Dr. Who's Reading Room: Archive

“A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.” —JK Rowling, on why she pays full taxes to Britain rather than using loopholes or emigrating to another country. (via adnascentia)

Dec 31, 201086 notes

#J.K Rowling #taxes #welfare state #patriotism

“A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.” —JK Rowling, on why she pays full taxes to Britain rather than using loopholes or emigrating to another country. (via adnascentia)

Dec 31, 201086 notes

#J.K Rowling #taxes #welfare state #patriotism

Dec 31, 2010

#Agatha Von Trapp #Von Trap Family Singers #Sound of Music #obituary

Dec 31, 2010

#Agatha Von Trapp #Von Trap Family Singers #Sound of Music #obituary

Greetings!

I’m coming to you from the new MacBook. With just “less than a minute remaining,” Migration Assistant “hung” with a non-spinning blue barber pole/peppermint stick (Mac users will know what I mean), so I shut the thing down. When I restarted, however, my account was there, as well as all my data, as far as I could tell. Mail, Calendar, and Bento look good. Some preferences, most notably TweetDeck, did not stick, but I’ve run a sync with MobileMe so all of that stuff is at least forthcoming. I had to authorize the new machine to play my iTunes purchases, but that’s pretty standard. These two machines both support “Back to My Mac” with MobileMe, and there is always the option of putting the old iMac into Target Disk Mode and grabbing any missing files or data over Firewire.

The screen on the MacBook is more crisp than the old iMac, but there are fewer pixels in the vertical, so all my windows need to be resized. But that is a small price to pay for mobility. I’m a cautiously happy camper.

Dec 31, 2010

Sirius in the constellation Canis Major – the legendary Dog Star – should be called the New Year’s star. This star – the brightest one in our sky – celebrates 2011 and every new year by reaching…

Dec 31, 2010

Friday’s Poem: “Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing” by Toi Derricotte, from Captivity. Friday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, born in New York City (1927)….

Dec 31, 2010

Dec 30, 20101 note

#blizzard #birds #dovekies #seafaring #Cape Cod #animal rescue

Dec 30, 2010

#blizzard #birds #dovekies #seafaring #Cape Cod #animal rescue

“You know, ‘Tree’ means ‘I love you’ in Nature.” —

This is the post that inspired my earlier post of the Kahlil Gibran poem; this, and snowshoeing.

I said this to Alexa. I was obviously very very very tired. (via simplybex)

Dec 30, 20104 notes

#reblog #quote #trees #nature #love

“You know, ‘Tree’ means ‘I love you’ in Nature.” —

This is the post that inspired my earlier post of the Kahlil Gibran poem; this, and snowshoeing.

I said this to Alexa. I was obviously very very very tired. (via simplybex)

Dec 30, 20104 notes

#reblog #quote #trees #nature #love

“Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.” —Kahlil Gibran (Found on Trees: Quotes, Poems, Proverbs, Maxims, Links Part I)

Dec 30, 2010

#trees #poems #earth #Kahlil Gibran #quotations

“Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.” —Kahlil Gibran (Found on Trees: Quotes, Poems, Proverbs, Maxims, Links Part I)

Dec 30, 20102 notes

#trees #poems #earth #Kahlil Gibran #quotations

15 Whoppers That Didn’t Get Beck Fired in 2010 http://bit.ly/glennlies #p2 The double standard continues.

Dec 30, 2010

Dec 30, 20101,769 notes

#iconic #image #poster #WWII #Rosie the Riveter #femiism

Dec 30, 20101,769 notes

#iconic #image #poster #WWII #Rosie the Riveter #femiism

Dec 30, 20103 notes

#Berkeley #Bionic legs #quarapalegic #exoskeleton #William Gibson #cyberpunk

Dec 30, 20103 notes

#Berkeley #Bionic legs #quarapalegic #exoskeleton #William Gibson #cyberpunk

The final morning of 2010 – tomorrow morning, December 31 – will feature the moon with the planet Venus in the eastern sky before sunrise. It should be quite a treat, because the moon and Venus rank…

Dec 30, 20101 note

Thursday’s Poem: “Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele, from Toward the Winter Solstice. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of best-selling novelist Donna Tartt, born in Greenwood,…

Dec 30, 2010

Purging PubSub

Today’s life lesson is to take time for digital housekeeping.

My PubSub folder in my user Library is 3.31 GB. I wanted to see what would happen if I moved this to another volume temporarily and created an empty folder in the PubSub Feeds folder. My first surprise was that it took 2 hours to move PubSub to an external drive. My question is what is the best way to downsize the Feeds rand Database folders so I can get the 3.31 GB back?

This story could also fit the theme of “troubles in paradise.” I really love my 2005 era iMac G5 “Ambient Light Sensor” (read: pre-iSight camera), but it is showing its age. It’s not an Intel Mac, so I can’t run Snow Leopard. More importantly, I have been really frustrated lacking a laptop, and bouncing around to different campuses to teach. I bought a new old Mac, a “Late 2006” black MacBook, to be exact. I bought it from a colleague whose place of employ had furnished him with a new MacBook Pro. I replaced the hard drive, because his was giving him problems, and he does want to try to preserve the data on it.

I own a copy of Leopard, so the first order of business was to install the same OS that my iMac had. Next was to put the iMac into Target Disk Mode, connect a FireWire cable and run Migration Assistant to transfer all of the data from the old machine. The applications, network settings, and other users transferred fine. It took an inordinately long time to transfer my user data.

Poking around, I discovered that the last thing it tried to transfer was this infamous PubSub. Disk Warrior had also balked for me, but I ignored the warning.

PubSub stores Safari’s RSS feeds. I had accumulated a lot of feeds, and there were a lot of documents besides. Removing these documents from Safari’s preferences did no good. With a test user, I tried deleting the PubSub directory. I was pleased to see that when I restarted Safari, the feeds and documents were recreated.

Right now, several hours after issuing the “Empty Trash” command on the iMac, I’m still only halfway through deleting nearly a million and a half files from PubSub. I’ve freed up three and a half Gb of space so far. That’s a CD shy of DVD’s worth of information.

I dare say when I restart Safari that it will recreate that many files. If I couldn’t purge them the conventional way, they must be documents from now defunct feeds or remnants of browser crashes. No doubt they’ve been there through several revisions of the browser. I believe this will significantly speed the migration process. (I’ve deleted old Mail as well.)

The life lesson here is Ben Franklin’s old “A stitch in time saves nine.” Or who said “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today”? Surely this example teaches that even in the deceptively tidy digital world, we can’t always “set it and forget it.” We must cultivate good housekeeping habits and delete old stuff.

By the way, this post is coming to you from a temporary (I hope) account on the MacBook. Fortunately, I still recall enough Unix magic from my geekdom at Lotus Development and IBM to go back and forth from an installed state to one where the computer thinks I’ve turned it on for the first time. I know I can run Migration Assistant from this user, but I want to have all the correct associations for administration with my user, which I’m migrating over. I want things to be, well, neat and tidy.

Dec 29, 20101 note

#life lesson #PubSub #Apple #Safari #iMac #Ambient Light Sensor #MacBook #EveryMac #Other World Computing #Migration Assistant #Target Disk Mode #clean your room