May Contain Nuts

Sadly, I don’t have quite the readership of Ursula Vernon, who tends to get unfathomable quantities of feedback when she asks questions far more obscure than the one I’m about to, but hopefully someone on MystBlogs will be able to point me in the right direction here…

I’m thinking about looking for a new printer soon, because the printer/scanner/copier we’ve got right now (an Epson CX-7400) sucks down ink like a cocaine addict in a sugar factory (or something), and tends to get its heads clogged at more frequent intervals than I would prefer (granted I’d prefer “never”, but I’ll take what I can get on the reliability front).

There are a few requirements for a new printer:

1. It needs to be able to print photographic prints with a reasonable degree of quality.
2. It needs to have large enough ink reserves that I’m not buying new cartridges every month at $12 a pop.
3. It needs to play nicely with Macs and PCs (this is largely a given, but as some animals are more equal than others, so do some printers play more nicely cross-platform than others… a Bonjour-compatible one would be ideal).
4. It would preferably be a multi-function printer, because we don’t have a lot of room for a printer and a scanner (or worse, a printer and a printer/scanner, since getting rid of the scanner in the CX-7400 in favor of a dedicated device seems unlikely).
5. For the purposes of this discussion, price is not necessarily an object, but keeping it below $300 would be nice, because then I’ll be able to afford it before the end of the world.

I have, in the past, had bad experiences with Canon printers just falling apart after a year or two, because Canon hadn’t evidently mastered the concept of selling an affordable, functional printer that runs forever but kills you with ink costs the same way that Epson has, but if that has changed, by all means point it out to me. I’m also hesitant to go with Epson again at the moment because of the aforementioned ink-sucking tendencies of our current printer, but if the higher-end models are less susceptible to this, again, please let me know.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to buy a laser printer for the day-to-day document printing, and save the color printing for an inkjet… if you think such a split-responsibility setup is a good idea, what would you recommend in the way of laser printers, and would you still suggest replacing the current inkjet all-in-one?

Okay, while this is cool and all, I don’t think I’d want to (or even be able to) surf this new interplanetary internet. Can’t we make with the particle-entangled communications arrays yet?

(For those who may not know, entangled particles are a pair of particles that reflect changes made to each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Forget subspace, Quantum Mechanics makes science fiction more awesome every day.)

I think I’m beginning to understand how and why Blizzard continually manages to make more money than some third-world countries… they make one game and sell it to you three times.  Clearly taking the Square-Enix Final Fantasy approach to storytelling through games (whereby you answer an increasingly large number of questions about the primary story’s plot through additional titles, ideally on completely different consoles so that hardware manufacturers can get in on the consumer screw-fest), they’re releasing StarCraft 2 as 3 separate titles, each focusing on a different race.  I suspect that to get the whole story, you’re going to have to drop $150 on what should by rights probably be a $60-$70 experience.  And before I go any farther, I would just like to point out that this is a different sort of “sell one game three times” magic than what the likes of Tell Tale Games does with their products… you really only have to buy a season once to get the whole story, and a whole season is still cheaper than most stand-alone titles.  Blizzard, on the other hand, will probably charge full price for each installment of their epic title of ultimate destiny (dun da-da-dun!).

While I respect Blizzard on one level for being able to turn such massive profits off of the backs of crushed souls the world over World of Warcraft players and bucking the trend toward games being varying shades of brown and black, stuff like this (as well as the completely unnecessary and inexplicably popular portable soul-crushing experience World of Warcraft: The Gathering CCG) just strikes me as exploiting a fanbase already slavishly devoted to your every whim.

So yesterday the most wonderful thing happened… I finally got a new Mac.  Y’know, to replace the one that I had sold on consignment at the end of May?

Last night was spent getting applications and personal effects moved onto the machine from the extenal life boat drive and setting up not one but two installations of Windows XP (one for Boot Camp gaming, the other for running 3DS MAX in a VM so I don’t have to restart the computer all the time).  This in and of itself took almost an hour to set up for, because I needed to create a slipstream disc with XP SP2 on it (I was unsure of the slipstreamable status of SP3, and didn’t want to risk it), and the process for doing so, while not necessarily complicated, was hampered by a lack of certain pieces of software that ultimately became unnecessary once I found nLite, which did all the hard work for me.  Trying to do it on Vista was also not entirely conducive to the process, as said missing pieces of software were incompatible with the new OS, but in the end I managed to get it done.

So now I have three different computers running on one machine, each with their own name (the new iMac’s name is Apollo, courtesy of Oscy, the Boot Camp partition is named Hephaestus, ’cause I thought the fact that he forged lightning bolts was somehow appropriate and amusing, and the VM machine is just called “MaxBox” because I was feeling incredibly uncreative by the time I got to that install).  There’s still a little bit of work to do to get everything back exactly as it was on my PowerMac, and I need to max out my machine’s RAM as soon as financially possible, but beyond that, I’m back in the saddle again.

So now comes the apology part…

Over the past three and a half months, my only computers have been the one at work (which I’m typically supposed to, y’know, be doing work on), the Dell hooked up to our television for the original purpose of watching downloaded movies and TV shows, and a G4 eMac running Tiger that probably wouldn’t have even been able to serve as a boat anchor thanks to its lack of a handle on the top (language warning on that link, btw).  Needless to say, this was not supposed to be a long-term solution to the problem of me consigning my G5, and with regular platitudes promising payment “early next week” for the better part of two months, I was never really motivated to come up with a seriously functioning secondary setup for my needs.  As a result, my access to (and general tolerance for reading) forums, chats, IMs, and even emails was rather substantially degraded, as I had no interest in setting up a whole ‘nother machine with my accounts and preferences and whatnot when a new iMac was perpetually just around the corner, and using a TV for a computer monitor (even an LCD TV) is something I regularly refuse to wish upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the thrust of the above paragraph’s worth of justifications is that I have been rather remarkably unreliable this summer, for which I sincerely and humbly apologize.  I’m doing my best to get back up and running at full capacity as quickly as I can, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be moving full steam ahead on several things that were supposed to be done mid-last-month, and following up on some emails and other communications that have sat far too long unanswered.  As far as inconveniences go, I realize that being stuck with a computer attached to a TV is far less problematic than having one’s house flooded by a hurricane, but this has been a pretty crappy summer for me, performance-wise, and the computer issues only compounded my general apathy towards the world.  God help me if I’m ever stuck in a hurricane, you may never see me again :P.

Also, Mister Cloak, I want to apologize directly to you for not only not answering your IM last night, but dropping offline almost immediately after you sent it… my connection to Steam last night was not exactly reliable… I think I was on and off about 10 times in the space of 5 minutes at one point.  Finally I just gave up and signed out completely.

This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately.  Work deadlines suck (the life out of me).  Anyway, on with the funny.

They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.

- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)

The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) - as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website - touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy.  The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really.  With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin).  Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you :P).

Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers.  Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu).  Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in :P.

This is going to be a pseudo-live blog post; basically, I’m writing as it happens, and will just post it at the end of the event.  I’m also about an hour late in getting started, so I’ll just jump right in…

A lot of folks (including the live commentators at Engadget) have been complaining about the volume of 3rd party demos in the keynote thus far.  While I do agree that at 11:00 they seem to be continuing with no end in sight, I think it’s sort of a good move on Apple’s part to really play up the mass-adoption of the iPhone SDK and showcase as many different ways of using it as possible while the cameras are rolling.  I wouldn’t read too much into the current stock drop being indicative of anything… Apple’s stock always plummets during and after the Keynote because Jesus did not, in fact, appear on stage as predicted.

Some of these apps are pretty slick.  The games all look fabulous, and the social2.0 location-aware apps from Loopt and Associated Press sound very impressive.  The push notification service sounds impressive, though I’m sure a lot of folks will question the stability and scalability of a unified point for all service updates to the user’s iPhone… RIM’s service outages and .Mac’s occasional freak-outs come to mind as negative points here…

New features in the 2.0 software look cool: full Office and iWork document support, bulk message delete (yay!), save images from emails, scientific mode calculator (also yay) and contact search are niceties.  The parental controls aren’t really that fascinating to me, but that may be due to my lack of parentaling duties.  The $10 price point for the Touch2.0 update is also a much nicer pill to swallow than the $20 update for 1.1.3.

Mobile Me: Still not 100% sure about the name of the service, but if the stills from Engadget and MacRumors are anything to go by, this is going to totally kick .Mac’s ass in the usability and awesomeness categories.  Still $99/year, but they’ve kindly doubled the storage to 20GB.  Huzzah!  And I can finally view my calendar online!  Huzzah again!  Early July, with the iPhone software update.  Not quite as huzzah, but I’ll take it.  No mention of bookmark sync to Windows Safari though… grr…

Cheap As Free iPhones!  8GB for $199, 16GB for $299, whee!  Now, drop the price on the plan and I’ll sell my Touch ;).  Seriously, I love my Touch, but the lack of reliable Wifi around here is kind of a killer (there’s plenty in downtown Spokane, but it’s not free, and the signal is questionable… to say nothing of coverage out here in the Valley).  Just wish AT&T’s plans weren’t so damned expensive.  There’s even 3G coverage out here, so I’d be set for data, I’d just be broke at the same time.

I’ll be interested to hear what comes of the 10.6 stuff after lunch, provided any of it is allowed out of the session…

Update: After reading through Apple’s information on Mobile Me, it appears that syncing of bookmarks across platforms (and even browsers) is supported, though Firefox doesn’t appear to be included in that support.  Still, cross-platform Safari bookmark sync is something that should have been built-in from day 1 of the Windows Safari release for .Mac users, so at least that much is working now.  I still might stick with Firefox and Delicious on both platforms because bookmark tags are my new best friend, but I’ll see what Mobile Me’s sync capabilities are before making a final decision there.  I’m also interested in seeing if there are any improvements to iDisk’s performance in store for this upgrade, because that’s been a decidedly torturous experience in the past (though Comcast’s draconian upload speed certainly does nothing to help).

So my Mac has been at the local Apple reseller’s since Wednesday, to be diagnosed and spec’d for a sale on consignment.  I realize there’s more important business ahead of it, like Macs that are actually in need of repairs, but still, I miss my G5.  It’s even weirder because I still have a computer to use, so it’s not like I’m going through withdrawal or anything, I just miss my G5.  I keep trying to tell myself not to get so concerned about it, because the guys at Mac Odyssey are really good people, and all of my data is backed up on my external drive, and there’s nothing to worry about, but I can’t help but be worried.  Hopefully I’ll hear something Monday when the person in charge of consignment deals is back at the store (I called yesterday to see what the progress was, but he wasn’t there on the weekend).

God help me if I ever have a kid go off to summer camp…

It’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness “here’s what’s on my mind while I’m at work” posts.  Feel free to insert your own “and now, for something completely different”s between paragraphs.  The people responsible for sacking those responsible for these subtitles have been sacked.

Costco is a cool place to get movie tickets, apparently.  $15 for 2 adult tickets at Regal, which is better than even the matinee ticket prices… and like $5 cheaper than the evening prices.  There will be serious Prince Caspianage today, followed by even more serious Indiana Jonesing next week.  On that note, we also got the new box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy Wednesday.  Willie?  Still twice as annoying as I remember her being (Osc was ready to shoot her during the first scene at the Obi Wan bar [which amused her to no end] in Shang Hai).

It’s gonna be the future soon.

Apple is apparently expanding on their original patent application for location-based content delivery.  I think I mentioned back when they signed that deal with Starbucks that being able to get on-demand location-aware content delivered to you in places outside the coffee shop would be seriously awesome… ordering movie tickets without waiting in line, buying a soundtrack from a theater’s “now showing” custom wi-fi music store, getting maps of malls or airports… the list goes on.  The iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile internet devices are quickly approaching and even surpassing the absolute utility of concepts like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Seriously, Star Trek’s got nothing on this stuff.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s taking the map angle in a different, more public direction (I think the smart whiteboard application is more useful then 4×6-foot interactive maps, personally).  Did I mention it’s gonna be the future soon?

By the way, I have serious respect for anyone who can sing and play an instrument at the same time with any degree of capability, because I simply fail at being coordinated enough to manage that.

Recently I gave up on the money management app I got in the MacHeist bundle, Cha-Ching, and ported the last month or so’s worth of financial stuff into another app called MoneyWell.  It’s a very different application from Cha-Ching, but it seems to have much better support, is a lot more stable, and makes it possible to really granularly control our spending, which is a really good thing.  It’s amazing what you discover when you actually sit down and plan out all of your finances in a really serious way, and with all of that information in mind, we can make better decisions about how to spend the money we make in the future.

Jonathan Coulton makes any work day better.  I blame linking to “Future Soon” for getting me started listening to him today.

I’m very seriously considering getting a refurbished AirPort Extreme so that we can get the Wii and our Touches hooked back up to the internet at home, because we’ve run out of unlocked networks elsewhere in the apartment complex to piggy-back off of, and I have a very serious need to play LostWinds.  I need to play it very seriously, in fact.

On a related note, I listed my G5 on Craigslist last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it in short order, but if not, I may need to look into alternatives (still thinking that the local reseller, Mac Odyssey, wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the 30% they take for finding a buyer and managing the sale).  I’m hoping to get enough for the G5 and the display combined to cover the cost of a refurbished iMac at $1599, with maybe a little left over for the AirPort Extreme.

So, as the rumors predicted, Apple has revved the iMac with some marginal processor, FSB, and RAM  speed improvements.  As a result, the brand new system I was looking at now comes with 2 GB of RAM standard, and has the option of being upgraded to a GeForce 8800 GS video card with 512 MB of RAM.  Total cost: $1949 + tax (with upgraded card… vanilla is still the same $1799 it was yesterday).

At the same time, these spec bumps have triggered a price drop on the now-last-gen iMacs that I was also eyeing.  The refurbished top-of-the-line 24″ system I was looking at last week has dropped from $1799 to $1599, with the added benefit of having a quad core processor over the newer one’s dual-core of the same speed (dunno how useful that is, but it sounds cool), a larger hard drive (500GB vs. 320GB), and the same 2GB of RAM standard.  It’s also got the same Radeon 2600 Pro card as the newer model’s base configuration.

Initially, I was torn over which system to get… new hotness is always better, but such is always the case, and if you wait for what you want to be cheap enough to buy, it’s not the new hotness anymore.  Given that I’m moving from a dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 system with a gig of RAM, as opposed to fretting over a minor spec bump from an older Intel-based iMac, the improvements to performance will be considerable regardless of which system I buy, and the older one is still just as awesome as it was last week, only now it’s $200 cheaper.  So, I’ve officially decided to get a refurbished 24″ 2.8 Core 2 Extreme iMac.  Hooray!

Now, paying for it is the tricky part.  Obviously, I don’t have the means to go throwing what is effectively a month and a half’s pay at a new system.  However, I am looking into selling the G5 as a means to paying for the new system.  Based on estimates I got a few months ago from a local reseller (Mac Odyssey), I could expect to get as much as $1799 for the G5.  That’s completely insane!  $1799 for a 3-year-old system that’s been deprecated by Apple moving to a new processor architecture!  And these suckers are apparently in huge demand!  The mind boggles.  Anyway, I’ve also decided to sell my trusty, somewhat dusty, high-tech electronic light pen input device 23″ Cinema Display, since I don’t have room on my desk for two monitors (awesome as that would be), and since it’ll still fetch a pretty decent price (I’ve seen people asking as much as $650 for them on Craigslist) that I can put toward making sure I can cover taxes on the new machine.

Despite Mac Odyssey wanting to take a 30% cut of the sale for actually finding a buyer and handling the transaction, I’m still inclined to try and sell my G5 through them.  Putting my primary system and monitor out for purchase on Craigslist for a combined cost of over $2000 kind of makes me nervous.  I know the chances of getting screwed are relatively low if I handle things right, but I don’t want to risk someone managing to get my G5 without actually paying me for it first, because then I’d be effing screwed.  With Mac Odyssey offering to handle not only the financial end, but also finding a buyer in the first place, I could probably expect to have a much faster turn-around time on the sale, and have my new computer in-hand within days, rather than weeks, of getting started with the proceedings.

I had mentioned last week that I wanted to go visit the local branch of Mac Odyssey and discuss options and what I would be expected to do prior to giving them my G5 for sale, but I discovered that the location closest to me was closed recently.  I may make a trek tonight over to the Coeur d’Alene location and chat with them about what they can do for me.  I want to make this happen relatively soon, because the refurbished last-gen iMacs are only going to be available for a limited period of time, and the G5’s resale value is only going to get worse.  I’m just somewhat hesitant to get rid of my G5.  It’s been a trustworthy machine (heh, almost said “little machine”) for the past 3 years, and it’s almost like ditching a friend or giving away a pet, stupid as that sounds.  It’s also fairly mind-boggling that I can actually sell my older computer for more than it costs to buy a new one.  Granted, it’s a more high-end system than the iMac was, and Apple systems retain their resale value for stupid lengths of time, but still, having a $2500 system retain about 67% of its resale value over 3 years is just completely nuts, and I keep expecting to have this end up being some eleborate prank that leaves me without a computer.  Mainly, I’m so amazed by this because my family has a tendency to use computers until they can’t even be given away anymore.  My dad is still rockin’ the P2 400 that we bought to replace the family’s old 486 DX2 system about a decade ago for crying out loud.

I can’t do anything just yet, because I’ve got some stuff to take care of for the Mysterium committee that would best be kept safe from the upheaval of computer trade-ins, but once that’s out of the way (hopefully this week),  I should be free and clear to sell my old system.  Now I just need to come up with a name for the new iMac… (this may explain why I have attachment problems… I name my electronics.)