Hello Eggo

It’s here, it’s here! My Asus G51JX-A1 is here! It arrived via UPS this morning in a giant box. Inside that box was another plain brown box. Inside that contained the laptop box. Inside that, it’s precious cargo: Eggo. It’s too early to give a review, but the initial impression is very positive! Thing thing’s chewed everything I’ve thrown at it. I installed the Halflife 2 demo and was able to run it at full resolution (1920×1080). It has no problem playing HD trailers from the Apple website either. It looks like this’ll be pretty solid. It’s a quad core, but each core has hyperthreading, so it shows up with a logical 8 cores. With 6GB of ram and a 1GB dedicated graphics card, this should last me a while!

More pictures and articles will follow.

Edit: Oops, the resolution is 1920×1080, full 1080p

I Can Relate

It’s in Hamilton Ontario

Happy New Year!

Goodbye 2009 (which was a good year in my opinion) and high hopes for 2010!

Busy Busy Busy!!

I just stopped by my blog to check up on things. It appears I was a few versions behind so I thought I should probably update it while I was here and avoiding doing my school work. After updating, I felt kinda guilty for not updating the blog more often.
It’s fall, so why not? School is back and super super busy, and I haven’t had ANY time to write a single line of code since I left work in the summer. How bad is that? That’s quite unlike me. This term’s course load is tremendous. I’m taking…

• Embedded Systems
• Electrical Engineering
• Algorithms
• Ethics in the workplace
• Numerical Methods

All of those classes besides the ethics class are extremely demanding and have me working many hours a day just to keep up. All this week has been 12+ hour days, except today when the lack of sleep started to catch up to me.
Just thought I’d give you guys a quick update on what’s going on, and hope to hear from you soon!

Two things: one, awesomeness for Biohazard. Two, I seem to now have editing permissions for my own posts after all

The Awesomeness for Biohazard
Yes, it IS safe for work, would I post THAT type of content here? You gotta give me some credit.

Anyway, you now have VGL -and- this! Woot! (Be sure to show Miyth!)

…Where are my manners? Long time no see, everyone! I’ve been more than a bit busy these days, and am gearing up currently to make yet another excursion to VGL with the ‘Hazard. Frankly, I do worry that he might evaporate in the light of the sun, but that is a risk I am willing to take, given the concert missed if not. I hope to return with many tales of “NO FREAKIN’ WAY!”, “SO AWESOME!”, “ROFLMAO!” and “PWNT!” (The last being me destroying Biohazard in ad-hoc wireless fun on the trip over. If not, at least there was Pwnage on one of us lol). And Bio, bring thy DS! We may have left ours in the car last time, but there is no way we can afford to miss out in this E3 closing ceremony concert.

Well, I am tired. I think sleep sounds like a good plan. Night, everyone!

iPhoto 09 first thought!

Faces is really cool.

Places is neato too.

But you can’t make smart albums with Faces or Places? Why not? Why can’t I have “All Photos with myself AND dad” ?

Oh well. Otherwise it’s wickedsweet.

Windows 7 thoughts

I’ve been playing around with the first beta for Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts on it.

A little background: I’m primarily a Mac user, and I haven’t used Vista much at all. I’ve been running W7 in a VMWare image (because that’s where Windows belongs and lately Windows has been stupid about running on my hardware). That’s that.

Running in a VM with 2GB of memory I have to say it runs brilliantly fast. IE8 is nice enough, though I find the menus incredibly difficult to navigate. Paint has been revamped with the new Ribbon interface (world asks “why?”), which although questionable, it still works pretty well. Paint has become a lot more feature rich lately — finally Microsoft seems to have realized it’s actually a pretty widely-used tool!

Haven’t tried any games on it.

Taskbar: Here’s where things get interesting. I’ll start with the Notification area, which has been revamped greatly. Instead of being clustered with a billion icons, it arranges itself perfectly and lets you configure what shows up and what doesn’t. And it works. It works well. It works like it always should have.

As for the rest of the bar, for starters you can finally re-arrange items in the taskbar (why this took so long is beyond me) but it works great. You items are now arranged by app, represented by a single app icon. This is also where your quick-launch items go. So allegedly it’s a lot like the Dock on Mac OS X. I’d say that’s a fair assumption. It works a bit differently, but they offer mostly the same functionality. The new taskbar will also show you window previews for each app, as you mouse over its icon. A nice touch.

So while I would say it’s borrowed things from the Dock, it’s not in a bad way. It’s all been implemented in a good Windows fashion and it doesn’t feel out of place. Very natural. I think it’s a great step forward in terms of usability. One thing they have to fix is the way running/nonrunning apps are shown. They all appear in the taskbar, with only a tiny, subtle indicator denoting a running app (a little outline, very faint). If they fix this, it will be mostly perfect.

So it’s generally a solid beta. No UAC bullcrap everywhere. It feels pretty refined. Good on them.

I have to say this looks mighty slick

Even though I’m generally not a fan of Windows laptops (especially from Dell), I must admit this is a very pretty one.

It looks like the screen might be pretty glossy, but generally that isn’t a problem for me. Not that I’m really in the market to get a new laptop (and certainly not a PC), but I just thought I’d point it out. Looks nice.

I think they are launching either H1 or H2 of this year (it’s a PC, there had to be something stupid about it).

OMG Bio left his room?

Well, I’m at MacWorld in San Fransisco. Have been for a few days now. I’m just playing around on the interweb so I thought I’d post here.

Right now I’m in an InDesign class about Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool.

Dear every app on every platform ever

STOP TAKING MY GODDAMN FOCUS.

EDIT:

Jumpstarted the conversation for you guys on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7hvip/dear_every_app_on_every_platform_please_stop/