Saturday, June 25, 2005

iTunes moment - Old Man

Treat Yo Mama and Old Man from the album "Sunrise Over Sea" by John Butler Trio


Awesome -- Slammin' -- Swamp Rock

Enjoy your last...
Last taste of freedom

A semi-round at the Plateau

Thousands of adoring fans of Duffergeek have been writing asking me to talk more about my golf rounds. Well, I'm not going to give into that kind of peer pressure. I mean I would be so weak to just go back to talking about this shot or that shot or...

OK, just a little bit...

Paul and I played at the Plateau Club today. SLOWLY. It took us nearly 3 hours to play 9 holes. The interesting thing, though, was that in general, I was hitting the ball extremely well. Totally relaxed. Taking nice and smooth swings at it and in general connecting solidly. I hit GIRs on #11 and #16 which has never happened before (at least not in one round). I even had a par on 16. WTF!?!

The Plateau still had its way with me though. Sticking branches out just enough to knock down an otherwise perfect 6 iron on 14. Sticking a bunker in a stupid place to mess up an otherwise fine tee shot on 15 (fried egg on the uphill ledge -- no less). Adding a rim accelerator to the cup on 11 turning an otherwise dandy par into a 3 putt bogey. Pfeh!

The slow play took it's toll though and I bailed after 9. It is a great feeling when everything just sorta works in a zen kinda way. I certainly won't count on that happening again in any of the upcoming tournaments.

ecto - part II

Apparently it does. SWEET! And at only $17.95 it's a bargain. Time to support software authors!!

ecto

Playing around with blogging tools. ecto is pretty cool. I like being able to publish from anywhere via the website, but I really prefer cool client apps. I hope this one works :)

Friday, June 24, 2005

What the huh??

I'm headed to Las Vegas for a few days pretty soon. I'll be staying at the Wynn Hotel which sounded ideal to me because it has its own golf course. I called last night to get a tee time and the conversation went something like this.


Wynn Guy: Concierge, can I help you?
Duffergeek: I'd like to make a tee time.
Wynn Guy: Will you be staying at the Wynn Hotel?
Duffergeek: Yep!
Wynn Guy: OK. Has anyone told you how much it costs?

Right here I start getting nervous. kind of a strage question to ask at this point...

Duffergeek: Um.. nope.
Wynn Guy: OK. It is $500.00 per round, that includes nearly everything - except balls. It covers your cart, greens fee, and maybe a caddie.

pause

Duffergeek:
What the huh? That's a lot of money for one round of golf.
Wynn Guy: Some people just hang up on my when I tell them that.
Duffergeek: Why is it so expensive?
Wynn Guy: Well, it is one of the best golf courses in the world.
Duffergeek: But I've played at Pebble Beach -- arguably THE best golf course in the world -- and it only costs $350.
Wynn Guy: Um, yeah. I've heard of that one. I don't really know. I could read you some of the stuff from the web site. I.. don't... um... play golf...
Duffergeek: OK. I'm gonna need to ponder that. Thanks. Bye.
Wynn Guy: Bye

That is a crazy amount for one round. Even in Vegas (unless, of course, the caddies are very, very special caddies -- but I didn't ask about that).

Perhaps I'll wait until I get there and win a crapload of money. Then it might not seem so bad.

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Time Machines are Probably Just Dumb.

I realized that we do time travel all the time (and no, I'm not talking about the standard passage of time). Ever sat in a meeting that seemed to drag on forever? That is a form of time travel. To everyone outside of that meeting, it was just an hour, but to you, it was an eternity. You were traveling through time more slowly than those other people. On Monday, I stayed home to play around with writing some code. I started coding around 11:00 am and the next thing I knew, it was 6:00pm. Where did the time go? Clearly, I was in some sort of a time warp. Most other people had 7 hours of meetings and commuting. That time flew by in what seemed like about 2 hours to me. From this, I can determine two things.

1) Conference rooms are time machines that slow down time.
2) Computers can be a time machine that speeds up time around me when I am doing things like writing code or playing World of Warcraft.

But what about more interesting uses of time machines? We had a discussion at lunch today about teleportation. I said that teleportation would be easy if you could just control time. You could stop time, travel somewhere and when you got there you could start time again and it would look to everyone else just like you had teleported to that place. In fact, that is probably how teleportation works. Here's the downside. Like sitting in a conference room for a boring meeting, it feels just as slow as regular travel to the person who is teleporting and since time has stopped, you probably can't use your MP3 player very well since the tempo in music would be totally screwed up so it is a really boring trip. I then extrapolated that people had probably already invented time machines for the purpose of teleportation, but then realized that they were really rather dumb and just decided to not tell anyone about it.


So. There ya go.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Intel Macs?

CNET says that Apple will replace IBM's PowerPC chips in figure Macs with Intel chips. I'm not getting my hopes up. If Macs continue to only support MacOS and they can't boot Windows, then it just means that Mac developers need to recompile their appps for Intel chips. Probably not a big deal for most but for those apps that are oprtimized for PowerPC or AltiVec, it's going to get messy.

Now if they CAN run Windows as well, I know what I'll be buying from now on. Being able to dual boot would really rock. I find it very unlikely, though, that any Intel based PCs not made by Apple would run MacOS X. I don't think they could handle the driver issues.

Hmmm... guess we'll find out Monday.