From my wife

Mouse gesture art in Chrome.

Sorry for no posts in a long time

I lost the www.ericbuschman.net domain, and the www.deathshade.com domain.

So I was finally able to register the www.ericbuschman.me domain.

Now just how to let everyone know where I am at :)

What we have been going through

Sunday morning, 7:40AM. The wife and I wake up as sometimes happens on the weekend for various reasons (used to getting up that early during the week, nose stuffed up due to allergies, etc) wake up. We hear what sounds like the neighbors taking a shower, and don't think anything of it, but I decide I wanted to get up to grab some breakfast and relax a little before maybe taking a nap on a lazy Sunday morning. We open the door and the neighbor's shower sounds suddenly a lot closer and louder. Not really paying any attention to it, we decide to continue with our plans for maybe pancakes or whatever else we decide for breakfast. Gail decides to hop onto her computer to check her email, steps out into the living room, and ends up having her foot completely drenched, with water completely covering the surprised and suddenly cold foot.

I know it doesn't make sense that we didn't realize that water was all over our living room before we actually got there, the sound had been getting louder but we figured that somehow we had left the faucet on all night or some other silly thing. And we were rudely awakened.

So now two days later and several insurance phone calls later here is what our living room and garage (because it is located directly beneath the living room) looks like:





We know everything is going to work itself out, our insurance carrier is awesome and is helping us through everything, but for the next couple of weeks (months?) living in our house is going to be not as comfortable as we had gotten used too.

Blog back online

Had some domain issues, now hosted as www.ericbuschman.net. Welcome back!

Oops Blizzard!

The Getty – Family Festival (Japan)

This weekend The Getty museum hosted a festival in honor of japanese culture.  I wasn’t early enough to see some of the more interesting things, just got to listen to some traditional drumming, and check out some lacquer artwork.  Here are some photos from the day (and a video):

Mac Mini

So recently I was having computer problems.  It ended up being a shot power supply.  But before I was able to resolve that issue I decided to embark on an adventure and try something new.  So I picked up a Mac Mini to tide me over until I was able to get my computer up and running.

First things first, the unboxing of it I don’t have pictures of (will get better at that since I got my new camera and am going to try and be more official in my posting).  But as with all of Apples products the packaging was clean, to the point, and very attractive.  The hardware was covered by a thin plastic scratch resistant sticker.  But other then that there was no packaging, the box came apart and there was the Mini.  Underneath it was the cables and manuals (etc), so the process of unboxing probably took 5 minutes at most.

Setup was easy, plug in the power (which comes with an external brick power supply much like a laptop), monitor, keyboard and mouse, and it was up and running.  The initial setup of OS X is simple and just involved choosing the current time zone, and the user account name you wanted to be your default user.  I would say within 20 minutes I was on the internet and surfing in Safari.

OS X is definitely a very pretty operating system, but coming from a Windows background there is a learning curve.  Instead of CTRL being one of base keys for quick commands, it is all done with the apple command button (looks like an apple).  I would say after getting Firefox loaded it took me at least 2-3 days before I wasn’t hitting CTRL-T to open a new tab and move to Apple-T.

The Finder application is in my opinion inferior to the windows Explorer alternative.  They wanted to make it feel different and break the mold that all other operating systems use, and in doing so they made something that isn’t quite as intuitive and useful as Explorer.

Gaming on the Mac Mini is as expected not that great.  The 8400M graphics chipset is not really powerful enough for the 23” LCD monitor I run at 1600x1200 resolution.  Running World of Warcraft on the Mini I had to do a lot of tweaking to get it to run smoothly, but once I got past the setup it worked great.

The reason why I returned the Mac Mini.  Well actually there were several.  First I heard that Apple might finally be announcing a Touch screen Mac soon, at least those are the rumors.  With a wife who is a graphical artist this would be something to keep an eye on.  Second when my desktop was back operational I realized that the Mac Mini was probably going to get pushed down to a glorified external harddrive, and I could buy a cheaper solution for that.  Thirdly with the up coming release of Snow Leopard, it seems waiting for new hardware with the new OS loaded already would be a more cost effective strategy if I really wanted to make the switch.

The Conclusion:

Apple products are very well designed, and work well.  I did not have any crashes while testing out OS X although I have heard of others having issues.  Without the support of the game development community the poor selection of games makes it not very interesting for me.  If I were strictly a web surfer / writer / coder / whatever I would probably end up going Linux for the over all savings.  But since I’m primarily a gamer a Mac will not be useful for me in the near term future.

P.S. Game Development Companies, porting to an Intel Mac shouldn’t be that hard, step up already ;)