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As I was browsing my Yahoo news page this morning, I came across this article on David Beckham and his new soccer team.
That's not the interesting part though. What caught my eye is that China has a soccer tabloid called "Balls Weekly".
Tonight, Beth and I went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. To be honest, I was a bit put off from the trailers by Johnny Depp's overuse of mascara, but his character works very well in the movie. Clearly the man knows what he's doing. I've long wanted to see a good pirate movie, and this one delivers. Now if there were a good pirate video game, my life would be nearly complete.
We still haven't seen the Hulk or Terminator 3. I'm not sure if we'll get around to seeing the former, but I want to see the latter at some point while it's still in the theaters. Beth wants to see Tomb Raider 2 pretty badly, but I couldn't really stand the first one and have trouble working up any enthusiasm for this one. Marriage is all about sacrifice though, so I'll search for the inner strength to make it happen. I'm still waiting for a good summer comedy to come along. It looks like the best we'll get this year is American Wedding, and I think they've given the best parts of that away in the trailer. Finding Nemo still rates as the movie to beat this year, at least in my book.
On a side note, I've been noticing more and more lately that movies put me to sleep, regardless of whether they're good or bad. This one was no exception - about halfway through I dozed off for perhaps 10 minutes. The heroine was rescued at some point in the middle of the movie and I have no idea how. I'm well on my way to becoming your typical old man.
Beth and I went to Red Lobster for dinner tonight. They still have those tasty bread-cake things, and the food wasn't bad, but the prices sure seem to have gone up considerably. There was also about a 30 minute wait - on a Thursday night around 7:30pm! What's up with that? it'll probably be some time before the seafood lover in me wants to drop anchor at their scurvy shores again. Arr.
I've unveiled my Plan for World Domination on the MacMAME forum earlier today. This one has been a long time in the planning stage, and now I think I've got a handle on all the various aspects, enough so that I'm ready for public feedback. The upshot, for those of you too lazy to click on the link, is that I'm thinking about splitting off the MacMAME front end and turning it into a shareware app. This doesn't mean that MacMAME itself will become shareware, it'll remain free and open-source. In fact, odds are that it'll be updated with more frequency as the money from the front-end should provide plenty of inspiration.
In related news, I spent some time this evening optimizing the OSX performance. i found a way to boost framerates from 5-15% depending on the circumstances. I also started converting MacMAME's internals entirely over to Carbon Events. As these things go, it's been kinda fun.
Within the past week or so, my G4 tower has started to whine. At first, it was off and on but now it's pretty much continuous. I cracked it open today and it appears that it's coming from the CPU fan. Since I leave it on all the time, something is going to have to be done. I predict a trip to Fry's in the near future. :)
Work is really keeping me busy now. There's very little I can talk about publicly, but I just switched projects from "Booty Call" to one that has yet to be assigned a code name. Hopefully I can rise to the challenge. ;) Of course, EverQuest is an ongoing thing, so it also figures prominently on my plate.
MacMAME is turning into a great stress reliever - go figure. I poked at it some late last night and managed to convert all the prefs handling stuff to the new CFPreferences API in OSX. Wow, what a difference! The prefs code, which has been almost untouched since the first Mac release in February 1997, is now easy to read and easy to maintain. CFPreferences, thou dost surely rock.
We went to Rubio's last night for dinner. I think for the first time ever, we saw Vanilla Coke at a fountain dispenser. Rubo's is one of those places that I missed greatly when I was in Austin, so it's good to once again have 2 of them within a 2 mile radius. Bit of trivia - we have 5 Wendy's within a 2 mile radius as well. While they're one of my favorite fast food chains, this has got to be oversaturating the local market.
I've run across a few neat Mac apps recently that have changed my life. The first is Comictastic, a fabulous app that downloads comics straight from their respective home pages and into a Cocoa-wrapped GUI. It's sweet and only costs $15.
The second is Kung-Log, which both Beth and I use to update these blog entries. Very nice and as full-featured as I need. It's donation-ware.
I'm also waffling over Mozilla once again. I had switched to Safari a while back, but every once in a while I run across a web page which doesn't work, yet works in the almighty Mozilla. Today it was the Ars Technica forums. No matter how hard I tried, attempting to log in using Safari results in a big fat nothing. It turns out (after a search on the Ars forums) that you have to right-click on the login link and open it in a new tab or window. Even then, they say, there are minor issues with the forum and Safari. I'm wondering if I shouldn't just save myself some headache and stick with Mozilla until the next Safari release. Mozilla may not be as pretty, but it excels at web browsing and that's really all I ask.
BTW, new MacMAME release today - mainly just bugfixes.
One of my favorite shows, Stargate SG-1 has been renewed for an 8th season. Woo-hoo! For some reason, this show seems to get dogged on by hardcore geeks, although I'm not sure why. I find it to be fairly realistic as these things go (they put on protective eyewear when they open up with heavy weapons fire), lighthearted at times in the same way that the Spock-McCoy dynamic is on Star Trek, and filled with plenty of drama without getting overly weighted down in soap-opera shenanigans and bad acting (my two biggest peeves with Farscape). I also appreciate how the writers frequently don't take shortcuts. By that I mean there are some shows where an episode starts out and you can feel the inevitable conclusion because you know things have to return to normal or have a happy (or at least satisfactory) ending. Not so on Stargate - they'll often visit a planet and things will end badly. Not that I live for that sort of thing, but I appreciate that it's not by-the-numbers script writing. The thing that probably tops it all off for me is that as a viewer you get a very palpable sense that all the actors are having fun and truly enjoy their work and each other's company.
But enough about that.
Work is keeping me busy this particular week. Things are certainly interesting on one project in particular. Hopefully this project will migrate from interesting to mundane soon. :) I also did some slight touch-ups on MacMAME over the weekend, fixing all the bugs that were reported on the last build. I'd like to get the OpenGL plugin whipped into shape soon, but I may go ahead and put out a bugfix release without it.
Beth has been busy putting together her uber-desk that we got on Sunday. It's been a 3 day chore, but she finally finished it earlier this evening, and it looks damn good. I'm totally jealous - it's a great desk at a great price.
The new Auto Trader came out today, and the Accord and the Jag are both listed. In fact, we got our first call on the Accord this evening. The guy wants to come by tomorrow to look at it. I'm not overly optimistic - he sounded kinda flaky - but we have to assume the best. I'd like to think the Jag will sell within our 12-week ad window, but I'm pragmatic enough to realize the odds aren't all that hot. But it's gotta go before we can get an SUV, so something will have to be done. On the plus side, if it takes a while, we may enter into the 2004 model year for the 4Runner, which would not be all that bad.
Looks like I fell off the blog wagon last week. It's time to catch back up.
I finally burped out a new MacMAME release earlier this week, after an aborted attempt on Sunday evening. This build marks the conversion to being OSX-only and Mach-O to boot. I'm pretty excited about that, since it'll be a whole lot easier to adopt some neat OSX-only technologies into it.
Beth has fallen in love with her iBook and has been customizing the living hell out of it. New icons, desktop wallpaper that cycles, crazy UI apps that change toolbar icons, you name it. She also encountered her first kernel panic while streaming music in iTunes off the server drive in my office. D'oh!
Work has been interesting, and as always, keeping me busier than I'd like. It's a good thing I love my job.
The last 3 days have been a blur of laziness. I've done not much more than nothing the entire holiday weekend. It's been quite some time since I've actually slacked off to that degree, and it felt great.
On Friday, Beth and I went to Fry's and picked up an internal 200G hard drive, which after rebate comes to $129. You can't beat that with a stick. I've been so lazy that I haven't installed it yet. When in place, it'll be the new home of mp3s, games, and a few test partitions for crazy OSX builds, replacing my uber-flaky external Maxtor 80GB hard drive. I'll never buy Maxtor again. I haven't lost any data on the drive, but it sticks something fierce. All day with the clunking and the banging and the glavin!
We went over to Paul and Mo's on Friday and had some lettuce wraps, some nice steaks, some funky Czech beer (funky in a bad way) and some of Mo's patented flan. Oh, and we didn't see any fireworks. Not a one. Ron said he "might stop by", which translated from Ron-speak means "wacky things will happen to me and you won't see me tonight."
On Saturday, I mainly futzed around with my MacMAME ROM collection in preparation for the 0.71 release. This mainly involved watching things download while hassling Beth about organizing her photos in iPhoto on her iBook. We capped Saturday off by watching several World's Strongest Man competitions on ESPN and eating many Del Taco tacos.
And Sunday was more of the same. Beth made some brilliant cinnamon pancakes for breakfast. Over the course of the day, I futzed around with MacMAME and got the 0.71 build nearly done, but feature-itis stopped me from finishing. We had dinner at the Big Fat Greek Restaurant on Mill and it was as fantastic as the last time we ate there. I continued to hassle beth about organizing her iPhoto collection.
We also got to the bottom of our sprinkler problems. One of the pipes in the back yard has a small but forceful leak by the back fence, which causes our neighbor's yard to flood. It's not fixed yet, but at least we've found the problem.