Disney Buys Marvel

Whoa! I wasn’t expecting to read in the New York Times this morning that Disney is buying Marvel (Comics) Entertainment:

The Walt Disney Company said Monday that it would buy the comic book giant Marvel Entertainment for about $4 billion.

I guess something like this was inevitable after Marvel went public in the 1990s and its subsequent economic fumbles and successes. There is one downside to this merger that I fear these kinds of mashups loom in the future: Hannah Montana fights crime with Spider-Man, The Mickey Mouse Club becomes a front for Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, Iron Man will spin off the Iron Mouse, etc.

Read about the acquisition here on the New York Times.

Dynamicsubspace.net Update, Twitter Removed

You may have noticed that I removed the Twitter box from the right margin of my current WordPress theme on dynamicsubspace.net. My work load has significantly increased with the beginning of the new semester, and there is still much that I have to catch up on from the Summer. Needless to say, I am cutting back on my social networking fun, and choosing to focus on only one online writing endeavor, namely this site. So, expect many more posts on dynamicsubspace.net, and not so much status commenting on Facebook or Twitter updates–at least in the foreseeable future.

Kent State University, Fall 2009 Begins

Tomorrow officially kicks off the Fall 2009 semester at Kent State University. My syllabi are ready for my two sections of composition, and I created Vista8 course pages for both classes so that I can go completely paperless this semester. Another added benefit of the paperless classroom is the virtualized classroom–maintaining an online presence may be advantageous if Swine Flu creates havoc on our petri dish campus.

If you would like to see my syllabus, you may download a pdf of it here: ellis-jason-11011-050-syllabus. This is my third semester of using the space exploration theme, but I have once again shifted and changed things to better accommodate my students’ needs as well as my own. I will post in the future on this iteration of my syllabus.

Snow Leopard Still Running Strong

This is my second day with MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and all is running well! As you can see in the picture above, the DICOM viewer OsiriX is displaying my brain beautifully (how science fictional is that?!). My other apps including InDesign CS4 and NetNewsWire have been working perfectly as well. I did run into a problem launching NeoOffice 3.0, because I negligently forgot to update it to Patch 7, which opens without a hitch.

One of the features that I really dig in Snow Leopard is the ability to increase Finder previews up to 512×512 resolution, and as I’ve mentioned before, the previews are lightning fast on my SSD equipped unibody MacBook. I have been lusting for this seemingly simple feature since my first color Mac (a PowerMac 8500/120–my first Mac was a Powerbook 145B, which had a monochrome LCD display). Now that I have it, I have found some of the mundane locating a particular file version significantly faster, because I can quickly spy inside each file within a folder packed with an overabundance of files.

Regarding my post yesterday where I mentioned that the fans were revving. Luckily, that behavior has subsided. My guess is that the indexing service was reindexing my external hard drive, because the fans returned to normal after I ejected the drive and briefly returned when I reattached it today. However, the excessive fan use has subsided and my Macbook is as quiet as ever.

There is one thing that bothers me about the 64bit kernel of Snow Leopard. As I mentioned previously, I had to manually enable the 64bit kernel on my MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008). After Yufang installed her copy of Snow Leopard on her MacBook (Early 2008), she too had the 32bit kernel running by default. However, the 64bit enabler application reports that the 64bit kernel is unsupported on her MacBook. This seems odd, because the Intel Core 2 Duo is a 64bit CPU which leads me to believe that it can run the 64bit kernel of MacOS X 10.6. I wonder if this has something to do with the memory controller (her MacBook uses DDR2 memory and mine uses DDR3). I’m not sure, but I will do more research on this topic and report back.

My Desktop After Installing Snow Leopard

When Yufang and I returned from Cleveland, I promptly began charging my new iPhone 3GS and installing MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on my aluminum unibody MacBook. See above for the finished product (note the Snow Leopard’s blood ringed mouth).

The install was relatively painless. I had backed up my files earlier this morning, so I left the installer to upgrade 10.5.8 to 10.6 while I got my iPhone 2G to accept Yufang’s SIM card (no easy task but it eventually submitted to my will).

I’ve only been running Snow Leopard for a few minutes, but I will tell you my first impressions. First, it is dang fast. Doing everyday chores, opening apps, etc. are substantially faster, and thumbnails are instantaneous (I have my icons set to 128×128 globally). Second, I do not how or if it improved things at all, but I did have to manually enable the 64bit kernel using this program. I have a 64bit capable processor and 4GB of RAM, so I figured running the kernel in 64bit mode shouldn’t hurt anything. Perhaps later I will test it out in 32bit versus 64bit mode. Third, the MacBook’s fans are revving while Safari is open. I have ejected the Snow Leopard install disc, so I know for sure that it isn’t the optical drive spinning up (anyways this is a very different sound than the fans running at full blast). I do not yet know what is causing the fan revving–could be Flash (a common culprit of this behavior in the past on most Intel Inside Macs) loading on some sites that have Flash ads. I haven’t read about anyone dealing with this problem, so I will have to do more research on this problem in the coming days.

I hope that your upgrade fares as well or better than mine!