If I didn’t have enough reason to avoid Belkin products before, now I am boycotting them.

1. What food do you like that most people hate? I’m not sure…. Anyone who knows me have any suggestions? A Garbage Plate at Nick’s?
2. What food do you hate that most people love? I hate Mayonaisse.
3. What famous person, whom many people may find attractive, is most unappealing to you? J-Lo
4. What famous person, whom many people may find unappealing, do you find attractive? Hmmm…. I dunno… My dad thinks Drew Barrymore is hideous, but I definitely disagree on that one.
5. What popular trend baffles you? Popularization of Japanese Culture in America.

It took me awhile to catch up on the shows that my TiVo recorded for me while I was gone… Yesterday I ripped a few poker shows off the TiVo and recorded them to DVD. Today it is catching up on my Good Eats encoding for the archive. I have been going through each file in the archive and watching them from start to finish, looking for encoding glitches or other problems. I have pretty much perfected my TiVo to Divx method, so some of the shows I encoded back in the day are looking a little rough (audio sync, over compression, etc). I have about 20 more episodes to watch, and have found about 9 that are borked (and the archive is still short one episode, “Pressure”).

I have been playing around with MacOS X 10.3 (“Panther”) for a few days now. I can’t think of any negatives, but here is what I like about it so far:

• Exposé is way more rad that I imagined. I bound my mouse’s thumb button to “Show Me All This Application’s Windows” and it is amazingly handy (especially when dealing with multiple browser windows and the like). My only real complaint is that my pager, Codetek Virtual Desktop doesn’t integrate as tightly with Exposé as I’d like. The real problem is that when you use one of the Exposé functions, like “Show Me All Windows”, it will only show you windows displayed on the current active desktop. Fortunately, it appears that a beta (of CVD) fixing this gripe is on it’s way.
• The new modifications to the Finder are quite nice, especially the new “favorites pane” or whatever they call it that now resides to the left of every window. One of my major problems with the column view of Jaguar has also been fixed. Now it is possible to start typing the first few letters of a filename and have it jump to the proper file. This worked in the other views in Jaguar, but always seemed to be borked in the column view. I still can’t stand the brushed metal view, and it violates Apple’s own UI guidelines, but I guess I am just going to have to grin and bear it. I can ignore appearance for functionality any day.
• Fast User Switching works really well, although it is pretty useless to me until someone needs to share my computer. I set up a user for which is declutterified for her. I had set this up before with the early Panther beta I played with, and it worked well. (I ultimately had to revert to Jaguar because Samba didn’t work properly in the Panther beta)
• XCode, the new development environment seems very sexy, if only for it’s Zerolink stuff… I need to play with this more, so more on this subject later
• Finally combined Disk Copy and Disk Utility, so I don’t have to randomly guess as to which is the proper app for what I need to do.
• An overall speed increase in many of the applications… Things moved pretty fast in Jaguar, but there is a subtle improvement that is nice.. And journalling the FS by default is a nice addition as well.

I am definitely happy with Panther, but I am not entirely certain it is worth \$130. I think Apple needs to revisit it’s release and price schedules and adjust them to be more inline with reality.

Sometimes I wish I could hide from the guys doing the renovations on the house…. They get into storytelling mode sometimes and it gets old quickly if I am trying to get something done.

I hung out with the Fam and then later with Chuck last night… I played some one-on-one no-limit against Chuck and lost, unfortunately, due to one really bad call. I was burying him, and he moved in on what I thought was a last-ditch effort and I called him…. Turns out he had a set.

http://www.ittc.ku.edu/%7ecbosley/pictures/P6270047.JPG

I wasn’t quite done when I pressed “post” on that last entry. When I got back to Boston I went to ’s joint and hung out for awhile until we both departed for the SNFC meeting. We saw Alien and grabbed Bertucci’s afterwards. It was great to get out with those guys and gals, I’ve missed the club since I’ve been back in NJ. Alien was as good as ever, and it was beautifully terrifying on the big screen.

After Bertucci’s, Corinna and I started to make our way back to her apartment, but thanks to a broken down auto on the train tracks, we were delayed for at least 45 minutes, although I wasn’t really keeping track. We got back to her house and went to bed right away… She left for work Monday morning and we said goodbye… This distance shit sucks..

There’s too much I missed while in Ithaca to truly catch up, but here’s a mild attempt. Thursday afternoon and I took a ride down to Manchester, NH to pick up Matt Weaver, who had flown up from CO for the party. We then turned around, backtracking toward Boston and ultimately to Ithaca. This was a long trip, Adam and I left around 3-ish and we didn’t arrive in Ithaca until 11pm. When we arrived at Sean and Kelly’s, we were greeted by a wonderful Indian feast prepared by Kelly, which was delicious. We caught up with each other until 3am or so and we all retired to various parts of the floor for slumber.

Friday was when the party was going down, and when everyone else started to arrive. We went to an A&W restaurant for lunch for fresh rootbeer and lunch. Around 5pm, Matt Girard arrived, and shortly after Rory arrived. Then came Jeremiah and Janis, later still Tourist and Christen arrived… There were some other people at the party, but i didn’t know them personally… We hung out, drank, ate obscene amounts of candy, and made jokes that probably wouldn’t be funny among any other company. After many hours and many drinks, I went to bed (floor) at some point well after midnight.

Saturday we went to breakfast, a playground, and lots of fun hanging out. Sunday everyone had to go their seperate ways, but some day love will find us. . I hitched a ride back with rory, and we got back in Boston some time around 4pm or something.

Pictures of the event are here, but I haven’t bothered to caption all of them yet.

Adam, Matt Weaver, and I are just outside NY on our way to ithaca, and we can see beautiful, beautiful sky.

So tonight was poker night… I’m running low on money so even though it’s too low for our .50/1.00 games, I bought in for \$25. I had some great hands, made some great plays, but also got lucky on some really bad plays (which always seem to happen against rory). I ended the night with \$61.25, so I more than doubled my money, which isn’t bad, eh?