Wait wait wait. You complaining about the price of an iMac when you just bought like 8 cameras back to back?

Yeah yeah. But I'm talking the total cost-value proposition here.

Here's my situation: I have my two year-old MacBook, (which is working much better now that I'm no longer slamming it in a notebook and dragging it off to classes anymore by the way), which I have installed at my desk alongside a 17" Samsung, and my aged decrepit Vista PC that I have connected to my TV, for Hulu, Netflix, and por-the Internet.

The PC is crap. Sometimes it won't initialize the TV via HDMI, sometimes the keyboard and mouse don't register, and once in a while, it starts looking at me funny; I'm not happy with it.

Meanwhile, the MacBook has only about 2 gigs of drive left. This storage gets filled up quickly by caches generated by Photoshop and browsers. I'm talking huge caches. iLife programs like to have everything on the main drive too, so I can't expand my iTunes library, easily import photos (notice there hasn't been anything new for a while?) or even sketch for more than a few minutes.

Long story short, what I've decided to do over the weekend was order a big, fast notebook drive: a 7200 RPM, 320 GB Western Digital, a little more than 2.5 x the current size and a bump up from the current 5400 which I expect will make tasks like processing RAW photos a little less painful, and even letting me install a stable copy of Windows to install some OS-specific tablet software.

I'm also picking up a cheap Intel motherboard to replace my ostensibly free ECS. I figure if anyone is capable of making a MB that isn't total crap, it's Intel. It'll remain an entertainment machine though. (Although I have heard reports of people running OS X on this particular MB).

This should at least tide me over until the Macs are refreshed, and then we'll see if a move is still warranted.

Went to Benihana's this afternoon and had a teriyaki steak prepared by our table chef, Antonio. What a crazy job... can't help but wonder how often a performing chef loses hold of a shaker they're juggling behind their back and smacks someone in the eye. The food is alright, if a bit bland, but face it: the real reason to go to a place like (and pay about double what you normally would for good Japanese food) is the show - and in that realm I can't say they disappoint.

Then I came home and tried to diagnosis my PC in anticipation of the Team Fortress 2 beta opening this week. The problem was running Half Life 2 Deathmatch (using the same Source engine) would consistently after about 3-5 minutes of play. I managed to successfully isolate the first problem (involving the VB JIT debugger), and then work my way to updating my BIOS, video card drivers, DirectX, sound card drivers, reinstalling the game, testing my RAM, then going out and buying new RAM... the result being that although the new RAM passes MemTest with flying colors, I'm $50 poorer and I can't even start Half Life without getting "Platform error: Module failed to initialize" followed by a 'memory could not be read' error. Awesome!

Naturally, I'm on the MacBook again. I'd really love to play Team Fortress though...

( And some stuff about iPhone... )

Oh, by the way kids, my number has changed: if you need to get a hold of me (and you still haven't figured out I'm almost always easier to reach through AIM), you can text my phone right here and we'll work it out.

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.

Good news, everyone!

After getting struck with a nasty case of what I can only assume was food poisoning (Update - After writing this, two family members contracted the same affliction, leading me to believe it was rather some stomach flu or something akin to that) of a myseterious origin, which led to rather displeasureable activities as extensive overnight vomiting, followed by a two-day period of fasting and a lovely 3-hour visit to the local Urgent Care clinic, and drugs for all sorts of nausea, fever, and... well, Pepto-Bismol... I finally seem to have purged my system free of the debilitating toxin that lurked within. Hooray!

I was going on a streak on posts here for the first part of the month, but my material began to turn sour and my motivation dim as I lapsed into a "one of those days" mood. It's funny how illness really helps you trivialize your immediate concerns and instills a vigor and will to just live.

( So, to quickly surmise events over the past week, )

I only have one more week of summer classes left, at which time I going to seriously start getting down to catching up on my summer reading (and, once and for all, finish the goddamn Across the Wall novel [which for some reason I can't seem to get past page 20 in, despite the fact that I loved the other books in the series]) and hell, maybe even get outside a little more and stop flaking out so much on the friends I have.

Yeah, that might be good.

(Oh, and Futurama is apparently back. Huzzah!)