I’m starting to really love being a Mac user! Check out this article by David Pogue of The NY Times. Here’s a guy who straddles both the Mac and the Windows worlds, and even he is getting a little peeved at the “innovation” coming out of the Redmond-based Windows corporation.

I have to agree. A lot of what I’m hearing and seeing of the upcoming (late 2006) Microsoft Vista operating system seems to already be in my Mac OS X Tiger system since last June! Also, see this article with some illuminating movies, featuring Bill Gate’s voiceover of the Vista features… with footage of someone showing off the Mac OS X Tiger features! Hilarious!!

Cheers!

I just saw this post on iPodDailyNews. Wow. First an operating system and all supporting technologies, then a game system… now a possible PMP? Of course, it’s just a rumour. Shouldn’t they have their hands full trying to put the finishing touches on their long-overdue Microsoft Vista OS? (interesting un-biased July 2005 article from eweek.com here)

Yes, I’m a Mac user, but I do have a great respect for Microsoft. Everyone in the Apple fan community slams Windows XP for security holes and the patches needed to install every week (it seems), but I see a company that is doing all it can to fix problems stemming from virus creators who have nothing better to do with their free time. My dad has been using Windows forever, and I have yet to hear from him any major problems with it. Then again, he’s a certified MS Tech (several times over!), and he uses security measures that I’m sure most people don’t know how (or dont take the time) to implement. Even though Apple has it’s own securities built-in on the 10.4 Tiger OS (install permissions, firewalls, UNIX securities, no root enabling), if it was the dominant OS it would be facing the same attacks.

Anyway, back to the rumour mill. Someone put up a link to an artist’s conception of what the Microsoft Digital Music Player might look like. I almost fell over laughing! I especially liked the built-in cooling fan and the ctrl-alt-del buttons. Click here to see it, and cheers!

Well, well, well. First, I want to thank the members of the family, friends, and others on the internet for visiting this blog from time to time. Again, I can’t say it enough, thank you! Please spread it around to the others, as this is one of the ways I communicate what’s going on in my life (as the blog heading suggests).

Right now, I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, kinda fitting for what I was just writing. Finally, I got around to setting up my music mix on the computer with iTunes so I have a four day long random mix of all kinds of favorite music. Classic/80’s/Pop/Hard/Progressive Rock, Prog Metal, Trance, Instrumental and other assorted goodies (Did I mention I love music?). I had this all set up before, but when I got the new iPod, I tried finding ways to painlessly move all the information from one iPod to another and accidentally erased all the track info from iTunes! All my music files were fine, not to worry, but all of my playlists that I painstakingly put together were trashed! I still have some work to do in order to bring my music library back to the way it was. What a pain.

Anither pain that I’m just now dealing with is my Palm Tungsten PDA and the sync to the computer. I’ve put off fixing this for awhile because it seemed that whenever I had this Palm perfectly synched with the computer, soon thereafter I’d get a new computer, or a new OS, or have to re-install the OS for some bone-headed reasons I won’t go into here. Believe me, it’s a major PAIN to have to re-install everything three times in a year. Now that I’ve reassured myself that I won’t be getting a new computer or a new OS, I can finally synch everything without much fear. I liked using the Palm to track finances, write documents, and synch all that info for backup and use on the computer (not to mention photos, too, which I have the iPod do now anyways!). Now that I have a Bluetooth phone, the realization dawned on me yesterday that I could literally be on the internet anywhere using the phone and the Palm PDA, which also has Bluetooth! I tried it out last night and, after some futzing about, works perfectly. I was able to go to some favorite sites and check email. All I’m worried about now is making sure I don’t incur a high phone bill!

Work, work, work! Where shall I start? As some may know, I don’t talk about, or let on, about where I work. Sooooooo… all I can say is that it’s been a month from hell! It seemed that no matter how I scheduled things, or how my team and I had to change the work schedule to avoid time constraints, we ran ourselves ragged. This next month, we have a lighter schedule due to our hard work this month, so I may take advantage of it. I also have to work on being a better supervisor; I have slipped a little in this area. Sometimes, when I’ve worked with some people for quite a while, I can be a pushover. I also may not fully notice what they’re doing from time to time. This is something that I’ll need to focus on rectifying, starting in the beginning of November.

Taking care of myself is another issue in itself. I’ve already put off going to the doctor and dentist for too long. I’m starting to see the ramifications of not seeing the dentist, not so much the doctor. However, in order to see the dentist, I need a doctor to prescribe Clindamyacin to me. Without it, no dentist will touch me because of a heart condition. Oh well, gotta get on it! At least I still excercise. That big yoga ball, that sometimes is called a body core trainer, is great to work on the abs with. It still feels great to have a flat stomach and V-shape even at 33 years old! (insert more worthless bragging here!)

Oh man! Was typing so long that I didn’t notice that Progulus.com is playing a band I just heard of recently. I just tuned in now, on iTunes, with several minutes left of a 20+ minute song, called “The End Of Light”, by the band Dreamscape. They’re from Germany, and sound a lot like Dream Theater, except for different singing. I heard this song in it’s entirety yesterday, and I was very impressed. I’ll be following up on these guys, and I may get some of their music soon! Another band I’ve discovered recently is Dragonforce (from the UK). Their music, unlike the last band I mentioned, is full-on Speed/Power/Epic Metal. Too bad the one recent album I checked out, all the songs end up sounding the same at the speed they’re usually going! Only good for those certain moods I’m in.

My last few posts have been about the Chicago White Sox and their World Series win. I did some research, and it seems that they are only the last out of ten ballclubs in history that have ever swept a World Series! It’s still awesome how well both teams played, especially the pitching. The whole series was a piching battle from start to finish! Neither team had a blowout or a slaughter. Simply a great run of games!

Well, that’s all from my end of the world. Hope your end of the world is going well (all of you!). Cheers!

Well, It’s been an exhausting week in both work and home life. Time to recap everything that’s been going on in my life.

The picture above was taken in the workout room of my apartment complex with my new phone. It’s a LG PM-325 from Sprint and I couldn’t be happier with it, as it’s my first camera phone. When camera phones came out, my first thought was that the idea was bone stupid. When I saw from other people how useful they can be, I quickly re-thought my opinions. I was going to send that pic to my mom (as in “Hi, Mom! I miss you much, so here’s a pic!”), but I instead sent a pic of my Sweetest Day gift from my wife:

(I love anything to do with Sonic the Hedgehog!)

In the first pic, I’m wearing earphones to a newer iPod. This one’s the color version that displays photos and album artwork on its screen. It will also display photos on any TV, provided it has the necessary ports. I just got this a couple of weeks ago, along with the iPod Nano for my honey as an early Sweetest Day gift (I mentioned it in a previous entry). Go figure that, this week, Apple announced a new upgraded version of the iPod that now plays video, too!! It’s also at the same price point as the older versions. Well, screw you Apple! I’m not upgrading this time and, besides, I don’t need video functions (thought it sure is convenient!) and I’m quite happy with my current one, thank you! Never fails… you buy one thing and it gets replaced two weeks to six months down the line. They just upgraded their iMac G5 lineup this week, too, and I just bought our current one seven months ago! Technology’s wonderful, isn’t it?

The next toys to get may be the Nintendo Revolution console, along with the new Zelda game that many gamers are waiting for and salivating over! I’ll definitely be getting that game. As for the console, I’ll have to wait after it’s release to see what features and problems it has. For now, I’m happy with the Pokémon XD game I got last week for Christine and I to play on my GameCube console. I’ll write more about that soon, as that little series of entries I had going about video games was kinda cool, IMHO!

Cheers!!

Introduction: As I’m a Apple Mac user, and have one o’ dem fancy dancy iPods, I just had to check out this podcasting craze. Not all that I hoped it would be. I know there’s a lot of people that love talk shows, and they can be interesting, but I’ve never been much of a talk radio person (I can’t stand a lot of DJ’s and their over-inflated opinions!). Plus, only the people with lots of cash to give away to the RIAA can make even music previews, so we’re seeing a lot of local music from around the world, which rarely interests me (I’ve only heard a few local artists that I’d like!)

This is the crux of my observations; since it’s now possible for anyone to create their own podcasts, and the learning curve in creating XML files for RSS syndication is low to middling, it opened the door for: 1) AAC (.m4a) sound file formats to become increasingly popular, since AAC is used to make enhanced podcasts (images and chapters) which you can’t do with the .mp3/.wav/.wma format and 2) doing what I just did with the special gems in my collection. Let me explain below…

… I have the first side of comedian Steven Wright’s “I Have A Pony” in a large .mp3 file. It’s great comedy, but what’s annoying about having a 48 minute sound file is having to scroll through it all just to locate a particular section. Well, enhanced podcasts can have chaptering enabled. This enables the listener to skip to pre-defined sections in that one file. I took that file, converted it to AAC format (roughly the same size file), and used a chaptering program to break it up into chapters, then had the program compile the chaptered version of the track. Then, I put it into my webserver file, created a XML file for iTunes to recognize as a podcast, then told iTunes to download the track from the computer… back into the computer!! The reason for this last step was to enable the chapter titles to show on the iPod interface. It won’t show them unless it’s been downloaded as a podcast.

It may seem like quite a bit of work, but it worked beautifully, and I’ll only create these enhanced files in special circumstances. I did all this later on with Dream Theater’s 23 minute long magnum opus “A Change Of Seasons”, a piece made up of seven parts. Also, before writing this, I ripped my copy of Queensrÿche’s “Operation: LIVEcrime” live album, which is an hour long (the AAC file weighs in at 59 MB’s), and chaptered it into 17 chapters and podcasted that one as well. It’s most beneficial doing this with a live album, since listening to the album as individual tracks on any .mp3 player disrupts the live feel, because the player always has that slight pause before the next track! NOTE: only iTunes (so far) can read AAC (.m4a) files. Luckily there is a version of iTunes for Windows users, so they don’t have to miss out on the enhanced podcast fun!

P.S.: The other good thing about doing this to live albums (having them all as one file, one chaptered track) is that, if you have whatever music player you’re using on “shuffle” mode, you don’t have to shut off that mode just to listen to a live performance in it’s entirety. Whee!! Next on my list: Live Rush concerts!