The one thing I’m looking forward to most about moving out into a new apartment is starting anew in respect to furniture. I think everyone at the apartment’s given up keeping it clean (since we’re out in… not that much time), so it’s an utter mess for the time being. Something I am NOT looking forward to is the actual process of moving out. Yuck.

I think I’m going to go for a clean, minimalistic feel to at least my desk area. I’m thinking maybe a clean light wood table top (with metal legs), or something like that. =) My bed… well, we’ll see about that. =) I have a feeling I’m going to be throwing down a decent chunk of money to furnish my new abode… but at least it’s not wasted money, I’ll probably use all that stuff many years down the line…

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.

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.

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… =)

Tomorrow is my last day at the System Performance and Modeling group at Freescale. On Monday, I start my third rotation with the games group of what was formerly known as Metrowerks. They make tools for Sony and Nintendo for their consoles, sounds pretty cool. =)

Been a while since I’ve blogged… not sure what to talk about…

Oh, yes, Van is now a BANG! madman and it makes me want to play Magic again…

Aaron, Sam, Van and I went to take pictures of the Duffy-Shamrock Joint Venture Tower which is almost 2000 feet (over a third of a mile) high. For comparison, Tapei 101 is almost 1700 feet tall. I’ve got pictures on my flickr, but that’s not what I really want to talk about right now.

So before we set out on our journey, I stopped by a Shell station to fill up on gas. There were these two young girls in an Eclipse using the pump in front of me. As I sat back down in my car after starting to fill my tank, I look up to see the girls start to drive away with the gas pump still connected to the car. Needless to say, it jerked off of the car, making a clanging noise and flung away a few yards. There were about three or four guys who saw all this occur and within seconds we all gave each other a somewhat amused look as if we all had affirmed every negative female driver stereotype there was possible, especially young ones that were given a sports car from their daddy. =P

The girl quickly got out of her car, closed the little door to her gas tank and sped off. She didn’t even go pick up the gas pump that was not lying on the ground. Girls these days. lol

Nancy moves to San Antonio today. =( Goodbye Nancy. =(

Wow… so long ago… haha.

“Give me the camera.”

Nancy confused. Little does she know she often confuses us…

Hehe, sorry, had to do it. =)

Fobby Nancy!

Byebye Nancy, good luck in SA!

I think “MacBook Pro” sounds stupid, so I’m calling Apple’s newest portable offering the Intel PowerBook. Tempting…

I have never EVER enjoyed a football game as much as this one. This game was AMAZING. The Tsui’s house erupted with so much noise it was insane! I have never meant the following more than I do now and I doubt I ever will again but this is for our team: HOOK’EM!!! TEXAS FIGHT!!!!!!!

As a special tribute to the Longhorns, I made a few modifications to OliverWEB (might need to refresh to reload the style sheet or clear your cache - especially Safari users).

After the game, we immediately packed our stuff and jetted to UT campus which was INSANE! It was awesome yelling out the car windows. Everyone was honking their horns and running around campus high-fiving other people. Awesome awesome awesome! Campus was just exploding with UT pride! Andrew also jumped into the south mall fountain (while evading the local police officer which was supposed to deter such actions). Some pics:

Man… I don’t think I can ever watch another football game ever again. More pics here!