It might be time to get a Mac. When you start getting emails with subject lines that say "24 Month Financing on all Apple PowerBooks, iBooks and Mac minis" and you have the card in your pocket that makes this statement even more compelling (a MicroCenter card), the temptation becomes so great, it's hard to stay the whole day of work.

Mac mini
1.42GHz / 1.0GB PC2700 DDR RAM / 80GB Hard Drive / SuperDrive 4x DVD�RW Drive / 54Mbps AirPort Extreme Wireless Card, Bluetooth Adapter included / 937490

It's a beautiful thing. Going for $999.97. OR

Apple PowerBook G4 15-inch
1.67GHz / 512MB PC2700 DDR RAM / 80GB Hard Drive / SuperDrive 8x DVD�RW Drive / 732552

which goes for $2299.99. The card is what I bought my current Wintel laptop on, and it was nearly identical in price, and that's long been paid off, so I can do it. But with 24 months "same as cash"!?!?! That's awesome. It could be around $100 a month for that PowerBook.

The only thing that I have an urgency about getting a Mac is that they will soon all be converted to Intel. While I have an Intel laptop, I am pretty much a lover of all things AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and a hater of all things Intel. I had my previous AMD, a 1400 MHz Athlon, from when I interned at QVC during the summer of 2001, until just a few months ago. A fan on the motherboard died, making this awful racket at first, then eventually fried itself, rendering the whole thing broken. So I bought a replacement mobo, CPU and some RAM (I had everything else) for less than $400. An Athlon 2800+ and 1GB RAM, and a top of the line (for the CPU) Motherboard. Sweet dealin'. I don't use it for games. My gaming PC, if mentioned on this website, could endanger my life ;) It's a beaut. 64 bit Athlon FX-53. That's all I can say.

So, I'll be taking advantage of this Macintosh "Giveaway". 2 years same as cash, it's practically a giveaway. I'll just walk in, pick one up, and walk out, and feel like I've rented a movie, at least in the same financial range, except I'll have this beautiful piece of machinery.

Which one should I get? I could save money, I have some ram at home too, but no "gig-sticks"... The Mac mini only takes one stick o' RAM, so a gig or a 2 gig stick would be optimal, but I'd have to buy one :(

Keep in mind, you Mac freaks... I am not converting, only "adding to my arsenal". Actually, I'm getting one because of the newest Mac OS X and the iLife '05 (particularly GarageBand). I'm not an artist so don't expect some new l33t Mac art or anything that artists do. I'll have some music up here, though. I've always been a big fan of classical music mixed with blues (at least, from what it sounds like in my head), or reggae and classical and blues, or swing, or rap and swing and blues and classical. Yeah, I haven't heard them either, let's see what I can do.

I think having a Mac will be pretty wicked sweet.

For the meantime, the Phillies are now tied for last place with the Marlins, and are 1.5 games behind the Nationals. The division is volatile. A win yesterday and we would have been in first place. We lost. It's tight. My heart can't take it. Check out the pictures in my album.

In other news, I now have an air conditioner in my bedroom, so it won't be a billion degrees in there anymore. It was steamy. With the temperature around 92 and the humidity at around 110%, it gets a bit harsh on the sweat glands. Even through the thunderstorm we had, which was apparently (by my guess) caused by the world not being used to 110% humidity... that's usually unheard of, except in these parts. So Mother Nature tried to make us feel like the world was ending. That was quite a thunderstorm. It shook the house and it rained a lot.

In yet other news, I now have a cool domain name. I've narrowed it down to one, it's ahead by a half-a-length, with a few others pulling in closely, but it's predicted by industry predicters that this domain name will win, or will at least be a website in the future. It's a neat domain name, no doubt. It's a .org, and the .com counterpart was already taken, and the owner was asking for $2,250, like I have $2k+ to spend on words... actually, not even words plural, just a WORD. $2k+ for one single word, that, when by itself makes no sense. The internet is going to hell. I'll tell you the domain name later :)

In yet other breaking news, I will start to have a weekly feature on here, for one week. Then it will turn into a bi-weekly, and eventually a random thing, then inevitably a never again. Tune in!

I'm going downstairs in the A/C.

I'm second and third guessing my domain name decisions... I have too many ideas for names. There's not one thing that, I feel, can aptly describe what my site is about. Especially when it's all done, except for the content. The content will never be finished :) When I get some cool recording equipment, I'll eventually have some good tunes on here, although "Show Off" in my music downloads is pretty good.

I just keep typing stuff into Network Solutions' text thingy there, and seeing what names are available, and at the end I'll email myself the list. Today I compiled a list of around 30 domain names. I think I really like one of them though. Maybe. We'll see tomorrow.

Or at least get discounts on their cars like their employees do!

Source...

A while ago I bought a QuickTime Pro license. I wanted to make the movies smaller so I could not have to worry about going on for 3 minutes and having people download a movie all day long. I had formatted and reinstalled Windows after I bought it, and I couldn't find the registration key for a while, but I found it. So there are 2 new movies up there for your viewing and listening pleasure, and they are all a lot smaller than they would be without the magic of Apple software. View the movies here.

[Update] I've simplified (but not beautified) the process of downloading. You will be prompted with a link after you click download, so that way you can right click and save it instead of opening the file in the browser. Also, I've added a file size to each download so you get an idea of how much free time I have... oh and how long it'll take you to download.

I ordered some things from Outpost last night (that's another story, my love affair with Outpost.com) which came today (see why I love them?) I got a new digital camera. It's neat, it records videos and has zoom unlike my other one which isn't very powerful at all.

The other thing I got was 1 GB of memory for my laptop. A huge upgrade from 512, it's the computer that does the most work for me. I thought it would be a nightmare replacing RAM in such a compact unit as a laptop. But, I found 2 manuals on hp.com, one for the lower memory module and one for the upper memory module, which I had to flip off the keyboard and get into the guts of it. I'd always be maxed out on memory after about an hour of using it... unacceptable. I work on that thing for about 5 hours at a time. I'm so used to it I could do everything on there blindfolded with my arms tied behind the chair. This is the more impacting purchase of the day. The camera is cool and everything, but just because I got a new camera doesn't mean I'll be using it more than the old one, except during the honeymoon period.

Also, we got a new couch for our living room, I'll take pictures of it with the new camera and put them up. I'll probably install the Canon software that came with the camera, until I get sick of it.

I just added comments to pictures, so now you can comment and tell me what a good looking guy I am. Or the opposite. But I will warn you: if you call me a good looking girl, I'll probably get upset. The photo albums now take a nanosecond longer to load. I have to figure out how to do it without making trips to the database. I can do it but it won't be backwards compatibleable, if you can read that word. I made it up kinda. The earlier stuff I made don't have what I call a "Count Property". The news has a comments "List Property" but no comments "Count Property". I can just add them in there, but it's a few hour project to take out all of the extra code that I wrote very foolishly when I could have just done it the way I'm thinking and make it really fast. Damn I am smart and yet stupid.

Other updates include some bug fixes, a new control to format text, some new bugs, and the content management system is up here but I won't be creating content with it until the menuable objects thing is done. I'd rather do a little work now rather than a lot of work for the remainder of the life of this site :) Someone once said that the lazy programmer is the smart programmer. I'm not so lazy but I make up for it with my smartness :-D I'm kidding... but I think the smart programmer tends to think of ways they can be lazy, so I think the other way around. Anyway, I could make a whole news section on the philosophy of the non-industrious ultra brain-powered software developer, but I won't.

I'm not really superstitious about this, I'd just thought I'd mention it in case you are reading this and you forget until now, and then you become all nervous and won't travel or do anything but sit at home and play with your rabbit's foot. :) It'll all be over shortly, hang in there.

But it reminds me of one of my favorite Cracker songs, "Lonesome Johnny Blues".

"Lucky number 7 passed me by. Lucky number 7 called my name and passed on by. Well he came back don't you know, with his brother 6 in tow, and that's how number 13 wound up at my side."

Quality stuff.

This server now has 1000 GB monthly transfer. I have an 80 GB hard drive on here, if I could fill it up, I could transfer the entire contents of the hard drive twelve and a half times. Or, more practically, if I have 100 MB of stuff on this website, i could have 10,000 people a month view everything I have on here. Even more practically, I'll never use 1000 GB a month. That total, however, includes my FTP and SSH usage, although SSH is really no percentage of 1000 GB. Using SSH, I may transfer 1 GB every 10 years :) The cap used to be 100 GB and I never used it, but the websites I have on here before this one hardly got used, although this one isn't used much either, but I visit it everyday :) Anyway, feel free to hoard my music.

I've decided to show 3 months on the calendar for my own personal reasons. I know there will never be anything new posted to the site in the future lest I unveil what I've been working on in my basement for 10 years, that which has previously been called science fiction, but still, the clock on the server still says May 2005. It's so simple to change it. The only thing that I have to fix about this site is that I can't reload it in Tomcat. It'll re-compile JSPs if I upload them, but I need to restart the application, and something in the server.xml file in Tomcat is preventing me from easily doing that (right now I have to go to the Linux shell and restart Tomcat, shutting down every site on this server...)

Next thing I'm working on is a simple content management system so I can easily add pages with stuff on them, and after that the forum, and then finally a poll system. The casba will be rocked.

Woohoo! I have a calendar now. The site is nowhere near done. Keep checking back for updates. I'm going to add a forum and some kind of cheap content management system. Those two are going to be added just because I'm using this same site for different sites. I just change the images and stylesheets, remove systems or leave them the same, and voila, you won't recognize it as being the same exact software but it will be :)

I have a cool idea for the calendar. Aside from people being able to add dates to it, the calendar is now a project. It will include a web component and a few pages. Basically, now I'll be able to show, for instance, a small "newspaper" icon on a day that there was news. Of course, I like making these things easily configurable, I'll also be able to have an icon that signifies, say, a new Photo Album added, and on the date the photo album was added, that icon will show up on the calendar. It's going to be neat. Other "calenderable" things I have are downloads and links. This thing is going to be cool.

So also, the calendar control will be clickable and you'll go to a page, when you click a specific date, and it'll show you all the neat things that happened on this site on that date.

I have a few more things I want to add before I call this site finished for now.

Forum
If I want to use this site to replace many other sites I've written, the first thing I need to write is a forum. It's going to be complete garbage compared to what's out there, but you know what? I don't care. The other sites up, the Connell site and the Bygrave site both have forums with messages in them, so I can't just ditch them. So, at least I have to make them for those sites.

Calendar
Same thing as above, those sites have calendars with dates in them, Kate would be mighty PO'd if I just erased them. She may be in Japan but that doesn't mean I have no reason to fear her :) She will be back and I will hear it, believe me, even if it's 2 years from now! I'm partly kidding, in case your name is Kate Bygrave... :)

Also, I'm going to have to make the page wider so I can fit the calendar on the right side. They'll be up by this weekend hopefully. Other things I want to do is make the news "pageable", sorta like Google Search Results (the clicky numbers at the bottom). Instead of having "Goooooooooogle" it's probably going to say "w00000000000000000t" or something wicked like that. Alright, it's 11pm, time for beddy-bye.

I've just updated my website to a whole new interface, but also to a whole new "back-end" too! You probably can't tell, but the new web page was programmed in 100% pure Java. Using JavaServer Faces as the presentation layer, a custom middle tier and data access tier, and for the persistence tier, I'm now using MySQL. It's worlds beyond what my old website could have even dreamt about becoming :) This website is like my old website's wildest dream. It would be like a man with no legs or arms (my old website) dreaming one day of becoming a professional basketball player (my "6'10'' tall, with a giant vertical leap, speed like a cheetah, and can make a jumpshot from anywhere" new website). That's how good this new website is.