An Experiment in Bloggery

A couple days ago I was in the Apple store, looking for the new MIDI keyboard. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any in stock. But what they did have were iPods. Now, I’ve been living with a 2G 10GB iPod. It’s decent, but it’s not the best one there is, and it couldn’t hold all my music. So I wanted to get a 20GB iPod. My dad, on the other hand, thought a 20GB iPod was a waste of money - for $100 more, you can double the size. So he bought me a 40GB iPod! And in addition, he recommended (and I downloaded) 12.3 GB of music I didn’t have from his massive music collection. So not only do I now have a spiffy new 40GB iPod, I have a bunch of new music to listen to as well! It’s very nice :)

Happy 2004, everyone! I hope you had a great New Year’s Eve!

My older brother had a bunch of friends over (16). While they were coming in we were all cooking dinner (a really extravagant thing) and then we played games until my friends showed up. At that point, me and my friends went downstairs and talked and played games and watched a movie. Then at some point early in the morning we all fell asleep. It was lots of fun :)

Well, yesterday I drove 2 hours to the Massachusetts border to pick up 4 friends from New York and drove back. They’re here for about a week. I’ve also not seen them in forever! We had lots of fun. We also ended up with about 17 people crammed into my house (I have no idea how that happened). It was lots and lots of fun.

Anyway, we’re going to do it again tomorrow for New Year’s Eve. Except my older brother is also having 17 people over, so the house is going to be completely crammed with people. It will be very fun. Unfortunately, a few people I hoped could come can’t. Oh well.

Well, yesterday I went and watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy screening at Showcase Cinemas. It started at 1:15 PM and ended at 12:30 AM. Extended versions of the first two, followed by Return of the King (with about 45 minutes of break between each one). It was simply amazing. The extended Two Towers was certainly an improvement over the non-extended one (although they still didn’t explain how the horses got to be in the keep of Helm’s Deep when they rode out). And Return of the King was excellent. Despite the lack of the Scourging of the Shire and other changes, it was still a great movie

Peter Jackson is god.

I was playing around the other day and I created an RTF file using some Webdings symbols (from the Private Use area of Unicode) that turned out to be a cartoon may with a speech balloon saying “hi!”, all with just text and kerning/baseline modifications.

I can’t do the same thing here, there’s not as much control with HTML, but I can at least do the cartoon man and speech balloon. Please note that there’s no positioning stuff with this, simply text commands. Also note that you have to be running on Mac OS X with Webdings installed (which it is by default).

Well, ShapeShifter was just released. It’s another Haxie by Unsanity for the Application Enhancer, but this one is really impressive. It lets you apply themes without having to replace system files or do anything dangerous at all. It’s really quite nifty. I especially like this Aluminum Alloy theme, along with an icon set from the QTX theme and a cursor set that was included by default with Mighty Mouse. It’s a nice change from the default Aqua. I just hope that some real quality themes get released now.

In other news, someone has finally figured out the velocity of an unladen swallow. For those of you unwashed heathens, this is a direct reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Today in the mail I just received a package with Stargate SG-1 seasons 3 and 4. This is by far the best science fiction TV series ever. In fact, it’s probably the best TV series out of any genre. The computer graphics are done incredibly well and integrate seamlessly with the series - it’s not a series where the graphics are done simply to have cool graphics, in Stargate SG-1 they’re simply part of the whole show experience. And the acting is great and the plots of each episode are written really well. The storyline is completely consistent and coherent throughout the entire series. All in all, it’s incredibly good. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see if you can rent it. I hear NetFlix (sp?) has the shows available. Also, the Sci-Fi network airs repeats on monday afternoons and on some other days as well.

Nice to see that you’re refreshing the RSS feed every half-hour :)

Out of curiosity, what news aggregator are you using? It’s not NetNewsWire. Whatever it is, it uses curl to fetch the page.

Hope you’re having fun :)

Here’s something crazy. This guy keeps his whole home directory in CVS! Yeah, it has some nice benefits (if you use multiple machines regularly), but it’s still gotta be a pain to manage.