Three till Seven

Well, after a few hours and several different Google searches, my iPhone 3G is now jailbroken and has Whited00r on it. I think my phone may be the fastest it’s ever been, and I’ve tried iOS 3.1.3, 4.0, and briefly tonight 4.2.1 on it. I updated my iPad to iOS 5 tonight and, on a whim, decided my aging iPhone could use some more flash and glitter, too. Someone on Reddit mentioned Whited00r as being a way to make your older iPhone speedier while still getting some of the features from later iOS versions, so I decided to try it.

Thanks to Joe’s recommendation, I’ve been using Turntable.FM recently, and I love it. I’ve found several new songs I’ve really liked, and actually several artists I hadn’t heard of either. It’s been a nice alternative to Pandora, which tends to play the same songs and artists for me over and over on the stations on which I’ve Liked/Disliked a lot of songs. It’s also been preferable to Spotify because I spend more time looking for music on Spotify than actually listening.

Today was my last day at HP, the end of a two-year internship. Starting Thursday, I’ll be working at a local company on their Java/open source team, and I think my first project will deal with PHP. I’m excited to start a new job, and am looking forward to doing something different on a daily basis than what I was doing at HP. Leaving HP wasn’t my original goal, and I started back in February trying to get a regular-employee position there, but it just never happened. They were in a hiring freeze and despite my manager’s efforts, they never got me an offer letter.

Jon’s dog Susie is having a rough time. She’s had a lump on her throat for a while now, but in the past week or so it has suddenly grown much bigger. Jon took her to the vet yesterday and she was so freaked out they couldn’t get much of an x-ray, for fear the stress would kill her right then: she was breathing really heavy on the examination table, frothing at the mouth. Jon scheduled an exploratory surgery for tomorrow afternoon, but we don’t have much hope of them being able to fix the problem.

I got my Air! I’m typing this from it now. :) I’ve had fun organizing and configuring everything, and I’m finally settling in to using it for some real work. Well, not work as in someone’s paying me to do it: I’m just working on a new layout for this site and my portfolio. I bought Acorn from the Mac App Store and am using it for my image editing, with Komodo Edit for my HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Here’s a screenshot of my primary desktop with Mission Control showing my apps:

I ordered one of the new MacBook Airs last night, and I’m super excited about it coming next week. I’m typing this entry on my old 2007 MacBook, which I bought used from a friend. All my Macs I’ve had used, so it’s cool to be getting my first brand-new one. I didn’t go the cheap route, either: I bought one of the 13” ones with the upgraded CPU and a 256GB SSD. Jon is such an up-seller, too: he was sitting beside me when I ordered, and he was all “you know, you’re spending this much on a computer anyway, you might as well spend the $100 extra and get the better CPU”.

I love visiting my parents in the spring because they live on a farm and there are always baby animals there this time of year. This time around, they have some chucklings and some kittens. First, the chucklings: a hen kept trying to set on some unfertilized eggs (we have no roosters) in the usual egg-laying spot, preventing the other hens from laying any eggs. My mom got tired of this and stuck the chicken inside an old cage. She then went around the property gathering an assortment of duck eggs that our lazy ducks weren’t caring for, and stuck them under the hen.