Confessions of an Undercover Geek

Today I was really excited because I thought I was going to get Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. Well apparently CompUSA doesn’t sell MacOS 10.4 at student prices. So the choice was waiting till tomorrow and paying $70 or getting it today and paying $130. So I obviously decided to wait and get it tomorrow. I am going out tonite so I wouldn’t have that much time to play with it anyhow. But while I was at CompUSA I picked up an Apple iSight digital camera. I am going to use it for video conferencing for work. I took a couple snapshots of my setup with iSight and I will post those later.

I am getting excited about the release of Apple Mac OS 10.4 Tiger which comes out at 6pm tonite. I have been reading a lot of the stories and the hype revolving the release. I have a thing from 6 to 7 pm tonite but will probably pop over to CompUSA once that is all done. I am going to see Hitchhikers Guide tonite at 9 so I don’t know how much time I will have to install Tiger tonite. I will definitely be documenting things in my blog while it happens.

There is a really good section of MacWorld’s Web site dedicated to the release of Tiger.

Recently television networks have been taken a closer look at the their morning and primtime news programs. In USA Today’s life section they have a story about NBC’s the Today Show. They have been winning the ratings game for a long time now but have been slowly slipping to Good Morning America. I was really surpised by what Katie Couric said:

What Today needs is to “get back to its hard-news roots. I think we were slipping into a tabloid mode,” Couric says. “The fellow who shot a nail through his head and didn’t know it? There’s a place for stories like that, because they’re kind of ‘wow.’ But we had too much of that and not enough substance.

When has television news ever been actual news? When I want to get real news, I don’t fiip on the Katie and Matt in the morning. I am going to go to the internet to get news (news.yahoo.com, news.google.com, Drudge Report). Katie says that she wants to get back to the hard news. I would say that the morning and evening network news shows have always been tabloids.

I just think that they don’t get it. People are moving away from TV news to the internet. People get their information differnetly then how they used to.

Yahoo! Search’s New Look
Originally uploaded by thorpus.

I think Yahoo has really been trying to ramp up their competition with Google. Yahoo has been releasing all types of new and really excellent beta services.

This is the new look for Yahoo Search. Could it possibly look like Google? hmmm….

My geekyness has been questioned becuase I have never read the book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently reading the book is some kind of primal right of geek passage. It comes out as a movie in theatres this weekend. My friends and I are going to go see the movie opening night.

I had 6 hrs of classes today. I also spent a good amount of time in the lab working on a database lab write up that is due tomorrow. Several times I listened to the song Mediction by Derek Webb on my iPod.

There are some songs that are truly amazing if you just take time to listen to the lyrics. All too often the music i have on is just background noise and I am not paying attention to what is being sung.

Derek Webb sings about how often we will look to worldly temporary things to find our freedom and comfort in the world. The only place that we can find our freedom is in Jesus. A life keeping your eyes on Jesus isn’t always easy but it will give you the true happiness. Here are some of the lyrics:

but i don’t want medication
just give me liberation
even if it cuts my legs right out from underneath
don’t give me medication
i want the real sensation
even when living feels just like death to me

don’t paint my face
i need to see the scars
so i don’t forget
the back of my tutor’s arm

’cause i just can’t keep it straight
which kills and which one saves

As a web developer, one of the biggest stresses in my life is getting the web sites I develop to look okay in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because Microsoft controls everything, they have been able to get away with being as non-standards compliant as they want to be.

Microsoft is currently working on Internet Explorer 7. I have been reading the blog that is written by the IE Developers.

They are talking about how IE 7 is going to have better support for web standards, specifically CSS and PNG. I think every web developer across the world yeld a collective “Praise the Lord!”

I also think this is a great example of corporations using blogs as a way to communicate with those that use their product.

Dave Matthews Band is by far one of my favorite bands to listen to, especially to see in concert. They have a certain amount of natural, untampered with energy that you don’t see in most bands.

Dave Matthews Band (DMB) recently announced that they are going to start selling their music on Apple iTunes. YAY! This is awesome news. Up until now they had been selling music on their web site and on Napster. Napster was a bust when it came to selling music online and the idea of buying and downloading music off their web site looked daunting.

By using iTunes, DMB’s music will be able to have their music make its way into the iPod’s of the masses (and my iPod) much faster. The only song DMB has on iTunes right now is their latest single American Baby. Hopefully they will start to put live shows on iTunes. That would be awesome.

After a week of long classes studying things such as, data definitioin language in sql, Gibbons v. Ogden, and Hierarchical Task Analysis, I took some time to relax and watch some movies this weekend. If you know me, you know how much I love watching movies. After a long day or week, I find them as an easy way of escaping.

I saw three really good movies this weekend.

I had rented the movies Final Cut and Oceans 12 through Blockbuster Online. Then last nite I watched the movie Phantom of the Opera. My friend Nam works at Blockbuster and they get to check movies out before they get released. Phantom gets released on DVD on Tuesday.

Final Cut was a great movie. It is starring Robin Williams and Jim Cavieziel (The guy who played Jesus in Passion of the Christ). It is another one of Robin Williams’s darker films. Its during a time when people can get implants that record everything that they see. Then when you die, you can have the footage of what you have seen through out your life turned into a kind of highlight reel or a “rememory.” Robin Williams plays one of the footage editors. He does very well in the movie. The movie goes to show why Robin is one of my favorite actors.

Oceans 12 was good. I had seen it in the theatres, twice actually. I slept through a portion of it in the theatre the first time i saw it. Its a good movie. I don’t think the story is as good as the first one. It tries really hard to be a gotcha film but doesn’t quite do as well as it needs to. I think its still worth a rent.

Phantom of the Opera was fantastic. I had heard so much about the musical and I had listened to the soundtrack enough times. I am sure the theatre version is a ton better. Hopefully I will be able to see it performed on stage sometime soon.

Pretty soon I have register for classes for the fall. Here is what I was looking at for a schedule:

• 4002-536-01 Web Client Side Programming
• 4002-455-01 Needs Assessment
• 4004-745-70 Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction
• 0621-501-02 Wines Of The World
• 0505-215-01 Fine Arts: Film Arts