pwnt.be

Obviously, not being a U.S. citizen, I’m officially unaware of the fact that the current season—i.e. the fourth—of House is by far the best one yet.

The cast of House M.D.

Up until the end of season 3, apart from a couple of sparks of genius, even Hugh Laurie’s brilliant acting—honestly, to be that natural, he has to be a jackass in real life—couldn’t save the series’ mediocre storyline. Much like an episode of Matlock, there was a pretty fixed structure to every episode: someone gets freak symptoms, House’s team misdiagnoses him a couple of times—usually with lupus at some point—, they invade his house, and, eventually, House gets a brilliant idea and cures the patient—deploying various snide remarks in the process. Occasionally, there’d be some drama of the romantic variety, but, to me, it never felt like they were going anywhere with that.

This season, however, has the American Idol-style team auditions, Cameron as a blonde for whatever reason, and, best of all, very creative storylines, while somehow sticking to the basic sequence of wrong diagnoses, the cure and even a compelling side story. They really bumped the show up a notch or two.

What I’d like to see, however, is less of Foreman’s soul-searching and more of House’s wit. I’m not into labels, but I wouldn’t rank House under “hospital drama” as much as I would under “black comedy”. No one really cares what’s wrong with the patient; we just crave House’s verbal abuse.

But I wouldn’t know any of that, now, would I?

While Google started rolling out IMAP support for Gmail almost a week ago, my account still hasn’t been upgraded. Granted, they’re vague enough:

We’re rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.

Six days still counts as “the next few days”, but still, surely, they could’ve made the whole process a bit less excruciating. Needless to say, it’s cumbersome to fire up Gmail’s settings on a daily basis, only to encounter the dreaded “Forwarding and POP”—especially if you’re holding off on actively using Gmail until you have IMAP working.

On a related note, I still don’t get why they used to offer POP, but not IMAP. If anything comes close to Web-based e-mail, it’s IMAP. And, sure, most people are used to POP, but POP for Gmail just has to confuse the hell out of them.

Ik zou iets kunnen schrijven over die androgyne zanger van Tokio Hotel, maar eigenlijk laat dat me allemaal koud. Over naar de orde van de dag.

Die treinstaking sociale actie bij het spoor van afgelopen vrijdag, daar valt toch geen touw aan vast te knopen? Als ik het goed begrijp, was dit de gang van zaken:

1. Oranje-blauw ijvert voor een minimale dienstverlening bij stakingen.

2. Men reikt de hand uit naar de social(istisch)e partners, teneinde tot een consensus te kunnen komen.

3. De ACOD roept “Kust ze!” en legt het treinverkeer lam.

Allez, allez. En dat allemaal om de mensen te laten voelen hoe een minimale dienstverlening in zijn werk zou gaan? Heet het niet net een minimale dienstverlening om het onderscheid te maken met een doordeweekse dag? Ik kan best begrijpen dat er wat treinen afgeschaft worden of te laat komen, maar zorg dan tenminste dat er tijdens de spits überhaupt nog treinen rijden; zo kan de werkende bevolking zich tenminste nog verplaatsen. Er is tenslotte nog een verschil tussen op een arbitrair uur het werk neerleggen, en het treinaanbod georganiseerd reduceren.

Wachten op Godot (bron)

Belangrijker nog: er staat nog niet eens iets op papier en de sossen slaan al aan het staken. Beetje voorbarig, niet? Het ligt er vingerdik op: u heeft het niet begrepen op oranje-blauw en u wil uw frustratie op de kiezer uitwerken. En als klap op de vuurpijl komt Bruno Tobback nog eens in De zevende dag klagen over de afwezigheid van sp.a-Spirit bij de regeringsvorming. Ronduit belachelijk.

En zo stond de treinreiziger weer eens letterlijk en figuurlijk in de kou. Één ding is zeker: ik ben blij dat ik ’s vrijdags geen lessen heb.

Fortune, among others, quotes Apple Discussions:

I’m upgrading my 20″ iMac (Core Duo) at the moment and the installation ‘completed’, then the computer rebooted and it has been sitting on a plain blue screen for the past 30 minutes.

There is no progress indicator of any sort but I can occasionally hear the hard drive seeking.

Should I restart my Mac or keep waiting???

So much for “It Just Works”, eh? I’ll bet they’re regretting their earlier move now.

Yes, yes, we all heard. Apple released Leopard.

Mac OS X Leopard. What Else is New?

Honestly. I already posted a rant about this, but how is this, and I quote, “the biggest system update in Mac history”?

Sure, the competition isn’t doing much better. From what I hear, Windows Vista is rough around the edges, and while Linux has been making tremendous improvements in the desktop department, it’s, at best, struggling to keep up, and definitely not innovating.

But where does Apple, Inc. get off convincing people that Leopard is an update of the same magnitude as Vista? Shoddy as it may be, Windows Vista is a full version bump—they went from version 5.1 to 6.0—whereas Leopard is just another branch in version 10 of the Macintosh OS. Vista was in development for years and thoroughly overhauls the whole concept of Windows for the desktop, whereas Leopard just polishes OS X’s UI for the umphteenth time.

Of course, it helps if you tout a seemingly impressive 300 new features. Talk about distorted perspectives. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that some creative writing might as well have lead to 3,000 new “features”, and that Microsoft might well have taken the same approach with Vista and listed 30,000 new features.

Moreover, the 10 top features they list aren’t that impressive to begin with, which leaves little to the imagination regarding the other 290. Let’s review.

Desktop

New look? Yes, well, the transparent menu bar is an even bigger eyesore than the glass Dock. Stacks? You patented it, what, 5 years ago, and your current implementation is exactly like toolbars for Windows’s taskbar, but with some fancy schmancy 3D effect. Déjà vu.

Finder

Cover Flow for file browsing? Yes, flipping through files like you’re flipping through vinyl records is far more revolutionary than vertically scrolling through a list of decently sized previews. And I’m sure all the extra space and I/O operations that come with the previews are music to hard drive manufacturers’ ears.

Quick Look

So, basically, it’s another preview, but larger. Well, la-de-fucking-da.

Time Machine

Now, this is actually a substantial improvement. Unfortunately, journaling filesystems and Windows’s System Restore feature have existed for ages, so, again, you’re just playing catch-up and obscuring that fact by adding obnoxious visual effects. Moving on.

Mail

Stationary. I can’t believe you went there. I absolutely loathe rich text e-mail, let alone rich text e-mail based on stationary. What are you, twelve?

iChat

Effects and backdrops? My god, you are twelve, aren’t you? Granted, the collaborative editing thing looks nice, but let’s face it, not even fanboys use iChat longer than a day before they switch to a more decent client.

Spaces

Hey, calling them “Spaces” instead of “desktops” isn’t going to fool anyone: ancient feature in Linux, available on Windows XP via a PowerToy published by Microsoft.

Safari

Even if it were true, being faster than any other browser on OS X is hardly an achievement. But kudos on adding inline find, even though coding the visual effect must have taken you at least twice as long as the actual finding.

Parental Controls

I’ll be frank here: I’ll never be a parent and I’ve never been subject to parental controls on a computer, so I have no idea if this feature is at all decent. I hear it’s convoluted in Vista, so if Apple managed to make it usable, good for them, but it’s not going to make me switch.

Boot Camp

Goodness, it’s a boot loader capable of starting Windows on an x86 PC. Remarkable.

So, in my opinion, the only reason to get Leopard—by which I mean pay over $100 for it—is its native support for 64-bit computing, if applicable. But they already played the 64-bit card when they introduced the Mac Pro, so it’d be a bit silly to admit they didn’t really support their own (closed) hardware properly until now.

But people don’t care. The smoke and mirrors are just too prevalent.