I do not consider myself an Apple zealot, but I'll have to admit that they make very nice hardware. I'm completely loving my Mac Book Pro. It's doubley more awesome that my Mac mini in almost every respect. Clock speed, RAM, hard drive space, video, you name it this thing is better. And it's portable. And it gets blazing hot when it's doing heavy processing, hotter than the surface of the sun I'd say.
Yesterday I picked up my books and softwares, those being Final Cut Studio 2 and Adobe Creative Suite 3 (adds up to a grand total of $3000+). I loaded up CS3 immediately and had fun doing stupid Photoshop jobs all day.


I tried screwing around with FCS2 last night but didn't really get anywhere. Final Cut Pro itself seems fairly straight forward so far but I couldn't figure out Color (color grading app) which is a bummer because one thing that my videos need are to be color graded.
School doesn't start until Tuesday and I'm beginning to get a little bored. E and I have been playing Halo 2 and we watched all the Back to te Future movies, but I'm ready for school. I do have my copy of Eternal Sonata now so maybe that'll ease the pai of waiting even if just by a little bit. I could always draw, I suppose. But I don't know if I'll be able to top this:
So, last night my bros and I went to Al's concert. It was freakin' sweet! He played pretty much every song off of Straight Out of Lynwood plus most of the mainstays (Eat It, Fat, Smells Like Nirvana, etc.). For the encore he played the cellphone song to which everybody, myself included, started waving their cellphones. After that he wound up with an extended version of Albuquerque. It was simply awesome. I shunned my quiet exterior and clapped and whooed and sang with everybody else. But, you're probably saying "Shuddup, give us teh pix!" I've only got a few because getting good pictures with the crazy lighting so I'm only giving you the good ones. Sucks to be you.


Well, I am now in the sunshine state's most famous city: Orlando. I'm about 10-15 from Universal, and hopefully, not too far from the school. I was going to do a blog update in Memphis but their WiFi was broken. Kind of funny because they were advertising it to the nines.
I've now flown on two planes and I can say I'd rather be in the cockpit. I have a phopia of needing to see where I'm going and it drives me nuts to just be able to see out the side. Also, night flying in storms is... interesting. Coming in over Orlando was quite impressive. In fact it looked a little like this.
Well, I'm dead tired. As always check out my Flickr page.
TUL, if you need the three letter abbreviation for future reference. We've just sat down and I've paid my $5.96 for wireless internet (sucks). Our flight is scheduled to leave at 4:28 PM CDT and it is currently 2:23 PM CDT so we've got a little bit of a wait. This flight will be taking us to Memphis, TN and then we'll have another two hour layover at which point I will probably be playing Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All. I've already played through the first scenerio and it's freakin' awesome. Kind of reminds me of Encyclopedia Brown (and how much I sucked at them). Seriously, though, it's a great game. I'll probably buy the first when I'm done with this one.
Well, I don't have a plug-in here so battery life is at a premium. I may do a quick update when we get to Memphis, but I'll definitely do an update once in Orlando. Be sure to check out my Flickr album for pictorial updates. And, just a note, wireless internet FTW.
As of today (or yesterday now :-P) I've been working at Wal-mart for one week. I've done probably about everything, now, and seen just about everything put on layaway (except groceries). I'm not sure what my standing is now, but I was already getting high praise on Monday (can't let it get to my head). Also, yesterday, the other layaway boy had his first day and I showed him the ropes. He'll be mainly working when I'm not. Just some interesting stats that I'll be updating regularly. To date I've boxed/binned the following:
4 GameCubes
1 GameBoy Advance SP
2 Xboxs
2 PlayStation 2s
1 Laptop
Quite fun, eh? Also, at the request of SeniorUSB, here is a picture of me in my "little vest":

One day after work I went to the electronics dept. to take a look at their laptops because apparently I'll get an extra 10% cupon for Christmas bonus. I didn't really expect to find anything aside from budget systems, but I found this. With the exception of hard drive space it is more powerful than my desktop (which will become a file/web server). A feature I thought was kind of interesting was the fact that it can play DVD/CDs without even booting into Windows (save on battery life I'm sure). But it will be nice to have a portable computing solution, not to mention just downright cool :-).
In programming land, I'm currently working on trying to write an NES emulator. This is pretty much just for the learning experience to help understand the behind the scene ops of computers/game consoles. I hope that by learning that stuff I'll have a better understanding of current systems (GBA, GCN, etc.) and thus develop for them with little or no learning curve. I've found a bunch of handy info at NesDev.com which is helping quite a bit and I more or less understand how the whole internal system works, but figuring how you load things in from ROM sill escapes me. Hopefully this time next week I'll have my mock 6502 running a few opcodes. I'm mainly trying to get the thing to the point that I can run the original Mario Bros. which is fairly basic but it'll be a mighty cool feeling, I'll tell you now :-).