I can think of three things that are ratable:

• The quality of the post, i.e. how well written it is
• My interest in the subject, i.e. I would read it even it the writing was a bit rough
• My agreement with the premise, i.e. if I don’t like what you said, even if it was well done, I would rate it lower than if I liked what you said.

Are there others? How do you decide to rate posts? Do you rate posts? I don’t, precisely because I can’t figure out what people are wanting to measure.

The best part for me is that Plagioclase’s mother has willingly and of her own volition picked it up and started using it. (Scrabble was the wedge.) This is akin to your cat, who has always feared vacuum cleaners, running up to you one day and asking to be vacuumed.

This is not to say the device is perfect. I, like everyone, wish it were cheaper & lighter & easier to do x (for some values of x) on it. But you know what? That doesn’t mean I’m going to send it back.

Am I the only person who found the academic relationships in this book so distracting as to make the thing unreadable? It’s a fluffy book, with lots of characters expositing so the reader is as smart as they are about Colonial American history, and specifically the practice and fear of witchcraft about the time of the Salem Trials. But the problem is, by trying to make the reader smarter, Howe makes the characters just seem dumb.

For example, the protagonist, Connie, is a Harvard PhD candidate who has just passed her orals in Colonial American History. I infer, then, that she has taken a lot of classes in Colonial American History (likely some of them specialized to the point of absurdity). In one scene, she’s reading a Probate document for a woman (Deliverance Dane) who she later decides is probably an undiscovered Salem witch. One of the listed items is a “receipt book.” It only took dear Connie half a page to figure out that “receipt” is not about running a store, but is a “recipe” book. Has Connie never taken a class in the domestic life of America? There were certainly plenty of books published before 1991 using the word “Receipts” where today we might use “Recipes”. And yes, I’m aware that Amazon.com wasn’t around then, but she’s at Harvard. They have a big library. Worse even, is that later as she’s discussing this with her advisor, she has to explain to him the transition from “receipt” to “recipe”.

Later, in another character’s diary from the 1700’s, she reads that “the Almanack” was given to somebody, and then proceeds to annoy us for I don’t know how many pages because I stopped reading before she figures out that “the Almanack” and the “Receipts” book are the same thing. I didn’t last long enough to know for sure because of this:

Connie has a meeting with another mentor, who is describing a paper given by Connie’s advisor at a conference only year before now, and Connie had no fucking idea that her advisor gave a paper nor its content. That was the last straw.

I’ll probably skip to the end and see how Mary Sue, er, Connie manages to come into her true powers and save the world. But unless you or any one you’ve ever known has never been in academia, or unless you have a higher tolerance for stupid “smart” people than I do, I don’t recommend the book. Or maybe you should just skip the bits with Connie. Nah. Don’t bother. Just read some of the glowing reviews to get the good bits of the story.

Edited to add: Ok, so I did finish it, and I’d like to revise my response a little. It was a pretty good story — not as inventive as some of the reviews would have you believe; if you’ve ready *any* urban fantasy or *any* witchy novels, it’s pretty familiar ground. There were some moments when it seemed as though there was an adult, literate novel trying to get through the fluff. Too many “details” seemed to be important, but then they were never used again. As a mystery, it wasn’t much of one. As a thriller, it wasn’t much of one. As a romance, it defintely wasn’t much of one. As historical fiction, that wasn’t too bad, but it was history-lite, much like you’d get in a middle-school book. As a feminist tome, it could have been so much more, but the protagonist only gets a little peeved once while her advisor calls her “my girl” over and over. As a story of academia it was laughable. All in all, I wish Ms Howe would have picked one genre and really stuck with it. I felt she continually took the easy way out, the fluff over the substance, like deciding to make a cake all out of different kinds of frosting with a few raisins tossed in. (For the record I dislike raisins. In this metaphor, raisins are the academic bits.)

On the plus side, Ms Howe gives Connie a wonderful interior vision (undoubtedly we are supposed to decide her facility with imagining what people are doing is related to her powers), and writes well enough to make me finish the book, even though I threw it away in the middle in disgust.

Heh.

As far as the various improvements/enhancements/refinements/whatever go, it’s ok. I like the new QuickTime, but I’m not enamored of the new Preview. Safari is Safari, and I suppose being able to change the size of icons in windows would be more interesting if I actually used icon view in Finder windows.

But as nice as all that stuff is, what I’m more concerned about is the applications I use every day. And so far, they are all broken (or at the very least damaged) in some way.

TextMate, my most used app after Safari, had to be updated to make the arrow keys work properly. There have been some changes with Ruby in snocat, and not all of the bundles work properly. I use the TODO bundle a lot, and it keeps failing with Ruby errors. I had to delete my old TODO and download a new copy. It works now, but I have several other Ruby-based commands that I have yet to test. I hope they work.

Cyberduck won’t even try to start. Luckily they’ve been working on this and have a beta version ready, which I have downloaded. It seems to work OK.

Quickbooks 2009. Oh. My. Gawd. For a company as large as Intuit is, you’d think they’d have an Apple developer account so they could start checking compatibility. But nooooooo. Crash crash crashy crash while doing fundamental tasks (like Receiving Payments!) and the developers think “For most users, the compatibility issues identified will not impact you.” It’s lucky that I held off updating my other QB computer. And of course, no idea when a fix will be coming, or even if it will address the issues I’m having.

Amazingly, surprisingly enough, I was able to start Adobe Photoshop CS2, and some Microsoft Office 2004 apps (Word and Excel). I didn’t put them through their paces, though. Word seemed especially sluggish, however. I’ve mostly switched over to Pages, but I still find labels much easier to set up in Word. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and make a Pages template for labels. I only use a couple of kinds.

I was disappointed that Chax wasn’t working, but there is a new version available (even if it is Alpha, it’s worth it). It just needs to make it possible for me to use it from the menu bar…

I probably have a gazillion apps, some of which I’ve never opened after the first time. It may take a while to get through them all.

So overall, a meh experience. Ah well, at least I didn’t have to pay $130 this time.