I live in Siberia

On vast frozen tundra.

Last night it rained. Haboro was transformed into one huge block of ice. The wind picked up, and it is currently gusting at....lemme check....ah yes, 33 miles per hour. I about fell over 3 or 10 times while walking to work today.

Things are kinda crazy this week at the middle school. Ive got my last classes with some of the grades because they are graduating sometime in early march. I will see them in highschool again of course but for all the other teachers, its seems to be a pretty sentimental time. I think they really like this class of 3rd years. I do to for the most part. they are almost all great kids.

I am going to get my armor for kendo sometime this week or next. Once i give my messurements to my sensei she is gonna call the company and be like "i know someone who knows someone" and get me a sweet deal. So thats awesome. I cant wait. More to follow soon.

Oh i just remembered. In Judo, its totally fine (and in fact encouraged) to take off your belt and throw it on the ground. Also then you can stomp on it, use it as a whip, tie it around someones ankle and pull them, use it as a head-band, a jump-rope, or pretty much anything else you can think of. I was absolutely mortified the first time i saw one of these sins transgress. Now, like horribly violent movies, I am desensitized to it. I can watch them (movies, judo students) even though I know its wrong. (albeit funny)

in other news, the iNtel iMac is awesome. i cant believe how fast people are getting their code to universal binaries. its crazy. I keep learning all these things in OSX that it basically impossible to do in winXP. Like being able to instantly find a folder of pictures and make a slideshow without having to use something as buggy as explorer is amazing.

And for once the GUI makes sense.

although i do miss notepad. its such a horrible application that i love it for being ugly, like those pug dogs.

Anyways yeah. OSX. For example, the command to quit a program is "Q+squiggly thing". If you alt+tab the switching bar fades in and you can jump to active prorams. I was like "hmmm can i kill a process from the alt+tab menu?" I figured the most logical way to do it would be to combine alt+tab and "q".

OSX was all like "yeah, we got that."

same thing happens when you press f10. The screen dims for everything except the active window. Real nice for when you are watching a less-than-fullscreen movie and you want the rest of the monitor to be less distracting. so i pressed f10 and then started pressing tab by accident. Ooops. Didnt know I could do that. the OS then flipped through all my open windows as if I was using alt+tab but with a "live view".

then there is the expose feature which i cant get enough of. the zooming windows! If firefox increased my productivity 10-fold with tabed browsing, OSX raises that to the hundrth power. So i tried something. i opened 10 videos in quicktime, and then played them all at the same time. I pressed the "expose all windows button" and they all flew out and played their movies. I didnt know I could watch 10 movies at the same time. Actually i really cant, I get too confused. By its fun to know that I can, if I could.

iTunes is OK. The DRM is annoying. If i want to play songs that someone buys from the iTunes music store, I have to "iAuthorize" my computer to iPlay them. The whole workaround of "burn it to a CD and then rip it back" is annoying. Also iTunes suffers from a lack of plugins. I didnt really mind not being able to play my *.wmv files. WMV is crappy anyways because their metadata is always screwed up, whereas everyone can read mp3 tags. So i coverted them all to mp3, which i was going to do anyways. What bothered me was that in the meantime I had to use mplayer or WMP to listen to the tracks. iTunes has no plugin for wmv. It such a simple thing, I dont get it. Also I still cant find the "jump" feature which was like the only reason I used winamp on winXP. I'm sure its here somewhere but so far I cant figure it out.

While the computer is 100 times better than i could have imagined, my biggest critique of the imac is the lack of compatability in iChat from Mac to PC. It seems like its all over the forums: getting Mac to talk to PC over webcam is at best really difficult. My solution has been to fire up my 7 year old laptop and run eyeball chat so that I can talk to ginna. Its so lame that my pII 300mhz crappy lappy does the job better than my iMac. Like i am sitting there on the floor with my laptop (its now missing 5 keys) looking up at my shiny white machine thinking "why??? WHY??!?!?!?!"

(sigh)

Now, the actually iChat itself is ridonkulis. I did a video chat with rich (mac <--> mac) and it was unbelievable how clear the video was. There was not a single jump and the audio was perfect, even in full screen. whats that like 10,000 miles in meatspace? But try to get that to go to PC. Its not working.

if anyone has any solutions, let me know. until then i will just excuse myself to a dark corner and weep inwardly.

Ok, I have to do some actual work now.

much love
Jesse