Sunday, December 30, 2007
…you spend more than $1k on lighting equipment for your home. I’ve made a few big home improvement purchases and yesterday added lighting to the fray. I’m replacing all of the lighting in the living room with theater style lighting as another step towards my eventual home theater living room. All this home improvement is very adult, very unlike me.
The new lighting will arrive in 2-3 weeks and consists of track lighting over the couch, decorative accent lighting for near the screen, and Lutron Maestro home automation switches to let my Logitech Harmony programmable uber-remote control the lighting for home theater macro’s.
Best part of it is this light, the Lightstik. The base is electrified (very weak current - you can’t feel it with your fingers) and the LED sticks just sit in there. The moment they make contact with the base unit they light up.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Yesterday brought 12 hours of production issues, troubleshooting, and delayed launches. I hate days like that and really can’t wait for the weekend now (2 days left). We have another busy day of launch activity ahead of us today, but hopefully we will complete everything and be ready for a nice relaxing Friday.
On the plus side I picked up an Airport Extreme to replace my slowly dying Linksys Gigabit-N router. The Airport Extreme has blown my socks off - not only is it drop dead simple to configure, but my Macbook Pro Lanshark connects at 300Mbps and gets 21MB/sec actual throughput at 1.4ms latency. Impressive!
Saturday, October 27, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
Saturday, October 27, 2007
The past 24 hours has brought a number of great things into my life. Yesterday night I went to the Bell Square Apple Store for the Leopard launch with Mike and picked myself up a copy of the shiny new version of OS X.
The launch event itself was an interesting experience. Apple really does know how to work a crowd, and the energy and passion it’s employees (retail and engineering alike) bring to work with them makes for a really positive experience for Apple’s customers.
Leopard itself is a neat little upgrade. The upgrade itself actually works really well - I didn’t lose any of my documents, settings, or preferences. Aside from Quicksilver being stuck in my dock (not the menubar where it really belongs) everything works flawlessly on Lanshark - Photoshop even stayed fully activated. Leopard is nothing revolutionary, but it really does add a lot of polish to OS X and makes for a worthwhile upgrade.
For the first time ever I actually kind of like the Finder. Quicklook (the ability to preview just about any document without the overhead of opening it’s parent application) is handy and makes confirmation that you have the document you are looking for brain dead simple. Spotlight is vastly improved featuring much faster searches, operators, and network search abilities.
Aside from the Leopard launch I was also thrilled to find out my Gmail account finally got IMAP enabled. The IMAP implementation is well done, and it makes Gmail’s iPhone experience as slick as their browser experience. Being able to have Mail.app cache my gmail account is handy as well for having my webmail searchable via the OS just like the rest of my personal knowledge store.
The final great thing to enter my life yesterday was Puzzle Quest for the DS. Puzzle Quest is a fun little RPG/Puzzler game that a couple of friends had suggested and it’s quite fun. It offers quick-in, quick-out gameplay - a fun addition to my go bag.
Last night I had the opportunity to experience the joy of Applecare. iChoad finally finished dying so I took him to the Apple Store (again) to drop him off. Unfortunately the University Village Apple Store is closed for renovation so I had to fight traffic up to Lynnwood. Luckily for me it was a reasonably pleasant experience. After a little diagnosis they agreed that the motherboard and video card had issues, and ordered the parts to replace them. I’ve had a few stuck pixels for a while so they also agreed to replace the LCD screen. All in all I should be getting him back early next week, with pretty much every component replaced.
The traffic I faced last night was in stark contrast to my ride in to work this morning. Some asshat scheduled an early morning meeting on a Friday so I was driving in at 7:10 - with practically no traffic. There is something weird about driving at 60mph in the dark on a freeway I rarely get to accelerate past 20 on - it felt forbidden and exhilarating.
Leopard launches tonight. Excitement!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Gmail is getting IMAP support and I need it now! I already have switched my whole life over to Gmail and the thought of having IMAP access to Gmail for my iPhone gives me tech-wood. Turn it on for me Google, I love you long time!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
I am pleased to announce that I am typing this post up from my shiny new workstation. I’ve decided to pretty much go all mobile again so it was time to trade my Marbles the Macbook in for it’s daddy, a nicely equiped 15″ Macbook Pro. I’ve dubbed my new aluminum friend Lanshark - a name inspired by my beloved pit bull Skype (the one and only real land shark.
When Apple announced their Up-to-Date Program that offers recent purchasers of Apple hardware the Leopard update for $10 - normally priced at $129, or included with any new Mac. I worked a little financial magic, confirmed the sale of Marbles for a reasonable price and dropped down to the Apple Store to pick it up.
A few first thoughts on Lanshark:
- Even though Lanshark has virtually the same processor as Marbles did the extra Video RAM and faster FSB make the computer feel noticeably faster.
- I can’t even begin to put into words how much I love the backlit keyboard. I really missed it when I traded in my G4 Powerbook for the Macbook and I’m 100% glad to have it back.
- The Macbook Pro is one sleek design masterpiece. My Thinkpad T61 at work is roughly the same speed and specs as Lanshark, but both the industrial design and the hardware integration are years behind it’s shiny competitor.
- The design of the packaging has improved a lot - my Powerbook came in a box roughly twice the size of the Macbook Pro, while both notebooks have nearly identical dimensions.
And now back to your regularly scheduled Portal playing action.
