Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Ahhh, a weight has been lifted. Several actually. My angry post the other night was the result of too much work, l33t hax0rs, and school work. Now, all three are gone for the time being.

I caught up on my work and things have stabilized from a task viewpoint. The script kiddies have been eradicated for the time being, we still have to work a bit to make sure we keep them out, and I just turned in my freaking 18 page research paper for one of my classes. That comes after I wrote 4 other 5-8 page papers last night. Very nice to be free of the burden.

<tangent>
Type 'leet' into Google. You will instantly get a slew of supposed "leet-speak" translators. Type in elite hacker and see what you get back. Lame.
</tangent>

Now, let's try out this new Blogger image hosting stuff. This was one of the things I found really disappointing about Blogger when I first started, among other things (Another tangent first, why isn't there a "search this blog" feature, so when I want to find one of my old stories I can do so without going to Google and knowing some magic. Someone with more skillz and time let me know if you find out how to do this easily).
Okay, that's not too shabby. Google seems to have it right. Works great in Firefox, and I have the option of either uploading or pointing to an external image myself. I would like to see the size option have more clarification though.

Last, go check out Ryan's post for tonight. I know I link to him below, but I agree completely with this post so I want to make sure you go there.

Now, I need to go splurge on some iTunes. The mother of those three really, really ridiculously good looking kids up there gave me a $20 GC to iTunes the other day to cheer me up. It worked. I think I might have to pick up some Lyrics Born.

Ready to Buy?Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.

Whoops, I clicked the sign-in button. That's my one click for the day.

Ever have a day(week?) that sucked more than any other before, and you had no idea how you would get everything done? Yeah, me too.

Ever decided that script kiddies should be drawn and quartered, and that we should all abandon computers and go live in the woods again? Yep, me again.

That's all. Beer is calling.

"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not."

Okay, Shannon tagged me to list my 6 favorite songs. I'm not sure if this is ever, or currently, but my mind can't possibly figure out how to do it for all-time. I will stick to current. These are in no particular order, and may change completely if you ask me again in a week.


1. Big and Rich - Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)
2. Toby Keith - HonkeyTonk U
3. Public Enemy - Give It Up (Dirty Drums in Memphis Remix)
4. Revis - Caught in the Rain
5. Wyclef and Eve - Your Love (L.O.V.E. Reggae Mix)
6. Del the Funky Homosapien - Mista Dobalina

Yeah, this is mainly a group of songs I have had on heavy rotation in iTunes while I do homework late at night.

Okay, tag you're it. List your favorite songs.

"Are you cool man? Like, how?"

I love when I find a new cool piece of technology. It is rare anymore, I have an RSS feed to engadget that you would expect to be chock full of this type of stuff, but it seems they mostly have a Treo and Hello Kitty fetish.

I was pleasantly surprised today to read the feed and see a device that is truly innovative and versatile. The product is the VR3 MP3 FM modulator. It is primarily sold through WalMart, although it is sold out right now so I had to find an alternate outlet.

The basic functionality of being an FM modulator is nothing interesting. Nor is the MP3 playback capability really. I'm pretty sure within a month new babies will be born with both of these features as prevalent as they have become.

Here's what is cool about this device. First, it is powered from your cigarette lighter. You know, that worthless thing used by morons killing themselves too slowly, but otherwise pointless for the most part. Next, it has USB host in it, and uses USB drives to hold the music. This is very flexible and very sweet. I have 1 or 2 flash drives that I no longer use, so this gives them new life. It also means you decide exactly how much space this player will have, depending on what form factor you wish to use. 1 GB flash drives are nearly free after rebate now, which would give the same capacity as the larger iPod shuffle. Otherwise, you could go all out and slap a USB hard drive on that bad boy.

Speaking of iPod shuffles, this is where we thought of a few more cool uses for this product. Why not stick the iPod shuffle in here, and have this be the FM modulator? Better yet, this is now essentially a car charger for the shuffle as well. Pop your music on, use this to listen in the car and recharge, and then take the shuffle with you and avoid human interaction the rest of the day.

My car just happens to have a lighter outlet in a spot where these controls will be very readily available, and is just out of the way enough not to be bumping it all the time. I'm anxious to get this and try it out.

I'm THX certified. I didn't even know you could do that in an alley...

Satan uses Intel processor, and now so does Apple. That's the idea you would get from some Apple fanboys after today's announcement that Apple will be transitioning away from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel x86 flavors.

I think this has gone much too far into a religious crusade. The POWER line, currently made by IBM for Apple, just hasn't been funded or focused enough to keep up. They have fallen behind in releasing new processor features, getting quantities ramped up, etc. With Motorola selling off their PowerPC business a few years ago, the writing was on the wall. Good for Apple hedging their bets all along by keeping OSX running on x86 as well as PPC. That's a great deal of extra work, but it paid off for them now.

I have had a love-hate relationship with Apple for a number of years. I started out on Apple's, and they really got me into computers. After the Apple IIGS though, I tried desperately not to touch an Apple for about the next 10 years. I chose to learn all the true nuts and bolts on everything from 8088's on up to the latest hyperthreaded Dell's. However, Apple snuck up on me and the rest of the world while we were distracted by something inefficient and shiny. Jobs came back with a vengeance and realized that people shouldn't care about what their computers were, or how they worked. They wanted them now to be an appliance, and one that just worked.

This is a perfect example of why they made this switch. Who really cares what processor the latest Powerbook will be running? As long as it does what the person needs. Heck, after an initial transition the developers don't really even care. It's just a different compiler, with some different flags. I've built on dozens of OS's and libraries, it's not all that difficult with semi-portable code. All of the lowest, non-portable code should be already done given that Apple has a version of the OS already running on these processors.

At this point I feel obliged to include a quote from Engadget. "So, i don't know a whole lot about the technical stuff.... but i own a powerbook...what does the switch mean to me?" Absolutely nothing you drooling idiot. You already bought your device, it's not going to quit working because they switched. When was the last time you compiled code...yeah I thought so. I hereby create a new term, derds. A derd is a wannabe-nerd who hangs out on tech sites voicing their opinion without the slightest bit of common-sense or knowledge.

Back to the matter at hand, several interesting possibilities come out of all of this. First, Apple has announced they will have tools to allow apps to run on either platform. That's really cool if they pull it off, processor emulation is always a sweet trick. I'm guessing it will not be optimal for one of the two platforms, and will probably not make use of processor extensions such as Altivec, SSE, etc. Still cool though.

Next, the dawn of a cheap Dell running OSX, or a slick mac mini running XP Media Center edition are upon us. Even if Apple tries to protect either of these interests in software, it is a simple mod chip or software patch away from working. Good for the consumer, questionable outcome for Apple.

Having thrown a bunch of stuff out here that will probably put non-techies to sleep, and may or may not be interesting, I will now throw my own opinion in. I definitely prefer PowerPC architecture. Lots of ooey, gooey registers, low power usage per performance, big-endian byte-ordering the way the programming gods intended, etc. However, I perfectly see the business reasons for Apple to switch. I can only hope now that they push Intel to become more power and heat-efficient in future designs. I will just have to deal with the pain that is little-endian some more.

Finally, just because I said I would, here is a direct quote from me: "I consider any motherboard not made by Apple or Dell to be a knock-off." I don't build computers anymore, and frankly just don't care. Suck it fanboys.