Now first of all, real South African apartheid was a morally repugnant system because black people are in fact the equal of white people. There existed no good reason for the state-imposed discrimination against them save for fear and racism.

District 9 seems to completely miss this crucial point by portraying the aliens not as the intellectual and cultural equals of humans, but as animalistic child-creatures. In fact, the aliens are even introduced as having been found aboard their own vessel malnourished, impoverished, disorganized, and generally unable to fend for themselves. And yet we’re supposed to believe they somehow constructed the metropolis-sized spacecraft they inhabit? Then when the aliens are brought to the surface, ostensibly due to compassionate and humanitarian impulses on the part of the South Africans, they demonstrate no real understanding of their situation or even the ability to communicate effectively with one another, let alone any leadership or work ethic.

Really, aside for two aliens we meet who are intelligent, have goals, and use technology, 99% of them are portrayed as little more than vermin. They have no desire to better themselves, can barely understand one another, and they spend most of their time squabbling over trash and fighting with Nigerian gangs over cat food. Seriously!

And yet they have weapons of such titanic power that greedy human corporations are rushing to try and figure out how they work. Who made these weapons? It clearly isn’t the bestial creatures we see playing with tires and getting tricked by semi-literate teenagers. So who did? Who made the spaceship itself, for that matter? Where did all the high tech gadgetry come from if most of the alien species is hopelessly primitive?

Perhaps this the alien society is supposed to be a caste system with wise leaders who guide the unwashed masses. This is supported early on with the revelation that the vessel’s command pod detached and plummeted to Earth while it was floating over Johannesburg. Now it all makes sense! The leaders were separated from their people and their technology, leaving the masses virtually powerless. As soon as they’re re-united, the alien society will begin to re-cohere!

Wrong again. Though the two intelligent aliens we meet are indeed from the command pod, when the remaining aliens are flown down to Earth, the intelligent ones appear to have no influence over them at all. I found myself wondering how the alien society ever managed to evolve past the “hitting each other with rocks” stage of cultural development considering how primitive and disorganized the vast majority of it is.

Over two decades, the aliens’ conditions worsen. I found myself incredulous, as later on in the movie, we see the aliens’ martial technology in action: bio-mechanical battle mechs and devastating energy firearms, both of which can pretty effortlessly disintegrate entire platoons of South African commandos. Soooooo…. why don’t the two intelligent aliens use the weapons to improve their situation? For that matter, why didn’t the stupid ones? They seem to like fighting a lot, so why don’t they ever turn their hellcannons on the humans? The movie specifically makes the point that humans can’t use the alien weapons, so the aliens are at an enormous technological advantage for the entire movie and never use it. Feh!

All in all I was extremely disappointed. With so much of the movie’s underpinnings making no cultural or logical sense at all, I found myself frustrated by the excellent CG and high-tech action scenes.

That said…

** WARNING: ** This next part contains spoilers! Click to read. Although if you don’t, this post will probably seem very short.

Spoilers

Okay, so there are some pretty gaping plotholes. But the movie manages to redeem itself to me through the rest of it. Maybe it’s because I’m totally in love with the Fallout universe, but seeing Denzel Washington barter for electricity with salt packets and shoot goggled biker thugs with a sawed-off shotgun just makes me happy inside. The world they all inhabit is indeed pretty derivative of Fallout’s but I don’t care because I love that world, and they manage to infuse it a great deal of detail and life.

So yeah, it’s flawed and you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a bit toward the middle, but I had a good time and didn’t feel ripped off by the outrageous ticket price.

I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:

Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.

Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?

That’s some real public safety for ya there

I bought this shotgun in New York sort of on a whim while I was sending my other guns across the country for my move to California. The reason is because these states, among a few others, require that you send your guns from gun store to gun store rather than just through the mail.

In any event, I had known for a while that I wanted a nice 12 gauge shotgun, and when I got to the store, there was an unbelievable combo deal for a beautiful Mossberg 500, so I bought it then and there. The side effect of this was that I only got to fondle it for about five minutes before I added it to the other stuff being sent across the country, and I didn’t see it until I arrived in California.

On maybe the second day I was here, I went to the gun store in California to pick up my guns. But they wouldn’t let me because state law required that I show ID, and my New York ID wasn’t valid for some reason. Balls. I couldn’t get a new one because I didn’t have a permanent address yet, so I waited a month, got a California ID (which cost me three times what it did in New York), waited two weeks for it to arrive (I got a valid temporary one instantly in New York), headed back to the gun store. I showed them my ID, and paid another $125 (WTF?), but California makes you wait, and so I left again and came back ten days later. ((Then I discovered that my car was locked in a parking lot, but that’s another story. Some higher power really didn’t want to see my reunited with my firearms!)) I finally got the guns home about three months after I arrived, and the whole process made me about $300 poorer for no good reason.

I can’t think of a single aspect of public safety that was increased by making me go through such a rigamarole. But of course, public safety isn’t really the point. The aim is to make gun ownership difficult, costly, bureaucracy-laden, and filled with legal minefields in the hope that more and more people will lack the motivation to do it, so that eventually the shrinking and demoralized gun-owning population can just be crushed entirely with a blanket ban or something as close to that as possible (see: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco). Well, I’m not gonna let that be me, so screw you New York and screw you California.

Just about the one thing these laws accomplished was to force me to spend several hundred dollars at gun stores, rather than the maybe 15 or 20 it would have been if I could have just boxed them up and sent ‘em through the mail. Thanks a lot, New York and California, for subsidizing gun stores’ profits. Boy, I bet that was what these states’ cockamamie legislatures had in mind!

</rant>

After I got the gun home, I played around with it for a little while, loading and unloading some 12 gauge snap caps and practicing working the action to get the feel of how it operated. But I just didn’t have time to go to the range, and so there it sat in my closet for another month or so, loaded with five rounds of buckshot but without my even knowing if the darn thing would even go bang!

I rectified this last weekend. Unlike rifle or pistol shooting, you can’t really fire a shotgun with marksmanship in mind since it throws a cloud of pellets rather than a single bullet. Before this, only other shooting experience I’d really had was a .22 at pieces of paper, while shotgun games are all about hitting moving targets.

I paid for a round of trap, one of the more basic games. After receiving some instruction, I got into position, chambered a round, brought the stock to my cheek, pulled the trigger, and…

1. I was not knocked on my butt
2. I was not deafened
3. A 50-foot area I was pointing the gun at did not break into fragments

Well, so much for what I was taught by online folklore, video games, and Hollywood! After being told that shotguns were the ultimate death cannons, that a 12 gauge will break your shoulder or knock you backwards a foot and blow out your eardrums and annihilate the target area all at the same time!, it was actually pretty moderate. I was even so focused on the target that I barely heard the bang, and the recoil was more of a hard push than a kick. Not at all what I was expecting.

The one thing that video games and Hollywood actually did correctly teach me about shotguns is that they sound totally badass when you rack the slide. That schikk-chikk sound is every bit as awesome and intimidating in real life as it is in the movies.

Of course, I didn’t hit the orange clay sailing through the air either, but I wasn’t really expecting to. But I did break the second one, and man oh man was it satisfying! A big shit-eating grin spread across my face as I thought Man, I hit that flying object 60 feet away! Out of the 25 shots I took, I hit 8 clays, which is generally a pretty miserable score, but not terrible for a beginner. And in the next round I hit 11 — progress!

All in all, it was a great deal of fun, and it makes me want to practice and improve so I’m not such an obvious n00b!

What I have stumbled on is the Canon CanoScan LIDE 100 scanner. ((FCC notice: you’ll never know whether or not Canon has sent me free stuff, fuckers! Bite me.)) It’s a very neat, very thin, and very cheap desktop scanner. You can get the dang thing for about 60 or 70 bucks, but when I found a $50 deal on Amazon a few months ago, I had to pull the trigger. Here’s what it looks like on my desk beside a horde of Orks and Tyranids:

I can’t really say much about the included software because I tossed it out without even looking at it. My time in IT has taught me that scanner software that comes from the manufacturer is universally, 100% shoddy beyond belief. Why is this? I’m honestly confused.

I instead elected to use Mac OS X’s built-in Image Capture software, which I find to be not only perfectly sufficient for my purposes, but also quite pleasant to use (caveat: I’m talking about the Snow Leopard version. In Leopard and before, it’s kinda lousy too). The scan button on the front even opens Image Capture and starts a scan, just like it should! How cool is that?

I mostly use it for scanning receipts, documents, and things like that, because I am obsessed with disaster preparedness and I want records of everything I own in case the place blows up and my renter’s insurance company is being a dick. For that purpose, the scans it produces are perfectly nice-looking, and text is extremely sharp and crisp.

In terms of speed, I have to admit it’s not the fastest scanner in the world. From placing the document on the bed to having a file on disk, it’ll probably take you maybe 30-45 seconds to have a finished product. But that’s perfectly suitable for my relatively infrequent needs.

The one issue I’ve had is that sometimes Image Capture can’t find the scanner. I don’t know if this is Image Capture or the scanner’s fault, but momentarily unplugging it never fails to beat whichever is the guilty party into comprehension of the other. Works for me!

For a $50 scanner, it’s held up great, and produces good results. It makes a great addition to my home office and if you need an unobtrusive, low-duty scanner, this one is pretty nice.

Update: I forgot to mention that the scanner is also USB-powered, which means that it doesn’t have to be plugged into the wall, which saves power and reduces clutter. I find it sort of silly that I neglected to mention this, since it was one of the primary features that drew me to it! Oh well, better late then never.

A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, including a heavily-customized TextMate and a knowledge of Mac editing shortcuts. That, and I’m really lousy in vi and emacs.

But ExpanDrive has changed my life. here’s how it works: you type in your SSH credentials, and instead of giving you a terminal window, it mounts the remote volume on your local machine just like a flash drive. Did you catch that? It mounts your remote home directory over SSH. Read: you can interact with your files using GUI tools over an SSH connection! This is nothing short of revolutionary for me, a long-time adherent of powerful GUI tools. Since I started using it last night, my productivity for one particularly annoying task to accomplish purely using a command line has probably doubled.

Under the hood it uses MacFUSE, which, as far as I’m concerned, it basically magic. All I care about is that it lets me mount remote volumes over SSH. I’m still in the 30-day trial period, so haven’t bought it yet, but honestly, whatever it costs, I’ll pay. It’s just that good.

If you spend any amount of time manipulating files over SSH, you owe it to yourself to use this application. No, really. Go download it right now.

I don’t know what reminded me of it, but the other day I felt the need to reinstall it and play it again, nearly 15 years after its 1995 release date. So I did! Like any good 1980s or 90s game, it has levels so tough that you wonder if the designers were really sadists. But that was just the style back then, and it’s an interesting transition coming from games where you get released from the city hospital free of charge after eating a few dozen slugs. Rebel Assault II was created far before that time, and it shows. Many of the missions are torturously difficult, requiring you to basically memorize the pattern of obstacles or the location of enemy stormtroopers.

One of the things I’m struck by is the innovative control styles. In the first mission, for example, you’re in the cockpit of a B-Wing blasting TIE fighters from a first-person perspective, with the computer doing most of the movement and you concentrating on shooting. The next mission has you blowing away stormtroopers in the third person, darting from cover to cover. Right after that, you pilot the Millennium Falcon in the third person (and it’s every bit as responsive as the movies have led us to believe, leading to my total memorization of the fantastic crashing animations).

Three levels, three control schemes. And it doesn’t stop there; the game experiments with blending the styles, for example making you dodge hazards while in the primarily shooting-oriented first-person cockpit view, or shoot said obstacles while in the hyper-responsive third-person flying view. There’s even a first-person shooter mode that looks a lot like Dark Forces, LucasArts’ first Star Wars FPS.

Even though the missions basically consist of little more than shooting and dodging, it rarely gets old because of the interesting way in which you’re doing it, and the engaging cutscenes between missions that keep your attention focused on the plot and characters.

That brings me to another notable aspect of the game: during a time when the idea of an “interactive movie” was all the rage, Rebel Assault II is one of the only games that has ever really delivered for me (another being The Daedalus Encounter). The cutscenes are very well-acted, and the compositing of the actors onto the 3D scenes is top-notch. The whole play-watch-play-watch dynamic doesn’t seem jarring at all, as the missions are pretty well integrated and integrated. The plot is pretty standard stuff: you’re a young hotshot rebel who goes on exciting space missions to foil the evil Empire. Pure Star Wars 13 year-old fantasy material, but it’s done well enough by the excellent acting and tight integration into the interactive action sequences.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very dated game and everything. But the gameplay still feels very rich, and the graphics aren’t anything to scoff at, either. In particular, the absolutely hellish mission where you have to pilot the Millennium Falcon through a serpentine mining shaft and then abruptly change to operating the main guns when the stormtroopers start shooting doesn’t even remotely feel like it was made 15 years ago. A higher resolution (640×480 was considered high-res!), better lighting, and some slightly more detailed textures would make the sequence feel very modern, in fact.

Tell me that this doesn’t look pretty good by today’s standards:

It’s a pretty short game, but I’ve found it to be just boatloads of fun. If you ever played Rebel Assault II as a kid or have the least bit of nostalgia, you owe it to yourself to crack it open again and take another look!

The opening sequence filled me with absolute glee. Your character begins in a cab, being driven to a hotel by an exceedingly chatty driver — the spitting image of so many exuberant African cab drivers I’ve encountered, their ebullience perhaps an elaborate (and usually successful) ploy to get a big tip. The car putters down rough dirt roads, bouncing and jostling everything in side it, including the two of you, when another car abruptly cuts you off — and the driver laments the decline in politeness since the civil war started. That drive is the Africa I remember — full of bumpy roads, gangs of roving children, relentlessly curious young men, women selling homemade fried foods, and the occasional bribe to pass by a blockade of armed men.

Sadly, once you’re out of the car, everything goes downhill. You awake to find yourself staring at the Jackal — the bastard who armed both sides of the bloody civil war and who it’s your primary mission to kill. Right off the bat, there he is in front of you, ruining any surprise or the possibility of the Jackal turning out to be one of your friends you’ll make along the way or even — gasp! — being female.

No, instead you find him leering over you like so many snidely whiplash villans before you even have a chance to do anything, musing out loud how he’s not going to kill you now, he’s going to let you live, so you can presumably be killed in some worse way by someone else! Sadly, we all know from years of movie clichés how well this turns out for the bad guy, again ruining any dramatic suspense. He’s supposed to be an arms dealer and he doesn’t have the guts to put a bullet in my head right now? Puh-leeze.

Sadly, the Jackal isn’t the only flat, boring character in the game. In Far Cry 2, everyone else you meet who doesn’t want to kill you somehow automatically loves you. Five minutes later I find myself talking to some dude who’s chastising me for killing some of his men… and then telling me to do some errand-boy task for him and giving me an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, and his own personal car. Do I ever see him again? Nope. Do I remember his name? I don’t even think he told it to me. Why am I working for him, considering that he gave me the firepower to level his compound if I so desired? Unclear. Why did he hire me if I just killed some of his troops? Unexplained. And I could go on.

So I go out and conduct the hit like my mysterious benefactor has ordered. And this leads me to my next complaint: for a shooter, killing is no fun in Far Cry 2. Oh, it’s satisfying, of course — your guns feel solid and real, enemies fall down clutching their wounds after what almost always feels like enough gunfire, and your own character seems just durable enough to sustain going Rambo — but not too often. No, the mechanics of fighting are really very good. And that’s the problem.

You see, each bullet you fire into one of those faceless, nameless mercenaries who are tearing the country apart actually has some real effect. The mercs claw at their injuries, they’ll drop their weapons, fall to one knee, cry out in pain, scream blood-choked obscenities, convulse on the ground, and emit the most spine-chilling death rattles I’ve ever heard from a game. While in a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky your enemies grunt like kung-fu fighters punched in the gut and yell, “Your mom!” in Russian when you shoot them, Far Cry 2′s baddies are much more human in their reactions to injury. This game reminds you at every turn that bullets do bad things to men, and the gory reminders aren’t confined to your enemies, either. When you become sufficiently injured yourself, “healing” consists of watching an animation of your character pulling bullets out of his leg with pliers, or bending back broken limbs, or re-setting dislocated fingers. It’s sometimes difficult to watch, always reminding you of the fragility of the human body when faced with the business end of a lethal weapon.

If there’s one lesson this game has taught me, it’s that fighting sucks. Where in many other shooters I find myself becoming almost bored of violence after hours of killing, Far Cry 2 makes me feel sickened. I avoid the endless guard posts not because I tire of slaying legions of grunts (like I would in another game), but because I feel like a bad person when I send bullets their way. Every time I run out of ammunition for my assault rifle and have to get up close and personal with a pistol, I can feel a knot form in my stomach as I coldly murder the frightened men whose faces I can see fill with fear. It gets even worse if things get so desperate that you have to use your machete. You’re treated to an animation of your character swiftly slicing a throat, with the accompanying cries of pain and desperation from your victim as he collapses to the ground clutching at his ruined neck. Sometimes it’s not quite enough, and he reaches for his pistol to take you with him. There really is no other option than to finish him off, which you do by delivering a coup-de-grace of machete-to-stomach, ending the man’s life with a sickening howl that is almost nausea-inducing.

The first time I did it, I found myself yelling out loud, “Oh my God, I’m a terrible person!” I glanced around, embarrassed, then realized that, no, it was true — my character really is a a terrible person. Later on, after a particularly grueling battle that came down to molotov-tossing and throat-slitting, I found myself wondering, isn’t there another way? Surely we can end this without bloodshed.

Alas, we cannot. Maybe that’s one of the lessons the game is trying to teach me: that sometimes bad men get guns and need to be killed before they kill you, and that diplomacy or stealth or sleight-of-hand won’t always be options in the face of something as monstrous as a civil war. Maybe. Meanwhile, the world of Far Cry 2 is populated by bad men with guns who very much want nothing more to kill each other and you. And that’s all — this isn’t the agency-filled world of an RPG where you can make, you know, choices, and have, you know, conversations.

Which is a real shame. The world seems less like a small African country invaded by mercenaries than it does an anarchic training ground with some buddies of yours hanging out. Having myself lived in an African village, I expected far more, well, Africans! I was expecting burned-out villages, communities huddled together trying to survive, looters, robbers, thieves, old men with world War I rifles, teenagers hawking boflotos and maybe ammunition, and more of the like. Instead, the population seems to consist almost entirely of the mercenaries who are fighting the war. It was actually pretty disheartening when I realized that I could count on every human being I met outside of a cease-fire zone to run at me guns blazing. I’d just be driving along when another jeep would pull up alongside and start shooting! Who are they? Who cares! They want to kill me, better kill them first!

Even the so-called unique locations on the map are no better. The airstrip? Sounds interesting, but it’s just a long tarmac with some rusted hangars inhabited by hostile mercenaries. There’s nothing there you can interact with; the different locale just offers some character and pizzazz to the inevitable gunfight you’ll get into once you arrive there. The chemical company? A couple train cars and a little station populated by thugs with guns. The cockfighting ring? Though the ramshackle sheet-metal compound was brilliantly faithful to real African shanties, I saw a lot less cockfighting than I did armed men shooting at me. Once the smoke cleared and I kicked my way out of the pile of mangled bodies I had managed to surround myself with, I found the actual cocks — all sitting placidly in the same pen, doing anything but fighting. Figures.

I could go on and on; sure, the locations themselves are extremely well-rendered and very unique, but their potential is mostly squandered since the only thing you actually do once you reach them is shoot at men. Again. And again. And again.

Basically, this game is such an exemplary shooter, it makes me wish it did everything else as well as it depicts fighting. I want to be able to upgrade my vehicle at the junkyard, bargain for information at the bars and chat with my buddies about their personal lives as a way of cooling down after a grueling battle. Speaking of my buddies, I want actual relationships with them. I want them to have compelling reasons to be my friends other than “oh, I’ve heard you’re a badass. Let me help you out!” or, “Thanks for rescuing me. You’re now my own personal Jesus!” I want to walk through villages of terrified, starving villagers trying to survive, cringing at my weapons but thankful that I’m not the type who comes in shooting instead. I want my cars to require more to repair them than tightening the magical repair bolt for a few seconds.

Far Cry 2 is such a rich world, full of wondrous peaks, haunting deserts, eerie towns, crumbling infrastructure, and improvised dwellings — but populated entirely by a bunch of trigger-happy goons. A world this compelling practically begs for something other than yet more gunplay.

I just got finished with Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, and it was a fascinating read. The premise is really quite simple: photograph armed American families of all types in their homes with their firearms.

Making up these families are were white people, black people, Asians, Jews, women, children, lesbians, soldiers, hunters, rape victims, target shooters, grandfathers — all united in their appreciation of firearms.

Ultimately, seeing such a diverse panoply of individuals who think the way I do made me feel a bit better about myself. You see, I was raised in an environment where the prevailing wisdom seemed to go that gun owners were backwoods rednecks who shot at tin cans and were so stupid and undereducated that they couldn’t read and didn’t vote.

Though I know logically that this is pure nonsense, it’s still hard for me to shake it at times. When I look at my gun, I sometimes still think, “does this make me paranoid or reactionary or mentally unbalanced?” Since coming out to my parents about being a gun owner, these are charges that have occasionally been leveled at me. It’s been a great comfort to read about all the gun owners out there who are happy, healthy, well-off, responsible, and forward-thinking.

One of the best aspects of the book is its lack of a political agenda. There isn’t even any commentary of any sort; each two page spread displays only the owners with their weapons, a list of said weapons, and a few short sentences told to the photographer on why they own the guns. Here’s an example:

Says Cicily, the wife in the picture:

I grew up in a gun environment, but the only people who had guns were gang members. I thought guns were bad things and only bad people had them. I had no exposure to any positive gun experiences so I didn’t know there were normal people who had guns. Matt took me shooting and I had so much fun. I was really impressed with how responsible everybody was. I felt like I was part of something very serious, fun, but everybody took it so seriously and so responsibly that I felt very safe. Now I want to go small game hunting because I love to cook. I want to learn how to cook pheasant and rabbit. I want to learn how to butcher — I want to do it all. All the stuff that all these old Wisconsin women seem to have been born knowing.

Reactionary, mentally delayed, or ignorant? I think not — that’s about as apolitical as it comes. These are good, rational, normal people, and they populate all 208 pages. The images are rich and human; they display happy, quirky people and their neat, messy, elaborate, and simple homes with their dogs, cats, children, cars, and meals. I really felt transported right into these people’s living rooms.

And yet I almost found myself more entranced by each explanation as to why the owner had a gun. I’m always fascinated to learn about the motivations of gun owners. I start to think back to my own and I realize that my reasons are so heavily individualized, taking into account childhood upbringing, a desire for rationality in political positions, an obsession with the mechanical, the desire for self-reliance, and rebellion against my parents. I suspected that other gun owners had similarly multifaceted reasons, and I was not let down. In fact, I found myself really and truly moved by three answers in particular that I found to be especially thought-provoking. Here they are:

Kevin:

As a Jewish American I am cognizant of the fact that 6 million of my people were turned into air pollution in the ’30s and ’40s. As a civil rights advocate I know that at some point words are not going to be enough when people are kicking down your door to pull you out of your house because you’re Jewish, black or gay. You can’t be pro civil rights without being pro gun. It’s hypocritical to deny someone the most basic of all human rights, which is the right to defend yourself.

Mike:

I am liberal Democrat and many of my friends are surprised to find that I’m a gun owner. They have this idea that gun owners are all a bunch of rednecks out in the woods poaching deer, but we’re all over the spectrum, not this monoculture.

Todd:

I never thought I would need or want a firearm until in 2002 I was told by law enforcement during a community outreach program that in the event of a disaster such as a terrorist attack or a massive hurricane, they will not be able to protect everyone. People will have to fend for themselves. It seems like common sense now after what happened in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, but I was naïve then and I thought the powers that be would always be there to keep law and order.

The diversity of opinion as well as the eloquence of those expressing them was staggering to me. Since the book makes no effort to push any political message, the only clear goal I can think of that this particular photographer had was the goal of any competent photographer: to capture his subjects as naturally as possible. Through not only warm, inviting images of regular human beings just like you and me but also their profound and thought-provoking responses to the question of gun ownership, that goal is admirably achieved.

Why? Well it’s a variety of things. My biggest gripe is its lack of integration with the Mac OS X Keychain. For the uninitiated, the Keychain is a secure service provided by Mac OS X that can store passwords and the like and make them accessible to applications that bother to integrate with it. Because it’s systemwide, I can be sure that any password I ask Safari to remember will be available to OmniWeb or the Finder, or the Disk Image mounter if they ask and I give permission. In practical terms, it means I can switch browsers and be sure that all my saved passwords will be remembered as long as the new browser is Keychain-savvy. It’s a terribly useful system, and I have pretty much all my passwords in it.

Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.

Another thing is the standard Mac OS X text view; developers will know it as an “NSTextView.” What’s so nice about NSTextViews? Well, for one, Appple keeps piling features into it! NSTextViews can check spelling and support a whole range of keyboard shortcuts for text selection and editing. In Tiger, NSTextViews started supporting instant definition and thesaurus lookups via an unbelievably-convenient floating dictionary panel that I use all the frikkin’ time:

In Leopard, NSTextViews can automatically detect links, change straight quotes to smart (“curly”) quotes, and check grammar. In the upcoming version of Mac OS X named Snow Leopard, who knows what they’ll add? The point is, any developer who uses NSTextViews in an application will get free features whenever Apple decided to update the NSTextView class. Thus, over the years, old applications have gotten more useful with the regular infusion of new functionality simply by using the Apple-supplied user interface widgets, and I’ve come to rely on a variety of features offered by NSTextView, in particular the systemwide spelling and dictionary integration and the text editing shortcuts. As with the Keychain, I’ve come to rely on the standardization afforded by NSTextviews.

Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.

And then there are all the niggling user interface quirks. Like how Firefox doesn’t respect Mac OS X’s systemwide “smooth scrolling” setting, instead, re-implementing it in what I feel is an overly slow manner. When I leave it on and use the arrow keys or the scroll wheel, it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, but when I disable it out of annoyance, I have difficulty finding my place whenever I jump by a page-length at a time by hitting page down or the space bar. Sigh. Just use OS X’s built-in setting!

Another annoyance of mine is the perennial ignorance of the difference between a pop-up menu button and a drop-down menu button. The issue arises from the fact that in Windows, there’s one user interface element for both things. But there’s a subtle difference in OS X. A pop-up menu is used to select state; it lets you choose from a list of items to determine which one you want to be looking at or interacting with. When you make a selection, the widget itself changes its title to show you which item you’ve selected, since you may need to refer to which item you’re looking at.

A drop-down menu, on the other hand, is used to issue commands. Drop-down menus have fixed titles because they’re closely related to the menus at the top of the screen (or on the top of the window in XP or Vista). That is, the menu’s title lets you know what kinds of commands you can issue, and clicking on it brings down a list of these commands.

I’m always getting confused in Windows because both of these user-interface concepts are jammed into one widget. Whenever I click on a drop-down menu in Windows, I don’t know if I’m about to tell the program to do something or just change my selection. Usually the only cues it provides are the wording of the menu items: strong action verbs usually denote commands, but this has the unfortunate side effect of causing homographs to complicate things. Will the item labeled “Tag Field” select a thing called a Tag Field, or will it somehow tag or highlight all the fields?

Sadly, Firefox opts to adopt the confusing, inferior, Windows-like hybrid drop-down/pop-up menu universally, even on the Mac version. Sigh.

Now, don’t get me wrong; Firefox is a great browser. It’s fast, loaded with features, and feels great on Windows. My problem is that it still isn’t a first-class Mac citizen. I, like most Mac users, chose my platform because of the perceived superiority of the software bundled with and capable of running on Macs. This perceived superiority arises from useful, tightly-integrated systemwide services like the Keychain and Time Machine, and the clean, intuitive user-interfaces favored by Mac developers. In other words, we want to see our choice vindicated by using software that takes advantage of the features that set our platform apart from the alternatives. Firefox still doesn’t do this. And so I’ll stick with Safari.