uninteresting :: rich

al and claire came by to visit (they might move out here from nyc) and big brother oli happened to ichat from belgium. we walked the macbook pro around to give him a virtual tour. it was like having our own max headroom.

*m* and *c* are having a baby boy!

the blog posts have been slow lately, mostly because i’ve been workin my b*alls off for the man (the man being SJ). the past 3 weeks i’ve worked most nights and weekends, and it’ll continue for another month or so. i love it though. it’s a high-profile project and it’s nice to establish myself as part of the ‘team’. the project is actually something that’s been announced and has been in the press quite a bit, but i’ll hold off talking about it until it launches.

the how weird (howard) street festival went off today. it was a crazy 83 degree sunny day in SF, and the burners took over several blocks of soma with great art, music and general weirdness. they have to move it elsewhere next year, because it’s getting too big.

so i’m really digging the apple tv (surprise). it really is pretty slick. things i like:

• video podcasts: they’re free and itunes syncs the newest ones down to the apple tv so there’s always fresh content to watch
• audio podcasts & music: all the audio content from your itunes library is also available. there’s a nice screensaver that animates your photos while you’re listening.
• HD photos: your photos are sync’d in full resolution, so all the details are shown on your hdtv. the pics look amazing. you can set it to sync specific iphoto albums (including smart albums). i have a smart album called ‘favs’ in iphoto that contains ‘all photos with 5 star ratings’. so whenever i come across a photo that i really like and want on my apple tv, i just rate it 5 stars which automatically puts it into that album, which in turn is automatically sync’d to the apple tv.
• streaming movie trailers: that are downloaded live from apple.com
• autosync of itunes subscriptions: the latest daily show automatically downloads to itunes and then gets pushed out to the apple tv.
• music videos: these are sync’d over also, so you get your own on-demand mtv
• media library: it plays mpeg4 and h.264, but unfortunately not divx and xvid (which is the primary format of content downloaded from eh, other places). so i need to convert things to mp4 (h.264 results in much smaller files, but just takes too long). visualhub is a great, mac-only swiss army knife program that converts any video format into any other format. and it has built-in support for xgrid, the grid computing component that’s part of OS X. so, first i connect my core 2 duo macbook pro to my core 2 duo imac via firewire for some super-fast networking (OS X also has built-in firewire networking). then i kickoff visualhub with a bunch of conversion jobs, and it automatically handles the grid processing. since each computer has dual-core cpu’s, i’ve got a total of 4 processors (9ghz) of computing power chugging away at it.