where is my keyboard viewer?

so i'm surfing the web looking for a good bar to host my friend's upcoming birthday party at.

(at which to host? bah, there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. in fact, the other way to say that "bar to host my friend's upcoming birthday party." changes the meaning substantially, making the bar the host of the party. the at which to host is just flimsy. some talk on this from the times and other smart folks.)

one of her favourites is the bruckner bar in the bronx. so i googled them and checked out their website. some really awesome music started playing! south american north atlantic caribbean sounding or maybe mediterranean yumminess! (if you wanna hear it, its here: brucknerbar.com)

i wanted to know what it was called and to check my hearing of the lyrics, so i googled it - and found it is called "Para Xo" by Moreno Veloso. But the o in Xo has an accent. I can NEVER remember how to type those on my mac. (it should be simple, option-' (the single quote) should bring up a meta-character-modifier waiting for the next vowel to add an / accent to it. the shortcut is inexplicably option-e then the character. á é í ó ú. for the \ accent it is sensibly option-` (upper left keyboard). for ~ tilde, it is option-n (ñ õ). for umlaut its option-u ü ö ï. for circumflex its option-i. îûâ. å is option-a. so these aren't really too intuitive but maybe they speed up typing for heavy users of the accents. i still think the / accent should be on option-'. (currently that makes the æ ae character.) and i don't see what would be wrong with using option-shift-" to meta the umlaut : (or maybe option :) and for circumflex why not option-6?

anyway, its again maybe just getting used to something that is not intuitive.

so i googled "how to type accents on the mac" and got this great website telling me about all kinds of neat things like the keyboard viewer and how to use the shortcut keys to type accented characters and stuff. and how in OS X the keycaps program is gone, replaced by keyboard viewer, and how to bring up the new one and stuff.

so i follow the instructions - system preferences / international / input menu and check the box next to 'show keyboard viewer."

all good - spotlight or searchlight or whatever doesn't recognize "keyboard viewer" but it still got me to system preferences... and typing keyboard viewer into system preferences's (ha!) search box does recognize keyboard viewer, so i'm psyched. but when i get to the intl / input menu, to my surprise there is NO keyboard viewer checkbox!

What?

double take - how could it be missing? back to google. did they take this away in 10.5.1? the article was referring to 10.3.9 so maybe something changed. google here, google there, finally find some dude in italy who fixed this by deleting some files and restarting his mac and stuff. apparently, apple is telling everyone who has this problem that they need to wipe their hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

hello! macs suck!

maybe not - maybe support just sucks, or apple are just unwilling to admit the plethora of common problems the platform has, so they ignore them. i'm sure they will try to fix this stuff, but, guys, fix your advertising! this is a complex operating system and its got a whole lot going on under the hood. you can paint over it, but it is NOT simple. and definitely NOT more stable than other competing systems. NOT more intuitive, NOT easier to use.

so that kind of pisses me off. they oughta revise their ads to focus on true positives of the mac, like the included software. they risk this kind of backlash. long time mac users are accustomed to problems and know how to work around them and so they aren't bothered by them.

i made the switch looking for all that stuff the ads promised, and i haven't found it yet.

still love the "mag-safe" power adapter though. hate the isight camera with no cover. not crazy about the white epoxy case. gray would've been much better i think.

cheers!

recent angst

system preferences froze while unchecking the "log out after 60 minutes of inactivity" box (that i never even checked in the first place - see "logout has timed out..."). got the spinning rainbow ball of death. had to reboot using terminal "sudo shutdown -r now" and even that took forever and a few tries to get right

the spinning rainbow ball of death is so horrible! and it happens way more often than a hung program on my thinkpad, and i haven't seen the BSoD in years. either way, i'd rather have the blue screen, at least then you know its over -- like taking off a band aid or seeing your ex dating somebody else. this beach ball forces you to cling to the false hope that we still have a chance to work it out, keep trying, it can get better... until your life slips away before you know it.

this particular time i tried using the force quit command (control alt delete? no, on a mac its command option escape) but it was the finder that was crashing. so despite force quitting, it restarted right back into the same problem, and nothing would work. couldn't restart from the menus, nor log out, nor switch programs, or do anything really. got terminal running and was able to reboot using unix commands.

but then during theh boot-up the display brightness reverts to 100% maximum brightness, and the screen is all white, the volume level reverts to 100% maximum volume, and the startup noise isn't all that quiet. so i'm sitting quietly in a darkish room and waiting for the reboot command to work when suddenly the darn thing finally reboots into full brightness and maximum volume scaring the begeezus outta me. (how hard would it be to put those settings into nvram? my thinkpad remembers its volume and display brightness settings between sessions and during startup...and it lets me modify them at any time, even before the OS has started to load... how hard would this be if every non-apple computer has had this for years?)

also, wifi drops my connection at home pretty regularly and starts trying to connect to a neighbor's network. its a weak signal so i only notice after fighting with slowness for a while. i've deleted the connection from the preferences a few times but it keeps coming back. when i try to switch back to my home network, it starts asking for the wep password again. to get it back i have to disable wireless and wait a little while but then it works again when i re-enable it. what's up with that? i've never had this problem on my thinkpad. airport suckage? its intermittent so i can't figure out whats causing it.

so while i still like my mac, i do not love it and at times i hate it. usually those times are when i want it to just work and it just doesn't. or when i want it to be at least as good as my thinkpad and it falls far short, specially on pretty easy things.

though i still feel that as my expertise increases (and system updates improve) many of these angsts will be resolved. but isn't that why you buy a mac in the first place? to avoid this kind of thing?

don't believe the hype, os 10.5 and windows xp are equally inefficient, annoying, crash prone, problematic, irritating, and bug-laden - they just do it differently.

though for the price i do think the mac is a better deal than a comparably equipped windows pc.

and it didn't come with too many craplets bogging the system down, which is nice.

though safari sucks as a browser and mail.app sucks as a mail program oh geez now i'm off on my mac apps don't play well with other apps rampage. i've mostly resolved this one by running picasa instead of iphoto - but it *is* annoying that i'm using virtually none of the built-in apple supplied software in favor of open source free software that i also use on my windows pc and my linux box, and the only reason is because the apple software doesn't play well with other programs.

i am intrigued to try filemaker's bento. i'll let ya know what i think of it.

cheers!

macbook is a keeper

i didn't return it, so the macbook is a keeper. ironically, the tipping point was installing windows vista on the second partition. the partitioning and installation went perfectly. vista works like a charm. its very fast and works more or less exactly the way i expect it to. i've only used vista to study languages and remote desktop to my work computer, but knowing that it is there really helped.

the further irony is that i'm writing this post from my tried and true thinkpad. it's never failed me.

my hope is that further system updates will resolve the remaining problems with the macbook.

see recent angst for these. also see recent happiness for happier thoughts.

garage band rocks!

so after spending new years vacation playing guitar hero and then chili night playing rock band, i got a bit fired up and picked up my for real (with strings & stuff!) guitar and started practicing.

i'm a white guy with no rhythm so timing and counting are some of the things i need to practice most. i found an online metronome that helped a little, but what i really wanted was to be able to set the time and pace and play along with a moving staves and bars.

so it occurred to me that i could load a song in garage band and play along with it...

until i found out it could record my playing straight through the mac mike!

my brain exploded. this was without question the absolutely perfect thing and exactly what i was looking for.

i'm not much of a musician (or else i would've known about this already probably) but now i have no excuse not to practice. unbelievable!

and it comes with the darn computer. how cool is that?

if you have any interest in making music, even just playing the cowbell, try garage band and fool around with it for a few minutes and it will make you happy. very happy.

now i'm going to try to see if a windows equivalent even exists (mostly out of curiosity) and see how it compares.