Prediction

Gas prices will continue to drop leading up to the November elections.

Gas prices will rise again after the November elections.

Rice Rocks

I happened to catch a couple minutes of the Condoleezza Rice interview on 60 minutes. For some reason, Katie Couric asked her about her exercise routine. She said that she works out 6 days a week…blah, blah. Then we find out that she likes to listen to Led Zeppelin and Cream when she works out! She even said, “I like to listen to very, very hard rock”.

Does she listen to Korn while watching footage of our military bombing the shit out of some poor country? Does she do shots of tequila while rocking out to Metallica?

WTF? Condi Rice likes to rock! Right on….I guess there is at least one thing I like about her.

Many Chiefs few Indians

Well, after over 100 hours of bruising, heat-drenched work I have finally finished painting the house. I still have trim work to finish but the hard work is done. Lessons learned:

• Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert when it comes to painting
• None of the “experts” showed up at our doorstep to help (exception noted in next bullet)
• Our neighbors, Doris & Ed, are the best damn neighbors in the entire Universe. Ed comes over on my second day of painting in overalls and sun hat, paintbrush in hand. “I just can’t see you suffer.” He helped me for at least 7 hours - finished an entire side of the house on his own, and helped on another wall. Up on a ladder, down on his knees, wrestling behind bushes planted all too close to the house. Oh, and did I mention that Ed is 82 years old? (Doris ran errands and provided treats….equally appreciated!) Most of my 30-something friends are luckly if they are in half the condition of Ed (and Doris).
  
• Painting is ok; scrapping and sanding a newly purchased house that was slightly neglected sucks. It really sucks.
• A freshly painted house looks nice.

Mac Follow-up

It has been a few weeks now since I picked up my first Mac - the little fella with a nice engine - a Mac Mini. Now that I have been using it for a while, here are some thoughts:

OS X (Tiger) is great. Period. I have been using Windows for years on end - I make my living as a geek - and I can honestly say OS X absolutely kills Windows XP. It runs smooth, fast, and without any hang-up’s. I thought Windows “freezes” and “hiccups” bothered me before - now they just piss me off.

Pray you don’t have to get inside. The Mac mini is not fun to open. Upgrading the RAM was a pain in the ass…but worth it.

Plug it in and go. One of my favorite things about my Mac is that is just seems to know what to do. The first time I plugged my digital camera in, voila, transfer complete. Easy and intuitive. The “plug it in and go” theory has held true with everything I have tried. Even my troublesome all-in-one printer works perfectly on the Mac - it never worked very well on my PC(s).

I still need both. There is no escaping the fact that I need both a Mac and PC. As an IT guy, I must work with and support PC users. In addition to my work requirement I have spent a great sum of money on software and hardware for my PC(s). I just can’t afford to buy everything again just for my Mac.

I will now differentiate between work and personal computing. My personal computing will now be Mac-centric. I just don’t see why I would use a Windows machine for things like email, web browsing, photo and movie management, and so forth. OS X just kicks ass.

I will purchase a high-end Mac. Now that I have determined that a Mac fits my needs, I will move to a higher-end model. When the time and price is right I will gladly fork over the money.

In a nutshell, my review of the Mac Mini is: 2 thumbs way up!