The Holidays were a mellow time in the life of Joe. I took 2 weeks off of work and just sort of decompressed. Good times were had by all.
I played some games online with Doug, spent a little time with the big swede and hung out on Christmas day with some friends from the dojo. Kelli and I shot our annual holiday harassment card which I will post for your amusement shortly.
I’ve picked up a Canon 5DmkII, which is pretty fantastic. I’ve done 2 shoots with it so far and by and large the transition from the 5D is seamless. I also grabbed some 16GB CF cards because this bad boy produces 25-30MB raw files. It’s no joke. Kelli got my a 24mm 2.8 lens for Christmas, and it was not a strong enough performer for landscape work. I’m going to swap it out for a 28mm 1.8.
Kelli and I are making plans to spend 10 days in May checking out DC and NYC along with Dayne and Julie from AK. Should be good times.
I’ve been tooling around for the past few days on the Hackintosh, working with the new EFIv9 boot loader. It’s actually really impressive how much stuff just works these days. I’m still got a few wrinkles to iron out regarding IONetworking to fix time machine and file sharing, but I’m pretty confident that I’ve got the issues nailed and can fix those tonight. The only real sore spot remaining these days is Firewire speeds which are about half of what they should be in 10.5. I haven’t seen anyone who has fixed this problem. You can replace the Firewire kexts with the ones from 10.4.9 and it fixes the speed problem, but then the machine will no longer sleep. I should point out, I’m only working on this because I want to play around with the new EFI bootloader, and everything (except FW) was working fine before. New EFI just lets you run a (almost) completely stock 10.5 install and use normal apple updates without fear of nuking your install.
Every once in a while I think about getting a Mac Pro and then remember that Apple wants almost 3k for a system comparable in most respects to this homebuilt $1k rig. No thanks.
Personally I don’t think Apple has cared about its desktop hardware business for a while. Almost all of their hardware innovation seems tied up in laptops and iphones.