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This christmas marks the first time (in many years) that I’ve come home for the christmas holidays without a desktop. Due to lack of transport, I was limited to no more than my MEC backpack and my camera bag (which I had to bring). After attempting to play TF with sadd3j the first night, at a whopping 6-7fps (the only class I could play was engineer), and trying my brother’s desktop that had no dedicated video card, I decided, it was time to make things happen. And that meant, going to look for a video card. Because the computer is new (and not so old) I couldn’t use JasonC’s old card that Jon had as it was AGP. So I landed on this 2600XT, it’s the card sadd3j is currently using for in his macpro. Coming in at just under $70, it will be my christmas gift to my brother as he’s bored out of his mind without much to do.

(You’ll have to excuse the crappy iphone quality of the photo)

Anyway, first impression of it, it was definitely a bit step up from having no card. Comparing the performance to my imac is a better comparison. Not having the imac with me, I can only review based on memory. The card is smooth, but only when details are set to around medium, video looks noticeably better in Left4Dead than TF2. There were a few instances last night when TF2 frames dropped to 15, and began to slug down. But I’m not sure if that’s the card’s performance as it maybe more attributed to the 1gig ram in the computer. Perhaps I’ll be able to get better performance if I throw in 2 more gigs. We’ll have to see…

So, after a little while of using the roomba, I found a problem.
This model suppose to slow down before hitting something to lessen the damage.
But it does it by infrared, and dark objects absorbs it. Hence all my dark furniture gets bumped full speed.
So here’s my solution, seems to work good.

BREAKING NEWS – Steve Jobs won’t take the stage at the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo in January. Phil Schiller will be delivering the keynote instead – and it will be the last Macworld keynote address delivered by Apple. Apple also announced it will no longer participate in Macworld Conference and Expo after the upcoming conference in January, moving away from a forum it has used to showcase new products.

Tonight is paint, I don’t think its going to be perfect, the lower speaker wire was too close to the baseboard to get a real nice feather. But there’ll be stuff along the wall eventually anyway. I’m also too lazy to keep plastering/sanding it. The dust is driving me crazy, and with no proper vacuum.. it’s a real pain to clean up. I need to call the blinds people for final confirmation on some measuring correctly, then I’ll order shades tonight. Really hoping the living room is done before Christmas.. but who knows when the shades will make it here.

Here’s a (dark) photo of where it stands now, after about 3 coats of plaster and sanding. SO much dust. My house is the new dustbowl.

I also installed the Powerbridge.. and ran into problems flushmounting the speakers, so I ended up sticking a bit of wood about 3mm thick on one edge of the existing speaker mounts, so at least they’ll mount a lot less angled than before (should be almost completely flat).

It’s now 1:11am, I’ve spent the past roughly 6 hours doing:

final sanding
wiping down the walls
taping off all the outlets, trim, ceiling, plasma mount
painting the whole living room (edging, then rolling)
waiting for it to dry
removing all tape
reinstalling outlet covers, speaker mounts
mounting tv and speakers
sweeping, mopping, swiffing and now Roomba is doing the final pass

And here we are (both photos taken with the 35f2 on the 5D (notice the lens distortion in the second):

I’m so tired, but will hook everything up (not the rears.. still contemplating how to convert the wire in a less ghetto fashion) just to sit there and be able to see.. cable-less theatre!

It’s been just about 4 months since I got my iPhone. Really not trying to be Apple-fan-boy-biased, but I can say the experience thus far has been great. It really is the perfect companion, not having data is ok, since there’s WIFI at school and at home so I’m connected most of the time. (side note: shazam, the music tagging application has previously required internet so it sends your recorded tag for analysis immediately, not supports offline in that you can record the clip without internet and it’ll do the song lookup next time you’re connected) So it’s pretty nifty having these apps on the phone, another one being iTalk by Griffin, which can record anything, the quality is surprisingly great straight off the built in mic, no processing and all.

But I digress, the point is that the iPhone has really lived up to all the hype (IMO). With exam studying and what not, I’ve really tried to remove all distractions mainly by not bringing the macbook out. But I do take a break once in a while, sometimes its playing games, other times its the mad texting with sadd3j, but more often than not, the best break is to watch a TV show off the iPhone.

Preface: I have to admit, when I got my new wallet from Sarah, I was hesitant as to whether I’d like it or not. Traditionally, I’ve liked 2-fold wallets more than 3-fold because I don’t like my bills having 2 bends instead of 1. I think my first response when I got it was: “You know I like 2-fold wallets right?”. But the 3-fold wallet was good because it was smaller than my old one, so I just started using it and haven’t switched back since.

So after trying to hold the iPhone while watching a TV show and finding it getting tiring (or when I’m eating) i finally solved it with the perfect iPhone stand: my wallet.

Instructions: 1. Open one flap; 2. Place iPhone in
It’s pretty sweet, theoretically, I’ll always have this stand with me, and the display angle is dead on. haha