One thing I’ve hated about Apple for a long time is the lack of legacy support combined with the quick, not-free upgrade cycle. Apple has a habit of upgrading their OS every one or two years, and charges over $100 for the new version. While charging for a “point” release is absurd, you might get away with not upgrading for a while, but soon no new Apple software will run on the just-replaced version of their OS.

It’s that time again, and PC World has a few gripes with some of Apple’s new features. I tend to ignore these things, but the reviewer’s issues with a new feature called “Stacks” caught my eye. For those of you who don’t know, Stacks are just like “Drawers (circa 1998)” in Gnome. Still don’t get it? It’s just like putting Quck Launch folders in a toolbar in Windows.

Of course, Apple couldn’t have been that far behind Microsoft in something so obvious, could they? No, they couldn’t. I’ve had my application, documents, and desktop folders in my Apple’s Dock since the first day I got my MacBook (click to open, right-click to expand). So why Stacks? Well, this wouldn’t be the first time Apple (or MS) threw in a new feature that was nothing more than a slightly polished version of what users were doing on their own.

The issue I have with Stacks, and with other attempts by OS makers to integrate features their users created, is that the implementation is often worse than the method it replaces. Stacks can only display 62 items within any one stack. The pre-stacks way displays a scrolling list of (essentially) unlimited length. Further, nested folders in Stacks don’t expand, but do using the old method.

So, in a couple of months, when my Mac-head friends ask me what I think of Stacks, I’ll tell them the same thing I did when Apple released the KHTML-based Safari: “It’s not bad, I’ve been using it for years.”

We’ve gone from worrying about Ben getting over the move to wondering why he’s so much more acclimated to his new surroundings than we are. Miles is still (and probably will continue to have) a tougher time, since he doesn’t have the distraction of school, but Ben is getting along swimmingly.

Brooke’s life is considerably less stressful ever since she finished making Halloween costumes for the boys. Miles’ wizard costume is very nice but took almost as much time as one of my comprehensive exams.

The weather here is changing. We’ve had cold snaps over the past two months, but this time it seems permanent. The locals keep telling us that it’s not normal to be almost to November with no snow, but no one is complaining. Tomorrow might turn out to be the first time I work from home on an arrangement I made with the department chair: If I don’t have class, office hours, or other meetings, and the weather is not nice enough to ride my bike, I will work from home.

Yes, despite the long years of additional education it took to earn a professorship, and the disagreeable arrangement of teaching evening classes, there are some very attractive aspects of my job. Besides an open schedule, and the four months of paid leave each year, working with some very energetic and sincere graduate students would have to be up there as well.

Finally, it’s official. We will be back in Utah for the holidays. Ben will have to miss a week of kindergarten (Gee, however can we hope he will make up that lost time?!?!), but I have a feeling our time there will fly by.

Let me just state that I’m not a fan of Radiohead. It’s not that I don’t like their music, I just have never really been exposed to it. What little I have heard seems eclectic and rather artistic, but I’ve been too occupied for the last few years to take the time to appreciate their work.

In case you haven’t heard, Radiohead, who represents themselves now, decided to release their album online and allow the buyer to stipulate the price. Since I’m not a fan, but was interested in finding out more about their music, I pre-ordered the album for $0.00. It came out yesterday, I received a link in my email, and I downloaded the entire album free and legally.

I gave it a listen, and I found the experience to be much like a wander through the Pompidou. Some things make you laugh (“Are they serious?”), others make you stop to consider them because of social factors (eg. the Urinal), and sometimes something really does strike a chord with you. This album though, had way too much that just didn’t appeal to me.

So, while I very much appreciate Radiohead’s efforts to restore balance to the music-listening public’s relationship with music-creators, I’m afraid their music doesn’t ring for me. This is not any fault of theirs (there are plenty of artists, playwrights, and architects whose work I don’t like), but simply an issue of metaphorical distance.

The great progress here was that I was able to sample the music without risk, and the performers had a chance to gain a fan.

This morning, my goal was to read through a draft of a paper I’m coauthoring for a research group. Brooke’s doing her morning pilates (or something like that), so Miles came to me mumbling something about getting a toy out of his bedroom. So, I took a minute break to walk upstairs with him.

“I wacheckerz”

“I thought you were getting a toy.”

“No. I wagame you.”

“I have to work.”

“Kay. I find toy. You gowerk.”

“Can I help you bring a toy downstairs?”

“No. You gowerk.”

Ouch.

I had hoped to keep my Mac laptop running as long as possible as a sort of experiment into its stability. I’m not editing video on this laptop, or parsing large amount of Arabic text with a Perl script (both things I’ve done in the past that have resulted in less-than-stellar reliability), but I’m just using it to get my work done.

I browse the web, write papers, check email, etc. I’ve had no issues with it, and it had run all semester (47 days) without a reboot.

I knew the end of that uptime would come when an update required me to reboot the system. Such updates are much less common in OS X than Windows, but they come nonetheless.

What brought my systems to a grinding halt was something much more mundane than a system update. It was a guy from IT, sent by the secretary to install the driver for the department copier. I really had no need for that, but I told him to have a go.

He needed all of the programs shutdown. Fine. My Word had a new document called “Document 76″ open at the time, and Smultron has a text files that had been open since the first week of class. I closed them all and let the techie go to work.

I waited a minute and, just as I left to talk to a colleague, the techie said, “I’ll just let it reboot, and then you’ll be done.”

Grrrr.

Oh well. Now my uptime is:

dhcp61:~ jbrowne$ uptime
10:31 up 18 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.15 0.20 0.14

I find it odd that, for the second straight weekend, the weather here is perfect for cycling, while it’s supposed to snow in Utah.

To my father, who is twice my age and just pushed me back to third place in the family bicycling arms race: HA-HA!