Received my iPod today. 10 GB storage space, more than enough for my music collection, plus my wife's. Exquisite appearance, even better than Sony. Apple always the beautifully one. Microsoft, take notes!
The good thing about iPod is than it can display Chinese ID3 tags. I can even put Chinese text files into the "Notes" folder of the iPod, so the iPod can double as a e-book reader. It can also store address book, Notes, to do list, etc., almost a PDA! Of course, it is mainly a elegant MP3 player.
I also installed Mac OS X development tools on my PowerBook. (Thank you, Yan!) PowerBook comes with the Java 2 and Perl 5.6 preinstalled. The Swing library makes the Java Mac OS X applications have the native OS X appearance, very beautiful. Now I can work on the OS X program development. It's fun. See my photo album.
After a long extruciating waiting, finally I received my Apple PowerBook. (See the following pictures). Nice looks, metallic appearance, 4.6 pounds with Mac OS X 10.2, PowerBook G4 1 MHz processor, 256 MB memory, 40 GB hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, and Blue Tooth. Actually I don't have any Blue Tooth gadgets, so I really don't care about the Blue Tooth technology yet. It is just nice to have it, anyway.
I haven't tampered with it yet. I just open the Terminal application to check the UNIX command line utilities. It seems an ordinary UNIX shell, showing tsch as the shell. I typed "ps", "who", etc to confirm it really has a UNIX feeling. It passed.
The Mac OS X already fully installed. To my surprise, the Chinese language kit is ready to activate, without extra installation. I can even use Chinese as file name. Not having many native OS X applications, I just configured the network settings, to intergrate it to my home network--10 Mbps old Ethernet, using a PC with NAT32 as an Internet router. By now, I can surf the net on the new PowerBook and extrange files with my old iMac.
Almost finished reading Neal Stephenson's _Crytpnomicon_, only a hundred or so pages left--the book has more than nine hundred pages. I spend the rest of the day to pander my new toy. I am still waiting for the iPod. Hopefully, I will receive it tomorrow.
See my photo album.
It's been a while since last time I updated this site. According the log, I did it almost a month ago. That's a little lazy, I suspected. Of course, we can always forgo this meaningless self-thrashing. Let's move on.
I didn't waste my time this month. I simply spend more time on books, printed books, instead of electron and photo streams. Years ago, I read a book by Cliff Stoll, whose _Coocoo's Egg_ is the first of its kind--how to catch a hacker. The title of this book is _Silicon Snake Oil_. It is a collection of essays. Anecdotes and self-indulgence aside, one of his points is: since the age of Internet, we sacrifice too much time online, especially on BBS and USENET, we almost forget that we have a REAL life outside the cyberspace. We should spend more time with our families, friends, instead of bickering pointlessly on the BBS and newsgroups, which is often no more than a flame war. I deem he has a good point. Ever since then, I limited my devotion to the Net, and spent more time in the REAL world. Of course, you can ask me that MATRIX question: What's real? On the other side of the cable, there is always a human being. But, how do you know? He passed the Turing test. But there still a lot of people regard Turing test moot.
I don't know. But I think the world of atoms gives me a quaint nostalgic qualm. Don't' get me wrong, I am not a Ludite at all. But I just want some balance between the world of atoms and the world of bits. They overlay, interact, sometimes contradict and often compete.
What did I read during the hiatus? A lot. I will elaborate tomorrow, after a good night's sleep.
8/22/2003: Read Europe: A History and Take Notes on Pound and Ounce.
8/18/2003: Wrote Special Characters and Met Museum.
8/16/2003: Wrote Titling MDs.
8/14/2003, I have the misfortune to witness the worst blackout in the US history. Here is my experience in this mishap.
8/12/2003: Updated Reading Notes.
5/12/2003: Please visit the SARS Donation Page of NYU Medical Center.
3/16/2003: Updated the Friends page, added the photos taken when Li Shi visited NYC on March 15, 2003.
3/10/2003: Added a Unix notes page at Computers section.
3/9/2003: Added a Random Thoughts in Chinese section in my Chinese site. BTW, it is not the Chinese translation of this English page.