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Ever since I installed Leopard on my personal laptop, I’d been having problems syncing information across my two computers (one of which still ran Tiger) using the .Mac sync feature. Keychain sync didn’t seem to be working at all, and the others were spotty.

So when I finally upgraded my work laptop to Leopard a couple of weeks ago, I thought my problems would go away. Not so much, in fact. I was still having problems, and they had actually gotten worse. My personal laptop, with a fresh install of Leopard (as opposed to my work laptop, which had just been upgraded) stopped syncing altogether; the Sync application kept crashing.

After some reading around, I deleted the sync history by removing the Local folder from ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices, but while that helped, it still didn’t seem to solve my problem fully. Now keychain and mail account syncing was working beautifully, but Safari bookmark sync wasn’t working at all.

And now, thanks to Daring Fireball, I know how to fix it. Woo!

So when I moved earlier this year, I bought an Airport Extreme base station. And typical of my luck, Apple announced the release of Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution (and the only realistic way to use Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature with a laptop) just a few weeks afterward.

I wasn’t too exercised by it, though, because I figured that I could just hook up a USB hard drive to my Airport Extreme and do the same thing. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that Time Machine wouldn’t recognize drives connected to the Airport Extreme as valid backup locations. Pretty dumb, I thought.

Thankfully, Apple released a firmware update (7.3.1) last week that enables you to use drives connected to the Airport Extreme as Time Machine backup destinations, so after much rejoicing, I went to my local Best Buy and bought myself a 1TB My Book external hard drive; I was going to have the poor man’s version of the Time Capsule, or die trying.

Now picture the tragic scene when I plugged the hard drive in, and neither of my Leopard laptops’ Time Machine installations saw the drive, even though it was mounting properly through the Finder. After floundering around a bit and searching the internet, I found out that Time Machine requires backup drives to be formatted with the HFS+ Journaled file system, and the My Book had shipped formatted in FAT32.

OK, simple enough, I thought. I’d just use Disk Utility to reformat the drive, and I’d be good to go. But, alarmingly, the the reformat kept failing with an error, and the only format I could get the drive successfully reformatted in was FAT. On a whim, I thought I’d try to make two smaller partitions on the drive and see if that worked. It did. But that’s odd, seeing as the HFS+ spec says the maximum volume size is 2 exabytes, and even regular HFS can handle 2 terabytes. What gives?

Regardless, now I have two 500GB partitions on my wireless backup drive, which actually works out for the best, so that I have a cleaner separation of the backups of my two different computers. All’s well that ends well.

I was able to perform a feat of awesomeness to celebrate the IDoA: I volunteered to help a friend set up a website so he can share his valuable and esoteric knowledge about keeping a home aquarium with the world. Woo! Look for a link here once he’s got it set up.

to blog about this before, but has anyone else seen this? I was out shopping with my sister a couple of weekends ago (she has now, alas, gone back to SLC, her three-month stint in SF over, and I miss her terribly), and we saw the strangest thing. Some stores in the mall (Westfield, in downtown San Francisco) were using real live people to model their clothes instead of mannequins. I am not making this up. There were two female models—of the rail-thin, supermodel variety—in cocktail dresses standing next to Ladies’ Shoes at Nordstrom, and Abercrombie & Fitch sported a muscular, shirtless, jeans-clad specimen standing in the entrance, complete with awestruck flirting shoppers hovering nearby. Weird, but brilliant.

So one of my roommates and I have been going through a bit of a peanut butter phase recently—we both like it on our morning toast. And, tragically, we recently ran out of it. No big deal, you say. Just go out and buy more. Not that simple, bub.

Where I happen to live in San Francisco, I’m about equidistant from two fancy-schmancy gourmet markets, Bi-Rite (Bi-Me Rite Out of House and Home) and Whole Foods (Whole Salary Foods). And normally, I love this; I have, at my fingertips, gourmet (and expensive!) chocolates, more fresh (and expensive!) cheeses than you can shake a stick at, imported (and expensive!) French lemonade, exotic handmade (and expensive!) fruit preserves, and some beautiful organic (read: expensive) vegetables, among other (expensive!) things.

So a few days ago I went to B-MROoHaH on a grocery run, where one of the items on my list was a replacement jar of peanut butter. Between the various jars of soy butter and other nut butters, there was one type of 100% organic, freshly ground, non-hydrogenated, lightly salted creamy peanut butter. Ok, sure, I thought, and brought it home.

I learned my lesson the next morning when I put it on my toast. It was…not good. I mean, it was certainly peanutty. Too peanutty. It was like distilled essence of peanut, mixed with ground peanuts, with some peanut oil added in for flavor. I mean, if I had wanted to eat peanuts, I would have dumped a handful of Planters on my toast. No, I wanted to eat peanut butter. And the texture was all wrong! I’m used to peanut butter with the consistency of spackle. This stuff kind of sloshed around when you tilted the jar…<shudder>.

After I choked down that single piece of toast, I decided that the only way the rest of that jar would be palatable would be in a PB&J sandwich with some really sweet jelly. It would not do solo, on a piece of toast. So today, I went down to WSF to see if I’d have better luck.

But I should have known better. I went in, walked up and down the aisles a bit, finally found the peanut butter. And stood there dumbfounded. Between the cashew butter and the soy butter, what should I find but more of that 100% organic, non-hydrogenated bullshit? I want my hydrogenation, dammit! Say what you will about the stuff that choosy moms choose, but it tastes good.

Why is it so hard to find a simple jar of peanut butter? Now I’m going to have to get in my car (which I rarely have to use these days), and drive all the way to my nearest mega-mart in order to get some good old Jif. Yeesh.

I don’t know what happened. For several weeks, when the phone had been in my pocket for a while and I’d take it out to use it, it would occasionally assert that it didn’t have a SIM card inserted, though, in fact, it did. However, this happened infrequently enough that I thought I’d have some time before I would be forced to replace the phone.

Yesterday, though the phone was indicating that it had 2/3 of its full charge in the morning, it had shut itself down to conserve power by the early evening. So I charged it overnight, and when I checked the phone today shortly after noon, it had again shut itself off. So when I returned home from my errands later in the afternoon, I plugged it in. Still plugged in, it rang about a half an hour ago, and I just missed getting to it before the voicemail picked up.

I flipped open the phone and hit the button to redial the caller I had missed. And the phone rebooted itself. Thereby letting me know that it had totally and completely given up the ghost. This phone has passed on. It’s hopped the twig. It’s shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. It’s stone dead. I’d say RIP, but I’m too busy dancing on the grave. With a rose between my teeth.

Now, of course, I’ll have to get a new phone. Any suggestions?

going to see movies in the theater are other people. It’s not just that some idiot invariably forgets to turn off his cell phone. It’s that I always, always have the misfortune to sit next to someone who is under the misconception that he’s sitting in his living room and is therefore free to keep up a running commentary on the movie, to make what he thinks are jokes, to laugh like an ass of the four-legged variety at inappropriate moments, to point his cheap laser pointer at the screen because he thinks it’s funny.

Film festival crowds are usually much better than the general public in this respect, however. Since they are mostly comprised of movie buffs like me, they’re usually much more respectful, and tend to keep their opinions to themselves until after the movie has ended. This was, alas, not the case last night, however. A friend and I went to see The Wash last night, and sitting immediately behind us was this elderly couple who felt it was their right to talk. Incessantly. Through the whole movie:

“What did he say?”

“What? Oh, I think he said…”

“Oh! You remember how we went to Bob and Cheryl’s house and they had that exact couch?”

“Which one is she? Judy or Marcia?”

“I don’t know.”

“Remember the time we…”

“Yes! And then we…

Jesus. What made it infinitely worse, though, was the lady sitting next to me, who kept, in a progressively louder voice when her previous entreaties were ignored, telling them to, for the love of God, SHUT UP. Finally, 10 minutes before the end of the movie, Matt had had enough and went outside to complain to the festival staff, who basically told him they weren’t going to do anything about it. I lasted 5 minutes more before I, too, left.

And the movie? Though it was nearly impossible to concentrate on it over the cacophony, I saw enough of it to give it 3 stars. Originally made in 1988, The Wash is based on the play of the same name by Philip Kan Gotanda and was shown in tribute to its recently deceased star, Mako (Makoto Iwamatsu). The filmmaking itself was nothing special, giving the movie a made-for-TV flavor, and the acting likewise not terribly impressive (except from veteran actors Makoto Iwamatsu and Sab Shimono). That said, the story was honest and entertaining, a nice departure from the effects-heavy movies of recent years, and the acting by the leads understated and genuine. Recommended.

Well, actually, I have several, but you’ve heard them all before. Suffice it to say that I haven’t been blogging lately, and I have resolved (and already failed, smarty-pants—ed.) to do it more this year. But better late than never, right?

First things first: happy new year! I’m only 7 days late on this, but better late yada yada.

Second, speaking of the new year, here are my new year’s resolutions. I guess the good thing about being late on this is that you get to hear how I’ve been doing on them so far. OK, OK, I can tell you that the prognosis on my resolutions so far is going to be uniformly “not so good,” but a girl can hope, right?

1. Get out of the house more. – Not so good on this one, but! Better than last year, and I’ll take that.
2. Watch more Netflix. – Doing well on this one so far. I’m down to the one-at-a-time plan, since my roommates have it too, but my second movie of the year shipped today.
3. Enjoy more of the city, now that I actually live in it. – There are some subsections to this one, enumerating the places I definitely want to go, but I’ll spare you. This one is, again, not so good, but I’m optimistic.
4. Last but not least—wait for it—blog more. – You know know how well I’ve been doing on this one.

What are your resolutions?

I hate hate hate flying there. And if you hadn’t already known I’m from Chicago, you would have realized it immediately from that statement.

Here I sit, in Oakland Airport, signed on to what must be the suckiest^* airport wi-fi network in America^**, after having found out that my flight to O’Hare has been—big surprise here—delayed.

Problem is, I’m having a devil of a time trying to find how delayed it is. First, I went to the Oakland Airport website, which only says that the flight has been delayed. No amended departure time, no nothing. Well, that’s helpful.

OK, then I figured I’d try my airline’s website, which doesn’t work properly in Firefox, the browser I am forced to use because of the aforementioned Suckiest. Airport. Wi-fi. Network. In. America. Grrr. Anyway, the airline seems to think there is nothing wrong and that the flight is taking off on time. Sigh. No help there.

So then I turned to that old standby, Google, and searched for “flight delays”. The first hit was the flight delay website for the FAA. It said that flights coming into O’Hare are being delayed an average of 1.5 hours due to—scratch that, make it a little over 2 hours…fricking awesome—weather, and directed me, get this, to my airline’s website for more information, which I already know won’t be there.

This just in…What the?! Now the Oakland Airport website says my flight is not delayed, and is leaving from a different gate^†. Huh? Sigh. I love flying. And by “love,” I mean that I’d rather have my fingernails removed with flaming hot pincers and be flayed alive than have to fly to Chicago in the wintertime.

^* Yes, that’s the technical term.

^** I’m talking about the Sprint PCS wi-fi network. Problem 1 is that their website doesn’t work in Safari. Which makes me crazy. But that’s a rant for another day.

^† I would just like to mention for the record that the only way I would have known about the gate change is by looking at the airport website. There are no monitors in this terminal with flight information^‡, and there was no one making an announcement over the PA. In fact, there is no one at the new gate to ask what is going on, and my supposedly on-time flight is supposed to be boarding in less than 20 minutes. These people are real professionals.

^‡ I would also like, for the record, to formally apologize to my roommate, whom I disagreed with just last night when she said that she hated the Oakland Airport. I said that I didn’t have a problem with the airport itself, but that I hated flying into it because it’s always a big pain in the ass to try and get home from there. Well, now I agree with her. I hate this airport.

Update 12/16/2006 12:51: OK, now the airline website says the flight has been delayed an hour—thought the airport website says that the flight is on time. And only now has someone arrived at the gate to answer questions, etc. Christ.

but I didn’t realize when I woke up this morning that I’d be plumbing the depths of mine today. Let me explain. It all started a few weeks ago, on my birthday. Being the bookworm that I am, I’m a member of the Borders frequent buyers’ club, and they’d very considerately sent me a 15% off one item coupon in honor of said birthday. It was set to expire today, November 12, and of course I hadn’t gotten around to using it yet.

A few weeks ago, they opened a brand new, ritzy shopping center—called Westfield—in downtown San Francisco, which happened to have a brand new Borders in it. So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. Well, three: check out the new shopping center, go spend my coupon, and eat lunch at the fancy-schmancy food court in Westfield’s basement.

But I didn’t reckon on three things:

1. Today is a Sunday.
2. In November, which is the month before December, which in Latin means “shopping madness”.
3. “Shopping center” is a euphemism for “mall”.
4. I hate the mall.

Okay, four things.

My first clue—that I should just turn around and go back home, that is—should have been the massive crowds pouring out of the Powell Street BART station. But I remained stubbornly optimistic; they couldn’t all, or even most, be going to the brand new shopping center in downtown SF on a Sunday just before the holiday season, could they? They could.

My second clue should have been the throng, the absolute throng, that was in front of every food court station when I passed through. It’s just the lunch-time crowd, I thought; I’d just come back down in an hour or so, when it was less crowded.

My third clue, after a little more than an hour spent in Borders, by which time I felt I was starving, should have been the very pleasant and very color-coordinated Filipino lady at the register, who nevertheless was obviously new and couldn’t seem, for the life of her, to figure out how to scan my 15% off coupon.

My business finally concluded at Borders—the lavender lady, never having figured out how to scan my coupon, just gave me a 20% discount off each item instead—and my stomach gnawing at my ribs, I made my way back down to the “Food Emporium” (I am not kidding; that is really what it’s called) in hopes that the crowds would have thinned a little and I’d be able to get my lunch and and an empty table in short order.

The crowds had thinned somewhat, but that just meant that the volume of people was such that I wasn’t forced to apologize to someone every two seconds for bumping into them. It was every four seconds, instead. A few minutes later, as I sat at a table eating my chicken sandwich, serenaded by the ear-splitting shrieks of an infant in the arms of his grim-faced father at the next table, my fourth clue arrived. I don’t know why I should have paid attention to this one, when I’d ignored the three perfectly good ones that came my way earlier.

Anyway, as I sat there trying to finish my sandwich as fast as humanly possible while still taking time to, you know, breathe, all the while mentally composing this blog post, I realized that I’d found suburban hell, right in the middle of downtown San Francisco. Right on the heels of that thought came this one: Oh my god, make it stop. So I finished my sandwich and got the hell out of Dodge.