Been a while since we’ve hung out at Mark’s… good memories there, and we added more tonight. Of note were the Trivial Pursuit champions, Andrew, Mark, Van and myself (and my Kevin Mitnick answer… yay animated GIFs!). Also, masked in an attempt to play the above pictured game with her, I very triumphantly slapped Kathy in the face much to my satisfaction. =) Sorry, little one, it’s just so much fun. =p

Photos are now on flickr. Enjoy!

I don’t know why I put an exclamation point in this post’s title, because I don’t really have a spring break (oh woe are those in the working world, haha ;). Regardless, I had a blast in Surfside, TX at a beach house. Many thanks to Kathy for putting up with us and fronting the planning, it really is a rather difficult thing to do.

I’m in the process of uploading a lot of pictures to my flickr, but it’s taking forever… once they’re there, I may title/comment on some of them and create a set. The other photographers on the trip have other pictures, especially a higher ratio of pictures including myself in them (and… that’s something I may or may not be interested in you seeing, haha).

Kathy, Ochs, Van and I went to Sam’s grandfather’s funeral today. I’m finding it difficult to put words on the experience, but it was quite obvious he was loved by many people. Please continue praying for Sam and his family, especially his grandmother.

Played some Rosetta Warcraft 3 on the MBP today. Seems like the issues were primarily due to the custom map we were trying to play (not sure if it’s a problem specifically with the map or with the Rosetta/Mac/IntelMac and the map together). We played a short regular game and a game of DoTA and it seems to play okay. The mouse acceleration is still a bit weird to me… I hear there’s a Microsoft utility I can use to make it Windows-like… I was using a Logitech mouse though so not sure if that’ll work… I might try it out sometime.

In other news, with casual use (web surfing, iTunes) the MBP doesn’t get scorching hot like when it’s importing 11000+ photos. Parts of it, especially towards the rear can still get pretty warm though.

Chad, Mark, Patrick, Van and I just finished watching Firefly finaled by Serenity. Man, such a crazy good series + movie. Anything I say about it won’t do it justice. So this is it. Watch it if you haven’t.

So, some initial comments on the MacBook Pro (I’ve given up being stubborn and calling it the Intel PowerBook)… Besides Safari downloading files and then making them vanish from my desktop, the only software issues I’ve had so far are with iPhoto and it dying on me when I tried to import my 11k+ photos. I may still have issues with iPhoto, but they may be based upon me not being used to the way it does its organization. For now, I prefer the Picasa way of doing things and I’m somewhat frustrated iPhoto didn’t do some simple organization based upon the directory hierarchy I told it to import from. sigh Oh well. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes.

Hardware wise, keyboard, screen, touchpad (except for the one-buttonness! curse you Stevie!!), and speed are all pretty satisfactory. However, this thing gets pretty hot under use, hotter than I was expecting after coming from a Pentium M Dell laptop which didn’t get nearly this hot unless it was at 100% CPU usage for hours. I guess they made sacrifices to get the thinness… I’m tempted to say I would have preferred a thicker and/or slightly louder laptop to make it cooler, but oh well. I definitely don’t feel sluggish like I did on my old PB 12” so that’s good. I think a decent chunk of the “wow factor” speed boost is lost on me a bit because I haven’t been using OS X for a few months, so I’m not familiar with the response times pre-Intel anymore.

Anyways, I’m looking forward to being able to do some decent photo-editting on my laptop (12” is too small for that - all my previous laptops). Debating about getting Photoshop…

Tried Warcraft 3 (under Rosetta) and it seemed to run okay at 1440x900x32 with all the other graphics settings at their default, but after a minute or two of a game with Mark, I got disconnected. Was a custom map, so I’m not sure if that was the culprit or not… will do more testing later I guess.

=)

Went to volunteer for the Freescale Marathon earlier today with other Freescalers… man, it was COLD! My hands still feel kinda weird, heh.

We were unprepared for the swarm when it came and like locusts in a field, they sucked up our water reserves like no other. I spent the next hour or so fervently filling up cups as fast as I could. My hands lost feeling so fast, it was crazy. I went into Home Depot and ran my hands under cool water and it felt like boiling water… =)

Anyways, even though it was uber cold, it was still a good experience with the coworkers.

While other people are all being romantic and/or bitter, I’m just going to sit here and say my MacBook Pro Intel PowerBook got upgraded before it even shipped…

VONDERFUL! ABSOLUTELY VONDERFUL!

On another note, I have been playing Guitar Hero on hard recently, and let me tell you… it’s hard. After listening to the Top Gun Theme a few times, Mark and I have taken it upon ourselves to create a game that allows us to play it with the Guitar Hero guitar. To not allow the Top Gun Theme to be played with the toy guitar with magical colored buttons would be a crime against humanity and everything 80’s. Not sure what time-frame we’re looking at for completion, but the PlayStation2 to USB converter I got from Fry’s seems to not be working, so that’s our roadblock at the time being.

In the mean time, I’ll be playing with the boys… =)

So I finally looked at my server logs and it seems like I’ve got a decent number of people hotlinking my images. Apparently I show up quite high on some Google image searches. I’ve decided to put an end to that and modified my htaccess file to block requests for images other than those from oliverweb.com. shrug

Here’s a graph of how many requests I got for an image of Pikachu:

I thought about instead of forbidding access to the picture to replace it with… hmmm… wait, that’s actually a good idea… I’ll get back to you on that. =)

Edit: OMG, this is hilarious!! Go here and scroll down a bit… you’ll know when you see it. =) (You may need to refresh/reload the page once)… some more. Oh… if your firewall is configured to block the HTTP_REFERRER in your browser, it prob won’t work and you’ll just see sad Pikachu… gotta figure out a way around that…