The New Democratic Agenda

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

With the Democrats’ newly regained control of the House and (likely) the Senate, some have been speculating as to their new agenda. And, it looks like rightwasright.us has the scoop on the Democrats’ new goals. Here’re a couple excerpts:

  • Tofurkey to be named official Thanksgiving dish
  • Freeways to be removed, replaced with light rail systems
  • Comatose people to be ground up and fed to poor
  • Ban Christmas: replace with Celebrate our Monkey Ancestors Day
  • […]

Indeed, it is a parody, but I’m guessing that both sides of the aisle could get a chuckle out of this one. (Via: BoingBoing)

Apple Upgrades MacBook Pros to Intel’s Core 2 Duo

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Without much fanfare — I was figuring this would be announced at a conference or such — Apple has upgraded its MacBook Pro line to Core 2 Duo chips.

The MacBook Pros’ Intel Core 2 Duo processor offers 4MB of shared L2 cache, which is up to 39 percent faster than the previous 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro and more than seven times faster than the 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 running industry standard benchmarks, Apple said. Additionally, it has enhanced Mac OS X to take advantage of the technology advances from Intel's Core 2 Duo processors, resulting in increased performance in professional applications like Aperture 1.5, Final Cut Pro 5 and Logic Pro 7.

An ideal fit for business and creative professionals, MacBook Pro delivers advanced performance including 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory expandable up to 3GB, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with up to 256MB of dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory, and a double-layer SuperDrive for burning professional-quality DVDs. […]

In the same way that the 486 was the successor to the 386, so is the Core 2 the successor to the Core [1]. Apple purports that the Core 2 is up to “39 percent faster”, but that’s probably wishful thinking. Sure, the Core 2 is faster, but benchmarks indicate that the difference is closer to 15-20% percent, depending on which set of applications are tested.

Still, “faster” is a good thing ;). Speed aside, though, this new generation gets some hardware updates as well. They now come standard with a FireWire 800 port (in addition to a FireWire 400 port) and a 120 GB hard drive. On top of that, they can also accept up to 3 GB of RAM. Sooo tempting!

US Bans Vegemite (Is Marmite Safe?)

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

File this one under I-didn’t-ever-think-that-would-happen, but the US has banned imports of Vegemite, a savory spread which is made from yeast:

An Australian has revealed that US border security police questioned him recently on suspicion of carrying Vegemite into the country.

The yeasty spread is banned because it contains folate, which in the US can be added only to bread and other grain products such as cereal.

Daniel Fogarty told the Geelong Advertiser that he was amazed when he and his partner Sarah Egan, who live in Canada, were asked if they had any Vegemite at a border crossing between the two countries. […]

As it turns out, I haven’t actually tried Vegemite — but I do rather enjoy Marmite. As I understand it, they’re similar in taste in some ways; however, proponents of each product typically declare that the other is a mere impostor and therefore vastly inferior ;).

That aside, I’m not sure if or whether Marmite is affected by this ban. It’s not that easy to find on store shelves to begin with — it’s typically relegated to a grocery store’s import or specialty sub-aisle, if anything — so it could be tough merely figuring out if a given store is no longer stocking Marmite or if it never stocked any in the first place :-/.

“The Matador” Is Not Showing At The Angelika

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments
Movie listings for The Angelika — October 1st 2006

Connie and I figured we’d catch a movie on Sunday — easy enough, right? Well, I clicked through to movies.yahoo.com to scope out the listings for our area. I looked over each of the theaters but paid extra attention to the hanful of indie theaters in our area. And, once I scrolled down to The Angelika I noticed that The Matador was showing.

“The Matador?”, I thought to myself. “The Pierce Brosnan flick where he plays a dysfunctional hitman?” I clicked through to the link for “Matador, The” and, yeah, it looked like my memory was about right. Just to be sure, Connie and I watched the trailer and it still looked pretty good.

We headed off to the theater, bought tickets, almost bought some bottled water — except that it was $3.65/bottle — and then headed into the theater. After a few previews, the lights dimmed and the movie began. Among the first scenes features a character watching tv (as evident by the scan lines filling the frame) of a woman being sawed in half. Um, wha? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, the thought that entered my head at that moment was “I don’t think this movie is what we think it is.”

After a quick session of telephone game-like conferring with my film-watching companions, we agreed to discretely mosey out. Obviously, there was a collision somewhere with the “Matador” namespace. At that point, we decided to stroll through the theater and find something else. We settled on Al Franken: God Spoke (trailer) which turned out better than I thought. (All the same, if you’re thinking about seeing it, it’ll probably be just as good on your CRT at home.)

Upon getting home, I thought that some detective work was in order. I mean, what happened there? I double-checked the listings at movies.yahoo.com which, sure enough, showed The Matador. And, clicking through to the info link for the movie matched up with the IMDB page for the movie we thought we were seeing. Then, I checked on The Angelika's Now Showing page and saw that they’re not showing The Matador. They’re showing some schlock entitled Matador - Viva Pedro. For sheesh. The moral of the story? If you want to see the presumably-funny Pierce Brosnan flick, I’d recommend trying a video store — it was apparently released on DVD on July 4th.

Hold Off From Upgrading To iTunes 7 If You Use Juice

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Apple released iTunes 7 about a fortnight ago with, among other features, support for movies from the iTunes Store (née iTunes Music Store). Reaction to its interface updates have been mixed, but I rather like the tweaks to the interface.

Having said that, if you use iTunes alongside the podcast-subscription tool Juice, you should probably hold off on the upgrade since there have been reports of incompatibilities between iTunes 7 and Juice. Basically, Juice is still able to download podcasts, but it’s unable to automatically add them to your iTunes library (as it normally would).

Of course, these incompatibilities pertain to iTunes version 7.00 and Juice version 2.2 (the current versions as I write this). If you’ve come across this entry and it’s hypothetically December 2006, the now-current versions of those apps may very well have solved those issues.

iTunes 7-based niggles aside, Juice still works very well with iTunes 6.x (to which I plan on downgrading this evening). In case you’re not familiar with the app, Juice is an open source “cross-platform podcast receiver” for Windows, OS X and Linux. While iTunes has built-in podcast support these days, I still prefer Juice for the extra features that it offers, including (optional) auto-expiration (delete episodes of Podcast XYZ after ## days), and (optional) genre-forcing (such as forcing all podcasts to the “Podcast” genre). Oh, and it also has a customizable scheduler, so that you can have it check for new podcasts at an interval which you specify (rather than the arbitrary interval defined in iTunes).