Two weeks with no post. That’s a record for me. Honestly, I have about four different posts I want to do but just haven’t been able to find the time. Perhaps I’ll be able to get one up this weekend.
Today is good Friday and mighty good Friday it is. I just wanted to wish anybody reading this a Happy Easter and that you are able to enjoy it with any and all that are close to you.
Perhaps you will get the opportunity to enjoy a tasty treat! Oh, and as I was told by a very insightful pastor once, God can indeed make something like this good for you. His will permitting, of course.
John Gruber at the Daring Fireball wrote a very well thought-out argument for Apple to extend their newly announced Boot Camp into a Classic like environment in the upcoming OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard). That is to say, rather than having to reboot your machine into Windows XP (or Vista), you’ll instead just double-click your Windows apps in OS X and they’ll run like OS 9 apps have under Classic since the original OS 10.0.
Of course, he goes into details on how this would benefit Apple but he is just simply a better writer or at the very least has more time to articulate himself. Give it a read.
I took this past week off from work to spend some time with Becky and the kids while they were out on Spring break. One of the other primary goals was to finish the garage (a build-out that started about two years ago) as well as some other smaller projects indoors:
I spent most of the time in the garage. I was able to finish installing the drywall and did the initial mud but still need to sand and paint it. I also installed the countertops on the workbench. The only thing remaining (other than the walls) is to find a home for all the things currently in my parking space in the drawers and cabinets. I’m also going to clean off and find a home for the workbench my father made. I’d hate to bust it up and dispose of it since it is in fine shape. I learned about Freecycle which people use to give away items. I’ll probably post a notice there and see if there are any takers.
As far as the other items, the door is done, the den is much improved but I did have to throw a few handfuls of things into a box as my nieces were coming over and and to get rid of the "working piles" out in the family room. The shelves and track lighting haven’t been started but I did get the materials and can do those in future weekends. His shelf really shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to an hour so I’ll see if I can that done by tomorrow. The track lighting will take an hour or more so will probably save that.
Parallels released this past week a virtualization product supporting OS X called Parallels Workstation. I’ve been playing with it and wouldn’t you know it, it works. I was able to install without too much trouble Windows 2000. Since it’s using the virtualization options of the Intel Core Duo CPU the client OS runs at pretty much full speed. As a disclaimer, I haven’t put the thing through any serious benchmarking, but it’s clear that this is virtualization and not emulation going on here. The only thing that doesn’t currently work is audio or a convenient way to exchange files with the host OS.
I still think WINE is the ideal, but this is a product I’ll probably end up getting (it’s only $40) so I can easily have multiple virtual machines available (Win2k, CentOS, Fedora Core, etc.) without the hassle of rebooting.
Of course, for fun, I tried to install the hacked version of the OS X install DVD (the one that supports BIOS) and it started booting but crashed quite quickly. That’s O.K. since it isn’t a supported client OS. It would have been neat to have OS X running in OS X. Could I install Parallels inside the Parallels client? It would be like the Russian nesting dolls but geeker.
Here’s a screenshot for those doubters. ;-)
Ken Kutaragi, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., made some information public about the upcoming launch of PS3.
Worldwide launch (North America, Asia, and European territories) will be in November consisting of approximately 2 million units with 1 million a month additional each month for the remainder of the fiscal year (March 2007). It will come with a 60G hard drive, full Blu-ray support, and be 100% backward compatible (upscaling to HD). An online service will also be freely available providing lobby matching, voice chat, and commerce features.
Pricing hasn’t been officially announced but is expected to be in the $400-450 range.
Not too bad. The real question is if SCEA employees will get one gratis (employees were all given a PS2 at launch). Personally, I doubt it. If it duplicates the PSP launch, we won’t even be able to buy one until the channel is filled (about 3-4 weeks after launch) and even then, since the hardware is sold at a lost the emplyee "discount" will be minimal.
Becky sent me this yesterday and I just had to share:
The Cost of Kids
I have repeatedly seen the breakdown of the cost of raising a child, but this is the first time I have seen the rewards listed this way. It’s nice, really nice!
The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up with $160,140.00 for a middle income family. Talk about sticker shock! That doesn’t eve! n touch college tuition.
But $160,140 isn’t so bad if you break it down. It translates into $8,896 a year, $741.38 a month, or $171.08 a week. That’s a mere $24.24 a day! Just over a dollar an hour.
Still, you might think the best financial advice says don’t have children if you want to be “rich.” It is just the opposite.
What do your get for your $160,140?
Naming rights—First, middle, and last!
Glimpses of God everyday.
Giggles under the covers every night.
More love than your heart can hold.
Butterfly kisses and Velcro hugs.
Endless wonder over rocks, ants, clouds, and warm cookies.
A hand to hold, usually covered with jam.
A partner for blowing bubbles, flying kites, building sand castles, and skipping down the sidewalk in the pouring rain.
Someone to laugh yourself silly with no matter what the boss said or how your stocks performed that day.
For $160,140, you never have to grow up.
You get to finger-paint, carve pumpkins, play hide-and-seek, catch lightning bugs, and never stop believing in Santa Claus.
You have an excuse to keep reading the Adventures of Piglet and Pooh, watching Saturday morning cartoons, going to Disneyland, and wishing on stars.
You get to frame rainbows, hearts, and flowers under refrigerator magnets and collect spray painted noodle wreaths for Christmas, hand prints set in clay for Mother’s Day, and cards with backward letters for Father’s Day.
For $160,140, there is no greater bang for your buck.
You get to be a hero just for retrieving a Frisbee off the garage roof, taking the training wheels off the bike, removing a splinter, filling a wading pool, coaxing a wad of gum out of bangs, and coaching a baseball team that never wins but always gets treated to ice cream regardless.
You get a front row seat to witness history the first step, first word, first bra, first date, and first time behind the wheel. You get to be immortal.
You get another branch added to your family tree, and if you’re lucky, a long list of limbs in your obituary called grandchildren.
You get an education in psychology, nursing, criminal justice, communications, and human sexuality that no college can match.
In the eyes of a child, you rank right up there with God.
You have all the power to heal a booboo, scare away the monsters under the bed, patch a broken heart, police a slumber party, ground them forever, and love them without limits, so one day they will, like you, love without counting the cost.
ENJOY YOUR KIDS AND GRANDKIDS
Friday was the first of three days for the family at Disneyland. As far things could have gone, it wasn’t too bad. We knew that rain was likely, but weren’t too worried about it. We weren’t quite anticipating the amount of rain that met us when we made it to the park around 10:00 AM. We quickly picked up some ponchos (with Mickey on them, of course) and continued on our way. The kids were not overly thrilled, but weren’t complaining (except after Brian got doused on Splash Mountain).
Day two and three should be quite dry and allow us to hit the other rides we weren’t able to fit in today.
I’m off to bed. We’re heading to Fantasyland at 7:00 AM (hotel guests get to go in an hour early). Oh joy! Nah, it should be a fun day.
This is the kind of car that I would really want. It goes 0-60 in 4 sec and gets 50 MPG. The kicker is that it wasn’t developed by anybody in Detroit, Japan, or Europe. It was designed and built by five students in a Philadelphia High School auto shop. I’m starting to get really annoyed that cars generally get no better millage today then 30 years ago. It makes you think that there really is an oil-company/auto industry conspiracy going on.
I just saw a post on slashdot asking what people’s first computer was. Me? That’s easy, an Apple ][+ that my dad bought for the family during the summer of 1983 (if I remember correctly). The true test of the geek, though, is if he (or she) can name all the computers they’ve owned. Let me see if I’m up to that challenge:
To be honest I think I may have missed one or two in the middle but man, that’s a handful, huh? Granted that’s over 20 years so I’m not too out of control, right? Right?!
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