I h@te iTunes somedays

I moved my entire library from my old (3+ years) Lacie Hard Drive to the new Seagate Free Agent Pro 750GB drive I bought yesterday and in doing so was greeted with iTunes choking on the move. I had to readd all of my items to iTunes, create a new library and then it figured since that was all new and dandy that it should reformat all our iPhones and iPods to match! I lost all my applications and now, even though I went through the iStore last night and replaced things I use (and even added a few new ones) my iPhone somehow feels foreign now.... just not the same.

It's an odd feeling, I am out of sorts from it and finding that the whole change over has left me feeling irritable and annoyed with my phone. Is that odd? That a device that is a tool for my day to day can have the same affect on my morning as... say.... not sleeping or waking up in a sea of fire.

I've read about iPhone addiction and people who can't live without their unit for not even a day. I'm not one of those people, I leave my phone on my desk all the time and leave for hours, I've left my phone at home a number of times when going out or to work and somedays I find I don't even know where it is. But now I have to question what type of involvement I have with this device... what is it about this change that has left me feeling so odd.

I think the answer is the mild OCD I have and the change to the design of my phone as set off this annoyance with the lack of control over the change. This would make the most sense considering I just spent 15 minutes moving the blue and grey icons around on my main screen to ensure that the distribution of colour and icon look made a symetrical pattern that was bordered by the brown icons. Maybe I'm just fucking crazy.

After posting this picture in I had to go back and move the weather icon next to the im+ icon and the safari icon up next to app store because the yellow in the weather needed to be next to the im icon. I also looked to see if I had any other blue icons so that I could move the mail app up and replace the ipod icon then add a new blue in place of settings..... yeah I am crazy.

Seattle, Banking and backyards

I drove down to Seattle the other day to pick up some friends from the airport. They just returned from a huge world trip and were gone for 8 months. It was a nice drive, sunny and traffic was subdued to a dull roar.

It occurred to me while driving through Blaine, WA that I had only been in the states for about 2 minutes and I was only 5-6 KM from the border but I feared the country I was now in. The thought of America makes me as uncomfortable as a Seth Rogen movie. I don't know how I feel about this re: relations with Americans et all but I do know that I have very little interest in visiting the southern neighbours. When I was at the airport it felt even more uncomfortable, parents treating their kids like dogs, the way people treated one another, how a guy in a turban freaked out a whole family of mid-west looking folks and the woman at Starbucks who tried to convince me that getting the smaller size coffee I wanted would only leave me coming back as 'folks need more than a grande y'know and a supersized McDonalds drink is barely enough'.

I know that everyone in a country is not the same and I know that there are people in Canada who are far worse than the people I have referenced thus far, but my stereotype of the USA leaves me looking around and seeing them all come true and it just makes me.... well.... not wanting to be there.

That said the drive over the bridge on the I5 as the sun was shining directly on to downtown Seattle was really really beautiful, during the time I spent in Seattle a few years ago for a course at the Mac Store I got over these fears and preconceptions quickly and enjoyed my time. I guess I need to shake the mental view of America as such a police state where people all tote guns about and the smallest thing will spark an injust act. (yes I know that my comments have ticked you off.)

The drive back was nice ( I missed you guys ) and ( to my surprise ) we were over the border in less than 10 minutes and back in to Canada. Drove home and dropped them off and went home for some sweet sweet sleep.

Backtracking.... before I went to Seattle I stopped off at the Citi Financial where I was going to refinance my loan and maybe get a little Doh-Ray-Mi for other bills n such. Well after going through all my information I was wondering why the loan officer and underwriter had been talking out of the office for the last 30 minutes... The underwriter came in and let me know I had qualified for my new loan and that I could sign the papers and be on my way....but.

But?

But. I'm legally obliged to tell you ( he says ) that due to an error on our part you have been paying an interest rate of 2.8% for the last 3 years instead of the predetermined 25.7%.

Say Whaaaaat?

And due to new banking regulations within our structure we can not claw back the amounts.

Fuckin sweet dude.

So now if you sign the new loan the interest rate will be 26.5% and you'll go back on to a $300 payment etc etc etc

Thanks guys.... I'll talk to you later. ( psst... I didn't sign the new papers because I'm not a moron )

So now the payments I had been making that were supposed to be only interest over the last 3 years have paid down over %60 of my loan principal and we owe very little on it. For the first time ( in a long time ) the bank has helped me and I like it! The reason for the screwup? Well the last two digits of my phone number are.... 28 and the interest field follows the phone field.

Lastly - Backyards....

I have spent a good amount of time cleaning up our new property and getting the area cleared. This guy rents the garage at my house to build his El Camino and other cars in. Apparently he had some cars parked in the pad out back at one point and is super happy I have cleared all the trees out and made space so he can park more cars there now. Yeah...

Listen, I didn't clean out this whole area so that you could put more obstacles and worry items in it for me. I cleaned it out so that the dangers that WERE there are now gone and my kids can play in the backyard. So the push to build the fence across the back yard and create a separate parking pad is now ON. I want to segregate out the cars from the kids and make my life somewhat more easy and calm.

So there's the news that's new and improved.

/end

So yummy in my tummy, so yummy, so yummy

This I found last night and tried it out. It is probably the best dessert I have made in a long long time.

Crumble:
1 cup flour
3/4 cup old-fashioned oats
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/2 cup melted butter or margarine

Fruit:
2 cups diced rhubarb

• Make sure you soak the Rhubarb in cold water for 30 minutes first and remove the outer coating to negate the stringiness
  

2 cups sliced apples

Thick n Gooey Centre:
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup water
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 tsp vanilla

Mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, spices, and melted butter.
Press half of the mixture into the bottom of a 9" square baking pan.
Arrange the rhubarb and apples evenly on top.

Cook the white sugar, water, cornstarch and vanilla until thick - This should be done slowly over about 30-45minutes while you slowly raise the heat. I would not recommend going much over medium in your heat.

Pour over the rhubarb and apples trying to evenly and completely coat them

Sprinkle the remaining oatmeal mixture on top.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45mins - 1 hour.

Serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream.

So Sick

Ugh... spent the day feeling like real crap after a couple of weeks of feeling like minor crap.

Hackintosh

I'm oh so happy. I have managed through a few days of work (about 6 hours in total) to get OSX86 10.5.6 running on my Dell X300 laptop. While a little slow due to the X300 being from 2005 and only an intel core single 1.2Ghz Pentium M with 640Mb ram it's still pretty damn good.

I'm super stoked to have a 'mac laptop' again as I really miss the simplicity with which I used to acomplish my tasks at home. I like my ACER Windows based laptop from work but I also feel restricted on it's use as OBVIOUSLY it's my works laptop.

The installation of OSX86 was pretty straight forward and you gotta give some serious props to the folks who have put their time and effort in to making it that way. The forums of infinitemac.com and others really help if you plan on doing this project yourself. I'm super interested in trying it out on other PC's like the IBM T60 core 2 duo.

The project manager of technology has a few IBMs and has been eyeing the project for a while, I showed him the X300 and now he wants me to work with him getting one or more of his units running. lol. Gladly I will do it as he got me the X300 as a write off from work.

This all came after struggling (again) with Ubuntu. I am just a GUI kind of guy and I like the functionallity of this OSX86 over the Ubuntu system for what I do. I spent maybe 14-18 hours working on getting my wireless card working on Ubuntu 9 where the brunt of my time on OSX86 was adding a flag to my com.apple.bootloader.plist file - which wasn't that much time. I do have to say that Ubuntu 9 lives up to the reviews and is an amazing piece of software and runs very very well with many great applications and features. Just - you need to be more of a jump in tech guy who loves command lines, wrappers and all the other things that come along with a pure linux system I guess.

For now tho - WOOT~! HACKINTOSH.