Journal singularity's Journal: On account of a slow Sunday afternoon 1
Long day today. In the office from 10am-6pm. In the office the same time tomorrow. A nice way to spend a long weekend, I suppose. I am off Monday, though.
So far today I have not done a lot. I researched getting a SCUBA certification before I go back down to the Virgin Islands (provided I go back this summer, of course). I watched a little of the "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast" video I received for Christmas.
Last night I went and saw "Big Fish". It actually was pretty good. I had been expecting a little more, but it was still worth seeing. To be honest, I feel like Tim Burton got more caught up in the special effects and the stories than in the actual plot. He tried to bring it together at the end, but it did not make up for the lack earlier in the movie.
Almost all of the kids are gone this weekend.
I have also been playing around a little bit with GarageBand, the new music-generation software from Apple. I really like it. I consider myself to have almost no musical talent (I listen to a lot, but creation and playing is a complete other story). In about twenty minutes of work, I had a song that did not sound too bad (well, a little under a minute of music right now, but...).
Not having talent to add original music on top of what is already provided, the song sounds a little ambient since it is just loops, but given everything else, it is not too bad. Once I feel comfortable enough, I might post it somewhere to download.
GarageBand is still obviously v1.0, but works well enough for now.
In other, very happy news, the new iPhoto is much more responsive, even with some of my 4000+ picture albums. I have complained (vocally) in the past about iPhoto's inability to deal well with albums with more than about 800-1000 pictures. I am proud to report that while the new iPhoto is not as fast as Steve Jobs tried to make it out during the recent keynote speech, it is definitely acceptable even with my largest libraries.
I am having some problems with the picture sharing. Some photos I am unable to open in an edit window (display window, though, since I cannot edit a picture on another computer). Instead I get an error saying "The file XXXX.jpg cannot be found." I assume this will be fixed in a later version.
Other than that, things are pretty slow. Kids are sitting around waiting to find someone to take them to the mall.
SCUBA! (Score:2)
I highly recommend doing your certification locally, not while on holiday. One of my biggest peeves with holiday certification is that there are too many people who get certified that should never have gotten certified. The "don't want to ruin the poor sod's holiday" mentality and lax rules in other countries. You should be able to get better instruction locally, and most im