blog.elfredpagan.com

Last night I went to one awesome show with Cesar, we saw Rock N’ Roll Soldiers, A Wilhelm Scream and Less Than Jake at The Parish. It was one of those weird occasions, where you go to a show and even the opening bands rock. This was the first time I saw Rock N’ Roll Soldiers and A Wilhelm Scream and they were totally awesome, awesome enough that I bought their cd’s at the show.

RnR Soldiers are basically a classic Rock and Roll band, I could see these guys getting big, they have an awesome stage presence and they were really fun to see. A Wilhelm Scream was a MA based Hardcore Punk band in the vein of H2O or Stretch Armstrong. They were really energetic and loud. They were one of those bands that I wished I new the lyrics to so I can sing along with them and maybe connect fists.

Less than Jake was totally awesome. They played a bunch of classic songs, which they knew was what the crowd wanted. They played one new song, and they announced it was the only new one they will play, IF the crowd acted like they loved it and rocked a lot with it (the song did rock). The band interacted a lot with the crowd, made bad jokes, drank on stage and basically had a lot of fun.

This show was so much fun, the only bad thing is that I’m getting old, lot’s of kids with x’s on their hands, not cool…

Photos Here

Yesterday was the big day, 42 days after ordering my MacBook Pro it finally arrived. The wait was probably a little longer than what I was expecting (by around 3-5 days at most), but I did get a nice CPU upgrade for free, so that was fine. At 10:30 am, just as the fedex page said, the box arrived. First thing I noted was how surprisingly thin the box actually was. I quickly opened the shipping box and got to Apple’s immaculate box. For those out of the know, the packaging is actually a big part of the Apple experience. You kind of feel like a kid on Christmas when you start opening their well thought out boxes. I haven’t felt this happy opening a box since I opened my PowerBook box way back in 2003.

The first thing I did was pop in the 1gb of extra memory I had waiting for it here. I remember reading that Rosetta needs a lot of RAM to run properly so I preempted my need and made a little order over at Crucial. It took me a total of 3 minutes tops to get to where the memory goes, pop install the DIMM and close the slot.

After turning it on and hearing the familiar boot chime, OS X took me to the setup assistant. I answered all the usual questions, configured my network connection, etc. It asked me if I wanted to run the migration assistant to get all my old data from my PowerBook. I thought about it for a minute and decided not to do so. I have a lot of stuff on that laptop and I would prefer to migrate on an as needed basis. It also was going to copy other things over like Fink, which obviously wouldn’t work on an Intel Mac.

The First thing I noticed when I got to the desktop is how much brighter the new screens are. You really have to see it to believe it. The resolution on the display is awesome too. This 15.4″ display has the same amount of pixels my previous 17″ has, which is nice because I don’t actually lose any screen real estate. As soon as it finished booting, I ran Software Update to grab anything that might have been released recently. It downloaded the iLife ‘06 updates and that’s pretty much it. I quickly ran .Mac synching to grab my contacts, bookmarks, keychain, etc. This worked without a hitch, GO APPLE!. The first app I went to download was Adium, it loaded really quickly (1 icon bounce!) I put in my account information, removed the dreaded duck icon and the sound set, and off I was chatting with people.

I started multi-tasking now. I downloaded the latest version of the XCode development tools, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Yojimbo, Transmit, Delicious Library, etc, etc, etc, etc. All of the mentioned apps already had Universal Binaries available, so things were blazingly fast. No more stuttering while I read my feeds or browsed my library. I also installed MS Office 2004, which ran as fast as it ran on my previous PowerBook (17″ 1ghz, 1gb of RAM) which was nice. I also downloaded and compiled DarwinPorts Until now, everything is quite speedy.

I installed more stuff I use, copied over my data and preferences, synchronized again with .Mac to get my rss feeds, Transmit shortcuts and Yojimbo data. I fooled around with the Apple Remote, Front Row, Photo Booth, etc. All working as advertised and quite nice. I downloaded some HD trailers that ran without a stutter, this thing is fast, really fast. I installed some “legacy” software. Good news is, Rosetta is completely transparent, some apps perform better than others though. Office ran quite nicely, Warcraft 3 ran better than on my 17″ PB, I tried running Photoshop, it run a little slower than on my Powerbook, but that was to be expected. I ran World of Warcraft for a while, bumped up the graphics settings and it still ran very well compared to my old laptop that could barely handle it.

After fooling around with the laptop for a while, I decided to run and benchmark (using the command time) a little program I wrote that uses VecLib The program pretty uses the MovieLense data set and calculates recommendations. A graph with the results is below.

The results here basically compare AltiVec with SSE3 and the clock speed of each of the CPUs. The program is single threaded, so only one core is used on the MacBook. This puts the results into what is to be somewhat expected. Where SSE3 runs similarly per clock speed as Altivec. I am no benchmark expert, so take these with a grain of salt.

I decided to run the MacBook off of it’s battery and see how long it would last. After using it regularly, with wifi, screen at 75-80% brightness and doing a variety of things on it, the battery lasted around 2hrs and 50 minutes before the battery indicator got red.

Overall, I am really happy with my new laptop. It runs really well and as new Universal Binaries get released, some apps will get faster and faster. My only pet peeves are: * The name * It runs warmer than my previous Powerbook. I guess the 17″ has more space for the components, so it makes sense.

Technorati Tags: macbook, apple

shipping notice
Originally uploaded by elfredpagan.

SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Time Warner has been having nasty DNS issues since late Wednesday or Early Thursday. Lots of sites have been failing to resolv, which annoyed the hell out of me. So I popped in some other DNS Servers and Voila, it works.

Yesterday I went to see Ozo at the Paramount Theatre. They definitely were on top of their game, their music performance was awesome, playing all the favorites and some new, unreleased songs. I think the venue doesn’t mesh with their style of music though, since it’s hard to dance in auditorium seating. I definitely prefer Stubbs as a venue over The Paramount for this type of show. The crowd was also more pretentious than the loving fans of other shows. It still was an awesome show.