We live in a paradoxal time, PC hardware is dirt cheap and linux is of course free but I find myself attracted to Mac OS X. This sucks because PPC hardware is freakin expensive, and something tells me that the fact that apple is opening up retail stores will not drop prices. Maybe they will be right next to the Disney store. Why cant they just sell their stuff at walmart like everyone else.

All I want is a computer that wont complain when I ask it to do everything! It’s not like I’m unreasonable, when I’m working I just need a few essential programs running at all times, and I need to be able to switch between them quickly. Should a modern computer have any problems running the bare necessities like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, WSFTP, Firefox, Visio, and Outlook at the same time? I should think not! But, what do I face every day? Memory problems! That ample 1 gigabyte of RAM my work computer has should be enough to keep it chugging happily along all day, or all week. It would be nice to not have to restart every day, it would also be nice not to play the little process priority game. You know the one, open up the task manager (assuming it will open today), sort by ‘Mem Usage’, and go down the list until you find something you can do without. Oh, look! Firefox is eating up 186MB of my RAM again. How wonderful!

END PROCESS

When I get an email from a user like this…

There are no error messages. The little box goes kind of blank, and so does the actual admin site. Then I cannot get anything to happen.

I can’t help thinking about that lonely Gazzelle in the discovery channel specials on Nile Crocodiles. The Gazzelle is already in the jaws of the massive reptile, it’s struggling, but it can’t get away. It’s back hasn’t been broken yet so instinct is telling it to just keep on kicking in the hope of somehow reaching safety. Yet from the vantage point of a nature videographer with a huge telephoto lense it’s pretty obvious that the Gazelle isn’t going to get away no matter how hard it struggles.

In my opinion the user is the Gazelle, and the “mysterious world of computers” is the crocodile. They are calling for help, I’m up on the other bank of the river, and I know that I can’t tell them anything that will actually save them.

My latest obsession is this game. It’s a lot like Civilization, of which I’ve only played the 3rd installment of that series. But, it’s in space. That makes it much cooler. And there are some features that really set it apart from other turn based strategy games like the Civ’s. If you haven’t played a game like this before you should expect a fairly steep learning curve. I haven’t played these games that often, and it’s quite a different experience from your standard real time strategy game.

Here are the links to a bunch of pictures and video I have uploaded recently.

Next time I will try take more videos of our mountain climbing, the whole ordeal is so intense and exhausting, that taking the camera out regularly is just about the last thing I wanted to do. Also, I had some extra photos on there taking up space, I need to clean off the memory card prior to our next big adventure.