vista 64 (part 2), air, flash, animation, and the hole in the center of the universe | 2:05 AM >

I had a lengthy conversation with Mike last night about a multitude of things, most notably his birthday, but the thing he said that stuck with me was, "But you're already at 100% capacity!"

It's kind of true. Last few weeks, for whatever reason, I've been catching two hours of sleep a night on average. Usually when I hit a good insomniac binge I stay up and do work, or work on personal projects, or make soap, but two hours is past my limit. I need four to function; when I get down to two I find that anything I do by moonlight isn't worth looking at after sunrise. So I stay in bed, not asleep, but resting.

Anyway. On to brighter things. I finished the site for the Balintore Trio this week. If you clicked that link before 29 April 2008, you're probably thinking something unkind about my web design abilities, but fear not! That's the old site, which will be erased on the aforementioned date by something wholly new. (I should probably come back at that point to edit this paragraph down, but I'm sure I won't.) The most fun I had with this was designing the header and footer images. All I can say is: Blender FTW. Also useful was Coda. I own TextMate -- it's the only editor I've used in the past ten years outside of Emacs -- but when it comes to coding websites I don't think there's anything available on any OS, anywhere, that comes close to Coda. I cannot say enough good things about that program.

I also finished a custom video player for FUNhouse. No link yet; still need to build the web page for it. Go, Coda! Be aggressive!

I discovered that my XBox 360 Controller for Windows doesn't work on the Mac, though. Since I used to swap back and forth with my old controller, and that old controller is already gone, you can imagine my chagrin. Ubuntu 8 seems to have a working driver built into it, though, so maybe one of these nights I'll finally take a look into Mac OS X hardware drivers.

My Vista 64 adventures have continued. I still like it and certainly still prefer it to XP. I had a serious issue with one of the NVidia nForce drivers (something about a firewall or something network-related) -- the driver consistently crashed both XP and Vista if it was loaded. After uninstalling it, I haven't had any more blue screens. Also, my keyboard goes dead every now and again for no reason. Since I got a USB one this time (yes, it's my first USB keyboard -- welcome to 1998, I hear Mike saying...), I just unplug and replug and it works. Still, that's a really stupid error.

Oh, and you might find this funny: when FARMBOY-ONE is turned on, the temperature in the room rises ten degrees. Celcius. I am not kidding.

On the up side, I bribed my girlfriend into adding an extra gig of ram to her laptop to bring her up to two gig. When I say bribe, I mean, I bribed her with actual RAM, which I then installed. Amazing how much better that machine runs now. She was actually happy with Vista with one gig (and an Intel GMA card eating 256 meg of that one gig), but she's seen the light. Just gotta get her some external speakers now and my geek level might go up.

Class is going well. I'm finaling the first shot of Class 2 right now, with a new one on the way this week coming. Once it's done I'll post a link here; now that Flickr has video hosting I find it even more convenient than before; I think I might end up hosting animation shots on it. There's a ninety second limit, which begs the question of what they intended it for in the first place.

The last thing I've had on my mind this week is Adobe AIR. I played with it a bit when it was still Apollo but I didn't want to get too deep in an API / system that was a work in progress. Now that it's settled, and that I finally have Flash CS3 Pro (Wohoo! No more AS1 for me!), AIR is looking like a really great way to do true rapid application development. I really love how, in ActionScript 3, the way objects have been done makes the UI and the code one and the same. Plus, you get cross-platform apps with no extra work. "I can write an app that processes video and works on Mac, Win, and Linux without learning a windowing toolkit or touching the QuickTime API? Sign me up!"

Not that I have time, but I think I might try to document my AIR studies through short video tutorials. The first one I'm going to do is a desktop clock, because I really want one. Not a regular one, mind, but one of those creepy Felix ones you always see in pawn-shop windows. That'll make it interesting. Plus, it'll give me some time to get acquainted with atan2.

Oh, and did I mention I'm moving? I'll send out a mass mail to everyone for whom I have addresses (and to whom I am not a mortal enemy) when the time comes; picking up the keys on Tuesday. It's a lovely place in the High Park area of Toronto. I can't wait to have a balcony again. I have a vision of tomatoes and basil growing on it.

Wow, when did it become 2am? I should go rest in my bed.