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Note: The official U2.com setlist for the Houston concert omits “Old Man River”.

Fig. 1. We learned that Edge travelled back in time from the future to end up in Dublin in time to meet up with U2. When asked about the future, he says only that it’s “better”.

Oh. My. God.

As far away as you are from me, right now? That’s how far I was from Edge.

Bono explained that Edge comes from the planet Zootopia, and when his spaceship landed in north Dublin in the 70s, it made a peculiar four-note sound, which now precedes “Miracle Drug.”

We were also treated to “Fast Cars” with a grito, “Miss Sarajevo” (Bono’s been brushing up on his Italian), and “Old Man River”.

Catching up this week quickly: working on a GUI to make FeedTree easier to use on Windows and Mac OS; lectured COMP 210 again this morning, and didn’t entirely botch it; leaving in an hour or so to catch U2 at the Toyota Center. (1 2 3 14!)

I just spent hours discovering that you should never, ever use setAction() on a JMenuItem on Mac OS X. The end result is an empty menu (that is, no text in it at all). Why? Who knows. (The correct answer is to use setActionCommand() and addActionListener().) Unfortunately, this same fix does not seem to fix my empty JButton, which will not show its label no matter how hard I try. Update: Wait, no, this fixes the button, too. GRAR!

Write a million times, run nowhere!

Why is it that the network always goes down during lunch, when there are no IT people around?

Ugh. So I guess I’m not the only one who sees TextWrangler/BBEdit grind to a halt after a while on Tiger. I used Activity Monitor to sample TextWrangler during some selection events and saw a lot of ugly busy-waiting around the system font cache, which would tend to corroborate Bare Bones’ claim that there’s a bug in OS X.