antonywilliams.com

Extremely impressive

Since my brother recently bought an iPhone, I've been wanting a phone that was a little more than just a regular phone.
Is this an iPhone-killer. ?
It's not really directly comparable. They both do very different things and are aimed at very different people.
Whilst the iPhone is aimed at people who want an iPod and a phone, this is aimed at people who want to do a lot more than have a music phone.
So maybe it doesn't look as cool, or say "designed in California" but for less than $200, at least I wasn't ripped off!





I've been a little reluctant to get a PPC (Pocket PC) as it runs Winblows.
They're known to have stability issues, and require registry hacks to get them working right.
Still, I've been wanting to do more than just call people with my phone for a while.
Windows Mobile 6 seems like a decent way to do that.
The benefit of using WM6 is the same as using regular windows. It's the most common platform, and there are thousands of programs available for it.
There are more than 40 different chess programs! Unfortunately, I can beat about 15 of them, but still! that leaves 25 good options!

As far as PPCs go, the Titan is clearly the best currently available. It's a dual core (1 core for the PC side, and 1 for the calling side). It's also the smallest PPC (of those that have a slide out keyboard) Surprisingly, it's not that big, and fits fine in my pocket.

I switched over to a Sprint SERO plan (Sprint Employee Referral Offer) and am getting an amazing deal!
$30 gets me 500mins, unlimited Texts, unlimited data (internet) with free nights and weekends starting at 7pm. I also get unlimited mobile-mobile.
Without too much trouble I ported over my number. Unfortunately I was without a working phone for about 24 hours :) So sorry to those who called last Thursday/Friday

It's a pretty well known fact that Utah drivers are the worst.
Why is this?
I'm not really sure. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that there are lots of students that learnt to drive in other states, but I'm pretty sure that the old people are worse than the students anyway, so that can't be the reason.....

Anway, there's nothing worse than those annoying tailgaters.
I often like to slam on my brakes just to scare them.

So, a few days ago, one particularly annoying tailgater in a gay Ford Mustang was following me for miles.
I was driving home, and knew that there was some construction ahead, so I drove straight for this huge ditch. He, of course, continued to tailgate. At the last possible second, I swerved a little to the right to avoid the ditch. The idiot behind didn't react quite as quickly, and hit it doing 35 mph.

That's what he gets for driving a Ford......

Apple announced today refreshments across their iMac, iLife, iWork lines, as well as silently upgrading their loveable Mac Mini’s.

The refreshed iMac line will now come in two sizes : 20" and 24" versions (Bye bye 17" iMacs). The casing for the computer is now a redesigned shiny aluminium enclosure, along with new glass-based LCD displays surrounded by a thin black frame.

Under the hood the new iMacs feature the latest Santa Rosa Intel Core 2 Duo processors (2.0 or 2.4 GHz) or the optional 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, along with 1 GB of memory (upgradeable to 4GB of 667 MHZ DDR2 SDRAM).

With the recent MacBook Pros using nVidia's latest GeForce 8600, I was expecting the iMac (seeing as they share almost everything except the HD) to have it. The Good news is that the ATI card they're using is built a on a smaller 65nm process. This is great as not only can they be clocked higher, but they release less heat. The bad news is that ATI (AMD) has TERRIBLE drivers for linux. For 99% of users this won't be a big deal, as they bought it to use OS X. For the other 1% of us however, this is a pretty big deal.




Apple also has introduced a new ultra-thin keyboard for their iMac line, mimicking the keyboard on the macbook.





The new 20-inch 2.4 GHz iMac (the one most of us are interested in), for a suggested retail price of $1,499 (US), includes:

* 20-inch widescreen LCD display (glossy)
* 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
* 1GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
* a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW)
* ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory
* built-in iSight video camera
* built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
* 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
* mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
* built-in stereo speakers and microphone and
* the new Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

Here's a photo Steve Jobs showed when comparing it to an equivalent Dell

Apple also refreshed their Mac Minis. The new Mac Mini is still a piece of junk, and a complete rip off. I've complained before at the iMac using laptop parts (because Apple require "thinness" more than performance, though they'd argue they require both). But at least the iMac uses a Desktop 3.5" hard drive.

The problem with the mac mini is that if you get the more expensive of the two (the obvious choice, as it had the DVD burner) it's only $400 less than the base 20" iMac. apart from the included screen, the iMac has a much bigger and faster hard-drive, a Santa Rosa CPU, a good dedicated graphics card and other stuff. So, what kind of idiot would buy the mac mini ?

Actually, I know a few.....


As most of you know, I'm a linux user (debian based distros), so I'm not overly fond of OS X. However, given a choice, it's much better than Micro$ucks.

At work, I'm the "mac guy" so guess what I will be getting sometime next week.
The 2.4Ghz 20" iMac (of course, with 2GB of RAM, not the stock 1GB)

I'm not the biggest fan of spending $8 to go to the cinema for something I could quite easily watch for free..... cough, cough..... but the Simpsons has to be an exception.
Having been a Simpsons fan for as long as I can remember, I wasn't sure if my expectations would be too high. There are very few films (save Lord of the Rings, Toy Story 2, Star Wars 3, X-men 2) that live up to the publics unrealistic expectations.


A few disgraces of sequels?
X-men 3, Shrek 3, Matrix 3, The girl Karate Kid just to name a few.

You'll be surprised to see that I didn't mention Pirates 2. Why is that you ask?
Because in my mind, Pirates of the Caribbean had no sequels. It was just one great film - THE END!
It bothers me when stupid hollywood execs get greedy. Apparantly $100M isn't enough money, lets create a stupid sequel with an embarrassing script. Who cares, right? The average idiot american will pay money to see it anyway.....
It makes sense, right?
Why struggle with getting a good script. They'll make the same amount of money whether it's good or bad, as people aren't seeing it for what it's worth, they're seeing it because it's the sequel to a good film.


Anyway, back to the Simpsons.
I've watched most of the first 13 or so seasons, and almost every episode was good.
I've watched some of season 18, and for the most part (with the exception of the episode: 24 minutes), RUBBISH.
This made me a little worried to watch the film. It turns out, Fox must have taken all the decent script writers, used them for the film, and dumped a bunch of high school drop-outs to script the TV series.

Occasionally they tried a little too hard to be funny (Homer swinging between the mountain and the "hard place."
Luckily the spider-pig theme song saved the day!



All in all, an expected "simpsons save the world (or, at least, Springfield) film" that was a breath of fresh air

It's known that they're planning sequels, so we can only hope they keep up the good work