My in-laws got us this new coffee maker as a joint graduation present.

I still don’t know what to think of it.

Rather than use the old fashioned method of brewing coffee, this contraption uses little air-sealed discs (I try not to think of the packaging waste this thing encourages) and brews up hot beverages fairly quick. So far, the hot chocolate is disgusting (my wife likes it; it’s not hot chocolate unless it’s dark chocolate to me), the coffee is so-so (I think I’m just brainwashed into fresh-ground brewing), but the tea is smooth and the cappuccinos are dead-on.

So, I use it almost exclusively for cappuccinos and revert to Mr. Coffee for the regular stuff. Fortunately, this thing makes me exempt from being one of those proud owners of a cappuccino maker that never gets used, but it renders me as a defenseless, lost male looking for disc packs at Bed Bath and Beyond.

The rule of thumb is that computers are like cars when it comes to purchase time: NEVER buy a first year model. Sure, the benchmark tests are coming in, and surprise–the MacBook Pros are faster than the Powerbooks. What surprises me, though, is that the online community hasn’t blatantly pointed out that the latest Macbooks are only powered by 32-bit Yonah chips.

Wasn’t the wait all about portable 64-bit G5 processors?

Well, I hope I won’t get trigger happy in the meanwhile, but I’m going to wait for Intel‘s 64-bit “Merom” processors, which should be released in September alongside the new Windows Vista. This timeframe seems to match Macrumor’s buyer’s guide timeline, too.

Football’s drawing to a close (Yay Steelers!), still some time until Chef Ramsey returns, and I still haven’t justified the need for cable television. What’s an avid couch potato to do?

In truth, I rarely ever watch TV. If I’m not working on code or reading, I’m up at 3 a.m. posting to this blog (as I’m doing right now). I have been slowly sucked into watching American Idol, though. I’d label the show as inverse-climactic, because I stop watching it as soon as the talented ones get to Hollywood. Is anyone with me? I find it’s just sooo much more entertaining not just to see Simon rant, but to also see and hear what delusional, wannabe singers arrive at the auditions. It’s simply jaw-dropping to find Michael Jackson imitators and dancers with props act like this is their true calling in life. I pray that I never find myself to be so obtuse, and that those people are the ones that don’t vote in elections.

I have a problem where I don’t give up on the unattainable.

In this case, I’m just going to have to wait.

Unsatisfied with ASDT but still wanting to find a way to author Actionscript 2.0 within the beautiful API of Eclipse, I tried out FDT, the pricey (199 EURO) plugin for Eclipse. Available for Mac as of a few months ago, I didn’t quite understand why someone would charge money for a plugin to an open-source application…now I know.

Maybe I didn’t get ASDT to work to its full potential, but FDT is wonderful; trying it erases the cost in my head. Setup took a little while, as I first started getting UTF8-BOMs in my class files and had to import Macromedia‘s Core Classes as a linked library (Macromedia placed the mx, Flash Player 7, and Flash Player 8 classes in separate folders–and not as packages, meaning Eclipse/FDT didn’t know how to interpret the core classpath).

Despite FDT‘s ease-of-use, I’m going back to Flash 8. Why? Well, there’s a bug with integrating Flash‘s HelpPanel with Eclipse (only on Mac, of course). I use help religiously, plus I have to compile in another program, so it’s back to the drawing board for me. My portfolio site will get finished…someday. Oh, I forgot to mention that I’m cheap (200 EUROS? that’s like $255!).

I’m happily beta testing Moses’s ZigoEngine+Fuse Kit 1.1, an Actionscript animation library, as I am working on my portfolio site (which will someday be finished!). While the library is extremely useful, the documentation was a little hard to follow. I e-mailed Moses with the issue and suggested to him to use JavaDocs format. I originally directed him to try out VisDoc, which is a solid html generator for Actionscript commenting. This was before I came across Senocular’s ZenDoc, a free generator built in PHP. It’s pretty solid, check it out.

A little ways south of Harrisburg on I83 is Yocumtown. What is Yocumtown? It’s Central Pa’s passport to international beer if you ask some, but to me it will always represent a unique luxury that only Central Pa offers: Maple Donuts.

Known as liquid cocaine in my Messiah days (I never went to Messiah, but I sure did play a lot of Mario Kart there), I originally tried this place out on my way home from Baltimore (back in the days when I lived in Baltimore). It wasn’t long before I was taking trips to Maples at 4 a.m. with friends from Messiah’s dorms.

I was feeling fairly nostalgic this past weekend after finding and visiting the Goddess of Caffeine, so I decided to stop in at the donut shop. At 300 calories a pop, it’s definitely not dough that’s weighing down the donut box, but it still beats anything else out there.

As I pointed out on the CodeTree Development Blog, I’ve been very impressed with TinyMCE, so much so that I’ve included it throughout CodeTree and would like to use it in Beyond Second v2. I’m sure hardcore developers have known about it for a long time, but the last time I looked for a MS Word-like interface it wasn’t up to snuff with Mac (and not under a GNU). Fortunately, it seems to work on everything except Safari, which bugs out on the JavaScript. No problem, just a simple JS detection script does the job until Apple gets their browser corrected:

var isSafari = (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Safari") != -1) ? true : false;
// Detect Client Browser type
if(!isSafari){...}

With Media Play staggering on its last limbs, I felt obligated to make off with a deal or two. The Nintendo DS section looked like a supermarket bread shelf right before a snow storm. The CD racks weren’t much better; most were littered with edited Snoop Dogg albums and artists who haven’t seen radio play since the grunge era. Fortunately, electronica still had some gems, and I left with five CDs for $20. A Paul Van Dyk double disc for 60 percent off?! A Digweed album with no vocals for $7?! Of course I’ll take it!

I just hope I’m not becoming some high school friend’s parent that needed ridiculing for being stuck in a previous decade’s music. Gone are the days when U2 posed as a some wannabe cool electonica band. Moby (unfortunately) has moved on to composing and looks to be more successful as a tea shop magnate. Clint Mansell has practically disappeared. Heck, even business suits are slowly realizing that techno is growing stale for their Flash intros. As for me, I’m scared to pick up any techno album post 2003.

Was Eminem right when he said “Nobody listens to techno?”

After installing and trying out FAME, I reopened Eclipse the next day only to have MTASC not compile (at least according to Flashout). Supposedly, MTASC couldn’t find the class “Flash” (I didn’t author it). I juggled the settings around, and when that failed I searched the boards. Then, I started posting all over the place. When responses didn’t really come in, I started writing to the authors of the software and plugins themselves.

In short, I’ve returned to the Flash API.

I’ve seen the warnings for Mac users that developing in open source Flash isn’t easy, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t worth the hassle. If my primary environment were a PC, I’d probably give it another go, since there are tons of great AS2.0 text editors out there. ASDT isn’t quite as thorough as Flash’s code completion/hints/help, and I’m just not up for paying for FDT.

I suppose I ought to mention that when I reset my CurrentJDK to Java 1.5 in Mac OS X that Firefox 1.5 crashed any time I viewed an applet. I played around with the JavaEmbeddingPlugin0.9.6+b but didn’t really get it to work, so I just followed the directions backwards to see Java applets again.
AS3.0 will be out officially soon enough, and by that time Adobe will have an official plugin for Flash/Flex. In the meanwhile, I’ll just have to deal with the timeline staring back at me.