I have three Macs. One is the G3 iBook that I bought back when Apple finally delivered the first practical desktop Unix. It was very nice, but these days it mostly just runs my Rosetta Stone language software. Current OS: 10.4.1. Hostname: Cyberdoll.

The second is a dual 1GHz G4 tower attached to a 20” Cinema Display. It’s still quite nice, and does a decent job with Photoshop and other applications (most recently World of Warcraft). Current OS: 10.4.1 and 10.4 Server. Hostnames: Arrin-Ken and Tai-Tastigon (Server).

The third is a 15” 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook. It is the center of my existence, holding all my email, projects, ripped CDs, games, toys, downloads, etc. Current OS: 10.3.9 (mama didn’t raise no fools). Hostname: Slots.

At work, there’s a Windows machine that I use for scheduling meetings and filing expense reports. Nice hardware, pity about the OS.

I have purchased quite a few songs from the iTunes Music Store, and all four of these machines were authorized to play them. When I was rebuilding Arrin-Ken last week, I deauthorized it, wiped the disk, installed a fresh OS, and then reauthorized. iTMS says: 4 machines authorized.

Today, I decided to deauthorize the Windows box at work. I just wasn’t using it for music much. When I was done, I logged into the store from my PowerBook and checked the authorization count: 5. Not good, so I checked it from the Windows machine: 3.

Belatedly, I realized that I might have actually done things in a slightly different order when creating Arrin-Ken, namely wiped the disk and then deauthorized it (it had multiple partitions, and only one had ever run iTunes). The authorization count was correct afterwards, so I didn’t worry about it. But I checked it on the machine that had just been reauthorized, and now it seems that the answer you get depends on where you’re standing when you ask.

Officially, doing things in the wrong order uses up an extra authentication slot:

Make sure you deauthorize your computer before you upgrade your RAM, hard disk or other system components. If you do not deauthorize your computer before you upgrade these components, one computer may use multiple authorizations.

But the count was correctly four when I checked it from that machine after the upgrade, and is now correctly three when I check from the Windows box. The obvious thing to do is to attempt to authenticate a completely different machine (say, the Windows laptop at home that only exists to make VPN connections to work), and then see how many authorizations they all think exist.

Worst case, I can exercise the once-a-year wipe option and remove all of my current authorizations, real and imagined. But that’s overkill if it’s just a glitch.

Update: glitch. All of my machines now report the correct authorization count.

As of Friday morning, over 90% of my spam is either in German, about the T_rk_sh g_n_c_d_ of _rm_n__ns, or both. None of it is getting into my main mailbox, of course; what manages to escape my usual spam filters ends up in my Quarantine folder, due to the unknown senders. After the first few get through to there, the filters learn to recognize it.

[Note that I disemvoweled that phrase to keep it from getting into search engines. I know better than to invite traffic from the folks who can’t even see a recipe for Christmas {large bird} without being compelled to post multi-page screeds about that history. I’m already getting email spam about it, I don’t need to clean out my blog comments as well.]

Okay, technically it’s one word, but an amusing one nonetheless, coming from an unexpected source. I haven’t mentioned it here before, but when I interviewed at Apple last year, the off-the-record explanation for why I wasn’t hired was that I just didn’t seem to be enthusiastic about the company. That, and I kicked off my sandals during the interview, which really freaked somebody out.

Never mind that I walked in with a PowerBook, an iPod Mini, two decades of Mac experience, an ADC membership, a NeXT connection going all the way back to the original beta hardware, a thorough understanding of the job, a friend in the developer group that made the product, plenty of experience doing what they needed done, and a willingness to at least discuss the likely $25,000 paycut compared to what I get at “that other company”. I wasn’t enthusiastic enough.

What he meant was that I wasn’t a starry-eyed zealot who would give his left nut for the chance to be on the inside, where the magic happens. You know, a “macophile”…

[What am I, then, if not one of those? A Unixphile, BSD flavor, with a side order of Photoshop. It was the combination of these two features that made it possible for me to once again become a Mac user, after I abandoned the platform way back in the Eighties. I still supported it at work, I just had no use for it personally.]

I woke up this morning with the sudden realization that I have never attempted to cook bacon on an outdoor grill. My first thought was that the large amount of grease would cause dramatic flare-ups. My second thought was that, like some other foods, it might not work well on the coarse-grained grates of my Weber Genesis Silver B. My third thought was that bacon comes out best when it has time to render out the fat, and my grill is, well, nuclear.

My fourth thought was to fire up that bad boy and give it the old college-dropout try. I’m glad I did, because not only did the bacon come out perfect on the first try, it didn’t spatter anything with grease, and the cooking odors stayed outdoors. Obviously, there was no leftover bacon grease to cook other things with, but I never really used the stuff anyway.

By preheating the grill on low and turning the heat up to medium after the grease started to render, I was able to keep the cast-iron grates from leaving burn marks. This also kept the bacon from sticking to the unseasoned cast-iron grates (unseasonable, really; at the setting I use for steaks, the grill surface is close to 750°, which quickly burns the stuff off).

Open the Keyboard Viewer. Click the Zoom/Maximize button. Compare to its “zoomed” size under Panther. Thank the person responsible.

(of course, to reach this point you must first open System Preferences and select the International preferences, switch to the Input Menu tab, and check the Keyboard Viewer palette and “show input menu in menu bar” boxes; only then will you actually be able to use the Keyboard Viewer. I think this is one of the most convoluted methods of enabling an essential utility yet devised, and I can only hope that Apple moves the damn thing into Dashboard real soon now.)

Well, maybe if they could actually hit the target at least once, instead of managing to fill a suburban neighborhood with bullet holes. Yes, officer, when you spray ammo at a fleeing suspect, the bullets that miss him actually hit something else. Remember that rule about knowing what’s behind your target? Didn’t think so.

I have a long way to go learning to read Japanese, but it’s nice to find the occasional phrase that my brain decodes automatically without stopping to translate:

いっぱい食べてオッパイ大きくしちゃいます！

The picture was cute, too.

Update: my, all of the online translation engines really make a hash of this one. I think BabelFish’s is the most glorious failure, though…

I kept waiting for something impressive to happen.

This is not a good sign when you’re dealing with a troupe whose reputation is built on delivering something impressive. Kà is entertaining, but if you’ve seen any of the other three Cirque de Soleil shows in Las Vegas, it’s a bit of a letdown.

What’s wrong? First, the lack of any “wow” moments; they deliver a number of decent pieces, loosely strung together by a half-page of storytelling, but nothing that really stands out. Second, the attempt to pass off the usual acrobatics as stylized combat; half a dozen scenes were marred by dreadful “fight” choreography. Third, the balance between technical gimmicks and artistry was weighted heavily toward the former; it looks like the production was built around the hardware, not the other way around, and much of it seems to be used simply because it’s there.

It can’t be a coincidence that the director of O and Mystère was off working on a show for the new Wynn Las Vegas casino…

Did it suck? No, it’s just not worth planning a trip around yet. There are plenty of talented performers in the show, and the sets are technically impressive; once they arrange a proper marriage between the two, they’ll have something. Except for the combat scenes; those really did suck.

[other shows this trip? The reliably terrific Blue Man Group, and the mostly-amusing George Carlin; his political material has always been weak, but the farther the rest of us get away from the early Seventies, the harder he tries to drag us back there. “No thanks, Uncle Dave”]