Technology

I LOVE watching HD content on my HD TV at home. I’ve become a bit of a snob about it, in that it annoys me greatly when a show I watch isn’t shown in HD. I love watching DVDs on my widescreen TV as well, but haven’t yet made the jump to hi-definition DVDs. Which way do I go? HD DVD? Blu-Ray? The latest format war has been waging for quite a while now, with no clear winner emerging. It’s been a head-to-head fight.

However, a recent exclusivity announcement by Warner Bros. may affect the outcome of this battle. WB recently announced that they would go exclusively with Blu-Ray. Up until now, they had been releasing movies in both hi-definition formats, and will continue to do so until May, after which they will only release videos in the Blu-Ray format. It is being speculated that New Line Cinema and HBO might follow suit (they are both subsidiaries of Warner) very soon.

This doesn’t mean HD DVD’s dead any time soon, though. This past summer, it was announced that both Paramount and Dreamworks were going exclusive with HD DVD.



Despite each camp having their own exclusive supporters, Blu-Ray has held the market share since the beginning as you can see by the above graphic. This is also intriguing because Blu-Ray players are more expensive than HD DVD players. Even after massive price cuts around the holiday season for HD DVD players, that camp is unable to break 40% for market share in any given week.

I anxiously await for one of these formats to emerge victoriously. I’m hesitant to buy a player one way or the other just yet, as I’m sure that purchase will ultimately lead to the demise of whatever format I chose. That’s the kind of luck I have. Hopefully one of the formats wins soon...

So, I’ve had the macbook for a little over a week now, and my initial impressions are good. As I continue to figure things out and adjust, I can’t help but feel terribly annoyed by a few things.

For one, there’s no “delete” key on the keyboard. There’s a key labeled ‘delete’, but it functions as the backspace key. The lack of a delete key is probably the biggest annoyance.

Secondly, there are no home/end/page up/page down keys... sorta... they’re there, but you have to hold a second key (the “command” key) down while hitting one of the arrow keys. So {Command}-{Left Arrow} is the equivelant of Home, or {Command}-{Down Arrow} is the equivelant of Page Down. I can get used to this one, I suppose...

Another major annoyance is the inability to resize windows from anywhere but the bottom right corner. So, for example, you can’t do a horizontal-only resize, where you drag the right or left side of a window so you’re only able to resize the width of a window. Apparently I used this a lot, because I keep going to do this, and find myself unable to. Oh well...

The macbook tends to get REALLY hot. I’m sure other laptops do too, but this seems excessive.

If anyone has suggestions on how to get around the “delete key” and “window resize” annoyances, they’d be much appreciated.

Other than these few things, I’m pretty happy. I imagine I’ll learn to live with the above, and eventually, they won’t be annoyances anymore.

Update: It’s actually {fn}-{arrow up/down} that gives you the equivelant of page up/down

I’m not sure if Armageddon is upon us or what’s goin’ on, but folks, last night I did something I never thought I would do... not as long as Microsoft ruled the earth. I actually ordered an Apple computer... a Macbook, to be specific. I have been anti-Apple¹ for as long as I can remember, but not too long ago I was at a friend’s home. This particular friend had recently bought himself a Macbook (he also, at the time, was a recent Mac convert), and so while I was there, he showcased it to me. I was actually blown away by what I saw. The UI was fantastic with many features that would certainly enhance my computing experience. The speed of the laptop was equally impressive. I grow so tired of how things slow down on Windows the more windows you have open. My friend had a LOT of things open on his Mac, and was able to very quickly switch between all of them with no lag. Everything just appeared to be blazing fast.

So I let my experience at my friend’s house soak in for a week or two, researched as much as I could about the Mac. I thought about everything I do on a daily basis with my computer and tried to figure out if I could get by with a Mac. I mean, let’s be real here, for most of us, it is quite difficult to get away from Microsoft. I have a couple applications that I use that I could not live without, which don’t exist for the Mac. Thanks to the beauty of Parallels, I think I will be able to run those applications on my new Mac.

And so it was decided, after months of thinking... I was going to get a Mac. Next came the waiting period, as I waited for the idea of a fairly expensive purchase sink in with Mrs. Goatload. After about a month, that waiting period ended yesterday

I’m very excited to get this Mac, and I anxiously await its arrival in the mail, but at this time, I would like to extend my deepest apologies to all those “Mac lovers” I’ve offended over the years. You know who you are... I didn’t really mean those things, I hope you live long healthy lives... I swear it!

This will be a huge change for me, so I’m hoping the transition to a Mac goes smoothly. I’m lucky enough to have a few close friends who already use Macs who I’ll certainly be leaning on for assistance in the coming months as I learn how to do things on it. Stay tuned to see how things go!

¹ I’m still anti-iPod though...