News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • MacWorld was disappointing.

    Ok, I know, I know, the iPhone was cool. Of course, unless they actually make the SDK for it available, it’s basically a non-starter. I don’t care how amazing they are, if you can’t get eReader for it, it’s useless to me.

    The thing is though, I guess in the rush to make the “vision clear” for the iPhone (complete with company name change!), they steamrollered a bunch of things that I do care about. What happened to the disclosure of the rest of the new features in Leopard? What about the ’07 versions of iLife and iWork? the 8-core Mac Pro? the commitment to gaming? [ok, I didn’t really expect that one]

    Honestly, I’m pretty disillusioned with Apple Inc. right now. Just as they actually started to look like they might be truly back in the personal computer game, they decide to make it perfectly clear how little they care about the Mac.

    And you know what? It’s not going to be clear sailing for them in the other markets they’ve decided to play in. Microsoft’s mediacenter story is nasty, but at least it actually plays TV. It’s also improving at a ferocious rate; the whole SideShow thing looks very cool.

    And for that matter everything plays MP3s now. There are already devices out there that are nicer than the current generation of iPods. I’ve gone on record as stating that iTunes is not going to rule that world for much longer, and I still believe that. The industry (and even consumers) are not going to stand for that kind of monopoly long term.

    So where does that leave us hardcore Mac fans? Your guess is as good as mine. Hopefully, they won’t forget about us completely. 🙁

  • Um… speaking of craplets

    It seems like Microsoft is so worried about how fragile Vista will be that they are pre-explaining that you may have problems if you run uncertified applications on it — despite that fact these applications worked fine on XP. For more info, see…

    ‘Craplets’ could damage Vista launch: Microsoft exec

  • I can see I’m off to a good start this year.

    To make up for being late again here’s two links-of-the-day…

    In honour of the Stevenote at MacWorld Expo, here are a couple of sites that will have live updates starting today, 9am Pacific.

    MacRumors.com – Live Event Coverage
    Live from Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs keynote

    The Macworld article is still live as of the time of this edit, but not the MacRumors content (although the site is still up).

  • Off by one (day) error

    Today’s er… Monday link-of-the-day is for those of you who want further illumination on the shallowness of pop culture:

    The Top Ten Lamest Superheroes of all Time

    (My favourite is Dog Welder.)

  • Man, what a party.

    Actually, I went to bed early; four days of snowboarding had caught up with me. Deb and Dennis went over to Stacey and Randy’s place for the traditional get together.

    Happy New Years everyone.

  • Just me’n the boys…

    … hanging out in Ironforge. 🙂

    (First use of “Force of Nature”)

  • This kind of excitement we can do without!

    Dennis is doing snowboarding TA training this week. He was at the top of the hill for his third run of the day, putting on his board, when the binding came apart in his hand. Yikes! Good thing he wasn’t riding at the time.

    Then he walks back down the hill with his instructor, and half way down the hill he sees his cousin (Tim) sitting in the snow, holding his hand and crying. It turns out he’s broken his wrist. Double yikes! He’s at CHEO getting it set as I write this.

    Let’s hope the rest of the season is less eventful.

    Update: Apparently it was a double break. The poor guy :-(. (I’m going to have to apologize to Stacey. Based on Dennis’ description, I downplayed the seriousness of it when I talked to her.)

  • Notes from the day after Christmas

    Deb likes her laptop.

    I unfortunately couldn’t convince her to go for a MacBook Pro, so I ended up getting her a Dell: 2GHz Core2Duo, 2Gig RAM, 160Gig drive, ATI X1400 grapics (256Meg), 6 hour battery. It really is a pretty nice machine. My task for the day is to move over everything she cares about from her old one. So far, I’ve moved her favourites, her email and address book, and her iTunes library. Now it gets more subtle…

    I got an 80Gig iPod video.

    I already had a library of movies that I had ripped — yes, from my own DVDs — to watch on my LifeDrive, so I just dropped them all into VisualHub and told it to convert them for use on the iPod; 12 hours and 20 Gig later, I’m all set. The screen is small, but it’s perfectly acceptable for my use.

    Dennis got lots of cool stuff…

    … as usual — games for both the PC and 360, a wireless 360 controller, a new snow skate, a marshmallow gun,… — but the gift he liked the best was a $2 rubber tube that you blow into to make farting noise. sigh.
    We had Christmas day dinner (mid-day meal) at my parents place.
    Excellent use of turkey. We got a chance to see Sonny and Edna for the first time in quite a while. They’re both looking well, although Sonny was down with a bit of cold. We spent the rest of the afternoon pigging out [For those that like it, no one does deserts like my family!], opening presents, playing games and chatting. What more could you want?

    The best of the season to one and all

  • Monday link-of-the-day (pre-Christmas edition)

    Not sure if I’m going to be posting tomorrow, so I thought I’d get the link-of-the-day out today. If ever there was a reason to buy a Mac, this is it:

    A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

    Read this one.

  • Music to blow speakers to

    Ken just posted the tracks from Friday’s jam session to his blog. If you’re interested, go have a listen.

    Since he doesn’t have comments enabled, and I wanted to comment :-), I figured I’d do so here. Anyone else with something to say can pile on this post’s comment section.

    First off, I want to thank Ken for going through the pain of producing individual tracks from it. I particularly like the name choices. Having names on the tracks almost makes it seem like we intended to do them. 😉

    My personal favorites are “Oh Ah”, “Float Me” and “Worst Bar”.

    I also think the recording quality is surprisingly good. I clearly would have benefitted from having better amplification, although given how long it’s been since I last played (keyboards) with anyone, I think it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t too loud.