Now and then after a big purchase, I get uneasy…. I start noticing products that are better or cheaper. This does my head in and has happened with 3 of the 4 last big purchases.

• Pentax Optio S: has dropped from $800 to $579 in 6 months and there  is now an S4 with 4 megapixels. In defence (argument to self), I love my Optio S and I did but it when it was just released and I don't think I would ever need 4 megapixels.
• Iriver IHP 100 10 Gig MP3 JukeBox: Iriver have released a 20GB and a 40GB model since and since playing with iPods I wonder if an ipod would have been a better decision (iPods also sync easier with the mac). In defence, Iriver has more features, has a very solid build, has radio, has recording built in (both voice and from Optical in), I didn't have the iBook when i bought it, Battery Life is Far superior, plays Ogg files.
• Iriver IMP 550 Mp3 CD Player: I am completely happy with this. It is the slimmest cd player I have ever seen and it has a radio built in to boot.
• 12 inch iBook G4: This is a great laptop and i wouldn't be without it but browsing Ebay has revealed 17 inch powerbooks for AU$ 2000, completely specced up. In defence , prices like AU$2000 when it should be AU$5600 indicate that there could be something bogus going on??, As I bought mine direct from Apple , I am guaranteed that if something did go wrong I would be dealt with properly.

After getting it all down on paper(???) I feel a bit better. Does this happen everybody or is it just me?

As you can see I am running amock with PhotoShop on the iBook (all the photos used are my own), There is so many features, it's not even funny and trying to experiment with it for only a few minutes a day is by no means enough. I came a cross a fun site today :http://www.wordspy.com/ . Some really wacky words in there.

There is a moonlight cinema here in Sydney that shows movies outdoors after sunset, I haven't gone yet but some of my mates have (to see "Ferris Buellers Day off") and said that it was excellent. I became a member today which entitles me to 4 free tickets ($44 for membership). There is some really cool movies coming up, it'll sure be different watching it outdoors with a coldie in my hand… glamour.

It's not often I fork out money for software, but today I ordered iLife 04 in my local AppleCenter. It cose $80 AU which is about 45 Euro. For that you get iPhoto 4(supposedly much much faster than iPhoto 2 – the main reason for buying th iLife suite), iMovie 4 (I definitely want to start doing some small movies in this), iDVD (for when I get a DVD burner) and the new GarageBand for all your sound studio needs. For the price it is absolutely amazing and hopefully well worth the investment. I should have it by thursday next week so I'll post a review then.

As I said the main reason for getting iLife 04 is for iPhoto. I have iPhoto 2 installed and have 1800 photos in my library but it is excrutiatingly slow, I installed iView Media Pro 2.0 which is alot quicked but it is not as usable as iPhoto. iView seems to be an App for storing and organising all media types, not only photos. As all I need it for is Photos, it's alot of overkill. The speed increase in iPhoto might all be hype though 🙁 .

Since installing PHPWiki on the iBook I have grown to really like it. It is really neat and the theory behind has proven itself. I'll be making a Philroche theme soon, and then having a Philroche.net wiki…while I do that i am going to remove my IRC app as it never gets used and looks a bit shit to be honest.

After a bad dose of the flu, I'm back alive and kicking. It (was) is weird having the flu when it is hot outside all the time, I had a killer sore throat but after some anti-biotics , it seems to have cleared up. I've spent the weekend getting Apache, PHP and MYSQL running on my Mac. It took some configuring (as Tenon iTools 7 messed everything up [their uninstall script isn't worth a shite]). I now have a new version of Apache2 running, Mysql and PHP. It is really sweet to have all this running as i can start some development without having to have net access. I installed PHPWiki which is really neat, and I will defintely be using it for documentation of future projects. I haven't put many photos up lately but I will get some up I promise. Frank Del Tore (aka Big Frank Smyth) has some road trip and christmas photos up now @ bigfranksmyth.yahoo.com. I've been working with PHP Smarty (PHP Template Engine) whch is really neat and well worth a butchers. PostCalendar uses it so you might as well have a look at postcalendar while you're at it.

Not much exciting happening this year so far (for me anyway),
Tim Berners lee gets a KBE for inventing the web.
Aggreg8 has 151,782 page hits in a little over a year… to me that is mega impressive.
50 things we'd like to see less of in 2004 is pretty good.
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003
Browser Emulation
Only 8 weeks untill I go off on my 3 month travel trip… I can't wait, trying to save all my money now to pay for it. If anybody knows of any obscure places in New Zealand worth visiting let me know.

Sup y'all, I hope you all had a great new year celebration, I did, we spent it in Sydney city center drinking on the street with the other 750,000 that were there. We then watched the fireworks directly under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was absolutely amazing and I have plenty of pictures and movies that I will put up when I get a chance. Great to see that ste is blogging again (I hope he keeps it up 🙂 ). Anyway have a great one….Sya