The Man

Happy New Year to everyone. Have a great Ought-Seven.

It's been about two weeks now that I've been using my new MacBook Pro. There are some definite upsides as well as downsides to life after the PowerPC to Intel switch.

The Good:

• I can play World of Warcraft.
  Not necessarily Intel related. I've got a couple of co-workers who are rabid players of this MMORPG and got me into playing. Addictive.
• Virtualization
  Because of the Intel architecture, I can run Parallels. This enables me to run other x86 native operating systems withinb virtual machines at about 95% native speed. No dual booting with Boot Camp necessary. Currently I have both Windows XP as well as Ubuntu Linux 6.10 running alongside Mac OS X. This stuff is just amazing.
• Horsepower
  Remember the day that RISC vs. CISC mattered? When Apple had commercials showing the Intel bunny guys getting toasted by the PowerPC? Those days really are over. The Core2Duo blazes.

The Bad:

• Intel Compatability
  Sure, Apple has done a more than admirable job of making PowerPC applications and libraries work on the new Intel hardware with Rosetta (seriously, it's damned seamless), but there is a definite performance hit when using it and there are a number of big software omissions that have yet to be Universal-ized. For instance, I am currently trying to build a PHP development environment on the MacBook, and everything works except for one thing: Oracle. Oracle provides the Instant Client libraries for Mac OS X, but only as PPC binaries! No Intel or univeral available. This means you absolutely cannot build PHP against them for OCI8 support, which is a prerequisite for me. Come on Oracle, get with the program. Thank the gods I can just build it all in my Linux VM.

At work. It's sick. Now I can do things like this:

You may be wondering what the beautiful stuff behind the ugly thing in the picture is. Well, that would be the GRAND-MOFO-CANYON BEEYOTCHES!

The Grand Canyon was on my mental top ten list of places I had to see before I got put in the ground. Scratch the GC off the list. What can I say? Stupid camera phone pictures just can't do it justice. I got to watch the sun set over the canyon. Awesome sight. Anyone who has seen it before knows what I mean.

Phoenix, AZ... what can I say about this town? Well, to be honest, the terrain really reminds me of the pictures I've seen on the news of Baghdad... minus the IED's. The people are relatively friendly, there are burrito stands on every corner, and gas was $2.30/gal. I didn't really get to see all that much of it since I was at the Gartner Open Source Software Summit during pretty much all of my time here, but I don't feel like I am missing out on that much. I've learned really quickly that once you've seen on cactus, you really have seen them all.

Those of you who have heard me talk about my co-worker Dave Kimball know that I speak wih absolute reverence about the man. He is easily one of the funniest human beings I've ever had the pleasure to cross paths with. He's a real salt of the earth type of guy. Hell, he spent 24 years in the Marine Corps, part of that as a drill instructor at Parris Island.

One of the best things about Dave is his story telling ability. He's always got an outrageous tale about what he did to recruits at basic training, or what it was like to fight in a war with a gun that had no bullets, or having to support a girl's entire family in the Phillipines. The stories never end. And when they are told with Dave's unique and endearing speaking cadence, it's all the better.

So today, Dave was telling us a story about a day in the life of the relationship between his crazy cat and crazy dog. I had my PDA on hand and surreptitiously recorded it for posteriy... and the results, while short, are a hoot.

Warning, Dave drops a few F-bombs, so be aware.

Who turns a whopping 32 years old today. Get your order in for Cialis now, buddy.