As for tonight, I probably won’t do too much besides hanging out with a couple of friends. Tomorrow I shall partake in the customary new year’s black-eyed peas and cabbage at the parents’ house. I’m just now getting over a bit of a stomach virus, so partying really isn’t something on the agenda. Thanks a lot, Waffle House. Bastards.

Now on to my resolutions for the coming year! Let’s go:

1. Get into photography. This goes back to my last post about DSLRs. Before I get into it, I still need to get me a good camera.
2. Volunteer at KNTU. I’ve applied to volunteer at our campus radio station but haven’t been called yet. I’ll probably drop by and see about it next week when people are actually there. This is more career requirement than resolution.
3. Start writing again! I can’t count how many ideas have popped into my head only to be forgotten once I feel like putting ideas on paper. This brings me to my next resolution:
4. Actually win a NaNoWriMo. I failed miserably this year, and all previous years. Granted, 2009 gave me my highest NaNoWriMo word count to date: 6,500 words. I could blame it on school, but it’s still pretty pathetic. Hopefully I can get myself to actually outline the story before writing it.
5. Ride my bike more. I already ride my bike to work and to class everyday, but when it comes to running errands or buying things, I usually do it with the car. A car that I will hopefully someday replace with:
6. Buy a classic Volkswagen. This probably won’t happen, but hey, I can dream, right? I would definitely like a Super Beetle, but would also be perfectly content with a Karmann Ghia or even a squareback. The trick is buying one that isn’t a rust bucket.
7. Start a podcast. I’ve always wanted to do this, but I’ve never had the resources to do it. Someday this year I’ll finally splurge and get a couple of mics and start a podcast with one of my good friends. We could definitely do it.

It looks like a lot, and it is, but it’s something to go on in 2010. Heck, I may even try to get my crappy political satire blog back up and running. We’ll just have to see what this next decade brings us. Happy New Year, everyone.

Went to Frisco last night to pick up a copy of Snow Leopard. Sure, I could have bought it at Best Buy, but I also didn’t know that there wasn’t a student discount on OS X. Even without a discount, the new OS still only costs $29. I’m still hesitating on taking the plunge today, though, since I’ve seen some pretty obvious, even hilarious, bugs on some Macs at work that shouldn’t have even made the RTM release.

For example, we received two brand-new 13″ MacBook Pros to prepare for use at work. They came with Snow Leopard, of course, and they all had one strange bug in common. In Spotlight, whenever you searched for a particular program, in this case Terminal, the results would show up in Chinese. Chinese. The default language is English out of the box. However, when we changed the default language from English to Standard, the problem was solved. Weird…

There are also some very frustrating changes to the interface, as well. Most notably the Macintosh HD desktop icon, a mainstay of Mac OS systems since at least the early 90′s, is gone by default. They’ve added a shortcut to the applications folder onto the Dock, but it still doesn’t replace that friendly little icon that gave me quick access to Finder. I know that there is a way to turn it back on, but I wasn’t there when my co-workers figured it out, so it is still a mystery to me.

Another thing we do frequently at work is add Macs to our Windows domain. Before, this was a easy as going to Applications > Utilities > Directory Utility. Not anymore. They’ve hidden Directory Utility deep in the bowels of the User Accounts configuration menus in System Preferences. They took something that would normally be simple and proceeded to bungle it up. I don’t think they even changed the program at all; they just made it harder to get to.

Given all of the problems I have with Snow Leopard even before installing it on my own machine, I have to day that my Apple Store experience in Frisco was very pleasant. I had never actually bought anything at the Apple Store before hand; I just browsed and looked in awe at the shiny new machines sitting on their birch veneer tables. I’ve always been pleased at the no-pressure shopping environment. I can do anything I want to those machines because they know that it will eventually lead to a sale. For me, it did, just at a Campus Apple Store, instead. I was really happy that I could just pick up the software, go to the nearest dude wearing the pretentious and uncomfortable-looking nametag, and he could check me out on the spot with his handheld point-of-sale system. Pretty painless. The only negative thing about my visit was realizing that they still charge $60 for the mac version of Sim City 4. Fucking nuts for a game made in 2003.

I’m way behind in the NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve got just a bit over 4,000 words. I should be near 15K. Oh boy, wish me luck.

I also bought my first mac this week. No, it’s not one of the new ones, but I got the previous-gen mac mini at the UNT Bookstore for a steal. The sale discount plus my Apple student discount made the final price of the entry-level machine $459. With the money I saved, I bought iWork and a new printer. Everything worked perfectly out of the box, and I’ve been pretty satisfied so far, but it could definitely use some more memory, since the base model only came with 1GB.

I’m also gonna give NaNoWriMo another shot this year. I hardly even got started last year, but now I’m trying to  build on a completely new story, kind of like a Kinky Friedman novel, so hopefully it works out.  They’ve also raised the word requirement to 50,000 words. It’s gonna be a hell of a challenge.