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EveryDay Carry (EDC)

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I’ve been a big fan of “murse’s” for a long time. I carry way too much crap to fit in pockets, and I used to use belt holsters, but it was just too much. It seems like rather than being called murse’s anymore, they’re referred to by EDC, or Everyday Carry. Often this refers to a firearm as well, but in my case, it’s usually gear like a computer, multitool, firstaid kit, business cards, iPhone, and various other items.

When I got an iPad, I moved from my rather large Timbuk2 Messenger (for a 15″ laptop), to a more reasonable bag by Caselogic that was cheap at BestBuy ($10). It’s served me well, but I’ve been looking at other bags.

Right now, I’m largely looking at the Hazard4 Kato Mini-Messenger here. But $100 is a lot to part with for this type of thing. The advantage, though, is it’ll hold an 11″ Macbook Air (which is on my shortlist), and with all the Molle loops, you can pretty much add on about any other pouch to hold what it won’t “stock”.

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Brave

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This evening, I went to see Brave with wife and friend, and I’ll admit that all of us went in not knowing what to expect. The previews all largely left the viewer wondering. Basically, a girl is being forced into a life she doesn’t want to live, so she wants to change her “fate”. First though, let’s step back to the Pixar “short” the movie started with.

The short is called “La Luna”, and it basically is about 3 generations of Moon “cleaners”. The idea being the moon collects star pieces (al la Mario Galaxy), and these cleaners head up there and sweep them all away, or to the side, which is what gives us different moon phases. It was an adorable little short, rather than being more humorously bent, it was more sentimental. As typical with Pixar shorts, it, by itself, justifies part of the ticket price in and of itself.

Back to the movie! So, basically, the trailers for the movie largely center around the first 20 minutes of the movie or so. The rest of the movie takes a relatively predictable path, yet not quite what one would expect. If you don’t want any semblance of spoilers, don’t expand the following. [DDET SPOILERS!]Anyway, the daughter is being fixed to be married. She doesn’t like this, runs off to change this, and ends up having a witch change it for her. This then results in her mother being “changed”, and a joint adventure ensues to get the mother back to how she was, and in the process, both grow. So basically, it is kind of similar to Shrek, or maybe some Mulan, or any other number of movies.[/DDET]

That said, Pixar gives its usual beauty and flavor to the movie, though I found the movie less humorous that previous Pixar movies (many of which seem to have a good amount of humor aimed at the adults in the crowd, which this had minimal). The acting was good, the score was well done, and the animation as usual was excellent. I am sure I’ll see it again on DVD, and I may enjoy it more, but for now, I’d rate it right around “UP”… enjoyable, but perhaps not a Pixar “classic”. Which, is a shame, given its standing as the first with a female protagonist ((actually, you could argue the 3 most important characters in the movie were female: Merida (the star), Elinor (her mother), and the witch)) ((My wife tells me this is very Wiccan/Neopagan symbology-wise with the Mother, Maiden, Crone (wikipedia) )).

[xrr rating=3.75/5]

Final Cut Studio 7 co-existing with FCP X

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Here at work, we have FCS7 and FCPX on all our lab machines, but we’ve always had a weird issue where the Mac App Store (MAS) shows updates being available, but they won’t install due to some error. After thinking about it for a while, I took at look at the Final Cut Studio 7 apps that have FCP X equivalents (Final Cut Pro.app, Motion.app, and Compressor.app), and interestingly, I found in Contents that each had a _MASReceipt directory. Interesting. It seems at some point the MAS put receipt files in the older versions of the apps, and that confused it thinking that there were updates.

Anyway, removing these directories from each of the apps fixed the issue. Seems like a bug on Apple’s part. =/

UPDATE: Upon looking further, it actually seems like the MAS put the receipts in the wrong apps. The _MASReceipt directories were in the old versions, but not in the proper versions. This SEEMS to be because, for our students sake, I renamed the MAS versions of FCPX apps X.app ((So, Final Cut Pro X.app, Motion X.app, and Compressor X.app)) but left the older versions by their original names. Once we switch to using FCPX primarily, I’ll file the old versions away, but for now, it just appears that Apple does things based on the name of the app, and not any kind of application signing. At least, in 10.6.8. =/ I was, however, able to move the _MASReceipt directories into their respective, correct, apps, and the MAS saw that, and now reports them as installed. Weird.