Maurice's selected thoughts.

It’s really very simple. My wife and I don’t care much for going out to see movies. We like movies. It’s just that to go out means finding a sitter, finding a movie, getting tickets, standing in line to pick up tickets, standing in line to buy overpriced popcorn and a soda, and finally sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a large room with at least one very rude asshole who doesn’t realize where he or she is. There is always the talking on the phone or more recently the texting with backlights ruining the view of the movie. It’s an overly complicated algorithm for a software designer that just wants things to work. So instead we bought a TV.

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I mentioned my storage problems in previous posts. Really I’ve had the same issues ever since I started in with these dam computers. Each upgrade has really just temporally delayed the inevitable. I’ve done a few things right. I’ve always used high quality power supplies and UPS. The result is I’ve not had a major drive failure in 18 years. Not bad. But it’s only a matter of time.

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I’m about half way through the second install disk on my G5. Figured now would be a good time to post. Pretty excited to start learning this stuff. I’ve been browsing through several design books on Safari. Looks like magic to me. I’m hoping it won’t be too hard learning what I need to know to hack together the more complicated illustrations I plan in my dissertation using Illustrator. The simple stuff is all done using OmniGraffle, which is great but limited.

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I finally bit the bullet. I bought a student version of Adobe CS 4 Design Premium. I’ve been thinking I need to get Illustrator for the diagrams I create for my research. OmniGraffle works great for flowcharts and block diagrams but sometimes I wish I had just a little more control. The other thing is editing photos. Obviously, Photoshop is the big raging beast for that. So, now I’m committed. We’ll see what happens. I can already say this may push my notebook over the brink. The 160 GB drive is bursting at the seams and all I can do is eyeball the SSD stuff that doesn’t come close to enough capacity in anything I could reasonably justify spending money on. I’m thinking this stuff will be reserved for desktop use, but then those drives are bursting at the seams too.

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PeepCode as I mentioned previously is quite an inspiring idea, and quite useful for learning new things about software in a fairly straight forward easy way. I bought a few of these a couple years back and liked them. I have to admit I mostly forgot about PeepCode until recently when I visited their site and found a screen-cast on making screen-casts and the software they use. Since I have done a few myself I was hooked and had to know what they are doing.

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As mentioned in my last post 10.5.2 seems to have fixed the previous issues I have experienced with Leopard. After several weeks of living with it I am very happy to report that I have not had a single panic since the update. I believe the issue is closed, but it it hard to say what the problem was based on the lack of information maintained by Apple regarding their updates. Given the alternative (Vista) I’d highly recommend Leopard at this point.

Well I’m happy to report that Leopard, the latest revision to Apple’s Mac OS X, has finally stopped crashing my machine. Apple released Leopard after an initial delay of over six months in October of last year. I was one of those that installed on the release date, having pre-ordered my copy from Apple. I have had several problems with this release compared to Tiger.

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