Boys, new monitor, Mac mini
I've been a bit discombobulated by Apple's switch
to Intel. When Steve Jobs announced the iMac Core Duo and the MacBook Pro at
Macworld this month, I started scouring the web for people's benchmarking of the
iMac Core Duo, to compare with Steve's claim of 2x-4x speed improvements over
the iMac G5 -- a claim I didn't believe. First, I had long discussions on the
Fool over the SPECfp benchmarks that were the basis for Steve's claims and
concluded that they were cherrypicked to highlight a dual core chip over a
single core chip (and, by the way, IBM has multicore G5 chips already, which
weren't compared). Xbench scores showed a 10-20% improvement at most, though
there turned out to be some issues of Quartz Beaming being turned on and
affecting the Xbench app on the Core Duo. Finally, real-world application speed
tests came in, mostly comparing native iLife apps on both iMacs, and the new
Core Duo only gets 10-30% speed boost over the G5, even with two
cores.
Anyway, I wasted a lot of time
posting other people's results to the Fool and discussing speed on the
discussion board.
Yesterday, I bought a
23" Apple Cinema Display HD to replace my old 17" Studio Display, which I intend
to sell along with the dual G4 on eBay (via isoldit). I also bought a Mac Mini
(G4 -- Intel transition not phasing me), and I set it up yesterday. Pretty
cool, especially once I use it as a headless server in a closet,
maybe.
Got sick with food poisoning
yesterday. An unopened jar of salsa, but it expired last month. Painful
cramps, until I made myself throw up in the toilet after 2 AM last night.
Better
today.
-----
The
boys are growing. William is getting harder to keep still at dinners; he's so
active and playful. However, he's learning to become remarkably quiet and
well-behaved, relatively speaking (still fidgety, but that's okay), at church.
On 1/15, the lady sitting next to us complimented him directly about how good he
was being.
Father Bernard N., our
priest from Kenya, is going back home to Kenya to start his own parish, having
been sent by his bishop just a few years ago to get his MBA here. When I first
arrived at our parish, I could only understand about 25% of his words, what with
his accent. Now that I'm beginning to understand him, he's leaving.
:-(
James is crawling and grabbing
things and pulling himself up to standing position all the time now. Plus,
since the AGU meeting last month, he recognizes me as his fun Daddy and crawls
to me whenever he wants to play! He still doesn't talk, though he babbles a bit
when he plays, sometimes. Da da da da,
mostly.
-----
Last
week, or maybe the week before, I saw the "Raising Cain" documentary on PBS.
It's about the crisis with boys in America, academically, socially,
psychologically, etc. Well worth watching, although I was already familiar with
a lot of the research being
discussed.
-----
I've
not been blogging as much as I'd like. Too tired, generally. Plus, Heather is
increasingly on travel, too. (Her sister Holly is staying with us a while,
while she's in the country to do her taxes.) Plus, iLife '06 (announced at
Macworld) has a new iWeb application that includes a blogging template. I might
try it out.
Posted: Tue - January 24, 2006 at 01:31 PM