« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
Back when the future looked unbelievably bright, this is what it looked like!
I especially like his "On the Shoulders of Giants" series.
While I'm here, let me point you over for more Tikitastic Stuff from Konakai.com. See where watching Tiki Bar TV gets you?
No, not a belated anniversary, just belated blogging on the subject!
We took off Thursday and Friday of last week as a prolonged anniversary celebration. What did we do? EVERYTHING WE COULD THINK TO DO!
Wednesday evening we had dinner with our friend, Katie (who is of Irish descent) over at WB Yeats Irish Pub. Tasty! If you get lucky, the bartender there will be the one that draws shamrocks in the head on your Guinness. From there we decided to try East End Martini Bar on Franklin Street. Good drinks, hip styling and hip staff, but the music is more dance hall volume than martini bar. I'm not saying loud music is bad (I'm guilty enough of that!): I'm just saying you have to hit the right volume for the venue. In a martini bar it should provide background without masking the snatches of conversation around you (much less your own!). LOUD music is for dance clubs where it makes people move in very close to one another. In any case, though, we had fun there!
Thursday was a day trip to the beach (Wrightsville). It's the beach: of COURSE we had fun. Stopped by a Smithfield's on the way back for tasty and cheap BBQ. Yum...
Friday we started with an adventurous, hot, sweaty Geocaching hike (what did you THINK I was going to say?). Yeesh. It's not that kind of blog! Found the cache, found some chiggers. Such lovely little creatures!
Friday afternoon we drove to Greensboro to an indoor shooting range and shot fancy handguns. I'd never fired a handgun before, and Elizabeth had only shot her dad's revolver years ago, so it was a cool experience. We brought back our bullet-ridden target as a memento, named him "Steve the Stiff", and put him up temporarily on the wall. I figure if anyone tries to rob our house they'll see Steve and decide there MUST be a better place to hit down the street!
After burning through 150 rounds of ammo, we drove over to Grove Winery, sampled their offerings, discussed the merits of various oaks for barrels, and toured their facility. A bit of a varied day, no?
Saturday was a putter-around-the-house day until that evening when we went to our favorite French restaurant (Provence). I can't believe we have such a great place so close to home! We're just luckly that way!
Sunday was the day after our anniversary, so we went back to a bit more normal middle-class American lifestyle and went grocery shopping and steam-cleaned the carpet in our daughter's room. Anti-climactic? Perhaps, but after all we'd done, we were just about celebrated out!
Then again, July 4th is just around the corner... is that a second wind I feel coming on???
This site is too much fun and has the potential to become a fabulous tour guide when you travel. Carrboro has a bunch of stuff listed (but I added much of it!). Way fun...
Elizabeth and I are working slowly but surely towards the launch of our web consulting business, Silicon Scenery. Mostly we will be working on some template-driven technologies for particular niche markets so that people can get a professional-looking website without having to pay for a web designer. They'll enter the data and images specific to their needs and then select a look for the site from an online catalog. A couple of clicks later they'll have a fully functional site for a fraction of a custom-design.
We'll also be doing some individual site design, though. This morning we finally finished the first such site: an 11 page layout for Elizabeth's dad's vacation rentals. You can check out the site and the cabins over at Winkler's Creek Cabins.
Step by step! Starting a business takes a long time to get it off the ground.
Republicans preach tax reductions and spending reductions, but what we've been seeing is tax reductions (predominantly for the wealthy) with spending increases, all funded via additional debt which will eventually mean higher taxes plus interest for us all.
I'm not saying you should expect great fiscal responsibility from the Democrats, either, but the Republicans need to put up or shut up. Controlling spending? Who? Where? All I've seen in the past few years is a government grown bloated and corrupt with massive diversions of public funds into the pockets of private contractors and perks for politicians while one bill after another is introduced to protect the profits of large corporate benefactors at the expense of the pocketbooks and rights of American citizens.
Our beloved PowerBook suffered another friggin' hard drive failure. I could send it back to Maxtor for replacement, but I'm wary of sending away a drive with my financial data on it.
In any case, we couldn't wait the weeks it would take to get it repaired, so we bit the bullet and bought a new MacBook.
Side note: Some of you that know me as a Sysadmin might be surprised by that fact that we're a Mac family. What would really surprise you is the number of people that work on Windows professionally that won't touch the thing at home. OS X just has more functionality for the power user (like built-in ssh, perl, apache, bash, ftpd, and on and on and on) along with a great user interface and application suite that just work.
Anyway, my review after the jump...
At the Apple Store we spoke to a sales rep that has both the MacBook Pro and MacBook at home. I already knew most of the differences, but his knowledge really contributed to our decision.
The biggest differences between the MacBook and MacBook Pro are screen size, video memory, and price. The Apple rep also clued us in to the fact that the MacBook chassis is stronger and more rigid (good!) and that the wifi antenna placement in the MacBook is better than in the Pro, so the MacBook gets a little better wifi performance.
The MacBook Pro has larger screens (15- and 17-inch models) and dedicated video RAM. I'm a fan of dedicated video RAM, but it's really essential only if you are a gamer. However, if you have a shared RAM model I would recommend that you add system RAM to improve overall performance. The Apple rep said that he had not seen any actually difference in video performance between the machines even when doing video edits.
We immediately ruled out the lowest-end MacBook (no DVD writer) and the highest end MacBook Pro (a 17-inch behemoth -- too big for us to consider it a laptop). We settled on the mid-level MacBook as the "sweet spot" in the Apple laptop lineup.
PROCESSOR: 2GHz Intel Core Duo
The dual-core Intel CPU is blisteringly fast. In spite of the fact that we have only 512MB of RAM at the moment and are sharing it with the video card, this little laptop screams. Photo Booth is a little application that lets you use the built-in camera to take pictures of yourself and to apply various warps, distortions, and special effects to your picture. My daughter LOVES the app. Here is where you can really see the speed of this machine: it previews NINE of the available special effects in near-realtime (I notice a quarter- to half-second lag between when you move and when all the previews show the move). Applications launch with amazing speed and the system itself boots really fast.
SCREEN: 13.4-inch Glossy
I was really trepidatious about having a smaller, glossy screen after working with my 15-inch matte-finish PowerBook for the last 3.5 years. What about glare? What about size? Well, glare has not been a problem, though I can see that it might be outdoors on sunny days. Of course, if I'm working in the sun a pair of sunglasses with polarizing lenses will likely solve that problem -- and I don't work in the sun often anyway. In terms of size I discovered that I'm not losing as much as I thought. The 13.4-inch screen has a 1280x800 resolution. The 15-inch screen on my PowerBook is 1280x854. By telling the dock to autohide I reclaimed more than 54 pixels, so I have a little more real estate (pixel-wise) that before (I didn't use autohide on the PBook). Also, this screen is much crisper and brighter than the PowerBook screen. It's a real pleasure!
RAM: 512MB
512MB of RAM is standard in the MacBook, but I recommend 1GB. Don't upgrade at the Apple Store, though! The machines come to them pre-built, the machine has two slots, and the RAM must be installed in matching sets. So, if you upgrade at the store, they sell you two 512MB sticks of RAM, install them and hand you the two 256MB sticks that were in it. There is no "trade-in" on the RAM!!! If you don't have to have a computer immediately (as was our case), order via Apple's online store and upgrade there. If you do have to buy from a brick-and-mortar store, don't get the upgrade. You can do it yourself via Edge Memory at a considerable savings -- not as cheap as ordering a custom build from Apple, but still cheaper than the Apple Store.
MISCELLANEOUS
Along with the MacBook itself, we purchased a Mighty Mouse. The little scroll ball (which allows for vertical and horizontal scrolling) is one of those things that you immediately "get". It's a great innovation. However, the MacBook has its USB ports located halfway to the front of the left side of laptop. If you are right-handed, this means the mouse cable must go all the way around laptop, leaving you a little short on cord to be really comfortable. Either the mouse cable needs another 8 inches of length or Apple should place a USB plug where it would be more accessible.
Another minor complaint is that the MacBook has a Mini-DVI connector rather than S-video. That's okay, but they don't include a DVI-to-AV cable, so you you have to buy it separately for $20 if you want to connect to your TV. That would be okay, too, but Apple is pushing FrontRow (a cool app!) as a kind of media center. They even include a remote control for it! Too bad I don't need a remote for watching anything on a 13.4-inch screen! However, I could use it if I had a DVI converter!!! It's a minor gripe, but I really wish the cable was included.
ROSETTA
Rosetta is the the translation layer that allows Intel Macs to run applications that use PowerPC binaries. Fortunately, the Intel Core Duo processor is so fast that they still run at near-native performance. However, I did have a problem getting Quicken 2006 to launch. I threw away preferences and search the web for solutions. On a hunch I tried launching Word and it crashed on launch as well. This clued me in: Rosetta had gone belly-up, not Quicken. A reboot fixed the issue for both apps, but it made me realize that Rosetta really is a bridge until new binaries are available rather than a permanent solution for compatibility.
SUMMARY
The MacBook is a well-built, high-performance machine that's a sheer pleasure to use. It has a few minor design flaws, but is a great little machine. I think the 2.0 GHz white MacBook is the sweet spot in Apple's current lineup for features, performance, and price. Upgrade the RAM to 1GB to get the most from it. I'm looking forward to OS 10.6 which will most likely bring Windows applications to the Mac as well running at native speeds without the need for dual booting.
Expanding upon a slashdot sig:
In Soviet Russia, the government owned the corporations. In modern America, the reverse is true.
As I watch our intellectual property laws become more and more regressive in hopes of protecting corporate profits for companies that can't figure out how to compete in a changing world, I realize that our patent and copyright law has become exactly the failure Thomas Jefferson warned it might.
Our democracy has been undermined by two dreadful rulings in our courts:
1 - That corporations are people in the eyes of the law and enjoy all the rights thereof.
2 - That the spending of money is free speech.
Bull on both counts.
Corporations are legal entities whose right to exist stops when they act contrary to the public good. They have the right to try to make a profit, but not if they do so in a way that makes our undermines our common best interests.
Money is not speech. That ruling is nothing but a clever tactic to quiet our voices by letting those with wealth control our elections by controlling campaign finance.
Kevin's simple guide to election reform:
1 - If you can't vote, you can't fund campaigns, parties, or PAC's. Donations from citizens only.
2 - You can't provide funds to candidates for whom you can't vote (i.e.: if you live in NC, you can't donate to a California senate candidate). That's their election for their representation, not yours.
3 - No corporation or individual can fund perks for politicians: no junkets, no fancy meals, no "educational travel".
4 - No politician can become a paid lobbyist upon leaving office. Serving our country is a privilege, not a cash cow.
We seriously need to get the corporations out of the process of running our country. I'm not a consumer, I'm a citizen.