Rough Draft

5 Mice

Macworld reviewed Soundtrack Pro and gave it 5 out of 5 mice. Score!

One Year Later

One year ago today I began working at Apple. w00t! Oddly enough though right now I'm back home in PA on vacation.

I can't imagine being any happier with my work life. Apple is a great place to work, and the Soundtrack Pro team is an awesome group of people. It's certainly been a lot of hard work over the past year, but when you finally get to go out and show off your product and find out that people love it, all the hard work is worth it.

And stealing from Josh's post on his one year anniversary at IBM a passage from Paul Graham's Hacker's and Painters (highly recommended to everyone, even non geeks):

'Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don't be fooled by the surface similarities. You've gone from guest to servant. It's possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say "authorized personnel only." But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you're not consciously aware of it.'

Do I miss college? Sure, though much more-so the people than the classes. And that's not to say that I am not having a great time living in CA. Things are just different.

Job Posting - Soundtrack Pro Team

We have three immediate openings on the Soundtrack Pro team. Two of the positions are for audio engineers (Req 2328477 and Req 2328484), and one is for a Cocoa Engineer (Req 2340516). If you're interested in any of the positions (or know someone who might be), feel free to email me (see Contact page for info), and I'll forward the information on to my manager.

Looptacular

From In Passing:

"I could shave my head... Save the earth. I could be Moby."
"No, you couldn't."
"That's not what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to indulge me."
"Sorry. 'Why yes, you could be Moby.' ...Except the music part."
"GarageBand! It's looptacular!"
--A guy and a girl at Berkeley Bowl.

Now if only they had referenced Soundtrack!

Panther Install Fest

I've installed Panther on 3 machines since I've been home (original iMac, my brother's 12" Powerbook G4, and my Dad's G4 450 MHZ G4 tower). The Powerbook and G4 Tower installations were simple upgrades from 10.2. The iMac had still been running Mac OS 9, and I needed to reformat the hard drive so I could install OS X on a partition within the first 8 GB's of the hard drive. All installations went flawless just as expected. Panther runs surprisingly well on the original iMac, especially since it only has 288 MB of RAM. Before I got back to school I'll probably pick up another 256 MB stick to replace the one 32 MB stick in it now.

Unfortunately, I have to go to one of my relatives' houses to fix their computer running Windows 98 sometime over break. From the sounds of it I'm going to need to reinstall Windows, but I have a feeling it won't go anywhere near as smoothly as installing Panther.

Apple Retail Stores and Live Music

I've been checking the Apple Retail page for news about the Cleveland Apple Store opening and though I haven't found anything about that, I have seen something called Music Nights. On October 15th, Thrice will be playing at the store in Santa Monica, CA and Thursday will be playing at the SoHo store. Very, very cool. I've bought both of the bands' recent albums from the iTunes Music Store. I'm hoping they release some live recordings from their performance on the ITMS, like Less Than Jake did a month or so ago. I'm also hoping the Cleveland store has some bands playing at it after it opens. Cleveland does have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after all.

New Computers

Apple of course announced new Power Mac G5 on Monday. They're shipping in August and Jeff and I both plan on ordering dual 2 GHZ machines. After the keynote on Monday we got our copies of Panther and iSight cameras. I haven't used Panther too much yet, but it seems pretty stable, so hopefully I can use it full time. I haven't really used my iSight for video conferencing either, but Jeff and I are going to try them out when he gets back to NC. Erik also got an iSight (or 2) so I'll have to video chat with him also at some point. Last but not least, I ordered a 12" Powerbook today and it should be here tomorrow. At this point I'm probably going to use that as my main machine, at least until I get a G5. I'm planning to put my G4 tower out in the living room and connect it to the TV as a media box.

Dream Come True

I got the call tonight offering me the internship position at Apple that I interviewed for last week. I can hardly believe it. No more than a week ago, I had no idea what I would be doing for the summer. Possibly staying in Cleveland and working at Metro Health, maybe staying in Maryland with my Uncle and working at Aspen, but I wasn't expecting to ever hear something from Apple. And now one week, a few emails, two phone interviews, and one job offering phone call later I'm an Apple employee (well once I fill out the paperwork which as Jeff mentioned is probably going to contain one hell of an NDA since it sounds like I'll be working on a product that hasn't even been officially announced yet). Wow, I don't know what else to say. This has got me thinking about how different this school year turned out from what I expected, but I think I'll save that for another post sometime.

Apple and Universal

There have been stories posted all over the place about Apple possibly buying Universal Music. Sounds like a very interesting move. If Apple is going to purcahse a music distribution company, I'm glad it's Universal, just because MCA and in turn Drive Thru Records is one of Universal's labels. My favorite computer company owning my favorite record label, woot! Actually, while Apple's buying companies they should buy the ReplayTV portion of Sonic Blue. :-)

Happy 27th Birthday Apple

Apple Computer, Inc. was founded April 1st 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and the oft forgotten Ronald Wayne.

Design Guru

Apple's Vice President of Industrial Design is featured in Time's Style and Design special issue. You can read the writeup here.