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Yesterday, I traded in “Fighterjet.”

I feel pretty raw about signing away the title for my 1998 Subaru Legacy GT 2.5 Limited. (Frankly, I’ll never remember the correct order “GT,” “2.5,” and “Limited” are supposed to go in, even after 10 years — 3273 days, to be exact — of car ownership.) Looking back, I took delivery on July 1, 1998.

What do you say about a car you owned for 122 months? A vehicle that was there to transport you through the highs and lows of life?

Well, the brochure for our new car says, “Few things connect to your life at more points than your car.” Amen. I’ll take a stab at a few notes in haphazard arrangement, below.

This will all seem melodramatic, and it is. There are, I’m sure, people who don’t get attached to their cars. My wife and I are not those people. However, I am beginning to realize that you can only really get attached to one car, and thereafter you realize you simply can’t do that again. This is my struggle this morning, and my usual tendencies to hang on are amplified by how long I had that Subaru.

Fighterjet was the first car I ever picked out and bought myself. The two cars before it dropped into my lap, by the generosity of my family, and being young, I did my level best to destroy them quickly. The Subaru had 40-some miles on it when I bought it, partly because I drove it a few times and partly because the test drive area around the dealership was so large.

Every girlfriend I had in my adult life rode in Fighterjet. One of them helped me choose it. The car outlasted all but one of them.

My wife and our first son rode in Fighterjet. In fact, it was the car that Aaron and I had to rescue from the snowy parking lot at work — its door had been jammed open by ice so the alarm was sounding — so that I could collect the bags we’d left at home and return to the hospital with them. The baby was born a day later, and perhaps we’ll be more prepared in the future.

Fighterjet didn’t have LATCH anchors. Oops.

When I bought Fighterjet, I didn’t have any music in MP3 format. Having an iPod connection was unheard of, because the iPod wouldn’t ship for years yet. But it had a CD player and a tape player, not to mention weather band radio. (Weather band radio is really dull.)

Luckily, I had obtained my first digital camera nine months before Fighterjet, so I was able to document the car pretty well.

The month I brought Fighterjet home, I went to Macworld Expo in New York City. It was the first of five such expos in New York (and that was a particularly whirlwind trip), but it was even more memorable for a big product introduction: the original bondi blue iMac. Fighterjet, meanwhile, was “Rio red.”

Hearing about the color of my car, Kristi laughed and said, “Oh, it’s pull-me-over red!” I got exactly one ticket with Fighterjet.

The Sabres had only been to the Stanley Cup Finals once in their history when I started driving Fighterjet. Now, they’ve been there twice. And had a few conference finals appearances, too. (Did Aaron and I drive Fighterjet to that playoff game with Philly? The one that created the wall of sound in the atrium of HSBC Arena? Correction: Aaron says it was this game against Ottawa.)

I drove to a lot of Ultimate games in Fighterjet. Cleaning it out, I had a regulation Frisbee in the trunk. Along with a wiffle bat and some wiffle balls — you never know when an impromptu game would break out.

I spent one long day in Fighterjet, stuck on the New York State Thruway (I-90) for about 15 hours, one winter. There was a big snowstorm. Some of you lived through it with me, and others have probably heard me talk about it, so I don’t think I need to say more. At least that time, I was prepared.

That incident taught me that if you can’t tell your car from other snow-covered cars in the vicinity, you should probably stay home.

Fighterjet drove through a lot of snow, and barely broke a sweat over it. There were a few close calls, though. Once, I hydroplaned through the turn from 96 onto 332 — no wheels gripped, they only slipped. There was one Christmas morning, driving to Cuba, where we spun 180 degrees together; thank goodness the next car was so far behind us. Another morning, going to work and sliding slowly, sideways, into and kissing a (thankfully) snow-packed guardrail.

I didn’t have a cell phone when I bought Fighterjet.

Baxter was in Fighterjet when I hit my second deer with the car, and, as a dog, he was pretty freaked out by the sudden ordeal. I really thought that was the end of the line, but the insurance didn’t total the car. I haven’t taken Baxter with me to get take out since, as I recall.

The car got its name from the view I got sitting in the driver’s seat, looking back through my regular and oddball lane-changer mirrors. It reminded me of the rearview cameras you see in fighter jet films on TV, looking back on the tail of the plane. Dumb, yes, but I couldn’t think of a better name.

I can’t remember how many sets of tires I put on the thing. The first one involved a lot of anxiety while reading reviews on the Tire Rack Web site. The Dunlop Sport SP2s, later, were utter flops.

Fighterjet helped me move between apartments and houses. Thrice. And, I think it helped move Lloyd’s family once, and maybe others. I forget.

I drove it to Pittsburgh and the Adirondacks and other places, but I also think of destinations I never went.

After giving up this car, I wonder how many cars I have left in me. How many more will I own? My sense of mortality is briefly heightened.

I miss Fighterjet, but it was time to move on. I feel like I’ve abandoned a friend — but that’s silly. Hopefully that feeling will fade, because, after all … it was just a car.

The Lullabot Web site has a clever way to help answer the question of “Is that site running Drupal?” Angie Byron mentions that the HTTP “Expires” header returned by Drupal corresponds to a specific default date. Look for that date in the HTTP headers, and you can make a reasonable guess that a site is a Drupal site — or at least one that hasn’t modified one of the core files.

Some commenters posted notes about how to do the same thing with wget and then curl. I expanded on the curl instructions to make them a little more robust (especially in the case of redirects or URL rewriting), and here’s the result:

$ curl -fsIL http://jaharmi.com/ 2>&1 | grep -q -m 1 "Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT" && echo "Yes, this appears to be a Drupal site." || echo "No, this does not appear to be a Drupal site."
Yes, this appears to be a Drupal site.

Aaron Hall noted on the MacEnterprise list that the font caches in Leopard “seem to be under /var/folders now, but you can manipulate them with the cool new atsutil in Leopard.”

The atsutil command is quite an interesting find to me, so I wanted to point it out.

Both Safari and Terminal gained drag and drop repositioning of tabs in Leopard. (True, Safari 3 also installs on Tiger as well as Microsoft Windows, but I’ve only used the new tab features under Leopard.) Since there has been discussion of the gestures required to reorder tabs within a window vs. drag them into new windows entirely, I wondered if the same was true for Terminal. (See Safari’s tab dragging modes and Safari 3.0: Dragging tabs up or down to move them sideways for more.)

Sure enough, I see the same results:

• The first tab in a Terminal window can be reordered, made into a new window, or added to an existing window by dragging up, down, or left — but not to the right.
• Dragging any other tab left or right as the first gesture only lets me reorder the tab within the same window.
• Dragging any other tab up or down as the first gesture only lets me move it to a new window or add it as a tab in an existing window. Unlike in Safari — where a thumbnail of a Web page is rendered for drag and drop — I see an entire Terminal window rendered transparently at full size until it is dropped in the new location.

So, perhaps there is some grand design at work here, and this odd user interface is actually intentional. (It’ll probably get tied to some multi-touch trackpad action soon, right?)

Frankly, I had utterly ignored drag and drop tabs in Safari. This feature didn’t work in older versions of the app and only appeared in Safari 3, so I hadn’t yet adjusted to it. The recent article on tag dragging modes at Daring Fireball comes about a week after my own interest in the feature suddenly piqued.

So, yes, drag and drop for tabs appeared relatively late in Safari’s development. I fail to use this feature even though I’ve wanted it for a long time. Together, these facts buttress my conviction that certain features need to be in a product on day one, or they will not get used. I refer to this as the “PageMaker window” problem, for it wasn’t until PageMaker 6-ish that you could open up more than one document at a time in PageMaker. By that time, I’d been using PageMaker for long enough that I had user interface scar tissue built up around the single-window limitation. Even though I had a feature I wanted, it was left unused most of the time.

Even if I did want to use tag drag and drop, its behavior in Safari is weird. I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to understand what was going on if it hadn’t been for the DF post. Or, at least, I wouldn’t have realized there were different modes at all. (It’s like user-interface-by-Zork-text-adventure. You have to discover the odd set of steps — which make some sense in hindsight — that drops the critical key from the keyhole onto the placement you’ve carefully slid under the door.)

My own experience with Safari 3 has shown that if the tab is the leftmost one in a Safari window, dragging it in any direction results in both the inter- and intra-window drag behavior described on DF. That’s the only tab position that works in this manner, though.

I also thought that holding down Option or Command during a drag would make a difference; I could swear that happened last week when I tried drag and drop, but I must be wrong. I can’t reproduce it today.

Update: There’s an older article at Betalogue that describes tab drag and drop, and mentions the behavior of the first tab.

If you read the reviews of the MagSafe power adapters on the Apple Store, many people are talking about their connectors fraying, melting, and otherwise developing dangerous damage. Quite a few of those posting reviews seem to want a recall.

I carry one of these around, so it’s worrisome.

I wonder how prevalent this problem really is. The power adapters are one of the lowest-rated items I come across in the store and they are heavily reviewed. Out of 471 reviews for the 85W model, the average is two out of five stars.

The Console utility has significantly changed in Leopard. I was going to write a post about that after Leopard’s fall release, but I don’t think I ever got to it.

In any case, Peter Hosey has written a much better article than I would have anyway, because he clearly knows more than I do about the Apple System Logger (ASL) facility. Please check it out, along with his entire series of posts about ASL.

I told Mike, via Curtis: “MacBook Air: It’s what left in your pocket if you buy one.”

I don’t like this price, $1799. Although it may sell, I don’t see the value proposition. At a different price, maybe.

I’m sure it’s really cool in person and a status symbol type of product … but we’ve had one of those in the Mac lineup already recently, and it was called the Power Macintosh G4 Cube. (I was there at the keynote when it was introduced. I have the “actual size” poster. I’ve got a Post-I™ on the poster which adds “Actual product lifespan: 11 months.”)

Maybe Apple’s recent history of defying sense and logic with its increasing sales will continue with this notebook. They sell more Macs than ever before, after doing very little to update the lineup since before the Intel Macs debuted. I don’t get it.

I want Apple’s system prices to go down, rather than up, but they’ve gone up lately. In 2008, we’ve seen a thin $1799 laptop, and an eight-core Mac Pro that costs $300 more than it did last year.

The MacBook Air also has an interesting set of compromises: no FireWire, one USB 2.0 port, no built-in Ethernet (although with a USB Ethernet adapter optional), no accessible components, and integrated battery. It’s almost a sys admin’s nightmare, unless I’m missing something.

Oh, and boo on the new acronym: “MBA.”

I spent some time with an agent on the online sales chat in the Apple Store last night. I had a few questions about the new Mac Pro models, and I got some interesting answers quickly. I’d recommend using the online sales chat if you have questions about your Mac purchase.

First, I wanted to know if both the Radeon HD 2600 XT and the GeForce 8800 GT had display rotation support. This is more useful to me now that I have a display that can rotate. As it turns out, both cards do support this.

Second, I asked about the AirPort Extreme card, which is a BTO option, because I wanted to know if it could be added later as a customer installable part. (Some items are not installable in Apple computers by customers, unless you want to void the warranty. The list of items varies by model and you can never assume that even commodity parts like RAM and hard disks are CIP. To my knowledge, there’s no Apple Web page that collects this information.) The Wi-Fi card can only be added at build time, or by an Apple authorized service center later. On the plus side, I noted in the specs that it supports 802.11n as well as the a, b, and g standards.

As for the increased cost of the Mac Pro’s only off-the-shelf configuration, the agent did bring up that the minimum RAM had been increased to 2 GB, the default hard disk had grown from 250 to 320 GB, and the processor had jumped from a dual 2.66 to a quad 2.8 GHz CPU. These are all fine and good, but the model that was for sale on Monday was the same model that went on sale in August 2006. Due to the relentless march of technological advancement I’d expect something better in January 2008, and not necessarily with this price increase.

I’m still going to wait to see what comes out at Macworld Expo next week. The price increase on the Mac Pro makes me wonder whether room was being made for something new between the professional tower and the Mac mini / iMac models. I’m still one of those people who remember with fondness that at one point, Power Mac G4 towers were reasonable options for home computers, with a starting price around $1199. Ever since the Power Mac G5, this economical option for an expandable system has been lost.

I got a new monitor at home. I broke down at the CompUSA going out of business sale, spotting a deal I was happy with, and bought the Gateway FPD2485W. It’s a flat panel LCD monitor I’ve been eyeing for a while and the price was acceptable. I was willing even though I was leery of purchasing an expensive new display without the possibility of return (“absolutely no returns,” CompUSA’s signs read) and without having a modern computer to connect it to.

See, eventually I’d like to get something like a Mac Pro with a large display. Actually, I’d like to have a computer that could handle two large DVI flat panels, just for the overkill factor.

I like the 1920×1200 resolution on the 24-inch LCD panel. I think the picture quality is excellent; compared to other 24-inch monitors on the shelf at Best Buy when I first discovered it, I felt it was the best. I like that it is supposed to handle HDCP for HD content; that makes it more future-proof in my mind, along with its bevy of digital and analog ports, including component video. It doesn’t hurt that its design gets out of the way, looks similar to a black plastic version of Apple’s aluminum flat panel monitors, practically glides on its elevation-and-swivel stand, and has a 90-degree screen rotation feature. It’s also wider than my chest!

I had concerns yesterday evening after unboxing it. The on-screen display (OSD) controls were driving me nuts; Gateway had decided to equip the monitor with touch-sensitive controls, and they weren’t responding well to my commands. The response was sluggish and instead of the main menu, I kept getting the Product Tour popping up on-screen when I pressed the admittedly-cool blue-backlit “buttons” that dim when not in use. Things were going so badly with these buttons that I wished with a sour feeling that I hadn’t gotten the monitor. I filed a support request with Gateway while I attempted to sort it out myself — because I knew that they wouldn’t care if I couldn’t get it working with a five-year-old Power Mac.

Today, I hooked the monitor up via VGA to my Athlon PC — and even though it has a similar GeForce 4MX card as the Power Mac I tried yesterday, using DVI, the OSD controls worked! Trying it on the Mac again, it appeared to work with both VGA and DVI.

However, I still haven’t quite figured out whether it plays nicely with the Energy Saver settings on the Mac and I still haven’t decided on VGA or DVI. I have some quibbles with its operation in both modes, but that could be due to the old computers or the Belkin KVM that’s in the loop. I’m hoping when I get a new computer, this will all work itself out.

It’s when, not if, that we plan to get a new computer. I just don’t see the point of getting today’s Mac Pro towers, when they may be replaced at any minute. But, in the meantime, this display makes me feel as if we already have a new computer; it’s bright enough to light up the room it’s in. It reinforcing my view that a good display, especially one with a higher resolution, can really change your computing experience.

I plan to write a full review at Epinions in a bit.

Update 03/08/2008: Just for reference, I did get a second one … along with a more modern computer.