… a work in progress

This is a test from my iphone using the wordpress app.

My Canon Rebel XSi finally arrived, I’ve been waiting so long since they announced it. Gonna test shoot some photos today of my new Golden Retriever puppy Ralphie.

UPDATE: 2 seconds later… Crap I don’t own any SD cards, gonna have to go buy one.

This is a funny video I found on YouTube about the Downfall of HD DVD. It uses a clip from the movie “Downfall” with Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler. Great movie about the fall of the Third Reich, go check it out sometime. A couple of other German movies to go check out if you haven’t seen them are “Run Lola Run”, “Das Boot” and “The Lives Of Others” Brilliant films

Have been trying to update the iMac with 10.5.2. It’s been hanging on reboot when running the update, so I’ve just been putting it off. Well today I received Aperture 2 and when I went to install it, Aperture 2 required Mac OS X 10.5.2. So I had to figure out how to install 10.5.2 upgrade without it hanging on reboot. I’m a total newbie to Macs so figuring out stuff is a challenge. I finally found a link to a standalone download for the 10.5.2 upgrade rather than using the “Check For Updates”. The standalone installation of 10.5.2 worked like a charm and I was finally able to reboot the system to 10.5.2.

So now that I have Aperture 2 up and running I need to figure out how to use it. This past year I shot in RAW format in the hopes that I would eventually get a Mac. I’m excited to see what I can do with Aperture 2 and my RAW image files.

I’m in San Diego right now for my dad’s birthday. I flew in last night to surprise him, and boy was he surprised. Today was spent troubleshooting computer problems for m parents. A PC that boots into the BSOD and sometimes doesn’t power up. CMOS was weird, a drive was making a noise and power supply sometimes didn’t run. Could be so many problems. Worked on another PC running Windows 98 with no CD burner. The Windows 98 PC which was running a Pentium II and a 4 GB drive was running pretty fast for that they needed it for. I stole the CD burner from the BSOD PC which is a newer P4 and installed it on the Win98 PC. Downloaded a free CD burner software and showed them how to backup some simple stuff. They had a brand new PC to replace the Win98 system and we set that up, with a nice new 20″ widescreen monitor. Tomorrow I need to transfer all the data from the two PCs to the brand new system, should go well.

Tonight we had Sushi Ota, so good! Here are some bad pics from my phone. Towards the end of the night I stopped taking photos. These are in the reverse order that I ate them.

Crab Head Soup

Tempura - Na No Hana, Shitake, Ebi

Crab Duh!

Sashimi - Shima Aji, Hobo, Japanese Tai, Japanese Blue Fin Toro

Crab wrapped in Cucumber, Tuna Meatballs. Both in Miso Sauce

I received my 24″ 2.8GHz iMac on Friday and I’m loving it The monitor housing is so huge I had to rearrange my furniture so I can see the TV while on the computer. Still getting used to using Mac OS, everything seems to make sense.  I have to figure out all the keyboard shortcuts for a Mac, I hate using the mouse. It’s really nice how things just work on a Mac, so far no problems. Rumor has it tomorrow Apple will release an updated Mac Book Pro.

Finally ordered that Mac I’ve been drooling over since it came out, the 24″ iMac 2.8. Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to use Mac OS since the last Apple I owned was in 1988. It was a Mac Plus with a grayscale 9″ screen and 3.5″ floppy. I think I had a SCSI CMS 40 Meg hard drive and a SCSI laser printer. I loved HyperCard back then and I think I used Z Terminal for dialing out. Prior to the Mac Plus I had an Apple II+ with 64Kb, sound card and dual 5.25″ drives. After the II+ I had an Apple IIC. I can still run the Bard’s Tale series , Ultima IV & V, and Wizardry series on the IIC. Man those were some really good games. My favorite had no graphics, but it was the most fun, Telengard. It looks like there is a Telengard version ported for a PC, gonna have to check it out. Good times

UPDATE: Damn! I can’t figure out how to get in full screen DOS mode in Windows Vista to run Telengard. All the better I suppose, I’d probably have wasted several hours killing orcs and finding treasure if it did run.

Looks like it’s over for Toshiba and HD-DVV. I feel bad for anyone who invested in HD-DVD, as it looks like the medium is officially dead. Netflix, Blockbuster, Best Buy, Wal-Mart all went with Blu Ray and Toshiba is stopping production. Reminds me of Beta Video and Laser Discs of which I had both. To this day I still have all my Laser Discs (original Star Wars series and all) and the Pioneer LD player I purchased in college. My sister and brother-in-law got a Toshiba HD DVD player for Christmas, I guess it would now make a good standard DVD player with up-conversion This time I’m happy with my choice of Blu Ray Disc, now hurry up and release the Bourne series on BD DVD.

Engadget Article

PS. I want my iMac so bad, I’m waiting for an employee discount to go thru. If it doesn’t happen soon I’m going to get the iMac thru Motivano.com where I can get a small discount on the system, about $140 bucks and save bigger percentages on software and upgrades.

Today Apple announced the release of the 32GB iPod Touch for $499. Better… but still not enough for me. I’ll wait till the next release.

Apple also announced the 16GB iPhone for $499. Great, but I’ll wait for the 3G/HSDPA model that is rumored to be released later this year.

I’ve been recently pricing out a new iMac 24″ with either the 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo or the 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme. I was checking out the Benchmark tests here and it seems the 2.8GHz version is worth the few hundred bucks for 16% overall performance increase.

I’ve been without broadband at home for a while now, about a year and a half. For a little bit of time I was allowed to jump onto the buildings T-1 line, but that was shared between two buildings and was really slow actually. It was as bad as dial-up at times, sometimes I couldn’t renew my IP address. Then the building owners cut me off, so I went shopping around for internet service. Cable modem is not available here because there is no cable service on this block, it’s the warehouse district outside of downtown. Across the street at my work we had been using a point-to-point wireless high power network that sent a signal about a mile or more to a wireless tower. At work when it was foggy, rain or snow we would not have any internet access. Then our next door neighbors had cable put in, the first customer on the block to have cable installed. 2 years ago the cable company wanted thousands to run cable to our block and the phone company only offered a T1 line. So we dumped our wireless service and got cable, so far so good. Fast and reliable service for our business. Now moving on to my loft… across the street. This side of the street has no cable and up until recently had no DSL service. For the past few months I’ve been using 3G or HSDPA service from AT&T wireless. AT&T recently launched 3G service and Denver and it has been fairly fast considering. So this now brings us to today, I have broadband internet service via QWEST DSL and it’s very fast for DSL service. I’m just happy to have something faster than GPRS/EDGE/3G.

Just did a network speed test, getting about 5.4mbps down and 640k up.