*STOMP*, Ketchup!

Wednesday August 15, 2007 at 3:06 pm | Filed under Entertainment, Family, Mac, Me

Good grief… over the past few weeks the Sharks get a new logo, Apple announces a new iMac/iLife/iWork/etc, our TV breaks, Monique and I drive halfway across the country and back for my family reunion in Colorado, and we get to go to a great concert at the Greek where we saw Squeeze and Fountains of Wayne. Oh yeah, and we also found out that we’re having a girl! I’ll tackle these one at a time:

The San Jose Sharks get cartoony! This new logo was unveiled in late July. I still haven’t seen any new uniforms, but those are on the way too. I don’t mind the new look, it’s really using the same colors as before but it’s a more aggressive style. Change is weird so far, but I’m sure it’ll grown on me.

Apple made a few announcements on August 7th where they introduced the new iMac, which looks like a giant iPhone, and the new iLife and iWork. The iMac is really nice, and comes with a new apple keyboard that I’ve ordered to replace my keyboard. The new ones have much less travel in the keys and are really nice to type on, plus they’re super thin!

As for iLife, it always seems to be packed with enough features to more than justify buying the new version each time it comes out. This time around there’s a ground-up re-write of iMovie, which I think will do wonders for those who have been shy about making movies because they were scared off by complicated software. Not that the older iMovie was complex, but this new interface is ridiculously easy. The downside of the new easy goodness is that some of the more advanced features were removed. So I’ll be keeping my old copy of iMovie ’06 (which the install kindly keeps for you in a separate folder). iWork is better than ever, and now there’s a new alternative for Excel called Numbers which seems really promising so far.

What’s next on the list? Our TEE-v done broke-ded! Yeah, we noticed a couple of weeks ago it was turning off from time to time on its own. Turns out it was trying to tell us that its lamp was nearing the end of its life. So tonight, after waiting and waiting, the dude is supposed to come out and fix it for a small fortune. Fun! It’ll be nice to have our idiot box back in action!

We took a mother of a road trip, me and the pregnant lady, to Greeley Colorado to meet up with a ton of family at my tri-annual Family Reunion. I still haven’t posted all of the pictures for this one, but they’re coming.

Lastly, we went to a great great concert on Monday night, had a friend with some last minute free tickets (Thanks Cary!) and we got to see Squeeze and Fountains of Wayne at the Greek! I am always weary of seeing bands that may be past their prime, but wow, Squeeze delivered! Those guys are getting up there in age and they still sound as good, or BETTER than they ever have.

In closing, I’ll throw a little baby update in here. We’re so excited to be having a girl. We’ve been shopping for stuff, we’re starting to go to checkups more frequently now (another one tomorrow morning), Monique’s got showers coming up, I’ve gotta get a lot of things done with the nursery before the big moment, and I really need to be posting to this here site more!

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First iWait. Then iPhone. Now iHappy.

Saturday June 30, 2007 at 2:27 am | Filed under Gadgetry, Mac

Who was I kidding thinking I wasn’t going to get an iPhone? I tried to convince myself of just this fact about a month ago when I started to believe some of the negative speculation and getting caught up in the idea that if I went with a cheaper phone, I could get the same satisfaction of a new gadget, but also solve the problems I was having with my current phone, which was losing it.

I went down to the freshly painted AT&T store 3 weeks ago and picked up a Nokia n75. I liked the phone a lot, but the serious flaw was that because it was “3G” (meaning it runs on a newer, quicker data network) it sucked the every lovin’ life out of its battery and had to be charged every night regardless of actual time being used that day. That was a deal breaker! I returned it on Wednesday amidst all of the hype about the iPhone. Then Thursday I made my Friday plans to stake out the local Apple store.

So I got to the Brea Mall at 9am Friday morning — prepared to wait 9 hours until 6pm, when the phone went on sale. I was a little discouraged to find out that I was #75 in line! Each person could buy 2 iPhones, so I was hoping the store received more than 150 of them. Waiting in line with all of the other crazies was a lot of fun and the time went by so much faster than I thought it would. There were some great people around me and we talked the whole day and I didn’t have to resort to my book or laptop that I brought with me. Most of the conversation was about speculation of inventory, and general pre-admiration of what the iPhone could do for us individually. But there was also some funny moments where 5 different people knocked down the line dividers, there was this old bitter dude (he looked like Larry David) who came by to give everyone a hard time and bounce his blue raquetball around, and of course the robo-security mall cops on Segways. Nice.

By the time 6pm rolled around we were ready to shell out some dough. The Apple store folks were awesome. There were like 50 employees in there, some as a welcoming crew screaming and giving high-5′s to people who were coming into the store to buy, and those leaving with their new treasures. I’ve always had a great experience at the Apple stores, but this was overkill. They were very organized, and most “checkout counters” were just employees with mobile credit card processors that printed out receipts right there on the spot. The girl that helped me had trouble with my card. It wouldn’t swipe!! I had to call Monique, who had met up with me about 5:30 and was waiting outside the store, to give another card to an employee and run it in to me. Well, it turned out to be the card reader that was at fault, and it finally all went through. We were out of there by 6:30 with our iPhones. Yeah, we got two! Monique’s going to decide if she wants to keep the 2nd one or no.. we’ll see.

As for the phone itself. I’ve been playing with it since about 7:30 (I had to eat!) and I’m really impressed. The touch keyboard I was worried about having trouble with is super intuitive and works great. The screen is the best screen I’ve ever seen on any small video device. It pairs up with the car’s bluetooth perfectly. It’s got a great camera. It’s the first phone I’ve even wanted to get my email with. I’m getting a much better signal in the house than I have with any other phone I’ve had. The visual voicemail is simply how voicemail should be done. After all my messin’ tonight the battery is only half drained. …and it’s a phone with a Video iPod built in! But I think the key is that it does all of these things in an incredible sexy design and with a (naturally) kick butt, easy-to-use Apple interface. Simple, and amazing.

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Apple To Offer DRM-free Music

Monday April 2, 2007 at 10:06 pm | Filed under Entertainment, Gadgetry, Mac, On the Web

Starting sometime in May Apple will offer a large portion of it’s iTunes music store catalog at higher quality and WITH NO DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT for an additional 30¢ per song. That’s right for $1.29 per song you can get a 256kbps AAC file (that would mean more than just iPods could play in the iTunes Music Store) with no strings attached! No news on a full album price but it will be interesting to see how they price’em. Read the full article here.

Something tells me that May will also bring the next Apple OS.

In other Apple news related to me — I ordered an Apple Airport Extreme last week which should arrive in the next few days. I’m anxious to play around with the speed of the 802.11n and not care about the range of our router ever again, plus utilize an apple interface for my router (both Monique’s new iMac and my new work MacBook Pro have 802.11n built in). I’ve not many complaints about the Netgear router I’ve had for years, but it’s losing steam lately and the control panel blows.

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