Got a phone call last night just as I was getting to Angel tube station. Dawkins was all better! So I diverted to Regent's Street to pick it up.
Not only did I have a new HDD, but they'd also replaced the fascia, trackpad and keyboard for some reason. Not that I'm complaining - they were all looking their age. No new logic board, though - the old one is still fine.
Got home, restored from my Time Machine backup, and Bob's your uncle, good as new.
Funny thing is, pre-Time Machine, my backups were sporadic at best. Had this happened just a month earlier, I would have lost loads.
Dawkins is poorly. :-(
Took it to the Apple store last night, and it seems that somehow or other both the logic board and the HDD are dead! I'm glad it's in warranty! Should be back in a week or so.
So in the meantime, no blogging, no IM and hardly any email.
Strap Schneier into a chair in a room with my two girls attempting I Try on SingStar and he'd hand over his private key in minutes.
I'd post a recording, only there's the Geneva Convention...
I was moderately pissed off when I read about the Radiohead boxed set that EMI have put out - I already owned everything on it except for I Might Be Wrong, which hasn't been available for ages. Much as I love Radiohead, I object to paying for a load of CDs I already have just to get hold of the obscure stuff. So I was resigned to never getting it.
Poked my head into HMV on the way home last might to see what the retail version of In Rainbows looks like, and there it was - I Might Be Wrong for sale. Just £6, too! Bliss. So much for not spending any more money this month...
BTW, check out Nude. Beautiful.
The other game I got for my PS3 was Oblivion, Game of the Year Edition.
If The Orange Box is big, Oblivion is gargantuan. Steve Yegge's post on Oblivion indicates just how big it feels - and I have the two expansion packs. This'll last me all year.
One problem I've often had with complex computer RPGs in the past has been with awkward control systems. No such trouble here, after a bit of slow start.
It's pretty, too, if not quite so graphically stunning as Half-Life 2. You can spend time just wandering around looking at stuff.
Still very early days - I've only just started the main quest, and I'm still mainly exploring - but it's fun so far.
I bought Mum a copy of MarsEdit for Christmas. She loved it - ever wondered where I got my nerd genes from? ;-)
Anyway, she was having trouble getting a couple of her inexplicably large number of blogs up and running with it - and somehow Daniel Jalkut, MarsEdit's author, spotted her blog post and came and helped her out. Wow - you don't get Bill helping the frustrated Vista victims out, do you? And that cost far more than MarsEdit.
He was pretty positive about a change I suggested recently, too.
So, MarsEdit is now even more highly recommended than it used to be.
I have a couple of PS3 game so far. And with all the cash I've spent over Christmas, and what with a move coming up, they'll probably be the last for a while. ;-) Luckily, they are both fab.
First up, I got the five-in-one Orange Box. So far, I've only got to Half-Life 2 and Portal out of the five.
The original Half-Life was one of my favorite FPSes of all time, along with Doom, Quake and XIII. So naturally I was really looking forward to Half-Life 2, and I've not been disappointed. It's superb. The graphics are like nothing I've ever seen. On my new telly, the picture quality is better than I get from DVDs, and far better than from TV signal. On the whole, the levels are challenging and satisfying, just as with the original. (The vehicle levels are a bit of a chore, though. Or is that just me?) I'm less than a third of the way through (with one visit to a walkthrough required so far) - and given that both the sequels are in the Orange Box too, there's plenty of gameplay here.
Portal is great - turning a 3rd person shooter with pretty realistic physics into a puzzle game was a stroke of genius. It's funny, too - very Alpha Complex. Criminally short - only 19 levels, the first dozen or so of which are pretty much tutorials. But then, I'm utterly stuck halfway through level 18 anyway, so it makes little difference to me how short it is. ;-)
Thanks to Jay for pointing out this rant, via reddit.
Now, I'm sorry they guy can't get a job, but if this is his attitude, I can't say I'm surprised. He's burned his bridges with ThoughtWorks, for a start. ;-)
Disclaimer - I work for ThoughtWorks. But I can say that with perfect honestly that his impression of TW doesn't mesh with mine. Thing is, he seems to think that what TW sells is platform expertise. It's not. We primarily sell smart people. (Oh, and me, too.) A smart person will pick up a new platform quickly. If that's not possible with Rails, that that's Rail's problem - not that I believe that to be the case. Yes, you do need a cadre of people with platform experience for a project to succeed, but not the whole team. (Perhaps he'd have better luck job hunting if he didn't restrict himself exclusively to Rails?)
He says that TW leaves bad code bases behind. Again, in my limited experience, that's not true at all. TWers seem to care deeply about what they do. Anyone else out there who doesn't work for TW who has any experiences they'd care to hare?
Also, his dismissal of TDD and agile practices such as pair programming suggests to me that he's not really tried them. We at TW have a lot of experience in these areas, and it all works just fine for us. If he claims to have improved productivity by dropping them, then he's clearly not comparing like-for-like. Done properly, I fervently believe that these practices improve productivity in the long term (if not in the short term).
I do wish we used more Django and less Rails, though. ;-)
Mum got me a lovely 500GB external hard disk, which is what I was waiting for before installing Leopard. I backed everything up with Carbon Copy Cloner, then did a scratch install.
Good God it's taking a long time to get everything re-installed. I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose; I'd filled four pages of my trusty Moleskine with a list of things to reinstall. Including MarsEdit - hence the sudden slew of posts. ;-) Still, just about done now.
No need to Virtue; Spaces seems like a very nice replacement so far.
Time Machine is great. Zero effort backups - this is huge. Be honest - how many of us have really good backups of our personal machines? Well, now there's no excuse. Interface is a bit wacky, though.
Lots of other great stuff for Python devs, too, and a built-in ssh agent. And I love the new Terminal.
Fracture isn't working at all, though. :-(
More later, perhaps.
Dr Who with Kylie. The best the Commonwealth has to offer.
Bit of a Poseidon Adventure rip-off, but fun.
So, I got myself a new telly. It's a Sharp Aquos LC-26AD5E 26" LCD. A bit bigger than I was planning on, but it was in the sales for £350, and it was very pretty.
It's got a very nice picture when watching DVDs or playing on the PS3. The downside of a big telly, though, is that non-HD TV looks really rubbish close up - there's just too much screen and not enough signal to go around. What it might look like on one of those 50" jobs I can only imagine.
And I can turn it off. ;-)