How is it that there are so many bad Chinese food places in Bloomington? I've been to three recently that never seem to have anybody in them, yet they stay in business somehow. Is it the low wages they pay their workers? Is it the takeout and delivery business? I'm not sure. The three places are Noodle Town, China Cafe Express and that Chinese place next to Kroger on College Mall (I think it's "Flower something something"). Noodle Town is actually pretty good and has reasonable prices; I suspect that they stay in business for two reasons: takeout and the fact that they are owned by the Japanese steak house next door. China Cafe Express is not so great AND over-priced. Maybe the rent is low out on 10th and the Bypass. Or maybe they're overpriced because Mama's Place next door is over-priced. (Although Mama's Place's prices are justified.) The Flower place is good and has average prices. Maybe they do a lot of deliveries too. It's run by South Asians (Vietnamese?) so there are some good non-standard-chinese/american dishes.

Wow, this Powerbook keyboard feels mushy after the new iMac keyboard. That's impressive—the Powerbook keyboard is one of my favourites, but it is quickly being eclipsed by the new Mac keyboard. It seems that Apple has finally made a quality input device. (The Mighty Mouse is nice but not breathtaking.)

My lessors's son was here this morning taking care of the dog while they are in the Frozen North* watching a granddaughter's football** game. It turns out that we both played Privateer back in the 90s. I told him that there is was a remake when the source was released a few years ago, so he installed it while I was at Aikido. He actually knew how to play it, unlike me: he was in his mid-20s when he played it; I was 12. It's free, so if you're into old games, or sandbox-style games, you might want to download it. Apparently there are distributions for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. That makes me happy (the Mac part).

Speaking of Mac and Windows, once I had VMWare installed, I ran into the font-smoothing problem that was a hot topic a few weeks ago. I had both anti-aliasing mechanisms on the same LCD and, as predicted, I prefer the one I'm used to. Windows' smoothing makes the text look all spindly to me.

Note: Pasting isn't working correctly from emacs to b2evolution. You'll have to bear with some stupid line breaks until I figure out the problem

*Not frozen at all times of year. Your mileage may vary depending on construction and weather.
**The other kind of football.

I am in the midst of downloading Important Programs* from IUWare right now and unfortunately the thing is beginning to resemble Zeno's paradox. The download rate slips ever slower and the estimated time to completion has remained the same for the last hour or so. At this rate it will never finish. At least now I have time to finish the linguistics department newsletter.

*Office and Visual Studio. Turns out I have an old-ish (2003) version of Visio but I'm not sure whether I will install it. I may buy OmniGraffle this month and it is a far better product.

So my new iMac came a few days early. In fact, it came before the iPod I ordered for my friend in comp ling because of the student-free-iPod deal. Apple announced new iPods today so I thought maybe they were waiting to deliver a new one, but no, it looks like he's getting a "2nd-gen" one, which appears to be the old one.

I'm not going to give a big review of the Mac because you almost certainly have strong opinions about Macs already (particularly about the wisdom of buying a desktop Mac), but I am really amazed by the ease of the upgrade process. I just did rsync -vaE /Volumes/backup/p3r3grin/5sep2007/ /Users/zackman and waited for 10 minutes and it's like I am still working on my laptop--almost uncanny. I restarted iTunes and it appeared exactly the way it is on my laptop right now. I started Mail and instead of being greeted with "set me up!" I saw the e-mail from the editor listing the things I need to fix (almost done, by the way; the next step is to install VMWare so I can finish the stupid Word fonts from the comfort of my own home). It's amazing—Unix rocks. Now I just need to go through and restore the little hacks like replacing US-Unicode.keylayout with my own custom Linguist.keylayout and getting rid of the melty GNU icon for emacs. And I need to reinstall a lot of programs too.

Later: Amazing! It even restored the custom folder icons I had! rsync must have correctly copied the resource forks of the folders. I didn't think it could do that.