$50 rebate on OS X Tiger
I upgraded to OS X Tiger on Monday night. I promised myself that I'd wait at least a few weeks, but Micro Center had a $50 rebate that I just couldn't pass up.
The installation was very smooth. I opted to do an "Archive and Install" (after an accidental basic upgrade. Grrr!). Since my Powerbook is relatively new and hasn't been modified very much, I didn't run into any problems or lose anything other than PHP and MySql. I'll have to reinstall these at some point, but that's not a big deal.
As for Tiger's new features, Spotlight is amazingly fast, Automator will be really cool (haven't played with that app yet), and Dashboard totally blows me away. There are so many cool widgets available. I'm already addicted to many of them and can't stop playing Snake!
flashbelt conference / WANTED: Yashica T3 film cam
I don't do much Flash work anymore, but a friend told me about the flashbelt conference coming to Minneapolis in June. It looks great. I'm out of touch with who's hot in the world of Flash these days, but judging by some of the speaker's work and personal sites, it looks like these are some of the top people around. I'm especially excited that Loc Dao of CBC Radio 3 will be there.
In camera news, I bought a Canon a95 to keep in my pocket and am now hunting for a used Yashica T3 film camera. Any help finding would be appreciated. I've checked eBay, but there's only one listed and the price seems a bit high.
Paris Hilton Podcasts!
How did I miss The Paris Hilton Podcast last week?
As soon as I discovered it, I wasted no time and listened at work today. Was it the worst? Yes. Was it as bad as I thought it would be? No. I actually found it somewhat entertaining to hear her world from the inside as she podcasted from restaurants, limos, hotels, the red carpet, autograph signings, etc.
The best/worst moment was listening to her talk about how much she loves iPods and how she has "a lot" of them. Does anyone need more than one...maybe two? She then goes on to list her favorite bands. Not good.
Flickr!
Flickr is currently rocking my world. I started a Minneapolis graffiti photo set that I hope to fill up with lots of shots over the summer.
Netflix Cover Art Bug
Last night I was at the video store with my sweet lady. Between the limited selection and couples arguing over whose turn it is to pick out the rental, we were reminded just how great Netflix is.
We ended up renting Kitchen Stories. The other dvd that I wanted to rent was This So-Called Disaster, but I just jotted the title down on an index card to add to my Netflix queue later in the evening. This is where it gets strange.
When I looked it up on Netflix, the top half of the cover art was correct, but the bottom half was for Kitchen Stories. Weird! I've never encountered a bug like that and it seems so bizarre that the combined artwork is made up of the two movies we wanted to watch.
Just in case they fix it, here's the screenshot I took at the time:
Google Homepage
Google Labs has done it again. You can now customize your Google homepage. Sweet!
OS X Lock Screen
I use Windows XP almost all day at work and am used to locking the screen when I go to lunch or am in a meeting. Tonight I wanted to leave my iMac on to finish some compiling (I'm installing Bugzilla, but that's a story for another time.) and realized that I've never wanted to lock the screen on a Mac until now. Surprisingly, I was caught having no idea how to do it.
My first thought was that the screensaver must have some sort of "require password" option to get back to the desktop. No luck. Thankfully, I found a great tip over on Todd's site.
All I had to do was open up the Keychain application, choose "show status in menu bar", and a lock icon appeared up by the clock that allowed me to lock the screen with a single click. Who knew it was that easy?
Cold Remedies
This year I've been plagued with colds. Last weekend I came down with the fourth cold I've had in the past three and a half months. I was furious and knew that it was time to stop eating so much junk food and get healthy again.
I heard Kevin Rose mention Dr. Weil recently on the TWIT podcast, so I checked him out. I'm a little turned off by the Dr. Weil Marketing Machine, with the healing music cd's, branded vitamins, etc., but I looked at what he had to say about a few things and he made a lot of sense. I ended up getting one of his audiobooks on iTunes and am really impressed by his balanced approach to healthy living.
The next morning I went back to Dr. Weil's site and found a Q & A about colds. At this point I had nothing else to lose and wanted to feel better, so I followed his advice. I went to Whole Foods and picked up some ginger tea, decaf green tea, organic vegetables, and a bottle of astragalus capsules.
After two days my cold wasn't just better, it was GONE. I'm not ready to say that this is the cure for the common cold, but I'm almost looking forward to getting another one so I can test the remedy again.
I'm now being a lot more conscious about what I eat and trying to drink more tea. Anyone else have immune boosting advice that they want to share?
