Spendy Joost: Hey, let’s go buy one of those new unibody Macbooks. The Apple store is open until 6 PM today and we’re already in the mall.

Sensible Joost: *rolls eyes* Not this again. We’ve been through this a million times already. We don’t really need one. Our 2007 white one gets the job done just fine. We’re using it right now.

Spendy Joost: But the battery life time! SEVEN HOURS! Think of all the stuff we could be getting done.

Sensible Joost: Yeah, seven hours of pointless surfing the net without plugging it in. Go do some coding first, then maybe you’ve earned yourself a reward. Haven’t we wanted to do some Ruby on Rails or Mac development for a while now? Go start a project, procrastinator!

Spendy Joost: We just don’t have the right equipment. We need room man. If we get the 15 inch model, the screen resolution will be better and productivity would go through the roof!

Sensible Joost: Uh huh. The 15 inch Macbook Pro? Remember when you just wanted the new 13 inch unibody when it was still just called the Macbook? Now you’re adding several hundred bucks to the price? We’re not made of money. How about we start small and code up a little something in Ruby first? Look, we’ve got Textmate open already…

Spendy Joost: It’s not going to cost us anything. Remember, Juniper sent us that new credit card when we signed up for financing at the Apple store. Plus we’re getting that company discount.

Sensible Joost: Of course it’s going to cost us money. We’re not doing too well financially right now after that Amsterdam trip, the new iPhone, the Xbox 360 replacement, the Wii, the running gear and those other gadgets over the last few months. Besides, we already had enough credit to finance one and thought we’d declined the Juniper card offer after they told us that we qualified and how much the credit limit was, but they sent us one anyway. And the company discount barely makes up for the taxes.

Spendy Joost: Our current piece of crap hangs all the time. There’s got to be something wrong with it! A new one won’t have these problems.

Sensible Joost: That hardly happens ‘all the time’. It’s not a piece of crap. Don’t call it that, it’s right here and can hear you. The Apple store replaced the casing twice for free now and it looks brand new. They even replaced the logic board at no cost twice, once while it was out of warranty. Whatever is causing those few beach balls can’t be due to the hardware.

Spendy Joost: Need I remind you about the fan noise? It drives you NUTS, doesn’t it?

Sensible Joost: Well, yes. Every time I think it’s been fixed by a new Leopard or Firefox version or when they replaced the logic board again, it comes back again after a few days. I’m just not willing to gamble $1,200 – $1,800 that a new model won’t have the same problem.

Spendy Joost: Don’t you want to be able to play games on your laptop like your friends at work? The high end 15 incher is faster than that gaming PC you keep around at home.

Sensible Joost: All we ever play on the PC is Team Fortress 2 [which rocks]. Most of our gaming gets done on the Xbox, and both our machine at work and the gaming PC at home play that just fine.

Spendy Joost: But it’ll be a NEW gadget. We love new gadgets! We caress them lovingly when nobody is looking. It’s our THING. We’ve been fondling other people’s new Macbooks at work for a while now, it’s time we got one of our own.

Sensible Joost: The new gadget euphoria wears off fast and is replaced pretty quickly with buyer’s remorse about the new debt we’re in. And about the fondling of other people’s computers at work… I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that for a while now. I think it creeps some of our co-workers out.

Spendy Joost: You know you’re going to crack one of these days. You’ve been thinking about this for ages, even before the new models became cheaper. Let’s just get it over with. BUYBUYBUYBUY!!!! Do it!

Sensible Joost: No.

Spendy Joost: How about now?

Sensible Joost: No.

Spendy Joost: Damn it! I don’t even know who you ARE anymore.

Sensible Joost: If we hold out another 6-12 months, a whole new generation of Macbooks will be out and with tax refund money coming in, we’ll be able to afford it.

Spendy Joost: SIX TO TWELVE MONTHS?! Are you shitting me? No way can I wait that long. Have you noticed EVERYBODY in the department at work is buying a new Macbook lately? You’re the only one still sporting a plastic one. We were the first switcher of all of them, and now they’re leaving us behind in the dust. You know they’re mocking us behind our back, don’t you?

Sensible Joost: What are you, twelve? We’re better than that now. We’ve managed to reign in our need to have the latest, hottest shiny thing. We’re in a much better place now than a few years ago. Let’s not undo all that personal growth. Last year’s model will do just fine.

Spendy Joost: Ugh. I hate you. You got that new iPhone the day it came out last month and even paid $200 extra because we weren’t eligible for their upgrade pricing yet.

Sensible Joost: That was different. The iPhone 3GS is totally awesome and makes us more awesome by extension. Plus we can upload clips to Youtube now while we’re on the go. Look at those cute little ducklings…

Spendy Joost: Fine! You win this time. I’ll try and wear you down some other day. Can we at least go buy something else then? Every time we talk ourselves out of buying something expensive, we spend money on something cheaper.

Sensible Joost: Sure. Let’s go see if Best Buy is still open. Then we can head over to Karl Strauss and get a beer.

Spendy Joost: Now you’re talkin’ my language…

Inspired by meekakitty and Jennie.

Update August 30th:

Spendy Joost: I win!

Sensible Joost: Sigh!

Learning iMovie ‘09 was a lot of fun, and I look forward to another excuse for a video. This barely 13 minute video quickly blew most of my 500 meg weekly limit on Vimeo and it was already too long for Youtube. My options seem to be better editing, shorter videos, more compression or upgrading to a Vimeo Pro account.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to properly fasten the Flip velcro mount, and from the looks of it, it’s not even available anymore from their accessories section of the store. Beats filming by holding your iPhone up in the air while riding a bike with one hand though.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived close enough to the office for almost 10 years now since I moved out to California, that I’ve been able to commute by bike every day, even across 2 office moves. 5-8 miles of biking a day is nice exercise, but I’ve started to up the ante a little lately by doing a little running too, using Nike+ to track my progress. Now that iPhone OS 3.0 has their software built in and you don’t need their receiver dongle anymore, it works nicely with my existing gadgets.

If you want to follow my future video antics, follow me on Twitter.

A personal highlight for me was being less than 50 feet away from actual Mars rover hardware that will be traveling to the Red Planet in 2011. The line to get into the spacecraft assembly facility was an hour long, but worth it, as we got to see the still unnamed Mars Science Lab in its semi-assembled state.

Pics below.

Side note: I’ve started a Twitter account to revive Martian Soil, a Mars blog I used to run some years back. Follow @martiansoil for your daily dose of Red Planet news.

• Roughly 88% of Peak Hour Demigod Users Pirates – Out of 140,000 connected users at peak, only 12% were legitimate.
• PlaceVine Wraping Around In-Game Ads – A partnership between PlaceVine and Double Fusion will help connect advertisers to the appropriate video games.
• The Sims 3 Gets Microtransactions and Day One DLC – $10 will get you 1000 SimPoints to spend on outfits and furniture and a new town will be available at launch for free.

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• EA: Online Has Transformed The Gaming Landscape – 500 million EA Sports online games have been played since last June, Electronic Arts said today.
• IGA Worldwide lands exclusive Cross Fire in-game advertising contract – G4Box and Wicked Interactive will use IGA's Radial 4.0 SDK to display, update and geo-target their ads to a holy grail: the 18-34, tech savvy, male demographic in their free-to-play FPS.

  The counterstrike-esque multiplayer first person shooter allows fo

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• PlaySpan Picks Up Spare Change – The growing online payment solution provider gains micro-transaction expertise in the social networking space with the acquisition
• Nintendo in major drive to prompt Wii console gamers to play online – Multiplayer titles Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 and Mario Kart Wii feature heavily in the campaign, reports New Media Age.

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• fatfoogoo announces partnership with Digital River – The partnership will provide for 'global payments and inventory management, as well as the use of virtual goods and currencies, electronic wallets (gwallet technology), secondary (peer-to-peer) marketplaces and auction functionality'.

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• OnLive games service ‘will work’ – Founder Steve Perlman defends the service against an onslaught of recent criticism, citing a revolutionary video compression algorithm and a large lineup of publisher partners that have performed their due diligence.

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• GDC Notes: Advanced Data Mining and Intelligence from Large-Scale Game Data – Orbus Gamework's Darius Kazemi kept notes during Bruce Ferguson (SOE) and Dmitri Williams of (USC) session.
• Stardock’s Impulse Exceeds One Million Customers – It took Stardock onlu 9 months to reach a million users.
• Sony Doubts OnLive Approach – Sony wonders how multiple users in the same household will be able to play games on average home broadband connections.
• Sony trademarks ‘PS Cloud’ – My take is it has nothing to do with competing with OnLive's streaming gaming service. It's merely a cloud data storage repository.
• EA Rebels Against its own DRM – EA's new de-authorization management tool lets users remove a license from a specific machine, so they can use one on another machine without uninstalling the whole game.

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• Bigfoot Networks launches second-generation gaming network card – Is lag still really an issue for a lot of gamers these days?
• Solid State Launches Current Publishers’ Edition For Windows – Their Solid Axis Current Publisher Edition is a stand-alone plug-and-play patching solution for Windows games aimed at reducing the cost of delivering updates without implementing any custom coding or programming.
• New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down – Steve Perlan’s new service allows you to offset your entire game logic onto a centralized set of online servers, effectively making the connecting system a thin client just in charge of rendering the output.
• XI Has Begun! – Sony launches an Alternate Reality Game from within PlayStation Home.
• GDC 2009: World of Goo creators call DRM a ‘waste of time’ – Ron Carmel recommending ditching digital rigjts management completely, stating especially indie developers don’t need DRM to stay afloat.
• Digital River And Playxpert Sign Joint Marketing Agreement – Their agreement allows both to “offer game publishers, resellers and studios a way to engage players of PC-based games in a branded in-game experience that integrates e-commerce with their online communities”.
• Microtransactions, Not Ads, To Have Highest Impact On Game Industry – 66% of respondents at the Venture Beat GamesBeat ‘09 event expect microtransactions to have a high impact on the games industry’s future.

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