wanted it back. Where did it go? It's enabled by default, but it just disappeared one day (probably a long time ago), and I only just noticed today. After doing everything the internet said, I restarted my computer hoping all I had done had fixed it. Boy was I wrong.

I restarted, and was met with the usual loading screen, an Apple logo and a loading animation. It stayed there. I even went and played GTA (IV) on the Playstation (II) for about 45 (XLV) minutes. I looked back, still loading.

I ended up doing a complete restore from a backup on my external hard drive. Most people would have though there would be something else I could do. On Windows, you boot up the OS disk and try clicking the repair buttons. I have had plenty of experience at this under Windows, and have never had it actually work. So I didn't bother.

After about an hour of copying what was practically a disk image back onto my disk, it started up fine, still no transparent menu bar.

So I started again, trying other things, anything I could think of. Restarted again. It refused to start.

This time I booted up the Leopard OS DVD, and clicked the repair button. It spent 20 minutes doing stuff, then restarted. It booted fine, and I even got my menu bar translucency back! If I had done that in the first place, I would have saved myself a day of breaking stuff. Imagine that, a repair button for a Mac OS, and It Just Works.

What have I learned today? If something takes 5 entries of an administrator/root level password, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

-Dave

After visiting my parents for the weekend, my girlfriend and I returned home to find a few events had happened over the weekend. Firstly, Gumphry, my flatmates fish, had passed away. He was buried in the backyard at the service on Saturday.

Secondly, we had new arrivals in the form of two chicks (as in baby chickens). We are stuck on names to call them, but one might possibly be called Mary Magdalene, after the "disciple" (read: prostitute). This came about after we thought of naming them after whatever they pecked at on the newspaper below them, the ad which they chose read "Erotic Ladies".

No names are yet confirmed, but the second may be something ridiculously long, as is usually the case when I have any say in things.

-Dave

PS: i now have internet back, yay!