Eric & Lauren

Dog in a Trance

Friday, January 30, 2009

I’m sure most of you have seen this by now, but if you haven’t, please watch and enjoy. Please note this is just a shortened clip of the segment from “The Soup” that is making the rounds right now (which can be found here; beware of PG-13 language). They’ve trained this dog to have some sort of psychological aversion to cupcakes…

It makes me laugh every time I watch it.

The Year in Music

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Being blessed to have a job where I can do this, I typically leave the music cranked up all day in my office while I’m writing code. I’ve noticed recently that I tend to get obsessed with an album for about 2 months and then will move on to something different.

Isn’t it strange how listening to certain albums can take you right back to the point in your life when you first discovered them? For instance, listening to One Part Lullaby by The Folk Implosion takes me right back to working at the movie theater in my Junior year of High School; listening to The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips takes me right back to the weeks Lauren and I began dating. It’s wild how music can do that.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at the last year to see what albums had the most playtime for me. Click the links throughout the list if you want to listen yourself… I recommend all of them!

Jan-Feb 2008 - In Rainbows - Radiohead

This one comes as no surprise since Radiohead is definitely one of my favorite bands; I became obsessed with them in college, and if you did any work in the DMS lab at Union, you’ll know that they were pretty much all that we listened to in there (when Donnie Darko wasn’t playing, of course). I think this is their best album since OK Computer. Favorite track: House of Cards.

March-May 2008 - Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem

I picked this up on a whim on day at work and listened to it for weeks straight without listening to anything else. If you want something upbeat that WILL stay in your head for months, this is the album. Favorite track: Someone Great.

Click to continue reading…

Quasi-Review of Windows 7 (Beta)

Friday, January 23, 2009

**The one-sentence verdict (for those of you with short attention spans): it will probably finally give people a reason to upgrade from XP, but below the flashy exterior and mostly helpful UI tweaks, it’s still Windows.**

As I’ve mentioned before in previous geeky posts on here, I was a diehard Windows fan until we bought our first Mac back in late 2005. Since I’ve been firmly entrenched in the Mac world for the last 4 years, I thought it would be fun to install the beta of Windows 7 and see what Microsoft has been working on recently.

I grabbed the 64-bit Windows 7 beta from Microsoft and installed it pretty painlessly through Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM; just acted like I was installing Vista and it worked without a hitch). It should be mentioned that the installation was pretty painless, and much quicker to install than probably any OS that I’ve done a clean install of in the past; well done Microsoft!

So, let’s get down to the details, shall we? While Vista felt like a slower version of XP with a fresh coat of paint, Windows 7 feels a little more like a new approach to Windows, and mostly for the better. Although it’s basically just Vista with a tweaked UI, the interface is surprisingly minimalistic at the outset; the new taskbar is pretty much the meat and potatoes of Windows 7, so lets start with that.

Well, it’s pretty much a rip off of OS X’s dock, but after using it for a few days, I’d say that’s a good thing. I’m not a huge fan of the blockiness or the icon spacing, but it is certainly much nicer to use than the unmanageable row of minimized windows I’m used to seeing in XP and Vista.

Unseen in my screen grabs are the nice “Aero Peek” hover effects you get when you move your mouse over the icon of an open program; little thumbnails pop up of all the open windows in that program and expand to full size when clicked. Combined with Vista’s Flip 3D, this is pretty much Microsoft’s answer to Exposé on OS X. I found Exposé to be more helpful in practice, but Aero Peek was certainly a nice UI tweak.

Moving on, I really liked the redesigned start menu and the use of “jump lists” when you right-click on a program’s icon. Right-clicking now gives you the usual info, along with program specific information that’s pretty useful (recently opened files, playback controls for media, etc). Once again, it’s similar to OS X’s dock (and maybe slightly superior in this respect).

Speaking of similarities, it’s almost comical how much Windows Explorer resembles Leopard’s Finder windows now… take a look at the screen shot above. I found getting around the system was slightly easier than in XP/Vista, but I prefer OS X’s lack of clutter in the Finder.

Performance-wise, everything was very snappy on my relatively-new MacBook Pro. Although the Aero interface may be a little heavy-handed with animated transitions and general flashiness, overall it was attractive and responsive (not sluggish like my experiences with Vista). It should be noted that it appears to be a much more energy hungry operating system than Leopard; my four hour battery life in OS X was only 1.5 hours in Windows 7, though the lack of good power management in the beta may be to blame.

So, is Windows 7 worthwhile? From my brief experience, I’d say that it’s very promising, but still trailing OS X by a long shot. Beneath the nice new paint job lies the same basic Windows that you’ve used for the last 15 years, which may not be a bad thing depending on the user. For me, it’s all the extra features and polish built into OS X out of the box that make it far superior still. As I’ve waxed on about recently, the features in OS X that I use so frequently (Spaces, Time Machine, Quick Look, etc) are desperately missed, even when I’m using the latest version of Windows.

If you have a decently powerful machine running XP, I think Windows 7 will be a worthy upgrade to consider when it releases sometime this year. Microsoft is genuinely taking it’s operating system in the right direction.

However, if you’re on the fence about purchasing a new machine, I still think a Mac is the best option.

Have you played with Windows 7? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Drumming Euphoria

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Please take 3 minutes out of your day to watch this Korean drummer absolutely lose his mind while performing a seemingly normal song. Pay close attention to the waves of drumming euphoria that overtake him, making him appear to be about 10x more excited to be playing the song than anyone else in his band.

I laughed so hard at this I nearly threw up…