General Life Update
The house that my roommates put in an offer for that I mentioned in my christmas post was accepted and they’ve gone all the way through the entire process to where they’re waiting for the closing date. The deadline in the contract is March 16th, so there will be a house by that date assuming all goes well. Just need to wait for the relevant people to get together to actually close. I’ve been spending time packing and such the past couple of weeks so that’s been fun. We’re moving out of this hell-hole of an apartment at the end of the month.

As it turns out, so is everybody else. Our downstairs neighbor moved out over the weekend and the people across the hall are looking to move too. Must be because of our neighbors from hell. Ugh. Anyway, it’ll soon be over with.

School Stuff
We’re in the middle of another school semester and as I think I may have mentioned here, I’m taking General Drawing this time out. It’s going about as well as expected considering I don’t really have any drawing skills to speak of. Half the class is perspective drawing and the other half is still life. The perspective stuff is a lot of fun for me since it’s all creating a composition, measuring and then drawing it out. I can do that sort of thing. Still life is…touch and go. Some weeks are better than others.

In other news, two of my photographs from last semester ended up being shown in the MVCC Faculty Select student art show.

I was hopeful that I could get something in but the deadline had unknowingly passed and the show was coming up. I spoke with my instructor and she managed to sneak these two into the show. If you’re local and want to swing by, it’s in the Information Technology and Theather building on the Utica Campus on the second floor. Tuesday-Friday 1pm to 6pm until April 7th. My roommate has a lot of stuff in there this year as well.

New Toy
And last, but not least, I have a new technological toy to play with! If you’ve seen my facebook status updates at all, you’ll probably know this already, but I’ve purchased a brand new Apple Macbook Pro.

My old laptop was the original Macbook Pro from 2006, bought a week or so after they first came out. It was still performing all right, especially in non game tasks but it was starting to fall apart and the wireless was REALLY spotty (aka, works fine one minute, next needs to be within 3 feet of the router in order to pick up a signal). It was time to put it out to pasture, as good of a laptop as it had been for me over the years. With Apple being rumored to update their laptop lineup relatively soon, I hunkered down and waited.

Finally the day came and I pounced on the store as soon as it came up and came away with an order for a new laptop. The spec bumps in the 15″ MacBook Pros were…incredibly impressive. I came away with a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.2ghz quad core sandy bridge i7, 4GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon 6750m with 1GB of memory, the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive option and the high res (1680×1050) anti-glare display.

It was delivered on Wendsday and all I have to say is, OMG this thing is FAST. I haven’t been able to find anything I do that really taxes it yet and when I boot into windows for games…wow. I’m playing Half Life 2 with everything enabled at over 100+ FPS at 1680×1050. City of Heroes with ultra mode enabled for almost everything works silky smooth. I’m REALLY impressed by the graphics card they put into these as historically apple tends to skimp on graphics.

I’m VERY happy with my purchase. This thing should last me another 5 years. Sure they’re expensive laptops, but if I’m only getting a new one every 4-5 years, it works out pretty well.

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I started doing the upgrade stuff after I got home from work which meant I spent all afternoon installing and then resetting up OS X how I want it. I’m really enjoying Snow Leopard. I’ve only encountered one software incompatibility so far (Curse you logitech!!!) and the rest of my stuff has worked flawlessly. I’m enjoying all the little enhancements over Leopard, like the application specific Expose support if you hold down your mouse on the dock icon. The entire OS is much snappier now and the install, as promised, took up much less room so my hard drive actually has free space now.

CS4 was neat. I’ve never actually owned a copy of Photoshop despite using it for things over the years. I think a lot of folks are in the same boat, honestly… But now it feels weird to have an actual, legit copy of that and all the other adobe apps. I have more design type software than I ever thought I’d have installed on here. I haven’t had a chance to use much of it but I’ve used it enough to know I really like the new interface in CS4. I also like the little photoshop improvements, like if you zoom in far enough it puts up a faint grid of pixels so you know where all the boundaries are. Neat stuff.

The only thing bad about yesterday was I wish I was able to go with my friends to the State Fair

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Well, it all started last night when I realized that…ok, hang on a sec, I need to explain my computing setup here for this to make sense. My main machine is my MacBook Pro, 3 years old. It’s got a 80GB hard drive in it. My music collection is about 25GB large, and my tv shows and podcasts expand that outward to 60GB. Which leaves no room for…well…anything else. So when I switched to using my MBP as my main machine, I got myself an external drive to house all of my media files and such. It’s worked pretty well, up until last night.

Last night I went to sync my iPod and I noticed that as soon as I plugged the drive into the computer, OS X froze. It seemed to do that whenever I plugged the external drive in. I thought something was screwed up in OS X and I’d have to reinstall (and then re-install again on friday when snow leopard arrived). But as it turns out the filesystem on the drive got corrupted somehow.

I managed to get OS X to mount the drive in read only mode so I could get stuff off of it. Which lead me to another problem…where am I going to put this stuff if it won’t fit on my hard drive? I suddenly remembered I have an 80GB iPod hanging around…and that can be used as an external drive too. So right now I’m copying all my music, video and large downloaded files over to my old iPod. It’s painfully slow, but it’s better than nothing.

Next up I’ll reformat the drive and put everything back. And now I’ll heed the warnings about ejecting a drive before unplugging it…

It’s been a rough day all around really. I realized today that I probably won’t be able to go to the state fair like I wanted to. Stupid broken foot. It’s not healing as fast as I would like and it looks like I’ll have to bow out of the trip and let my friends go on their own. Too much walking and I didn’t want to stress it that much unless things got back to normal. My mom said she’d go with me next week (she enjoys the fair a lot) if my foot allows so hopefully that works out. I really wanted to go this year.

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Getting the Wassyart.com redesign done this weekend was tempered a bit by an unplanned fairly major purchase involving my laptop.

My MacBook Pro is roughly 3 years old at this point, and while it's still holding up as far as my computing needs are concerned, the battery was not. Not that I should be surprised since batteries typically last only a year or two before they die and mine was at least 2 years old (I got a battery replacement back when they were doing the recalls). So a couple months ago, I noticed my laptop was starting to shut off randomly after a few minutes of not being plugged in. Not to mention the fact that it was charging really weirdly (when it decided to charge at all). I had been putting off getting a new one since they're so freaking expensive ( $130ish dollars) and I had other things on my mind.

Unfortunately, my MacBook made the decision for me. While I was working on Wassy's website on Friday, I noticed that the bottom of the laptop was feeling a bit funny. So I turned it over to look and sure enough, the battery had started bulging. Sigh. Turning off quickly I can ignore. A battery that starts bulging…not so much.

I made an emergency trip out to the Apple Store in Syracuse that afternoon to grab a new one. On the plus side, I now have at least 3 hours of battery life again which is very nice. Haven't had that in a long time. Of course, my wallet is now $130 and change lighter. It's always something.

Sunday was notable in that I went to spend some time with my family. One of my nephews was having a birthday party and because of my grandmother situation, my aunt invited the entire family to the party so we could all get together. It was quite cool hanging out with the family, as I hadn't seen many of them in quite a while since we didn't do the traditional Christmas Eve party. We left pretty quickly after the kids got the squirt guns out though. There was a lot of splash damage going around after that.

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The iPod Nano 16GB has arrived…and dear lord is it small. I knew it was going to be small, but seeing one and really holding it on your hand are two different things. I'm sorta afraid I'm going to stick a piece of paper over it and totally lose it.

First of all, I have to say I'm really impressed by Apple's refurbished products. The nano is in perfect condition. No scratches on the case or the screen, looks like new, works exactly like it should.

I'm really enjoying the updates to the iPod interface from my 4th gen standard iPod. Things like being able to turn the shuffle mode on and off from within the playlist are awesome. And it sounds like the sound quality is a little bit better than what I had before. Also, really liking the Cover Flow teacher more than I thought I would. Basically it lets you tilt the iPod to the side and it pops up a line of all of your album covers which you scroll through and can pick songs to listen to that way. It works way better on the iPod than it does on iTunes.

Overall, very happy with the purchase. Well, not that I had to make it, but now that I have it, things worked out pretty well. Just need to tweak my playlists a bit so I get the right subset of my 25GB library onto the 15GB of storage it has. I got it close, but it looks like I missed a few things when I was setting it up.

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Just posting a quick update to my iPod story from yesterday. I put in an order for a refurbished 16GB iPod Nano (in black) yesterday morning. It should be arriving tomorrow. And it can't come soon enough as I'm going a little crazy without being able to listen to some music over here.

I keep thinking things like "oh, I should go to the gym…ah crap" or "Man, it's quiet in here, I should put on my headphones and— daaaah!"

Soooooon…

In other news, the tour dates for ProgNation 09 have been announced and there's a show at a nice place in albany. Waiting on the ticket prices and such to finalize plans for that show. But it's such a nice venue (with fairly crappy parking near it, unfortunetly) and close enough where we wouldn't have to stay overnight or something. A definite option anyway. We shall see how things develop

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Yesterday I went out to Syracuse with Wassy so that she could get her misbehaving iPod fixed. I also went out there with the intention of buying a new bathroom scale (something that was a little more accurate than my current scale) and some scissors. The iPod exchange ended up going pretty smoothly, however I couldn't find the scale I wanted anywhere. We gave up after a few hours of wandering around Carousel and went to Olive Garden for a late lunch/dinner.

After that we decided that we would try to find a independent music store because we were both looking for some hard to find CDs, but the GPS lead us to an empty lot. So we gave up on that and went back to her apartment with a pit stop over at my place so I could pick up the hard drive that used to be in my desktop. The plan was for my friend Jason to stick it in his computer so I could get some information off of it that I had been meaning to do since my desktop blew up last year.

Unfortunately, we both forgot that his power supply doesn't have the right cable to power the drive so we went out locally in search of something that would work. We didn't have any luck on that though…but I did pick up a new keyboard because mine was getting difficult. It was starting to become hard to push the tab and the q keys and it seemed to be spreading across the keyboard. So now I've got the new Apple keyboard. The really thin one. I'm really enjoying it. Good feel, very solid construction with the USB ports on the side so I don't have to make a dive for the hub to plug in my headset and such.

After that, we returned to their place and watched Sicko, the documentary by Michael Moore about health care in america. I must say that was fairly depressing. I just hope that with all of the public spotlight that's on the medical care system going into this election, americans will be able to figure this thing out. It's staggering what other countries have as far as universal health care that we haven't figured out yet.

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In the latest installment of what seems to be the ongoing rebellion of all of my computers and electronic equipment, the power adapter for my Macbook Pro has decided to die. Just when I needed the computer over the weekend to work with my partner on our Software Engineering project. So not only was it annoying, it was terribly inconvenient too.

As it turns out, apple charges $80 for a replacement power adapter, so there goes my play money for this week, which  is too bad because Dream Theater just put out a reasonably priced hoody that I would have liked to own. Oh well.

What happened was that a couple of the springs in the plug were lose so the prongs weren't making good contact with the computer. Therefore, it wasn't charging. Sigh. Stupid little springs.

I had to drive out to Syracuse to buy a replacement since that's the closest store that had one to me (about an hour of driving each way). They've convienently blocked off about half of the parking during peak shopping season for construction so finding a spot was horrible. And inside the mall was worse. Ugh. I'm never going shopping there again in December. It's just too crazy for me.

I was able to make it back in one piece though. And my partner and I did some good work in getting the framework of our project together. I'm going to be putting some more work in tomorrow and we'll see how much we can get done.

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I started out yesterday (Sunday) with the intention of doing as little productive as possible. I sorta succeeded except for the afternoon, but it was a good effort regardless.

I spent a lot of time playing Parasite Eve for the playstation on loan from my friends. It's a really nice game, pretty good graphics for such an old game, especially the FMV cutscenes. I had been working on it for a few weeks on and off (due to time constraints and other games catching my attention) and I finally finished it yesterday morning. I'm currently going through the EX Game mode where you get to keep your uber powerful weapons and armor from your last play through. There's more enemies and such this time through, plus another dungeon thingy to explore.

My afternoon was taken up by errands and running around to various electronics stores trying to piece together the best way for me to hook my iPod up to my Rogue's stereo. Still no pictures! Sorry I was going to take some today at lunch but I got sidetracked by some insurance problems that I had to call to get straightened out. My VIN number was listed wrong on my insurance and I needed to get it fixed before the DMV started sending me nasty letters.

After that, I did a little work on my Buddhism paper for world religions in my effort to not have to write the whole thing at the last minute. And then I watched some more Invader Zim which is an awesome animated cartoon thingy that I found through Netflix. So very random, and so very good.

Today I'm going to have practically no free time again because I have to go meet with my partner to work on our Software Engineering homework which is probably going to take up a good portion of the night. Sigh. I can't wait until school is over.

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Two years ago, I went to my first Trans Siberian Orchestra concert and I was blown away by the amazing presentation and light show those guys put together. Unfortunetly, last year, I skipped the show because I didn't want to spend the money on tickets.

I couldn't skip two years in a row though. Yesterday was the fan club pre-sale for this years show. The plan was for my Dad to buy the tickets, since he was paying for them anyway. Not to mention he got us really good seats for two shows in a row. But unfortunately, this wasn't going to happen. The presale website was all messed up yesterday, and he got stuck waiting in line. I decided to take matters into my own hands and try for tickets myself.

The website said to wait patiently while in line, but I took a peak at the line page to see what was going on and figured I had a better chance refreshing the page every few minutes. A couple of cycles through this I scored… I managed to grab 8th row to start with, but it was off to the side and up near the wall, so I tried again. Instantly more tickets showed up. A bit further back, but more centered than the last time. I told my dad and we jumped on those. Last I heard he was still waiting in line…

I can't wait until the end of December now.

I also mentioned the other day that i was worried about the new Apple announcement with the iPod refresh. Thankfully, Steve Jobs didn't release anything that I absolutely wanted to have. There were some nice products and I'll probably end up with a iPod Touch somewhere down the line, but it doesn't store nearly as much as I'd like. I'll look into it if my current iPod dies I suppose.

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