This really is good news, because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to aptly replicate the problems I’m having with it and the fine folks at Apple would continue to classify them as a software issue. I would like to imagine that I will go in tonight and they will just give me a brand-new computer for my trouble, but I suppose there’ll be a whole period of waiting for them to ship it back to HQ and so forth.
Archive for September, 2009
Hooray! My (still relatively) new computer won’t start!
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009Husky
Monday, September 28th, 2009The downside of having lost some weight since we moved to Madison is, as the wuv of my wife reminded me the other day, that it means my jeans no longer fit. (By “my jeans,” I mean the one pair of jeans I traditionally own at any given time.) So today, since we found ourselves at the mall as part of the ongoing quest to repair my MacBook, and because the day was kind of a bust, workwise, following Eileen and Melissa’s visit, we trucked over to Penney’s for some Levi’s. (more…)
Noooo—really?
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Paul Graham wrote a pretty great little essay about how the medium has always really been the salient issue in publishing, while content has been more or less irrelevant. What an interesting notion. If only it had occurred to someone before…
(Via the Daily Dish)
Job security
Saturday, September 26th, 2009It took about 25 hours (and takeout from downstairs, and a little pained tweeting, and some pizza and Topperstix), many of them all in an unbroken row, but I finished the rush job I got on Thursday night, earning myself a tidy little sum for a day’s work—and probably, I undercharged. I was cleaning up a couple of short books on bovine artificial insemination that had been translated from Spanish. One had been translated pretty well; the other had been done by software, and it was grim.
The work was just a slog in some parts, but it was tremendously satisfying to reread it this morning, making minor corrections and seeing that what once looked in places like refrigerator-magnet poetry done by a monkey was now not just comprehensible but pretty fluid. Anyway, it made me think:
There might not be many jobs in newspapers these days. Or at magazines, or for new-media outlets that actually pay. But I bet there’s still going to be plenty of work for anyone who’s good at facilitating communication.
What? What the hell is dude talking about?
Saturday, September 26th, 2009???
Is Conor really telling us that loyalty to an abstraction (“the people”) is preferable to loyalty to a person (“the President”)? As a conservative, does he think that the former is even a well-defined concept? Possible given human nature? Desirable?
???
Western civilization, from the ancient Greeks up on through the American experiment and in its imminent future aboard Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise, is (as best I can tell) essentially founded upon a belief that loyalty to ideals—that is, abstractions—should supersede loyalty to people.
(Plus, as one of the commenters on the post points out, working for the president is a job. It’s not more than that, because the whole point of a president is that he is not special. Do I have a responsibility to not write a tell-all about my former bosses—that is what the post that started it is about—because I should be loyal to them? And if I don’t, then why does someone who worked for the president?*)
*Barring, of course, the matter of state secrets and so forth—the publication of which we already have rules in place to prosecute.
