Links - Do Caring-Apple Penguins have C.L.U.E.?

• I am debating this one right now for my iMac. We got it last January. Still can't decide, but I am leaning to "no" at the moment.
  
• Interesting collection of linux software (Ubuntu oriented) for the designer/developer.
• This was all over the net the other day, but is still pretty amazing how much money you can save with such a small change (given you do it a zillion times a day)
• Jeff Atwood discusses why Anti-Virus software is flawed (and unknowingly makes a case for Virus-Fighting-Autobots)
• I wonder if you could use some of these to put extra PC terminals around the house (kids rooms, living room, etc). Either way, its a pretty cool design.
• Do you have a C.L.U.E.? I have heard about this before ... might look into it more before we start house shopping for real
• This recipe might not quite up to our standards, but probably still better than the stuff in the store
• Cool idea for trying to find a new apartment (assuming there data is up-to-date).
• You don't need to get straight A's?? What did I work my butt off senior year for then? .... in case you were wondering, you also don't have to study 3 hours outside of class for every hour in class .... if you don't go to class, 3*0=0 :-)
• I wish I had known about this in high school (and it was available). Maybe Jeff would have started working for them even sooner ;-)
  

Moving has officially started

Last night, with the help of a coworker, we picked up the moving truck and got our two couches outside. After he left, Em and I got the bulk of our furniture out into the truck ... which means just lots of boxes and securing everything left for today. The 'rents should be in town late afternoon and I am taking a half day.

Its pretty crazy to see all of your worldly possessions in a single place. On the one hand, it looks like a TON of junk. On the other hand it seems really small, given that its pretty much everything you own.

On an side/un-related note ... the iPhone comes out today. I would love to get one but they are way too expensive. According to a coworker, there are already 26 people in line at the local mall waiting to get one. Craziness.

Everything Update For Josh

• Parallels - I installed Parallels the other day on my iMac and I have to say, its a really impressive product. Very fast, clean interface, works great. I have XP running in it for Quicken and eventually .NET development, and its working great. The image files aren't too big either. My only complaint so far is that there isn't an easy way via the interface to create a snapshot of a virtual machine (ie a copy of its current state for backup purposes). I eventually made one by hand by copying the image files but a nice interface would have been nice. My only other glitch, and this is very minor, is that with dual monitors, the transition effects when switching between OSs blinks a bit and isn't smooth. All well ;). Oh, and once you install the Parallels tools in XP, you can move your mouse straight into it and out without clicking or anything and it will send the signals correctly. That plus clipboard integration is pretty nice.
  
• Quicken - I installed this as I said above. Works well, I am still trying to get all my accounts setup correctly but I am happy. It did crash the first time I ran it (being the first program installed in XP, i had to laugh) but it has worked fine since.
  
• SuperDuper - My final installation of the past weekend, this backup software is working out well. I broke down and paid for the "full" version since I really liked it and it unlocked the "smart updates" for your backup partition and in-app scheduling. Now I have it setup to make a smart backup once a week thats fully bootable. A nice bit of insurance.
  
• Game Night - wed night was a Sark Game Night, we played Call of Duty at the Sark office. Fun times. I am pretty sure I was #1 (or 2) in every game so that was cool. With this, plus last week's Sark stuff and some large meetings this week I have gotten several lunches and dinners paid for recently. :-D
  
• Moms weekend - this past weekend my mom and Em's mom made their way into town to visit. Other than some freak snow showers and a whirlwinds weekend, I think everyone had a great time. Some of the highlights were showing the moms JungleJims (they were both pretty much awe struck by the time they made it to the bakery, which is less than half the store), a good but not quite what we expected dinner at the Glendale Pub, some good relaxing and talking, and a great breakfast at the Original Pancake House. I had some GREAT sourdough pancakes BTW.
  
• Em Test - Em took the Praxis this past weekend and thinks she did well. Not much left besides graduation!
  
• Taxes - This weekend I gotta finish up our taxes. While I wouldn't suggest it just for the tax break, spending a ton of money on tuition results in a nice tax credit. Lots of debt, but a nice tax credit.
  
• Broomball double header - Last two weeks we have had broomball double headers. First time we won both games, second time we lost both. 2/4 ain't too bad! :) Another game at 4 this week. Wish me luck.
  
• work - work has been kinda crazy this week. Without going into too much detail, we ended our previous "Sprint" last week and had a large demo of our current progress on Monday that went very well. On Tuesday I had meetings pretty much all day to discuss the things that went well/wrong in the last sprint, figure out what we want to do this sprint and plan for those things. The rest of the week had me working to understand my new integration point (integrating the billing system with the system that stores policy information, which happened to be installed before I was born ;) ) and hashing out the basic design of my parts in conjunction with a coworker. This is looking to be a work filled sprint, but at the end we will have the majority of the system in place which is exciting. Also, we are working to get end-t0-end testing in place for our integration points which may mean I will be able to actually call up the a voice response system and test my code from last sprint which would be cool.
  
• sark conf call - The Sark/Sogeti buyout officially happened on March 1st, so technically I now work for Sogeti US. I have been getting bits and pieces of information and details as they become available but still don't have a complete picture of what this will mean for the future. If I hear anything crazy I will post, don't worry :) We had a national conf. call on wed that was a lot of biz jargon and fluff, but at least gave us some names and the idea that things were moving forward. I should be getting benefit and policy info in the mail sometime this week....hopefully.
  
• go carts, happy hour - last week we had our yearly Sark monthly meeting at the indoor competition racing place. 30+ MPH go-karts == fun even if my side hurt all the next two days from one bad turn into a wall. I did great, except for 4 penalties. But one wasn't my fault I swear! I though I had gotten one so I went into the pit area behind another guy, but when the guy saw me he just looked at me strange and told me to go ahead. Then on my next lap a diff official-guy gave me a penalty for going in the pit without a reason! You believe that crap!? ;)
  
• seega - this project has stalled after its initial momentum, but I am hoping to work on it some this weekend. I have been just too buzy at work. plus...
  
• photessera - I have been working some on this project. I came up with what I think is a more efficient design to keep the memory footprint down, but its hinges on my ability to find/make a PNG encoder that can create a file via streaming input (so that the entire original image need not be in memory). I have been reading the PNG spec and about the DEFLATE algorithm but fear that I will need 2 passes over the data to create the file. I MAY be able to get away with a single pass but I will have to do some creative sampling prior or concede that the compression won't be at its best. I am really considering throwing something together this weekend so that I can run some tests on the tradeoffs of time/memory footprint/number and amount of HD read & writes/complexity/resulting compression. Its actually a very interesting problem.
  
• root beer - I got a new kind of root beer from JJs when we went last weekend. I will post a review whenever I get a chance to upload the pics
• SCDJWS - my studying has been stalled with the above, but its moving along. Actually I have having to pick up a number of the secondary technologies in my current project which should be helpful.
• Pics - I took some decent pics the other day, but haven't put them on the web yet. When I do there will be a post.
• Noah's Arc in our backyard - the other morning I was getting ready and was looking out the window at our porch at the various birds which were enjoying the fresh birdseed I had put out. Your normal bunch of misc small birds flying around. Then I saw our resident squirrel come by, but with a friend, and got to watch him try his best to reach the location of our bird feeder (he eventually did get it, he is quite the acrobat). To go along with the pair of squirrels, we currently have a pair of Red Bellied Woodpeckers, Cardinals, and Blue Jays flying around. I actually got to see all 4 pairs in a half hour time span the other day. It was pretty cool.
  

Quick Hits

• Free hot chocolate and amaretto flavored creamer is nice to have at work
• I saw something about Terry Pratchett the other day. I should read some of his stuff again. It was always entertaining.
• I found a promising free photo editor to add GPS data to photos: PhotoGPSEditor. Haven't downloaded it yet, but I intend to. Now if I could just find a nice batch photo editor. It would help with making web versions of photos and my testing of my mosaic project.
• I got the source code for my mosaic project program from the office today, so I will be working on that again starting this weekend.
• I want to find a decent Visio alternative for Mac that is free. Anyone have any suggestions?
  
• Evidently, COMMAND+F5 on a Mac turns on a type of text-to-voice utility. I was just trying to force FireFox to reload a page. Took me a good 10 minutes to figure out how to turn it off. Finally I found a Mac Help page when I searched for "voice" that was titled: My computer is speaking and a black box appears on the screen. Exactly what I wanted ;)
• I ate lunch today at a place called Izzy's. It is a small chain with restaurants around the Cinci area known for their corned beef. It was OH so tasty. I got a Izzy's Combo which consisted of corned beef, pastrami, and cheese on an onion roll w/ a very large potato pancake and sauerkraut. mmmmmmm :)
  
• Yesterday we took a walk while at work up to the 14th floor (top floor of our building, we are on 11). Same basic layout as our floor but smaller b/c they have an outdoor balcony w/ tables. There were also some very nice offices up there for the big wigs. Great view of downtown. The balcony was pretty cold but it will be nice to eat lunch up there when the weather gets a little bit better.
• Next week we are supposed to have several days of cold where the lows will be all in the single digits and the wind chill will be well below zero. I am ready for spring.
• A guy at work mentioned the site ChaCha.com yesterday. Evidently, you can search for stuff on it over the web, or with a guide (a "real" person who helps you find stuff on the internet and chats with you). Now, if you know me and any of the stuff me and the guys did during college, you know I was tempted to abuse this system and start up some non-traditional search chats. I have refrained for the time being, mainly b/c I was at work, but I may still have to see how far these people will go to help me find what I want. ;) I am also not completely convinced its not either a sophisticated computer program or slave labor in a third world country. Hopefully the computer program.
• Anyone know of a easy way to host a set of XML files on the net for free? Obviously I could sign up for some free hosting but that seems like overkill. This stems from my previous post about Google maps. At least if I could do this, I could keep the data separate from the blog code. I wish blogger let you upload your own pages.
  
• Does anyone know what non-dairy creamer is made out of???? I just thought about it and have no idea myself.

Updates-a-plenty

- Work -

Today we had our "Sprint" #3 kickoff meeting for most of the day. GAIC is using the Scrum as its agile project management methodology. Basically, in order to enable the project team to adapt to changing requirements the project is divided into many "sprints". Prior to each sprint set tasks are picked to be completed in that sprint, and their efforts estimated. During the sprint a "scrum" meeting is held each day where everyone gives a 2 minute description of what they did, what they are doing, and what impediments they have.

From the few meetings we have already had, it seems like a good plan in theory .... we will have to wait and see how well it works out, but I have heard good things. It is definitely a better plan than a monolithic waterfall model, but it really depends on the PM and how well the team can follow the guidelines. Only time will tell. ;)

This new sprint I have been tasked with writing up a new set of web services that will expose the billing system's account information and policy information to users who request it via the IVR system (Interactive Voice Response). I am psyched that I will be getting to do some real development and development with new things. I have no idea if my estimates for the work will be anywhere near correct, but we will see.

- Life -

The other night I made some really good risotto. I sauteed some chicken with peppers and then made up some risotto with various herbs, chicken broth, white wine, onions and garlic. At the end I added a stick of goat cheese, some parmesan, and the chicken and peppers. It was very yummy.

Not a whole lot has been going on other than work, working out (which I am glad to say I have been doing a decent amount of), sleeping, and trying to help Em study. Em found a flier at the rec. center saying they were going to have dodgeball leagues in April. I let our "activity committee" know and we may be doing that instead of indoor soccer for the spring. :-D

Yesterday I found this link (can't remember from where). Its from the Instructables.com website which I read every once in a while. It has some great tutorials on it for really out-there projects. I would love to make a set of invisible book shelves for our apt even if I have no idea where to put them. Maybe some day when we have our own house. Either way they are pretty cool.


- Tech -

Unfortunately I haven't had time or the chance to work on my mosaic project in the past few weeks. I spent some time this past weekend researching various methods of working with very large image files, but haven't gotten any more code hammered out really. This is also due to the fact that the latest code I wrote is sitting on the HD of a machine in Sark's office which I don't have daily access to. Hopefully I will be able to stop by on my way home tomorrow so I can start it back up. I want to rework some of the design and get the code into a new Subversion server on my new Mac so that I can track my changes and various attempts better. Also, if I can come across a free license for Jira I would really like to setup some project stuff and bug tracking for it so that I can keep track of what I am doing between coding sessions. If I can't get a copy of Jira, I may setup Trac or something like it (although I don't really want to have to setup new programming environments just to run the bug/project tracking software).

Last night I finally got around to using SuperDuper to backup my iMac to my external HD. So far I have to say I am fairly impressed. The interface is clean, simple, and straightforward. The initial backup (which is a full 1:1 backup took under 2 hours ... subsequent backups will be "smart" and just do the files and data that has changed). I am still on the fence if I will buy the "pro" version. It gives you some extra features, scheduling, etc. Things I want but I can probably do some other way.

On a somewhat interesting note, yesterday afternoon I was talking to a coworking about if there was a way to sync google calendar with iCal. From what I have found online it looks like you can only do read-only sync's each way assuming you publish your iCal to some WebDav server. However, yesterday we found a program some people are working on called SpanningSync. It allows you to sync both systems read/write and it will sync changes almost immediatly. Only problem was that it is currently in private beta .... well it was when we found it around 4pm. As of 6pm they opened it up for a public beta test ... and took it back down around 10 b/c their servers were maxed out. I didn't find out until this morning. I guess the early bird does catch the worm. After looking into it more and reading that it is probably either subscription based or a lifetime fee to use the end product ... and that it may use an intermediate server to sync the data ... I probably won't use it when its done. But the product is really cool none the less.

Good ideas

I am using the "link" field for this post for the first time. Not 100% sure what it will do but if you can't find a link here it is.

Funny little web-comic about places you shouldn't work. Found it via DZone. Thought I would share it with you-all.

The acronym one is very true.

--------

When I came in today and started working on some training stuff @ GAIC ... I definitely tried hitting COMMAND+C, COMMAND+~, and CTRL+LEFT several times ... each before realizing why the thing wasn't working. It took me about 5 minutes to get readjusted but I am still almost hitting ALT about once an hour. Suprising how fast your habits can change.

[UPDATE] Ahhhhh it makes the header link to the site. Yeah thats not obvious so this will probably be the last time I use it.

Extended update ..... daily photos

Ok, so, as soon as I posted that last post, I realized there were things I forgot:

• Its AMAZING how quiet the iMac is.
• I am still getting used to COMMAND+TAB and COMMAND+~ instead of ALT+TAB but I think I actually like it better for most situations. Not all but lots.
  
• I am slowly trying to put together a full address book with contact info for my friends, co-workers, family etc. Its going slow but its gonna be nice when its all in one place and birthdays are automatically added to iCal
• Being able to drag pics from iPhoto into the address book for people's cards or to iChat for custom buddy icons is REALLY slick
• Sark is probably going to start up a dodgeball team and an indoor soccer team :-D (and we just got done watching Dodgeball on TV, fate!? maybe)
• Broomball starts up again next week (I get to see how out of shape I am) and Darts starts up in a few weeks.

Here are some pics I took in the past week or so and meant to put up but didn't:
Daring Mr. Squirrel the other morning.

This was gonna be the first pic of 2 in a daily photo post entitled "Heaven and Hell" Bet you can't figure out which is which


Finally are two pics of the building where I am working during the training. Its an old train station converted into offices and is right down town. Pretty cool architecture and painting. I am gonna miss it later when we are sitting in cubicles.

Week(end) update (with Mac pics)

So its been a few days since my last post. Basically, that whole time I have been either at work (full days plus a much longer drive than I am used to), playing with the new Mac, or doing stuff around the apt.

As far as work is concerned, the the first week went well overall. I now have my new badge, have my parking situation figured out, lasted through a week of training on Guidewire, and have moved my PC to a new training room to prepare for this week's training (this room has normal desks!! :) ). Next week is another week of training, but now on the actual integration work we will be doing for the project. Should be good to get into stuff thats more directly related to our work and get a better idea of what I will be doing.

As far as other life stuff is concerned ... not a whole lot is new. We had our first noticable snow of the year last night / this morning. This weekend I played on the computer and did stuff around the apt. while Em gets ready for one of her two large tests she needs to take to graduate. Tonight we had some great cream of wild rice soup that we have made several times now. I may post the recipe later.

And now for what everyone has been waiting for .... pics/info on the new Mac :-D:

Oh the anticipation!!!!













Its finally here!























The birth of our new baby.














The new setup -->










The two desktops ... (switched left-right from what I was seeing, too lazy to move back)















So far, I have to say I love it. No real problems. Some things of note that I have found so far:

• If it wasn't for me taking pics and reading all the directions, I could have had it up and video conferencing in less than 10 minutes easy.
• We have TOO MANY photos. iPhoto has some cool was to ogranize and view your photos but adding labels and keywords takes forever when you have over 7K. :) But thats my fault, and I am up for the task.
  
• Home/End don't work the same ... still getting used to
• COMMAND (Apple key) + C/X/V for copy/cut/paste ... got used to, will be hard to go back to CMD+...
• Finder windows lack an "UP" button to go up to the parent folder (at least I haven't found it yet) which is annoying.
• Delete won't delete a file in Finder, draggin to the wastebasket is actually kind of fun, but I wish I could hit delete
• Enter to rename a file is different but I have gotten used to it.
  
• iChat is a really good program (assuming you use AIM and/or Jabber only) and with the Chax add-on, its everything I need
• Safari is pretty decent (better than IE) but not perfect. For example, Blogger's interface doesn't come up right. Thus, I am posting this with good old FF. No keychain support but I will survive.
• iPhoto is really cool and was easy to setup so that Em and I could both use the same library with our accounts.
• I can NOT get iTunes to work with 2 users and a single common library. However I have gotten it setup so that both accounts have the same music files, but diff libraries. It will have to do for now. I don't really blame it, it wasn't designed to do it. The people who say they have done it online, must be liars.
• Stickies are cool and work like they should
• Frontrow is nice but I don't know how often I will use it
• Installing apps on a Mac is something to be cherished. 1) Download .dmg file which safari automatically mounts if you say "ok its safe". 2) Drag applition icon over to "Appliations" folder on HD 3) PROFIT! (some have installers, but they usually start up and ask you 2 questions and then basically just do the above steps)
  
• Office 2k4 for Mac (PPC code via Rosetta) works but isn't perfect (crashed twice while printing something for Em ... but since its Mac OS X, only it died and it came right back up)
• divx and flip4mac needed to play movies .. but work fine
• Eclipse runs great (2GB of ram really helps)
• VLC is a pretty nice video player although I don't totally need it now that I have the other codecs installed
• I have downloaded SuperDuper but haven't set it up yet. Maybe later tonight.
• Internal speakers are better than people acted like online

Basically, I have run into only a couple small issues (most of which aren't problems just differences I need to get used to) and have loved everything else. The thing is really fast, clean interfaces for the most part, full of cool apps right from the beginning and is really easy to use. I just wish I had more time to play with it.

Next things up for me are setting up the backup software, putting all of our music into Em's iTunes, copying over the rest of our old data from the external HD, scanning bills/paperwork with the new printer/scanner, and continuing to work on organizing our music and photos. SO MANY PHOTOS!!! I will post more about it after I have done a few more things.

Having fun playing

Ok, so this rocks!

There just isn't enough time to play and post and sleep and go to work.

For right now we will leave it at ... the iMac was delivered. It looks great. It handles great. I have the external HD setup, the second monitor setup, and have done two 3-way video conferences (one with Josh and Jeeves, and the other with Em's sister and brother). All in all I am completely happy so far. Tomorrow I promise to post a better post with pics, etc. And my first thoughts. Right now I am installing Office for Emily and making sure her account is setup. Then some more playing till bed time. I would post the pics but iPhoto is importing all of my photos right now and I havent figured out how to resize pics yet. But the camera was recognized without any hicups, Office is installed with abot 3 clicks, and everything is super fast. :-D

FIRST POST FROM THE NEW iMAC!!!

Title says pretty much all of it

I am just sitting here setting things up, testing things out, and realizing how ugly a beige PC looks when sitting on the floor under a new iMac :)

Oh and I just noticed that Blogger is screwing up in Safari. I may need to get Firefox fast!

DELIVERED!

I just got the email notification and checked the FedEx website ...

my new iMac shows as delivered!

Oh, today is going to go by SOOOO slow now. I can't wait to get home and see my new toy ;) Please send your condolences to Em. She may be without a husband for a few days. :-p He has a new mistress.

** I am not sure if Blogger changed something in their code, or if its an IE bug ... but posting today via IE at work results in extra line breaks being added to my posts if I edit them. Hrmm. Thank god for FF and/or Safari ... not sure which I will be using from now on. **

New Client Today

I am at my new client (GreatAmerican Insurance) as of 8 this morning and things are going ok.

I will have training the next couple weeks and am not sure how often I will be able to post during work hours. I will post a bigger update tonight.

In case you were worried, the new Mac is still on its way somewhere presumably between CA and OH (the tracking says it left CA but has yet to be updated to where it has arrived)

Oh, and one other thing for Marmot .... in case you wanted another reason to want a Mac ... I saw a tip today that said that the calculator built into Mac OS X has a RPN mode built in. :)

[EDIT 12:09 PM] I was talking to a fellow Sark on the beach last week who has a MacBook Pro. We were talking about BootCamp and some other stuff and everything he said was promising for how well it all works. Only one problem came up .... I mentioned that I had gotten the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. He said he had thought about it previously, and had always wondered about using one and trying to install/boot into bootcamp. The reason being, that when running the install process (or even when trying to hit the key combination to boot into windows) the BT keyboard may not be recognized or setup. I just got done glancing around MacRumors.com's forums and some other sites and it looks like it can be setup but requires you to have a normal USB keyboard around when installing. Once XP is installed, you can add the correct drivers for the BT keyboard and mouse and use that. Hopefully I will be able to get it to work. I don't want to buy Parallels before they release the next version but I don't want have to have two keyboards around when/if I want to use Windows (only Quicken so far as something I won't have a Mac version of)

Shipped! Kinda ...

I found two shipment notices waiting for me in my inbox this morning from Apple :)
Unfortunately, they were for my printer and my mini-dvi-to-dvi connector :(

But at least its a start.

No updates really ... beyond the fact that I am waiting for the Mac to arrive, and still working on the Mosaic program (Jeff, I will send you the source or find a way to post it soon .... I need to work out a few bugs and clean it up a bit. You can't hold it against me if the code isn't up to Google's standards ;) ... however, I can happily say I coded all of it short of the image read/write APIs. Those are from standard Java api's.)

One interesting thing to note, I worked out a more advanced matchEngine which parses each tile into an set number of "sectors" which it compares individual to the seed tile (instead of comparing the whole tile's avg color, this checks multiple regions of the tiles). I thought this would give me very similar results, but could aid in color boundries being more "correct". An example of the problem I was hoping to avoid would be two library images, one red on the top half, and blue on the bottom ... and the other with the colors reversed. Both would have the same overall avg color (some purple) but if the tile we were matching had more red on top ... one would make a much better choice. My "simple" match engine couldn't distinguish the two. My second one can .... but as it turns out, that obvious case doesn't come up that often unless you have a huge library to pick from. In reality, the mosaics it is producing seem to have a little better color consistency, but it really depends on the image and the library. Most are actually ending up worse in various ways. So, its back to the drawing board on that one.

<~~~ Original


Simple Match ~~>









<~~ 2x2 Partitioned


4x4 Partitioned ~~>









In this case the simple match looks the best in my opinion. With the 4x4 we end up getting some color detail that was lacking in the previous ones, but we lose a ton of clearity. I still haven't fully figured out what is going on.

Next step, new Mac.

ORDERED-XOR!
as of 5:50pm :)

So, the MacWorld keynote has come, and gone ..... And I am left with a mildly sour taste in my mouth. Steve announced some really cool stuff, but unfortunately they weren't things I wanted to buy, or will any time soon at least. That being said, here are my thoughts on what WAS announced:

• Apple TV - pretty interesting. I am really curiuos what kind of hardware is really in it (misc Intel CPU? 20GB hd?) they didn't give really specific details. I wonder if its basically a stripped down Mac mini or not even that. Could result in some interesting media center-ish setups but since I only have one decent TV (and its not HD) and will have one PC (which is in site of the TV) not really up my alley. But interesting.
  
• iPhone - Really cool, Really expensive, Really a ton of things in one all trying to use a touch screen. This was obviously the main highlight of the conference. I was pretty suprised they actually got it out and will be shipping relatively soon (June I think they said?). Full screen, still pretty thin, touch screen, phone, internet/wifi, iPod connector, browser, Mac OS X version on board ...... the list goes on and on. Only problem is that while in the future I may want a new iPod, I doubt I am going to pay $500-$600 for a uber-phone and have to switch networks and sign up for a new 2-year plan. But very cool none the less.
  
• Airport Extreme - I saw this on the web site. 802.11n base stations for home users. Pretty cool if/when I want wireless since the current iMacs have 802.11n built in, just not enabled by default I believe

Unfortunately, in all the iPhone hype, Steve didn't get around to releasing iLife '07, or Leapord (ot at least more info about it), or announcing that the iMac line was getting updated video cards, or that they were releasing a new headless-mid-range Mac, or that Ben Lee was a super cool guy and will get free computer for life! I mean come on, not even that I was a super cool guy! What a snub!

Back to reality, I thought at least a few of those might happen and were the reason for me waiting till mid January to get my new computer. Am I mad that nothing changed for me? No. Am I a little dissapointed? yeah. Do I think I made the right decision in waiting? Yes. I would have been more upset if they had come out with something way cooler and I missed out b/c I didn't have the patience. Well, I did have the patience, and now I get a new (still just as cool as yesterday) machine. Unless something changes, I am planning on ordering it tonight after I get the final "OK" from Em. ;) As of right now, below is what I am planning on buying, and I am way excited:

• 17" iMac
• 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• 160GB Hard Drive
• 8x SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD�RW/CD-RW)
• 802.11g - built in
  
• Bluetooth - built in
  
• 10/100/1000 NIC
• PCI-express ATI X1600 video card w/ 128MB GDDR3
• iSight & mic - built in
• 2x Firewire 400, 3x USB 2.0, and mini-dvi connections
• Bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse
• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) + iLife '06
  
• HP Photosmart C3180 All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier
• Currently you can get a $100 rebate when you purchase a select printer and a new system. This one happens to be $99
  
• Apple mini-DVI to VGA adapter
• so that I can connect my current 17" LCD to it and have dual monitors
  

Total: Just over $1,400 with $100 printer rebate and tax.
Should ship within 24 hours (or so the site says) and be delivered 3-5 biz days later :)

It should be really cool. And its a good thing, b/c my old Tangeant is slowly falling to pieces. Or more exactly, locking up with more frequency. I had never had any similar problems with it in all the years but lately, at random intervals and seemingly independent to what you are doing the machine locks up. Video still displays but is completly unresponsive. I have checked the normal culprits and have uninstalled quite a few things and turned off random services that might be having problems, but have been unable to track down the root cause. So the new computer is much needed. Oh, and YES, I know I am crazy to still be using that POS from UDiT, but I am and it has served me well. And, one great thing about keeping it all this time ... the difference when I upgrade from a 1.1GHz PIII w/ 384MB RAM to a 2.0GHz dual core machine with 2GB RAM is going to be amazing!

Sooooo Close

Just a little update ... MacWorld keynote starts in aprox 10 minutes. I will have a real update post about what I have been up to (a ton of progess on the Mosaic project) and other stuff sometime this afternoon ... and hopefully a post about the Mac I order tonight, tonight.

:-D

External HD or "Thing to make Win/Mac switch that much easier"

This afternoon Em and I got a really nice external HD at CompUSA. They were having some really nice sales (and will be through at least part of next week) on HDs and external HDs. I got a 250GB Seagate USB2.0 external HD. (link here) .

I had been planning on buying 1 or 2 external HD enclosures to put a couple of my current IDE HDs into after I have switched over to the Mac. However, after thinking about, I decided that just buying a new external HD would be better (namely, it would be only slightly more expensive, would give me a brand new faster drive, I wouldn't have to worry about the age of the old drives, and I could use it to transfer files much easier).

So far, I have not had a single complaint and am loving it. I wanted at least 160GB (the size of the internal drive in the Mac I want) but 250GB is even better ;) . I have partitioned it with a 1 160GB partition (which will be formated to HFS+ once I have the Mac), two 32GB FAT32 partitions and one FAT32 partition with the rest of the space. You may be curious why the 3 FAT32 partitions. Well, A) FAT32 can be nativly read/written in both WinXP and Mac OS X and B) evidently in Windows XP, you can't format a partition over 32GB to FAT32. Only NTFS. However, FAT32 can support larger sizes, just Window's formatter sucks. So right now I have 3 where I wanted 1. All well, I will format it into one after I have the Mac and have copied everything to it.

So far, speeds have been good considering I only have USB 1.1 on my desktop (the drive supports 2.0 thank god).

Next up ... cleaning up current files, figuring out what I need/want/didn't even know I had, and copying it all to the new drive.

When I get the Mac I am going to more than likely purchase a copy of SuperDuper. I have looked at a couple backup programs so far and it looks to be the best combination of what I want. Using it, I will be able to have it create nightly incremental backup of my entire internal HD without thinking, and if anything ever happens to the interal drive, the Mac can boot from the USB drive with only a keystroke during boot-up. So, no more worrying about HD failure. :)

I am hoping to have a whole series of reviews/write-ups about the various software/hardware I use and the good, bad, and ugly of switching for a Windows user to a brand new iMac. Not a bard start.