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with my own money, from my very first full-time job, was a Titanium PowerBook. It was insanely beautiful, powerful, and just wow.
For my entire computer-using life until then, I’d been a die-hard Windows user. I was about as anti-Apple as you could get, talked with a faintly mocking openly scornful voice when I spoke of Macs—conveniently forgetting that the first computer I’d ever been really excited to use was the shiny new Apple IIgs in our junior high school computer lab, or even the comparatively ancient IIe that sat next to it. Exciting because they were different.
Fast-forward to about 10 years ago, and Mac OS X had just come out. Having been exposed during my college years to Unix—the first computer science class I took was learning Scheme in a lab full of gorgeous and much-missed NeXT machines—and having had a ridiculous amount of trouble with my custom-built Windows box, I was ripe for a change. But what I was really excited about was trying out a real, user-friendly consumer OS based on Unix*.
So, the TiBook. From the moment I opened that box, I haven’t looked back. Every computer I’ve bought since has been a Mac. For the last ten years, I have spent probably more time with my various Macs and iDevices than I have interacting with humans, or doing anything else. I have worked, played, procrastinated, produced, entertained myself, connected, communicated, laughed, taken a reprieve from fear and grief, escaped, found my way, lived with one of these devices as a constant companion. And Steve Jobs made that all possible.
It’s a little crazy to think that someone you’ve never met can have such a profound impact on your life, but Steve Jobs and the work he did had that impact, for me and millions of others. So thanks, Mr. Jobs.
*To this day, I geek out a little bit every time I use a Unix command-line. Every time I go into Terminal.app and type something as simple as ls, there’s a romance to it that MS-DOS never had.
…the current Bleach filler arc was “nevertheless interesting?” Yeah, totally changed my mind. They had the last episode of that today, and it could not have come soon enough.
And now that it’s so close, of course, I cannot wait for the regular story to come back, which it should next Tuesday. I suppose what this means is that I should take up the manga so that I can be up to the minute on it. Come on, Tuesday!
Yes, and an otaku, too. Just thought I’d get that out of the way first so you don’t have to say it.
I really get a charge out of TV show fan-service where they make references to pop culture or, better yet, other TV shows. It’s one of the reasons I love Psych, or the final Michael J. Fox episode of Spin City where, after he left city hall, his character went to work for a young senator named Alex P. Keaton. Ha!
Imagine how excited I get about stuff like that, and then imagine it going on for 25 solid minutes, as it did in the first half of the Gintama/Sket Dance collaboration that’s airing this week. The casting of these two shows is so incestuous that there was endless fodder for jokes; for example, the voice actor who plays Gintoki in Gintama is the same one who plays Switch in Sket Dance. I was beside myself with delight. So much fun!
He’s somewhat famous in our circle for liking nearly every movie he’s ever seen. Seriously. In the 10-odd years I’ve known him, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s said he didn’t like a movie.
The reason I bring that up is to give you context when I say I like every kind of music: I am about music the way my friend is about movies. I can find something to like in just about every piece of music, and rarely meet a piece I don’t like. Nevertheless, though it’s shorter than most, I too have a musical shitlist.
This song, while a “heartfelt” acknowledgement of her struggle with a myriad of mental and physical issues—and good for her, seriously, for getting past them—is a caricature. It’s overwrought, heavy-handed, and Lovato’s delivery of the word “skyscraper” sets my teeth on edge.
I hate this song. It makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears—kinda dangerous when you’re driving, like I was when I first heard this song. Like I said, kudos to Demi Lovato for coming out the better from a very tough time in her life, but the song still sucks.
So I roll out of bed a few minutes ago, and as is my routine, I sleepily check my news feeds, starting with my tech blogs. 2 seconds later, I’m wide awake.
TextMate 2.0: “There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users.”
I am reminded, forcibly, why I hate to program in PHP. It’s made doubly worse because I’ve spent the last few months steeped in Ruby and Python, which are so much better it’s almost—almost—laughable.
So you may have noticed the new template. What you may not know is that the changes are more than skin-deep: I’ve rewritten the template from the ground up to take advantage of all the latest CSS3/HTML5 bells and whistles, including my new favorite thing, Compass.
The site is now responsive: you should be able to look at it on everything from an iPhone to a desktop and the layout should gracefully change to accommodate the screen size (if you notice any wrinkles, please do let me know).
Finally, the site design makes use of a series of best practices that my colleagues and I have been compiling over the years, which has culminated in an open source project we call our CSS3 Foundation.
never have been—a fan of first-person shooters (at least in part due to motion sickness). So I’m not necessarily up on the latest news in FPS game-dom, but even I’d heard of the anticipation, and disappointment, the release of Duke Nukem Forever generated.
It’s not racy, it’s not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It’s like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive—and you’re the uncle.
I’ve been watching a lot of anime, because for the first time in a while, there is a lot of good stuff coming out:
Both Bleach and Naruto Shippuuden have been great lately, though I confess I can’t wait until this (nevertheless interesting) filler arc completes in Bleach. I want to know what happens next!
Adding to my collection of treasured long-running shounen series is Gintama, which I fortuitously completed the entire backlog of just before it came back on the air after a year-long hiatus. I love this one; it is damn funny despite the preponderance of toilet humor, and serious when it counts. Great, great stuff.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like Sket Dance at first, but it’s actually quite funny. Bonus: the ending theme is by the Pillows!
I am very much enjoying Beelzebub so far; this one has great potential.
I like Deadman Wonderland, though I don’t love it. Though it’s well-made and interesting, it is not as good as Blue Exorcist, which is very promising indeed.
Though my interest in The World God Only Knows is waning a bit recently, it’s still entertaining, and I really enjoy its unrepentant otaku protagonist.
Even among all the excellent anime going on this season, Hanasaku Iroha is the clear standout. I completely love this beautifully produced, gently humorous series. If you’re only going to watch one series this season, this should be it.