A little update..

Contrary to popular belief, I am still around. Truth be told, I have been somewhat busy with getting "in touch" with my old IT roots. Oh the wonders of the IT field are creeping back up on me...

Back in the day, early turn of the millennium, I got my certs on Windows 2000, the MCSE, the -SA, the -P, the CompTIA N+, and the CompTIA A+. The whole alphabet soup. So driven by my love/hate of relationship of computing that lurks deep within me, and because the freaking ad flyer said we could get some high double-digit salary in no time, I went down the IT route. It didn't help either that the owner of the place drove a Ferrari Modena 360 cliche-first-Ferarri-owner red. By the look of things, the IT field was it. Computers (or Microsoft certs.) are the answer to all your needs, they implied.

Looking back, I have no Ferrari, or black BMW M3. The owner of the placed ended up leaving the place with people's money, and I'm looking to update my certifications. What can I say, it's funny how things change so much, but at the same time they are those small fragments that tell you things are still the same in some places. For good, or worse.

And so I sit here once again, lurking deep in computing/network terminology, once more. Not as thrilled as the first time, but yet with some expectation left. Maybe this time it works? Who knows. I must say, going back these five years (damn, time flies) to retake this stuff, has lead to many memories of those times. I must say those were some crazy, hectic times. Oh man...I salute you The Academy of South Fla. and everything that went on around that time.

Don't have enough money for the Photo? Get the GIMP-Shop instead.

Many of us swear and die by the wonders of Adobe's Photoshop. It's an awesome application for what it does, despite some shortcomings here and there. It has been the de facto standard in the graphic industry for ages, and it will most likely remain that way for ages to come.

Having said all of that, Photoshop costs a generous amount of cash. Truth be told, many people (ahem..) tend to pirate the freaking thing with each new release. Sure we may all have to end up moving to Sealand and talk like pirates in the process, but we do it nevertheless. Why? Because Photoshop is that good, and as I said, it is used everywhere.

But what choices do you have if you don't want to end up living in a platform out the coast of England? Why open-source of course, thus the GIMP is brought into the picture.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor application with some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; licensed under the GNU General Public License, GIMP is free software. The latest version of GIMP is 2.2.13, released on August 25, 2006

As told by the Wikipedia entry here. So that's all fine and dandy, except it doesn't really work like Photoshop, the menus are all wrong! Don't worry my pirate friend in rehab, that's why we have GIMPshop.

GIMPshop is a modified version of the GIMP intended to mimic that look and feel of our beloved expensive Photoshop counterpart. It was originally created for OSX (of course), but now you can find ports for Windows, Linux, and even Solaris. Not to mention the OSX version is nowadays a Universal Binary. Hell, these guys are even in better shape than Adobe with the Intel Mac support ;).

As you can see, for a free open-source alternative the GIMP (or GIMPshop) truly makes a worthy contender. Sure it may not have all of Adobe's Photoshop features. It may not look or feel 100% like Photoshop. But for the average Joe, it does all you ever wanted and then more. So if you don't want to feel as much of a pirate , give the GIMP a try. Argghhhhh you won't be disappointed matey!

OSX Reloaded

Now that I have my PC back in "operational status", I was able to accomplish the long overdue reinstall of OSX on my PowerMac G5.

Using my PC as a backup storage device basically , I backed up my 20-and-then-some Gigs iTunes library, iPhoto library, documents, random crap, etc. After two+ hours of a tedious backup procedure (I should get a firewire external HD next time..) I was ready to re-install OSX on my PowerMac.

One of the main reasons why I needed to do a reinstall was the crazy amount of kernel panics I was been submitted to on a regular basis. The culprit, and I'm pretty sure of this, was the evil piece of crap software called 'Virtual PC" by the fine folks at Redmond, WA. Worst piece of software. Ever.

Anyhow, I went ahead held-C while booting up, click here-there, customized the install, and off it went. A couple of minutes later, I was greeted by the familiar default OSX desktop with the gargantuan Dock. First thing I did was to minimize the Dock, and turn on the magnification effect. Secondly, I ran Software Update...and holy crap was there a whole lot to update. Given that my so-called "broadband" service is crap (avg. download speed 25-30 kb/s) this turned out to be a 3-4 hour affair to get all updates. *sighs*.

Long story short, I am now back with a freshly installed, and most importantly, stable system. So far I haven't gotten one panic *knocks on wood*. Sure it may have been one tedious, time-wasting event, but hey..not like you gonna do this every other week, right? Lets hope everything continues to be nice and calm with at least this Mac. Oh and before I forget, never install Virtual PC on your Mac, to quote Bobby Boucher's Mom..."IT'S THE DEVIL!!"

Labels: 10.4, Apple, Mac, OSX, Virtual Pc

Video Of the Week #10: The funny return

Haven't done one of these for a quite a while, so here we go. Behold the first VOtW of 2007. To re-kick the saga of net-bound videos here at Void, I give you an oldie but goldie YouTube vid.

Some may recall how scary (and dark) DOOM 3 was. Truth be told, I played the game and I had my "OMGWTF" momments. Although I don't think my moments were as severe as these guys here. Staged or not, I still laugh my head off to these guys. Enjoy.

No longer #1...

.. at least when you Google "void inside". A short time ago the void was the number one hit whenever it got Google'd. Today it's a different story, the number one stop belongs to a band's MySpace page. Go figure...

I guess I am no longer "feeling lucky" ;).

Panic at the Kernel

So here I was almost done writing a moderate sized impression on Casino Royale, when my PowerMac decided it was time to panic...

*sighs* I really need to reinstall OS X on this thing. Man does it sucks losing what you had done out of nowhere. Well, look forward to my impressions on Casino Royale... possibly the day after the Steve-note tomorrow.

Damn you kernel panic, you creep out of nowhere and steal my blog posts like that..

24

The magic number everybody can associate with the God-like figure Jack Bauer is. Matter of fact, we all know that the final battle that will determine the fate of humanity as we know it will be the ultimate showdown between Mr. Bauer and Him... and by Him I mean The Man of Texas, Chuck Norris.

Putting our end of days theory aside, twenty-four is also..(and I quote Wikipedia for this):

• The number of frames per second at which motion picture film is usually projected .
• The number of cycles in the Chinese solar year.
• The number of Carats representing 100% pure gold.
• The number of bits a computer needs to represent truecolour images (for a maximum of 16,777,216 colours).
• The number of letters in both the modern and classical Greek alphabet. For the latter reason, also the number of chapters or "books" into which Homer's Odyssey and Iliad came to be divided.
• and more..
  

Having said all that, as of today twenty-four is also the number of years that I carry with me. Yes sir, twenty-four years old, let me close my birthday...er..day by thanking everyone that said "happy birthday". Let's hope this 24th. year of life brings something good to "write home about" as they say..

Happy New Year!

Well another year has passed, and so another one begins...

I just wanted to wish everybody a good '07. If 2006 was good for you, then I hope 2007 keeps that "goodness" going. If 2006 left something to be desired, well lets try switching things around and make this year count. We have 364 days to make things count, lets get started and make double-o seven a good year.