iPhone post

This is my first post from my iPhone. Awesome

An Open Letter to Vaynerchuk

Open Letter to Gary Vaynerchuk.

Hi GV. I’ve been watching your show for sometime now, and while I can’t say I’ve been with you from the beginning I have gone back and watched most of your shows. I’m not 21, and I haven’t had much if any wine. But I’m doing what you did, I’m trying significant flavor profiles week by week and am building my palette. Its something I never would’ve thought to do. You made me think of it.

And its not just me, You’re making everyone think about there wine. How we drink, why we drink, drinking what we like, not listening to others. Its not us thats coming up with these ideas, it was you. You are more than just a wine taster and critic. You’re a teacher. You’ve been teaching to try new things, to get out of the box. And as you you’ve said this is changing to wine world. A wine world that has predominately been held in oligopoly those Sir Gary Vaynerchuks of the wine world.. But you’re breaking those barriers, and claiming that oneself it the only authority to your own palette.

You say at the end of every episode,”You with a little bit of me, We’re changing the wine world”. While this may be true, can you believe before saying, “You with a little bit of me, WE’VE CHANGED THE WINE WORLD”. In the next seven days I don’t think you can.

Gary Vaynerchuk. You’ve done a lot for us. Informed us, Taught and Entertained Us. You can’t leave now. You can’t leave for a long time. You’re revolutionary, and one day it’ll be know. Gary Vee and the Vayniacs, changed the wine world.

Today is the best day. EVER!

Today EMI, the largest record company, announced that all of it’s music will be sold DRM free on the iTunes Music Store.On top of that, they are raising the bitrate for all tracks sold. This is simply a boon for digital music everywhere, as Warner, Sony, & Universal will follow suit, they just have too to keep up. And before that indie labels such as Tooth & Nail, A&M, Fueled by Ramen, will follow suit.

read the engadget blog post here

via engaget

[update: I have since found out Tooth and Nail is a subsidiary of EMI]

CES 2007

I’ll be blogging what I think is the really important and things that i find that are awesome during CES 2007. So look foward to that. And I’ll be blogging Macworld ‘07 also. Yeah I’m going to be busy.

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, What I’m thankful for.

Most people would think, I’ll just say my new MacBook Pro (Which is true, I’m quite thankful that I now run Mac OS X 10.4.x). However there is so much more.

First and foremost I’m thankful for my faith and religion, for the strength it has provided me in the harshest and hardest of times.
Secondly I’d like to thank Charles Babbage/ Ada Lovelace. You guys were the forerunners for what I’m using right now. And then I’d like to thank my family and friends. Not to say you are less than Ada Lovelace, you are certainly not, but I think that I would not be telling people what I’m thankful unless it was for Ada Lovelace.
And now in no particular order:

Srinivasa Ramanujan, Pierre de Fermat, Andrew Wiles, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Issac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, & Bernard Reimann. You guys were/are pretty freakin’ awesome.

Metallica, Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor), Slayer, Panic! at the Disco, Norma Jean, Five Iron Frenzy, Daft Punk, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, & Alice in Chains. Wondrous Music!

Eugene Atget, Ansel Adams, David Hockney, and various other photographers. You show the world as it is

Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci. You show the world as it might be.

Bill Gates, Kevin Rose,Tim O’Reilly, Linus Torvalds, IBM, Engadget & Weblogs Inc.,Google, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Shigeru Miyamoto, Cliffy B, Bungie, John Carmack,Valve, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Sony, Nintendo, & Apple. Thanks for making technology, gadgets, and computing my life and for creating gmail.

George Lucas, Tron, Steven Spielberg,The Wachowski Brothers, Kevin Smith, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves. Great Movies.

Douglas Adams, Micheal Crichton, J.R.R Tolkien, Robert Ludlum, Charles Seife, R.L Stein, & J.K Rowling. Great Reads, and interaction at an intellectual level.

My best friends (H-dog and K-dog). Thanks Brothers, good times.
All the people I’ve met at college, especially my R.A.

Peace

Thanks People

Life Sucks

Life pretty much is the largest waste of time.
Look we’re going to die, we can’t stop entropy (mathematically we can, however it has since never happened). WE shouldn’t exist. Yet we do, and what happens. Dumb stuff.

Nothing in life is worth all the other fills the time voids between. Love, love is a lie, create by those who wanted more. Happiness, happiness is mirage for those who believe love. Love is the cause of all unhappiness.

And I’m unhappy.

Pictures

Always have backups of your pictures. Those are memories you can’t get back. I lost some very good pictures of people I care a lot about, and now they are gone and left me. Like a dream I once had.

Just keep backups.
And Backups of Backups.

Forgotten Blog

No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog, I’ve just been busy. In fact I’m writing this post on break from writing a critique. Lots of great things have been going on. I’ve made some friends here at university and already have stories I’m not going to forget (Waffle House+Drunk People= Funny and Scary). Parisian Internet Radio is infinitely better than US internet radio, mostly because it has more variety.

I have a fascination with London and Paris, mostly because I’ve been to both, and throughly enjoyed myself (well not so much Paris but thats because I didn’t see only the greatest museum of all time). I love Daft Punk a French House styled band. Lord Byron is my favorite poet, and as I love computers Ada Lovelace is my hero, in a non-hero sort of way.

Bob Saget… my best friend!

Ok maybe not, but one of my best friends might come to my college. Hooray

Dude I met someone from a really long time ago.

So today, I found out my friend’s room mate is someone I went to school with. Elementary School. It was awesome

Mac Pros, Core Animation, and no Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro’s and everything else from WWDC

So no surprise on the Mac Pros, other than the price (which is actually really good) and the xserve. Now Leopard was good, but still no Updated Finder or a Desktop Widget layer. However Time Machine and my favorite Core Animation was amazing. Core animation is so amazing and I can only imagine its uses for film and video, not to mention some very interesting ways to view them also. And supposedly there are a ton of new Features that are being held close to Apple proverbial chest.

But the big downer is they didn’t update the MacBook Pro, something I not only wanted but really needed also. Apple update the bios and add a new CPU, it isn’t that difficult. Plus Leopard is going to be the first 64 bit version of Mac OS X that runs on the x86 platform. So buying any Mac other than the Mac Pro (damn that name sucks doesn’t it) is a waste since in 6 months it won’t take advantage of Leopard’s 64bit underpinnings.

da mac (book and or book pro)

I’ve used the new Macbooks and Macbook Pros a few times now, and well honestly I have to say, I’m fairly impressed with the new MacBook Pro. I just wish it were $200 dollars cheaper, for the 15.4 inch version (If you guys have noticed, college student in desperate need of a computer). There are however a few features i would like to see on the MacBook that are standard on the Pro version. The light-up keys and auto-dimming function is something that any user will appreciate. And if there was some dedicated graphics processor, maybe an ATI X1300
or X1400 something lower end no doubt, but dedicated nonetheless. Those are two things I would absolutely love to see on the Macbook.

Why Microsoft makes me sad.

Let me preface this by saying, contrary to my vocal beliefs, Microsoft isn’t all that bad. For how large they are, and how much they try to put into every release of their software, they do a moderately good job.

Now onto what, in all honesty, really holds back the greatness Microsoft really can be.

Firstly its their product cycle. Vista is going to be realeased nearly half a decade after XP. Within that time, many things have changed. Users want the graphics chip accelerated desktop GUIs, something Mac OS X has had for a very long time, and has implemented quite well with allowing for extensiblity to other programs. Also during this 5 year stint, users have been calling for “fast-search”, search based on pre-databased information and metadata. Spotlight and Beagle have both provided this for the alternative platforms, and third-party applications for the Windows platfom, but Google Desktop has never really integrated with the platform the way Spotlight and the Core Data API does for Mac OS X. All these features and more such as, a better browser (if you can call IE a browser), more user oriented suite of tools ( such as iLife). This things are finally coming into Vista, and even though they were announced before Mac OS X shipped with Spotlight and Dashboard, they weren’t the first out the door where it really matters.

Secondly, Windows Media Player needs to be more robust. Microsoft would argue that, Media Center is the more robust Media Player, but Windows Media Player could’ve and should’ve had podcast support about 3 years ago. It isn’t that diffcult of a thing to support. The interface is down right dreadful and it’s absolutely astounding to walk around the UF campus and still see people using it over Winamp, Zinf or even iTunes (which by the way is a great media player but horrible music store).

Thirdly, Outlook has never been a good e-mail/PIM client, its overly complicated. IT has tons and tons of features, but most will never ever be used. And Outlook 2007 is even more convoluted. Comparing Calendars is useless side by side and it shouldn’t take me 3 trips to a manual and some ridiculous method of creating a faux folder to create one new calendar. Microsoft has serious issues with its interface design choices sometimes, mostly so they don’t copy Apple. But if they had a shorter product cycle they wouldn’t have to worry about that.

Finally what irks me the most is this. Why if they are so large and so powerful, is there so many bugs. Apple has its fair share of bugs to, especially with the iLife suite corrupting itself, but nontheless Apple Operating software and some of its suites work exactly like promised (especially Final Cut, which is great but not as good as Sony Vegas). Microsoft is doing something very wrong in this respect and hopefully since Vista has been delayed so many times, that once they get rid of the bugs, they won’t come back.

Mac Book Pros, educational discounts, College, and various other gadgets

Long post title simple idea. I’m seriously considering getting a Mac Book Pro, pending a few major and minor caveats.

1) Firstly the software I’ll need day to day. Now I know in the majority of my classes Mac OS X will be shuned. I can deal with that. I can still open word docs, powerpoints, and excel files. And if they give me an Acess database, i’ll tell them to wait a few minutes and boot into windows, no big deal. The problem comes with third-party software. There just isn’t a big following of good open source software. No good note taking applications. No good note taking applications (Stickies in Dashboard don’t count), no amazing email/pim application (the iLife suite is lacking some serious things with e-mail and PIM, mainly a standard three pane interface with Mail.App and having iCal, Mail, and Address Book as one app. Most likely a marketing move).

2) I have to mount an install file? what the hell is up with that. I have to mount install files but Its difficult to mount NAS devices? Not cool at all.

3) Podcast support in iTunes shouldn’t require iTunes Music store to be activated, it should just download the enclosures through Safari’s RSS integration.

4) The battery gets freakin’ hot when plugged in, not usable as a laptop then and probably detrimental to the battery as it is Li-Ion.

5) Two Button support either eludes me in Windows or rather isn’t there.

6) That damned Beach Ball.

7) Why are they so damn expensive for the low end Mac Books that are aimed at students. Students want to have $800 notebooks, most of them can’t afford a $2000 Mac Book Pro, or want the smaller form factor. When Apple can easily bring the cost down, why don’t they? Because of the software, the whole iLife suite and the great integration of iLife and the rest of the mac system mainly through the Core Data API (and its main frontend Spotlight)? That should be the value add, what really holds on to the customer have, after capturing them with the style and low price ( Sub $1000). Educationaly Discounts don’t help much for the low end.

These few things not only bug me right now about getting a notebook from Apple but always have been the impeding factor for my purchase.

Neo Lumos

Neo Lumos

Originally uploaded by kaiserollofdoom.

Flickr Photo of the Day

This is just funny.

A keyboard anyone can love? Maybe only men…… without girlfriends.

link

Google Book: Search

Google Book: Search

Originally uploaded by kaiserollofdoom.

This is a great book, and that cd under it is also very good.

moblogging @ its not so finest

moblogging is now for me feasible but rather impracticle(there is no spell checking). But if you must know, I probably will end up moblogging a few times.

AP Scores

AP Biology = 5
AP Statistics = 5

HTC Wizard

Also known as the T-Mobile MDA for T-mobile USA, or more recently, my new phone. Expect a post on the device and Pictures, up later today.