Buster Keaton

I went into NYC today and saw The General at Film Forum, as part of their all-day Buster Keaton marathon. I would have liked to have seen one or two more films while I was there, but I didn’t want to stay in the city all day. I first became a fan of Buster Keaton when I was in college, a long time ago. I haven’t managed to see more than two or three of his films though.  I really need to rectify that. I think I should try to find time to watch Sherlock Jr. soon.

Saturday

I went into New York yesterday, and did a few semi-interesting things. First, I went to the building where my NYU iOS dev class will (likely) be held. I wanted to do a dry run before the class actually starts, so I’d know where it was and how long it would take to get there. While i was in the neighborhood, I stopped at Strand Books and Forbidden Planet. I picked up one book at Strand, but managed to somehow leave Forbidden Planet without spending any money. Then, I took the subway from Union Square to Grand Central, and wandered around there for a while. I stopped at the Lexington Ave Midtown Comics location. This time, I did not succeed in leaving without spending any money, though I only bought a few new comics.

After that, I walked to MoMA and hung out there for a while. I would have stayed longer, but a pigeon used me for target practice while I was in the sculpture garden. (I just got a bit on my shirt sleeve, which I managed to wash off in the bathroom, so it wasn’t really that bad.) There’s a joke in here somewhere, involving this Jackson Pollock painting, but it’s too obvious.

I held up pretty well through a day that involved a lot of walking around in hot weather, but I started feeling it on the way home.  I had some back pain last night and didn’t sleep well.  But I’m feeling better this morning and will likely try to do a bit of walking around today too.

laptop stuff

We’re in the middle of Hurricane Irene right now, but my part of Somerville is fine, and we haven’t lost power. I’ve been using this time to finish setting up my new ThinkPad, and to wipe my old Inspiron and Aspire One.
For the Aspire One, I uninstalled a few programs, let Windows apply a bunch of pending updates, then created a new account and wiped out my old one.  I gave that machine away yesterday, before the storm hit.
For the Dell Inspiron, I had too much stuff on there to easily clean up, so I just did a clean install of Windows 7 on that, created a user account, and ran updates to get it (mostly) current.  I think that’s ready to sell now.
On the ThinkPad, I’d done most of the quick installs already — Firefox, Notepad++, and a bunch of stuff like that. Yesterday, I took care of the two major installs: Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  Now, I’m letting the system pull down and install updates for both of those programs.
Over all, I think I’ve probably pulled down 5 or 10 GB of updates over my internet connection this weekend.  Thank god I don’t have a data cap on my Optimum Online account!

new laptop – initial impressions

So I got my ThinkPad E520 today, and I thought I’d write up some initial impressions.

  • It’s lighter than I thought it would be. I guess it’s mostly plastic, and the battery isn’t huge, so that must be why. It feels weird though.
  • This is the first laptop I’ve ever bought that had a numeric keypad as part of the keyboard. (Well, technically, I had a barely portable Amstrad back in the early nineties that had a full-size keyboard with numeric keypad, but that wasn’t really a laptop.) This also feels a bit weird.  When I’m typing, my fingers aren’t in the middle of the laptop, they’re in the middle of the main part of the keyboard, which is a bit left of center. And the trackpad  is centered under the main part of the keyboard, so that too is left of center. I think I’ll be able to get used to it, but it does feel weird right now.
  • The keyboard isn’t bad, but, given the size, I wish they’d gone with a more conventional key layout.  Ins, Del, Home, and End are up on the top row, but PgUp and PgDn are tiny little keys on either side of the up arrow key.  (On the plus side, they did maintain the inverted T arrow key layout.)
  • This laptop has the Lenovo “Enhanced Experience“, which is supposed to speed up boot time. My experience so far is about 45 seconds to the login screen, then 45 more seconds to the desktop after entering my password. Not bad, I guess, but not stunning.
  • This machine has a fingerprint reader.  I set it up to allow me to login with a swipe of my index finger, but it hasn’t worked so far.  I might need to go through the setup wizard again.
  • Lenovo tends to ship a bunch of proprietary utilities on their machines.  This one has a handful of programs pre-installed, but only a few are really useless and need to be uninstalled. 
  • I’ll definitely be uninstalling Norton Internet Security.  I’ll probably install F-Prot for anti-virus protection. I’ve been using it for several years on all my machines with no problems.

So those are my initial rambling thoughts.  I’ll probably post more in a few days, when I’ve gotten a bit further with it.

    old laptops

    Once I get my new Lenovo, I’m going to get rid of my old Dell Inspiron and my Acer Aspire One. For some reason, whenever I’m getting rid of a computer, I like to go back and review some stuff — when I got it, how much I paid for it, whether or not I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it, and so on.

    I bought the Inspiron in February 2007, so that makes it about four and a half years old. I usually consider three years to be a decent life span for a laptop, so this one has certainly lasted long enough. I bought it through the Dell EPP (Employee Purchase Program), back when I was at NMS, my previous job. I was surprised to see that I spent $2000 on it. That seems like a lot now — the new Lenovo is only costing me $550, and it’s a pretty good machine, not a refurb or anything. I got a fair bit of use out of the Inspiron. I took it on a few trips, both personal and business, and I used it a lot when my Mom was in the hospital (and later the nursing home).

    I bought the Acer Aspire One from Woot in July 2009, so it’s only about two years old. I never did get much use out of it. At this point, most of the scenarios where I could see myself using a netbook, I’m more likely to just go with the iPad. I think, for me at least, the iPad really killed any need for a netbook. If I need a full-featured computer, the netbook isn’t good enough, and if I don’t, then the iPad is easier to lug around and use.

    I turned the Aspire One on today, to make sure it was still working, and I took a look at the event log. The last time I had it turned on was March 30. So, five months without any use pretty well indicates that I don’t need the thing. I’ve occasionally thought about wiping out Windows on it and installing Flow or UNR on it. If I did that, though, it would just be for fun; I don’t see any real utility in using either of those on a regular basis.

    new laptop

    I just ordered a new laptop from Tiger Direct — a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520 1143-3FU. (Heck of a name, huh?) It was only $550, and has a couple of things I want that aren’t usually included in most consumer laptops: Windows 7 Pro (instead of Home), and a 7200 RPM drive.
    This will be replacing my Dell Inspiron, which is old enough that it has a PATA hard drive, and can’t be upgraded past 2 GB.
    I actually don’t use my Windows laptop that much — I use my MacBook for everyday use, like reading email, surfing, writing blog posts, and stuff like that. I still feel like I should have a reasonably up-to-date Windows laptop on hand, and this Lenovo wasn’t too expensive, and should hopefully last me for a few years.

    American Museum of Natural History

    I went to the Met last Sunday. Today, I decided to go to the Museum of Natural History. I didn’t have any particular plan for my visit, so I just wandered around randomly. That doesn’t work as well at this museum as it does at the Met, but I still enjoyed myself. If I’d planned things out more, I would probably have bought a ticket to see the World’s Largest Dinosaurs exhibit. I also downloaded their Explorer app to my iPhone near the end of my visit. It would have been a good idea to have that when I first entered the museum. It’s a real help in finding your way around the museum.

    I think I kind of like this idea of going into a random museum in NYC on rainy Sunday afternoons. Maybe MoMA next Sunday, if we get another rainy weekend.

    One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

    I went to the Met on Sunday, mostly just because it was a rainy day, and I didn’t want to just sit around in my apartment all day. They’re running an exhibit right now called “A Sensitivity to the Seasons: Summer and Autumn in Japanese Art.” Most of the items in the exhibit were, I think, things I’d seen before. They displayed a number of prints from “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” including Sudden Shower on the Great Bridge. I know I’d seen this print, and others from the series, before, but something struck me about it right then, maybe having something to do with the rainy weather outside. I’ve always liked Japanese prints like these, but I never really bothered to learn much about them.

    On my way out of the museum, I found this book, marked down to $16, so I picked up a copy. It’s a huge book, with great reproductions of all the prints in the series, and a fair bit of background information. The book was apparently related to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum some time ago, where they have a full set of prints. Their site has a nice interface for browsing the prints, by season, or by keyword, so you can view, for instance, all the prints with rain or snow in them.

    On the way home from the museum, it occurred to me that this series would also make for a pretty cool iPad application. Well, someone else had that idea too: Hiroshige HD is an iOS app containing the Edo series, and several others. It’s only 99 cents right now. There’s not much to it, other than reproductions of the prints, but it’s a fun way to browse through them.

    free F&SF magazine for Kindle

    A free “digest” version of F&SF is now available for the Kindle (and also for the iPhone/iPad Kindle app). I remember picking up F&SF on the newsstand occasionally when I was a kid, along with my comic books and Bazooka Joe bubble gum. They published some great stories. I haven’t picked up an issue in years though. I have plenty of SF and fantasy short stories on my Kindle, and in my Instapaper account, culled from various sources (all legal), that I haven’t read yet.

    Nice jQuery plugins

    I’ve been working on a web page for the last couple of days that has to do a bunch of stuff client-side, so I’ve been relying more on JavaScript and jQuery, rather than the usual ASP.NET Web Forms stuff I’m used to.

    Here’s a list of three relatively simple jQuery plugins that I’m using. I’ve found that, when looking for a way to do something in JavaScript/jQuery, there are usually several options. There are a lot of plugins out there. Some of them are well-written, cross-browser compatible, small, and quick. Others are a little buggy. These three appear to be in the former category.

    Watermark plugin for jQuery — We usually use the Ajax Control Toolkit watermark extender. This seems to work just as well, with minimal effort.

    jquery-color — I wanted to do some simple color animations on this page. Basically, I wanted to just briefly highlight a new entry with a color background, then have that background color fade out. This can be done with jQuery UI, but that’s a heavy bit of code to include, if you don’t really need it all. This plugin took a while to track down. The page for this at plugins.jquery.com just has a bunch of dead links on it. And searching for jquery color animation on Google mostly leads you astray. I found links to jquery-color on a couple of Stack Overflow questions.

    simplepager — I’m displaying a list of comments on the page, and I needed to have a way to display them 10 at a time and page through them. This, again, is something that would be easy for me to do server-side with a ListView and DataPager, but I hadn’t really had to do it client-side before. There’s one site I worked on recently where the original author had implemented his own custom pager, but I didn’t want to use that code if I could avoid it. (Not that there was anything wrong with it, but it was well-integrated into that specific instance, and would have required work to generalize.) I had to make a minor change to this plugin, and I’m thinking that maybe I should submit it back to the author and see if he’ll merge it into the release version. I probably need to create an account on Github to do that, but that wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway.