Coomey.net

Hah! Saw this on Digg today. Apparently the company Lasonic is bringing to market a totally retro boombox. I gotta get me one of these to go with my parachute pants, THINK LIFE t-shirt and Japanese flag headband. Awesome.

Happy New Year to everyone. Have a great Ought-Seven.

It's been about two weeks now that I've been using my new MacBook Pro. There are some definite upsides as well as downsides to life after the PowerPC to Intel switch.

The Good:

• I can play World of Warcraft.
  Not necessarily Intel related. I've got a couple of co-workers who are rabid players of this MMORPG and got me into playing. Addictive.
• Virtualization
  Because of the Intel architecture, I can run Parallels. This enables me to run other x86 native operating systems withinb virtual machines at about 95% native speed. No dual booting with Boot Camp necessary. Currently I have both Windows XP as well as Ubuntu Linux 6.10 running alongside Mac OS X. This stuff is just amazing.
• Horsepower
  Remember the day that RISC vs. CISC mattered? When Apple had commercials showing the Intel bunny guys getting toasted by the PowerPC? Those days really are over. The Core2Duo blazes.

The Bad:

• Intel Compatability
  Sure, Apple has done a more than admirable job of making PowerPC applications and libraries work on the new Intel hardware with Rosetta (seriously, it's damned seamless), but there is a definite performance hit when using it and there are a number of big software omissions that have yet to be Universal-ized. For instance, I am currently trying to build a PHP development environment on the MacBook, and everything works except for one thing: Oracle. Oracle provides the Instant Client libraries for Mac OS X, but only as PPC binaries! No Intel or univeral available. This means you absolutely cannot build PHP against them for OCI8 support, which is a prerequisite for me. Come on Oracle, get with the program. Thank the gods I can just build it all in my Linux VM.

At work. It's sick. Now I can do things like this:

Well, looks like Zoe and Liam have discovered the treasure trove of information that is Wikipedia. It all started a couple of days ago when Zoe wanted to see a picture of a Velociraptor. Naturally, daddy went to Wikiland. She was really curious that you could find almost anything in the Wiki, and I wanted to foster that. Tonight, I let them have at it on my computer. I was playing my guitar at the time so I wasn't sure what she was looking up. Just now I noticed my browser history and found (apparently) what interests a seven year old girl. Here's a list of the things she put into the search field and looked up, in order:

Rat
Queens
Owen M. Fiss (wtf?)
Monkey
Kitten
Kids
Joaquin Phoenix (wtf?)
Island
Leatherback Turtle
Ice
Ghost
Fossil
Forest
Fish
Extraterrestrial life in popular culture
Doll
Dirt
Chicago Bears (:D)
Bat
Apple
Alien

Take from that list what you will.

Congrats! Chris and Jill's wedding was yesterday, and it really couldn't have been better. The weather was perfect, the foliage was great and the cows were really into it. A lot of happy tears at this one.

Here's some photos. (Thanks Ryan).