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so i got the logitech bluetooth wireless headphones off ebay. they arrived yesterday, and i am now untethered from my mp3 player. they're pretty nice, although they don't look nearly as cool as they do in the pictures online. reviews on amazon and such also say that the plastic headband sucks and will break, so i'll have to patch it - there's a couple of recommended methods that involve epoxy or superglue. probably do that this weekend before i start using them too heavily.
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been in waterloo for a week now.. i spent most of last week walking between work, home, and school. since it's a ~45 minute walk between any two of these places, i spent at least 2 hours walking each day. i finally got a bus pass this morning from feds, so my poor aching feet get a rest :)
co-op orientation at RIM/slipstream was a blast.. it's nice when orientation involves ~150 students instead of politically correct grownups. some of the orientation stuff was irrelevant to us slipstream co-ops, but fun nonetheless. oh, and we get blackberries. ass-kickingly good.
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oh boy. third post from the same terminal in incheon airport. this place is almost becoming home :)
so my excellent plans have been derailed by the weather (damn you, weather!). i was supposed to take mongolian airlines from mongolia to seoul, then take a connecting korean airlines flight 2 hours later from seoul to los angeles, and then another connecting air canada flight 8 hours later from los angeles to toronto. the 8 hours stop in los angeles was actually nice, since it was in the middle of the day on a sunday, and venice beach is about 5 miles from the airport. i was looking forward to taking a stroll there.
instead, it turns out that mongolian airlines has zero spare aircraft lying around. this causes problems because things like the weather in faraway places can totally screw things over. for instance, the aircraft that i was supposed to be on (from mongolia to seoul) was supposed to (prior to my flight) arrive from beijing. technical difficulties in beijing delayed that flight for about 12 hours, so my flight was then delayed for about 8 hours. if they had had an extra aircraft sitting around, this wouldn't have been a problem at all.
anyway, i had to reschedule the connecting flights, so now i'm stuck in seoul airport for 10 hours in the dead of night, instead of los angeles for 8 hours in the middle of the day, and i reach toronto about 12 hours after originally planned.
i'm sure there's some sort of lesson to be learnt here using aircraft dependency charts and buffers and propagation delay, but i can't be bothered.
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so i went to "g.d.'s mongolian barbequeue" today. it's basically a watered-down version of the mongolian grill that's in waterloo (and possibly other places). for those who don't know, it's a place where you fill your bowl with meats/veggies/sauces and the guys grill it on a big circular grill in front of you. it has absolutely nothing to do with traditional mongolian culture or food in any way whatsoever, the name is just a marketing gimmick. and now, like the fortune cookie (invented in san francisco!) propagated back to china, this restaurant has propagated back to mongolia.
of course, while i was there, i didn't see a single mongolian diner. :)
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that's right, my powerbook may burst into flame at any moment! i've ordered a replacement battery from apple's site (pretty painless process) and it should hit waterloo in 4-6 weeks. the apple site says to not use my battery until then (i.e. run it off AC power instead) but i can't wait that long.. i'll just try and keep a relatively low charge in the battery and cross my fingers.. :)
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time to start nesting universes. i bet that's how ours was created :)
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an interesting theory got slashdotted today.. one of the main arguments in the article (and the one i'm interested in) is that jobs is deliberately not announcing leopard features to prevent the 4th quarter sales from dropping. makes sense to me.. i'm sure jobs is aware of the osborne effect (which ironically turned out to be a myth in that particular case) and doesn't want to kill current sales as consumers decide to wait for leopard.
also, more long term thoughts: it seems like windows and mac are getting closer and closer not just in terms of features, but in terms of public perception, which is more important. i think that in the not-too-distant-future, people are going to wake up and realize that windows isn't their only option in terms of operating systems. the bad news, of course, is that they're going to think mac and windows are their only options, and by that point mac and windows will be so similar that it won't really matter what they think. linux is also slowly moving closer to the same feature set, so eventually we're going to end up with three operating systems that are the average of the windows, mac, and linux.
the problem here, again, is choice. when all the options end up being the same, consumer choice gets limited and everybody suffers. that'll be the point where somebody gets severely dissatisfied with their options, has a revolutionary idea, and presto! a new innovative OS is born. lather, rinse, repeat...
the main problem here (other than the fact that i'm bored because bus schedules aren't optimized for me), is that people and/or corporations are greedy. each of windows, mac, and linux had, in the not-too-distant-past, a distinct group of users. linux had the free-as-in-freedom crowd, mac had the eye-candy people, and windows had the people who just wanted to use their computer (not really, but you get the picture). the linux developers wanted to get everybody else using their platform, apple wanted to get everybody else using their platform, and windows wanted to keep everybody from switching. so they started copying features and techniques and methodologies from the other systems in the hope that they would attract the other groups of users. given that the groups of users are different, it makes sense that they want different things. no one operating system is going to satisfy all of them, and the "average" operating system (i.e. averaged from windows, mac, and linux) is going to satisfy nobody at all.
oh well, such are the lessons we learn, over and over and over.
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so the US seems to have reached new heights of absurdity in their attempts to make airlines more secure. banning all fluids from carry-on luggage is just ridiculous. i think this comment on slashdot says pretty much what i want to say, except better. it's unfortunate that so many flights from canada to non-north-american destinations go through the US.. i am not looking forward to flying through LAX in a couple of days :(
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so, WWDC kicked off today. steve job's keynote address was kind of disappointing.. i was hoping for some sort major bombshell. instead, he just went through a list of ten features coming in leopard next spring. that, and the transition of the powermac to intel. most of the leopard stuff is kind of boring and expected - more features in mail and ichat, virtual desktops, easier widget creation for the dashboard, etc.
the one ray of hope remaining is that jobs said that they're still keeping some of the features under wraps. this, of course, allows me to speculate.. :)
so, parallels has already created pretty nicely-integrated virtualization software for the intel macs that let you run windows. however, this is still not as user-friendly for the average-joe user as it could be. the ideal case would be just being able to run a .exe file straight from OS X without having to explicitly go through a virtual machine. in order to do this, the virtualization software would have to be integrated into the OS, and running in the background (or at least started/stopped transparently on demand). this would be similar to how OS X can run OS 9.1 apps using the "Classic" emulation layer.
the other thing would be to integrate windowing environments. running a windows application should be no different than running a mac application. there's probably half a dozen different ways to do this, ranging from hacking the virtualization to use the underlying mac draw routines, all the way to simply pre-loading the windows virtual install with a mac skin and just drawing the window area instead of the entire windows desktop. it gets messier when dealing with things like the system tray or other windows things that have no mac equivalent. however, i'm pretty sure the engineers at apple can figure out a reasonable way of doing this.
if this is something apple's working on, then... i need to call it something. let's call it "hasta" (inspired from this picture). so, if this is something apple's working on, they will want it to be compatible with vista/glass applications. this means that any changes to the vista APIs will have an effect on hasta, and any vista delay means a hasta delay. combining that with the general difficulty of the task and how long apple has had to work on it, i would guess that apple may or may not have hasta ready in time for leopard's release, which is why jobs didn't say anything about it.
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exams: 4 down, 2 go. the 4 exams so far were marathoned in 4 days (1 each day), so it was pretty tiring. as soon as one exam was over, we'd break for an hour or two and then go back to studying for the next one. for me, at least, the exams got progressively worse. distributed was first, which went pretty well (too much writing, though). after that came SE2, which was decent. third was systems performance analysis, where i had to guess at some of the questions, but i think my guesses were reasonable. last was networks and security, where i had absolutely no idea what some of the questions were asking. i guess my strategy of not going to class doesn't actually work as well as i thought. :( anyway, two more exams left. AI on tuesday, and astrophysics on thursday. they shouldn't be too bad.
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