February 11, 2008 · No Comments

If all goes well, that’s when I’ll finally be done with this degree!

UMUC only does commencement once a year, though, so that wouldn’t be until Spring 2009. Lame!

As of today there’s only 6 months and 6 days left to go! Peep that nifty countdown timer to the left!

 February 9, 2008 · No Comments

Good idea: having fish on Friday.

Bad idea: ordering the fried calamari appetizer. And the fried seafood platter.

I don’t think i want to see another fried thing to eat as long as I live… ohhhhh…

 February 9, 2008 · No Comments

I get my 2007 bonus in two weeks (yeah, we get our bonus for the previous year in the last paycheck in February), and I’ve got my eyes on a new computer; one of those nifty Mac Pros would be awesome for me to do my photo editing, especially since my current computer (a 15″ PowerBook G4) is getting on in computer-years and barely runs Aperture any more. It’s at the low low low end of the system requirements and even then it barely works for photo-editing.

Unfortunately, it seems that the graphics card that I want for the Mac Pro would make the whole order take a week or two for it to actually arrive. I talked with one of the guys at the Apple store today and he said that they usually have a few in stock, but if I wanted it there then I’d be sold the stock machine (complete with stock graphics card) and the additional card would be an add-on that they’d put in for me, so I’d end up with two graphics cards instead of just replacing the original one with the new one. Same with the other bits and pieces like the hard drive. I’d be able to run four monitors instead of just two. That’s crazy, but it’d beat having to wait for my computer to arrive in the mail, especially if it wouldn’t cost much for the graphics card I’d want.

Apple now has a personal shopper program, so I requested one for next payday. I figure that I’ll see how much that paycheck will be, configure a list of the things that I need for my setup and the things that’d be nice to have, and take it in to the store after work to see what they can do. Basically get a one-on-one session where I can give them a list of the things that I want, tell them my budget, and pull a Tim Gunn:

 February 6, 2008 · No Comments

Like any good thing (“Master Ninja I”), there’s always going to be a sequel (“Master Ninja II”). Take my Random MST3k AppleScript from a few days ago, for instance… now there’s Random MST3k v.2!

It’s now been improved so that, instead of making a list of all the movies and then trying to figure out which ones don’t have a label, it now makes a list of the movies from the get-go that aren’t labeled and then picks a random movie from that list. This should help speed up picking a movie at random: imagine having 100 movies, and you’ve already watched 99 — it’d have to keep trying random numbers until it’s picked that one that hasn’t been seen yet! (But if you’ve got only one movie left to watch, why would you even bother with this script? Huh?) Now, any movie it picks will be one that you haven’t yet seen, assuming you’ve been labeling the movies that you have already seen like you’re supposed to.

Yeah, I guess it’s a basic script, but it’s my basic script and I’ve never really coded anything in AppleScript before these, so nyah nyah, I’m proud of it.