If you had told me that four months out of college, I would be giving a presentation to Microsoft, I would have laughed.

Oh god...

---

So, let's change the subject. New MacBooks, eh?

Looks pretty sweet. It's just... with my spending, I don't think I'm in a position to responsibly buy one without financing it, and that just seems like a sticky proposition these days. I picked up a 21.6" Acer screen this weekend from Staples for less than a fourth of the cost of the new Apple display, and it doesn't even have (yet another) port that nothing [yet] plugs into. And you know what? It's not half bad - not miraculous, but it totally gets the job done. (Funnily enough, the new Cinema Display looks rather like the HP consumer displays. Only much much more luxe. The HP business displays are the way to go though, imho.)

On the other hand, they are awesome looking machines. I mean, gorgeous.

But when I can grind my own coffee as well as Peet's, get to work in my Rabbit as well as that guy's Porsche, and even have a spare dime to spend on something ridiculous, it's a mighty tough proposition.

Methinks it might be time to start putting some money aside for MacWorld...

Or hey, my sister's always wanted her own computer...

I didn't want to comment on this debacle, but seeing that last ad makes me almost as angry as the Seinfeld ads had me perplexed.

I'm a Windows professional. I work exclusively with Microsoft (and, well my employer's) products. And at home, I use a PC and a Mac.

Neither of these things define who you are people! They're goddamn tools! God!

Seriously, this 'me too' campaign is the most asinine thing Microsoft could have done. How completely out of touch can you be? Fire your ad agency and book Chiat Day or... anybody else, stupid condescending pricks.

Nothing against the fine people at Microsoft, surely. But they need to get their act together, and fast.

Dump the hardware or go all the way - i.e. make PCs.

Shrink your product line and focus on your core competencies. Why in the world are there more versions of Windows Vista than there are Windows Server 2008?

Apple can pull it off because they're nipping at the heels of a behemoth. Microsoft - no.

Use what's right for you, but seriously now kids - don't knock it until you've tried it.

I noted several weeks ago that I received a laptop from HP that I tried and liked okay, though not without a few reservations. About two weeks later, I decided that while the machine did what I needed, what I really wanted was another Mac. I deal with enough problems with my Windows desktop as it is, and believe it or not, some applications I prefer to use (including OmniOutliner, Curio, MAMP, and Google Notifier) are Mac-only. The trade-offs, however, included abandoning the on-board dedicated video card on my customized dv2000t, 20 gigs of drive space, 512 megs of RAM, and about $200. And with the slew of issues plaguing MacBook users, I was particularly apprehensive. But in the end, I'm very glad I made the switch. (To HP's credit, their email and telephone support was absolutely fantastic, and the return didn't cost me a penny. Pity you can't keep the company from self-destructing. :p)

The screen is MUCH improved over the HP laptop, which while an inch bigger, had a cheap plastic sheen to it and was uber-reflective. The color saturation was annoyingly off as well. Both were bright and quite usable, but the MacBook has better color (considerably better than my antiquated iBook) and the reflectivity is low, even in use outdoors and in poor lighting conditions.

My other MacBook concern regarded Rosetta; on the Mac, I doodle with SketchBook Pro and Photoshop Elements 2 (via a Wacom tablet), apps which are not Universal Binaries. Fortunately, even with the paltry RAM, it does perform acceptably. There are quirks though. Fast successive strokes will occasionally be misinterpreted, which can be an annoyance, but the problem is not so great as to make it an unusable solution.

As for Windows, I've currently got Boot Camp set up (because Parallels costs about $80 more than I'd care to spend at the moment) and running a $15 copy of Windows XP Pro (bought through the Microsoft Student Alliance Program through American River College, w00t), and loaded with Visual Studio 2005 and Office. For kicks, I also got and ran the benchmark for my beloved MMO, Final Fantasy XI, and was surprised to with the resulting score:

3207 - "We assume that your computer can run FINAL FANTASY XI for Windows enjoyably with the default settings. If your video card exceeds the recommended system requirements, it may be possible to run "FINAL FANTASY XI for Windows" easily even in high resolution mode."

So there you go. FFXI is playable on a MacBook with integrated graphics, albeit with chop and on low resolution.

You know what else runs better than I feared? Second Life. And I may talk about that in greater detail later, but for now, some pictures of the machine I forsook:

( Read more... )

Fun while it lasted, but I'm glad I moved on. Here's my current "studio":

Stolen Dodge Caravan: Our stolen car was found last Tuesday illegally parked in Folsom. The ignition was gone, along with the rear bench, and the radio was partly removed. The van has since been towed and scrapped for parts and replaced by a recent Honda Odyssey.

HP dv2000t Laptop: I received the laptop on the 28th, played with it for a couple weeks, and then returned it. It was a pretty sleek machine with a very nice build and tons of amenities for the price (like built-in VGA and S-Video outputs, ExpressCard slot, two internal microphones, good speakers, back lit media keys, solid keyboard) but I ran into quirks which made me question it's longevity; the USB ports went out on two occasions when using a Wacom tablet, the screen wasn't the greatest, and odd Windows behaviors (waking up from Stand By to Hibernate, for instance) eventually convinced me to send back the machine (which HP was surprisingly nice about) and spend the extra $200 for a MacBook.

MacBook: Received on Friday from Amazon.com. No complaints. My biggest concern was the reports of intense heat emitted by the machines, but thus far, it hasn't even been an issue.

dragaroo.net: I recently renewed the domain. But there's nothing there to see.

Sac State: I'm in my third week of classes. So far, so good. My bizarre schedule is actually not half as bad as I expected it to be; I simply a lot about 1:30 time for what typically is an hour drive, and then spend half an hour drinking a coffee or catching up on my reading. My teachers are all surprisingly well-qualified but seem to go on tangents (relating to their job experience at corporations like HP, Maxtor, Price Waterhouse Coopers, etc...) quite a bit. Then again, I am enrolled in three people-skills courses (Bus Com, Public Speaking [for the third time], Organizational Behavior), so I suppose it's to be expected.

Shadowed by Wings: Finished this one a few days ago and enjoyed it quite a bit (now that I know what to expect from the series). Zarq is a likable, human character, plagued by the haunt of her mother, her (essentially nonexistent) social status as a female 'rishi whelp', and opposed by her 'peers' which alternately fear and loathe her. Against impossible odds, she attempts to achieve... the impossible: revenge against her father's murderer and a clutch (province) of her own. The story is told (narrated by Zarq herself), in such a manner that everything seems undeniably realistic as... outlandish as much of it is. And so on... more formal write-up when I find the time.

I had my last class for Managerial Accounting (and likely, of any kind of accounting class, ever) this morning, and now I'm free for the next couple of months to... basically do as I please.

I'm determined to remain productive in some capacity throughout the summer, and I started working towards that goal by applying for an opening for a 'Seasonal Mac Specialist' at the Apple Store in Arden Fair. True, it's a bit of a drive from Roseville (15~20 minutes) and every time I've been in the shoe-box of a store, it's been pretty packed with customers and at one point, people just there to check their email (now displaced by what seems to be a full-time rent-a-cop). But on the plus side, I would need virtually no training, I've got plenty of high-pressure retail experience and ultimately, it wouldn't really be work. I submitted my app, but if that doesn't come to fruition, then I'm just as content to just take it easy... for a couple of weeks anyway...

I've also been playing around a bit with our new iMac, including installing another gig of RAM ordered from Newegg (I got it right the second time). The machine is really quite nice; I booted into Windows and ran the Prey demo (until I was too creeped out to play it anymore,) and was quite impressed by the performance. Also got Starcraft and Tropico Mucho Macho running fine under Rosetta, and am working on WoW... for testing purposes, of course...

I was actually fairly impressed to see that at this point in time, most of the software I use on a regular basis is now available as a Universal Binary. Firefox, Opera, VLC, GraphicConverter, Handbrake, Cyberduck, Wacom Tablet drivers, heck even iJournal (my blogging client on the Mac side) were all easily acquired and appear to run great. And Alias SketchBook Pro runs like a charm - something I was quite surprised to discover. Now all that's left that might give me trouble is Maya, and really, that's not a mission critical app so far as I'm concerned.

Yowzers, three relatively insubstantial entries in one day!

This is just priceless though. Even Steve Jobs hasn't been able to evade Murphy's Law. (Part of the macTV podcast).

Speaking of Jobs, Apple is holding yet another press event this Tuesday (seems like they're holding one every month now, doesn't it?) where they will be unveiling some 'fun new products'. What do you suppose that could be in reference to?

I think it's fairly obvious that they will be announcing revisions to their consumer product lines. Probably not an iBook (or MacBook) so soon after the release of the MacBook Pro, but maybe a real video iPod? Or this rumored touchscreen device?

Maybe some third-party commitments from the likes of Alias (please)?

Definitely more content announcements; more distribution deals for the networks through iTunes (which could feasibly be split into it's own store). I wouldn't count out a movie rental service, in a similar vein to real or Vongo; I think that would have some definite appeal to certain crowds.

That's all conjecture though. I'm sure we'll see soon enough.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has started ramping up buzz for it's upcoming Origami device. I watched the promotional video (which doesn't seem like it was supposed to have been published just yet), and it actually looks pretty interesting. It's a sort of micro-laptop (think really BIG Pocket PC), depicted as possessing a touchscreen, keyboard, GPS capabilities, WiFi connectivity to the Internet and to your PC, and powerful enough to run Halo on the go. (We'll see about that...)

Of course, with all that functionality, no doubt it will come out at a starting price of at least $1k, which makes it immediately unattractive as a computer accessory... *sigh*

At any rate, should be interesting to see, even if I have to file it under the 'gadgets I like to track but will never own' category.

(BTW, notice all the CSS float:left, float:right action lately? That's right; I did learn something from that CSS course. :p)

Apologies for the delay in getting this write-up posted; by the end of yesterday evening I simply didn't have the energy left in me to sit down and try to do justice to what I witnessed Thursday afternoon.

Today, I'm happy to share with you my impressions of the Apple booth at MacWorld Expo 2006, San Francisco! (It was orignally going to be an all-enomcpassing post, but as I noted in the footnote... it wasn't going to happen. I seem to really be making of habit of writing incredibly long posts of late . . .)

After nabbing the registration priory codes late Wednesday night, we took off in the morning and got to the show floor in the Moscone South Hall at about noon. Right off the back, of course, I headed straight for Apple's typically massive booth, where as they did in the MacWorld I had last attended three years prior, had a stage equipped with a huge (presumably high-definition) display projection where the new Apple hardware and software packages were demoed to the crowds by enthusiastic and very professional-acting men and women; they were genuinely putting on a show about the product they were demonstrating and (with one possible minor exception) it really looked like they knew what they were talking about!

iMac
Arriving at the Apple booth, I discovered that despite the very large number (at least 40 in all, not including the rows of Macs demonstrating other Apple software) of Intel desktops and portables on display, each manned with it's own Apple rep, it was going to be a while before I could actually get my hands on a machine. So instead, we stood around the demo stage (as every seat was taken) and watched the last half of the iMac demo (Kong in 1080p HD) and bits from the Keynote (the Photoshop CS demo where Jobs ran an automated task to create a poster for Kong, of course demonstrating the seamlessness of the Rosetta engine for emulating the PPC instruction set... or whatnot. I was actually a bit more impressed by this demo than I was watching the keynote; the filters were running fairly quickly on a very high resolution image, and would absolutely more than suffice for just about any kind of Photoshop work not for print (i.e. web and digital graphics); great news.
( Read more... )