you probably got here by mistake.
11 August 2004
Huzzah! Finally, after searching and searching I found it. If I tune my crappy ass FM transmitter for my iPod to 88.3 I can get from home to work (and back!) in relatively static free bliss. I don’t know if it’s the crappy transmitter I have or the fact that Madison has so many damn radio stations, but it is a pain in the ass.
09 August 2004
I had fun with Apple products this weekend. A few weeks ago my little brother ordered a new iPod from Apple. I have been wanting to get Sarah a green iPod Mini for a while so I asked my mother to order one for me. This way my parents could hold onto it for me until Sarah’s birthday and I wouldn’t need to come up with a really good lie to explain the missing $250 from the checking account. I could then pay my parents back after Sarah’s birthday. Well, I was able to get a Mini this past Friday so I had my mother cancel her order. Of course I had to give it to her right away which is fine by me. I was expecting her to give me a bit more flak for spending the money but she was just damn happy to get the mini. I also had a couple older Apple Airport Base Stations that had blown capacitors. I was actually able to repair 2 of them this weekend. Unfortunately, after running for about 48 hours the one I had been using stopped responding to wireless. So it’s back to my crappy Dell access point for the time being. I think I may need to drill some ventilation holes or something.
03 July 2004
The Apple WWDC is now over. There were some very excellent sessions and some that were not so great. The Quicktime in the Enterprise session was great. Dave Schroeder from UW DoIT showed the Digital Academic Television Network (DATN). People were very impressed. Of course some of the sessions were not so great. I went to a session titled ?¢‚Ǩ?ìBuilding Your Web Site on OS X”. I was expecting a session talking about setting up things like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. for a production web site. What I got was a very basic demo of getting those things running on your desktop machine so you can test your web site. Pretty disappointing. There of course was hella information on OS X 10.4, code named ?¢‚Ǩ?ìTiger”. It looks really good. The big features they showed off that I think were the best were: Spotlight: file system searching. Find anything iChat AV: Video chat with up to 3 people, audio chat with 10 Safari: RSS newsfeed reader built in. You have to see it to appreciate it I think. Automator: Setup taks for automating various tasks. Very, very cool looking. I’m planning on writing a bit on the server version when I get back home. It has some other great sounding updates and new features. For now it’s time to pack up and get ready to head home.
03 July 2004
Sarah and I have been in San Francisco for a week now. I’ve had the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to keep me busy. Sarah spent a good portion of her free time doing some site seeing, s you can see from some of these pictures. We’ve had a great time, but we are really excited to get home to the kids. They had a great week with Grandma Anderson so I hope they’ll be happy to see us. We got them some pretty decent souvenirs so hopefully that will help. 🙂
29 June 2004
At the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference today I went to a session on the new h.264 standard for video. Very nice. This new codec is a huge step ahead of the current crop. The presenters went through the typical techno stuff that only the digital media people understood, but the real impressive stuff was when they demoed some movie trailers. h.263 was producing better quality at half the bit rate of mpeg-2. Also, when you do scale things low enough that you lose quality, instead of getting blocky video the video just becomes softer. You lose sharpness but it is so much nicer than the blocky video you get with other codecs. Very impressive stuff.
16 May 2004
I’m sitting in my backyard right now setting up my itinerary for the WWDC while my kids play in their new sandbox. 802.11 wifi is damn cool.