rich ruminations

My friend Nick has posted what has to be the Best blond joke ever.

Uh oh… Norton AV for OS X makes a Mac less secure.

I gave up on Norton for the Mac a few years ago… too many stability problems, no real benefit. Of course, the lack of virus and spyware problems on OS X reduces any urgency I feel toward having some sort of anti-virus software installed.

The Power Line blog is one of my favorites. Today John Hinderaker responds to an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The editorial recycles the MSM trope about the horrors of the Patriot Act, and John’s rebuttal is wonderful.

Read the whole thing: Power Line: Getting Specific About the Patriot Act

Alex’s Christmas has been a good one, he’s got quite a few very cool gifts, including several PS2 games - King Kong, Battlefront 2, and others.

Unfortunately the PS2 began having disk read errors (the second time we’ve experienced this in the past four years), so once again we used the recalibration directions found on the Ars Technica site (a most excellent source of technical reviews and articles), and successfully restored proper operation.

Alex is now in video game heaven… at least until the PS3 is released, then I guess we’ll have to upgrade.

I take a minimalist approach to using third-party utilities for computers, for a few reasons. First, over the years I’ve found many of them to not be very reliable, leading to crashes or data corruption. Second, if the author didn’t follow the rules (and sometimes even if they did), things break when the OS is upgraded. So rather than contend with crashes and other problems, I’m very picky about what gets installed.

Yesterday I was browsing this site and found this recommendation about a utility I wasn’t familiar with:

Quicksilver allows you to find what you need quickly and easily, while keeping your hands on the keyboard. For example, if you want to launch an application hidden in the depths of your file system, simply activate Quicksilver with a keystroke, type a few letters of the application’s name, then hit Return or Enter to launch it.

I downloaded and installed, and am happy to say that Quicksilver appears to be well-designed and useful. I’ll give it a few weeks before making a final decision, but for now, I’m encouraged.

Get Quicksilver here.