Dr. J. Robert Cade, the man who brought the world Gatorade, died yesterday in Florida at 80.

“That question changed our lives,” Cade said.

12:27 < esch> [the TNG bathroom]
12:28 < solios> hah.
12:28 < solios> my dad and I theorized long and hard about bathrooms on the ENT-D
12:29 < solios> at least the ENT-A actually had one on the bridge.
12:29 <@rjbs> they don't need them
12:29 <@rjbs> replicated food can be entirely digested
12:29 <@rjbs> so there is no waste product
12:29 <@rjbs> this leads to a horrible problem, though
12:29 <@rjbs> the crews of starships eat replicated food all the time, and their sphincters atrophy
12:30 <@rjbs> and when they take shore leave, they have trouble controlling their bowels
12:30 <@rjbs> leading to what is commonly known as "Risa Stains"

The works of Dale Chihuly at the Phipps Conservatory (Schenley Park, Pittsburgh). Gorgeous, gorgeous work.

21:39 < solios> every square game after the first final fantasy needs a hardwired "skip exposition" button.
21:40 < solios> you spend more time waiting for people to talk than you do blowing shit up in a Front Mission replay.*
21:41 <@ejp> you can hold down, [B] I think and it Goes Faster
21:42 < solios> yeah, but the problem with front mission is there's spots of expo you can speed up and spots you can't.
21:43 <@ejp> wonderful.
21:43 <@ejp> see, I hate that. even the fast speed is annoying to read.
21:43 < solios> naturally the spots you can't plod along at a speed of no with music I'm sure the japanese consider to be Deep and Appropriate.
21:44 < solios> but is really just plodding and grating.
21:44 < solios> on the upside, you can punch trucks.
21:44 < solios> and that makes up for everything.
21:45 < mdxi> hahaha
21:45 <@bda> haha
21:45 <@bda> solios++
21:46 < solios> (front mission)++

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Front Mission is fantastic. The inability to skip the plot on a replay is a minor nit.

* The story's predictable and traditional but still pretty engaging the first time through. With a "new game +" however, you have no need for the arena and you're stomping through maps so fast that the story becomes a brick wall you repeatedly splatter against in your mad rush to go pummel some more baddies.

First up: a new size for the TextEdit window!

Deleting the preferences fixed that, just like it fixed a recent problem I had with Final Cut Pro wherein the app would bounce a few times in the dock and then disappear instead of loading like every other well behaved app does.

And if that wasn't enough, there's this nifty little bit of Chinese Water Torture that Safari kicks out every time a field manifests a scrollbar (and yes, this happens on sites that are not my various CMS backends, so I know it's not just Safari putting a hatin' on Moveable Type):

Update, 20071115 - the TextEdit problem cropped up again, and seems to have stuck. Leopard's TextEdit malfunctions horribly with plaintext. I tried Textwrangler, but it doesn't behave properly either. Same problem, actually - Text Does Not Appear. My sister had a similar problem under 10.4 in which ALL text on the system - menus, finder, error messages, buttons, etc. were completely blank. A reinstall fixed that nicely. In this case, I figure I'll hold out for 10.5.1 and if that doesn't fix things then I'll try a format and reinstall. The afflicted machine (my over-upgraded g4 733) started off with a botched install, so starting over may be the most optimal solution.

In other Apple news, my G4 2x450 seems to be acting up - two crashes in less than 12 hours, both with VLC running, both when VLC changed from fullscreen playback of a file with one aspect ratio to fullscreen playback of a file with a different size/aspect - video output dies (prompting a "no signal" message on the display), and sound continues for a few seconds before the machine locks completely. The only thing that's changed on maniac over the past several months is that the machine is now reading files from a Leopard client server instead of a 10.4 client server, so it's either some new breed of software wonkiness, or the old girl is finally starting to lose it in the hardware department.