Recently in Mobile Devices Category

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, though I didn't see it coming so soon: the day before yesterday, I became the proud owner of a shiny new MacBook Air. That took, what...less than a month after shipping? I really ought to start keeping a log of when I buy stuff, and calculate the mean time between release and acquisition.

I'm using the MBA right this second to type up this post, sitting at the bar at a Starbucks in Chesapeake. This is exactly the sort of thing this machine was created for; it's so light, I could barely tell I was carrying a laptop around in my backpack. It's thin enough that it fits perfectly in the back pocket of my MacBook Pro's case - the one meant for carrying papers, magazines, that sort of thing. It's the sort of machine you carry around when you don't really feel like carrying a laptop around.

The MBA is not without its faults; the 4200 RPM hard drive is not exactly the fastest thing around, and the machine frequently stutters under heavy disk load; tasks such as Spotlight indexing and permission repairs take significantly longer than on my other Macs, and the entire system occasionally hiccups for no apparent reason. The battery on this particular system takes an inordinately long time to charge, another issue that seems to plague some machines and not others.

Those issues aside, the Air is an outstanding machine that could conceivably serve well as either a secondary or primary computer, depending on what you intend to use it for. For myself, it will fit into the 'secondary' role, mainly for web browsing, blogging, and writing projects; that it takes up very little space and thus fits well into a locker is a nice bonus.

Over three months since the last post. A lot can change in three months, as I've learned.

First thing first: I'm no longer in Sacramento. In fact, I'm about a week away from heading across the country to not-so-sunny Norfolk, Virginia, enroute to my next assignment, the USS George Washington, to begin my second carrier tour. The nice thing about going back to sea is that I've already got a fair idea of what's going on, what's good to know, and more specifically, who is good to know. It also gives me an opportunity to start off with a clean slate; I didn't exactly start my first sea tour off on the right foot, and though I did eventually get onto the right track, life would have been much more pleasant had I put forth a bit more effort.

So, in the meantime, I'm cooling my heels (metaphorically speaking) at my folks' place in the hills east of Fresno, enjoying my last week in California by pretty much doing as little as possible (except spend money, which will be touched on in a paragraph or two). I have taken a couple trips up to Kings Canyon National Park, as well as a day trip to Cupertino to visit Apple at 1 Infinite Loop a couple days ago. Selected pictures from these trips are up on my deviantART gallery.

Pictures, I'll add, were taken with my new Canon EOS 30D DSLR camera, which I'm still trying to figure out the controls for. I've got the basics of ISO adjustment down reasonably well, but I haven't even touched on things like shutter speed, aperture settings, etc. I'm too used to the typical point-and-shoot, though the Olympus SP500UZ I previously used had similar user-adjustable settings (which I rarely used). I'll adjust in time, I suppose - after all, practice makes perfect.

The camera was but one of a slew of acquisitions in the past few weeks, which include:

-17-inch MacBook Pro, with high-resolution display, 160GB 7200 RPM hard drive and third-party upgrade to 4GB of RAM

-8GB iPhone (yeah, that was a given)

-Three external hard drives (1TB dual-drive RAID setup, and two 160GB 2.5-inch bus-powered drives)

-Final Cut Studio 2 (which was a #&*$! to install, since I was putting extra content on the new 1TB drive which accidentally got powered down 2/3 of the way through the first attempt)

-FileMaker Pro 8.5 (which, naturally, was superceded by version 9 two whole days later)

-Adobe Lightroom (coupled with Photoshop CS3, this makes processing the 30D's RAW images so much more enjoyable)

In short, I picked up everything I could possibly need to keep myself busy/entertained when I'm stuck on the ship in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, I have a short attention span. What can I say?

I really need to start posting on here more often; I know, I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again in my next post 2-5 months from now. If, for some strange reason, you're wondering what I've been doing lately, better places to look would be my Twitter profile, or my deviantART profile (which has the bonus of including pictures!).

I think that says enough right there.

(Oh, and you can see the real thing right here.)

So, I got my copy of the Kingdom Hearts II soundtrack today.  I like.  While a lot of the tracks are remixes from the first game, most of them sound much better -- though there are exceptions.  Now, all I need is the game...which I finally broke down and ordered from YesAsia today.  I'd better start brushing up on my Japanese...

In other news, I finally picked up and installed a copy of World of Warcraft.  Daaaaaang...I knew I should have resisted the urge.  So much for my free time for the next few months.  (But hey...at least I remembered to post something here, for once!)  So, if any of you playing on Agamaggan spot a hapless, bumbling undead mage wandering around aimlessly...hook a brother up!  :D

On yet another subject (I will find a way to put something from every category in this one post, just you wait!), I've rediscovered the usefulness of my second-generation iPAQ hx4700, after dabbling with another pair of Windows Mobile devices -- the i-mate PDA2K (HTC Blue Angel) and Qtek 9100 (HTC Wizard).  Of those two, the Wizard is my favorite:  a tiny, full-featured Pocket PC Phone Edition running Windows Mobile 5, with built-in Bluetooth, 801.11g, GSM/GPRS/EDGE capability, and a 1.3MP camera to boot.  On the flipside, I just upgraded the PDA2K to WM5 (using an unofficial ROM, since I'm not using the device for anything particularly important), and it seems to be behaving just fine for now, where it had serious stability issues under its native WM2003SE.  I'll see how it performs over the next few weeks or so, and post a follow-up then with my verdict.

Meantime, I'm debating what to do with this year's tax refund...  A large part of me is wanting to splurge on a new 17" iMac Core Duo, whilst the remaining part (commonly known to most as "common sense") strongly advises saving instead of spending, seeing as I've got (yet another) move followed immediately by a cross-country drive to Florida coming in a couple months.  Decisions, decisions...

And...well, that's about it.  I guess I had to run out of stuff to babble about eventually.

Just one more quick reminder for anyone who ended up here (instead of at the article you expected) from an outdated search engine link:  the old Spectator Mode archives can still be found at http://www.specmode.net/blogger.