Dave Mancuso dot Com

Apple is really using Intel Pentium chips in its Macs beginning next year. The Mac faithful are reeling. Some of them really think the sky is falling.

Seriously, folks. If you’re simply offended that Apple is moving to the “Dark Side,” you really need to rethink what makes Apple innovative. They use IDE drives. They use PCI cards from ATI. They use USB. The list goes on and on, industry standard components that are used in PCs everywhere.

The fact is that yes, Apple is a hardware company, but it’s always been the things it does with the hardware that make it great. It’s both the form and the function, and if Apple decides that Pentium chips make OS X function better, it’s a good bet that they know what they’re doing.

And an even better bet that they have some tricks and surprises up their sleeves to make this move look like magic in the making.

An acre, wooded. We’re really excited.

We chose a house to build on it too. A real nice plan.

Pretty cool. The next 10 months will be interesting between the rental by I-283 and the house in the middle of the woods being built.

The poor cat is 15 years old now. This week was a crisis for him. He has a mass on the left side of his neck that has grown into his throat. He was having trouble breathing. The vet did a spectrum of tests and xrays, and got a sample of the mass for a biopsy. He thinks it’s cancerous.

Dart isn’t eating. He’s pretty quiet, a bit lethargic. The real shame is that cat or not, 15 years old or not, Dart is the coolest cat I ever knew (and we’ve had 3). He really seems like a human trapped in a cat body.

The biopsy comes back within 7 to 10 days, so we’ll know then. He’s reacting well to antibiotics, but in a week I may be taking him in to the vet for a final visit if he goes more downhill. Poor guy.

I wanted to take my old microwave with me from the old house, but I didn’t think that the new owners would appreciate the gaping hole from ripping it out above the range.

So I got the Consumer Reports guide and went to the store. I found such an awesome deal. I mean, it was thirty bucks less than the CR price, it was top rated, and man, it had gobs of room inside. It was huge! Really awesome.

So I took it home and unpacked it and set it on the counter. And I looked at it and I said “Holy cow, this thing is huge!”

But not in a good way.

It barely fit on the counter. It crowded out drying dishes. It was a nice deal, sure, but not if I have no room to wash the dishes. Besides, it seemed to take over the kitchen. Y’know, like politicians seem to take over your phone around election time.

So back I went to the store to get the other (and smaller) CR best buy. Much nicer, still plenty of room, and as an added bonus, I’ve magically eliminated my wife’s sidelong glances and mumblings under her breath whenever she’s near that side of the kitchen.

After all, it’s the little things that count, right?

Due to superhuman effort, superincredible strategies, and supernatural incantations, I have turned huge piles filling my townhouse basement–so huge that you can’t walk down there–into:

huger piles that reach to the ceiling.

But now you can walk around down there, in small structured paths. It’s like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I know you are all very proud of me.

As I go through these items in the basement, know that all of your birthday presents in the next year will be unique and thoughtful (ahem).

😉

Heh. Heh.

The story is here.

Conan O’Brien rules.

I had a terrible, weird dream the other night.

Denise and I decided for some strange reason to look for a new house. To do that, we had to sell our house. So we put the house up for sale and got an offer right away.

But then, because the other people had to sell their own house, we kept showing our house to other people. Like, a zillion times and cleaning every time. And then somebody else bought our house because they could do it quicker, because they didn’t have a house to sell.

And then, we had to find a rental, because we still hadn’t found a new house to move to. So we found a townhouse that was nice and we got ready to move to it. And we threw out all kinds of stuff so we could fit into this little townhouse.

So then in the dream, we moved. And it took like, vanload after vanload, and moving van after moving van. And it took so long that we didn’t have time to clean for the people moving in. So, like, we still had stuff to move just before the people bought the house, so we moved everything and cleaned like madmen all night to get everything ready for the new people. Or at least zombie-like madmen, because this all dragged on so long that everything was like that slow motion stuff in dreams.

And the worst was that we moved so much stuff that we filled the rental to the gills, and then we couldn’t walk around in it anymore. It was like the movies, where the house is so full of popcorn or something that you can’t go inside. But it was all our stuff from the house.

And then the people actually bought our house, and we went back to the little townhouse, because we still weren’t sure where we would really move to. And as we sat down in this little townhouse exhausted, we heard all these cars and trucks zooming around, and we looked out back and noticed that the townhouse backed up to a superhighway with constant traffic. So we pretended the cars and trucks were ocean waves on the beach and tried to go to sleep.

UPDATE: Um–hey, guess what? IT WASN’T A DREAM.

I’m really up feces tributary without any visible means of propulsion, aren’t I?

And people have been asking me what’s up–the website hasn’t been updated in a while.

Well, between selling the house, renting the temporary townhouse, looking for a lot or good house to build on/buy, trying to figure out where the best place for the kids is next year (same place they are now, really, if we can swing it), some extended family life changes, odd things going on at work, working with Tangelo, beginning to write TaskMaster, some heavy duty PHP/RB/PostgreSQL projects, budget time, and some awesome opportunities that I’ll tell more about later (if they pan out), um…..

I’ve not had much time to add things to the website.

But, I hope at the end of this month, after we move into the townhouse and settle on selling our current home, that you’ll see some interesting things here. I have a great backlog of things to put here and discuss. I may even set up a forum and/or a wiki for some more discussion about hot (as in controversial) topics.

(Man. Did I say this month? I meant May. Isn’t April over yet? It’s been two months worth of time this month already.)

But seriously, on the WE network tonight, a show of Prince Charles’ wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles is sandwiched in between repeat showings of the movie Death Becomes Her. Just a coincidence, or someone’s weird idea of a poor joke (if you’ve seen the movie, that is—a black comedy about obsession with beauty among other things)?

It just really seems like no one can leave this couple alone, and now I’m even seeing digs where they probably don’t exist.

Jerry Springer now has his own radio show on Air America. It’s political. He’s serious. This is no April Fool’s joke.

It makes more sense when you find out that he was in politics before television, and that his television show was actually a real talk show before he sold out for shock show dollars.

So, even though watching his TV show is like watching a train wreck (I’ve seen pieces of it several times, but it’s tough to watch, believe me), who knows if his radio show will redeem his rep?

Maybe too little, too late?