MacBook Pros are here...

Duo. by OndraSoukup.

Just a quick one...they are here. I need to go play with mine a bit more. It works awesome, doesn't pickup my home wifi which is a great excuse to get AirPort Extreme now ;)

They keyboard is fabulous. LED screen shines so much I don't notice it's glossy.

Gotta run ;)

And you go see some unboxing pics ;)

I failed.

But at least I tried. I actually went to sleep after the last blogpost. I stayed up till 6:30 and woke up at 8:30...took a shower a it was just time to jet to work. But something has been wrong. My temporary office located in one of the meeting rooms got squatted by some Microsoft Axapta™ developers. That system never works. But that's not what I'm here for...my work was installing the damn computers. And this one was especially slow. Something wrong with the hard-drive. So basic installation of Windows XP took about two and half hours...and I couldn't nap because of the devs and some sales manager right next to me. 

I got home,  took a 23 minute nap at 6:15 PM...I was a bit tired, but after few minutes I was just fine. Then I tried to take a nap at 10:15 PM. Whoops. I woke up at 8:45 the next morning. And that's where I decided to screw this crazy sleeping scheme. Maybe in next few weeks I'll try again :) 

By the way, I scored myself a table in the IT office after cleaning it up...just a load of boxes and papers to stack somewhere else. The airconditioned office. Yes! Pretty nice as the temperatures raised from 16°C to 34°C during the day...and I get to be in the company of other IT guys. So now I know that Axapta sucks and those idiots in accounts screwed up the laptop order again.

The Poly-something sleep.

I know there's been something wrong with my sleep for long time. The time I've been going to sleep has been getting pushed back by the usual "I have to finish this" 5 or 10 minute stuff. And it's gone from 11PM to 2:30AM in last years. The bad thing about this ? I still had to get up for school, still the same time. 6:30AM. Which results in 4 hour sleep, right ? That caused me to develop a nasty habit of coming home, eating bits of food and falling asleep. You can't call that a nap cause I've sometimes napped longer than I actually slept at night. So all refreshed I woke up at 6 or 7 PM, ready to do stuff. I actually had 2 half-days and half-sleep during 24 hours. 4 hours sleep and then school and afternoon was 4-5 hour sleep and then doing something else during the night. 

It seemed like I had no other option than starting  to push the bed time back to midnight. But then my friend Adam Mulligan posted a message on twitter that confused me. Some strange words. Poly. That means something like ..."many" maybe. Phasic. Didn't realized what it was supposed to mean at the time. And Sleep. Adam will sleep. Hey, everyone does, no big deal. So let's try google, this makes no sense to me. Yet better, I'll ask wikipedia if it knows anything about the mysterious polyphasic sleep. 

Basically it's all about having some core sleep at night, I'll be making that those 4 hours of sleep I had till now, and some naps, 15 - 30 minutes, regularly,same time, every day. Your body will learn that you "need to" sleep like this and will fall into the deepest stage of sleep even when just napping for 15 minutes. I'll not go that deep to just nap and leave out the core sleep at night at all. But this can be also done after you learn how to nap the proper way. The average time to switch from regular monophasic sleep to polyphasic sleep is 14 days. During those, you may not feel well.

As my work is to install Windows machines manually, I'll start right tomorrow. The copy process and the initial unattended setup from Dell takes about 20 - 30 minutes, perfect for a nap. The only downside is that all offices have glass walls to the corridor, so everyone will see me sleeping in my overly comfortable chair...napping at work...I guess I'll just tape my blog URL onto the glass ;)

It is now 3:30 and I plan to wake up around 7:30 or 8 tomorrow. 10AM is when my work starts. Takes me about the same time to get there as it does to school. But I finally have time for morning RSS reading (cause newspaper is soooo pre-2000) and crunchy toasts! :-)

Can people on the internet behave ?

What a beautiful day, reading through my emails in the morning, I noticed I got message from youtube user NARUTOISLILDAV. 15 year old boy whose name is probably not "naruto" how he's filled out on his profile. Judging by the anime he has got in favorites with quite too much similar name.
without further ado, there's the message:
Subject:ds suck dick
can u tell me y ds is shit psp is the best ds is so wack i ut it in the floor and i out my feet on the top on psp all day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!by the psp lover

Whoa, wasn't that exciting? So short and it's really beefed up with emotions. I had to read it 10 times, really slow, trying to understand every single word. But I think I failed miserably.
So boy, there's your reply. Youtube had a bit problem with its lenght. Duh :)

i think i can't, but I can block fucktards who don't really know how to spell even basic sentences in their native language and make no content for youtube, therefore being useless for the community. make some better contribution than writing stupid messages like this.
I really understand your parents bought you just the PSP and said no to spend more money on the DS for you, 15 year old whelp, so you've became a sony fangirl, but there's no reason to be rude to other people. and yes, I have recently bought a PSP just for loco roco ;)

PS: grow up kid ;)

and some evidence for those who don't trust me ;)

click to enlarge

Don't get angry, but I think the most of these rude&stupid kids come from US. Is it the internet penetration? Parents? They shall teach them that the internets are not so annonymous tubes. Yes, I've mailed your parents kid -- google did it's job :P

Is can we be still heres?

But rather than writing about, I'm experiencing stuff. Flying around, socializing, getting out from house for whole weekend...the usual teenage stuff ;)

Hasn't had a single free weekend for like 4 weeks, school classes distract me so I can just read RSS and keep on telling my girlfriend (not anymore :/) that I'm really busy studying :)

And yes, when going to a party with your parents, don't get trashed as I did.

brb, flying back to prague and waiting for friday to come for a decent rave in duplex. cause I seem to like my stereotypes, fairly good music, foreign kids of my age and tequilla. my love in vodka is not that strong anymore, taste is taste :)

when nothing happens here, watch my flickr photos or keep eye on my twitter (like a blog, but less time consuming...well, more if I sum it all up :).

Blending the days, getting no sleep.

Just a quick one in the morning, all refreshed, albeit no sleep for 22 hours now. Just watched another 2 episodes of Veronica Mars, had a shower and thinking how my days are blending together. I had this on Thursday/Friday, came home at 7am after a really good party with british friends I met that night and woke up 11am the very same Friday. Yes, the same day, you know, I felt like my days have no boarders or something like that. Call it confused. Here we go again, I knew that if I went to sleep at 3am, I'd wake up at 6:30 all messed up and angry. So I've chosen to idle on Apple TV modding irc channel and buffer up some TV Shows into my brain. But I'm feeling like it's still Sunday. School will clear this up for me unfortunately, so I'm picking up a pair of Red Bulls on the gas station on my way to school. Or 2. You know, my frieds may have some early morning wakeup problems too ;)

Is this the end of iSights ?

They were the fist "serious" webcams out there. They started era of webcams which went onto the display top to make the "visual contact". Superior picture, autofocus and integrated noise canceling microphone. They were the best. When released and many years after. That was the happier part of their life.
They were pulled in Europe for ROHS, the were unavailable worldwide and disappeared from Apple store later on, leaving just accessories behind.

Now it's their final. I'm pretty sure we'll not see any new external iSight. Why ? Read the release notes for MacOS X 10.4.9 update.
Includes iChat support for USB Video Class webcams.
There were petitions and hacks to make USB cams work for you. Along with macam, people had a chance to use their 10$ USB webcams with iChat. I'd be happy to see this. But with announcement of new external iSight. Now it just looks like Apple has the "either get a computer with integrated camera, or we just don't care and leave the problem of camera up to you" pose.
So I'm happy I still have mine working. It's awesome and will stay like that. And in case it breaks - any tips for similar camera ? Really sensitive CCD chip, VGA resolution, autofocus and built-in microphone that works really nice ?

Try visiting www.apple.com/isight and you're redirected to the Apple Store with no iSight listed. Bye iSight, we'll all miss you.

Where kids go to play.

After scrolling my city up and down all around on Google Maps, I realized that some things in my life just don't change that much as it may seem. When I was a kid, 10-13 years ago, my mom often took me and my brother to the city centre, there was a nice playground, lot's of toys, a fountain. And a really nice ice-cream shop. My mom never bought more than 2 flavors, so I never actually tasted a lemon, chocolate and strawberry together. Thanks mom ;) A peaceful quite place right in the city centre.
Now let's see where I spend my happy times now. Walking distance is like 3 minutes from the ice-cream shop. I've already got my experience about drinking too much kinds of alcohol during the night. Cause weekend is the time when I want to kibosh, escape the boring week days. I just wanna play. Hang out with girls. Get healthily trashed and dance like mad...

And all I needed to do is cross the street. Places don't change themselves as much as you think. They do change you! Only if you will.
This way I'd like to thank my friend DJ Phunix for letting me in and discovering this awesome club. Duplex. The Place to be. One of the best clubs in Prague. At least all foreigners say so. Says hi to all drunk guys from Wales :P

How far away those actually are ?

and a little NSFW video from the MTV closing party with lexy and k-paul.
new owner is taking over. bye jaja, we'll miss you.
beware of the lady stripping, pretty nasty :P

Little treat.

Designed. by OndraSoukup.

In order to bump my style points by +10, I got an orange shuffle today. It's awesome. Light, clips onto everything, really stylish and plays music in a cool way. No display, no prediction which song will come after. No control. Life is random. Enjoy!
I'm pretty sure this is one of the must have things that every metrosexual should have. Why lug around with uncool, ugly Creative (hey, I never had one!) player. We love to wear stuff, right? Why not wear your music player? Be sure to pick a color that will suit the most stuff in your closet. And if you're the rainbow style guy who wears pretty much every color made, get more of those. Different colors. Dirty cheap. Go ahead!

Missing out school.

Not being in school for over 2 weeks has it's bright side. Waking up past 10 AM, eating junk food all day, watching stupid TV shows, riding snowboard, strolling around the town and flirting with girls. But remember kids ! Everything bright has the dark side too. For the first week, I thought I'll just die. Body temperature just below 40°C, all the pills screwing up my stomach. I missed my math test on friday, as well as the test from german language. german with lowercase "g". I pay no respect to that fucking language. I hate it, I let others know and in the half-term, I'm failing. I'm quite happy with that, the little rebel inside me is winning against that stupid teacher. No. Not teacher. She isn't really teacher, she has no degree, she's just the wife of our PE teacher. And that's the reason we have no other language. Because no-one is interested to be teaching bunch of brats with no respect...and underpaid. Some teachers can handle us. And some just take the book, read the content and tell us to finish the exercise 7 on page 51. Well. I can read books. I don't need a "teacher" for that. I need someone who would explain stuff to me and not say "it's in the book, you figure out". So I really do understand why I'm failing. And the clock ticks. 38 hours to go. Monday again. After two weeks. Waking up at 6:30 AM. Riding metro with people who don't wash themselves for like a week. Screw everyone, if I fail at the end of the year, I'll do something really nasty to the "teacher".

(oops, this blogpost turned into essay on "how I hate german language and my teacher"...no problem there, I do :)

R4DS is here!

I think this video speaks for everything. Sit back and enjoy the lust of unboxing it.

Making your life better.

By using a credit card. Or debit card in my case. Imagine having just bing bank notes and almost no change. You'll better understand me and my situation. Paying less than a dollar with my MasterCard for an ice-cream at McDonald's looked REALLY weird here in Czech Republic. People are just too old-fashioned here. They don't trust them, they say it wastes time. In the picture, you can see the amount of money I paid today. I could have paid by regular change, but I had just big valuable bank notes with me at the time. Well, I didn't actually pay for it. You did. It was your gift me from all of you !

Yes, a free gift from my dear readers ! I've earned almost $2 on that little AdSense box so far. That's the only thing I can disclose and not terminate the TOS of the big-G. I'll have another one tomorrow, as I love ice-cream, the winter is not as cold as it should be and there is still money left from the ads.

But be careful kids, sliding the card through terminals is easy, making money is not. You can waste your whole salary in one day when you don't see the bank notes missing in your purse, even worse when using credit card with no limit :)

Final note to all good people. If you don't want me to get cold - stop clicking my ads :D

Notes on PSP.

Blog on PSP. by OndraSoukup.

I'm little bit upset, when Sony says that Flash is supported and JavaScript is really really basic thing which I hope the PSP Browser has, YouTube didn't work on this toy with 3.03 OE-A' firmware, so I had a rather boring class of math today. Quadratic equalations with substitution are just not as entertaining as any video on YouTube would be...
But this blog renders quite nice and fast (which I can't say about YouTube search page or digg.com) on PSP, leaving the navigation away and posts get a full screen estate.

Blue skies rock.

Floating people. by OndraSoukup.

Just testing out blog posting from flickr ;)

R4DS ordered.

Earlier today, I've placed order for my R4DS at gameyeeeah.com. PayPal makes it so easy to spend money, you just click and fifty bucks are gone :)

What I'm really looking forward is running a backup of Opera Browser for DS as I already have a SuperCard Lite, running patched to use the 32MB GBA RAM in SuperCard instead of the official Memory Extension. And it runs those clean dumps. Important for me, Mac user. I can finally give up my Remote Desktop which I used to convert games for SuperCard.

Why R4 ? Well, it was in stock, overall price was $45.50 with shipping and it can be easily converted to M3 Simply and back. Expect a deeper review soon, maybe I'll make it a video review because long typing on the keyboard can be painful sometimes :)

How I (almost) stole a MacBook Pro.

Being in Switzerland for many times before, I knew that security isn't really a big issue here. People leave their bike next to their house for 3 years intact, cars open on parking lots and they are fine with it. On the other hand, at Media Markt, I was asked to leave my backpack with my laptop and all other stuff at the entrance. No problem with that, but today I paid visit to a Darty store. Somewhere, don't recall the exact location and I don't really want to be too specific about this.

The part that I liked most of the store was a tiny place, where I found both 2 favors of the MacBook, 24" iMac and a mini. They all had a cable in USB, which when unplugged, kicked off a really loud and really annoying alarm. In advance, the MacBooks had no battery, there was no Apple Remote around and power-bricks were locked out in a special compartment, not accessible by regular customer... so there was pretty much nothing to slip by sticky pockets. Except for the MacBook Pro. A shiny new machine, not having that requisite USB cable, immediately stroke my eyes. The price was set to 3500 Swiss francs, which equals to around US $2,900. Yay, the 2.33GHz machine, with basic stock 2GB RAM and 120GB drive. Well, that is a machine that I'd accept to replace my broken PowerBook. Aaaaww the hinges, poor them...
Now the real fun begins, after closing the lid, sleeping the machine, checking under battery if has that obligatory inductive sticker which lets off the alarm gates at store doors even on sub-dollar thing like a blank DVD. No. The machine was really new, which was also indicated by a MagSafe charger which was carelessly laying behind the MacBook Pro, of course, not secured. I have to admit, I had the dark thoughts of putting it under my jacket and sneaking out :))))

But this is an Apple device and I'm not a damn thief ! So I decided to take it to the front desk, tell them they should tie it with zillion kensington locks and plug that USB thing into every port they find. Out of sudden, my mom appeared, telling me she found car keys at the bathroom (cool, they have single unisex bathroom here ;) and in her fear to speak any other language then the default czech one, she pointed at a guy who was marching out the store rapidly. With the MacBook Pro in one hand, Audi car keys in the other, I ran past 3 or 4 store clerks that totally ignored me, out of the store and finally catching the guy who was looking for his key at the moment. He was happy, but I was not. At this time, I was technically a thief. I ran out of the store with quiet expensive thing in my hands, not even thinking about any payment. I slowly returned to the store, wondering if those alarm gates did anything ? Yes ? No ? I didn't know, in the hurry I did no realize at all. I came up to the guy at the information counter, telling him that this device was not secured by anything. He looked really surprised, telling me he thought it was my machine and he'll have someone to look at it. A tiny "Thank You" for me invoked the thought that everyone would have done this, as it's pretty natural and obvious.

It should be. I have to say, this is what I really like about Switzerland.

Ping ?

Is anyone out there ? Seems like there is a technical problem right at the beginning, the URL of my blog leads to 404 page :(
So I'm off to publish this first post, maybe blogger will feel better about finally making this thing come to life ;)

edit: yay, it worked out ! New blogpost is awaiting you tomorrow.