I've been using it for like 15 minutes and I'm blown away by how much they streamlined things.  Apps load faster, stacks are gorgeous, icons show previews for all files so its so easy to find shit quickly.  Love the look of new QuickTime but I'll probably never use it cuz I use VLC for the playlists. 


So far all of my apps appear to work just fine but I'm sure I'll find some bugs here and there after more testing.

My inkjet printer installed and works fine, but my laser isn't technically Mac compatible so I'm having to do some workarounds before I will be able to use it.

What ever happened to a separation of church and state?

Marriage is a culturally and socially relative term.  What right does a government have to enforce it's definition and limitation of marriage on a nation of people with diverse cultural and social backgrounds?  Government should only be concerned with government matters such as taxation, health insurance, and other relevant matters and leave the interpretation of what marriage means to the people.  I believe that we would be much better off if our government would take a more European stance on people's rights to form unions.  By that, I mean our government should recognize the right of consenting adults (regardless of sexual orientation) to form civil unions and be privy to the rights of such (like healthcare benefits, hospital visitation, tax breaks, etc).  Conducting a 'marriage ceremony' is then the right of the citizens to do as they please without any interference from the government.

The 'Sanctity of Marriage'

sanc·ti·ty  (sngkt-t)
n. pl. sanc·ti·ties
1. Holiness of life or disposition; saintliness.
2. The quality or condition of being considered sacred; inviolability.
3. Something considered sacred.

I will never understand how a LGBT couple marrying has any effect on the sanctity of someone else's marriage.  In my opinion, the sacred or holy quality of YOUR marriage is upheld by YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE ONLY and the actions of anyone else cannot alter the condition of your own marriage.  Besides that, what is sacred or holy is subjective and what right does one person have to force their views of marriage onto another? 

The Lies and Deception
Those who support Proposition 8 claim that when LGBT couples marry it degrades the meaning of the word marriage.  There are those who say that they do not oppose LGBT couples marrying, they just want them to call it a different name.  I think that is about as silly of an argument as any.  Again, I believe the government should recognize people's union as a reguliously neutral concept and then each couple is within their own rights to perform whatever ceremony they want to celebrate their union.  If they want to call it a marriage, then how does that harm you?  If they want to call it a big gay boat ride, then what does that matter to you?  Who cares what you call it.  Your own beliefs and values are upheld by you and your actions, not by what someone else decides to do with their own life.

There were also those who sent out TV ads saying that if same-sex marriage was legal then children in school would have to be taught about same-sex marriage.  This was a clear attempt to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 but it also is a rediculous argument.  I think half the problem with our schools is we are too busy trying to teach our children cultural superiority that we forget to teach them that there are a variety of cultures in the world and even in our own country.  Moreover, why should schools be teaching marriage anyway other than to inform children that a variety of cultures view marriage in different ways?  I, for one, hope we can stop using the schools and our homes to pass on bigoted ideas to our children and intead teach our children to be intelligent, tolerant, and critically thinking people.  Then, maybe the next generation will move further to protecting the equality that our courts whittled away today with the decision to uphold Proposition 8.

So there is a fairly large Mac virus outbreak.  I haven't got it but I'm seeing people all over the internets who have.  Its a trojan horse being spread through torrent files (iWork 09 and Adobe CS4 products).  I knew that Macs would eventually have a large enough install base to become targets and now it looks like they have reached that tipping point.  The good news is this trojan is very unsophisticated and insanely easy to find and clean.  Bascially, it installs a service into your startup items list and then hijacks your internet connection allowing for someone to remotely access your Mac.  Want to see if you have it?  Simply go to System/Library/StartupItems and see if theres anything suspicious in there (such as iWorkServices).  If you've got a Mac and have been torrenting lately I recommend you check to make sure aren't infected.

The whole thing can be removed by using the following steps:

1. (open Terminal.app)
2. sudo su (enter password)
3. rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices
4. rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices
5. rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices
6. rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg
7. killall -9 iWorkServices

And thats it, no crazy registry edits or any of that.  I'm sure eventually Mac viruses will become more sophisticated but this one is pretty lame.  Try comparing that removal process to something like the Antivirus 2009 shit thats going around for Windows now.  That stuff is horrible to try to get rid of.  Every time I see it I recommend a complete format and reinstall. 

So any other conspiracy theorists think that maybe a Mac Antivirus company (Intego) made this trojan themselves just to drum up some business for their software in these bad economic times?  I think its definately a possibility but who knows.

Westheimer block party was lots of fun.  Saw some old faces, met some cool new people.  Saw some badass bands.  What more can one hope for in one night?

It was especially awesome to see Adrian as we hadn't hung out in FOREVER.  Also, Adrian and Brandon's new band is amazing.  Can't wait to see more songs from them in the future.

Fucking database class at school has me brainwashed.  I am constantly finding myself thinking of ways to make various databases in use at my office more efficient and sexified. 

I think I have reached a point of ultimate nerdiness for which their is no return!

Ugh, my head hurts. 

So at my job we have a program that goes out to rigzone.com once a day and downloads some shit which it dumps into a database that gets manipulated further by our program.  So some dude at rigzone jacked with their system and it screwed up my program so I spent all day patching the php/mysql shit on our program so that its compatible with their shit again.

I have decided that php is the most unuserfriendly language ever.  It might as well be assembly for all I care because its a pain in the ass.

Also, if I can patch a program in a day (and I'm not really even a programmer) then why the hell does it take software companies so fucking long to get their shit working right!!!

So as hugely inconvenient as Ike has been, I really didn't fare too badly.  We got power back Monday and ever since, I've just been chillin around the house and/or helping out friends and family who needed help cleaning up their house or just needed a place to shower or get a good nights sleep in some AC.  

This is from my in-law's neighborhood and is probably the craziest tree-on-house that I saw.



We still have no power at my office and my boss asked me yesterday if they could move operations to my apartment if they still don't have power next week. That should be interesting  as my apartment is only about 700 sq. feet.  He said he'd pay my next months rent tho so I'm down for the squishyness.


--------------------------------------------------------------

GHWT Vicarious Video

I'm going to Specs in a bit to get some rum and juices to make Hurricanes. I don't even like rum but what the hell, I might as well drink some to appease the Gods of Destruction.

That being said, I think I'm going to stay with a friend in Humble for the weekend. Its not really much out of the way of the storm but it beats sitting at my apartment bored out of my mind with no electricity and fun stuff to do.

I don't think I've ever been so excited about a game before but Guitar Hero World Tour is supposed to have 3 Tool songs: Parabola, Schism, and Vicarious. And anyone who knows me should know I'm practically obsessed with Tool so yeah I'm hella happy about that. Also worth mentioning, they will have a L'Via L'Viaquez (Mars Volta) and Santeria which will be badass to play. The only complaint I have is that there aren't a lot of chick-sang songs.

Also, as far as I can tell, my existing Rock Band instrument set will work with GHWT which is great because I don't want to have to pay $200 for another instrument set and we definitely don't have room for two drum sets anyway.

I wish my PS3 had mad decoding skillz like DivX. Only about 1/2 of my pr0n plays through the "media center" interface on it.

Otherwize it r0xx0rs. I watched my first blu-ray movies on it a couple of days ago. Man people are a lot uglier in 1080p.

I was just taking a shower listening to my iPhone on "shuffle" with a playlist of about 350 songs. I also had my desktop in my living room shuffling from the same playlist. When I got out of the shower, my iPhone and my desktop were both playing Parabola by Tool (which I think is one of the best songs EVER). I just thought it was cool that both my devices wanted to play it for me at the same time.

I'm posting this from my iPhone. I love everything about it except for the battery life. This thing is about a million times better than my old winmo phone.

Also, I got hit by an uninsured motorist last week and I got my car back from repairs yesterday which makes me happy. I had a sentra for a rental which totally made me feel like a granny. I'm never driving a car without bucket seats again if I can help it.

I married my long-time fiance Allen Stanley on July 3rd.  We didn't make a big to-do about it as we'd already lived together for over 2 years and pretty much already felt married anyway.  So we dropped by the courthouse with our moms and dads and had the judge marry us and then we had a small reception the Sunday afterwards.  Then we went on our honeymoon which was really badass.  All the money we saved by NOT having a big fancy wedding allowed us to have a really pimp honeymoon.  We went to Dublin and London.  I'm going to post some of my favorite photos here but there are way more posted at our wedding website (http://www.allenandashleywedding.info) if you want to take a look. 

So we bought a new 46" Sony LCD tv with our income tax returns and I'm lovin it.  We were so overdue b/c our old tv is like 15 years old and looks horrible.  But anyway, I'm really diggin that I can download divx movies and then just hook up my laptop to my TV to watch them.  They actually look pretty good...I would say that most of the time I wouldn't be able to tell if it was a divx or an actual dvd.  But all that plugging and unplugging the laptop can get annoying which got me thinking that why in the hell haven't they integrated the media center capabiliites INTO the tv yet?  I mean it wouldn't be too difficult, they just need a cheap processor, video controller, and some ram/rom (akin to what they use in the AppleTV's).  They don't really even need to put a hard drive in em, just a couple of USB ports so you can connect an external hard drive that stores all your music/movies/photos ect. An network connection would be nice too so that shared media can be accessed over the network.  All in all though I doubt it would add more than $300 bucks to the cost of the tv and I think lots of ppl would buy it.  After all, everything is moving towards digital downloads.  Anyway those are just my thoughts.  

I've been plugging away at school...after this semester I will have 8 more classes left to take before I can graduate.  I'm so thrilled to be this close to finishing.  I can't express how amazing it feels to be finally nearing the finish line.  

Allen and I are also planning on finally tying the knot this summer.  I think we are just going to go to the justice of the peace to get married but we want to have a reception to celebrate with friends and family afterwards.  For our honeymoon we are planning on going to Europe.  We are thinking we want to go to Dublin, London, and Amsterdam, but we don't have any definite schedule set yet.

I took my little sister up to Galveston to hang out with some family and friends at their bay house.  

Over the past year or so I've kinda refocused my life in light of 3 goals

1) I don't want to work crappy retail jobs much longer

2) I want to finish school asap so I can get a better job asap

3) I want a family but I don't want kids until I finish school

So with these 3 things in mind, I've enrolled back in school and I'm two years away from getting my Bachelors in IT at UofH. Since I refuse to be in massive debt by the time I graduate I'm having to bust my ass to pay for school and make good grades at the same time.

Sometimes I'm a little sad that I rarely get to hang out with my friends anymore but I've accepted the fact that if I am to finish school in the 2 years alotted myself, I'm simply not going to have time for much else.

Being that it's summertime right now and I'm not taking summerschool, I do have a little time for some debauchery so if anyone wants to hang out with my nerdy ass just holla.

Here are a few pics from Jaki's benefit show Saturday night. Much fun was had. It was very refreshing to meet some new people and to see old, friendly faces. ( Click y0h )

We are hiring at the Fry's Electronics in Webster. Starting pay is anywhere from $7/$8 an hour but if you hustle, you can get promoted very quickly and be bringing home $600+ a week.

I am a supervisor in the computer department, so if you or someone you know is interested just let me know. I can be reached @ 832-984-8346. Anyone can show up and fill out an application, but your chances of getting hired into a good department are better if you talk to me first.

So I took about a 6 month hiatus from the internet. It wasn't really intentional. I just met the most amazing person ever and for the past 8 months, I've spent practically every waking non-work moment with him. His name is Allen Stanley, and as of a week ago, we are engaged to be married.

I really feel happier than I have ever felt in my life.

I do miss the friends I haven't talked to in forever tho, and I hope all is well for you guys.