The Blog with No Name

I think being a deconstruction worker would be a blast!

Even the graffiti is emo:

Just beautiful:

NASA captured a sunset on Mars:

For some reason, I think this picture is really cool.

UPDATE: Dan prompted me to make this a wallpaper. Get it here (1920×1280, so best suitable for widescreen displays).

The last few days I’ve been in Colorado for Thanksgiving and skiing. Look:

These pictures were taken with my Motorola RIZR, which has a pretty decent camera.

As you can see, the weather has been nice. Yesterday we were at Copper Mountain, which wasn’t completely packed out and iced over. I got a deal through the airlines I used to get here, so I got two tickets for the price of one, which was awesome. Today, we hit Arapahoe Basin, the place where “all the locals go.” It was pretty nice, but we agreed that it would be much better later in the season with more snow cover. They have a lot of xtreem(!!!) terrain that we couldn’t hit because there was barely two feet of snow coverage. Lots of rocks were peeking out of the snow. Overall, it was quite nice and much better than I expected for being so early in the season.

Once, a long time ago, a girl described my personality as “flat as a pancake.” I was inclined to believe her at the time but not so much anymore.

For Halloween, T-Mobile allowed us to don costumes and bowl for free. I went as Elwood Blues of The Blues Brothers fame. I looked like this (minus the pink stuff):

My buddy, as Jake Blues, and I won $25 each for our costumes. I wish I could always make money that easy.

So, I have a silly side and I have a serious side. For example, I enjoy beautiful things, like this sunset the other day as I saw it from the window of my cube:

I’ve posted some pics of my new Mac Pro here. I used iPhoto and iWeb together to whip out that page in a matter of minutes. Apple really has nailed the integration of their iLife apps. Very slick.

Anyway, some initial thoughts on the Mac Pro:

First, I “only” have 1 GB of RAM. Reports I was reading around the web made me think I’d definitely be needing to get more RAM on the double; however, now I’m not so sure. Pretty much all my apps are universal binary, meaning they natively support the Intel chipset and don’t have to use Rosetta to run. I’ve read that Rosetta is a memory hog. Right now, I have 13 apps running, and I still have 330 MB of free RAM. Granted most of the apps I have running are pretty lightweight, but if I can get this much performance out of just 1 GB of RAM, I think I can postpone getting more RAM for a bit. This would be great since the RAM for this machine is really expensive. To get another 2 GB of RAM it would be nearly $500. If I wanted to max out the RAM in this thing, it’d cost nearly $5000 for the 16 GB.

Second, this thing is very very quiet. I came home from work today, and I thought it had shut off for some reason because I couldn’t hear anything. I can only hear a slight whir of the fans, but considering they’re maybe a foot away from my ear that’s not too surprising. I’ll try to remember to listen for it when I’m being a hardcore gamer, but I’m guessing it won’t get much louder.

Third, so far I’ve been very happy with the performance. CPU usage is very low almost all the time, and it looks like the tasks are well split between all 4 cores. My CPU monitor shows all them being used for something. Game-wise, I’ve been able to completely max out UT2k4 at 1920×1200 resolution and it runs smooth as glass. World of Warcraft is barely even a challenge. I can sit in Ironforge with every graphical option turned way up, and it still hits the 60 fps cap. It will be nice to get a beefier game and really put this thing through the paces.

Fourth, I’m still amazed how fast the migration from my old tower went. It really was just a matter of dumping a bunch of data over from one machine to the other. I was anticipating it taking twice as much time and involve a lot more headache. I have a real trim OS right now, and I hope to keep it that way.

Here are selected pictures from Fluger’s wedding yesterday. These are pics I liked best and don’t necessarily represent all of the good and serious photos. For this little gallery I was focusing on the funner shots. I hope you enjoy. If you would like any for printing, feel free to contact me, and I’ll ship ‘em right out.

Fluger got married yesterday. I was the photographer for the wedding, and I had a lot of fun. So far I’m happy with how the photos turned out and I haven’t even slathered on the Photoshop love yet.

Here’s one with me in it because I’m egotistical and this is my blog (see if you can spot me):

All of those guys were on my old dorm floor. 5th Hill forever!

I’ll see if I can get a little photo album from the wedding uploaded soon.

As per Chris’s suggestion, click below to compare the above photo to a photo from our freshman year.
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You know, the only reason that cop shot the bear was because it was black. Had that been a polar bear, nobody would have been hurt.

Cool pics of earth from NASA. Behold:

Here’s some pictorial evidence why my job is a good job. First, we get animal crackers:

Second, yesterday we had a big company party of sorts with free food and a 3-on-3 basketball tourney. Real TMO employees had the day off so they could be there. Pathetic contractors like me were able to enjoy the festivities only if their bosses allowed it. Squatch, the Sonics mascot, came out for some fun too:

I walked to downtown today, and all I got was this picture. I do believe it’s a real school for girls.

(via Volokh)

That’s Pope Benedict XVI. I know, I know, you all thought it was Freddy Krueger in a santa hat. Well, you thought wrong. Seriously, though, is it possible for the media to take an even more unflattering picture? I think not! Here’s a bit of triva: that hat he’s wearing is a traditional hat going back to the twelfth century! Wow!