"All Work and No Play" Doesn't Exist in My Vocabulary

First a bit about school, then a few other things.

Visual Basic is an... interesting programming language, to say the least. It was obviously designed to be, um, basic, and visual. When someone says it'll take them 5 minutes to throw together a program in Visual Basic, they're not kidding. This shit is easy.

Of course, having programmed before, a lot of it is just learning VB's way of doing things. There's no need to re-learn what arrays are, or how classes work. Just VB's way of implementing them, which is mostly easy but at times really weird. Complex code should probably be reserved for other languages

In the non-programming part of school there's two Cisco courses without books that happen to have a 90% overlap, a course for leaning Windows Server 2003, and a cabling course taught by an anti-consumerist Indian man. Lovely.

Shifting over to games, now.

The olympics were fun. Or at least the men's gold medal hockey game I managed to tune in for over the web. It was the first time I used a good online video streaming service, and it did not disappoint. Watching the game in HD was pretty damned cool. I only wish they would do the same thing for the rest of online shows. Especially the Comedy Network, which is especially disappointing since it broadcasts at 400x300 and only buffers 1 minute of footage.

Speaking of HD video I've decided that, whenever possible, I'll be keeping a full HD (1080p) copy of whatever shows and movies I download. Most TV shows are only uploaded in 720p format, but a lot of movies are put up in 1080p, like Up, so I'll be keeping those in their full 1080p glory. Not just because I have a 1080p TV sitting beside my computer but also because any 1080p video I open up on my main display (2560x1440) is small enough to hover in a window. 720p doesn't fare much better, since I can have four 720p videos open simultaneously without any overlap, but at least when it scales to fill up the whole screen each video pixel gets 4 screen pixels. Anything smaller than 720p just looks like shit. But how, pray tell, am I going to be downloading 1080p video? That's the next exciting bit.

We finally upgraded our internet. Well, technically we still have the shitty DSL since it saves us more money than it costs us on our bill, but we also got cable internet alongside the shitty DSL, and it's fantastic. 12 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up (could be better), no traffic shaping, no bandwidth cap, 40$ a month. Cheap, fast, somewhat reliable (it drops packets), unfiltered internet. It's awesome.

To test it out, I downloaded the updated iPhone SDK, which stands at a little over 3 GB. It took about 1 hour to finish. 1 hour, for a 3 GB file. The same thing would've taken me about a week on the shitty DSL since they throttle the connection as soon as they sense there's any activity. Instead I got it in about an hour, at a constant speed of almost 1 MB/s. (Remember your bits and Bytes)

So what have I been doing with all my spare bandwidth? Well, for half the day most of it goes to my sister when she's playing WoW, but for the other half of the day I've got some downloads going at a throttled 500 kB/s. Plus all my iTunes podcasts are in HD now, and all the YouTube videos I watch are also in HTML5 HD, as is Vimeo.

On the topic of HTML5 video, the WebKit nightlies are really good at playing HTML5 video. The Chrome beta, on the other hand, is absolutely horrible at it. Not only is the video all blocky, it also doesn't play back smoothly. Whatever Google's doing with the Chrome beta, they're doing it wrong. The WebKit team had their own way of handling HTML5 video for a reason, and whatever Google's doing to mess with it needs to be undone.

Speaking of apps, there's two new things to talk about on that front.

One is that I've done some spring cleaning on my iPhone and gone from about 6 full pages of non-Apple apps to only 3 mostly-full pages of non-Apple apps. Not too bad. Of course, the apps I use almost all the time, Apple or non-Apple, could fit onto half a home screen: Safari, Mail, iPod, Phone, Messages, Strategery. Facebook and Tweetie might be able to squeeze into the bottom half with Calendar, Maps, and WeatherEye.

The other is that I've gotten the latest MacHeist bundle, which includes MacJournal (which I probably won't use), RipIt (for ripping DVDs when I can't get the HD version), Clips (to greatly expand my clipboard, maybe), CoverScout (and SongGenie, which I'll be using to populate my iTunes library with the information and album art I'm missing on a few songs), Flow (an FTP app), Tales Of Monkey Island (which I'll never, ever play), RapidWeaver (like DreamWeaver, except for the Mac, and rapid!), Airburst Extreme (another game I'll never play), Tracks (for even more control over iTunes), Solitaire (also won't ever play), and probably Tweetie as a bonus app later in the MacHeist sale (which I already own).

While I was downloading the apps I'll use, I also noticed I had access to the other MacHeist bundle I bought. I also noticed I completely forgot about one of the apps, AppShelf, which is apparently an app to help keep track of all your serial numbers. So I downloaded it and immediately went to town on it, putting in all the serial codes, app icons, homepages, etc, of each app into this little database. It's nice to know that everything's all in one place, so long as it's not easily accessible to the outside world but can still be backed up and retrieved when needed.

On the topic of apps and such, Steam is coming to the Mac! What an exciting time for Mac users. Not only is Steam coming to the Mac, but the entire Source engine is being ported over to OpenGL (none of that Cider bullshit), and your Windows Steam game serials will also work on OS X Steam. It doesn't get much more awesome than that.

Unless of course they were to store your game saves online, so when you go from a PC to a Mac you can resume your game exactly where you left off. Oh wait, they are! Even more awesome!

That's about it for now. I look forward to giving Valve more money when the Mac version of Steam comes out. Cheers.