The great thing about growing up in a family with three brothers is that gift buying is incredibly easy. I ask them what they want and they tell me. They ask me what I want and I tell them. We go out and buy whatever was asked for and give the gifts to each other. All of us have our perfect gifts (since we chose them ourselves) and no feelings are hurt. We usually just give them to each other once we buy them, since we don’t really see the point in wrapping something when we already know what will be inside the wrapping paper.
This year, Justin got me an iTunes Music Store gift certificate, since I’m somewhat of an anti-piracy advocate. I was happy when I heard that Apple was opening the iTunes Music Store to Canada, since it’s we were lacking a good source of legal music downloads here. Prior to this gift certificate, I hadn’t actually played around with iTunes too much and actually felt that it was a bit bloated for a music player. But now, I’ve been spending more time playing with it and I’ve found that almost all of the functions it provides are useful, with little that I wouldn’t use.
I really like how it provides an excellent, integrated music experience. It handles CD ripping and burning very elegantly, as well as music downloads in one simple interface. It would take a very long essay in order to explain how much I love iTunes now, so I’ll spare you my fanaticism. However, I can’t stress how great it is to be able to legally download music now. In the past, I’ve wasted a lot of money buying CDs where I only liked two or three songs, so it will be nice to just pay for what I want from now on.
Published on Dec. 20, 2004
in Tech.
I’m selling my laptop to my dad. I’ve had it for a year and it’s served me well for that time, but I’m giving it up to my dad now, since he needs (or wants, rather) one for various financial things he has to do. It’s funny - he’s almost buying it for full price from me. After all’s said and done, I will have paid just $200 to use this laptop for a year. If you think about it as a rental, it’s an amazingly good deal.
This coming week, there’s going to be a lot of computer switching at our house. I’m giving my laptop to my dad; he’s giving his computer to Justin; Justin’s giving his computer to me. There’s going to be lots of backing up, formatting and installing coming up. It’s going to be fun!
I don’t think I’ll be laptopless for long though. Apple should be releasing Tiger in the next few months, along with shiny new Tiger-ready iBooks. I’m deciding between the 12″ and 14″ models, but I’m not sure what to go with. I guess there’s no point in worrying about it when the new models haven’t even come out yet.
If there happen to be any Mac users out there reading this - is it likely that the new iBooks will come with NVIDIA cards as opposed to ATi Mobility cards? The performance I got with my ATi Mobility Radeon for this laptop was pretty poor, and with the amount of power that Exposé needs, I’m not feeling too comfortable about getting one with my iBook.
Once I switch over, I’ll be saying goodbye to desktop Linux for a while, as I’ll be converting my PC into a file server for my family at that point. I love Linux a lot, but I’ll let it mature for a few more years before coming back. It’s at the point where it provides a good desktop for low-end consumers and power users alike, but it needs more refinement and integration before it will really take off. My wishlist for a perfect desktop Linux basically results in what Apple has already achieved with Mac OS X, so it makes good sense to finally switch over. Oh, and also, OS X is hot.
Published on Dec. 11, 2004
in Tech.
I absolutely love what Google has been doing with Google Suggest. It’s currently in beta, but it’s already a great tool. It’s basically regular Google, but with find-as-you-type. I don’t think I’ve professed my love for find-as-you-type before, so to sum up, it’s a super-fast way of searching for what you want. For example, if you want to search for “kalan porter”, you need to the entire search term before beginning the search. However, with find-as-you-type, it immediately begins to narrow down your request with every letter you type. On Google Suggest, a box with the top ten search requests shows up once you start typing. So, if you’ve only typed “kal” so far, Google will already have intuitively narrowed down “kalan porter” as the number one request. Hit Enter and away you search, without having to manually type your whole search term.
In fact, if you type just the first three letters of almost any popstar, you’ll at least get them in Google Suggest’s top ten. An exception would be Theresa Sokyrka, whose name unfortunately begins with “the”.
I love what Google has been doing with their web applications. Things like Google Suggest and Gmail use a generous amount of clever Javascript/DOM trickery that has wonderful results. I can’t wait to see what other things they have up their sleeves. Personally, for Google Suggest, I’d like to see an option to show the top ten results for the search term, not just the top ten most popular requests. I’m not sure how this would work logistically, but it would be such a great feature. That would making search extremely fast and convenient, since you would be able to visit your search result directly from the Google homepage.
It’s fun looking at all of this and playing with some rudimentary Javascript/DOM on my own. I can’t wait to start my co-op job, since I’ll get to do this all day.
Published on Dec. 2, 2004
in General.
I started getting a large quantity of comments today from a variety of people with differing interests. It’s funny how they all started coming in just now. Though, as much as I’d love to discuss the wonders of online gaming, free pornography and inexpensive male anatomy enlargement medication, I think I’ll pass. Although I don’t normally condone stifling people’s enthusiasm for their interests, all comments will now be moderated before going live on the site.
I’ll be testing out some Wordpress spam-filtering hacks, so you might have problems commenting for the next little while.
EDIT: It appears that I’ve partially solved the problem. I checked my logs and discovered that the robot was directly accessing wp-comments-post.php to repeatedly post their comments. So, I renamed the file and updated Wordpress to use the renamed comments page. Problem solved. Comments are now off moderation.
Published on Dec. 1, 2004
in Music.
After years of leaving my Backstreet Boys CDs on the shelves, I started listening to them again. I still remember 90% of the lyrics, which is really, really sad. The trouble is, I can’t stop listening to them now. Get Another Boyfriend is so addictive! I bet I’m going to end up buying their stupid new CD too.
I don’t know why, but I’m really cycling back to my pop phase in a big way. I bought both Clay’s Merry Christmas With Love and Kalan’s 219 Days on the day of their respective releases. I haven’t bought CDs on their release dates for a very long time. I’m even making Andrew buy the Australian Idol runner-up’s single for me while he’s in Australia.
I’ve even started listening to Christina Aguilera’s fluffy poptastic stuff again. She was such a nice person back then. Now, I feel like I’m going to catch five diseases if I stand too close to her.
I think that the root of my pop addiction is the glory note. Once a singer hits one of those impossibly high notes for 10+ seconds, they’ve got me. It’s hard to keep me away once the glory notes start coming - that’s why I’ve vowed to not watch the next season of American Idol. It’s a vow that I’ll likely not keep, but at least I’m taking one baby step away from getting hooked on all these terribly cheesy songs.
