uninteresting :: rich

black rock city satellite image

hard to believe, but the day has finally come…i leave for BM tonight. and it couldn’t have come at a better time – the past few weeks have just been insane. studying for the PMP sucked, and work has been even more sucky. i’ll probably have to continue managing things at work from SF through the weekend, until we start the drive out to the playa. and then, all that stuff will fade away, cuz i’m comin’ home…

one more nerd post before i go:

synergy is one of the coolest new things i’ve tried in a while. it’s a little free, open-source program that you run on 2 or more computers (they can be any mix of mac, pc, or unix). after a little configuration, you can use the same mouse/keyboard on one machine to control the other! alright, it’s not exactly earthshattering, but seeing it in action is pretty cool. for example, i’ve got my work laptop setup on the kitchen desk next to my minimac. while using the laptop & it’s mouse/kb, i move the cursor off the left side of the laptop screen, and it suddenly enters the mac screen from the right, as if it’s an extension of the same screen. and then i can completely control the mac from the laptop’s mouse/kb. if that excites you, you’re a dork, too.

engadget’s howto tutorial to set it up

paul van dyk, central park, 8/19/05

me ‘n my luv had our annual BM kickoff on Saturday – seeing PVD in CP. the weather was beautiful, unlike last year when it poured rain (that was a blast, too, but chilly and miserable afterwards). so many people we knew were there. good times. though i think we’re both feeling a little burned out on pvd. i’ve seen him like 4 times in the past 2 yrs.

i’ve been studying for this professional certification for the past 2 months or so – the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. i was a little worried that i hadn’t studied enough, but i took the exam on Friday and did much better than i needed to. what a load off my mind. the exam is being revised next month to become more difficult and cover more material, so i’m glad i got it in – especially before BM. i need a good month after getting back to decompress.

so the nerds are abuzz over leaked developer versions of apple osx tiger that run on standard pc/intel hardware (apple announced a few weeks back that they’re switching from ibm’s powerpc chip over to the intel chips that all windows pcs use). sure, apple put some light security measures in place to prevent it from working on non-apple hardware, but as usual, what the hackers want they will get. the osx86project outlines exactly how to get it up and running on standard pc hardware. and the word is that it’s way faster on intel than on regular macs! i can’t wait to try, but probably won’t have time until after BM.

it’s really annoying how companies don’t allow consumers to do what they really want with cool stuff. apple has already said that they won’t sell a standalone version of osx that people can install onto their pcs (even though they’d sell *millions* of copies overnight). they plan to only bundle it with apple branded pcs.

so it’s left up to end-users themselves to create hacks – probably the best example being xbox media center, which has turned my xbox (that i never use for games) into a really cool media player.

and speaking of cool things – this company has developed a projector that projects into thin air!