This flickr photoset is pretty spiffy. Each is a real desktop with no photoshop’n trickery what-so-ever! Now if I tried this… hm, no, I don’t wanna look at the corner of two, plain, white, boring walls.
Chris Pirillo seems to have had the same idea too.
And what’s this? Even more?
Popularity: 8% [?]
Tagged:My first 3D accelerator card was a nVidia Riva 128. This was when 3dfx p’0wned 3D gaming and my friends scoffed at me. Soon after nVidia was #1 because my friends (along with just about everyone else) bought nVidia-based cards. Two years ago I bought a ATI 9700 Pro. Now, while it’s not as obvious, ATI is indeed on top. Last year I bought a Mac. Hmmm. I could go on with many, many more examples but it’s not like this is scientific proof of anything.
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OSX. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?
–Link
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Tagged:As of ~2pm this afternoon I’m back in glasses.
I got my first pair in the 5th grade. My mother picked them out for me– just like my hairstyle (or lack of), my clothes, my everything. I only wore them when I absolutely had to– to read the chalkboard –and never more than that. I had braces then as well so yeah, double giant huge whammy on the self esteem. During the summer following 6th grade I was off somewhere in the middle of the woods on a long camping trip and gave up on just wearing my glasses only when I had to. I don’t remember why. For the next three years I wore them every day and dealt with it. After the 9th grade the braces came off and soon after, so did my glasses. In one summer I change every superficial thing about me that I didn’t like. Of course, not until my senior year in high school did I realize that I wasn’t an ugly freaky geek. But at least I did finally figure it out, thanks to my wonderful female friends who didn’t give me a choice; thank you Leigh, Amy, Boykin, Heather, Courtney, Tamara and Sarah wherever you are.
Many years later, I’m back in glasses. I didn’t pick out the frames– my wife and the sales lady did, though I guess they did a pretty decent job. Due to the circumstances, I really didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t see well enough to know which frames I’d like. I like ‘em, a little… maybe, as much as I’m ready to like any frames. The contacts are out and I’m hoping to keep it that way. I have better vision with glasses than any contacts can provide and there’s all the health reasons too. If I can handle looking through lenses that will not stay clean, the rain and frames back in my vision. But being back in glasses also brings back a lot of childhood insecurities and discomfort. Am I “grown up” enough to push that away? Maybe, I guess we’ll see.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Tagged:I noticed an advertisement in a video game magazine for a free trial of EverQuest 2 this evening and decided to give it a whirl. Downloading the installer was quick enough, since it’s only 18 MB or so, but the installation took a very long time– almost 1 hour. After the game was installed and I had an account created it was time for character creation. Compared to World of Warcraft I really like the many different options of races. Not that there are any new races that weren’t found in EQ1 with all of the expansions, but still there’s a good many to choose from. Character creation also offers many, many different hair styles, facial feature options and choice of height. Overall, I guess with more options players run into less clones of themselves, but to be honest, I’ve never had issues with that in World of Warcraft.
I like all of the voice acting. Though, after a while, it might get a little annoying. It wasn’t that the acting was bad, it really was quite decent, but so much of it… eh, I just feel it could get old. It’s not something I need to enjoy a MMORPG. The talk bubbles, however, were annoying. I’m sure these can be disabled, but there are so many options in EQ2 that I couldn’t find what I was looking for. The graphics options have the same problems– simply too many. EQ2 looks good, I guess, and I’m sure many options have to be disabled on lower end computers, but all of those options just get in the way. My wife’s system may not be the best around these days, but I’m betting I could have enabled more options and had prettier graphics if I’d only know what to turn on and what to leave alone.
Running around on the newbie island, after playing EQ1 for years, still had me confused. Say what you will about World of Warcraft’s quest system but it works and it works very well. I killed mobs. Lots of them. And I think I had a few quests. But the game didn’t get all of that across to me very well. The font is horrid. The graphics are “real”, yet also “cold”. I may go back in to try the demo some more, since it’s playable up to level 6 (I stumbled my way to level 4 this evening), but then again, I may not.
Trying out the demo did kill my curiousity. I wont be wondering what I’m missing, or not missing in this case, any more.
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