To page up in iTerm, I hit shift-pageup. To go to the previous tab in Firefox, I hit control-pageup. There is no dedicated pageup key on Apple laptops. Instead, you hit Fn and the up arrow. I have found, on this keyboard, that I must depress the keys in the following order: modifier, fn, key. Shift-fn-up will page up. Fn-shift-up will not. This is really distracting, as it effectively makes one chord into a few tied and partially chorded strokes. Argh, nothing should work this way!

I won’t get into the details of how I waited in agony all weekend, refreshing FedEx’s page to see whether my MacBook had gotten any closer to Bethlehem, or how I sat in the bathtub on Monday morning, straining to hear the sounds of delivery men coming into the entryway. In the end, I got my laptop basically on time. It showed up on Monday, shortly before I had to leave for work. I was so excited to get it that the FedEx guy and his trainee looked a little amused – but that’s how I get when I get a new toy. I took some photos as I unwrapped everything, which was fun: opening Apple hardware is always like opening a present, largely because of the well-designed packaging.

From what I can tell, the MacBook does dual channel RAM. It comes with two 256 meg sticks. I wanted more RAM, and I started shopping for it with the assumption, “Apple overcharges for RAM.” This has been true since the dawn of time, from what I know, so it seemed safe.

Previously, I had wondered whether I could cope if the new iBook replacement phased out the twelve-inch PowerBook. I made a list of my requirements:

I really loafed today – that is, after a really annoying bit of network trouble with a colo this morning. Once that was done with, I just played a lot of Sly 3 and poked at some code. When Gloria got back, we went downtown for ice cream, and Barbara had my favorite flavor, peppermint stick. It was awesome. We walked around downtown for a little while and looked at the arts and crafts market that was set up on Main Street, then headed home. At home, we watched a lot of Food Network; they were running a number of back-to-back shows about pies. A number of the pies looked extremely delicious.

I got an email from Tom about a problem he was having with Number::Tolerant. That reminded me to have a look at releasing the trivial changes I had sitting in my repository. While doing that, tab completion reminded me of Number::Nary, so I went and had a look at it. In 0.05, I’d removed a secret feature that I’d written into 0.04. It was very badly done in 0.04, as I recall, but I re-added it correctly, and that makes me happy.

I’m watching a documentary about the creation of new weapons systems. It’s always interesting to see the technology, but I’m always made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that the machinery is designed to take human life. Many of the military personnel they talk to use euphemisms which, I imagine, are drilled into them to depersonalize battlefield killing. (I’m really just guessing at that.) They say, for example, that they will “deactivate an enemy installation” (by raining shrapnel into a foxhole).

So, I’m watching “Movies That Shook the World,” and they’re talking about The Last Temptation of Christ. I just don’t understand why people got so riled up about that movie. It was a good movie. I doesn’t say that Jesus wasn’t the Messiah – although I don’t see why a movie can’t be free to make that claim. It actually shows that Jesus was the Messiah, wholly man and wholly God. It shows Jesus living a real, full life. He gets married, he has children, and all that stuff… but it’s fiction! I don’t just mean that it’s a movie, but that in the context of the movie, Jesus’s life beyond the Calvary is just a fiction, presented by Satan as a temptation. Is it that they see Jesus doing things that they don’t think he did (getting married, having sex)? The movie then asserts that these things didn’t happen. Are the images themselves offensive for some reason? It can’t just be that we’re seeing Jesus tempted and conflicted. We see that already in canon. Most people who protested did not, presumably, see the movie. Someone told them about the movie and told them that it was bad. What was the stake of the people giving those instructions?

At first, I wrote this introduction to this entry:

I’ve been using a SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys since it was Hydra. I basically can’t deal with it as a full-time editor, but for things like brainstorming and some forms of pairing, it’s totally fantastic. I can /msg my coworkers about some upcoming software, and once it’s clear that we’d rather be writing tests than talking about design, I can fire up SEE and paste around a URL. Everybody drops into the file, and we write tests and comments and maybe even documentation until we’re all tired of it, and we end up with a document that we can all work against to Get Things Done.