snow!

I just shoveled the blizzard in front of my house and measured a 27 inch snow wall on either side of the sidewalk. The backyard is even higher. My car looks like a giant snow mound. Everything is shut down including the post office. The snow is still coming down so we may be inside for a while… Crazy!

the iPhone is released… but not by apple!

I guess everyone can calm down about the iPhone. Turns out Cisco has owned the name for a while now and decided to cash in on the hype.

So my question is, does Apple even care? It seems like they would have bought the name from Cisco a long time a go if it was such a big deal. And why do I care? Yeah, I’m an Apple fan but I hate cell phones. It’s probably the only piece of tech that bores me stupid. I don’t really care about having a phone that syncs with iCal. I don’t care if it plays iTunes. I don’t even care if it has a cool Apple logo on it. I just want a phone that doesn’t drop my calls. And I have a feeling the Apple phone won’t try to revolutionize signal strength, because signal strength just ain’t sexy.

But now that Apple can’t use the iPhone name I’m totally stoked for an announcement! And just to hear what they’re going to call it! So this time Apple got me to join the hype by NOT doing anything. Foiled again.

ENGADGET LINK

mac pro awesomeness

Today marks one month since my switch to Mac and I have to say it’s pretty freakin sweet. My Windows machine had been pushing 5 years and got me through the second half of college, a ton of corporate video jobs and an HD feature length edit. It’s served it’s time.I’ve wanted to buy a Mac for as long as I can remember. I tried to finance a G4 tower many, many years ago, but alas, my credit at the time wasn’t so top notch. Then, just before I bought my current Windows box, I was ready to buy a desklamp iMac, but one look at Microsoft’s shiny new XP operating system made me think twice. It was a huge step up from Windows 98, which in itself was my sole reason for wanting to buy a Mac. I hated 98. XP had just enough flash to make me realize I could get a great machine for much less money and escape from Windows 98. I found a great deal at Best Buy, and other than being the single worst purchasing exoerience I’ve ever had, it’s been a great computer.So my Mac purchase wasn’t based on any hatred for Windows. In fact, with Vista just around the corner I imagine Apple has some reason to sweat. If Microsoft hadn’t just released XP I would have bought a Mac 5 years ago! I imagine there are many others like myself who want to switch but won’t because Vista will be just enough flash for them to keep using Windows. In 6 months there will be $500 eMachines running Vista and bundled with a printer and flat screen. With that kind of competition Apple’s may lose a fair number of potential switchers, just like it lost me 5 years ago to XP.So for me the operating system wasn’t the main motivator, though I’ve quickly realized how much XP sucks compared to OS X. At this point I’ve had enough time to learn my way around the Mac and I love it. It looks great, it’s simple and it’s clean. The initial setup process was flawless, and I’m constantly finding little tricks here and there that actually make me excited to use an operating system. It’s a weird feeling really. Sure, there are things Id like to change (anyone know how to switch the Command and Control key functions?) but they’re very minor gripes compared to the awesomeness of OS X.So why the switch?First, I needed a new computer. You probably already got that from the intro paragraph.Second, I’m lucky enough to work in video production, and have managed to do everything I need using Sony Vegas 6, Sony DVD Architect, Flash and Photoshop. If you haven’t used Vegas Video to edit, it’s awesome. There’s a small group of industry pros that endorse Vegas, but for the most part no one’s heard of it. Most of my post-production work is done solo. So I can I shoot, edit and author everything from my home office in whatever editing environment I like.But I’ve had several meetings for outside video jobs (from corporate video to TV documentaries) where interviewers questioned why I would use Vegas to do actual work. In fact they would assume I use Final Cut Pro, or possibly Premiere if I was slumming it, but never Vegas. I began to feel like a Vegas spokesperson, going on and on about the ease of use and feature set while they sat there and wrote “unprofessional” on my resume. I realized that given equal demo reels, they would choose a Final Cut editor first, a Premiere editor second, and a Vegas editor never. At my level of production Final Cut is the standard, so it made sense to get on the train (though I haven’t stopped using Vegas altogether, more posts on that later).The third factor was the switch to Intel chips. That made the elusive Mac pricing far less elusive when compared to similarly equipped Windows machines. Even better, it made it possible to run Windows full speed on the Mac, either through Apple’s Boot Camp or right along side OS X through Parallels. That was the biggest motivator right there – running Windows. I imagine a lot of people will use this as a safety net, so if the Mac thing doesn’t work out for them they can always just use it as a Windows machine. For me it means I can continue to run my existing sotware and that all my current editing jobs could be brought over from the old computer (without changing editing environments mid-project). This has paid off in a HUGE way. Running Vegas in Windows on the Mac Pro is an entirely new experience. Very, very fast.So I ordered my first Mac, complete with the Final Cut Studio, Movie Magic Screenwriter, Parallels, a new copy of Windows XP, a couple of Dell monitors and a bunch of other stuff that has me in serious geek heaven. I’ve got lots of post I want to do on different aspects of the new setup, assuming I don’t drown in technology overload.I’m excited to see where Apple will take their computer line in 2007. They’ll probably do something with the new four-core Intel chips (two of those makes an eight core machine!), though I have a very hard time maxing out four cores so I’m not sure having eight will be a huge benefit until software is written to take advantage of all those cores. 

walking table

…

James Kim found dead…

man fakes retardation for 20 years

Funny…

UPDATE – The article was taken offline. Note to self – never link to Local6.com again…

poops mcgee – updated!

Does anyone else wish for a return to a simpler, less bloated Engadget? This is one of my top ten favorite sites. I check it everyday, and sometimes if I’m really slacking, way more than I should. You could even say I’m a Peter Rojas fanboy (which sounds way creepier than it really is, I promise). But they did a redesign recently that I have been trying to come to grips with since it happened. I’ve been trying really hard, but every time I open the site I know it’s going to be work. I know that everything on my computer is going to screech to a halt, and that it’s like I’m surfing on one of those analog modems from War Games.

The major changes were in the way comments are handled and the overall layout. The comments thing is great. Just dandy. But the new layout is set to scale to your browser window. So instead of getting a nice, neat column in the middle of the screen, everything scales to the edges. Besides making it harder to read at a glance, it makes images BIG! And for the pleasure of big pictures it means my browser window won’t scroll properly. Using the scroll wheel on my mouse returns a stuttering screen. The scroll bar in the browser itself takes a while to adjust to the scaling screen and changes sizes a bit until the whole page is loaded, which takes a LONG time. Do I have to wait for the page to load before touching any buttons? Am I upsetting it?

For some reason the site works slightly better in Internet Explorer than Firefox, but I haven’t installed Firefox 2.0 yet so may that will fix some stuff.

I tried the site on my wife’s Thinkpad, and it was readable but still EXTREMELY slow to load. And the scrolling thing was only marginally better.

Is there something I don’t get? Is it possible that a blog is actually taxing my system so much that I can’t render a website properly?! I know I have an old computer but it’s still running a P4 with a gig of RAM and a 128MB graphics card… for reading a website I would think that should be plenty. Did they just forget about me? :(

UPDATE! 12/18/06
Engadget is again running smoothly now that I’m using a Quad Core Mac Pro with 4 gigs of RAM. Fair enough. It was totally worth it.

get your nazi shirts at wal-mart!

Holy crap this is funny. I guess the prices got so low they’re using the lowest paid shirt designers they can find. Research people! Research! Thanks to Digg for the LINK.

it was only a matter of time…

MySpaced the Movie…

sony forces lik-sang out of business

Awesome game importer Lik-Sang has been forced out of business by the legal arm of Sony. Something to do with selling Asian PSPs directly to European gamers. This is way shitty. I don’t know jack shit about international trade laws, so maybe Lik-Sang had it coming to them. But after a constant stream of bad press, is anyone (especially gamers!) going to give Sony the benefit of the doubt on this? I seriously doubt it. Lik-Sang has a great reputation in the gamer community. Certainly a lot better than Sony at this point. I was stoked, STOKED!, about the PS3. But now… between pricing, constant delays, other gaming and HD movie options and a truckload of bad press, I’m not so big on it anymore. That Xbox360 is looking pretty sweet right now.

But even if they lose a few gamer fans it’s not like Sony is going to crumble any time soon. Even as I write this in a fury of hatred I’m burning Sony DVD-Rs on a Sony DVD burner of the movie we shot on a Sony camera using Sony tapes. And just for fun I exported an AVC file of the movie so I can watch it on my Sony PSP.

LINK to LIK-SANG PRESS RELEASE