mac mania

As some may know the WWDC is currently running in Cali. This is the developer conference for everything Apple. The main interest every year is the Keynote by Jobs. This year was far from a let down. Let's see, we have new cinema monitors that, not only, are beautiful, but there's the new record size of 30 inches. That is huge. If you watch the Keynote (there's a link at macrumors.com, you'll see the crowed go crazy multiple times. Also Jobs showed off the news version of OS X - Tiger (to be released in 2005). Now that is looking really, really hot. It can't be placed in words how cool some of the stuff is, you just have to watch the video. In closing, it is a great time to be a Mac user or a switcher especially with Feds telling people to stop using Internet Explorer. Ha.

DMB Concert

That was, as I expected, a GREAT concert. The set lists from previous days were looking fantastic and they certainly predicted this one well. You can look at the set list HERE, just click June 27th from the menu. Some songs of note were: Song that Jane Likes, Don't Drink the Water, Two Step, Dancing Nancies, and Stay. All of the songs were good but these are just ones that I think were especially exciting. I wasparticularly excited about the song that jane likes, really great song. Two Step was almost exactly like the Listener Supported version. That's definetly a good thing. I was very surprised with the new songs. They were all fantastic. New Songs 1, 2, and 3 were easily of the same quality as the rest of their repertoire. It looks like DMB is finally putting out some solid new stuff. Good to hear. Don't feel like writing anymore now, maybe later.

fucked up movies...

We saw the Triplets of Belleville last night, we being the usual: Matt, Olivia, Jacob, Tiny, and I. I wasn't sure if I would like it or not, Jacob only told me that there was some obscure animation playing at The Palace, so, seeing as we both had a prior engagement that we really wanted to forget about, we went.

Now this was the first time I had been back in the palace in several years, but this place was tops. Not really its condition, Tiny pointed out that the seats needed to be sloped more because she could see people's heads, but just the service. I guess service is a bad word for it, atmosphere is better. For example, you could bring coffee and Biscotti into the movie, as Matt and Olivia both did, and it wasn't styrofoam-cup-terrible coffee, Matt said it was good stuff. And in actual coffee cups. Sweet. Anyway, mundane things aside, the movie was amazing. It was indeed a french animation. Only a few lines were actually spoken, yet it was still hilarious. I highly recommend.

On another note, while I was there one of the theater staff said that the palace was trying to get Fahrenheight 9/11. That rocks my socks. I'll probably end up seeing it somewhere else before that, but still, getting it here is an important thing. DMB today.

Bush Bashing

Man I saw the WORST political ad ever on the Bush site today. Actually I saw it on Fark, as most of you know, I wouldn't simply browse into the GWB site, nay. Anyway, here's the link: LINK. I hope that whoever wrote that aad no longer has a job, seriously. It's called Kerry's Coalition of the Wild Eyed, if you have trouble finding it, but that link should open it right up. Now before you say it, yes, I know it was MoveOn who compared Hitler to Bush but seriously, it plays like a pro-Dem ad until the end. Terrible ad.

In other news, I'm seeing DMB on Sunday, yay.

the web mail race

Looks like Hotmail has finally hopped on the bandwagon and raised their storage capacity. I knew they would have to do it, I just wasn't sure when. Gmail hasn't even gone public yet and it's created a nice ripple in the web mail industry. First was Yahoo, who bumbed up to 100MB then Hotmail, not one to be beat, announced their free 250MB service. 250 megs is significantly better than what they were offering - 2. Still, it doesn't even compare to Gmail at 1 Gig or 1024 megs.

Do I think that Gmail will put both Yahoo and Hotmail out of business? Doubtful. Many who already have the two will probably stay, especially since they just rose their capacity to well over what a normal person would use. Look out for Gmail.

More Music

I've been buying new music like a mad man, I really should stop. I got Undermined by Phish. They played a song or two from that on Letterman a couple nights ago. Overall it's good, but if you're used to their live albums you'll probably be dissapointed. It is more pop than I would like to see Phish doing but still good.

I also got Modest Mouse's new CD Good News for People Who Like Bad News. This is really one of the best albums I've picked up all year. It's more like Built to Spill than anything they have ever done and that's a good thing.

Gmail

I've been getting Gmail invites like crazy so if anyone wants some here:
Gmail

Gmail

Gmail

New Stuff

As youmay or may not notice, I changed the look of this here Blog. Also you can leave comments now, yay! Comment away, if you want. BTW, you CAN comment if you don't have a blog account, you just have to click "or post anonymously" under the sign in thing. Just leave your name in the comment.

Doughnut

I'm reading a new book: Rule of Four by two young people. It's pretty good so far, it really tastes of Dan Brown - not a bad thing. I saw The Terminal last night; the movie with Tom Hanks as a foreigner stranded in a NY airport for a very long time. It was pretty good, I mean, it had its moments. Not Hanks' best performance by far, but still worth seeing.

New Music, Yay

Well, I finally put 2 and 2 together, ( and I didn't get 5) I have money and I have iTunes, so I started downloading some music that's just a pain to try to find on any p2p thing. Firstly, I got the first new Pixies song in 13 years which is apparently about a children's book. It's good, it's not an amazing culmination of the many years that they have been playing, so don't get too excited, it's just your typical Pixies song. Which is good, it would be terrible if they did something drastically different for their first new song.

Next I got a couple songs from this band Franz Ferdinand that I saw on Conan. They're pretty damn good. I haven't heard enough to say they're the next big thing but from what I hear, they are. I also got some other random stuff that isn't very noteworthy but you can't win them all.

New Toy

I just got a nice new toy: Kodak EasyShare CX6330 digital camera. It is a beauty, really. I just uploaded the first pictures taken to my hard drive and wow they're great. They'll be even better when I actually know what I'm doing. Video isn't bad either.

Gmail

Holy god Gmail is awesome. my new account is: iamzeus@gmail.com Anyway, there's sooo much space. It saves all of your sent messages and everything ever. You NEVER need to delete a thing. You just search. It's amazing.

Gmail

Well I just purached myself a Gmail account on Ebay for $20. Couldn't wait. Now I have the difficult task of choosing the user name. It can basically be anything I want since so few actually have accounts. hmmm....

Apple updated their Powermacs the other day. Crazy. They're now up to 2.5ghz dual-processors. Man I would like one of those. They're supposed to be twice as fast as your basic Pentium-4 based system. Damn.

cicada wars

I'm usually not one to complain about our new friends. I have graciously, I think, put up with them, after all I would scream a little if I were under ground for 17 years. But today was the last straw. I shall wage war on the cicada.

I was on my way to the mall when I heard one of them scream and I knew it had come from somewhere in my car. It sounded like it was behind me and to my left. So I turned around and tried to see where it was but it screamed louder. That was when I realized that it was actually one me. I thought it was on my back, so I tried swatting at it and it just screamed louder and louder. I decided to just give up and wait until I parked to deal with that whore. So I made my way through the cicadas that were dive-bombing my car and parked at the mall.

When I tried to grab off of my back I couldn't find it so I turned around and realized that it was on the collar of my shirt. That bastard. So I through it at my window and smashed it with a water bottle. The war has begun.

HP

I saw the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, on Saturday at Garrett. I thought it was good, however, some in my crew (word) thought it was terrible. I thought it was bad that they left out a huge part of the plot, the friendship between Lupin and Harry's dad and all of the background that the book gives you. They touch on it slightly, but if you haven't read the book than you really are missing a lot. But, if you view the movie strictly from a film critic's point of view than it was a fantastic movie. I don't think they could have done a better job in making this film. It just flowed so nicely. Int he future, I think the content of the films will get better ( more accurate, just more in general) but I don't think they'll be able to top that one. In comparing The Prioner to the other two, I think this one was easily the best. The other two just don't have the flow that this one has.

Apple assessment

After using my new Powerbook for a little over a week I feel obligated to write about the pros and cons of all Apple that I have encountered. If you're thinking of buying a Mac (Jacob and Matt) than pay close attention.

Firstly, the service. Ordering was a little difficult, I will have to admit. Although this may not happen to you, my parents were purchasing with a Debit card. Now, a debit card such as ours has a $500 daily spending limit as a fraud protection utility. So, if we tried to just purchase the Powerbook straight from the net, it wouldn't work. We had to call Apple than the bank and set up a mutual agreement. The bank would let Apple and only Apple's large transaction through if they filed within the day. So, we placed our order and Apple promised that they would withdrawal the money later that day. Well, they didn't. They waited for a few days and there were problems. Anyway, that was cleared up eventually and the P-Book was ordered. Shipping made up for it. It came from China to Cumberland in literally a single day. That was free shipping. kudos to Apple for that.

Now, the goods. When I first got the package it looked like your standard brown fed-ex package but inside that was the beautiful box that the powerbook came in. Trust me, I don't call many boxes beautiful. You could tell that Apple put a lot of thought into package. Every detail was taken care of. After reading the boring stuff and plugging it in, I turned it on and, imagine that, it just worked. OS X 10.3 was pre-installed and it worked wonderfully. After creating my account I did a few updates and I was good. The first thing I noticed: OS X beats the hell out of XP. It really is a beautiful thing. It is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. If you just want to check your email and chat with friends, you will have no problems switching, it's all intuitive. Also, if you want to geek it out you have Unix. That's definitely a strong point. A lot of people think OS X is weak because it's too simple, you can't get any more powerful than that Unix terminal, trust me. Now, at first I was just doing the basics, installing and surfing the web. Installing is strange to a windows user. All of the programs come in image files, you decompress the image files and (in most cases) you get a one file application that you drag to the Application folder. That took a little bit to get used to. Also, if you don't like the program, just get rid of that one file and you're done. Amazing.

Navigating. You have the dock and that is all you need. I have two things on my desktop, my hard drive and a folder. The dock is your friend. You put any program you want there, click it and zam.... it's open. Nice. I won't get into too much, but the file organization of OS X is great, it forces you to organize yourself and you will love it in the end.

Designing. I design web sites as I'm sure most people know. So this is a big factor for me. I first got myself Photoshop and the entire Macromedia suite. They work great, lots of fonts that you don't get with the Windows versions. Anyway, designing on this thing is a dream. For instance, say I'm working with an HTML file, sometimes I want to open it with Dreamweaver or text editor, sometimes with Safari (web browser). All I do is drag the file on top of the icon of the application that I want to use in the dock and it is opened with that app. Great feature. One other thing that you will learn to love is expose. If you have a lot of windows open, this really comes in handy. Hit F9 and all of the windows scale down and appear in front of you side by side so you can pick one, hit F10 and all the windows in a certain application do the same thing, hit F11 and everything goes away and you see your desktop. This doesn't sound that great until you see it. It probably is my favorite feature of OS X. Learned to love it.

One thing that really holds people back from buying Apple is the speed. They see 1.5 GHz and think, well I can get a 3 GHz PC for that much money, why would I buy a Mac. Well, firstly, the architectures are completely, you can't even begin to compare Macs and PCs in hat sort of way. But I will tell you that speed is not a problem at all. My mom has a 3 GHz AMD PC and this Mac easily rivals that. It is blazing. Secondly, speed isn't everything. You can get a really fast car or you can get the luxury automobile. I sprung for the Benz.

In closing, if you have never used a Mac I suggest you find someone who has a nice new one and check it out or go to an Apple store. If you've previously used Macs and you hated it, try OS X. It kills every other version of Mac OS. Well, that's all I can think of now, if I find anything wrong I'll certainly writ about it. Wow that was long.

Press Press Press

If you check out Matt Poland's Blog, he talks about the story that the AP wrote about the book this year. I had completely forgot about this until I read his journal. Apparently a place in Florida picked up the story, here, and so did the LA Times he says. I looked for the story on their website and it turns out that they did however you can't access it online unless you're a member. It's not free like the great NYTimes. Also, a paper in Indiana picked up.

That's really exciting. We're famous. There's a part in the article where the guy talks about PVTV (the article John and I wrote) and I really felt vindicated after our many rejections. Also, all of those bastards that say we don't doing anything in seminar can read that article and then eat it with a little mayo. That's quite the way to go out.

Ebert

Well, lately I've seen a couple new movies. Well, one new movie and one that was new to me. Firstly, I saw Shrek 2. That was crazy. It had the same humor that the first one used, but it looks like they mastered the techniques in this one. There were so many sexual innuendos in this one or maybe my friends and I can pervert just about anything. Actually we're not the only people who noticed. I'll have to buy that one when it comes out. Pixar always leaves subtleties to look for. The second film was Kill Bill Volume 1. I think I was the only person who hadn't seen this movie before Friday night. It was good. I liked. Parts were very unrealistic and just cheesy but as a whole I really liked it. I'm not sure if Volume 2 is still in theaters or not. It probably isn't so I'm looking forward to watching the DVD. Anyway, see those two. Good.

The Bad Plus

With some of the graduation money that is continually pouring in from various relatives that I've never heard of from towns I've also never heard of I purchased a great CD. The Bad Plus - Give. Awesome. Matt's cousin turned me on to this band when we were in Baltimore a few months back but this is the first time I really listened and they are fantastic. Drum, Bass, and Piano - you can't beat that. So, check it out if you can. You can't really find any of their music on download thingies (Kazaa) because they're not too well known and it's jazz, but I encourage at least visiting their website and listening to some stuff they have there: www.thebadplus.com.

on graduation

Graduation was nice. I was more a part of it then I thought I would be. What I mean is that I originally thought that by last night it would all seem like a formality and I wouldn't enjoy it. That wasn't the case though. It was fun having a whole of people there just watching you. Well, that's what it felt like. However, that morning at the practice I realized two things: 1) I have no idea who the majority of the people in my class are and 2) I'm glad I don't. I only say this because I was right in the middle of retard-fest. You know, kids that barely graduated. That's tough to do. It would have been better if they would just let me sit with my friends, but that's obviously impossible.

Anyway, on to the details of the night. Waiting in the library for around an hour before going out wasn't so great. It was really hot in that bitch. It's kind of ironic that I spent the last moments of my high school career in the two places I probably went to the least: the library and the gym. Oh well. Getting out there was no big deal, although the huge crowed overwhelmed me at first. The speeches weren't bad. They were short and that's what I like. Then the awards came. I won the two awards I expected I would: the Frank LaParle (the one I got at the banquet) and the Spanish award. The Spanish was $500, so with the other award I made out with $600 for the night. Not bad.