Changes

Changes, Apple, and RSS.

You may notice the blog is a bit different. You may also have noticed there was a temporary “down” period yesterday. So what changed? Well, Bravenet was annoying, so I dropped them. That means the second counter has disappeared, along with the poll. The SiteMeter counter is still there, and is accurate. I am awaiting my 1500th visitor, shouldn’t be too long. The poll I haven’t found a replacement for yet. I hope to have a new poll within about a month, but who knows with me. New though is finally a search. At 149 posts (Saturday is 150, woohoo!) I felt a search was needed. The search includes a page that lets me see what the top searches are, top results, etc…, so I will periodically post those. It also provides a site map when it “spiders” my site, so that may be useful to some of you. It isn’t great yet though, so I will need to play with how deep it maps. Right now you can only reach the map from a search page, but I will be adding the link on the main site pages, and on the links in the top right of the blog.

Apple released it’s Q3 today. Two billion dollars in revenue, $61 million in profit, $4.96 billion cash in the bank (yes, cash, for buying smaller companies up generally). Wow. Also, it was confirmed that the reason the iMacs are shipping late is due to IBM’s poor G5 turnout. It isn’t IBM’s fault, 90nm is just really small to be building chips at.

I downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. It is an RSS news program. For those who don’t know, RSS is an online syndication standard, similar to how the Bay City Times gets all the Associated press articles, or how yahoo lists Reuter’s news. I like it so far. I have MacRumors, Space.com, Crazy Apple Rumors Site, Apple Hot News, MacCentral, and of course, my own. Yes, the blog has an RSS feed, it is built into iBlog. So if any of you are using an RSS program, you can get my feed here (Yes, it looks weird if you view it in your browser, all RSS feeds do. I promise it works fine though).

Ok, I have a nasty headache again from the wisdom teeth, so I am going to bed. I can’t believe I wrote this much honestly.

Night, all.
See you Satuday.

Remember: 150th post – Saturday, July 17th 100th general in iBlog – Sunday, August 1st (unless we get a special before then)

nick

Fry, referring to his accidentally nailing his own grandmother, knocking her up, and becoming his own grandfather:
“I did do the nasty in the pasty!”

On time, holy crap!

On time, Apple, Weather, and Job.

I’m on time! Well, I have an excuse (yes, I need an excuse to do things right). I brought my ibook over to Jenn’s so I can update from here.

Apple is at about 99,900,000, so they should certainly reach the 100,000,000 by tomorrow evening. I am impressed at how fast they are accumulating downloads.

It’s really warm out. The good news is it should rain in about 3 hours, thus dropping the temp and humidity. Michigan pisses me off. 63, 65, 55, 90, 85, 65. What the hell? Pick a season and stick with it.

I have folding@home running again. The graphical, regular program. Working fine, and I am glad.

I need a job. Yeah, I do the landscaping thing, but I need a REAL job. I rewrote my resume, and need to start submitting it. I need money, and I need something to do all day, and Jobs are good at solving both of those.

Ok, good night all. I will try to be on time Wednesday too, start a habit of it. And I PROMISE new poll by next post.

bye
nick

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons and make SUPER lemons.
(Principal Scudworth, Clone High)

Whooopsie

Sorry, Troubles, and Count.

Sorry all. Two days late is kinda bad, huh? I didn’t post Thursday before I left to Jenn’s, thinking I would when I got home. Problem was I didn’t come home til about 1 on Saturday morning. So I put it off till now, about 12 Saturday afternoon. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.

When I installed F@H, I also installed a little utility to make it auto launch. Little did I know what a pain in the ass it would be. I decided to switch from the command line version of folding to the GUI app, and deleted the command line program. For the last 2 days now I have been unable to use my terminal, because it attempted to launch a non existent program, then when unable to find it exit the shell. Fine, I’ll put the program back. Nope, still exits the shell as soon as I end F@H. After a 16 post thread on MacRumors forums, I found the culprit. It wasn’t some Unix file like we thought (I checked every shell rc, profile, and login file I could think of) but the preferences file for Terminal. And stranger still, the setting can’t be reached from in Terminal, I had to open the com.apple.Terminal.plist file manually. Weird shit. Glad is all OK now though.

The 1 year anniversary of the counter has now passed. July 6th, 2003 I put it up, with 0 views. July 6th, 2004 it ended the day at 1306, which is really 150 too low, so 1456. By the way, you will notice that both counters (should) have the same value now. The Bravenet counter will go away soon, followed by the replacement of the poll and the addition of a search feature. No, really, I will.

Jenn and I are going to sidewalk sales today, and perhaps the car show. I need to go get ready for that, so I will see you all, tomorrow. Being late screws stuff up.

TTFN

nick

I’m sure glad global warming never happened.
Oh, it did, nuclear winter just cancelled it out.

Hello Out There

Quotes, Fireworks, Bro, Apple, Folding, XBench, and OS X.

There was no quote last time, you notice that? I couldn’t think of one, sorry. I have been running dry on quotes lately. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

Fireworks Saturday were cool. Jenn and I were right behind DoubleTree Hotel, between their building and the river. Was a really good spot I felt. Jenn seemed to enjoy them too.

I realized earlier today that my brother’s birthday is the 9th, which is like 3 days away. Wow, that’s close.

Apple is giving away free ipods. Every 100,000th song purchased, from the 95,100,000th to the 99,900,000th, will bring a free 20GB ipod to the purchaser. Then, on the 100,000,000th song, the purchaser will receive the grand prize of a 40GB ipod, a 17″ PowerBook, and a gift certificate for 10,000 free songs to fill their new ipod. Also, the grand prize winner will get a chance to create their own celebrity play list for the music store. Apple’s website has more info, as well as the rules for no-purchase entry. They are at about 96,865,000 right now.

I ran XBench on Jenn’s new ibook. Wow. With a dual 800MHz G4 as a baseline 100, Jason’s 733 G4 Quicksilver received a 64.68 overall, my 800 G3 ibook got a 42.90, and our 400 G3 imac a 30.24. So what does Jenn’s 933 G4 ibook get? An 85.17! Thats wicked considering it was only $1049. She scored over 100 in several categories too, especially under memory since she has DDR memory where the baseline system had SDR. And by the way, A dual 2.0 G5 Powermac averages a 200 overall, with up to 2000 in HD performance thanks to it’s Serial ATA drives.

What else…..

I am using Folding@home now. Some of you may remember that I used to run SETI@home. I pretty much stopped running SETI when I switched to the ibook, and have now decided that folding is probably a better choice. Yeah, looking for Aliens is fun, but this is more likely to be useful.

I’m getting to the point I wish I didn’t know about Tiger. I hate knowing I have to wait till mid 2005 to buy it. By the way, for those unaware, OS X has cats for all the version names. 10.0 is cheetah, 10.1 is puma, 10.2 is jaguar, 10.3 is panther, 10.4 is tiger. Future versions of the OS are expected to include lynx, cougar, and leopard.

Well, thats quite a post for me, so I am going to bed.

night

nick

“I’m gonna bite you sucka”
– Blackula

Happy 4th of July (Almost)

Happy 4th, Fireworks, Work, Tires, and Apple.

Well, it’s the 2nd of July right now, but wont see again till 5th so Happy Independence Day all.

Jenn and I went to watch fireworks last night, ended up on 3rd and Madison, across from the police station. Tonight we sat on her roof. Think tomorrow we are going to go for something closer.

Worked last 2 days. Tried doing a BK in Chesaning today, lol. Was alot more to be done than we were made aware of. We did not finish.

I am really tired right now. I need to get my schedule figured out better.

Apple apparent misjudged the time it would take to sell off remaining iMacs and bring new ones to market, and are now in a pickle. You can’t buy iMacs from the Apple Store online until September now, according to the store. Apple always cuts production a few months before a new model, and the new model was longer in development that expected. Ahhh…. Apple. No iMacs til September, thats funny. Fun thing is they make it sound like a major revision. Perhaps they will be nice G5 iMacs with 8x SuperDrives and USB 2.0, FireWire 800, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, and PCI Express upgradable graphics cards. Ooooooh <drool>.

Ok, I can’t stay up much longer, so night all, and see you Monday night.

nick

Another WWDC Keynote

WWDC, and thats about it.

Well, at first glance this WWDC seemed sub-par. A 30″ LCD, new LCD housings, and the Tiger preview. Don’t get me wrong, a 30″ LCD is nothing to scoff at, especially since the new video card supports 2 of them. I would love a pair of 2650×1600 monitors next to my G5, I just dont have $3200 per monitor or even $2000 for a G5.

Then I watched the video though… and everything changed.

Tiger is going to be awesome. No doubt about it. From the new “Pipeline” search feature to my favorite new feature, “Dashboard”, it will rock when it arrives in 2005. If you want to see more about it, since I dont want to explain it all here, check out Apple’s site or the keynote video stream.

Week has been uneventful otherwise. Scott and I broke our record of a 70 minute lunch with a 90. Is kinda sad really. Oh well. Thats about it though I think.

Guess I will see you all Friday.
Sorry about the short crappyness, but I dont have anything else to say.

nick

It’s not that I have to always be right,
It’s just that I always am.

Number 143

Late, Jenn, WWDC, and St. Stans.

Ok, really late, sorry. Anyway though…

Big news for Jenn. Friday she got her acceptance letter to the nursing program at SVSU. Her computer really died though. There is a problem with the power supply in it, so it wont charge at all any more. So saturday we went to the Apple Store and she got a new ibook. It was a remaining one from the previous model so got a good deal too. She is very happy with it though.

Today we went to St. Stans picnic. I have now accepted that I got old. I realized how much it costs to buy stuff. We didn’t feel like spending $4 on an elephant ear, so we came home
and made them ourselves, then made pizza too.

So WWDC is tomorrow. There is no G5 leak like last year, but there are some pics floating around that are supposedly of Tiger, more rumors about new displays, and some pics from inside the convention center that take shots at MS’s Longhorn.

OK, I think that’s it. Will see you all on Tuesday, unless something big happens at WWDC, then will update Monday evening.

nick

People often ask “why does 7-11 have locks on the door if they are open 24 hours?”
Well, they need some way to keep people out during the police investigation of the bi-weekly robbery.

Stuff, Just Stuff

WWDC Dream, Website, Hooters, Jenn, Consumers, X-Prize, and Movie.

Ok, so I did my roundup of possible updates, but what do I really want to see? A new imac. I want to see a new G5 iMac in particular, with PCI Express graphics, especially an ATI Radeon 9600 or so, though I am open to a bit lower. G5 processor in the 1.6 or 1.8 GHz range. DDR 400 RAM, FW800, and 8x Superdrive. I know this is all possible. As long as the imac is single processor, having a 1.8GHz model shouldn’t interfere too much with PowerMac sales, and I have to admit upgradable video would be a HUGE asset to the iMac.

Anyway, enough of that.

I did some more site work. Am up to a whopping 5 pages now. I am going to estimate will be set by July 6 (counter’s 1 year), but no promises.

Hooters is open again. Bay City’s is anyway. Saginaw is said to be opening “early July”. Told you so.

Jenn got to meet my dad yesterday. Seemed to go well. Wasn’t alot of conversation between, mostly just Jenn and I talking while my dad and mom and bro talked. They have met now though, so we are all evenish, or something.

Gas main work in front of our house is done. Now the other side gets it. At least they aren’t digging huge trenches with a back hoe like they would 10 years ago.

A private pilot has become an astronaut. Is the first time a private company has built a plane capable of carrying a man to sub-orbital altitudes. They are going to reach further soon, in an attempt to win the $10 mil X-prize. Look on google for more.

I watched Scott’s DVD “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”. Oh – My – God. Very funny, kinda stupid, a must see.

Ok, tired as shit so going to bed. See you all Saturday.

nick

“He… He OG’d.”
“OG’d? Over golded? When will these kids learn?”

Apple Store, WOOOOO!

Today, Yesterday, Friday, WWDC, and Apple Store highlights.

Today Jenn and I went down to the Apple Store. Her computer was acting goofy, I mentioned my ibook has crashed only about once in the year and a half I have owned it, and after a little looking online we decided to head to Somerset. We looked through the Apple Store, I finally got to see Somerset North (wow, a bunch of $$$$$$$$$ stores, and rather few of them really, compared to South). Then we headed a bit north to Great Lakes Crossing, walked around a bit, and ate at Olive Garden.

Yesterday we went to Marsh Point Par 3. I don’t really suggest it. A lot of lost balls, and even more mosquito bites. Oh well, still kinda fun. I also baked her a cake, as it was her birthday. Friday I worked. So that was my weekend.

WWDC is closer. I can’t freaking wait. I want to see what will be in 10.4, and if Apple will manage any new models. I love keynotes.

So Apple Store stuff…

ipod mini is REALLY mini. I thought my ipod was small, but wow, freaking wow. 17″ PowerBook is massive. I didn’t get a real great look last time, since store was packed during the 10.3 release. Also, G5 towers are huge. I know the only people that care about this shit are Jason and Nick, and both have seen, but I still just have to say it all.

Best part? Jenn says we can go again after WWDC. Wooohoo!

Ok, I going to bed. New Poll up too.

Tata
nick

You bastard.
(OK, funnier when you can watch Peter Griffin say it.)

La la la

Work, Jenn, WWDC, and Website.

Hi

Has been semi uneventful 3 days.

I worked on Wednesday with Scott, and we worked a little on Tuesday too. Bauer kinda took out the side off a building with a mower, so we ran away,

More time with Jenn of course. Her birthday is Saturday. Between finding her a gift and Fathers day, I am kinda stumped. Maybe nobody will get anything, too make it all easier.

WWDC is getting closer, and I more excited. I love WWDC, it and MWSF. I wish I could go someday. Probably MW, since its MUCH cheaper. WWDC is like $3k to go.

I did more website work finally. I need to work on getting it up. I know I need to, but yet I have so little time recently. Soon. Also, as of July 6thish I will be back to 1 counter. Thats the day the SiteMeter turns 1, and thus it will be easier to reset and then forward to whatever bravenet says.

Ok, I promise a new poll next time, but not today.

Sunday…
nick

Diamonds: She’ll pretty much have to.