What a waste of day (includes octopi)

Monday, June 28, 2004 » link update

This morning was going as well as a morning can go, especially when it starts at 2PM. Then my computer exploded.

What actually happened was a bit more anticlimactic. (Or is that less climactic?) Application after application started freezing up, leaving me with OS X's friendly spinning lollipop (or beachball, as I've learned to call it after spending enough time on the Apple boards). The problem persisted even after several reboots. I tried all of the standard resuscitation techniques—repairing permissions, fsck, weeding out old preference files—to no avail. What it finally came down to was some trouble with my user fonts directory. Yes, some font had been locking up the entire system. I suppose the trouble arose out of me spending most of last night scouring the Web for, downloading, and installing an army of Chinese and Japanese fonts, some shadier than others.

After figuring out what was going on, I cleaned out my user fonts and everything went back to normal. I've accumulated a huge number of fonts over the last few years, many of which were only one-shot uses for specific graphics or projects. So, I'm taking advantage of this to streamline my font library a bit, and possibly start taking advantage of Apple's Font Book application, which has been left untouched since I upgraded about six months ago.

Of course, now it's about 3:30 AM and I didn't get to the things I was planning on doing today. Instead of doing anything productive now, I'm sitting here writing this as snippets from the Famicom 20th Anniversary series play in the background. (Right now it's Zelda II.) It's kind of a familiar situation, since last night I was just finishing up an image I've been working on for the last few days, and I figured I'd put the final touches on it this morning and be done with it. Now it looks like that'll be happening tomorrow. Hopefully my folder icons won't start an uprising.

Also, whoever is responsible for these rules, a lot.