Tons going on. There are quite a few little thing that I’d like to comment on.
Final Fantasy XII
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII and so far I’ve been having quite a bit of fun. I just escaped from the Nalbina dungeons and I’m about to enter the Aerodrome to meet Balthier. Now I’ve played every Final Fantasy since my first, which was VII, except for 8 (no interest) and 11 (no interest).
I’ve been enjoying the new battle system, it’s quite nice. I kind of miss the old fixed camera system instead of giving the user full control. I like the way it notifies you when you are near treasure when you’re walking around. The gambit system is quite fun, and takes some of the monotony out of the game.
That said, the parties still have some very artificial limitations. Why can I have four people in my party, all fighting, when one is a guest but when they are all officially in my party, I can only have three? This is always something that has annoyed me. If I have a party of 6, why can’t all six help me? Now I could understand a bit when everyone had to be controlled individually during battles, but that problem is gone with the gambit system. Now this limitation just feels more artificial.
And the license system? A bit annoying.
MacBook Pro
Last week I bought a new MacBook Pro to replace my little old PowerBook G4. At this point, the G4 has become my favorite computer I’ve ever owned. Not only did it have a great GUI and unix on it, it was absolutely dead silent unless you really pushed it.
I’ve been loving my new MacBook Pro through. The LED backlighting is great. It’s a little disconcerting that it switches between brightness levels instantly instead of warming up/down to them like a florescent light does. But the thing is still very quiet, and really REALLY fast. Things that stressed my old little G4 near the max (I’m looking at you, YouTube) barely show up on my CPU monitor now. Everything feels fast.
But I’m REALLY amazed at OS X’s ability to transfer stuff between computers. I figured I’d try it (after all, reinstalling the OS is nothing) so I let Apple copy my settings over. After 2-3 hours, it was all done. When OS X booted up for the first time, almost everything was set up exactly like my last laptop. My music and photos were all there. All my stored web passwords and such were all there. It was amazing. I remember how hard it was to move from one Windows PC to another. People just don’t know what they are missing.
Photos
In the last few weeks, I’ve taken a ton of photos. I finally finished going through them and tagging/adjusting them, and as such I am putting up a huge number of them for people to look at in the 2007 Photos section. I’ve also been thinking about adding a little photo to ever post here from my collection, just for visual interest and so more people can see my photos.
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll stay on my current software system for running this site. It’s starting to annoy me. But I figure Apple will announce what’s up with iWeb tomorrow so I’ll know what’s going to happen. If they have fixed some of my criticisms (see the post about iWeb last year) then I’ll move over to it. If not, I guess I’ll just have to work on converting to WordPress or something. I’m not that interested in writing a full blog management system again, and my current system really would need quite a bit of work to get where I’d like it.
