Reving the MacBook

Apple introduced some speed bumps for their line of MacBooks. The low-end $1099 version has now been raised to a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 80 GB hard drive, 1 GB of memory and Combo Drive. With a student discount, this notebook retails for $999. This is as close Apple is going to get to the $100 laptop project.

What I'm psyched about it picking up an old version of the MacBook at a massive discount. I can't imagine why I would need a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor in a MacBook. It would be used primarily for casual computing.

Samsung NV7 OPS

A few weeks ago (I can't remember if I mentioned this already) I bought the Samsung NV7 OPS. I haven't had much of an opportunity to use this yet. Partly because it's been raining and I've been hesitant to take it out in bad weather. Secondly because I've been working and I don't really have time to take pictures on my lunch break. I'll probably get good usage out of it this weekend for Walk America and PodCamp San Antonio.

Locked Car

Sophie accidentally locked herself and her brother in Liz's car today. Liz was packing up the kids to go to church when she ran back in the house to get a sippy cup for Roman. Sophie, not being strapped into her car set, wondered into the driver seat, cranked the radio, turned off the air conditioner and locked the car.

Liz and I spent about twenty minutes pleading with Sophie to either unlock the the door ("life up on the thingy, baby, please") or to roll down the window ("press the button, Sophie. C'mon, press the button"). Sophie was able to roll down the window just enough for Liz to reach her arm in...and than Sophie rolled the window back up, almost crushing Liz's arm. At some point I was able to get a coat hanger and by some miracle unlock the door.

Lesson learned?

Joost

LSD High Priest Timothy Leary co-authored this great book called Chaos and Cyber Culture in which he predicts the demise of television as we know it. It looks as though Tim's theory wasn't too far off base, at least not for the moment. Sure, downloadable digital media is gaining in popularity and even finding a nest in the mainstream, but I think, much like Dr. Leary's theory, that cable television as we know it will soon be buried by the on-demand content strung about the internet and connected to each user through thousands of social netowrking sites.

Joost is one of the first companies to try and come out full force to take down cable television. Essentially, it is cable television on your computer powered by the internet. The shows are not "shoveled" to you en masse, but cataloged and presented to you for immediate streamings. Joost is still in beta right now and is lacking in some content, but the concept behind it is amazing. I think this will be the future of multimedia. Death to overpriced movie theatres that show commercials and over-hyped DVD releases.

Busy Saturday

Saturday, May 19th is a cursed date. I've got so many things going on that day that somebody is getting dissapointed by me before the sun sets. Essentially, I've got five major events that I'm supposed to be attending that day.

• March of Dime's Walk America that morning


• Wireless Toyz' Car Show, Xbox Tournament and Sale


• Ryan's wedding


• Somebody else's wedding that my mom wants me to go to


• PodCamp San Antonio

I know that I have to do Walk America for Sophia. Wireless Toyz' sale can go on without me (I might make an appearance for the car show), the weddings are a no brainer cut from the list (I'm already married, bitch) and PodCamp San Antonio is going to be a major networking event. We'll see how it goes.

401k
Now that officially emancipated from Wells Fargo, I've got to figure out what to do with my 401k. The right thing would be to roll it over to Apple and keep it growing, but the fun thing would be to buy Liz a black MacBook and a 23" Cinema Display for me. Decisions.

Lenovo ThinkPad
Even though I'm a total Apple fanboy, I'd like to pick up a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 just so I could have a dedicated Linux notebook. Why not use Parallels on my MacBook Pro and load Linux on my main machine? Because then I wouldn't have an excuse to buy a new toy.

Beer
I'm a sucker for the good things in life. Liz and I made a special trip to Whole Foods this evening because I was tired of the beer selection at the Valero down the street from my house. I picked up a sixpack of Stella Artois and a corked bottle of Chimay Rouge.

Tattoo
I've been wanting to get a small "command sign" tattoo on my wrist for a while now, but it was never "doable" while I was working at a fairly conservative job. Now that I'm emancipated from corporate monochromism, I thought I'd take the dive and put a little ink in my skin.



Xbox 360 Elite
The latest rev of Microsoft's gaming system will be hitting shelves on April 29th. I'm thinking about picking one up, but in doing so I'd be excluding Liz from all of my gaming bliss. She's been wanting a Nintendo Wii. I'm going to have weigh the pros and cons on each purchase and then I'll probably won't buy either one.

Digg Reality
You have to be familiary with Digg to understand this video, but who isn't a fan of Digg?

Tornados
We had some really bad weather in South Texas last night. Tornados touched down in several parts of the state and wreaked havoc. I went outside around 12:35am and it was totally surreal to see wind and rain of that magnitude.

Hot Buttered Mobile
I'm a gadget whore by nature and when it comes to shiny love, I'm a sucker for a sexy mobile phone. Nokia's new N95 model is probably the hottest phone on the market. It completely blows away my Treo 700p. It features Symbian OS, built-in GPS, EDGE/HSDPA data connections, 5 MP camera, etc. It's available unlocked for American GSM service providers. I'm super tempted to open up an account with T-Mobile or Cingular so I can start juicing some of Nokia's, LG's and Samsung's unlocked phones.

"I love you, Daddy"
Sophie is speaking more than ever. She's forming complete sentences and her words are more audible. Out of everything she's said or can say, guess which one is my favorite.

O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media has to be one of my favorite companies. Besides publishing books on anything and everything having to do with computers and technology, they offer online courses and various conferences covering topics such as Web 2.0 and Ambient Findability. Who needs college when you have O'Reilly?

***I wrote a much larger post, but Blogger dumped all of my input while trying to upload it, so here is the condensed version***

Bowling
I went bowling last night as part of an office team builder. I realized half way through that i don't really like bowling. How do I know I like where I work, when bowling got boring we started hacking the lane computer.

Wells Fargo
Today is officially my last day of being employed by Wells Fargo. At midnight tonight at lose my pay, benefits, etc. Possibly this would have been a sad event, seeing how I was at WF for over five years, but it's not. The last interview I went on left a horrible taste in my mouth (not to be taken literally). The guy interviewing me really had no clue. He had no idea as to what type of work history and experience I was bringing to his group. He was clearly a manager more afraid of losing his job than trying to lead people. He, like most managers at WF, is looking for an automaton that will won't hurt his department metrics.

MacBook Pro
It's official! I'm in love with my MacBook Pro. Sure, I've always been fond of my PowerBooks, but I have a whole new feeling towards my new machine. I don't know if it's the blazing fast speed, the brighter screen or the built-in webcam, but I can't get enough keyboard time with it.

Seriously though, my MBook Pro has been a great machine thus far. It has made me more productive and I am amazed at just how fast the 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processor really is. Love is a strong word, but I think it applies in this case.

MacIntel
I hate it when people refer to their Intel Macs as "MacIntels". What the hell does that mean? It's also as ignorant sounding as people who refer to their Dells as "puters" - I didn't know trailers could generate the wattage required to power up an eMachine.

Just a quick announcement that JosephPalumbo.net went live on my server last night. It's far from a completed project (i.e. none of the links works), but I've been dragging my feet for long enough. I thought by putting the site on the internet it would be more of an incentive to keep working on it.

A Unix Side Note
I decided that I would try a two week one week experiment in which I would only use my MacBook Pro in Single User Mode (hold Command + S during boot up) and work exclusively through the Terminal while in regular mode. Essentially, I'm only allowing myself to move, copy and delete files via Unix commands and open and close processes using Terminal.

Why am I subjecting myself to this denial of Aqua-goodness? 1) I want to become more proficient at the command line and 2) my mom bought me a book for Christmas two years ago from O'Reilly, "Unix for Mac OS X Tiger" that I've just starting reading.