Absurd Singularity

Realized I haven't posted in awhile and it's mainly due to the convergence of multiple factors. The main one being life in general, in every aspect, has just been insanely busy. Then every new day brings a new story about the Bush administration that just serves to annoy me even more. I can't remember if there was ever a time where I've been constantly annoyed by the government for so many consecutive weeks straight. So that just puts me in a bad mood in general. *sigh* Well, not really much I can do 'cept buckle down and plow through it. All I can say is... it's going to be an interesting year...

On an unrelated note, I finally took the time out to clear out my Mail's inbox. I had emails in there from 2 years ago that I hadn't sorted yet. Kinda scary. Anyway, time to accumulate another 2 years worth of emails. ;-p

Anyway, a few images taken in my parent's front yard. I have a suspicion that my Canon 70-200IS is a bit soft wide open so thinking of sending it in to Canon for calibration.

Either it's soft or front/back focusing. Maybe I should send in my XT as well.

But my Canon 24-105IS continues to impress me every time I use it. Pretty super pics right out of the camera. Although its bokeh is a little... odd sometimes. The 70-200 definitely is better in that department.

I think the most interesting thing about this article was finding out that the US currently has no official language. Although I suppose just about everybody assumed that it was English. Anyway, I guess count me in as amongst the 84% that support making English the national language.

Plucked from Metafilter, this guy's good.

toy?

Whatever could it be? ;-p

Valid points Lee, although I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not. ;-) But, in case you weren't...

1. I haven't had a desire for a Mac desktop in ages. When it comes to Macs, I'm strictly mobile.
2. Are you kidding? I used to be king of the first iteration Mac products. ;-) I had the first Powerbook G3 model, first Titanium Powerbook G4, and first Aluminum Powerbook G4.
3. Isn't it $150? But yeah, that's stretching it a bit. However, since it was only a $10 premium after all was said and done...

Get a Nano, Ben! :-p

My 2 gigs of RAM for me ol' MacBook arrived today. Installation, while definitely a breeze compared to the older iBooks, does require a bit of muscle as you gotta really cram those RAM chips into their slots. First time around I didn't do that so the machine wouldn't boot up. Plus the little levers that you use to eject the chips are made of somewhat flimsy plastic so I'm always afraid of accidentally snapping them off.

As for the heat issue, the MacBook to me appears to run no hotter than my Powerbook G4 1.25Ghz. It does get a bit toasty but I wouldn't say it's abnormally so. Plus the heat is mostly confined to the left side of the machine towards the rear so I can balance it on my right leg without a problem. Will probably just get another CoolPad.

Anyhoo, gotta wait till after Memorial Day for my HD to arrive so unfortunately another week or so before I can finally start testing this sucka out. Grrrr.....

Spent the better part of the last 2 days finally unpacking and installing my sound system. Good lord this stuff is a pain in the ass. And this is with the hard part already done for me. The previous owner had wall-mounted his speakers so he already had speaker wire running through the walls and ceiling for a Dolby 5.1 system. Unfortunately, the parts of the wire that was available at each speaker location was just a smidgen too short to reach my satellite speaker connectors. On two of them I was able to yank out enough wire to make them reach but the other two wouldn't budge so I had to make a trip out to Home Depot to grab some lengths of wire, electrical tape and wire connectors. Actually I wound up making three trips to Home Depot cause I got the wire size wrong the first time (good thing I only bought 5 feet then) and I had to make the third trip to buy some dry wall screws cause I forgot to buy a speaker mount for the center speaker.

Mounting the satellites onto the wall wasn't particularly hard but I always feel nervous when drilling holes into dry wall cause I hate having to patch up the holes if I mess up. The stud finder worked pretty well and out of 10 screws I had to use, only 2 needed support cause there was no stud where it was needed.