I’ve dabbled with Cocoa development off an on for a few years now, but until recently never had a project interesting enough to really put in the effort to truly learn the platform. But now I think it’s time to finally dig a little deeper and get serious about developing applications for the Macintosh.

This appears to be the book to get for Cocoa development. I’m currently working through the early chapters to solidify my mastery of the tools and look forward to getting to the more advanced concepts that will follow.

I first learned about this band after watching the music video for “El Universo Sobre Mi”, which was a great piece of high energy, upbeat Spanish rock. The followup “Dias De Verano” was a little more mellow but eventually grew on me. These two songs were good enough to take the risk and buy the whole album. This turned out to be a good choice and and the album is currently making its way up my list of favorite Spanish language music.

I ran across a reference to this book quite accidentally while searching for some unrelated information about Macintosh programming. The content of the book is starting to show its age-while the code samples are written with the Carbon API for OS X, they have more of an OS 9 feel to them-there are still some good tips about some of the Macintosh-specific quirks to look out for while developing games for the Mac. It’s refreshing to read some game programming material that doesn’t focus on DirectX for a change.

This is probably the best programming book I’ve read in a long time. Unlike many books on Mac OS X development that spend most their contents explaining how to drag and drop components in Interface Builder, this book concentrates more on the Unix core and Core Foundation framework. There are chapters on the GCC compiler, Subversion version control, and CHUD performance tools to round out your understanding of the mechanics of programming for the Mac. I was particularly interested in the chapters on Bonjour networking and Keychain authentication to learn more about developing applications with a more polished Macintosh feel. It was also nice to see that the authors were not afraid to include larger sample programs in the code. Many examples were over five or six pages long—plenty of space to see new techniques in action.

This was one of the strangest movies I have seen in a long time. I sat mesmerized through the entire story, wrapped up in the haunting fantasy world that was created. As others have written, it’s a shame this movie didn’t get a wider release. I would have loved to have seen this on the big screen.

This is the first of my Allconsuming “you should consume” suggestions and it turned out to be a good one. The mandolins and pedal steel guitar give the music a country feel but there is also an orchestral foundation with unexpected instruments like clarinet, oboe, viola, cello, and piano.

I hadn’t read a good review of this movie, and there were people cringing in pain as the movie ended, but I enjoyed it. The love story at the center of the movie was a bit silly and the political intrigue among the feuding clans was less than intriguing. But the movie had plenty of battle sequences. And none of the usual cliches of archers raining fire from a distance or trebuchets sieging the fortress walls. No, this movie featured old school storm-the-castle, hand-to-hand sword fighting.

The movie begins right as the last leaves off, and quickly throws away all the promise of the what the story could have been. The loose ends are clumsily swept away and we are left with a super vampire and and packs of unthinking werewolves. For most of the movie Michael just sits around looking pretty as the fate of his family legacy is decided without his help.

This was still an enjoyable movie, even if it was unable to live up to its potential. After all, how can you go wrong with vampires and wereworlves and blood and Kate Beckinsale in tight black leather outfits (when she was wearing clothes at all) shooting guns for two hours?

When I was in college, my Taiwanese roommate would often complain about how bad Americanized Chinese food was and how he would would have to find good family-run restaurants, get to know the owners, and order off menu to get anything approaching authentic.

I countered that if the food I knew wasn’t real enough then he would have to take me to a restaurant that would offer a more traditional Chinese meal. He wanted to make sure that I was really willing to try different food including such delicacies as chicken feet.

The chicken feet were surprisingly good, considering that they were after all the feet of chicken. Interestingly enough, however, rolling my tongue over the thin toes as I sucked the meat off of the bones seemed to cut down on my enjoyment.

And so I have to conclude that chicken feet were worth consuming after all, if only for the adventure, but should qualify that with a “won’t consume again”.

“It really isn’t an adventure story, is it, Mr. Hayes?”

“No, Jimmy. It’s not”