Heather got out of surgery this morning without any complications at all. She is trying to get some much needed rest now. I will be in and out while I stay at the hospital with stops at the house to walk the dog or sleep. She should be home by Friday if all goes as planned…
Monthly Archive for June, 2004
That is where I currently find myself. Around 2 or 3 AM, I realized that I would not be able to get to sleep tonight soon. As I am supposed to get up at 4:30 AM, I realized that the whole exercise is fruitless. So, I stay awake. I am about to get in the shower and get ready to go to the hospital. Hopefully I will fall asleep once Heather gets out of surgery.
In the past few waking hours, I have found some cool stuff though…
While looking at the 2004 WWDC Apple Design Award Winners, I found the following hidden freeware software gems…
- Freeverse Software’s Big Bang Chess
- Pixelglow’s port of AT&T’s graphviz
This cool little chess application can play solo, over the network (Rendezvous, iChat, etc.), or via e-mail (and it seems to handle sending the e-mails through Mail.app). Very slick and full of OpenGL goodness 
A very nice looking graphic application that has been ported to take advantage of Mac OS X’s features.
Just an update, Heather will be having surgery tomorrow. We have to be at the hospital tomorrow at 6 AM and the surgery will be at 7:30 AM. It should be over by around 9 or 9:30 AM. I will post again when everything is done, she is doing fine, and I have had a chance to run home to check on Vegas and let her go out to do her business…
I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and prayers for Heather. I am sure everything will be fine, but it will be nice when the doctor comes out to tell me so
Hmmm…previously, I had simply been following the news clips of the Mac OS X Tiger preview. Spotlight didn’t seem all that hot. It is simply searching after-all. Now that I have watched the stream (which I don’t know why it wasn’t available live during the event), Spotlight seems much, much cooler. It actually indexes both full content of files and metadata. Steve showed a search which picked up a file that had no immediate relation to the text searched on, but then it became clear that the text that was searched on was a location label in the PDF map file. It looks quick and really comprehensive.
For switchers, it is kinda cool as windows terms have been built in so searching for wallpaper will point you at the “Desktop Picture” control panel. Searching for “airport”, “wireless”, “wifi”, or “802.11″ and be referred to the network control panel.
This simply seems to be a well thought out evolution of search on the desktop…
UPDATE:
I totally forgot to mention that all of this cool searching can filter by document type and can be preserved as saved query folders. In Mail, you can create saved query mailboxes which seem to function just like Gmail’s filtering (and I was just thinking how much I liked Gmail’s implementation and wishing it was in Mail)
Yesterday, Apple previewed 10.4, Mac OS X Tiger, at the WWDC. Of course all of the fanfare that normally accompanies a Steve-note was present. I had very high hopes for this release about a week ago and then I saw the leaked screenshots on MacRumors a few days ago. There was a lot of discussion as to whether they were real or fake, but I was convinced they were real, but I wasn’t that wowed. Now after I see the full real presentation, I am still not that wowed 
There are some good points though…
Continue reading ‘They’re … uhm … GGGRRREAT!?’
Well, we just home an hour ago from a friends house and I was greeted with a small surprise…
Click on each picture for a more detailed look at the carnage 
Heather had used the phone earlier and accidentally left it sitting on the couch arm. Unfortunately, our dog, Vegas, feels that anything down at all near here level is a play toy and she seems especially fascinated by my shiny little phone.
Luckily, it still seems to work fine. I was already thinking about getting a new phone. I may get either the Treo 600 or the possible new Bluetooth phone that may be coming out according to Sprint PCS Info. Or maybe I should just hold out to dump Sprint due to their horrible phone selection and refusal to get heavily into bluetooth?
I think Spider-Man 2 is my most anticipated movie of the year, somewhat ahead of even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Lord of the Rings was my previously my favorite ongoing movie property, but the Spider-Man series is taking the lead now that LOTR has ended.
I have always loved the Spider-Man mythos. The comic books were exceedingly good and the 1994 animated series that lasted 4 years was exceptional in its own right. I wish MTV had had the sense to keep their Spider-Man animated series that was on last year (I blogged on this back in July 2003).
Back to the subject of the upcoming film, the buzz seems to be almost entirely good. I think this is largely the talent of Sam Raimi and his dedication to the proper feel of the Spider-Man story. I don’t agree with all of his vision, but I do with most of it. Predominantly, I don’t care for the fact that the webs are a biological ability of the altered Peter Parker. I definitely preferred the original story-line that held the webs were a chemical composition created by Parker and shot through web shooters. I can understand why it was changed as running out of web fluid was overused in the past as a plot device. I am not saying that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst aren’t great in their respective roles, because they obviously are. Kirsten Dunst is also one of the hotter leading ladies I could think of for the role of Mary Jane Watson. I am predicting an 80% freshness rating or higher on Rotten Tomatoes.
Unfortunately, I won’t be catching the film on opening night, but I do hope to get to it in the first week, schedule allowing. I believe this movie is just going to rock and rock very hard.
Looks like I now have some invitations to hand out to get an account at Gmail. Please send me an e-mail or comment here if you are interested in trying it out…
I have moved all of my mailing list subscriptions over to Gmail as it really works pretty well and I have been wanting some useful webmail (beats everything else I have tried hands down).
UPDATE:
Invites are all gone now…Will post again when more become available…
I have been playing around with Gmail for a few days as someone was kind enough to send me an invite. I like what I am seeing so far. It is INCREDIBLY fast. I like the concept of labels. There is no facility to filter mail into specific folders, but rather mail can be filtered to include a label and these labels can sort your mail. Basically multiple views of the data in your inbox. The textual ads are pretty much just like what Google normally uses and do not interfere with normal mail usage and I personally like the fact that they are targeted at the subject my e-mail is concerning as that makes them more timely and more likely to be useful. Not sure if I would buy anything by following one of these links, but I would say they have a much better chance than typical web ads…
Well, our flight got in at about 6:30 AM this morning. We went and picked up Vegas from the PetsHotel and now we are all back home. This doesn’t even begin to tell the story of the last 48 hours or so…
Continue reading ‘Back from Sin City…’