It's 2am and like the cat in the picture, I'm a little disgruntled. The one thing I've always disliked about Rails on a Mac is the fact that RMagick is so darn hard to get working properly. You can do it from source, but then you have to update it manually. You can try to use MacPorts, but that's a very fragile process. I had it working in Tiger, but to be quite frank, I'm not sure how that happened and it must have been more of an accident than anything else.

In this installment of a blog, I'm going to be covering how I managed to get RMagick up and running using a combination of RubyGems and MacPorts. I'll start by saying, it was a very clumsy process. After having everything installed manually using a great tutorial on Rails Envy, I decided to scrap that in belief there had to be an easier way. When I tried to use  MacPorts and then install the RMagick gem, I kept running into an error about it not being able to find the freetype library. It was indeed on the system (/opt/local/lib/...), but it wasn't where the gem installer was expecting it (/usr/loca/lib/...). Give me a break.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but Leopard has finally hit the streets, or at least made it's way via FedEx priority overnight to my apartment. Of course I tracked it the whole way from Illinois to Pittsburgh, but that's just part of the job when it comes to new products from Apple. I'm in the process now of getting things up and running again, but I plan to update this blog as tinker with Leopard. I'll try to primarily focus on things I like, things I dislike, some of those surprises that I didn't expect.

In case you missed the memo, Apple recently released the next generation of their iPod lineup. One of the big annoucements was the release of their iPod Touch. The touch incorporates coverflow and touch navigation pretty much identical to the iPhone. It also has wireless baked right in so you can take it with you and use Safari to navigate your way around the web. Did I pick one up? C'mon, that's a given, but the better question is how long did I hold out before ordering? Amazingly about 6 hours. Yeah, I'm slacking.

On the day of the annoucement, I really wasn't paying much attention and had forgotten Apple was holding a special event. Once I got back home and realized they had put out the new iPod line, I decided to investigate. I must say, the iPod Touch is pretty much what I expected, it's an iPhone without the "phone" piece. One thing I was somewhat disappointed with was the storage capacity. Maximum is 16GB. While that won't come close to holding all my music, I decided it was worth it anyway to have a device that incorporated touch functionality with wireless built-in. They also refreshed all their other iPods with a fresh new look and incorporated some new user interface functionality into the video iPod, now called "iPod Classic".

Anyway, with my new iPod set to arrive towards the end of September, I now have an 80GB video iPod to sell. Get ahold of me if you are interested.

It was late Sunday evening when I received an important notification from Apple. My Apple TV had shipped. Coming right out off the manufacturing line, this new piece of gadgetry had a long journey before it made its way to my livingroom. Starting off in Shenzhen, China, the package found its way to Anchorage, Alaska, but it wasn't done there. It trafficked the fine city of Indianapolis, Indiana before finally finding itself in the rainy city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One delivery exception later, it was time for me to procure my elegant new machina from the FedEx store in downtown Pittsburgh.

Alright, so for those of thus that are Apple enthusiasts you might have been eagerly awaiting the MacWorld 2007 Expo. It's one of the many venues where Steve Jobs hosts a keynote and talks about new product annoucements and the future of Apple. In previous years, there was always something uncovered during the keynote that was innovative and often hit my wallet pretty hard, but this year, all I can say is whoa.

Two quick updates that apply to the title of this particular collection of words I'm calling a blog. Many of you know I am quick to adopt technology at the blink of an eye. However, when it comes to patience, I tend to be selective. Over the past two weeks, this has come into the forefront on two occasions.

First of all, I've been patiently waiting to purchase a new MacBook Pro. I closely follow several Apple-related rumor sites and heard speculation that Apple would be releasing new versions of this line just in time for the shopping season. They were right. On Tuesday, October 24, 2006 Apple announced their new MacBook Pro lines that now included the Intel Core Duo 2. Within 15 minutes of reading this in my news feeds, I had completed my order on Apple's online store. This is the point in the blog where you quit shaking your head and saying 'Damon, your such a geek'.

Apple just unveiled a wide variety of new upgrades to their iPod line, upgraded the services on their iTunes Store to include movie downloads, and released a brand spanking new version of iTunes. See that picture to your left, yeah, that's their new service that allows you to download movies. Oh wait, I almost forgot to mention their debut of a soon to be released product only known as iTV. For now I'll leave it an exercise of the reader to go investigate all the details, but wanted to draw attention to one of my favorite new features of iTunes, 'Cover Flow'.