In cased you missed it on digg or reddit or del.icio.us.. I updated my iTunes Album Artwork Grabber. It works again!
You can get artwork for virtually the entire store at 600×600px and for some random albums at resolutions of 1400×1400 and higher. Great for rasturbating or printing out covers for your not-so-legal CDs. 
Well yes, my blog has remained neglected yet again. And this time I actually have had stuff to write about. Oh well.
We have a new addition to the family, Claire Elizabeth! Born the 8th of August… so she’s nearing one month now. This is #11.
You can find pictures here:
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| Baby pics! Claire Elizabeth born 8/8/07! |
I recently got a really nice little camera.. the Casio EX-S770. It’s .7″ thick, and features a massive 2.8″ widescreen LCD… it’s beautiful.
That is all 
Yes, I’m still alive!
I have neglected my blog a bit, but I really haven’t had much interesting to say (though I have been on my forum a lot lately.. so if you haven’t already, stop in and say hi). So I’ll just do one quick stream-of-consciousness post.
I’m shopping for a digital camera.. any suggestions? I’m really digging the Casio EX-S770… ultra compacts are awesome.
Feist’s album is pretty cool.. listening to it right now. A little repetitive at times, but overall quite a little charming album.
Neon Horse’s album is pretty darn nice as well.. the only shortcoming of the album is it’s length. It should be illegal to make really good albums 30 minutes long.
My dad is still working (at 11:23PM), trying to finish up some last minute painting. A customer is having a wedding the day after tomorrow and wanted to remodel an entire room. Rush rush!
I’m dog tired right now.. I’ve been waking up at 6:00 every morning for the past couple days so I can get a shower and be ready in time to leave to help my dad with the above mentioned job. Luckily, today was the last day and I have a nice big check from it all 
Maybe now I can pay off the rest of my computer which is on my mom’s credit card..
My sister’s birthday is this Tuesday.
Did I mention I’m tired? I think I’m heading to bed… good night…… hopefully the next entry won’t be three months from now.
peace, love,
Josh
Well, a nice large box from Dell arrived at my front door Tuesday. After signing for it I quickly took it to the dining room (yeah, thats the computer room too.. ) and set it all up. I also got a nice USB HD enclosure from Rosewill as the Dell doesn’t have any IDE slots and I needed my “media drive” (mainly music).
All I can say is wow. First off, it’s SILENT! There is one fan in the whole thing, and it’s cooled by some interesting duct-type opening in the front. When I first turned it on, the screen flashed and I thought it turned itself back off because I didn’t hear it. Wow. My old computer sounded like a hair dryer or loud AC unit in comparison.
After booting up, I played around with MCE 2005 a little bit. Didn’t really see anything I needed, so I grabbed the Vista DVD I got from the recent powertogether promotion and installed that. I had already played around a little with Vista on my older computer, but due to the crappy integrated graphics (got a 1.0 in the Vista experience rating!) and only 512MB of RAM I couldn’t use Aero. With this, I’m still using an integrated graphics chip, but it’s much much better. It gets a 3.5 and actually runs Aero very nicely. I haven’t seen any slowness at all. Gaming is a different matter, but for Aero it’s great anyway. I can’t wait till the single-slot and cheaper DX10 cards come out! Anyhow..
The E6300 CPU is amazing. Even one core is infinitely faster than my old Celeron and two just blow it away that much more. It takes a LOT to reach 100% CPU usage. Multi-tasks like a champ. And this is the slowest in the Core2Duo 6000 line! I can’t imagine how it’d perform if it was one of the faster models and/or OCed. (Which is the only thing I don’t like about this Dell.. no OCing unless I replace the motherboard and probably the PSU as well)
After playing around with Vista for a few days I can say I really like. Which is kind of surprising considering I’m generally a big Linux fanboy. It actually looks very good and functions pretty nicely too. I’m definitely glad I went for 2Gb of RAM, as even with just Firefox, Thunderbird, and iTunes open right now I’m using nearly half of it.
So yeah, me likey. 
I was planning on home-building a Core2Duo system over the summer, after I had gotten the ~$1,000 that I’d need, but sure enough my current computer is dieing on me after three or four years of use (the power supply went, I replaced it, and now USB doesn’t work and the computer won’t even POST if I have a CD drive plugged in, XP shuts the computer off half-way through the boot, so it’s basically a glorified web browser/email checker.), I had to get one sooner.
I was looking around on the Dell Outlet for something in my budget with 2GB of RAM, and there it was It’s a refurbished E520 with a Core 2 Duo E6300, MCE 2005, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, and daul DVD-ROM and DVD +/- RW drives, and should be here in just over a week if I’m lucky.
From what I understand it doesn’t have any IDE slots, so I’m going to have to buy a enclousure for my music/video/etc drive. Also, I’ll need a video card as the integrated graphics will obviously suck.
I’m holding off on the video card until the whole range of DX10 cards are out. If the rumors are true, the 8600 Ultra will be SWEET. Mid-range at a great price and huge bang-for-your-buck DX10 gaming. Nice.
After a bit of problem with censorship on a certain Christian music forum I frequent, a suggestion was made for a new forum, and I volunteered to set it up, host it, etc. It’s mainly aimed for discussing things from a Christian perspective, but anybody is welcome to join.
Also… diet is still going swell. 198lbs. Woohoo.
update: I’m disabling comments because this post seems to attract a ton of Russian spam that Akismet won’t catch. Sorry if anybody needed to comment this.
Well, I’m down to 203. That’s exactly 10lbs since I started on the first of this month.. woohoo!
This last week has actually been the slowest, only .6lbs. I need to start walking again! (and the birthday party pizza and ice cream last night probably didn’t help..)
I thought I’d stick up a link to this site here for anybody that might be interested. It started out as OSWD.org, but one of the admins there went solo-style and kicked everybody else off the staff and basically took over the site even though he had done virtually nothing with it for years. So it then split off to openwebdesign.org which was doing good until it got sold and greed took over. Ads were being inserted in users designs, and general all-around confusion commenced. So now out of the rubble of those two sites emerged the new Open Design Community. It’s basically a place were web designers to come and submit templates for others to use, and for users to come and find designs for their site. Check it out!
Ok, so much for the Finding Nemo reference.
But I really am on a diet. I hit 210lbs recently, and that’s just waaaay too much for comfort. So I’m cutting back my calories/fats/carbs and starting to exercise daily. My goal is 70lbs lost over the next year and half or so. But I’m also going to start trying to build some muscle alongside losing the fat.
Wish me luck!