Reminder to self: specify that I want a Mac Pro on my desk when negotiating my tenure-track contract this fall (with whomever that might be).

Here’s one very handy command to know, particularly when you’re 700+ miles away from your OS X box: sudo softwareupdate -i -a. It goes very nicely with fink selfupdate && fink update-all.

I got an email today announcing the big grand opening of the Apple Store in Raleigh at Crabtree Valley Mall (I’d have figured on them going to Triangle Town Center, but whatevs) and, disturbingly, I am actually contemplating dragging my butt out there at an ungodly hour for a free T-shirt and to enter a drawing. So long as I don’t end up buying anything—cash flow being a tad on the negative side these days since I’m basically unemployed for the next two months—I suppose it could be fun.

Since I am off on an interview today, posting may be restricted to this linkfest:

• Hei Lun Chan of Begging to Differ dissects the NFL labor dispute to the bare essentials; if only he were as hot as Rachel Nichols, I might never need to watch ESPN again.
• Clint Ecker of Ars Technica reviews the Intel Mac mini for those who have not experienced for themselves the bliss that is Core Duo.
• The Solomon Amendment case was another 8–0 slam dunk for those right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, and probably the right decision on precedent (in my mind, it would be hard to strike down the Solomon Amendment but uphold much of the Civil Rights Act of 1964); overall, I tend to agree with Will Baude’s assessment that policymakers (explicitly excluding, being the attitudinalist I am, the Court) on all sides of the issue are wrong. Baude also ponders the possibility that private universities might choose to divest themselves of their law schools to avoid any adverse effect should they chose to continue to bar military recruiters.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

The blog is now running on the Mac mini, apparently without incident. The blog seems a little zippier in responding to requests now that it’s not running over the wireless network; the dual cores on the Mini may also be helping the zippy feeling, as the computer is compiling an Emacs 22 prerelease from fink in the background.

Meet the new addition to the Lawrence household, an Intel Mac mini (1.66 GHz Core Duo, 512MB RAM and 80GB hard drive):

See all of the photos here.

Thus far, it’s been pretty spiffy. I can’t really sit all the way across the room and use it, except when in Front Row, and I’m still getting used to the slightly different key shortcuts for things with the Belkin MediaPilot wireless keyboard/thumbmouse I bought to go with it, but those aren’t problems with the computer per se. I haven’t sat down and done much Unixy stuff with it yet; all I have really done is a brief foray into Terminal to copy a file from my work machine to email to someone this evening, during which I found that the backspace keybinding acts funny in ssh sessions to my Debian boxes (undoubtably a simple setting I’ll have to Google for later on).

Anyway… back to watching NewsRadio Season 3…

Well, at least now I feel better about the news that the Intel Mac mini has an integrated graphics chipset (þ: Ars Technica).

Mind you, since I wasn’t really planning to run games on it—that is, after all, why I have an Xbox—it didn’t really bother me in the first place. I may end up upgrading the RAM from the default 512MB sooner rather than later, depending on how much of a memory hog fetchmail, Apache, and the blog end up being, but waiting around for Apple to install a memory upgrade before shipping it didn’t exactly appeal to me.

Thanks to the IRS’s massive overwitholding, I’ll be helping stimulate the Chinese economy (and the share price of AAPL) with the purchase of one of these for the living room so I can finally get rid of the ancient Pentium III/450MHz in my study and put the blog on the right—i.e. wired to the cable company—end of the wireless bridge in my apartment.

The long-rumored move of Apple OS X to Intel processors was confirmed today by Apple at its annual developer’s conference. More at Wizbang and Slashdot, the latter of which claims that there is a “preview” that you can order for Intel processors today, something I wouldn’t mind taking for a spin, although it is as yet unclear whether you’re going to be stuck with buying Apple’s hardware to run OS X. Frankly, I’m much more interested in spending $350 or so to upgrade my desktop box’s motherboard & CPU combo to an Athlon 64 than dropping two large on a similar configuration just so I can run OS X.