The Snook and I spent the best part of the afternoon today gardening. Yes, gardening. We needed to transplant our baby tomatoes and I’ve got lots of other veggies we need to start. (I found sweetcorn seedlings at Kmart! I told the Snook we had to get them. They’ll probably be hopelessly oversized for the space, but I like the idea of growing a little bit of Indiana here.) Anyway, we’ve got a triangular flower bed in the backyard that we thought would be perfect. Unfortunately all the rain we’ve had lately turned it into a total weed jungle! So we bought a hoe and the Snook did his best farmer imitation. Within an hour we had it clear. We planted my sweetcorn, ten tomato plants, and a jalapeno chili plant and then gave them all a good drink. (I also went berzerk on about two dozen slugs I found in the worm farm. But the less said about my slug rage, the better.) Here are some pictures…

       

   

So that’s the before picture, Snookums the triumphant farmer, and the after version. Then a closeup of our sweetcorn and our chili plant. It’s not the greatest garden in the world, but it’s a pretty big accomplishment for two computer geeks!

What’s New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Ninety percent of this stuff is “under the hood” as far as I’m concerned, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

Woohoo! I have officially upgraded to Panther. I got my copy this morning – along with a complimentary T-shirt! – and managed to save a hundred bucks courtesy of the educational discount. (Shh!) The upgrade itself went much more smoothly than I expected. I cleared off the iPod and used it to back up the stuff I wanted to keep: applications, documents, bookmarks, my iPhoto library, mailboxes, etc. Then I reformatted the drive and did a clean install from scratch (removing the partitions I set up last time). The install process probably took twenty minutes from start to finish. Then it was just a lot of busy work – setting up accounts, importing the old stuff off the iPod, etc. I think it’s all done except for downloading the latest Gimp release.

Initial impressions: Things definitely seem zippier. Not a lot, but I didn’t think OS X ran very slow on my machine before. I’m loving the new Exposé thing; I’ve got a hot corner set on the upper-right that clears the desktop. Very useful. Snooky and I tried the fast user switching which works just fine, but as I don’t have Quartz Extreme we couldn’t see the ultra-cool rotating cube effect. The Font Book is pretty sweet; I’m hoping that I’ll have access to the system fonts once I get the Gimp going. (We couldn’t get ’em to work before but I had a dodgy installation, I think.) So far I’ve had two applications break after the upgrade: Kung-Tunes and icWord. Everything else seems to be working okay. Oh, and I got rid of Classic! No more OS9; I’ve taken the leap. (I never used it much anyway.) More updates to follow once I’ve played around some more…

Crud. Not only did the Herald not publish my letter, they sent me a really stupid response too. Read on if you want to see the exchange.My Letter:
As an Atkins dieter myself (and twenty kilos lighter because of it), I’d like to say thanks for your great even-handed article. Unfortunately Mr. Matthews got one fact glaringly wrong – the Atkins plan does NOT instruct dieters to eliminate all carbs from their diets. This is impossible. Instead you are urged to reduce your daily intake of carbs to 20 grams for the first two weeks, after which you start increasing gradually. Atkins’s detractors (who rarely seem to have read his books) often imagine that we eat nothing but steak and eggs at every meal. Trust me; even at 20 grams you can still eat several cups of vegetables a day… You just can’t have them in the form of a salad sandwich.

Their Reply:
Many thanks for the information. The article came from a UK newspaper. The column accompanying it did make the point it was a low, rather than no-carb diet.

How crappy is that? I was responding to this direct quote from the article: “To trigger this effect, Atkins dieters are instructed to begin by eliminating all carbohydrates from their diet, forcing their bodies to get energy by burning up fat reserves instead.” It clearly says “all”. That’s a MISTAKE, and it’s exactly the kind of MISINFORMATION that leads to knee-jerk negative reactions. Grrr. I might have to send them another message.

Holy crap! You can now search the actual text of over 120,000 books at Amazon. This would be awesome for research… Too bad I’m not in uni anymore. Though I suppose it’ll come in handy the next time I’ve got a phrase stuck in my head that I can’t identify!

Welcome home to Brigita‘s Mister, after a long, long time at sea.

Look at the Aussie dollar! Go, you good thing, go!

I miss Fall in Indiana.

My Dad sent me that this morning.

Planning a trip to New Zealand anytime soon? I think the Snook and I are definitely going to have to check out these Lord of the Rings filming locations.

Lately I’ve been thinking about icons and usability, and specifically whether the little link, e-mail, and speech bubble icons before each post are intuitive. Most other bloggers seem to have settled on using text links. I worry that new visitors to the site won’t realize that they can leave comments. So I’m running an experiment. As you can see, I’ve removed the icons in favor of text links. (I scrapped the e-mail link altogether; was anybody using it? The address was wrong anyway!) I should be able to track which method resulted in the most first-time comments. Right now, I’m not sure I like it. I find it difficult to visually distinguish between posts, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to the old system. What do you guys think? Did you find w-g confusing the first time you visited?

Update: Okay, okay, they’re back! I did get rid of the e-mail icon though. I guess in certain situations usability comes secondary to the interests of long-time users. 🙂