The Ramblings of a Fool

Welcome to the tenth installment of the Foolish Foto of the Weekish (only 15ish days late this time! Getting better.). Before we get to this week’s foto, Pakistani Supreme Court Justices have picked the winner of the last FFOTW… Congratulations to Pappi Suave! Check out the winning entry. Now on with the show. Submit a winning caption and win all the glory next week (bonus: give me your URL and I’ll link to it). Here we go…

WEEK 10:

 

Pika-ewww

You can do better… Submit your caption or read other submissions.

Foto originally found here.

The future
I’ve been clickin’ away on Leopard now for almost a week and so far so good. I’m gonna drive it around a bit more before officially reviewing it, but thanks to Juan Puto (of Turdlog and Foolish Foto fame), I’ve decided to use this time to throw my prediction together for the names of the last four OS Xs (that “X” is a “TEN” not an “ECKS” for those of you outside the Apple reality distortion field… hence there are only four left).

To carry on the big(ish) cat thing:

10.6 — Lynx (Sounds cool, even though it was a lame car)
10.7 — Cougar (Yes, the Cougar and the Puma are the same thing, but Apple has the trademark and they’re not gonna miss out on using it… also a car, but less lame than the Lynx)
10.8 — Ocelot (Running out of cats. A stretch to be sure, but they aren’t gonna blow their wad with “Lion” until the last one… and “Bobcat” ain’t cool enough sounding (sorry Charlotte, Texas State, et al). And a bobcat is a lynx… they’re not gonna pull that crap again after the whole Puma/Cougar fiasco)
10.9 — Lion (Duh… the king)

The future -er
So when OS XI or 11 or whatever comes out… what will those releases be named for?

Dogs? Snakes? Birds? Sharks? Imaginary animals? (Hello!… Liger, Cerebus, Pegasus, Phoenix, Successful Republicans, Orko!)

Only time will tell (my guess is that they’ll switch to non animals… cities perhaps?).

How cool would “Mac OS 11.9 Austin” be?

Are you one of the few, the proud, the foolish?

We’ve gone back through the mountains of archives and added a 3rd place finish to each of the FFOTWs. Totals have been totaled up (much like sums have been summed up, ya see?).

» Open the trophy case.

The ever-debated quest to find “The One”:

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Make sure to vote on all the polls.

Getting rumblings already about “Where’s this? Where’s that?” Vote on your favorite of these ten… but feel free to add more in the comments section. Also feel free to champion your choice in the comments section. Tell you friends to vote too.

—TF

Ready to Roar
Well kids, another year, another cat show. (not really yearly… but whatever)

Tiger was great, but its time has come. Leopard, the new Mac OS X (10.5.0 to be exact) comes out tomorrow. Unlike the Vista release, this one is reasonably on time (a few months late thanks to Apple shifting development emphasis to the iPhone for a while… sure, Steve). Also unlike Vista, most people think it’ll be great. An improvement on the existing OS and not a giant headache and hassle to install.

Madden and Mac
No… I’m not writing about the much maligned and delayed release of the monster football title to the Mac platform, I’m gonna comment the fact that, like EA, Mac has settled in on a winning formula for software release. As EA does with tons of titles, Mac has now moved into the mode of releasing “better enough” updates every 400ish days. Like the article on macobserver says, the release is “Evolutionary, not Revolutionary”. I’m sure once I get my hands on it, I’ll agree… but as a shareholder and a Mac fan, I think that’s the way it should be.

Time Machine and Spaces
After watching the demo for Leopard that Apple has put up on there site, if all Apple did was add Time Machine and Spaces, I’d be in line to get a copy already. Now Apple says they’ve added 300 new features… those of us who live on planet “see-through-hyperbole”
understand that most of them are tiny little insignificant things, like an extra system font or more desktop backgrounds… but enough of those 300 will be significant enough to make me wonder how I got along without them before. After I get and work with the new cat, I’ll report back on those. I don’t care if they are few (basically what the last section was about)… but anything worth writing about, will be welcome.
I don’t want my Mac OS to stagnate with mini-updates for years and years while Apple sits there developing the “next big thing” (a la Microsoft). Those of us who use the product all the time, don’t want titanic shifts in the way it works every half-decade. We want what we know and love to stay pretty much the same well-thought-out added features and nothing that will cause me to have to spend time getting used to for 6 months. I don’t want to be shocked by features and a new look. I want it to feel like my best friend decided to stop doing the little things that annoy me about him and starting being even cooler than ever… like buying me a beer for no reason… all the time. That’s Mac’s philosophy (and EA’s for that matter). They get it. Mister Softy and his Ultimate Makeover don’t.

History of OS X
Just for fun, let’s look back at the Feline Family Tree complete with DOBs (thanks wiki):

Mac OS X v10.0 (Cheetah) – March 24, 2001
Mac OS X v10.1 (Puma) – September 25, 2001
Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) – August 23, 2002
Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) – October 24, 2003
Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger) – April 29, 2005
Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) – October 26, 2007

I remember most of these fondly. I can’t remember through the fog of years, but I think I got my first kitty when it was a Puma. I think I was a lil’ too chicken to make the switch until after the first rev. After a few days of “Where the hell is my top-right applications pull-down” I was a believer (and hated the times I had to go “Classic”). It’s been a great few years and the future looks brighter than ever.

Thanks, Apple.

—TF

Reader question:
Hey Tom! If you could invent an animal, what would it be, and why would it be super awesome?
— Phil. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Great question, Phil (great city name too). I think if I were to invent an animal it would have to be some kind of mammal… cuz they are a lil’ bit smarter, cuddlier and get-girls-to-pay-attention-to-meer than reptiles or birds. It’d definitely be protective when needed and near-kill on command (killing is wrong). It could not shed, it would run errands for me, and must be able to squish itself into a really small size for easy portability. It’d have to eat something that I already have plenty of around the house… like fart.

Food is expensive… and on Taco Tuesdays, he’d be one happy mofo. And his name would be Beezle.

Gotta question for Tom? Email him and he’ll try his best (and fail) to not be a complete moron in answering.

Welcome to the eight installment of the Foolish Foto of the Week (still on Fridays!… only 6 weeks late this time!). Before we get to this week’s foto, Miss Teen USA judges have picked the winner of the last FFOTW… Congratulations to Juan Puto! Check out the winning entry. Now on with the show. Submit a winning caption and win all the glory next week (bonus: give me your URL and I’ll link to it). Here we go…

WEEK 9:

 

Male Pattern Badness

You can do better… Submit your caption or read other submissions.

Foto originally found here.

Some dead horses deserves further beating…

“I personally believe that the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries to we will be able to build up our future for our children.”

The shame.

Welcome to the ninth installment of the Foolish Foto of the Week (still on Fridays!). Before we get to this week’s foto, our esteemed panel has picked the winner of the last FFOTW… Congratulations to Steven! Check out the winning entry. Now on with the show. Submit a winning caption and win all the glory next week (bonus: give me your URL and I’ll link to it). Here we go…

WEEK 8:

 

For panting in the summer… as a scarf in the winter.

You can do better… Submit your caption or read other submissions.

Foto originally found here.

A fool am I. After years of using my cool FSACU action (Flatten/Select All/Copy/Undo) and it’s counterpart the FCU (after a specific selection… Flatten/Copy/Undo) both used to get a flat version of a multilayered Photoshop file to use in whatever way you want… I’ve recently found out that is already built in to Photoshop.

Duh.

D’oh.

Crap.

It’s Edit>Copy Merged (aka: Shift-Cmd-C)… damn, I thought I was “cool”. Replace the “c” with an “f” and we arrive at what I really am.

— TF