Archive for the 'Computers' Category

summer upgrades

Published on July 5, 2010 in Computers. Closed

Day off from camp today. As I sit here recovering from our VERY long day of cruising the Taste of Chicago and eating lots of exotic and tasty foods. I got tempted to do some more upgrades. I usually ignore all my computer/tech stuff in the summer, but this long weekend has me motivated, I guess.

Droid is now running a 2.2 build. It’s fast and I put Flash on there. Best part is being able to watch videos inline in Google Reader. All my music is showing up twice, but hopefully I’ll find a fix for that. I’m not really using the droid for music playing until they implement gapless playback or a soundcheck-like volume normalizing feature and/or the ability to shuffle by album.

WordPress is now at 3.0. Haven’t noticed any differences (unless crossposting doesn’t work when I publish this), except a couple memory errors in my dashboard… I didn’t really need to read the wordpress development news.

And now, to take advantage of the rest of my day off… I think we’ll be playing Lego Harry Potter.

flights are booked… and I hate pdfs

Published on October 21, 2009 in Computers, Family & Friends and Work. Closed Tags: , , , .

So, I’ve had to create and send PDFs to coworkers this week. I hate PDFs. I believe that they are the devil’s file format. Why would I sink to such a level, you ask? Because my boss doesn’t have/can’t operate Excel (and doesn’t have the web savvy to use Google Docs). There’s lots of rumblings about our boss, but that’s really nothing new. I hate the feeling of instability it lends to my job, though. I’d totally go back to a tech job, if I could find one that was in a laid back environment and paid well… on the other hand, I’d really go for a position at a place with high ropes that had steady work for two or three seasons, even if it paid the same as I’m getting, now.

In other news, we’ll be back on the east coast, doing the family thing and trying to catch up with all the people who I’ve neglected to see on my last couple trips that way from the day after Christmas until about the 30th. Let me know if you have time in there and want to reserve a day or evening, now.

busy summer, as usual

Published on July 12, 2009 in Computers, Random Thoughts and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Camp is going well. I’m taking lots of pictures, again, but we haven’t made any decisions about where to put them, yet. If any go online publicly, I’ll be sure to post a link. I bought a timbuk2 backpack to help alleviate some near-constant back pain. It’s a great bag and quite comfortable. I still love my big messenger bag, but I’ll save it for team-building programs.

I’m also back to trains and other public transportation for the summer and have been listening to a lot of music (and Half-Blood Prince, lately, in preparation for the movie). I like how the commute in the summertime gives me a chance to reconnect with my music collection. I’d still love to replace my phone (which still turns itself off quite a bit) and my iPod and the GPS with one device… but I don’t know if I should wait for the Garmin phones to come out or just cave in and get an iPhone. So I’m still nursing my phone along and carrying both.

The wedding and trip out to Maine  was fun. I haven’t really had a chance to go through those pictures and pick out the best ones yet, but again, I’ll post a link, when I do. I don’t think I have another day off until camp is over… though, I may take a Saturday, next week or the week after. I’m LOVING my Macbook pro. I haven’t completely set myself up on it and decided what programs I’m going to use for photo work and web work to replace my windows favorites (Paint Shop Pro and Homesite 5.5). It’s an awesome piece of hardware, and I’ve already used it to do some stats work for adventure ed. and it was almost a pleasant experience. I’ve definitely gotten used to the trackpad and the multi-touch-ness.

I’m also eating a little healthier. When I’m picking out meals, I constantly think of the Dead Milkmen song “nutrition,” which is fun to hum, but it’s kind of a silly song. I’ll get more into the reasons for this sudden health-consciousness when I’ve completely wrapped my head around it.

‘tween vacations

Published on June 15, 2009 in Computers, Family & Friends and Photo. Closed Tags: , , , .

‘Tween season is ending. Camp orientation/training started today. Got a a good relaxing week in Wisconsin complete with Bingo, lots of Uno, a round of Mini adventure golf, a few boat rides, lots of good eating and a fair amount of laying around doing nothing. There are pictures. There will be yelp reviews, soon.

Macbooks down in price! Great timing! Cheap upgrade to Snow Leopard, too! Now, convince me not to switch to AT&T and get an iPhone … or convince me to switch, turn-by-turn GPS was one of the things holding me back from the iPhone and I guess that’s not an issue for much longer. I need a reliable phone ASAP. I’d love to wait for an Android phone on Verizon, but the chances that Verizon will cripple its coolness (app store and free access to all of googleness) is almost guaranteed… or convince me to wait and risk a few weeks of camp with a phone that turns itself off a few times a day. If I go all apple on hardware, will I be tempted by the apple counterparts to the Google stuff I use and love?

Looking forward to a trip out east next week… hope Sarah and I can shake our weird ailments before then.

upgrade anticipation

Published on March 22, 2009 in Computers, Photo, Random Thoughts and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I have a time frame for the macbook upgrade. If I haven’t done it by June 25th, it will happen that day. The fact that it is going to happen makes me hate the loud fans and uncomfortable weight of the Dell even more. I don’t actually hate the Dell, it’s had a bunch of good years, but it is time for the upgrade.

I don’t have a timeframe for the phone upgrade. I was waiting for the nuvifone, but there isn’t a release date for that yet, and the main reason I was leaning towards it was the GPS-centric nature of it. The word on the street is that the new iPhone OS will enable using the Google maps in other applications and allow turn-by-turn directions. I don’t know if I can go Apple in such a big way… but the iPhone does have great customer satisfaction ratings and such. My phone turned itself off three times, completely at random, on Thursday… it is definitely time for that upgrade, but it also might not happen until the summer.

I don’t know if it’s actually going to be an upgrade, but we’re supposed to switch from Dish to U-Verse next month. Our DSL is currently with AT&T, and it can’t even handle streaming Netflix movies… I don’t think we ordered any more speed, so it probably won’t change, but the girl who set up the install sure did try to convince us that it was a newer, better, more exclusive dsl line. As far as I’ve heard, U-Verse is just TV over DSL. It’s pretty likely that we’re actually trying to squeeze TV and the internet over the same pipe and actually downgrading. We shall see.

This site’s wordpress code is due for an upgrade, but I don’t have any desire to do that. All of my little plugins are working fine. Maybe, if I get a little more into tumblr/twitter/etc. after the phone/macbook upgrade, I’ll feel the need to tweak the code here to keep up with more mobile updates.

My car doesn’t need any upgrades… I guess Doug’s van is dead, though. We peeked at some craigslist ads for similar vehicles in our price range, but haven’t started actively looking at anything yet. I’ve been using the Sirius in my car much more often, lately. I got an eMail from Sirius and I was tempted to buy the latest portable radio while I can still “lock in” the current rates. Who knows if Sirius will survive? I’ve done my part to support them. I resisted the urge by telling myself that the radio I had put in my car works fine and I don’t need another portable music player… I like the idea of combining a couple devices, not adding one to carry around.

My camera also doesn’t need to be upgraded, but I haven’t used it much, lately. When I had time to be taking pictures, I was mostly playing video games. I’ll bring it along on the field trips for work and maybe that’ll respark my desire to shoot. Maybe a new toy would help… Or maybe I should get a Diana+ for myself, since it seems to be getting all the cool attachments and add-ons lately.

Upgrade fever is similar to Spring fever. All of our vacation planning is definitely keeping the typical spring fever symptoms at bay… unless vacation planning is a symptom of spring fever. Mom’s coming up during my spring break, we’ve got a family vacation planned for early June and a wedding back east in late June… and we’ve yet to pick out a show, but we plan to hit APT/Theater in the woods again this summer. I guess there are a few weeks between the team-building season and the camp season that I haven’t thought about, yet. There’s always video games…

pulled the trigger on a new (to me) Mac

Published on October 27, 2008 in Computers, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I found a plugin that’s supposed to crosspost from my wordpress blog to myspace. That would cut down on a lot of copying and pasting for each blog entry. There may be formatting issues. We shall see. This entry is mostly a test to see how well it works.
[Update: didn't work at all]

First, I should mention that I entered this shot of Penny into a photo contest with the extremely vague theme of “Black & White.” Sarah found the contest, she entered too – You should vote for us.

Sarah is working today. She went from no jobs to one retail job at Jo-Ann fabrics, one photojournalism gig at a local paper and one Promotions gig (web design, print newsletter design, photo slideshows, etc.) for a non-profit in Florida. It’s weird to be home while she’s not; that hasn’t happened in a while.

While she was in Florida, gathering photos for this job and meeting the people she’d be working for, I replaced the G4 with a G5. I grabbed a last-generation G5 (just before the intel switch) on eBay. It’s crazy fast, compared to the G4, and stable, so far. I got everyone’s accounts migrated onto it without too much trouble. The handles got a little bent in shipping, but that’s ok. The G4 has been a trusty computer for many years now, mostly as a backup, occasionally as Mark or Drew & Candace’s main machine in Woonsocket, but I think my constant hardware tweaking was finally too much for it. It was crashing at random. I mostly suspected the not-really-for-a-mac video card, but I didn’t want to go back to the one that was slowing the whole machine down. It’s downstairs and hooked up to that behemoth of a CRT monitor that Zombie is hooked up to. When I have time, I’ll mess with it and see if I can make it stable. Unfortunately, it never crashed on my watch, so I don’t know if I can duplicate the problem.

I’d like to be downstairs, now, playing with the other computers and catching up on my TV shows, but Frank’s friend Karol is sleeping on the couch down there. I’m trying to think of a way to make noise and wake him up but not give away the fact that I’m doing it just to wake him up.

browsing

Published on October 14, 2008 in Computers, Family & Friends and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Been trying to keep myself occupied while Sarah is off at her photo/web design/newsletter gig. I’ve done a lot of Mac shopping… not for the eventual replacement laptop(s) for our old limping ones, but to replace the G4 that’s been my trusty backup since sometime in 2001. It’s always been quirky, being a mac, but now it’s just plain unstable and Sarah and her mom and I all use it a fair amount. Sarah will probably end up doing most of her work it, since her laptop can’t really handle much. It’s crashing about once or twice daily. I don’t know what’s causing it, and it’s never actually crashed while I was using it, but I shouldn’t expect wonders from a machine with so many weird hardware upgrades. I’m not in a place where I can invest in a new Intel mac to replace it, so I’ve been browsing craigslist and ebay for decent G5s. It’ll be sad to retire the G4. Maybe it can be made stable and live on in some semi-retired state. It is kinda loud, though, might not be worth it. Maybe I can find a home for it.

In other news, Thursday, the Mazda is getting an oil change and the master window switch replaced, again. The first time it was because the Auto button wasn’t working. Then the replacement made the right rear window non-operational. It’s been a long process, and a learning experience, since I’m now on my extended warranty and have to pay money for repairs. I also have to pay a whole bunch of money to have my windshield replaced. I woke up, Sunday morning, to find a starburst and cracks branching off in multiple directions right at the top center of the glass. Illinois doesn’t have that nice separate glass policy that Massachusetts did… so I have to pay my full comprehensive deductible. I’d say that maybe I could get some cook pictures of the work in progress, but we’ve lined up sealcoating for the driveway for the same day, and that smell gives me an almost instant headache that lasts for a whole day.

Tomorrow, I think I get rained on during our first day trip of the season.

new strings

Published on August 26, 2008 in Computers, Family & Friends and Music. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

I need new strings. A string on my bass broke last night during practice… I hadn’t bought strings in so long, I must’ve thrown out the last batch of old ones I took off, so I had no spares. I had to leave practice early. After I left, I suppose there must’ve been some sort of discussion, because, when I got home, I got a call, thanking me for my efforts and asking when I could come pick up my amp later this week and a few lame apologies and excuses. This isn’t a disaster, though. It was good to be playing again, but it was definitely not the right group of guys. I have a very good sense of musical variety and space and melody and they could put together interesting song pieces, but didn’t really understand the musicality I was trying to bring to it. The phrase that will echo through my head is, “it sounds kinda gay when you do that, could you not do that?” I don’t think I’ve ever been told that one of my bass lines is wrong for a song. I want to believe it was just a matter of taste or style… but the songwriter dude will always be that “young, pushy and impatient guy with no sense of musical space” in my mind.

Even though I was half-relieved to be out of this musical situation, I still want to play, so I was a little upset. If nothing else, I have to go through the effort of finding musicians, again, and that’s a lot more effort than I originally imagined it to be. A little sadness and/or stress brought out all my usual urges. My first urge was the “nasty letter” … to go post on craigslist about not wanting to play with “impatient, pushy kids” and having unencumbered “freedom to use space, variety and melody” in my basslines… but I quickly squashed that idea. It was replaced with my go-to urge in times of stress and light depression: spending money. It started innocently enough, looking into the exhaust fan for the mac. But I was doing it on my zombie PC downstairs, which needed software updates… then I started looking into what kind of hardware was in there and whether I could max it out. It’s not like it was running slow at all and I barely ever even use that machine. I had an amazon cart full of hardware, when I came to my senses and realized I was stress-spending (like stress-eating, but more expensive).  I can spend money today on much more necessary things, like a haircut and an eye exam and new sunglasses…. and maybe new strings.

I guess this means I don’t need to pick up my 18″ cabinet when I go back east. I should probably retrieve it from whoever has it and get it to Mom’s, so I can have it shipped out here, when and if it does become necessary. We still haven’t firmed up any definite days for the week I’m out there, but the requests for hang-out time are coming in quickly, so if you haven’t commented or eMailed me, do it soon. T-Minus 6 or 7 Days … or something like that.

can I get a 60 inch monitor for my house?

Published on August 7, 2008 in Computers, Photo and Work. Closed Tags: , , .

60 inches is big!

updates on recent trips and stuff, soon, I promise!

I am wearing Crocs

Published on June 14, 2008 in Computers, Family & Friends, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

They’re like duck boats for your feet… that’s what they make me think of anyway. I picked up a pair of the “off-road” variety at the REI, that we spent hours trying to find, yesterday. They’re comfortable. The strap button is irritating me a little, but nothing out of the ordinary for a new-shoe kinda thing. We went there to look at camera bags, since mine is dying and so is Sarah’s. They’re supposed to have some Crumpler bags, but they didn’t have anything except a couple gadget pouches. By the way, when did REI start putting its “co-op” status in the limelight? I have this member card, which I thought was just another store rewards program… but it turns out that I’m a member of the REI Co-op. I even had a “dividend” that I got to put towards my purchase.

Getting utterly lost on the way there, due to our complete reliance on the unerring accuracy of printed out Google directions, made me realize that I really do benefit from the GPS. It’s time to get a unit in the car that’s mountable, unlike the cheesy little laptop. I added one with a good traffic system and a big screen to my Amazon wishlist. I’m unimpressed with MSN’s traffic system, on the laptop, but I’ve heard there are a couple new traffic monitoring systems coming out soon. We did chance upon a Cosi, though, so it wasn’t a total waste.

It’s nice to have my car back. I had to pay my deductible, but the Progressive dude seemed pretty sure that once he heard back from State Farm, that I’d get reimbursed pretty quickly. I got a nifty little keychain. It’s one of those classic, flat, rubbery ones. It’s a nice addition to my growing keychain collection. The place also did some serious cleaning of the interior. I was amazed.

I’m strongly considering using public transportation for camp this summer. I don’t need to carry a whole lot of equipment to camp everyday, and I’ve got my iPod and Nintendo DS for train/bus entertainment. I did some searching through transitchicago.com for routes from a couple of the Metra stations. The system is pretty darn cool, goes through Google maps and gives you alternate routes with approximate arrival times. Maybe I’ll try out a route or two next week, during camp training.

woot