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Here’s a snapshot of the system profiler of an Apple iMac with a 2 Ghz Dual Core Intel chip.

Another year, another Macworld. The usual gang of suspects were there, although the crowd did seem bigger this year than previous years. There were the show presenters, the bubbly vendors, and attractive booth babes. The place was also teeming with creative folk as expected. The whole gamut was represented: agency principals, designers, hipster art students, musicians and photographers. Geeks were also in full force: there were the developers, the gamers, and Mac enthusiasts that seemed to have been Apple devotees since the inception of the Macintosh two decades ago. You’d see a couple of suits walking by once in a while.

Although it may seem like I’ve been people watching the entire time, the photos I took prove otherwise (they’re more of the booth and gadget variety). View them here.*

*about the photos, I thought of uploading them to my new Flickr account, this being a new year and all, but I ran into some problems. All methods of uploading photos failed: from the web-based technique, to the stand-alone Flickr Uploadr, to the iPhoto plug-in. Oh well, I’ll try again some other day.

Last Sunday

We don’t get snow here in the Bay Area - frost is all we get when it becomes cold - like last Sunday morning.

Later in the day, we had a little Christmas get-together with our friends from our sons’ school.

  
The dads……………………………….. the moms.

And the kids.

New Comment Spam

All throughout the week, I’ve been getting a new kind of comment spam. It’s not the kind that advertises the latest online casinos, or pushes pills or anything like that. Rather, it links to legitimate sites that are quite popular - but nothing else. The aim seems to get bloggers to blacklist these legit sites in some sort of retaliatory gesture. Weird.

Surfing at Night

This simple trick to conserve an iBook or PowerBook’s battery power turns out to be good for other purposes, like making things more readable in direct sunlight. By applying this hint, the screen’s colors get “inverted,” not unlike a negative. I found this to be quite useful when surfing in bed at night. Since the large white areas on my screen become black and the type becomes white, there is less luminous glow. It makes for easier reading in the dark and it becomes less of a bother to my wife, who is a light sleeper.

Narnia

We saw “The Chronicles of Narnia” on opening day. I liked it. The Emmy Award-winning animated adaptation from the ’70s had more of an emotional impact on me, however. The book, even more so. This review sums up what I feel about the movie. Prior to watching “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” I selectively read negative reviews only, perhaps to allow the movie to prove them wrong. But their criticisms were mostly fair and on-point. I don’t understand those writers, however, who object to the use of a lion (in the book and movie) as a symbol for Christ. They’re just plain clueless.

Conversations

On Saturday evening we headed to Dublin for a party at a friend’s house. It was a great get-together complete with a hilarious White Elephant gift exchange. At one point in the party I braved the chilly air with the smokers outside (although I’m not one myself). Our conversation turned to Christianity somehow. One of our long-time friends mentioned how most of her family are followers of Christ and how they fervently pray for her. Although they don’t condone her homosexual lifestyle, they are non-judgmental towards her and love her dearly. She says she herself is a believer in Christ. She says she acknowledges what the Bible says about her lifestyle but she has a hard time letting go, especially of her current relationship.

Quite a frank admission.

Finally, FINALLY, someone has figured out the solution to the Adobe ImageReady droplet problem that has rendered my desktop Mac useless for batch-resizing images for over two years now. Each time I attempt to use a droplet, I would get an error message that says, “Could not play back the batch. You do not have permission to write to this file.” But thanks to Ian_Altgilbers (whoever you are), my Mac is back in batchin’ action.

Update: Here’s an image I used to test if the solution worked.

That’s me with two of my sons and their newborn cousin who came into this world last Friday.

Quark revamps its identity. Its old logo is gone. A green, stylized “Q” takes its place. It’s already been done before, however. Check this out.

On a personal note, Quark XPress 4.1 is the only reason I have OS 9 classic still installed on my laptop. I’m one of the few holdouts that haven’t upgraded to the later, OS X-compatible 6.5 version. Quark should be glad though that I’m not one of the multitudes who have switched to Adobe’s über-cool InDesign.

via CreativePro

I got a distressing call from my boss this evening about a robbery at our Palo Alto store. The manager of the store was the only one present during closing time when an armed robber forced his way in. He demanded that he be handed several Mac laptops. The robber put his gun down while helping himself to the laptops. The manager then grabbed the gun and a struggle ensued. The gun went off and the bullet grazed the manager’s head. The robber then ran off.

I just watched the news and was glad to find out that the manager was just released from the hospital. There is a manhunt for the suspect at this very moment.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news earlier today, a stampede erupts in Richmond, Virginia during a used iBook sale. Many people get hurt. The iBooks sold for $50 each.

Update (8:44 am, 08/17): Here are news articles (1, 2) on the robbery. The suspect is still at large.