Woke at 9:30 am to finish packing and drive to Steph’s parents’ house where we were leaving our cars. My parents picked us up at my in-laws at around 2:30 pm so we could get to Newark Airport [which is about an hour away] two hours before our 5:25 pm flight. The trip there was uneventful, as were check-in and going through security. The line at check-in was excruciatingly long, though; glad we got there early. We waited in the terminal for a bit and then boarded the plane. For the record, Alitalia’s food is not nearly as good as Virgin Atlantic’s. I slept a couple of hours during the flight, but for the most part stayed awake reading.
We arrived in Italy at 7:30 am the next morning [1:30 am NJ time]. After deplaning, we found the cruise line representative, waited around for the other passengers, then got on a bus to take a tour of the Vatican. And boy was it the wrong tour for us to take. 5 hours of walking around in the heat, listening to the [very knowledgeable] tour guide talk about all the art and architecture in the Vatican Museum. We could have been on an air-conditioned tour bus seeing all the touristy places in Rome. I was very unimpressed with the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s also got an “eh” from me. On the whole, I did not enjoy the tour.
Sweaty and tired, we finally boarded the bus that would take us on our hour long ride to the ship. Steph fell asleep [as she would do on every bus ride we took for the entire 12 days], but I stayed awake and enjoyed the countryside. We checked in at the ship, got our keys, and went to our cabin. Fortunately, all of our luggage had made the trip and was happily waiting for us when we got there. Other passengers were not so lucky. After getting situated, we went up to the dining room for dinner. We had the late seating, so this was at around 8:45 pm local [2:45 pm NJ]. I was a bit nervous about this because, unless your party has exactly the same number of people as there are chairs at the table, they seat you with random people. Thankfully, the couple that we sat with didn’t suck. Dave and Stephanie, of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, were also married on July 1 and on their honeymoon. They turned out to be great dinner companions.
With all of the day’s required activities at an end, we were finally able to retire to our cabin and get some sleep. All told I had been up for 30 hours straight, with only an hour or two of sleep. I crashed hard….
Just a brief post to say we’re back from the honeymoon. I’ll write up some detailed posts about all of our stops after things get settled.
As of yesterday, I am a married man. We had a lovely Roman Catholic ceremony, and surprisingly the church did not burst into flames when I received communion. Thankfully the church was air conditioned because it was exceedingly hot. After the ceremony, we spent about a half an hour at a park having bridal party pictures taken. Then it was on to the reception, which was held at a hotel right on the river. Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves, with many saying it was the best wedding they had ever been to. By the end of the day, both Steph and I were exhausted. We’re currently at her parents’ beach house with about 20 other people. I’ve definitely gone over my quota of socialising for the month.
I downloaded Boot Camp and sacrificed 20GB of my hard drive to Windows XP. Besides the general repugnance I feel whenever installing Windows anywhere, the process was straightforward. Everything seems to work the way it should. I’m going to eventually install Guild Wars on there and see how that works out. More pictures here.
whatever happened to acid rain? You never hear about it anymore. Did it just go away? Discuss.
I’ve come up with a new word to use when mocking the 1337:
- pwnf
- When you think you’ve just pwned, but then someting backfires on you big time. This word could be used to describe most of the posts on bash.org.
Yesterday I went back to the Apple Store in Freehold and bought a MacBook Pro. Using Steph’s educator’s discount, I was able to save around $300 [$200 on the MBP itself, plus $110 on the AppleCare]. I got a base 15″ 2.16Ghz model. Saturday I was debating weather or not I wanted to spend the $90 to upgrade the hard drive from 100GB to 120GB. Had I done that, I would have had to order it online and figure out where to have it shipped and worry about buying it as Steph but using my credit card to pay for it, etc. In the end I decided 20GB wasn’t worth the hassle. And here we are.
I’m still getting used to the size of this thing; it’s just odd having so much screen. Speaking of the display, it’s significantly brighter than my 12″ PowerBook’s LCD. I also keep making typos as I’m not used to the keyboard yet [the backlit keyboard, yay]. I expected the MBP to be a bit heavier than it actually is. So far, I’ve installed the majority of the software I use on a regular basis. There are still a few menu bar items that I can’t remember the names of, so I haven’t gotten around to getting those. I tried out Front Row and Photo Booth this morning and they’re quite neat applications. The speed boost of the 2.16GHz Core Duo is, of course, quite welcome. Spotlight especially runs amazingly fast. It imported everything from my 100GB external firewire drive and I didn’t even notice.
So what’s going to happen to my 12″ PowerBook? I couldn’t bare to part with the thing. Despite it’s pokey-ness, it’s still my favourite computer ever. I’m giving it to Steph so that I can visit it whenever I want. I didn’t delete any of my stuff from it, because I figure I’m going to forget to move something over to the MBP and I’d like to have a “backup”. I just created her own user account with some basic apps in the Dock. She’s not a Mac user [yet], so it’ll take some getting used to for her, but hopefully she’ll be the next person I get to switch.
Went to the Apple Store grand opening this morning. I had my dad call the mall earlier in the week to see if they were doing any kind of special setup. They said they weren’t expecting a crowd and to just come at 9:30. Boy were they ever wrong. I did a pass through the mall parking lot on my way to my parents’ house and didn’t see crowds pouring out into the streets, so I figured they were probably right. My dad, my brother and I got there around 9:30 and there was quite a line. There weren’t thousands of people, but enough that we had to wait to get in.
When we finally made it, I looked around for something to buy. I decided on an AirPort Express. Expect Apple to release one that does video in the next month or so now that I finally have one. I mostly bought it for the print server anyway; I’ve had issues using printer sharing on OS X. I also got two free t-shirts, as my brother didn’t want his. Many pictures were taken. See them here. It was good times.
Yesterday, Apple released the Intel successor to the iBook: the MacBook [still the worst name ever]. With that, Apple has smashed any hopes I had remaining of getting a 12″ MacBook Pro. And it looks like the nice folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog agree with me. The 13″ MacBook, while of a similar size to my beloved 12″ PowerBook, has such an underpowered graphics card [Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory] that it’s not even worth getting. Who designs a graphics card that shares system memory? That’s just dumb. So it looks like when I can finally afford to upgrade, it’ll be to a 15″ MacBook Pro. Unless Apple surprises me. But I’m not getting my hopes up.
