• Saturday, April 30th, 2005
Things have just been crazy recently. So much happening. I haven’t had a lot of spare time and the few free moments I’ve had have just been spent vedging in front of World of Warcraft to let my brain relax.
Right now though, I’m sitting here, expecting my copy of MacOS 10.4 (and iLife 05) to arrive any minute as it apparently shipped yesterday. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting huge changes from 10.4, just some good bug fixes and a few new features and tidy ups. There’s been a lot of hype about the Spotlight and Dashboard features and while I do see them as being potentially very useful, they aren’t features that excite me. Yesterday though I saw John Siracusa of Ars Technica had posted a review and his MacOS reviews are the only ones I really pay any attention to. You can find it here. After reading this, I got very excited about the not so flashy internal changes. More fine grained concurency, massive movement in the direction of advanced metadata, signs that file type handling might actually be done properly one day, more work offloaded to the video card. Basically it just blew me away. I guess I can understand that features like this are not things a general user is interested in but I’m still amazed I didn’t even hear about these features until a day before the release. They’ve even fixed my pet peve of new files not being displayed immediately in the Finder. I’d have paid just to get that fix on it’s own. 
So, yeah, like I said. Waiting for the box to arrive. I installed Quicktime 7 this morning and bought a QT Pro key. I agree that they shouldn’t be charging for that functionality but I wanted the features and it’ll work till Quicktime 8 comes out in a few years so I’m not too bothered about it.
Picked up the new Garbage album “Bleed Like Me” the other day. At first I thought it was very good. Over the last few days my rating of it has increased to “great”. I might go into more detail if I get a chance but I think it’s safe to say if you liked their earlier work, you won’t be disappointed with this one.
P.S. I will post some Wellington pics soon, things have just been too crazy.
• Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
I’m kind of busy right now and as such, don’t have time to make a proper post but I thought I should at least post something here. I had a great time overall. Did lots of cool stuff, went to lots of cool places and met lots of cool people. I didn’t spend a fortune (well I guess that might depend on your perspective) but I did pick up a few little goodies. Mostly CDs, action figures and gashapon. I went to the Armageddon pop culture expo but most of the shopping was done outside in the streets of Wellington. Due to limited space on the bus I ended up posting things back and at this point, only one of the two small boxes has arrived but I expect the other soon. So anyway, I’ll post more later. For now I’ll just show a pic of this cool Minawa-chan figure I picked up. She’s from the second series of Mahoromatic. Figure made by Yamato USA.
Edit: P.S. I will post more soon (with pic goodness)
• Monday, April 11th, 2005
I’ve not updated a lot recently but it’s largely because I’ve not had a lot to write. Over the last few weeks or so, I’ve been sent out on behalf of my company to work somewhere else. I’m now in the top floor of a building about a block away from my previous workplace. I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it all but I feel I’m settling in a bit. I’ve been walking up the stairs the whole time and I think it’s having quite a positive effect on my leg (Which I broke a little over a year ago) since stair climbing is really the ideal exercise to help get the strengh back that’s been lacking.
I went out to Adriana’s Restaurant last night with some friends. It’s a local Hamilton place, at 6 Alma St. It’s an Italian resturant. There were some unexpected delays but overall I thought it was a lovely evening. I’d definitely recommend the place, the food was delicious. 
• Monday, April 04th, 2005
I’ve been thinking for a while this blog is a bit too bland with all the masses of text so I figured I’d throw in some images a bit more often. It’s not like I’m going to run out of web space or bandwidth any time soon. So all going well this should be a regular occurrence. Don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt the page loading times or inflict pain on modem users. Everything big will be linked to.
But anyway, yes, the new Goldenhorse album. It’s great! I don’t think I can go into much more detail like I did on Tori Amos’ recent album although reasons why elude me. I just don’t know what more to say. I realise this is totally useless to anyone reading this and using it to make a purchasing decision since it is nothing but pure opinion with nothing to back it up but I just can’t help it, that’s all I have. Well…I guess I could mention that the musicians play their instruments well, the songs are catchy and Kirsten Morell has an amazing and unique voice. Probably worth mentioning Goldenhorse is a New Zealand band so it may be a very difficult album to find if you don’t live here.
Edit: Another great thing about this album is that it isn’t copy controlled like their last one. I wonder if the recording industry is learning how pointless that is?
While I’m on the topic, I’d like to give a “meh” to Fantastic Plastic Machine’s “Zoo (Too remixes)” and an inconclusive waving of the hand to Daft Punk’s “Human After All”. I’m not saying the latter is bad, it certainly has it’s moments but some of it feels a little bland compared to their past efforts. Needs some more listening though. Oh, and Kana…wow…been listening to “Dobutsu-teki Ningen”. Again I need to listen more but I am impressed with what I’ve heard so far.
