Apple

MacWorld, and more

So MacWorld was Tuesday. Apple came out with a new Word Processor, to replace AppleWorks, a new low-cost computer, a new iPod, and some more. New program, Pages, is like word, but from Apple. It looks cool to me. The Mac mini is $499, 1.25 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40GB HD, and a Combo Drive (CD-R/RW, DVD). And the new iPod shuffle is just $99 for a 512 MB or $149 for a 1 GB. At first I was un-excited about the shuffle because of its lack of a display, but I am becoming more and more accepting of the idea since I realized that on my iPod I mostly just set it to shuffle and pay no attention to it, other than maybe jumping to the next song occasionally. All-in-all, a good MacWorld.

Also, yesterday, was Apples quarterly profit report. They have, to date, sold 10 million iPods, 4.5 million in the last quarter. Thats amazing.

Apple has also posted videos of some of the features of Tiger (OS X 10.4) and if you watch the video of Dashboard, the weather widget gets set to Saginaw, MI. Of all the cities, how? Why? Well, I tried to figure it out. I searched the web for anything connecting Apple to Saginaw. I came up with not what I wished for, but I did get some results. I will post them Sunday (Yes, I am doing a 2 part series, I figure you have enough Mac stuff already).

OK, stuff you care about now.

I am working on cleaning my room, slowly. I still have work to do though.

Grandma is getting better. Much more coherent.

I think thats enough.

Til Sunday,

nick

“That guy really twists my dreads”

It's Noon, and I'm Bored, So Why Not?

First of all, though you probably didn’t notice, the “Blogger” category is gone. I went through last night and marked them all as “Blogger post #XX” and then incorporated them into the other categories. There will be a new category coming soon though, very soon.

I also did some calculating the other day, and came up with this:

May 13, 2005 – 250th Post
May 19, 2005 – 200th General (earliest)
Oct 10, 2005 – 300th Post

I think those are right anyway. Note that the 200th General is listed as earliest, since every non-general post will push that date back by 3 days.

Yesterday we watched Troy. A good movie, based largely on the Iliad. If you liked Gladiator, you will like Troy.

Grandma is doing better. Main problem now seems to be that she is dopy from the medication. She doesn’t complain about pain as much though, and is starting to get used to not being able to use her arm.

Ok, I gonna go. Remember, MacWorld is tomorrow, Keynote is at 12 (Yay!, wait, they said no live webcast this year BOOOO!)

nick

Why don’t they try hiring people who have IQs higher than their age?
me – long ago

update: I just read through my comments and thought I should add that I haven’t started toward any resolutions yet. Thats one of those things about new year’s resolutions, you have all year to work at them.

Wow

Thats all that can describe it. Wow.

So, Chris made it to Toronto Ok, and seems to be doing well. He got a little lost on his way, but school is going well from what I hear.

On Wednesday morning my grandma was to go in for rotator cuff surgery at 5, for the operation at 8. Around 4:45 the phone rings and it’s my uncle Steve. After chatting with home for a few minutes, my mom realizes he isn’t at home in Allentown, PA, he is sitting in his van at the end of our driveway, where he had been for about 3 hours. So, he and a co-worker of his went with my mom and grandma for the surgery. He has always had a habit of showing up without saying anything. He left a little after 10 Wednesday night without sleeping, but stopped in Ohio because the roads were getting pretty bad. Grandma is doing fine, though understandably sore.

I went to Saginaw with Jenn today. First to Kohl’s to try and exchange my gloves that came apart (with no success), then to Dick’s to try and find a matching sleeping bag to mine (again, no success). You always feel bad when you come home with no accomplishments. I did buy Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy though. And we found out her ring should be in come morning.

Bourne Supremacy wasn’t great. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, however, was. A truly great “stoner” movie. You have to see it.

OK, thats all for tonight. Monday I shall return, and Thursday I will tell you all about the fun new things Steve brings us at MacWorld on Tuesday.

nick

There are several sacred things in this world that you don’t EVER mess with. One of them happens to be another man’s fries. Now, you just remember that and you’ll live a long and healthy life.

Apple Store!

Jenn and I went to the Apple Store yesterday. The 30″ display is beautiful. Strangely, it doesn’t look that big. It does however make the 23″ look small, which is quite a feat. Up close though it is a massive display, too massive in fact for ordinary tasks, as web pages and text documents seem rather tiny on the display. Pictures and movies however are gorgeous.

The iMac G5 is much better looking in person. The G4s seemed kind of awkward because of the widescreen LCD, especially the 20″, but the G5s are square, and eliminate the problem. (as a side note, the word awkward is rather awkward, yes?)

Jenn rented “Metal Gear Solid 3” for me while she is taking exams, so I may be hard to reach for about a week. Sorry. She also rented “The Day After Tomorrow”.

OK, I’ll be back Tuesday.

nick

:) From Jenn

I’m bored cause Nick is watching CSI and I didn’t pay attention to the first half, so I am blogging for him. He got one of his ebay payments today, so that was exciting, but then the one item didn’t sell again, so that was sucky.

John kerry kept saying, “I HAVE A PLAN, I HAVE A PLAN!” but never actually said what the plan was. Well, Nick found the “plan” on his website but it was really vague. Only two weeks and one day till the election, do you know who you are voting for? I can’t vote cause I’m from out of town and registered in a township two and half hours a way, but you better vote damn it.

Nick has an apple car that went on ebay for $160.00, three times what he paid. But hes gonna keep it, cause frankly the apple car ROCKS!

Oh yeah by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, it is freaking cold out.

If you are bored on Sunday nights, you have to watch Desperate Housewives on ABC. I don’t really know what it is about the show but it is really good. Its a new series that started three weeks ago, and its about all the twistedness of suburbean life. Its good, trust me, watch it.

TTYL……..Jenn……..
till nick posts on Thursday

Hmmmmm

Only seven more days till Nick’s birthday. Twenty-two not exactly an important year. Sixteen you can drive, Eighteen you can vote, get freedom, legal adult, twenty-one you can drink and more adult stuff, twenty-five you get cheaper car insurance, twenty-two nuthin.

Apple Expo in Paris was Tuesday morning. New iMacs came out. They are thin now… two inches thin. I like the old iMacs better cause of the way they looked, but the new ones are faster. It was on at 4am here cause Paris is six hours ahead. There was no live cast but I followed the updates.

Broadway is half paved, we walked down the half of concrete with the dogs, but molly kept going in and out of the ditches. Fun Fun. Should be done soon hopefully.

ps. In case you can’t tell this blog wasn’t written by Nick, he didn’t want to so I (Jenn) wrote it. I did good didn’t I 🙂

It's Shake n' Bake, and I helped!

So, uhm, I don’t want to be here…

I am pretty tired, and kinda hot, and, well, I am probably just going to do a half-assed job at posting if I do, so, uhm…

But there was a few things I wanted to mention, but there not important…

And it’s not like anybody reads this anymore…

Hmm…

Ok, I guess.

I worked today, but not yesterday, and only a little the day before.

Blog/Website has been re-spidered, so all pages but this one are in search index.

I decided Schwarzenegger and Ventura would be interesting running mates.

Haven’t done any website work in a long time now. Haven’t done baseball cards in a few days either.

If I don’t work tomorrow, I am going to clean/rearrange my room.

I finally found the key to our front door. I lost it like a year ago. Was in center console of the car.

Powerbooks ship with all their install images on a single DVD, rather than 8 install/restore CDs and a system check CD like Jenn’s ibook or 2 Install, 3 restore, and 1 check CD like mine. Is a good idea. iBook is only mac that ships with a CD-Rom option, and thats only available on the low end edu only model.

OK, thats enough. I’m going to bed.

bye,
nick

If the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be coming toward you, rather than you toward it, then you know its not a dream, and you’re just sleep walking down a railroad track.

Changes

You may notice the blog is a bit different. You may also have noticed there was a temporary “down” period yesterday. So what changed? Well, Bravenet was annoying, so I dropped them. That means the second counter has disappeared, along with the poll. The SiteMeter counter is still there, and is accurate. I am awaiting my 1500th visitor, shouldn’t be too long. The poll I haven’t found a replacement for yet. I hope to have a new poll within about a month, but who knows with me. New though is finally a search. At 149 posts (Saturday is 150, woohoo!) I felt a search was needed. The search includes a page that lets me see what the top searches are, top results, etc…, so I will periodically post those. It also provides a site map when it “spiders” my site, so that may be useful to some of you. It isn’t great yet though, so I will need to play with how deep it maps. Right now you can only reach the map from a search page, but I will be adding the link on the main site pages, and on the links in the top right of the blog.

Apple released it’s Q3 today. Two billion dollars in revenue, $61 million in profit, $4.96 billion cash in the bank (yes, cash, for buying smaller companies up generally). Wow. Also, it was confirmed that the reason the iMacs are shipping late is due to IBM’s poor G5 turnout. It isn’t IBM’s fault, 90nm is just really small to be building chips at.

I downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. It is an RSS news program. For those who don’t know, RSS is an online syndication standard, similar to how the Bay City Times gets all the Associated press articles, or how yahoo lists Reuter’s news. I like it so far. I have MacRumors, Space.com, Crazy Apple Rumors Site, Apple Hot News, MacCentral, and of course, my own. Yes, the blog has an RSS feed, it is built into iBlog. So if any of you are using an RSS program, you can get my feed here (Yes, it looks weird if you view it in your browser, all RSS feeds do. I promise it works fine though).

Ok, I have a nasty headache again from the wisdom teeth, so I am going to bed. I can’t believe I wrote this much honestly.

Night, all.
See you Satuday.

Remember: 150th post – Saturday, July 17th 100th general in iBlog – Sunday, August 1st (unless we get a special before then)

nick

Fry, referring to his accidentally nailing his own grandmother, knocking her up, and becoming his own grandfather:
“I did do the nasty in the pasty!”

On time, holy crap!

I’m on time! Well, I have an excuse (yes, I need an excuse to do things right). I brought my ibook over to Jenn’s so I can update from here.

Apple is at about 99,900,000, so they should certainly reach the 100,000,000 by tomorrow evening. I am impressed at how fast they are accumulating downloads.

It’s really warm out. The good news is it should rain in about 3 hours, thus dropping the temp and humidity. Michigan pisses me off. 63, 65, 55, 90, 85, 65. What the hell? Pick a season and stick with it.

I have folding@home running again. The graphical, regular program. Working fine, and I am glad.

I need a job. Yeah, I do the landscaping thing, but I need a REAL job. I rewrote my resume, and need to start submitting it. I need money, and I need something to do all day, and Jobs are good at solving both of those.

Ok, good night all. I will try to be on time Wednesday too, start a habit of it. And I PROMISE new poll by next post.

bye
nick

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons and make SUPER lemons.
(Principal Scudworth, Clone High)

Hello Out There

There was no quote last time, you notice that? I couldn’t think of one, sorry. I have been running dry on quotes lately. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Fireworks Saturday were cool. Jenn and I were right behind DoubleTree Hotel, between their building and the river. Was a really good spot I felt. Jenn seemed to enjoy them too.

I realized earlier today that my brother’s birthday is the 9th, which is like 3 days away. Wow, that’s close.

Apple is giving away free ipods. Every 100,000th song purchased, from the 95,100,000th to the 99,900,000th, will bring a free 20GB ipod to the purchaser. Then, on the 100,000,000th song, the purchaser will receive the grand prize of a 40GB ipod, a 17″ PowerBook, and a gift certificate for 10,000 free songs to fill their new ipod. Also, the grand prize winner will get a chance to create their own celebrity play list for the music store. Apple’s website has more info, as well as the rules for no-purchase entry. They are at about 96,865,000 right now.

I ran XBench on Jenn’s new ibook. Wow. With a dual 800MHz G4 as a baseline 100, Jason’s 733 G4 Quicksilver received a 64.68 overall, my 800 G3 ibook got a 42.90, and our 400 G3 imac a 30.24. So what does Jenn’s 933 G4 ibook get? An 85.17! Thats wicked considering it was only $1049. She scored over 100 in several categories too, especially under memory since she has DDR memory where the baseline system had SDR. And by the way, A dual 2.0 G5 Powermac averages a 200 overall, with up to 2000 in HD performance thanks to it’s Serial ATA drives.

What else…..

I am using Folding@home now. Some of you may remember that I used to run SETI@home. I pretty much stopped running SETI when I switched to the ibook, and have now decided that folding is probably a better choice. Yeah, looking for Aliens is fun, but this is more likely to be useful.

I’m getting to the point I wish I didn’t know about Tiger. I hate knowing I have to wait till mid 2005 to buy it. By the way, for those unaware, OS X has cats for all the version names. 10.0 is cheetah, 10.1 is puma, 10.2 is jaguar, 10.3 is panther, 10.4 is tiger. Future versions of the OS are expected to include lynx, cougar, and leopard.

Well, thats quite a post for me, so I am going to bed.

night

nick

“I’m gonna bite you sucka”
– Blackula