iLife ’05

Had a quick play with iLife ’05
at lunchtime.  Admittedly I’d barely had time to play with iLife
’04, but the new features I’ve noticed so far look handy enough…
iMovie doesn’t complain about trying to import clips that are longer
than 9.5 minutes any more, and GarageBand has a built-in instrument
tuner and notation feature now, amongst many other things.  (It’s
also supposed to support direct import of MIDI files, but as yet it’s
steadfastly refused to consider importing any of mine– at least I
don’t seem to be alone with this problem though..

iLose

Typical… I see anyone who bought a Mac after January 11th gets a 75% discount on an upgrade to iLife ’05. When did I buy mine? January the bleeding 5th.

Just to rub salt into the wound, it didn’t arrive until January
13th, so if I’d walked into PC World and bought another one that day,
that one would have qualified…

Update:
When I filled in the qualification form I just said I’d bought it on
January 13th anyway, and I got a shipment notice yesterday… remains
to be seen how much they’ll debit my Mastercard though….

I’m feeling spammy

Hmm. Since I was given a gmail invite before Christmas, I’ve used it to send precisely one email, to a work colleague. Nonetheless, I checked my account this evening out of curiosity, and I’ve already accumulated 36 items in my Spam folder– still, at least it was all correctly identified I suppose…

Step back in time

Gah… spent half the afternoon today trying to work out why all my
autogen.sh scripts were suddenly and silently not generating configure
scripts any more. Turned out that my Powerbook’s clock had reset to
January 1 1904 when the battery ran out this morning (pmud
doesn’t seem to work on my G4, so I can’t predict when it’s going to
happen). But come on guys, some sort of warning message would
have been nice…

In other news, the Centra on the business park has finally seen the light, and is now selling both Diet and sugar-stoked regular Irn Bru. Now if only its Daily Record deliveries were a bit more reliable…

iBlog

My first post on my new 1.5GHz Powerbook G4. 
I’m liking it a lot; I was a bit concerned that I’d find the fairly low
resolution to be an issue (1280×854 doesn’t exactly maximise the potential of its 128Mb graphics
card– even the 3-year old Inspiron 8100 it’s replacing
managed 1400×1050 with a 32Mb card), but I’m getting used to it pretty quickly.

Am dual-booting OSX with Mandrake 10.1 PPC for now (and even running them simultaneously, thanks to the impressive Mac on Linux),
as I was used to Mandrake 10.1 on my Dell anyway.  The only real bummer
is the well-documented lack of any Airport Extreme drivers for Linux as
yet– I’m sure the guys will get there eventually though.

Twelve Days of Christmas

Back at work again today after an extended holiday break.

Tuesday 21st: Christmas Lunch for the Desktop Group at Sun
Ireland. Normally this would have developed into an all-nighter,
but this time I had to scoot off early to get to a gig– The Thrills were playing at The Point.

Christmas Eve: We consumed the mulled wine that I’d bought in Lidl because
it was easier to buy something than find a security guard to let me out
through the alarmed “I haven’t shoplifted anything honest” gate.

Christmas Day: Breakfast in bed, opened some pressies, coffee,
opened some more pressies, dinner, opened the rest of our
pressies. Remarkably (given that I’ve never really seen it snow
properly in Dublin in the four years I’ve lived here), we had what
would have qualified as a white Christmas in the UK, by dint of three
fairly heavy snow showers. Apparently though, there has to be
half an inch lying at Dublin Airport or something before you can
collect your winnings from the bookies over here– good job I’m not a betting
man.

Boxing Day: Still trying to get used to it being called St.Stephen’s Day here.

Monday: Scooted off to the shops to buy a network adapter for our PS2,
for which I’d specifically been given some dosh by Julie’s parents. Got one for the requisite amount in Game, with a copy of TM:B Online right there in the box– no namby-pamby coupon-sending for me!

Hogmanay: We saw in the New Year at the Portmarnock Hotel,
who were doing a dinner (or masked ball, but that sounded too scary)
and accommodation package. While I’m not sure the price tag was
entirely justified, it wasn’t any more over the odds than any other
(mostly mankier) hotels were charging, the food was
excellent, and it’s always nice to get a night off the washing-up.

New Year’s Day: Drove back home down the coast road, at exactly the same time as a mini-tornado hit land. We had to pull off the road momentarily, but almost as soon as we did it had passed again.

Last night: My first real blast at online gaming, with a few sessions of SSX 3, TOCA 2 and Burnout 3. Have a stunning 100% online win record (2/2) at SSX, but am going to need rather more practice at the others…

Drookit

Went to see ageing Clydeside crooners Wet Wet Wet on Friday night. Rattled out all the old favourites expertly enough (even though Marti needed a crib sheet for some of them), but I think it was probably the first gig where I’ve had to sit down, and it’s just not the same really. This was more than adequately compensated by also being the first gig I’ve been to where you’ve been able to buy a CD of that night’s performance right after the show, though… bye bye bootleggers!