I’m feeling better today, I can’t speak for Billy though. The sound of football is prowling through the house making today a rather boring Sunday. While I’d rather gouge my eyes out than watch a game there just isn’t anything else to do. I can’t hang out with anybody for fear of getting them sick so I’m pretty much just stuck at home. I don’t even want to be in my room because I’ve seen so much of it the past few days. I could clean, lord knows it needs it; but what’s the point anyway? It won’t stay clean.

Billy has apparently moved on from ultralight ciggarettes to menthol. I can’t say I’m happy about that, but what can I do about that either. I was hoping he’d try and quit again but, that’s not going to happen I guess.

Twitter is becoming the bain of my existence it seems. Not the actual service but more so the iPhone clients. They all seem to have some caveat of equal but completely different annoyance. Twitterrific doesn’t do push and loads slow, Echofon has push but it’s far from instant, and it doesn’t support display names only usernames. Tweetie just doesn’t do anything worthwhile at all. Wait I didn’t tag this post as a rant so I should quit while I’m ahead…

I hate being sick, it messes up your routine. I should be hungry, but I’m not. I want to eat, but I don’t even know if it would be a meal or just eating for the sake of eating. Ugh, there isn’t anything to eat in the house anyway.

I’m going to miss the new Family Guy tonight because Desperate Housewives is starting up!!! I have so many shows to keep up with downloading. Desperate Housewives, Family Guy, Cleveland Show, American Dad, the Simpsons; and that’s just Sundays. I have a weekly lineup too! I’m going to fill up this terabyte drive I bought (just for my iTunes library) pretty quick at this rate. Oh and not to spoil the Cleveland Show for anyone who hasn’t seen the pilot yet (it’s been all over the Internet all summer), the show looks good, but not great.

Well this killed a few minutes of the day. I purposly typed it on my phone for that very reason.

– Kevin Salas
Posted from my iPhone

I think we are all slowly getting sick around the house. Billy got it first and we aren’t 100% sure exactly where he got it from. It seems to just be an annoying cold so hopefully nothing too major. Each day it seems like another one of us gets the symptoms. I don’t think (knock on wood) that my version is nearly as severe as his. I started taking airborne as soon as he got sick so maybe that will help. My mom started feeling bad today, she said everyone has been sick where she works too so I guess it’s just going around.

Even being sickly though I still was able to beat GTA-IV today! I’ve only had the game for a year now. In all fairness it wasn’t until recently that I was all that into trying to beat it. I kinda want to buy an Xbox360 but I’m also afraid I’ll just spend all that money on it and it’ll collect dust like the ps3 and wii do. Maybe I should sit down and play some more of the Lego wii games we have. There are plenty of other things I’d probably get more use out of to spend that money on.

Oh, and I don’t know how many out there reading my blog are local; but as you might have heard we in Atlanta had a really severe flood earlier this week. Thankfully while our neighborhood sits in a hole our house sits pretty high up so we are safe. Our yard and pool on the other hand got everyone else’s runoff it seems. While it has dried out the ground is still saturated and we are in for more flood weather tonight and tomorrow (5″ of rain expected). I don’t mind the thunder and lightning, or even the rain; I just hope the power doesn’t go out for very long.

Well I better get back to watching deal or no deal with my mom, lol. Especially as the directv is expected to go out as soon as a rain drop fall.

– Kevin Salas
Posted from my iPhone

Let me preface this by saying that I absolutely love my MacBook Air.

But…

I’ve owned it for over a year now, and ever since its purchase it has had one big plaguing problem. It has a tendency to overheat when doing mildly intensive tasks (mainly video/flash playback, or other intensive tasks). Now I know this is an ultraportable machine designed for use on the go, and its not intended to be a main workhorse computer. I do use this as my main machine, mainly because I hate having to keep track of all my files across various machines. For me, I don’t generally do many graphics or processor intensive tasks. I do encode video (tv shows) for playback and storage in iTunes on my television, however I store those on the Mac Mini that is attached to the tv and it has a faster processor; so it gets to have that fun. With my photography I do edit photos, but I absolutely hate Photoshop (mainly due to its complex nature, and all the classes I’ve taken in photoshop have taught me nothing) so I use Pixelmator (which runs so much better on any machine). So as you can see the only problem I should be having is storage, since this machine was only available with a 60gb SSD or 80gb ATA (and I have the 80gb). I’d love to have an SSD but thats a story for another day.

Now this overheating issue use to be much worse, Apple has issued a firmware update that helped mildly. No longer did it simply shut down one of the cores to cut back on heat problems, now it just scales back processing so bad that watching youtube videos are impossible. Playback becomes so choppy that you can’t make it through an entire video. It would get so hot trying to play freaking farmville on facebook (flash content) that it got out of sync with the server because of how slow it was loading.

On to this magical fix; and no I didn’t buy a Rev. B or C MacBook Air to replace it. There is a utility called CoolBook that allows mac users to effectively under-clock the processor. This utility lets you specify the voltage the processor is getting when its running at different speeds. This doesn’t change the speeds, just the amount of power its consuming, therefore keeping it from getting nearly as hot. This also has a side benefit of using less battery power and giving you more time away from the plug. The utility is $10.00 and its attached to the computer you are using so it isn’t transferrable, its tied along with its serial to the machine. I installed it earlier today, and while it has gotten warm, it hasn’t gotten nearly as hot. I’ve been able to watch all the things on youtube I’ve missed out on! Hell i’m tempted to install iMovie and see how well it’ll create them.

While I am in the minority for people that own Airs, I still have to say its a wonderful everyday main machine for my uses, and I love it. Just now, I love it even more.