Day Sixty-seven: evening of October 8th 2009

I didn’t work on digitizing today. I’m going to re-evaluate the slides that I scan for posting. I’ll probably continue with the USCGC Dallas shots. Ultimately, I’ll try and forward the shots to the unit for the ship’s history. As far as the rest, I’m going to be more selective/critical of the images that have similar content.

Later on, I was wondering what the Mac Book Pro processor speed would look like when it was running the in PC emulator Parallel 4.0. So, as usual, I decided to do an online search and discovered that the company didn’t state specifically what it might be. They mentioned how much faster it was than the previous version 3.0 and something about virtualization management (?). What caught my eye though was on a forum as I rummaged about. Someone asked why their virtual PC seemed to be so sluggish. Down the thread, other individuals chimed in, and then an interesting post suggested that the individuals with that problem should try making Windows XP take over by going full screen, with OS X appearing to be in stasis. “Hey!“ My brain exclaims. “Why not try this!” Forgetting the processor speed, I quit Safari, started Parallels 4.0, and fired up Company of Heroes to run the graphics check. When the options screen loaded, I selected the graphics set up to tweak the setting before running the analysis. I notice that the memory usage was yellow which meant the potential for inconsistent performance. So I started changing the graphics characteristics (texture, shadow, etc.) to low, until the memory usage went green. Then I accepted the new values, and ran the test. I was surprised to see the frame rates in the 50s and 60s, with the overall performance classified as “Great” - Wow! I quit the game. I’ll get back to it later. On the way out I checked the properties of my system in the control panel, it read 2.93 Ghz - another Wow! The next time I decide to fool around with Parallels, I’ll have to see what happens with Windows XP running in a window (ha, ha).

I managed to fire up Fallout 3 on the PS3 and play for awhile. The ‘awhile’ was the result of falling asleep. I must have been really tired, because I wasn’t in the recliner.