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DragonCon 2009
I had the chance to finally attend DragonCon for the first time, if only for a day. Saturday was the chosen day, because it was the weekend, and because that was the day of the Adam Savage panel, which is the main reason I wanted to go this year. The biggest thing that sticks out in my mind is the lines. It took about two and a half hours to get a badge due to essentially a cluster of a registration area. There were two sections, cash and credit, but these were not broken out until near the front of the line. On top of that, there were only a total of three cashiers and about 7 to 10 registration staff. In my mind, there should have been more cashiers to balance things out, but that’s just my observation. The other line was the line for the Adam Savage panel, which ended up outside and stretching down the block. Thankfully the weather wasn’t full-blown hot, but it was warm enough to be uncomfortable. About an hour later we were let inside to sit and wait longer. The wait was worth it, and I ended up in the third row. Adam shared 100 of his wishes and explained a bit about them, then went on to take questions from the audience. In person he’s great to listen to, and I really enjoyed it. Other enjoyable parts of the con were seeing friends, checking out the vendor areas and of course the costumes. We had caught the end of the parade, thanks to the evilly long registration lines, but it was still a decent site. Everything from Star Trek to Ghostbusters was represented.

As the Apple Ripens…
Snow Leopard is performing quite well on my Macbook. The upgrade process itself took about an hour, and after that it’s been smooth sailing. The only issue I had was due to my own fault. I moved some applications from their default locations, so when the upgrade occurred, I ended up with two copies of some programs (I like keeping things somewhat organized). Performance-wise, there is a definite difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Finder is much more responsive, startup and shutdown are a lot quicker, and overall the OS is running fine.

iTunes and iPhone OS 3.1 are out as of yesterday and I’ve performed upgrades to these latest versions. So far, so good, but I haven’t used them enough to really dig deep into them and see what happens.

I’m posting this today in memory of my dad. It’ll be three years on Monday, but I wanted to get this posted while it was still in my head. It’s one of my fondest memories of dad.

The Macbooks weren’t my first brush with Apple computers, or OS X even. Back in 2001, I bought one of the cool iMacs that had recently come out. You know, the big ole CRT models. It had a whopping 450mHz G4(?) processor and 512MB of RAM, if I remember right. At any rate, it was my first attempt at switching, and unfortunately it failed. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of decent software that I knew of out for the Mac, and the 10.0 of Mac OS was sluggish to say the least. Long story short, I eventually decommissioned the machine and put it in a corner and went back to Windows and Linux.

That wasn’t the end of the line for the Mac, though. It’s true, I lived with my parents for a while after getting out of school and working in the real world. My dad had asked about a computer, and I knew I had the Mac sitting in a corner. He basically wanted something to play with and try to learn about computers with. The Mac was perfect for that, and since I knew he wasn’t gonna get a virus (I put OS 9 back on it), it meant little-to-no work for me. I sat it on his desk downstairs, ran a network cable to it and got it set up. I loaded some games on it, and showed him a few game websites and he was set. The smile on his face is something I still think back on and remember. He absolultely loved the idea that he could get on and play Bingo at any time he wanted. He also found a few other sites, and I had bought him a CD filled with a few more Mac games. Eventually I showed him some the word processor and spreadsheet apps, and I can remember nights of him organizing things and typing things up. Sadly, he passed in 2006, and with it went the Mac. My mom is not a computer person at all, so I came and picked it back up. Last I knew of it, I gave it to my friend Eric back in PA.