Not going to go into detail about all the whacky stuff Steve Jobs brought up at his keynote today (at MacWorld Expo or whatever the shindig is called), because you can just shuffle on over to the Apple Store and check it out yourself.

All in all, there’s a whole lotta sexy comin’ outta the Infinite Loop these days, and I’m right here loving every second of it. Yes, I am one of those really annoying recent cult converts, but really, the sexy is all over the place. As I said earlier today, “I think it’s going to take a pretty solid string of rolls vs Will for us to not have a Mac mini within the next 3 months”. That statement continues to hold true.

I’m already getting in line for the Tiger upgrade and the new iWord software. The iPod shuffle (or whatever they’re calling it) I’ll give a miss, but I could see that being a popular stocking stuffer eventually (especially if they make it a little more slick, metallic, rounded, and not white).

For what it’s worth, the only times I’ve turned on my PC since I got my Mac was first to share a drive so I could haul my photo library off it, and second to ssh into the Mac to kill WoW (which doesn’t seem to like losing it’s connection very much). Otherwise, it’s just taking up valuable leg room right now. Might be time to move it to a secondary location and put Linux on it.

My lovely assistant forwarded me a link this morning to Connoisseur 1.0, a little iTunes-like recipe management application for OSX. A quick glance is encouraging — not only does it do collections (akin to playlists), it also exports to HTML (albeit apparently only single recipes rather than collections, but that isn’t for-certain at this point), and, somewhat amusingly, it will synch your recipes to your iPod. One of which I happen to own with ~10-12 gb free. I bet that’d hold a lotta recipes.

On the way home from work a few days ago, I popped into the bookstore (a Coles offshoot of Chapters offshoot of iNdigo) to look at cookbooks. One of my plans this year (not really a resolution since it’s likely to be a bit ephemeral, or at very least cyclic) is to learn how to cook healthier food. Also, I’m turning into a cookbook junkie. Apparently this is a sign of advancing age, but I’m not complaining.

While I was rifling through the cookbook shelf (wading through the Atkins and South Beach shit at the front), I happened to spot the new (!) Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipe book. It’s a weighty tome, clocking in just under 1050 pages, but it’s nicely put together (although the font’s a bit teeny — clearly another sign of my advancing agedness, alas). I didn’t pick it up that day since the book really is quite heavy, and I had to stop at the grocery store on the way home. I did, however, pick it up last night.

Impressions so far:

1) It’s very well written. I don’t know if that comes up very often when reviewing cook books, but there it is. The book is, after all, a collection of articles and recipes previously tested for and published in the Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

2) It’s interesting enough to just sit and read. Most recipes have an associated story that discusses the trials and tribulations the CI folks went through during the testing, selecting, and modifying processes. Maybe this makes me more of a food geek than even I really expected, but that’s OK. I like food. I’m not ashamed to admit this.

3) It’s not, under any circumstances, intended to be a healthy-eating cookbook. The majority of the recipes I read through last night included at least a half stick (1/8th of a lb) of butter, or bacon, or both. This is not an American Heart Association publication, of that there can be no doubt.

4) It’s more advanced than Bittman, but not off-puttingly so. I doubt I will ever make their beef broth, for example, but I could manage it if I wanted to. While the techniques tend towards the more advanced side of things, they do carefully describe and often illustrate the techniques being used. This makes the book a fantastic learning tool. Not a “my first cookbook” sort of book, but a nice follow on to a couple of years of Bittman.

On the topic of cook books, I’ve found myself recently wishing for recipe management software that allowed me to:

- Search the full text of recipes, as well as filter by region and main ingredients.
- Create menus and generate shopping lists.
- View nutrition information and analysis.
- Scale recipes easily.
- Organize recipes with a “playlist”-like facility.
- Produce decently formatted print copies for kitchen use.
- Export the whole kit to a web-deliverable format.

Well, I guess the last thing was a bit much to ask for, but other, smarter people have already done the rest. Specifically, I’m looking at A Cook’s Books recipe management software for Mac OSX. Best of all, it’s a $15 license. I’ll be grabbing the demo sometime in the next while, and I’ll let you know how it works out. The feature which sets this one apart from the others (there are a LOT of recipe management systems) is that it hooks into the USDA nutrion database. That’s pretty slick, particularly since the USDA provides the database in various formats for just this purpose (which is also pretty cool).

So, ok, maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like games such as Grand Theft Auto. Not only do I not like them, I find them offensive, plausibly damaging, and utterly unnecessary. It’s a very particular sort of game that I don’t like at this level — games that work to provide a reasonable emulation of real-life crime, violence, drug-culture, and that encourage you, as a player, to become part of that world, rather than setting you up to fight against it. In other words, I’m not a big fan of games where the whole point is to have the player role-play a real-life bad guy.

Give me aliens. Give me Sith. Let me run around being a dagger-wielding zombie chick with a bad attitude and a distaste for Night Elves. Set me up with a BFG and some nail guns running around being a Space Marine on Mars. Better yet, give me a hunk of desert and a bit of fertile land along a river and I will build a civilisation. Let me build. Let me create. Let me fight the bad guys. Let me solve crimes. Let me make-believe in a fantasy world. Don’t…don’t have me commit serious (epic, even) analogs of real-world crimes and reward me based on how many people I kill, prostitutes I control, or drug money I bring in. Well, you can offer me the chance to do that if you like, but don’t sell it to the ten-to-fifteen year old set, m’kay?

Now, of course, there’s the ESRB and their video games rating guide, but it’s not exactly all that useful. First off, “the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce the ratings at the retail level, [but] we do work closely with retailers and game centers to encourage them to display ratings information and not sell or rent certain product to minors”. Secondly, most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to a) know about the rating system, b) actually use the rating system to select games for their children, or c) really have the first clue wtf the kids are doing downstairs on the X-Box in the first place.

I guess that’s actually secondly, thirdly, and fourthly.

Anyhow, I think the actual creation of these games is ethically questionable at the best of times, but I understand the most fundamental reasons for doing so: they make millions and millions of dollars. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example, “could be looking at 3 million copies sold in the opening weekend”. At around $50 US per copy, that’s, oh, $150,000,000. In the first weekend. Not an insignificant motivation.

I suppose I just wish that ESRB ratings were (far) more rigorous and better enforced. People are going to continue making these games, for obvious bottom-line-feeding reasons. Parents, however, aren’t going to suddenly wake up tomorrow and be more actively involved and responsible with regards to their childrens’ lives. Which is sad, but true. This being the case, I’d just like to see the video games treated more like…well, more like something that’s rigorously rated that has those ratings enforced at the point of sale. Movies, I suppose. Or…porn mags. Or something.

That’s enough of that, however. I started this post talking about Apple for a reason, and that’s because the Postal people have just released their sequel, Postal2: Running With Scissors for the Mac, and Apple is refusing to carry the title. “The controversial game has been given a M-rating (Mature audiences) along with a first-ever ‘Intense Violence’ sublabel from the ESRB.” Really, if you go look at their website (WARNING: FRONT PAGE IS NOT WORK FRIENDLY) you’ll see that the “M” rating really doesn’t cut it. “AO” (Adult Only, 18+) is what it should have, and that should be enforced at the point of sale by retail drones checking valid photo ID. But I digress…

The Postal site describes their latest product as follows:

Forget what you know about first person shooters. Walk a week in the Postal Dude’s shoes.

Freely explore full 3-D open-ended environments. Interact with over 100 unique NPC’s including Gary Coleman, marching bands, dogs, cats and elephants, protesters, policemen and civilians, with or without weapons.

POSTAL 2 is all about choice; experiment with everyone and everything.

And remember… it’s only as violent as you are!

Which really begs the question: if you’re not running around exploring this open-ended environment with a shotgun and a lust to kill anything that moves, what, exactly, are your interaction options? For all I know there’s a learn-to-be-a-chef-while-playing-mahjongg mini-game, but I’m doubting it.

Wrapping up: I think the Postal people are basically dumbasses for saying things like “The company that brought us the famous ’1984′ Superbowl commercial has obviously become Big Brother” and believing it.

You buy the ticket, you take the ride. That’s all there is to it.

This article pretty much sums up my current attitude about the iPod photo — I just don’t get it. I understand iPods now…and then some. I love my iPod. I love how it looks, how it works, how it feels in my hand, how it integrates with iTunes, how it lets me single-handedly (literally) create and play music queues in a matter of seconds, while standing on the bus, half asleep. The iPod is a perfect little music device that just does what it’s supposed to do, does it well, and just works.

The iPod photo, however, I don’t get. Now, if it were just a plain old iPod with a 60gb drive, colour screen, and longer battery life…that I get. But wtf is with the “photo” part? I just really don’t see the draw.

Can you explain it?