about life under the antarctic ice, narrated by hilary swank. penguins, seals, starfishes, jellyfishes, whales. funniest part was when a baby seal poked a diver in the butt when he tried to resurface from a breathing hole. i got out of bed eventually, acclimated myself to the waking life. i watered my grass (the 4th day of growth), photosynthesizing nicely in the sun. i called my father for a ride to waltham, where a free used HP printer was waiting for pickup.
before going to waltham, i briefly stopped by belmont to dig out two old printers from the basement, an okidata laser printer and a lexmark inkjet. not sure what their vintages were, but they definitely fell under the category of "old." at the waltham address, i went inside, grabbed the HP printer, and came back out, all within a minute, my quickest craig's list transaction to date. when you're dealing with "free," there really isn't any point to inspecting the merchandise. i've been told it prints in both b&w and color, although i might have to hand feed the paper. as long as it works, i'm happy.
when i got home around 3pm, that's when i made lunch, just some scrambled eggs and sausages with the usual complimentary fruit beverage. not before too long the sky turned dark, and my parents came over to my place for dinner, bringing with them food. i always make sure to show them what recipe failures i've made, stored away within tupperwares inside the fridge. "do you think this is bad?" i'd ask, as if the fact that i got sick eating its leftover incarnation wasn't enough of a clue. on a completely unrelated topic, they suggested i leave the door to the guest bedroom open, that way the heat from the air vent in that room would circulate with the warm air in the rest of the house. i was skeptical at first, but i think i can actually feel the difference, my kitchen feels slightly warmer now. my parents went back to belmont after dinner.
last night i transferred 6 years worth of e-mails from outlook express on OS 9 to mail on OS X. this is a big step, like moving in with a girlfriend. midway through the transfer it crashed though, but eventually i converted all my messages. the whole point of switching to a new operating system is the promise of better performance, greater efficiency. let me tell you right now that this is completely not the case here. after i transferred, that's when i realized that mail is lacking in certain features that i've become accustomed to in outlook express. my biggest gripe is the inability to select different views for different mailboxes. e.g. i might have a "read mail" mailbox that i only want to see the "from" field, while a "sent mail" mailbox i only want to see the "to" field, but the view selections are global, affecting all the mailboxes. i hope apple corrects this problem soon. another thing i don't like about OS X is the fact that finder windows don't pop in front of everything else when i click the desktop, but instead the windows are hidden beneath the windows of preexisting opened applications. maybe there's some way to turn on this feature that i haven't discovered yet, but it's annoying, i find that i'm having a really hard time navigating the system because of this. also, my usb microtech cameramate compact flash memory reader totally doesn't work under jaguar, i had to resort to my portable microtech zio reader - that kind of left a bitter taste in my mouth as well. like i said, i'm not getting the enhanced performance and efficiency that i thought i would when i made the jump into OS X. gosh i love apple!