The Post-Christmas Show
Christmas was pretty good this year, apart from being snowed in on Christmas Eve and not being able to go to the grandparents’ house for the first time in my entire life. Christmas day was great, however. I got just what I needed for my apartment. A new lamp, a Crock Pot, and a new HDTV. I think I was the most excited about the Crock Pot. Later in the day we had our traditional dinner and poker game with relatives. And on top of all that, it was a white Chrsitmas. Awesome.
On Saturday, I proceeded to go to Best Buy to find and HDMI cable for my Xbox. I wriggled my way through the madhouse, only to find that they had nothing shorter than 6′ and nothing cheaper than $30. I went to Wal-Mart instead and found a 3-footer for $17. Still fucking ridiculous, but Forza 3 never looked so good.
There was also another reason why I went into the Best Buy hellhole yesterday: to look at digital SLRs. I’ve been looking for a camera since my parents have all but adopted my old Olympus point-and-shoot. I’ve really wanted a DSLR that shoots video, so I won’t have to decide on whether to buy a video or still camera, so I looked first at the Canon Digital Rebel T1i. I really liked the controls on this camera. I was changing modes and tweaking f-stops in short time, and this is coming from a guy whose only SLR experience was with a Pentax K1000. I played with the T1i for a bit, and then a gave a Nikon a chance. I can’t remember what model it was, since I couldn’t decipher the confusing buttons and interface. It could have been the D90, but I dunno. Then I went back to a Canon, in particular the EOS 5D. It had the same easy-to-use controls, but the kit lens and continuous shooting was kickass. I have never played with continuous shooting before, so I was almost giggling with delight at the prospect of shooting several pictures a second with relative ease.
I’ve also looked on the web for that perfect camera, and I’ve found another candidate: the Pentax K-x. In the same body as the K2000, another former candidate, it adds a better sensor and 720p HD video. It’s also cheaper than the Canon T1i. It may end up my final decision, once money becomes available.
Now, on to a restful week of nothingness and New Years.
Movin’ Along
The television portion of my RTVF class ended this week. It had to have been the most fun I’ve had at college so far. I learned so much and met a lot of interesting people. Hopefully I’ll get my copy of the projects next week so I can post mine up on here.
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.
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