All of my websites are in the process of migrating away from my homegrown blogging software - Exposition / Narrative / Rendition - in favor of the latest version of WordPress. The reason? Simply put, I am much more interested in blogging than the building of blogging software. I originally created Narrative because there wasn’t a good blogging package for ASP.NET. Now, almost 6 years later, while I still work as a .

I ordered a new MacBook Pro last week, the day the new hardware refresh was released. Actually, I spent a bunch of time running around to Apple stores to see if anyone had one in stock but no one did so I had to order mine custom from the Apple store. The computer left Shanghai, China on the 6th and arrived in Anchorage, Alaska today. According to the FedEx tracking system, it has already left Alaska and is en route to me.

After yesterday’s announcement of the new Apple iTunes movie rental service, the stock of Blockbuster tanked 17%. The end is near for those ubiquitous blue and gold stores. Personally, I loathe Blockbuster. Looking for a movie at Blockbuster is right up there with standing in line at airport security in terms of fun for me. I tried out the iTunes movie rentals last night. It took a few minutes to actually find any rentable movies (only 1,000 titles were available on day 1) but after I figured it out, it was trivial.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for 2 years and 3 months. Don’t even ask me how many hours I’ve put into this game. I have 3 accounts (I only play on two) and a dozen characters, including 3 that I’ve leveled to 70 and 2 of which are keyed for Karazhan. I have lots of great things to say about the game and I’ve had a lot of fun playing it.

Apple released the MacBook Air today. It is the world’s thinnest laptop. At it’s thickest, it is thinner than any other laptop’s thinnest. It is a nice boon for the executive traveller who is tired of lugging around extra batteries and a heavy laptop. The MacBook Air weighs only 3 lbs. and has a battery that lasts 5 hours. That’s a long battery life, really. My work laptop (not a Mac) has a 30 minute battery life and weighs 10 lbs.

I have written at length about how the Playstation 3 is vastly superior, technically, than the XBox 360. Playstation 3 uses the Blu-ray format for video and game discs and the XBox 360 uses the HD DVD format for the same. There isn’t that much different between the two disc formats. Essentially the difference between the two is the same as the difference between VHS and Beta for VCRs in the 80s.

I have not even been to my own website in over 6 months. Now that I’ve seen it, I don’t like the design anymore. I dislike the font and everything looks a little too red, white, and blue. I’m quite the patriotic dude but I don’t feel the need to splash the national colors on my website. Hence, I will be coming up with a new stylesheet soon. Apparently, the comments are not working right now, either.

I am a big proponent of finding a viable biofuel alternative to oil for energy in the United States. Ethanol is a good choice but it’s been a question whether or not it would be profitable and cost-effective. A new paper published today in the Proceedings of Natural Sciences clears that all up. Turns out that switchgrass produces 540% more energy than is required to grow it and turn it into ethanol.

I started ForkBender.com with a first post on May 27, 2003. The software I use to maintain this blog is called Exposition (which sits on a CMS I wrote called Narrative). This software dates back to February, 2003. So in the next few months, I will have had Narrative and Exposition in production for 5 years! The software now powers almost a dozen websites and contains a couple of thousand posts and images.

Recently seen on the daily commute: Large print - “Two words: Closed Casket” Small print - “Don’t get hit by a train” Pretty effective visual there.