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Monday, May 12, 2008

Friday, May 02, 2008

  • Mettle

    Last week I watched a movie called Into The Wild, a film adapation of a book about Christopher McCandless.

    McCandless gave away nearly everything he owned shortly after graduating from college and began wandering the US, just for the experience of living a selfless life without attachments. His ultimate goal was to journey into the Alaskan wilderness to live in complete solitude, to truly discover himself. He eventually made it there, but was woefully unprepared, and discovered that his true self was, apparently, a 67-pound emaciated corpse in a sleeping bag. :(

    I thought it was a great movie... his journey was fascinating, and if the portrayal of him was accurate, he truly was an essentially good person.

    But that is not my point.

    If you read the Wikipedia entries I linked to up there, you'll see that there is a general consensus that, in addition to being a wonderful human being, McCandless was a colossal idiot for going into the Alaskan wilderness unprepared. I'm sort of in agreement with that, assuming the information is correct. But colossal idiot or not, there's no denying that Christopher McCandless tested his own mettle before he checked out.

    I'll be 41 years old this year. I served in the military for six years. I've seen more of the world than the average person, I suppose. I've been in a lot of really stressful situations and I've come out OK time and time again. But I don't think my mettle has ever been truly tested.

    I don't even know what mettle means.

    If you put me on the witness stand, held up a Sean doll, and asked me to point at the mettle, I'd look away and squirm. If you threatened me with contempt, I'd point at the doll somewhere roughly halfway between my brain and my balls, which I guess puts it in or near my heart, and the poetic implications of that are so galactically corny that I don't even want to think about it.

    But I can't help thinking about it. By the numbers, I'm in the third decade of my adult life, but I've never really felt like what I thought being an adult would feel like. I'm certain that's got to be a very subjective feeling, but I know I'm not feeling it. And I know I'm not a "child at heart" kind of person. I feel a strange incompleteness that I don't think I should be feeling at my age, and I think that feeling is due to a surplus of untested mettle.

    I guess this is the onset of my midlife crisis. As a younger man, I would joke about things like this, but now that I'm here, it's not so funny. I really feel like I need to do something about this, but I haven't the slightest idea what that should be.

    My inner colossal idiot is telling me that it should involve real, physical, consequential danger, and in the absence of any suggestions, I'm inclined to agree with him.

    Got any suggestions?


    Currently Listening
    Svn Fngrs
    By Frank Black
    Half Man
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Thursday, April 10, 2008

  • More fun with AppleScript - closing tabs in Safari

    I go through a lot of browser tabs when I'm working, so I needed to cook up a way to quickly close a bunch of tabs in Safari. Safari already has a way to close all tabs except the current tab, so we just need a way to close tabs to the left or to the right of the current tab. AppleScript to the rescue!

    First, the left tabs:

    tell application "Safari"
        set cWindow to first item of windows
        set ctIndex to index of current tab of cWindow
        repeat ctIndex - 1 times
                close first item of tabs of cWindow
        end repeat
    end tell
    open location "x-launchbar:hide"

    Then, the right:

    tell application "Safari"
        set cWindow to first item of windows
        set ctIndex to index of current tab of cWindow
        repeat while (count of tabs of cWindow) > ctIndex
                close last item of tabs of cWindow
        end repeat
    end tell
    open location "x-launchbar:hide"

    I save those as "Close Left Tabs" and "Close Right Tabs" in ~/Library/Scripts. When I need to use them, I just bang a couple of keys to bring up the very-excellent LaunchBar, then 'CL' or 'CR' to run whichever one I need.

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