Gah!
Everything I learned about the solar system is wrong… and apparently, so is everything currently being taught…
A bunch of star geeks today, have decided that Pluto is not a planet.. so, our solar system which has had 9 planets for like…forever… is down to 8 =(
That’s a lot of textbooks/astronomy books/etc. that need to be edited and reprinted now.
Yep, they’re coming.. soon…
I know this..because, since I can’t afford the MacPro system I want, I’m going to be purchasing a iMac, and over the weekend, the lead time for a stock machine has slipped from “less then 24 hours” to “1-2 business days”. And the custom machine I want, went from “3-5 days” to “7-10 days”. That kind of slip normally indicates a hardware revision coming soon.
My guess is Apple will be switching to the Core 2 Duo chips instead of the Core Duo…
Time to warm up the credit cards
Blizzard today released patch version 1.12 for World of Warcraft. You can click on “read more” to see the full patch notes.
I’m going to pick and choose.. first.. my absolute favorite new thing in 1.12:
Added support for controlling iTunes from within World of Warcraft. You can bind a set of keys for play/pause, next track, back track and volume up and down.
Yup..you read that right. Blizzard has incorporated iTunes controls as a Mac only feature with this release. I played around with it briefly on the test server. And it worked pretty good. Since I run in windowed mode most of the time so that I can control iTunes, this will be a nice change. It means I can go back to full screen mode!
This review is also the “rogue” review, so I get to re-spec my rogue for free… of course, my rogue is all of level 17, so, its not a huge deal to me. This part annoys me though:
Temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs) will no longer persist through zoning or logging out due to technical issues. This feature is anticipated to be activated once more with the expansion.
This has been a bug with poisons since the game went live. They actually fixed it last tuesday… and then turned it off again the next day. Seems their hardware can’t handle it, and it made already laggy and slow performance, even slower and laggier…
You’d think that for the $89,700,000 a month that they’re pulling in ($14.95×6 million players), they’d be able to fix the problems with their hardware that have existed since release.
Hopefully, this patch won’t ‘break’ too many of my addons.
We don’t walk up the slide daddy
This pear of wisdom came from Kael. Right after I had attempted to walk up the slide while holding Maryn. And, of course, I slipped about 3/4s of the way up the slide, and came tumbling down to the sound of a laughing toddler, who, between fits of laughter, reminded me that we don’t go UP the slide.
You may, or may not have noticed.. but, I had some issues today with site up time. What started out as a quick upgrade to MT3.31 while the kids were napping.. turned into a 3 hour adventure.
Seems either the download I was getting from Sixapart was corrupted, or, it was getting corrupted every time I tried to transfer it up to the webserver. Everytime I’d try and extract it, I’d get errors about the tar file not being valid tar file. Did a Google for the error I was getting, and found someone who had the same problem, a year or so ago. Tried his solution (which was to decompress the archive file from Sixapart on my machine locally, then tar/gz it and upload it).
For posterity, and in case anyone else runs into the same error, here’s what it was:
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
It worked.. and we’re back! I took advantage of the downtime to change to a new SQL server, that is actually running on the same hardware as the server, so hopefully response time on the dynamic pages will be a little faster.
Drop me a line if something looks funky, or isn’t working the way it should be. I had to make some minor changes to the templates and CSS sheet to include support for tags (not that I plan on using them, but..just in case).
Since I’ve been told I “broke” Maryn with regards eating.. I figured might as well keep feeding her new foods now..so, at Kael’s birthday party we had BBQ..so I gave Maryn her first rib.
Apparently, she likes ribs.. since she tried to help herself to more:
And now that she’s finally getting some teeth (we can just see the little holes where her first teeth will pop through).. she’ll enjoy the ribs even more next time!
We had Kael’s 3rd Birthday party today… most of his friends that we invited cancelled out at the last minute… but, he still had fun!
Most of his loot was in the form of Cars stuff, since he loves that movie and the toys.
He had a blast opening his presents.. and, like any three year old.. after each present, we got “More! More! I want to open more!”
His grandparents bought a bouncehouse to use for his party (and for his party next year, and Maryn’s parties..etc..), which he loved.. had to fight to get him out of there to eat lunch..
His big hit (at least, we’re assuming it was the big hit) was his very own digital camera! Fisher-Price makes these new cameras that are “kid-ready” they look like view-finders, have a thick rubber casing on them, and only shoot in 640×480 resolution.. .which is good.. because now, maybe we won’t have to fight to keep our Canon EOS 20D away from him (although, he does take some really good pictures with it) Once we get him setup with his own copy of iPhoto, I’ll upload some of the pictures he’s taken.
One last birthday party pic:
WWDC ’06 started today, this morning Steve gave the keynote. He introduced the new MacPro a 64-bit, quad core, xeon based, Mac tower…. droooool!
Available today, the “standard” config (there is only one standard config for the Mac Pro, versus 3 standard configs for the PowerMac G5), is this:
2 2.66Ghz Dual Core Xeons
1 GB 667Mhz FB-DIMM
250GB 7200 RPB SATA HD
NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT, 256MB video card
16x Superdrive
Price of the “standard” config? $2499
So… like any good Mac geek.. I went and priced out the configuration I want..
2 2.66Ghz Dual-Core Xeons
2 GB 667Mhz FB-DIMM
500GB 7200RPM SATA HD
ATI Radeon x1900XT (512MB)
16x Superdrive
Bluetooth/Airport Extreme
20″ Cinema Display (Got to have a new monitor, to go with the new computer right?)
The price tag for my shopping spree? $4127.00+tax.
Sigh… anyone got $5000.00 they’re not using and want to donate to me?
Also highlighted at WWDC today, OS X.5 (Leopard) client and server, Xserves using Xeon chips.
More on Leopard’s feature preview later, I’m still watching the webcast… Time Machine looks sweet!
if you needed any proof that personal responsibility has gone right the hell out the window… take a look at this.
Yep… you read that right.. the jackass is suing the government..because he went out in the dark, to pee, and fell off a cliff….
Tucked into his lawsuit (Jerry Mersereau v. United States of America) is this succinct description of his misadventure: “While finding a place to relieve himself, plaintiff walked off the unguarded and unprotected cliff falling approximately 20 to 30 feet to the creek bed below.”
Now Mersereau wants the U.S. government to pay for his injuries and the “mental anguish” his fall has caused. He says the government should have known the cliff posed a danger to campers.
Posed a danger to campers? Umm..how bout the government counter sues, because he should have known his ass can’t see in the dark and he should have brought a flashlight????
idiot…. what’s worse..is he’ll probably win his stupid lawsuit..thus, encouraging more people to do stupid stuff, and then sue someone else..
I’m driving Kael to swim lessons today.. and we go through a couple of road construction areas.. one is where they are repaving a chunk of the road.. no big deal.
The other, has been doing some work on the islands, planting new trees, trimming up bushes, ripping up the grass/rocks/etc.. today.. we go by.. and I see they have replaced the grass/rocks/little bushes they ripped out..with bright, shiny, green… astroturf…
WTF? They couldn’t have just laid sod back down to replace the grass? now we have astro-turf’d islands.. we’ll get bright green grass year round… sigh…