Tim Cosgrove

I bought myself a MacBook the other day. I had been flirting with the idea for some time, but was put off by various reports of defects (the 'mooing', the discolored plastic thing, etc). After doing some research I decided that reports of the defects were blown way out of proportion, and once Apple admitted that the discoloring was actually a manufacturing defect, and thus covered under Apple Care, I no longer was afraid of it, and I went ahead and took the plunge. It is quite a sexy little machine. The screen is very bright, the keyboard feels nice, and it's very responsive. It's not as radical a night and day difference as when I jumped from a 400 mHz G4 to a 1 GHz TiBook, but then again I don't really have enough RAM in this thing to do it justice, and also the Universal Binary apps are still coming, so I expect things can only get better. I ordered a 100GB HD for it, which is already in, and I'm waiting on 2GB of RAM which should arrive tomorrow or the next day, at which point I can really begin loading things onto the machine in earnest and begin using it as a work and music machine. I was really starting to get frustrated with my TiBook; things were sticking too much, bogging down, and I think I'm just starting to run too many apps at once. I'm pretty happy about the upgrade. Plus, I got a free iPod nano out of it, since I got the machine under academic discount and Apple has an iPod rebate offer out to students at the moment.

I feel kind of iffy about Apple the corporation at the moment. Several things seem just Not Nice about the way they do business: the endless lawsuits to protect IP by shutting down Linux hackers; locking the OS onto proprietary hardware; the iTunes DRM crap (which honestly is really only a problem if you actually buy things from the iTMS, which is pretty dumb, but still); the way in which manufacturing defects are denied and ignored; etc etc etc. And yet, I'm not prepared to jump ship just yet. Windows is just a mess, every time I have to deal with it, and I don't want to deal. Linux on the other hand would be nice, both politically and in having a relatively low resource demand; you can run a good Linux system on relatively light hardware. And yet, everyone I know who runs Linux spends a disproportionate amount of their time maintaining their system. This is generally fine for them since most of the people I know who run Linux are geeks who like doing that sort of thing; but, having dealt with it a tiny bit directly and having seen the crazy troubleshooting sessions that people go to just to find out what tiny thing broke their sound/wifi/graphics with the last minor kernel update, I am content to steer clear and use my McMachine. Plus there are a few Mac-only pieces of software that I use, so that kind of seals it.

One experiment I plan to run with this machine is that I plan to try and keep it in as good physical condition as possible, so that I can resell it when better machines come around. This is not my ideal machine; I expect that when the 2nd rev of towers or of the MacBook Pro (hate the new names, grr) comes around I'll grab a new one, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get a decent price for this machine when that happens. I tend to be very rough on my hardware, so we'll see if I can be nice and keep this one relatively ding-free.

This past weekend I spent time up north in Guerneville, which is a town along the Russian River about two hours out from San Francisco. A friend's friend has a house on the river there, so we went and camped on his lawn. It was very slow, exactly what you'd want a weekend in a sleepy river town to be. On Saturday we went and made the rounds of the town itself, checking out the shops and a burger place etc. It's a small town, with a couple of charmingly tacky tourist stores where you can buy fake straw hats decorated with cowrie shells. Then we went kayaking on the river for a few hours, which was lovely. Later on in the evening we subjected ourselves to the Abounding River, and then went to another friend's 50th birthday party, which was charming and low-key.

Sunday was mostly spent moving slowly, getting ready for a large-ish barbecue (about 15 people ended up showing), and eating said barbecue food and chatting. Late in the day we tried kayaking again, this time on different boats, and I ended up flipping over, which was fine.

Today after breakfast we broke camp and drove out to the coast, stopping at a little town for coffee and sandwiches on the way. We ended up on a beach just North of Jenner, which is the town where the Russian River meets the ocean. After exploring the beach for a couple of hours and lying around we made our way back. Traffic was minimal. It was a lovely weekend.

The river was peaceful and pretty.

We saw ducklings with their mom or dad. They were cute.

I am so tired. Why am I posting to the blog? Why, because it's been 2 weeks since last post! This is actually probably still keeps me within the top 10% of frequently posting blogs. Sadly.

OK I go bed now.

....a digital camera might not be bad. It might be time to invest in one again, now that I lost my last one at GDC and am suddenly motivated to take pictures again.

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dog attacks