Devauld.ca

Aside from attending Glen and Nicole's house warming, and marveling at their castle like house with ramparts and 10 foot ceilings, I passed a gaming milestone on Saturday. After much thumb madness and a few nights cussing at the television, I managed to cross the 2k mark with my gamerscore (If you don't have a live account you check it out here).

Although I prefer to compare the actual achievements that an individual has obtained, than the actual gamerscore, it felt pretty good passing the 2k milestone. My X-Box can tell you all about it, on his blog. The two games that have contributed the most to my score are: Saint's Row and Dead Rising, with the two of them counting for over half of my points. I've pretty much finished with the single player for the Row, but I can see a bit more time with Dead Rising. Although I'm not sure how much I'll be playing either, now that I've got my hands on Gears of War.

Truth be told, I don't have a whole lot of time for either, with Christmas quickly approaching, and all sorts of professional and personal obligations to fulfill. Althought, I'm sure I'll still find an hour here or there to cut up a zombie or chuck a couple grenades.

A quick view at my sidebar will reveal that my frequency for imprinting myself upon the interweb is decreasing. It's been in a steady fall since I switched over to new blog software. It's not intentional, but I do find the fact that all I seem to post for is Photo Friday a bit on the silly side.

I'm standing at the end of a work day, waiting for the weekend to start. Tonight is a viewing of Off the Grid which, as most Warren Miller films do, will get me pumped for the snow season. Saturday is catchup day, and Mike is coming over for a little business, then some X-Box 360. Sunday, a couple buddies and I are heading to the Wood and Tool Show so that I may drool over tools I really don't need, and perhaps purchase a few that I do in fact need.

Hopefully I can make time at the end of it to write all about the happenings so that when I'm old and grey, I can reminisce of a time when I had stuff to do, and a body to do it with.

As I sit here, my Visine drenched eyes trying to keep focused on my LCD monitor, I'm finishing up a night of installation and configuration. Jerry and I have decided to undertake a side project, with what's left of my...

Who am I kidding? I don't have any free time.

Anyways, tonight I needed to get my Mac developer ready. The clean shiny toys that I installed when I first recieved my little dynamo were not enough for the industrial use I would need out of them.

I started off with my favorite code editor, and the required configuration file to make it the way I wanted. I know a lot of the heavyweights in the rails community have been caught using TextMate, but I wasn't about learning a new editor, as well as forking out close to forty euro for a fancy text editor. The installation was as easy as I've grown to expect from my new Apple toy. I grabbed a dmg file from the web, dragged it's contents into the Application folder, and all was done.

Next was getting to the meat of Rails, and I diligently followed these instructions to get it done. It was the first time I compiled anything on my Mac, and from the instructions I don't think the Mac community is as technically experimental as the Linux folks. All the old conforting commands like sudo and source were available right out of the box, and truth be told the most difficult part was waiting for the downloads to complete. Downloading Xcode and MySQL took the longest, Xcode because it's huge, and MySQL because I chose a terrible mirror.

After that adventure, I had to get subversion installed, as well as a snazzy front end for it.

I was just getting ready to get started and I decided to flip to my dashboard to see what time it was, and low and behold, there was only enough time left in the day to write this stuff down and head straight to bed.

In part of my digital lifestyle revolution, I made the switch. I ordered a Mac Mini from the online store about a week ago, and it finally showed up. The box was absolutely massive when I picked it up from FedEx, and when I finally got it home, I opened it up to find the bulk of the box was filled with air, to protect the small box inside. The actual packaging for my new toy was no larger than a grade school lunch box.

The mini is appropriately named. It's hard to believe when you take it out of the box that it's a dual core computer with all the bells and whistles. I plugged 'er in, turned 'er on and right away I was Mac-in.

My initial impressions are very good. Installing applications is as easy as dragging them into a folder called: Applications. If you want to 'uninstall' them, you simply drag them from that folder into the trash. It's as easy as that. It was very nice change from the Windoze Next, Next, Next, OK, Next, Accept, Next, Finish type installations.

I waded out into the internet (which I didn't need to configure, it just worked when I turned the computer on), and started grabbing some programs. Of note was Quicksilver, a program so basted in awsomeness that I don't think I'll survive without it. A context sensitive search of everything on your computer, accessible through a hotkey. It is so nice to use, and so very useful, that I'm having problems figuring out why it isn't on every operating system on the planet.

Next I had to spruce up my Dashboard with some snazzy widgets. Now, with a simple click of a button, I have access to a load of information, and portals to my e-mail and most commonly used websites.

There has been a couple of problems. Out of the box, my Mac won't play all the video formats that my Windows box does, but I'm sure the solution to that is only a google search away. The other large issue was that my mouse defaulted to the one button approach for which Apple is known. It took me longer to figure out what was going on than it took me to fix it, and it gave me a chance to try out the Spotlight functionality that is built into OS X.

I'm very glad I made the switch. I was beginning to get frustrated with Windows, and I noticed that more and more of what most consider to be hard core nerds were moving in the same direction. I found myself doing more and more to my computer, than I was doing with my computer. I find the Apple innovations like the Mighty Mouse scroll thingy to be really nice. Furthermore, their software is really, really easy to use.

I'll keep you updated on my Mac adventures

The remorse that fills me when a great weekend comes to an end is always painful, but hopefully it will give me a standard to which all future weekends can be compared.

Right after work on Friday, I went out to Joey's for eye candy and appetizers. I met with a recently departed co-worker to chat with him about his leaving and his new line of work. As usual I had my business hat on, and may have lined up more peripheral work for myself, which we all know I don't have enought time to complete.

Knowing that I need to spend more time enjoying life and having fun, I decided to make a huge leap and jump back into the console market after over ten years of absense. I went down to BestBuy, and picked myself up an XBox 360.

I took it home and untangled everything and in typical Microsoft fashion the bloody thing had to update itself about four times before I was able to play anything, but boy was it worth it. I picked up Burnout: Revenge and Dead Rising and had myself a whole barrel of fun crashing cars and killing zombies. The Live Arcade is a lot of fun too, playing the old games that I used to plunk away at in the theatre in Houston. I'm glad I made the purchase, and I know I'm going to have a lot of fun. Looking at my calendar, I can tell I won't be playing much for about the next two weeks, but knowing that it's there will make downtime a lot more fun.

I did manage to get away from my new electronic fun a couple time this weekend. On Saturday, Sonja and I went out to watch the Semi Finals for the Alberta Cup in which my team was playing. The game was solid, but in the end we ended up losing to the Rams.

Sunday, I made it out to the Calgary Climbing Center so that I could practice up, and get Sonja knowledgable about Belaying. It was a pile of fun but it didn't even take two hours before my hands and arms were sore from hauling my fat but up the walls.

I came home on Sunday looking forward to a little bit more XBox action, and found that my internet was borked. I called Shaw to inquire, and the man on the other end of the phone told me a troubleshooting technique that reminded me of the stupidity of blowing on Nintendo cartridges. Basically, I have to unplug the modem, unhook it from the cable, and then touch the copper on the wire. I then hook everything back up, plug it back in, and everything is good to go. That is until two minutes elapses and my connection is all messed up again. Shaw realized that there is a problem, but they won't send out a service man until Friday of next week. That's a long time to go without internet, and it makes me damn happy I switched over to a hosted solution for my websites.