Another shabbes...

Well, another shabbes where I won't be going to shul. Admittedly, it's raining outside, it will be cold tomorrow morning, and my wife is pregnant, so I can understand why she wants me to take her to the bank tomorrow for her work. But I can look forward to the day when she doesn't work there anymore, and then I can go to shul regularly again. I'm also hoping to introduce erev shabbat dinners on friday nights, and actually cook them and all. I also hope to do one Orthodox-compliant shabbes, just to see what it feels like. I got another jewish book, Judaism for Two, I'm interested to see what I has for relationship stuff. Oh, we got Delicious Library for our Mac. Wow. Even with our old 450MHz G4 it still can scan pretty quickly, so we're going to use this to catalog our library. And it's pretty fun, so I think we'll start the hardcovers this Sunday. (Saturday we have my brother Tony over.)

It's a BOY!!!

Well, it's official. The ultrasound showed my son, happily showing off his.. male parts. So, I'll post the scanned images to my flickr account later. Now we're looking at boy clothing, and rethinking the colors for the baby room.

Edit: We've posted the pictures finally.

Mac programming

Okay, started Carbon programming last night. Why? got Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets for our Mac awhile back. But it doesn't use the joystick. So I'm writing a program that the user will launch, it will read the joystick and "type" the appropriate command.

It took me 3 hours to find the HIDManager demo program, hack it up to read our joystick's 10 buttons and have it type 'z' when I press a button on the joystick. This morning I spent about an hour playing with Interface Builder. I've now got an idea of how events work in Carbon, and what's going to be version 1 and version 2 (or really version 0.1 and 0.2...).

Once I have a decent program that I'm willing to let others use and see the code on, I'll release it somewhere on SourceForge. I'm pleasantly surprised on just how quickly I was able to turn out a basic program, although dismayed that Apple's demo programs' source code is barely documented at all - I would have expected a little better. And I still don't see a comprehensive API documentation (like msdn.microsoft.com).

MY NEW MAC!

I am now a Mac owner. Okay, technically I was one already. (I had a Perform 575 from years ago.) I got a used Powermac G4 450MHz. We're going to upgrade it's processor, video card, and install OSX 10.4 - Tiger. I'll probably buy Tiger soon, as OS X 10.0 is pretty well useless.. I'll probably put the video card on my winter gift list, and get the processor upgrade myself (as it's around $200 or more). It's got 256MB, but we're looking to upgrade that as well.

I'll post pictures of it on my Flickr account soon.

(edit)

We got it Saturday, and we're now planning to soup it up. I've just finished installing Tiger on it, and I'll be installing Firefox and all on it. Getting it on the wireless networking isn't working yet, but I'm still tooling away on that. Happy. Happy. Happy.

(edit #2)

I've posted our mac pictures to my Flickr account.

Referenda C and D

I was thinking about Referenda C and D today. I found out that it's not an income-tax issue. It's a sales-tax issue.

I've heard the analogy. It's like a bartender, who charges $3 for a beer, you give him $5 and he says he'll keep the other $2. Except that that's a flawed analogy.

It's really like a bartender charges $3 for a $3 beer, but who's limited to a certain profit limit. The next day you come in, and he has to give you back 30 cents because he made too much profit. The $3 price was legitimate, but too many people bought beer, and so he can't keep the extra money.

The thing is, the state collects these taxes, and legally. But people seem to be spending more money (and therefore paying sales tax on these purchases) than the state is permitted to collect. Those pesky buyers! Referenda C and D would let the state keep those sales taxes, spend them as appropriate, and then report back to the taxpayers on how they spent that money.

Sounds legitimate to me.

Kippot

These kippot are cute. Of course, I don't do suede kippot. But still, very cute.

New TV Centre and stuff

Okay, we got the new TV center setup. Looks nice - I'm sure we'll post pictures at some point, probably to my Flickr account.. Had Noodles & Company tonight, their Mac and Cheese isn't half bad.

I got my wife () Luigi's Mansion for the gamecube, and she's playing that now. Fun fun. got her Yoshi's Topsy-Turvy for the game boy advance. Also quite a bit of fun.

wants a mac laptop. As in, "Chris doesn't get a mac mini, Chris buys me a mac laptop!" :). We'll see, the holidays are in a few months...

I can't wait to get my backpay. I've already allocated most of it, I think about 500-600 is still up in the air, and we'll see what happens to it.