Thursday, May 31, 2007

more itunes issues

I still can't get all my music downloaded. I hope this issue gets the better soon.

Lots of noise on the apple forums. No official response from Apple yet.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

itunes music store

I bought my first couple of tracks on the itunes music store tonight. I figured I would give it a shot since some are now DRM free.

Performance of the music store sucks though. I'm trying to download my second album and I'm getting about 2kbps through the store. After years, I'm finally willing to give this a try, and the performance issues are stopping me from finding and buying more music. Honestly, I bet the pirate music networks are faster and easier. Maybe that's what I should do tonight instead... buy the music on itunes, and then just download pirated mp3s so I can actually listen to them.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

starcraft 2

I just got done watching the gameplay demo for starcraft 2. Which could also be titled, "how we unbalanced the protoss".

I'm looking forward to seeing how they have buffed the other races to even out the gameplay.

Monday, May 21, 2007

macbook revisited

I got OS X reinstalled on Gwen's Macbook Pro last night. The good news is that reinstalling OS X is easier than reinstalling windows. The only rub was that I had to manually reinstall the fonts that Finale uses. Oh and I bet I'll have to reinstall the printer drivers.

I'll find out after today whether it was really that simple.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Gwen's Macbook

Gwen's Macbook pro wont boot into OS X. Funny enough I can boot it into windows XP. Gwen installed some updates from Apple's Software Update, which prompted her to reboot the machine, and now it's hosed. I'm currently copying everything off the HD to another external hard drive before I try reinstalling OS X. Maybe those "geniuses" down at the Apple Store will be required.

I hate software.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Wordpress

Brian has inspired me to get wordpress setup on a new domain. This may pave the way for a blog shift. I'll keep y'all posted.

Apple Rebuttal

Disclaimer: I like apple. I like them a lot. Most of my new hardware these days is apple. That said, I think Apple can do much better in it's criticisms of Microsoft, and in the efforts of its marketing campaign in general. So I'm going to catalog a few rebuttals to their ads.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

Choose a Vista: Microsoft is doing something called anytime upgrade to handle upgrading. This is to answer the "get stuck with one that doesn't do very much at all" part of the apple commercial. I do appreciate the simplicity of purchasing OS X.

Party is Over: Yeah ok, there's a lot of truth in this one. Microsoft dropped the ball on the vista schedule. And older hardware is supposedly much harder to get working. I could point out the System 9 -> OS X platform switch and what it did to apple hardware. Or perhaps the PPC -> Intel transition and what it did to apple software support. That doesn't really reduce the validity of the criticism though. I would wager however that windows is more friendly to old software than OS X. A lot of the cruft in windows comes from the effort they expend supporting old software.

Genius: Perhaps I should take my mac to the apple genius bar so they can tell me why aperture keeps crashing with this error all the time.

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000000

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90810125 CFRetain + 56
1 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893a9d _NSKeyValueObservationInfoCreateByRemoving + 444
2 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893888 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObserverRegistration) _removeObserver:forProperty:] + 56
3 com.apple.Foundation 0x92893800 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObserverRegistration) removeObserver:forKeyPath:] + 554
4 com.apple.Aperture 0x002279e2 0x1000 + 2255330
5 com.apple.Aperture 0x00229888 0x1000 + 2263176
6 com.apple.AppKit 0x9335ad88 -[NSApplication sendAction:to:from:] + 107

Sunday, May 06, 2007

first 10k race

I just finished my first organized run. It was loosely organized, and a lot of fun. Here is what my Garmin forerunner recorded:

Distance: 6.3 miles
Elapsed Time: 1:06:53
Avg Pace: 10:37/mile
Avg Speed: 5.7 mph
Max Speed: 12.0 mph
Calories: 832

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

writing

I don't think I'm a good writer. I can write technical specifications pretty well, and I can contribute to marketing messaging and brainstorming, but I don't feel particularly skilled at crafting a blog post that is interesting.

Maybe I should switch to twitter...