my so-called blog (redux)

Stuff and things. Gas prices suck, and therefore I’m looking for new housing. Which also sucks. Laziness means I don’t really want to be bothered with moving. I also gave in and tried one of those subscription-based music services - I’ve got an account on Rhapsody now. I’m actually liking it pretty well; they have a lot more music than I do, and a good selection of the more off-the-wall stuff I like. (That was a concern of mine. I don’t really much care for the top-40 kinda stuff. There’s plenty of that on here, but right now I’m playing some Belle and Sebastian.) I’ve kinda come around to the idea of subscription music; it’s a good way to find things, and it’s inexpensive enough that it’s worth paying for. It definitely doesn’t beat actually buying and having a copy of the thing though - if the internet goes down then I can’t get on rhapsody, and CDs have better sound quality than rhapsody (though I’ll admit to probably not being able to notice). Yep.

I’ve been playing with the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution a bit in a VM. It’s neat, you can make layers and install software in them. The layers are kept independant of your actual system so any changes the application makes (including you saving files) are kept seperate of the system as a whole. So, I had an idea: there needs to be a portable version of SVS. Then, you could make any application portable. Just take the
portable SVS and your exported layer with you and there you are.

Stuff and/or things. I’ve been way too interested in not doing anything productive lately. I did manage to actually finish a book - on a whim, I got a copy of High Fidelity and Sideways - and am halfway through the other. High Fidelity was great, and now I need to read more of his stuff. Sideways is a good bit different than the movie in a good number of areas, but that’s the one I haven’t finished yet.

Apple released Boot Camp a few days ago. I think this with the Parallels beta that’s out give me enough ammunition to justify an Intel iMac for my work PC. I’m honestly way more interested in Parallels, because dual-booting is too klumsy. Plus, I tried Parallels out on my home PC (which is a piece of crap Athlon 2400+ with a $25 motherboard) and it’s actually a really good performer. It seems to work better than VMWare Server Beta on the same hardware. 20″ iMac plus Dell 2007FPW equals much goodness.