The BirdBrain's Nest

I don't know if anyone has any interest or not, but I have a couple GMail invites to give away. Leave your name and email in the comments.

It's that time of year when everyone gets sick at some point. Now is my time. For a couple days now I've felt like doing nothing, which is impossible with how much school is demanding my time. I feel like sleeping 12-15 hours a day but then can't get anything done.

School is just insane right now. They have this weird expectation of students studying and doing homework. And we have this lack of power to say no, so we spend every waking moment reading incredibly dry textbooks, doing homework we don't understand, or listening to teachers who don't speak English very well or spend the class time just writing down formulas on the board (instead of actually teaching us something). Ugh.

I think it's worth it. (makes the rest life look easy)

I'm ready to kill Microsoft Word right now. I have an assignment that needs to be typed out. The questions are in a Word doc, and I just need to fill my answers in between. Since I won't pay for Word, I am using an open source word processor called Abiword. For some reason (the tables in the .doc?), as I type stuff in, Abiword only puts one chararcter on the screen every 5 seconds or so. When I use the native file format, Abiword behaves normally. So something in that .doc is causing extreme slowdowns. That's just been the annoying part, my real frustration is that when I tried to open this document in Word on campus so that I can print it out, Word said my file was corrupted. And I even tried the "recover a corrupted file to get the text only" method. Still got the same error message. Is Word (and MS Office) so bloated and convoluted that it can't even extract ONLY TEXT from a "corrupted" document? And if Microsoft decided to rewrite Word (if they ever would), would it be available before Blackcomb comes out in 2010?

/me goes to download openoffice

I've been looking at the iMac G5 and think that it's a good looking computer. If you have the wireless keyboard and mouse, as well as Airport Extreme, the power cable should generally be the only cable necessary. Unfortunately Airport, Bluetooth, and the wireless keyboard/mouse are extras. I'm not going to claim that I'm an expert on the RAM requirements for Macs and OS X, but the base 256MB seems a bit low. Posters on DeviantArt made comments about the graphics card not being as good as it can be. Even Joy of Tech poked some fun at these seemingly lacking features.

So what's my point? At the least Apple should add Bluetooth and the wireless keyboard/mouse as standard, adding Airport Extreme would be an even nicer baseline boost. To make a really sweet computer, Apple should bump the minimum ram to 512MB, add Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, wireless keyboard/mouse, and maybe even bump the graphics card up a notch or two.

The iMac even looks semi-portable, like a computer that could be brought from home to school occasionally without the hassle of a desktop or the cost of a laptop. And if you could get a tuner for Cable TV/AM/FM with TiVo or ReplayTV functionality, either built in or via USB, you could have a very functional machine. Might be the perfect thing for the college crowd. Cost might be around $2000 (with the upgraded features from above and the tuner), but when you look a comparable PowerBook ($2800 for the 17") plus a TV and stereo you're now talking $3200+. Hasn't Apple wanted the iMac to be the center of the digital hub? And I haven't even got to talking about the iPod and where it could go.

Update: Engadget has an article about the lack of TV tuner, hinting of the possibility of a media center Mac.

In the past three weeks i've gone on vacation, had my wisdom teeth removed, got sick the day before school started, and then actually started school. I won't be 100% again until Christmas time.

I even bought a new computer. I thought Azotus (P133/24M/Win95) had died so while I was on vacation I got Azotus 2.0 (AMD233/132Meg/Win98SE). The new case is twice as big the old one and is the ugly beige color instead of the nice charcol gray of Azotus 1.0. All my data is on Azotus 2.0 now, but has to be sorted and organized. Just like everything in my apartment. I did change the shell of Azotus from explorer to bbLean, which has a bit a *nix feel to it.