Nothing funny about feldspar

Less than 2 weeks before Christmas, and I haven’t made a single cookie. I did make a batch of fudge, though.

I’d better get crackin’!

I seem to have become co-owner of yet another business. How does this keep happening?!

October 4th? That’s the last update? Well, I must admit I have had a relatively (call it insanely) busy six weeks. (Nearly typed “inanely” but I wasn’t not-thinking during that time.) What have I been doing? Well, to avoid breaking out of seminonymous mode, let’s just say I might end up with IMDB credit one day. Which is frakkin’ amusing considering I don’t go to a lot of movies nor watch a lot of television.

But I love me some technical crewing. Technical crew consists of the camera department, the lighting department, and the grips (the folks who move stuff). These are the gear-heads of movies, people who gather ’round and ooh and ahh over video monitors, colored polyacrylic sheets and clamping mechanisms. I love dealing with equipment, knowing how to put stuff together & put it away properly, having to be near the action to let the creative folks do their thing. (I worked for a few days in non-technical crew, and that was dull. Anybody need somebody to run to the store? I’m your girl. How about to the film supplier? That’s me — I got GPS in my car! Anything to avoid sitting around while someone else is doing the fun stuff.)

I have learned a huge amount about how unglamorous films really are (*you* try being ethereal in 35 degree weather while wearing a thin drape, or figure out how to keep the lights on in the woods when the generator runs out of gasoline). I’ve also learned that movies have huge similarities to startup culture, but huge differences too. And I have learned that you really need some good connections and negotiating skills, otherwise your 3-day short film won’t be affordable. Finally, I have learned that I have to study up if I intend to produce a feature film… Did I say that aloud?

One friend of mine said he lost “10 of the 25 pounds” he’d gained since he last moved. Another friend, rightfully so, trumpeted a milestone upon reaching the halfway point of her weight-loss target. I am impressed and depressed at the same time. I have never dieted; have never felt I could set an appropriate target. What is the right amount someone should weigh? When I was 20, I wanted to weigh what I did at 16. Now I’d be happy to weigh what I did at 20, or even 32!

A person I know mostly online has very simple goals: weigh less, move more, contribute more. She posts her progress monthly. Maybe I should try something like that, except I don’t have a scale.

It would help if I could get Plagioclase to participate. Given a choice between eating anything at home and eating out, he will go out. You think I’m kidding? He leaves on Saturday morning to run errands, and as soon as he leaves the driveway he decides he’s hungry and stops at McDonald’s. It’s not only that he hates leftovers — he prefers other people’s food, the fattier the better.

We are nutritionally bad for each other. When he’s (or I am) away, I lose weight. I go out less often, eat less in the evening, and eat less overall. He had been a picky eater until we started dating, pretty much only eating hamburgers and cheese on crackers (he’s since become more omnivorous than me), but when we’re together we enjoy eating. A lot. And it needs to stop.

We’re currently on the “don’t get sick” insurance plan, and neither of us has been to a doctor for a few years (to avoid getting pre-existing conditions on our records — what you don’t know you can’t tell), yet I know that we’re not exhibiting healthy behaviors. I don’t want either of us to experience the issues our dads faced as a result of crappy eating (both had late-onset insulin-dependent diabetes, which never seemed to be controlled well no matter how strict the diet).

Hmph. So let’s consider this a first pass at recognizing the problem. I suppose I need to buy a scale.

Ok, so I installed snocat on my MacBook, knowing full well that there were likely to be issues.

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.