Tasty macbook pro/Dell comparison

MacWorld posted a comparison of a Mac Book Pro and a similarly-configured Dell Inspiron, and, based on list prices, the mac book pro is about $450 less than the Dell. Dell, the low-cost leader, outpriced by Apple. What is the world coming to? It's interesting that Dell is the pricing target for Sun as well.

New Cellphone tools

I got a new cellphone this weekend - a Samsung A900. This is Samsung's answer to the RAZR. Unfortunately, it doesn't support iSync on the mac - nasty nasty. There are some ways to work around this, however.

To copy contacts:

• Create a group in Address Book with the contacts you want to have on the phone.
  
• Note that Company contacts with no first name or last name entered will show up as "no name" on the phone.
  
• Set Address Book preferences to export as vCard 2.1 format, not vCard 3.0.
  
• Option-drag them to a folder on your drive.
  
• Use Bluetooth file exchange to copy the contacts over to the phone.

To make AAC ringtones:
If you have Quicktime Pro installed, you can make them very easily.

Open up Quicktime Pro and load in the audio file you want to turn into a ringtone. You'll want to trim it down to ~25 seconds worth of audio. Go to File -> Export. In the drop down option titled "Export:", make sure you select Movie to MPEG-4, and click on Options....Once you do that, under the dropdown, select Audio, and make sure Audio Track is set as "Music", and and set the slider for the kbits/second to 24. Under channel, set it to "Mono", and Output Sample Rate to 22.050kHz. Now, set the Encoding Quality to "Best". Click on OK, and click on Save. This will save your file on your desktop.

Now, you have a (filename).mp4 file. Make sure to remove all the spaces in the file name, and rename the extention from mp4 to m4a. If you can not see the extentions, you need to enable that in your windows folder options.

You now have an AAC-endcoded file, and can upload it by using various AAC uploaders.

Thanks go out to these bloggers and posters:
www.sprintusers.com forum on a900 and ringtones
Using an a900 and a mac
www.sprintusers.com forum on using an a900 with a mac

Jello Jamboree

Yesterday (friday) at church, they had an "intergenerational event" called "jello jamboree". This is a whole series of jello-focussed events, ranging from bringing in homemade jello creations for judging, to jello tasting, to all sorts of messy jello flinging and tossing for the junior-high-school crowd. We did "jello kitty" - a hello kitty face in Jello. Pictures of Jello Kitty to follow. Jello Kitty didn't win any prizes, unfortunately, we were shut out by a very pretty, Van Gogh-like sunflower picture done in Jello, but I think it was the best in the show.

Laurel, in her own little adorable linguistic way, suggested that it would be better to have a name that rhymed, and so they should have a "jello bordello". My first reaction was "hmm - that might be pushing it, even for unitarians", and my second reaction was "where did you learn that word?!?"

Good old Albion

My dad got his B.A. at Albion College in Michigan. Good old Albion. I didn't even think of going there when I was getting ready to leave high school. But then there was this interesting article on the freakonomics blog. The item they found indicates that maybe I judged too quickly. I note that they didn't check Macalester, so who knows where things would have turned out. I certainly can't complain too much about my net realized value from Macalester's college cuteness...