The Sims 2

Quite a time sink, isn't it?

A question to those more Sim-knowledgeable than me: I seem to be missing something in my experiment family's (Lisa and Jane Experiment, a happily married couple) kitchen. When I tell them to clean up some food that's been left on the floor, they yell about something that looks like a refrigerator and then they put the stuff back in the floor. But they have a fridge. That's where the food came from to begin with! So what is it they want?

ETA: angharad_gov figured out that they couldn't get to the garbage bin. So now the Experiments have a clean kitchen.

New iMac impressions

So, I've had the new machine up and running for a day now. What's it like, compared to the old one?

To be honest, I didn't expect much of a difference at all. I was looking at buying more RAM for the old one when Jenny started talking about wanting one and I got a bunch of vacation days paid out in cash. So I thought, what the heck? Why not just buy a new one and give the old one to Jenny? I got it in February, so it's not like it's outdated quite yet. A new one I can get with more RAM, and it'll have a little faster CPU and a little better graphics. And Tiger pre-installed.

In theory, the new machine has half again as much RAM as the old one (1.5GB against 1GB), 0.3GHz higher CPU speed and a considerably fancier video card. Given that, it feels much faster than I expected. This is probably a combination of the RAM in this one being faster (it's DDR2 instead of DDR), the video card being faster and Tiger being faster.

As for OSX 10.4, it's not that different from 10.3 and the reviews I've read pretty much told the truth. Spotlight is much less useful than it might be. On the other tentacle, I find Dashboard more useful than I expected to. And, even more strange, I actually like Apple's new Mighty Mouse.

For those out there who might some day use OSX's FireWire personality-tranfer functionality to clone an old Mac to a new one: it doesn't copy /usr/local or any changes you made by hand under /etc. It did copy everything I had stuffed under /opt, though, so I can't really figure out why it didn't take /usr/local too.

Sims2 philosophical question

Does it really count as a cheat when it's clearly described in the manual? Even if the manual itself calls it a cheat?