Midnight Cheese

This is exactly the kind of review I’ve been hoping to read regarding the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, Show Your Bones, which is due to be released today. I can’t wait for my copy to show up in the mail! That band is something else…

Update: Finally got the album. Btw, if you’re looking to purchase new releases through Amazon, don’t. Titles show up waay past the release date. Anyway, the album is good. It’s very different, but good. It’s like they got expensive equipment and a studio, and actually sat down and thought about what they were doing. So it loses that raw edge that the first album had, but the music is still very very well done.

Spent St. Patrick’s Day in K-town with Ernie and the UTK Painting folks. Ernie beat me to the post both on the blog and flickr, but I’m posting my photos anyway. Ernie put up a few photos that I left out, so check his stream out, as well.

Saturday was a fantastic day for making that I-40 drive between Knoxville and Nashville. And an even better evening for having dinner downtown with Merredith.

I helped my brother move into his new place on Sunday, and with that, learned just how crazy housing prices have gotten, even in little Smyrna, Tennessee.

My left shift button has fallen off my MacBook. It didn’t break off, jut kind of came undone. I keep snapping it back on, but my finger continues to slide it off every other time I use the shift key. Tomorrow I may finally head over to the Apple store and see what’s involved in getting it fixed.

Just a quick round-up of small things.

Trying to get wine/Darwine running on the MacBook has been problematic. I’ve gotten wine to compile and Darwine will launch installers for certain applications, but thread issues have kept me from actually running anything. Others sem to have had success, however.

The backend functionality for a widget idea is shaping up. Lots of good PHP action. I need to redesign the front-end and hopefully I can post something for testing purposes soon.

I had to breakdown and see how well the MacBook graphics card performed, so I installed World of Warcraft. Needless to say, it’s smooth as butter.

Merredith and cooked up some spaghetti this evening that was fantastic. Excellent garlic bread as well.

The UTK E-Torch provided links to the Glocker construction webcams. The final product looks nice. The addition that stretches out in front of the stairs that lead to the Spam Building is interesting as well.

The time has come to part ways with the old PowerBook. My very first laptop, the second computer I ever bought with my own money, and probably the computer I’ve gotten the most use out of. (Although, the G3 Tower I used in college ranks right up there. It’s a tank of a machine.)

As much as I threw this thing around, and carried along in such a sad excuse for a laptop bag, it’s amazing it lasted as long as it did. Nearly four years. That laptop traveled with me to Bangor, DC, Orlando, Miami, many trips to Knoxville, and plenty of places in between. Several versions of midnightcheese.com and plenty of freelance projects were drafted up on that machine. Not to mention the tens of thousands of emails and memories that passed through along the way as well.

So good-bye old friend. You’re falling apart, and only half functional, but I hope you can be put to good use somewhere.

Merredith and I took a trip to Atlanta this weekend to check out the IKEA store and visit with Jeff. IKEA is one of those companies that pays attention to detail in everything they do. Walking through that store was an amazing experience. From the food(Sweedish Meatballs) to the hand dryers in the restroom, they think of everything. The parking lot contained a Family Parking area with extra large spaces that allow families and their accessories(strollers) to get out of the car without worrying about bumping into the car parked next to them.

Everything in the store is self-serve. You walk through the showroom first, paying attention to the tags on each piece of furniture which tell where each item is located in the warehouse. Customers pull the items from the warehouse themselves, pay, and then load it all up into the car. There is almost no staff visible as you walk through the store, yet everything is set up so well, there’s really no need for any assistance.

The level of detail that IKEA pays to their stores is equal with the detail that companies like Volkswagen and Apple pay to their products. I just wish IKEA could portray this through their website! You just can’t get any perspective from their website.

As a result of spending just over a day in Atlanta, I really started to realize how small Nashville is and how much they really lack in city planning. Atlanta has amazing amounts of new development happening, especially in the area located near IKEA. Just moving from one end of that city to another, I had forgotten how nice it is to have sidewalks, curbs, landscaping… and to have this consistent through out the city. It really puts Nashville to shame.

But all in all it was a good weekend. Had lots of fun with Merredith and got to hang with Jeff a bit as well.

After using the MacBook for several days now, I thought I would mention just a few misc. odds and ends.

It sounds like the left fan spins all the time. Even when running on battery. This is likely the fan that covers the CPU rather than the GPU, I’m guessing. I’m not getting the high-pitched noises that others have reported. I did have that noise issue with my old PowerBook G4, though. When running on battery, neither core seems to go above 20% usage.

I’m not seeing the band of white at the bottom of the LCD either. But as I mentioned in the last post, the backlight is definitely different on this machine than on their previous laptops. It’s almost like there’s some type of reflective panel back there, because as you move your head or tilt the screen, the brightness kind of rolls along with the tilt. So I think that brightness increase at the base has to do with the angle you look at the screen.

Last night I finally got a little time to sit down with the laptop plugged in and put the machine to task. I ran Google Earth under Rosetta while installing World of Warcraft. Both processes required Rosetta. The machine really began to heat up when that processor was put to use. It’s definitely hotter than my old PowerBook G4 at peak performance. But even with the heat the machine ran smoothly. No hang-ups or pauses. One thing that really surprised me was the ability to run Google Earth under Rosetta with almost zero lag at all. Very impressive.

Battery life is averaging about what was reported in the Ars Technica article. Just over 3 hours.

I would say my only real complaint with this machine compared to the old G4 is the width of the casing around the LCD screen. It’s noticeably wider, mostly due to the iSight being built-in(and why 60 pixels were shaved off the LCD from previous PowerBooks.) But this is probably the only noticeable instance that the machine has recessed in design innovation.