Arragh!!! Global Pro is a piece of crap!  Possibly the WORST piece of management software ever created.  Ok, I feel better now.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're better off.

Hmm, it's been awhile since I updated this thing.

For starters; I recently switched jobs, and will now be down here in Charlotte, NC permanently.  So, I bought a condo.  It's across the street from the Ballantyne Resort (golf and hotel) and down the street from the Ballantyne Country Club.  So, in a nutshell, a very nice area.  If I read the stats right, over 50% of the population in the area is under 30 years of age.  I need to get cooking on you know what ...

Oh, yeah, if I start saying yall on IRC, please kickban me.

I hate computers.  More specifically, I hate computers with cameras that photograph vehicles exceeding the (way too low, imo) speed limit.

I got a letter in the mail showing a photograph of my rental car in Charlotte doing a measly 16 Mph over the speed limit.  I paid up online via credit card, and was done with it pretty quickly.  Yes, this was my first driving vioilation, ever.

Anyway, I've got to admit, it's kinda neat technology.  I'll be less impressed, though, if I find out that the only automation was identifying the *object* exceeding the speed limit ...

I need ideas.  In addition to prolixium.com, I also own prolixium.net and antiderivative.net.  The pages are pretty plain, so I figure I should put some content there.

Any suggestions?

I think it's official, I'm now a 24 addict. I picked up DVDs for the first season last weekend, and am almost halfway through. Not sure how anyone can deal with waiting a week between each hour.

The Mac Mini continues to work fine. There are a couple things I've been annoyed at, though:

1) The Terminal.app doesn't have any of the PgUp, PgDn, Fn keys defined correctly. I had to add them all in manually.

2) iTunes doesn't have a Sort-By-Directory feature. This stinks, because some of my audio files have incorrect tag info, so it can't group them by album. (ie, I can't listen to just the songs from one album automatically)

3) Everything eats up too much CPU. Camino is probably the lighest browser (well, besides Links or telnet) compared to Firefox or Safari. They all eat up tons of CPU just sitting there, though. Also watching a DVD with XinePlayer or iDVD eats up around 32%. That's rediculous, with Linux 2.4 on XFree86, I remember being able to watch DVDs on my laptop (P4M-2GHz, at the time) and only see around 5% CPU used. I'm not going to even start about memory usage.

4) The Unix that comes with OS X is pretty crappy. Maybe I should just criticize Darwin instead.  For example, I have a script that will ping a certain address, and then re-authenticate me to the Hotel's network. Of course, this doesn't work on OS X, because /sbin/ping returns 0 for both success and failure! Gah! Also, top uses too much CPU. Maybe Darwin needs a /proc ... ahem.

5) The software update always requires a reboot. Why? This thing uses a Unix file system (well, I use UFS, at least), it shouldn't have to reboot to update shared filed, or other things. There needs to be a "I don't want to reboot, I'll just suffer the consequences, if any" option. Oh well, I guess I'm a little late in submitting a feature request for Tiger.

6) All the hotkeys kinda suck. They're not consistant. For example, if I have a minimized window for some app, there's no standard way to bring it to the front. Apple-# will work for some apps, like Terminal.app, but it'll try to load a bookmarked page in Safari, and do absolutely nothing in Camino.

Except for those ... the system is pretty neat :) Anyway, please comment, if there's a fix for any of those.

Oh, yeah, we lose an hour this weekend. I hate daylight savings time. Let's all just use GMT.

I love transparent terminals.  Now, these guys went a little too far.

After an interesting (:= fun) week at work, I'm home again this weekend to celebrate Easter with family.  It's been awhile since I've seen my dad's side of the family; it'll be nice seeing everyone this weekend.  I already ate a box of peeps though, I should learn to restrain myself.

Also, NBC sucks.  I get ready to watch The Apprentice, and find out it started at 20:30 EST, instead of 21:00 like usual.  I suppose I'll have to head over to some of these sites later on.

In other news, I already miss my Mac Mini, which is sitting in Charlotte.  I lost connectivity with it, too, which worries me...

I finally got a chance to unpack and try out my new Mac Mini this past Friday.  The packaging was pretty neat, but I suppose I was expecting something cool looking anyway considering this is an Apple product.

My overall impression of the hardware and OSX is good.  However, the Terminal.app lacks some good terminal emulation.  Backspace, PgUp, PgDn, and a few other things do not work as expected.  When ssh'ing to other Linux/FreeBSD hosts, I've had to use ^H for backspace, and some odd hackery to view scrollback in my Irssi screen.  After fiddling with the $TERM settings for a little bit, I ended up trying out GLterm.  The emulation in this terminal emulator is flawless, but it lacks transparency.  Since this is completely OpenGL-based, I guess transparency isn't going to happen any day soon.

As far as a universal DivX, XviD, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc player, for the time being I've been using VLC.  It seems to work fine, but I've noticed some tearing in the video output.  I tried out MPlayer and that seemed to work well, too.

I don't really like iTunes, and I figured I would stay away from it for awhile.  Using XMMS via XDarwin seems to work, but it lacks whatever output plugin it needs to access the Apple-ish sound system.  There's no /dev/dsp in OSX.  I've been sticking to mpg123 (no mpg321 in Fink ... or was it just renamed?) and some shell trickery to generate something that resembles a playlist.

Oh, yeah, Exposé is really neat.  I wish I had multiple workspaces, though.  Guess that's something I'll have to investigate tomorrow after work.  I should start packing, now.  Back to Charlotte tomorrow!