48 today (ugh!), but guess what was on my front step when I got home: My XO!
More info once I’ve had a chance to play with it. Yes, I’m using it to send this.
Author: adminmcq
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MacBook Air
So the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and I must say, there wasn’t really anything that thrilled me. A new NAS? I guess. But they’re awfully late to the table, and it’s not cheap. Movie rentals? Not in Canada. An upgrade to get mail on the Touch? Great! But wait, you want to charge for it, even though it’s going to be free on all new ones sold? Come on!
And then there’s the MacBook Air. Am I the only person who thinks this is way too expensive? It’s got only an 80Gig HD, no optical drive, no wired ethernet, only one USB port, no Firewire and a significantly slower processor than the other Apple laptops. I guess it’s nice that it comes with 2Gig of memory, but you’ll notice that they had to put 2Gig in at the factory, since there’s no way to upgrade it.
Compare it to a black MacBook… Same size screen and the same graphics chip. The MB is cheaper, but it has less memory, so let’s say we upgrade the memory to 2Gig and throw in the 250Gig HD — we still only come up to the price of the MBA. And the MB does have an optical drive, a firewire port, a second USB port and a 2.0GHz processor (vs. 1.6GHz on the MBA).
I’m sorry, but making it thin around the edges and backlighting the keyboard is not enough compensation for those limitations. Essentially, no one should buy the MacBook Air.
Update: OMFG, it doesn’t even have a user replaceable battery! WTF?
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This. Is. Horrendous.
What these people are doing to innocent children is abhorrent. Accepting this behaviour would be well beyond religious tolerance; It’s cult brainwashing at its absolute worst. For God’s sake, can we not take these poor kids away from their sadly misguided parents before it’s too late?
(Yes, I realize it’s not a new documentary.)
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Pakenham
For the last few years, my family has been getting season passes at Mount Pakenham. It’s not a big hill, but it’s close, the people are friendly, and (as Dennis likes to remind me) the terrain park is awesome. Well, the park isn’t open yet, but things definitely looked promising when we were up this weekend. There were three runs open, and lots of snow on the remaining ones. Maybe next week.
Now all I have to do is get back in shape, so I can do more than six runs before collapsing in exhaustion. Oh well, the season is young. Here’s a Treo shot from the lift on Sunday. See. Snow! 🙂
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The Golden Compass
Apologies, but it seems that both of the CBC links in this article are gone. now — a reminder of why article permanence is important!
What kind of a world gives us both this…
…and this…
To my eye, it seems like there is a distinct lack of forthrightness here on the part of either the board, the original person requesting the “review” or both. The fact that nobody involved is willing to discuss why the review was requested seems like an obvious attempt to deflect the natural criticism that this situation would engender.
And it’s clear what the situation is: The Golden Compass specifically targets the myths of Christianity and inverts them, providing a clear “what if” scenario that, heaven forbid (sic), might actually cause young people to think about their beliefs.
Well, we can’t have that!
It’s time for us to realize, as a species, that ignorance is never the answer. By all means, talk to your child about the books. Remind him that they are fiction. Heck, if you’re feeling especially daring, discuss whether the world would be significantly different if what the books describe were real.
Whatever you do though, don’t hide the books from your kids. If their faith is so fragile that The Golden Compass can disrupt it, then perhaps there’s a bigger picture you need to be considering.
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10.5.1 broke my FW audio.
Not sure whether the consensus in the community is that 10.5.1 is better than 10.5, but several of the problems that hit me personally were not fixed, and I developed a new one: Now, my firewire audio interface disappears at random intervals using the built-in drivers, and attempts to run the official Yamaha ones were unsuccessful. bah! (and again I say, bah!).
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Bah, 10.5 just blows.
Originally, this post contained links to several other blogs that reported problems with 10.5, but sadly they were all gone when I checked the links.
Ok, I’m clearly not the only person who is having problems with Leopard. But I have to say this is the worst Mac OS upgrade I’ve been through. Everything from random messages filling up the system logs (in at least two variations), to incompatibilities, to things that are just plain busted (e.g. neither Back to my Mac nor Time Machine work for me).
I just spent another two hours fighting to get my (Apple) iSight camera to work again — this even though it had already been working since I upgraded.
I really can’t keep wasting this much time on something that isn’t adding significant value. If things don’t stabilize soon, I’m going to have to downgrade to 10.4 again. And if you want to talk about something that would dissipate the Reality Distortion Field, boy, that would be it.
Aside: On my MBP I did a straight upgrade, but I did a complete HD wipe and re-install on the server. Neither one is working well.
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Reason 4.0
I picked up the Reason 4.0 upgrade this week. If you’re looking to do this, and you live in Ottawa, I heartily recommend ordering it directly from the Propellerhead store: I saw it on sale at one Ottawa music store for $299, but I got mine direct from Propellerhead for US$142, including shipping. That’s a particularly good deal given the current strength of the Canadian dollar. It also took less than a week to get here.
In honour of the upgrade, here’s a little piece I pulled together from several copies of the new-for-Reason-4.0 “Thor” synthesizer, a couple of Rex loops and a little help from my friend Alex 😉 …
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Well, that was painful.
We’re back!
It took longer than it should have because I decided to do a full wipe and re-install on the server. Aside from some complexity around getting PHP and MySQL to agree on where the MySQL socket was, this wasn’t too bad. [Ok, I admit it, it sucked big time.] I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it for a while yet (and re-installing a ton of random apps), but at least the sites are back up.
Another contributing factor to the delay was that, for some unknown reason, my internet connection decided to start being flaky on Friday. Now, if this had happened after I got Leopard, I could have blamed it on my messing around, but it actually started the morning before I started making any changes. In any case, as of now, I seem to be getting dropped once a day (at least), and left in a state where it takes several minutes before I can connect again. I’m not sure what’s up here, but it’s (obviously) playing havoc with my DNS address, so if you’re having trouble finding mikew.ca, at least you’ll know why.
