Absurd Singularity

For those of you who I haven't contacted directly already... =)

To practice for the presidential elections later this fall, you can cut yer teeth on this "Battle of the Babies" contest:

http://z100.elvisduran.com/pages/contest/babybattle/?article=3618017

And vote for "Devon C." =) 7th row, third from the right. Theoretically it's one vote per email address so if you have multiple email addresses, feel free to vote multiple times. ;-p And remember to click on the link in the email that's sent to the address to confirm the vote. Many thanks! =)

Despite the cloudy and chilly weather, we took our new bikes along with Devon's new bike seat out for a test run around the neighborhood. As expected, Devon kicked up a massive fuss when we were putting his helmet on but once we got moving he forgot all about it. Mostly. =) But he seemed to enjoy the ride and the bell on the handlebars gave him something to do.

So about a month ago, I decided to take Erin's suggestion that we get bikes seriously and we started looking. She had been saying she wanted to take bike rides with Devon when the weather got better since this past winter when she spotted this baby/toddler bike seat. Originally this was supposed to have been a relatively quick process. But as Erin would say a few weeks later, "I should have known this was going to happen after the whole aquarium debacle." Obviously not her exact words. ;-p

So I finally had some time last night to veg out in front of the plasma and watch my second Blu-Ray title ever. The first being Talladega Nights which came with the PS3 two years ago. And if the image above didn't clue you in already, the movie du jour was Appleseed Ex Machina. Historically I'm not a huge Appleseed fan. I like Masamune Shirow's work, and while the anime adaptations for his Ghost in the Shell title has generally been quite good, Appleseed has been pretty neglected as an animated feature, until now.

Appleseed Ex Machina is very much a visual tour de force. And viewing it in high def is a must. My plasma only goes up to 1080i and even then I was hugely impressed so on the ubiquitous 1080p models these days it's gotta look even better. The artwork is rather unique as it kinda looks like vividly colored 2-D cel shading wrapped around 3-D models which is somewhat disconcerting but quite pretty. Deunan has never looked so hot as she is in this movie. ;-p

Unfortunately the animation seems to be a bit weak. No issues during the fast-moving action scenes but character movement just looks kinda unnatural when the characters are moving slowly or just doing casual motions. Produced by John Woo, pretty much all his signature touches are found in the movie. Unfortunately they all come in one action sequence at the beginning. And that's another problem with this movie; the really good action sequences come in the first third of the movie, everything else, I'm sad to say is nothing special, even though they involve the cool-looking Landmates. If you're looking for ridiculously off the wall, physics defying but very cool-looking fight sequences, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is still the best there is.

And the other area where this movie falls short is the plot. It's really not that good and feels like the writers just threw a whole bunch of used story elements at a wall and went with it. And obviously it's very predictable. Very disappointing overall. It's basically a sci-fi Borg/zombie movie, declawed.

So, while there's no doubt that while this title is one hell of a good-looking flick, that's pretty much all that it's got going for it. Which is really disappointing. Worth a rental, but only if you've got the high def equipment to have it shine on.

And what a fine day it is. =)

Doing his best mummy impersonation.

I approve of Mommy's attempt to keep me busy.

So on Mother's Day I took the family out to a local beekeeper that I found online. Erin's suffering from massive seasonal allergies and I had heard that taking a teaspoon of honey daily for a year or so would help desensitize the immune system to pollen. Can't be off the shelf stuff since they undergo a treatment process that removes any extraneous matter. And it would preferably be from a beekeeper close to the area so that the trees and plants would be the same. But anyway, a few photos of that will be posted in a later entry.

But on the way to the beekeeper, Devon decided to take his noon nap and since Erin is loathe to wake him during naptime, we wound up just driving around the area for awhile. Besides seeing gigantic $2 million dollar homes, we came across an alpaca farm. So obviously we had to stop on the side of the road and take a few snaps. Unfortunately I didn't have any lens longer than 70mm with me at the time.

And unfortunately they had just been sheared apparently so we didn't see them in their full glory. But this curious fella was nice enough to come right up to the fence to take a closer look.

Return visitors may have noticed that this blog suddenly looks different. Your eyes do not deceive as I've finally spent some time consolidating the templates and design of this site so that all the pages actually follow the same style and layout now. With my old style, basically none of the pages besides the main index and individual entry pages looked right. No longer a problem. I'll be doing more fiddling so don't be alarmed if things start blowing up left and right.

As regular readers may have noticed by now, I have a tendency to shoehorn the highest capacity hard drives into my MacBook Pro as soon as they're available. So I was pretty psyched in March when Samsung announced that their standard height (9.5mm) 500GB notebook hard drive was shipping. But apparently they were talking outta their ass cause even now, no one has actually seen the damn thing. Unless apparently you live in France.

But, late last week, our IT guy pointed out this link to me where a Brit actually went and installed the thicker (12.5mm) Hitachi 500GB notebook hard drive into his 15" MBP. So, being the fearless, cutting-edge techie that I am, I got one too. And I also picked up an external Firewire 800/Firewire 400/USB2/eSATA case for the ol' 320GB drive that was soon to be no longer numero uno. Actually it's a good idea anyway to pick up at least one external drive case that supports Firewire because the transfer speeds just crushes USB2. Saves a lot of time when having to clone hundreds of gigs worth of data between drives so the price premium is worth it over the super cheapo USB2 only cases.

So late last night I cloned my existing drive using Carbon Copy Cloner into the new 500GB and this morning I swapped the drives. The only difference between what I did during the install and what the Brit did is I didn't have to move the remote sensor and catch light leads to the side. I left them on top. Most likely because I didn't use the rubber band strips on the bottom like he did (I just put in a layer of plastic). I wasn't worried about padding on the bottom because with the extra height of this drive it's pretty much an exact fit so no worries about vertical movement. The layer of plastic I put down was just to prevent the hard drive from sitting directly on the metal bottom casing.

But everything actually worked without a hitch and I was up and running in minutes. Only issue is I have to reinstall my Windows partition because I don't think CCC can clone Windows partitions (I may be wrong since I didn't actually try it). But at least I have over 100GB+ of free space again after being down to about 7GB on my 320GB drive. I may still wind up getting the Samsung anyway (when they finally decide to sell it in the US) to use as a main backup where it'll be a direct clone of this Hitachi so in case of catastrophic failure I can just quickly swap and be back in action.

Still not ready to swap out my optical drive for another hard drive though.

Yeah, you know that whole "Asians take studying way too seriously" stereotype? This isn't helping. =p

Typically there are two schools of thought when it comes to umbrellas¹.

   1. Buy the cheapest ones possible. When it inevitably breaks, just buy another one.
   2. Search for the most wind-resistant umbrella possible, cost be damned.

One of our investors at work is a believer of the first school. A bit over a year ago he showed up to work with a big box of dirt cheap, plastic, black, throwaway umbrellas for communal use. These umbrellas would literally fall apart upon opening. A child could bend the stem with one hand. But when facing a commute home in inclement weather with your own umbrella at home, it was better than nothing.

Personally, I've been following the second school for the past 2 years or so. My previous umbrella is this Brookstone one which actually worked pretty well. It had a pretty large 54" inch canopy yet collapsed down to a manageable size. Until one particularly wind-blown day when one of the ribs snapped like a twig. Even crippled it still works although one panel flops around like a fish outta water.

Earlier in the week, these Senz umbrellas caught my eye. Besides looking like the F-117 stealth fighter, I was intrigued by the claim that it won't invert under adverse wind conditions because that's pretty much the main thing I hate about umbrellas. So I ordered their mini folding umbrella which arrived yesterday. Now the mini is supposed to survive only 40mph winds (not 70 like their regular sized version) but it's also not as peculiar-looking as its larger brethren. It's not particularly impressive looking compared to other umbrellas. The ribs look fragile so I'm definitely interested to see how it'll actually perform come crunch time. Comes with a lifetime warranty though so that's something going for it.

And then Devon got his hands on it...

Umm, not a guitar Dev.

Alright, now you've got it.

Thinks it'll go great with his car.

Now I don't need to worry about spring showers indoors anymore. ;-p

¹ Ok, there may also be people who eschew umbrellas altogether but I've only seen one person who does that (or used to) on a regular basis. ;-p

Bit the bullet and picked up a used Lensbaby 3G and macro kit to play around with. Everything's manual so it'll take some time to get used to. And it'll probably be doubly tough to get shots of Devon with it since he's not gonna stay still long enough for me to get everything set up for a proper exposure.

So I was quite excited to read Gruber's post on the changes Apple made to Spaces in the latest 10.5.3 update. Like Gruber, the limitation that Spaces had prior to 10.5.3 also prevented me from using it. Just played around with it and the current implementation is much more in line with how I'd like to use it so it's another feature that I can finally use. However, there's still a quirk that doesn't quite fit with how I like to work. Namely, what it does when an application is hidden.

Let's say I have Firefox windows open on multiple spaces and then hide the app. If I switch to another space and then command-Tab to Firefox, Spaces teleports me back to the space where I had originally hidden Firefox, even though the current space I'm in also has a Firefox window. I would much rather Spaces just unhides the app in the space that I'm currently in. Only if the current space doesn't have a window for the app should it send me to one that does.

Anyhoo, it remains to be seen if they ever change this but for now I'm just happy they've gotten as far as it is right now.