Saturday, September 30, 2006
OK - I admit it, I’m addicted to Starbucks Frappaccino’s and their little cousin the Doubleshot. This morning I picked one up at the corner store that had a crease in it’s label. I think the ‘new’ logo is neat:
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Tonight was unexpectedly populous at Le Cinema Sparks! I had planned on doing a movie showing with a few friends, and it ended up being quite the showing of The Chronicles of Riddick in hi-def for a large number of people. Thank you so much to Ben, Elliot, Ian, Keenan, Rob, Shawna, and Troy for the fantastic evening and great company.
Ian, Ben, and Keenan joined me for dinner at Pho 900 on Broadway, where we all made the bzzzt mistake of bzzzzzzt drinking iced bzzt Vietnamese coffee and having Pho. The Pho was fantastic, but the sugary deliciousness of the coffee was significantly more caffeinated than planned.
After dinner we all went back to my place and were joined by the rest of the crowd for some drunken movie madness. Now it’s past two in the morning, and I’m left alone, somewhat buzzed, and very awake still from the caffeine with nothing but an exhausted puppy and my beloved TNG to keep me company.
Friday, September 29, 2006
After a fairly long week of doing little other than working and watching TNG I’m glad the weekend has arrived. I left work a little early today and went home to clean up for my weekend (and quite possibly some friends coming over later).
Aside from my relentless stream of TNG I’ve been busy getting my bedroom in shape. I got my living room to where I was happy with it (in all it’s adult glory) and have decided the bedroom is next. I got a new desk to replace the old TV hutch and it’s proved to be an excellent and ergonomic choice for my beloved 24″ iMac. Picture as follows:
A few comments on the new 24″ iMac now that I’ve had it for a while:
–24″ of screen real estate (1920×1200) is fantastic for day to day use and media alike. The screen is amazingly bright, fairly color accurate, and highly responsive. The near 1080p resolution looks great when playing back hi-def content.
–The new Intel 64bit Core 2 Duo processors are fast! I can do video editing and encoding in significantly faster than real time.
–Providing 1GB of RAM and a 128MB graphics card standard is a nice touch. I had to upgrade to the 3GB maximum RAM for running Photoshop and a few other memory intensive applications but most users will find 1GB enough.
–The mighty mouse is great in concept - I love the scroll wheel - but is flawed in reality. The LED based lighting and low resolution make the mouse rather sluggish and inaccurate. I would expect Apple to be leading the laser mouse revolution, not ignoring it.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The best possible thing arrived yesterday in the mail from Costco: all seven seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation! Costco had a special deal on their website where you can get all seven seasons shipped for a little over $300 and I simply couldn’t resist.
Brien and I immediately dug into Season 3, and I spent much of last night and the day so far today watching it in a window on iChoad while working on some stuff. The video quality is only average (they didn’t clean it up much - it’s still interlaced and only minimally cleaner than the NTSC source it came from), but the new 5.1 soundtrack is a lot cleaner than the original broadcasts over NTSC.
Oh Space Drama, how I love thee in all 49 discs of your glory!
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Does it get any more emo than this?
Friday, September 22, 2006
The end of a long week usually brings peace - this week a haircut showed up too! I just got back from Scream where I got my snazzy new haircut, and had a chance to pick up The Life Aquatic soundtrack soundtrack.
As movie soundtracks go I have to say it’s one of my favorites - Life on Mars and Queen Bitch by David Bowie mixed with the electro that was the background to the Ping Island sequence is simply flawless! Seriously, go pick up a copy!
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
I’ve re-discovered two distinct technological pleasures: screen and Delicious Monster. Aside from spending a few days of quality time with those two gems I’ve been keeping busy with work and keeping up with my day to day stuff around the house.
Screen is an old session management tool for unix systems and boy is it neat. It basically lets you run terminal programs in sessions, and manage those sessions in very interesting ways. You can connect, share, and disconnect from remote sessions at will making managing multiple context-insensitive applications over SSH a breeze.
Delicious Monster makes a DVD/game/book management tool that I had looked at previously, but not investigated fully. They offer some amazing technologies to make it easier to manage a big collection. Most uniquely it offers easy data entry via the camera built into my iMac by “scanning” the barcodes and pulling all the information down automatically.
It took me a little under two hours to scan, sort, and manage all 300+ movies that I have in my collection. I used a tool called Deliweb to create this nifty view of all my movies.
