my so-called blog (redux)

So comcast sucks, and now I have DSL. Yay, 3mbit! I ordered 6. Interwebs suck.

so made it up north quite OK, though with a handy dandy cold. got a really nice set of Grado Labs headphones (who coincidentally also have the shittiest website ever). every time I move up a notch it’s an “omg no way” move - I can hear recording booth echo in stuff now, and it’s awesome. can’t wait to try it on some real CDs. hell, I may have to switch to APE or FLAC encoding now.

I did manage to find one thing that’s been pissing me off a good bit since I saw it. there are some anti-Net Neutrality ads playing implying that it’d cost more for me to actually use Google rather than whatever my ISP deems appropriate. the ads are so bad it’s laughable, but it’s not like there’s a counterpoint being offered in the public media. so, now I have a cause.

so I got an iMac a few days ago.. it’s pretty decent, I’m enjoying it. It has a bad hard drive but I have a firewire enclosure that I wasn’t using so it all works out, really. I really need to get rid of some other stuff now, though. Still have 2 PCs that I could be divested of.

I also added a last.fm tracker to my blog. Since they do personalized charts and all, I’m thinking of going through every week and seeing what it is I’ve been listening to and then coming up with a paragraph or two on whatever the standout act is there. It’d get me to write in this thing more often, if nothing else.

So I think I might go ahead and get ridda a whole bunch of toys I have. I’ve got this XBox I never use and two computers I could part with pretty easily (a 1GHz Celeron and a 2GHz Pentium 4). Heck, I may even get rid of my decent PC - I have a Sempron 2800+ that I only really use for TiVo transfers. I have a whole room dedicated to computer stuff that I’m hardly ever in nowadays (though there’s a lot of stuff in there, much of it not stuff I’d want to part with) so getting rid of all this crap would be nice. Plus, I could buy more shiny afterwards.

So I think NaNoWriMo is a complete failure for me, as I haven’t actually bothered writing anything. Maybe next year, when I’m not so freakin busy.

So I got some new toys - through work managed to get a nicer PowerBook than the one I had. The new one’s a 1.5GHz G4 as opposed to my 1.0GHz TiBook, and has a full 512MB more RAM and 20GB more disk space too (the old was 1GB and 60GB, the new 1.5 and 80). I lose out in SuperDrive but win in warranty. I also got a first-gen white iBook - a 500MHz/128MB machine with nary but a DVD reader (no burning at all!) and an additional 128MB SODIMM. I DIY’ed an Orinoco card into it and scrounged up some more RAM and now it’s a pretty nice machine. I’m pretty amazed at how usable this thing is, given that I have OS X on it and all. The Orinoco card, being quite a bit longer than the reg. Airport card, gives my keyboard a bit of a bulge, though, but it’s still usable. I got a freakin’ awesome deal on both machines, and I’m very happy with them both. (The TiBook still worked well but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and you can sorta feel it. I’m sure the iBook will feel worse once I start trying to play music on it.) Now I want to see if I can scare up some cash for a 20″ widescreen monitor and/or a laptop stand - then I could use the new G4 as my desktop too. I’m kinda thinking of tasking the iBook as a development box, since it draws very little power (45wt) and I can have the stuff I need on it. It’s not terribly fast but it really doesn’t have to be, either. I’m going to start using my PCs less and less, I think..

Speaking of toys, I need to get rid of my Xbox. Doesn’t do me a whole lot of good.. I haven’t turned it on in like 4 months.

“What would I not do to Tommy Lee.” Recorded for posterity.

I wanna get a new phone; so far I can’t decide between the Nokia 6103 or the Samsung T509 (both through T-Mobile).

So I read a fairly interesting article on Apple’s enterprise strategy (or, rather, their lack of it). It reminded me that I really want Apple to put some more effort into their enterprise IT offerings. There’s a few neat things there - Apple Remote Desktop is cool, and it’s good they’re starting to implement policy into Open Directory - but I think it really needs to be fleshed out. Leopard’s going to introduce a lot of new stuff, but I still feel like Microsoft is eating Apple’s lunch in the enterprise. Furthermore, I think that if Apple really seriously put some resources into it and played catchup for a while, they could have pretty much everything MS has in their Exchange and Active Directory products - except I believe Apple’d make it easier to use and manage. I just kinda wish they’d go ahead and do it already. I’m impatient though - it really has taken them a few years to refine their consumer apps (the iLife suite) into something that’s truly a joy for your average home user to use and to get it out under enough noses that people start to realise what the value of all these products are. Maybe it’ll be the same with the enterprise stuff, though I do still see a lot missing there.

In other news, I saw the the most awesomest show I’ve seen in quite some time the other night - highly recommended if they’re in your area, even if you don’t really do the subject matter of their music (it’s based on MegaMan, and I never was into it but the show was still freakin’ awesome). Also, congratulations to Pedro and his new arrival!

So wow. “storm passing” kinda didn’t make it - seems to be now, though. The flea problem seems to be subsiding - an aside, if you hadn’t heard: after we got back from Tupelo the house had a whole bunch of fleas in it. Bombed it a couple times and it seems to be ok now. On the plus side, I had a good excuse to mop the floors and rent a rug doctor for the furniture.

I’ve also gotten a TiVo. A bit late to the bandwagon, maybe, but here I is! I kinda wish I had gotten it sooner, as it’s really cool and also functional at the same time. It’s almost Mac-like in how it takes care of little things. Frex, when you fast-forward through commericals, all you have to do it hit the play button when you see your show and it bonks back to the beginning to the show. There’s even a nice API and a Web services sort of thing for it too. Kicks the crap out of the DVR Comcast provides.

So we all managed to survive the first week or two of classes (sorta). Just gotta hedge my bets against the spring semester.. Got the power bill for last month and it’s just as high as it was for July, which is disappointing. I don’t think it’ll actually go down for winter, since winter means gas heating which means expensive even if it’s not used very much.

I think I’m switching back to my Sony Ericsson phone - I like my Nokia but I kinda missed my T610. Just need to get a bluetooth headset for it. Speaking of, there aren’t enough stereo models - I got pretty used to having a stereo headset for the Nokia (it came with one since it has an FM radio in it, which I’ve used maybe twice), and it makes it a lot easier for me to hear what’s going on when on the phone. Only motorola seems to make a stereo bluetooth headset that’ll work with a phone, though, and it’s priced high enough to make me not want to buy it (since I’ll want to use it as headphones and be disappointed when they suck at it).

One thing I’ve found recently that’s pretty neat: Wineass, where some kinda whino-y dude reviews cheap wines. Fun and educationalable.

No longer on vacation. (Since yesterday, actually.. I got bored.) My new computer and such came in - work ordered me a nice one - and I am very happy with it. Wish the battery life was a bit better though.

I also managed to find this. It’s one of the earliest Web browsers for Unix around - predates Mosaic, even, and has a whole bunch of neat features that kinda foreshadow how everything’s going today, including scripting support, early concepts of style sheets, in-page apps, etc. Kinda neat from a historical perspective, as it’s from a time when Motif was a good thing.