The first thing that caught my attention was the contrast coloured keys. Not only do they look nice, the tactile feedback from the keys is very fulfilling. After the CRTs, this is my first computer with a glossy screen. The reflections are noticeable  and everytime I move, I have adjust to the lighting which was not a chore with my netbook which had matté display. However, the auto-brightness control is flawless.

Now while booting up, I was asked the usual questions about my name, etc. and within minutes the machine was up and running. Grandpa was very impressed by the screen. We loaded up iPhoto and copied pictures from his recent US trip and they looked simply awesome.

Finally, it was time to get the hands dirty. My account had sudo privileges and the next thing I did was to fire

sudo passwd

to change the root password. Now, in the GNU/Linux world, the distro is bundled with a package manager. So, all you want to do is apt-get install / zypper in software. They download the binaries from their servers (after you subscribe to the repositories) and you are good to go. However, it seems that in the BSD arena, there is  a culture of building your own software. I was aware of package managers like Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew. Homebrew seemed to be a popular choice with new people and so I decided to with Homebrew.

To compile stuff on MacOS, you need get developer tools called XCode. It is free and massive download from the Mac App Store. After the download was over, I found a new App in Applications called “Install XCode.” Installation was breeze and within a few minutes, I had Homebrew installed. wget, aria2c, etc compiled and I was happy.
I am not particularly a fan of iTunes. I find it complicated. Previously I used mplayer right from the terminal itself to play music. So I fired

brew install mplayer

It failed. It turns out that Apple has decided to discontinue shipping gcc without llvm with the new XCode. Most of the people who had this issue reported that using brew with “–use-gcc” solves the problem. I suppose that they that previous versions of XCode installed before upgrading to 4.2 but for me I had no choice as Lion was pre-installed.
Finally, thanks to the people who don’t like the bloat of XCode, I found a package that had just gcc related stuff (http://cloud.github.com/downloads/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer/GCC-10.7-v2.pkg). So, I removed XCode, installed this and installed XCode again and viola, I had mplayer…
Also, the default Terminal.app simply sucks. iTerm2 is far better and it has support for Page-Up and Page-Down keys also.

On reading pg’s essay on the subject, I found something new. There is also a “Good Procrastination” and most of the great people he met were the good procrastinators. To summarize, there are three kinds of procrastinators, who put off work doing,
A. Nothing
B. Something less important
C. Something more important

Needless to say, all of us want be the C-Type. So, now the definition of “what is important” lies on what is really important! And the importance of something is always fuzzy and depends from person to person. For example, playing Tetris two hours before the exam is less important and completely stupid for a sane student. For me it is not, tetris gets me in the flow! On day of the “Theory of Computation” exam, I did just that and the paper went fine (and was damn easy too!). What I am trying to say here is that the importance of what you do is something that you dont know and will never know. What you do during the time you are procrastinating is something that makes you (slacker/hacker/gamer/blogger/reader/cyclist/etc).

Thus, what I have decided is that I will always do something and not do it if it is not interesting; hoping that whatever I do is important.

At around 1000hrs, when I went down to read the newspaper, I decided to go out for a movie. I sought permission from Mom and called up Mrugank. I left for his place. However we could not get any seats. The early afternoon was spent in killing time and fruitless calls to Airtel DTH for activation of the free DTH connection that came along with his new LED TV.

We then decided to freak out at Aditya Bungalows as the house was empty (Grandparents on vacation). We got lunch from ‘Gandhi Bakery’ (The food was okay but anything would have sufficed at that time as I was famished).

We spent the afternoon and pre evening watching “The Big Bang Theory”. After listening to Obama’s speech (He is on tour to India), we left. I dropped Mrugank home and left for home.

When I reached home, Mom was out for Meditation. I then watched “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”. I really enjoyed the movie. I found that Spock’s character in the movie had reached the maturity and was concrete. The ending was undoubtedly ‘not happy’. Spock is dead!; That is a real shock but I know what happens next (Thanks to Memory Alpha and I have also seen the next movie , Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, directed by Leonard Nimoy himself). My knowledge of knowing what happended next actually hindered the experience.

“If you know the future, there is no mystery and there is no hope”.

I think that right now I am suffering with some kind of a block. Neither have I completed my term work (4 Java programs and seminar documentation) nor have I studied anything lately. I also want to start working on iSee but nothing is materializing right now.

I recall a dialogue from a movie whose name I’m not able to recall. It says,

“True Independence is when you have the freedom to choose the Truth.”

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