Stinque Proudly Presents the Next Ukulele Sensation

Hero cat sacrifices himself to save us all.

That almost makes me like cats.

Hello everyone. My name is Jamie Sommers and I’m addicted to Blue Bell Peach Cobbler ice cream.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Upon trying pecan pie ice cream paired with pumpkin bread pudding at Trader Joe’s tonight I dubbed it “criminally good,” which the sample lady seemed to appreciate.

@Mistress Cynica: +1.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Hi, Jamie Sommers. We’ve all been where you are now. But you’ve come to the right place. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

@mellbell: … which the sample lady seemed to appreciate. She was drunk.

So let’s talk about me. I’ve just seen the big news of the day – the week – the year! A new 27 in iMac with a Retina screen!!! I just finished paying off the old 27in iMac and now it’s old. OLD. It is not NEW. It does not make graphics scream at ten jillion terra flops. With a new iMac with Retina screen I could see all the boring details of my boring life in never before heard of detail. 27in iMacs with retina screens cry out to me from Fung Shei or wherever the hell they build them. ‘Customize me,’ they cry. ‘Upgrade the fusion drive and processor speed! Make me your own.’ But I am strong.

I give it five days.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Wait, you can get Blue Bell ice cream outside of Texas now??? Their ice cream is up there with Taco Cabana breakfast tacos, Salt Lick barbecue, and Texas-shaped tortilla chips from H-E-B as my favorite Texas things you can’t get outside of the state.

WTF is this crazy “Gamergate” shit and why the hell can’t Utah universities put up metal detectors when some asshat threatens to do a major school shooting if a feminist gives a speech?

@SanFranLefty: Oklahoma has had Blue Bell ice cream for years. Hell, I can even get it at my local pizza joint in Orygun. They’re just holding out on California.

@SanFranLefty: I’ve been following Gamergate for a couple months, and I couldn’t possibly explain it to you.

Let’s try this: Gamergate is all about what happened in Utah, and advocates swearing up and down that it has nothing to do with what happened in Utah.

Plus this: The term was coined and publicized by Adam Baldwin.

@Benedick: I was panting as they rolled out the 27″ 5k beauty. And then they spoiled it all with the PRICE!
“My friends all drive Porsche’s, I must make amends.”
They’ve moved the bar again. (Stuck in the last decade with my 21″ MAC)

@BobCens: Dell is about to ship a 5k monitor for $2500 — quality yet unknown, functionality uncertain. (Requires two Thunderbolt cables.)

And for “typical” civilian tasks — not involving, say, commercial video production — the Retina iMac ranks with the Mac Pro for performance.

$2500 is a bargain.

@BobCens: What noje said. Plus. (And think about this) Yosemite cries out for a retina screen. CRIES. OUT.

@Benedick: 27 inches?? “Good luck fitting that in your pocket,” said the actress to the bishop.

@Benedick: Yosemite cries out for a retina screen.

Having endured an emergency upgrade to a Retina MacBook Pro a few weeks ago (the old MBP is dead, Jim), I can’t yet personally attest to this — because Real Geeks wait for the bugfix update — but that’s what I’m hearing.

And while the SuperDuperHiRez screen is nice, I don’t think it’s that nice. What’s really nice is the all-electronic hard drive. Ho. Lee. Shit. Fucking speed freak. No moving parts under the hood. The Mac is just a big iPhone!

Good God, count on a kitty video thread turning into Burning Apple Man in about 30 seconds. Personally I just purchased my first iPhone and iPad this week and I’m feeling vaguely unclean. Thankfully I still have my trusty Windows desktop workhorse to use for things like, I don’t know, computing!

@Dave H: Computing is so 2010.

@nojo: Wait till you see a restart in Yosemite. Wait till you see how Pages looks. Wait till you see how fast Safari is.

I must stop. My heart is too full. I know that Steve Jobs is looking down at us all from Up There. Just as he always did in life.

@¡Andrew!: Darling, it’s “As the actress said…” If we are to tread the boards we must strive to be word perfect.

@Benedick: I’ve always been a loose cannon. Next, I’ll be solving crimes in my spare time.

@Dave H: Hey, I run three versions of Windows on my Mac to see just how much Explorer fucks up my work…

Although, to be fair, double-digit IE plays much nicer than before. Especially since I no longer have to swap in PNGs to get transparency in a page layout.

As far as getting work done, I’ll take Unix under the hood, thankyouverymuch. I can run a complete bog-standard web server on my laptop, which makes development sooooo much nicer.

@SanFranLefty: Yes! We’ve been able to get Blue Bell in Arizona for a couple of years now. Used to have a Taco Cabana too, but they didn’t last long. (I still call their customer service line from time to time, just to let them know I care.)

@Benedick: I finished the half gallon carton a few minutes ago. Just between you and me (tell no one), there’s a carton of Mint Chocolate Chip.

It’s calling my name.

@Dave H: I’ve been trying to move Dave up to the 21st Cent for awhile now. He’s probably still using Windows & Excel 95 (I am on an antique Sony).
The Yosemite OS update is nothing to brag about. They always do away with some stuff I use and like. On the other hand, the damn stuff just works all the time. I picked up a Mac Pro 13″ w/Retina screen from the refurbished store. It came with 8G RAM and a flash drive. Pretty cool machine. Now it’s time to upgrade my iPad2 to one of those Retina Pads!

@nojo: The first computer I bought did not come with a hard drive. Think about that, kids. So I learned how to use a virtual drive which was slicker than owl shit until the inevitable crash.

@Dodgerblue: During my decade-long escape from Geekdom, a good friend made some spare change cracking copy-protected floppies on an Apple II. (Or ][, if you’re hopelessly anal about it.)

I always thought Elephant was the perfect brand name for floppies, with the perfect slogan: “Never forget”.

Nostalgia . . . did you ever write basic code and save to a cassette cartridge?
Shades of Commodore 64 or a Radio Shack TRS-80.

@BobCens: Basic on punchtape at a TTY.

(Terminal in the math room connected over a dedicated phone line to an HP 2020 mainframe at school-district headquarters. Screen? What’s a screen?)

@BobCens: @nojo: Any flickering thoughts I ever had about enjoying programming were beaten out of me in the fall of 1970 when I had to type decks of punched cards for my freshman engineering class that combined drafting and computers. I HATED turning in a stack of cards and hours/days later picking up the resulting printout to see if your program worked. It wasn’t until I bought a TI99/4A that I started having fun with computers – which certainly did not include programming.

@Dave H: Which also explains my decade-long avoidance of geeking. Punchcards? FORTRAN? COBOL? The kids who actually grokked that stuff? Totally frightening. Not the future I wanted.

Fast-forward, oh, thirty years. Swift — Apple’s new programming language — is all shits and giggles. It’s easy to pick up, and fun to use. Just a few months in, all my old Objective-C code looks like a goddam jungle to me. I cant replace it fast enough.