reesesWeb

There's lots to like about Leopard, other than the usual OS X update firewire suckage. The best new feature is about eighteen years late -- the date in iCal's dock icon is finally correct.

Any of you have a recommendation for a Mac-friendly non-iPod video capable portable media players that handle video? I'm disqualifying the iPod for now as its codec support is pretty minimal. Otherwise, it has almost everything I'm looking for.

Other than that, I'm looking at the Creative Zen Vision W, which looks great on "paper" but is ugly and doesn't love the Mac. In fact, the only way to get it to work with a Mac is to use xnjb, an open source MTP application. Suck. That's so far from iTunes integration that it makes my head spin.

Your money goes through my code, my designs, or systems. I say that with certainty, because you're online and you know how to Google or read blogs, so you're my demographic. Billions of dollars a year, and I'm not talking about "I worked at foo.com and they make a billion a year." I'm talking about every credit card transaction, every gift card redemption, every check processed, every invoice paid at various institutions.

I don't make financial mistakes with that work. I'm renowned for it, and am often sought out to consult on that basis.

So why is it that I cannot upgrade a personal box of mine?

I've had a hate/hate relationship with web browsers, switching often between Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, Safari, and Camino, or just complaining about them. Sometimes I try to improve things slightly, but the task is sysiphian. The only things I think are more difficult to get right (what's the html markup for sarcasm?) are mail user agents and telephones.

I went to look at the new MacBook today at the Apple store. I feel this desire to replace both my G4 PowerBooks with another Macintosh laptop.

Now that I've validated its functionality, I'm ready to migrate the Mac Mini to be a home theater pc, and I miss the dual screen functionality afforded by having a laptop with screen-spanning ability.

That said, the MacBook non-Pro will not be replacing anything at my house any time soon.

The good:

• The keyboard is much nicer than it looks. I expected a Mattel Aquarius experience, but it types almost as well as my PowerBooks. It took about three femtoseconds to adjust.

I have some .dfont files I wanted to convert into true type (ttf) files. .dfont files are peculiar to the Mac, and peculiar to Mac OS X, which seems kind of strange, because they're data-fork true type font files.

9:30 PM: Start Parallels and create a pre-configured instance for Windows XP, modifying RAM allotment to 512MB, relocating the data files to an external FireWire Drive, and changing the CDROM from an ISO file to the Mac's SuperDrive DL.

9:35 PM: Put Windows XP disk in drive, start VM.

9:46 PM: Windows XP installer says,"39 minutes left to install," as it copies files, probes hardware (probably especially easy with a virtual machine with constrained virtualised hardware), and tells me how much better life will be with XP. On my last install (on a PC), 39 became 23 which lasted for FOUR HOURS.