白鷺

Well, hopefully the UTF-8 encoding will work and you should see the title as characters and not squares. I guess it doesn't help a whole lot unless you know enough Chinese/Japanese to actually read them, but hey, you should be able to guess at the meaning of the second character from the main radical, and if you don't know the first character, there's not much hope for you.

In the tradition of naming my gadgets and things after mecha, I was searching for a fitting name for my newly acquired Macbook Air. I had decided to leave my previous laptop named Scherazade (no, not that Scheherazade) even though my reborn desktop from 2005 retained Escaflowne as moniker. That left open the possibility of some names from more recent mecha anime that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, the names in those were not nearly as interesting. (Sure, Fafner's not bad, but it does derive its name from a dwarf-turned-evil-dragon.) Ikaruga is certainly nice, but somehow does not quite capture the obscurity and coolness I desire. Luckily, I was able to flip through my Yasushi Suzuki artbook to find that the ship preceding Ikaruga, is, Shirasagi.

白鷺 literally refers to a white heron, so it does give the connotation of a bright, sleek, bird. And to go along with the name, I grabbed a nice photo of Himeji-jou off of Flickr, since, as the wikipedia entry points out, "It is occasionally known as Hakurojou or Shirasagijou because of its brilliant white exterior."

And then I went and named the Windows partition Ikaruga. (you know, because of the whole dark-light duality metaphor?)

Anyway, I installed a bunch of 3rd-party software and hacks to make everything the way I wanted, even though OS X is pretty nice already.

1. hacked the menu bar to not be translucent (Apple later made this an option in 10.5.2, but the look is slightly different.)

2. hacked Mail.app to display three panes in a horizontal format, rather than having the message body and list of messages in a vertically arranged column.

3. installed SIMBL and other hacks in order to get the colors in Terminal so that the blue on black would be readable.

4. installed quicksilver and visor

5. grabbed a copy of Papers

6. Adium, of course

7. growl, even though Leopard isn't properly supported yet

8. wait patiently for MailStamps to be updated for Leopard so that I don't have to deal with Mail.app's stupid buttons.