60 inches is big!
updates on recent trips and stuff, soon, I promise!
Tag Archive for 'Computers'
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My iPod is getting old. It’s kind of sad. I guess it has outlasted any other portable audio device I’ve ever owned. I’ll always have fond memories of my Fisher portable CD player, with the 40 seconds of memory, so that I could take a CD out, if I was in the last 40 seconds of the track, and put the new CD in, with no gap in the music. And I’ll never forget my cute Philips portable MP3 mini CD player. It looked just like a miniature discman. Those 80mm discs were a little hard to find, and the name and size caused a lot of confusion with minidiscs, but it got me through many bus trips. I definitely had a few other trashy portable CD players and portable CD players that could read MP3s, but those two were my favorites. Had I known how much effort (making MP3 CDs) and time and money (buying CDs) I could have saved myself, I probably would’ve gotten the iPod a lot sooner. But it was two and a half years ago, and now it’s throwing up this weird “connect to your computer. use itunes to restore” error message every now and then. Resetting/restarting it seems to make it go away, I don’t actually have to connect it to a computer or restore it, that would be annoying. It might mean that the hard drive is dying. I dunno, maybe I should try a restore one of these days. It’s an essential part of my life, now that I’m on the trains and buses every day.
It got me thinking about my phone situation, again. It’s also not performing at it’s best, and occasionally turning off or restarting itself, randomly, and my contract is up sometime in the next six months. I still think switching from Verizon to AT&T, for the iPhone, is a big hassle… and I don’t know if the iPhone would fill my expectations as either a GPS device or as an iPod replacement. Sure, the idea of having all of those gadgets in one is appealing, but I really like the click-wheel, I think I’d miss it. I really like my phone’s real QWERTY keyboard, with real keys. And I even like my big honkin’ laptop GPS system, though, that is the system that most needs replacing with something smaller and easier to use. Still no word on carriers for the Nuvifone. I doubt that it’ll be the right replacement for the iPod, though, so unless it’s available on Verizon, it’s not gonna happen for me. The only way the switch to AT&T is going to happen is if the iPhone proves itself to be the all-encompassing device that I need it to be.
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.
A few interesting prospects, but nothing solid, yet, on the band front. I’m leaning towards the folk stuff, especially after a conversation with Mark about his band’s general distaste for Chicagoland. Someone told them that the groups they played with were the “end all, be all” of the Chicago suburban scene… maybe among their own little incestuous high school friends and families and bandmates. Though, after looking through the ads in craigslist for the past few weeks, I fear that there may not be a whole lot of great original music out here in the ‘burbs. I told Mark that I’d do my best to whip the scene into shape, so that it’s worth his band’s trouble to come back out here. I’m not sure if that’s realistic, but I’ll do my best to find the good scene… since the Suburban Youth Culture doesn’t suit Mark’s needs.
Got a couple new power adapters for my laptops, including a auto adapter for the little Dell that’s coming with us to Seattle. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it’ll kill the need for that DC to AC converter that always makes the airport security flip their wigs. I also got the latest version of my GPS software… it’s the new Microsoft version with the “Connected Services” that tell me traffic and gas price information through a little FM receiver. Unfortunately, I haven’t had those services connect for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time and only when I’m as close to downtown as the high schools I work at… as soon I get a few miles out, it loses its connection or something. I’m holding out until we try it in the Seattle area to give it the scathingly bad review that it, so far, deserves. The GPS part, however, works really well, as good or better than previous versions. It still doesn’t speak the street names, but it does automatically reroute when you go off route, instead of just saying “Off Route” over and over again until you tell it what to do.
I don’t usually get into politics, but we had a discussion at work this morning about the general opinion on Bush. It’s probably true that some people would be happy if he suddenly died, and other people would be happy if he enacted his secret plan to start a war with Iran and postpone the next presidential election indefinitely. I’d be happy if I never had to see his beady little eyes on TV again. I am also kind of afraid of Hillary’s crazy eyes, but they don’t bother me as much, I guess.
Sarah’s throwing me a birthday party. I don’t remember the last party I had… but this is mostly an excuse to get some friends over and play some games and eat some food. The food is shaping up to be pretty yummy, I think. I’m excited. If you’re feeling really bad about not coming, there’s always Apple gift cards (for the day when the old Dell does finally die) or stuff from my Amazon wishlist. I will be thirty years old. I don’t feel it, I guess, but I don’t know how old I feel. I do know that I’d really like to find some people to perform music with. Steve from snakes & ladders sent a video documentary-type-thing on the band that he put together that drove that home.
I thought that the Dell had ended it’s extended lease on life, again, but it turned out to be bad drivers for my network card. It took way too long to narrow the problem from random freezing to maybe the Firefox beta to maybe just Firefox to anything internet to the new drivers from windows update. It’s been running normally again since I updated a few power management settings that were suggested on some forum. Acceptable solution, I guess. Before all that narrowing down was done, I opened it up again to make sure it wasn’t simply overheating. There wasn’t a whole lot of dust to blow out, though. Opening up laptops and fiddling with them isn’t as much fun as full sized PCs. Yet another reason my next laptop will be a Macbook Pro. Still don’t know when I’ll make that upgrade, but I thought about it a lot more, while trying to figure this thing out.
In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.
Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.
It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.
Technically, I guess it’s called the Spindle, but I like “Car Kabob.” The rumor is that it’s supposed to come down or (hopefully) get moved because Walgreen’s is expanding or something and it can’t stay where it is. We’ve been hoping to get there and take some pictures, and with all of our accumulating cameras, we decided to take advantage of the sun that was out there, today, even though the wind chill made it ridiculously cold outside. I brought my Panasonic and a bunch of fun cameras: the Holga, the Diana+, the Reality 3D, the Polaroid 450 Land Camera and the Cheki mini 25. The old 450 was kinda hard to use in the cold. We were trying to use the warming plate, but failed to pre-warm it. The 3D camera also proved hard to wind, especially since our fingers were freezing after a couple minutes of exposure. The Cheki won cutest camera and cutest prints of the day. It may have suffered a little bit from the cold as well, but we cheated towards the end of our time there and took some out the window of the car and let the car’s heat help develop them.
HP finally put the Leopard drivers on their website for our printer/scanner/fax, so we can now scan directly from the mac, again. We’d been scanning to my laptop and then writing the files to the network shares on the mac. It was a little tedious, but we don’t have to do that anymore. Yay!
The sun is still only coming out on days where we sleep in or need to go to work. We got an old Polaroid 450 land camera working with a new set of batteries and a pack of 690 from the local Wolf Camera… Sarah tried to buy it at the camera store she works at, but they told her she couldn’t… something about needing it for passport photos. Pretty strange that she had to take her business elsewhere. Anyway, that’s a lot of film to use up in all these new/old cameras. So we need a sunny day… preferably one with temperatures at least in the double digits.
The adapter that came the other day turned out to be the opposite of what I needed, but I took a trip down to Micro Center while Sarah was at work. It took a really long time to get there, due to traffic/weather issues, so I didn’t get to wander around the store and bask in it’s full glory, but it was pretty impressive. Very big store, seemed to have a good selection and someone was there to help me within a minute or two of me walking in. They had the right one, so I’m closer to fixing the fish tank computer, though I still don’t know where or when I’ll tackle that.
In other news, I took some of the money in my ING account and invested it in some stocks, prompted by their eMail about acquiring Sharebuilder. I’ll never use the crazy stock strategies that I learned with Dad at those nutty seminars, but I did include some Food industry stocks in my little portfolio, in honor of his idea that “people will always need food.” I’m about 60/40 Technology & Food industry stocks, so I guess I could do another food stock or some other industry, but I invested about half of what was in the ING account, and I was kinda hoping to see the results of that savings account interest versus the stock gains over time. So I’ll probably just leave it how it is.
Now that Sarah has picked up a couple new, fun cameras and we set up both her Holga and the Diana+ with 35mm film mods, we’re ready to go out and shoot like crazy. She even brought home a roll of film that fits the Brownie Starflex from some deep, dark back corner of the attic, at work. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a day with decent weather or half-decent light forever. We want to go to the car-kabob in Berwyn, and we’ve been talkin’ about it for a while now, but gray skies make for lots of boring photos.
I prepped my Robert Rodriguez Puerco Pibil tonight and put it in the fridge to marinate. We used a couple slightly different ingredients, but it still smelled strong and spicy. It was really tasty last time. I hope it turn out just as good. Maybe I’ll try to make the recipe on the Sin City DVD… I should really watch that movie again, first, though. I got Planet Terror this Christmas, too, I really need to put aside some quality time in front of the TV downstairs.
I also got a 24-20 pin adapter so that I can use Frank’s old power supply in the fish tank. That’s gonna be a messy project, I’m sure, so I’ll have to save it for a fully free day. I finally got the laptop Sarah’s uncle left here back to working order, I’m not gonna open it up and resolder the power jack, though. I’ve never been good with soldering and taking apart my Dell was a tedious project that I probably would avoid doing again, given the choice.
Still enjoying my break… but would enjoy it more with a little sunshine.
- Boston accents really are funny. I was conditioned not to respond much to them, while living out there, but when my Mom’s friend Joyce started talking about the Pops concert they went to and mentioned the “orchestra” (Auk-sturrah), I almost cracked up. I didn’t hear too many other examples, but once I heard that, my ears were sort of listening for it. No one’s mentioned anything overly funny about my accent out here. Dad trained himself out of his Boston accent to be on the radio, so I grew with a midwesternized sort of accent… but there are discrepancies, mostly in vowel sounds; some double-O words like roof and room have an oo sound in my head, not a uh sound… and it seems that there’s some long E and long A differences, too. Sarah works on N McLean Blvd. The first time I went there, the directions her mom gave me included a street that sounded like [Shirley] MacLaine… and of course there’s the example from that Threadless shirt that rhymed Cherry with Fairy, that might be close enough for spoken poetry, but one has a clear eh sound to me, while the other has a long A.
-Â I miss playing music. I knew that already, obviously, but I took a ride with Mark to a couple music stores, looking for gifts for Raianne, and I missed even that part of the scene. Hanging around talking to music store employees, seeing how knowledgeable they are, guessing what kinds of shoppers the other people in the store are: parents, multi-instrumentalists, strictly piano, garage band kids, etc. I also almost went to a show at Ralph’s. I was extremely tempted, just to see some local music, even if it was metal(!) … but I didn’t end up going, mostly because I didn’t have my earplugs with me, but the yearning was there.
- While the GPS is useful out here for finding out how long it’s going to take to get places or getting around large obstacles like airports or finding out where the bridges over the rivers are, it’s not necessary, since the grid road structure seems to extend forever. It is, however, completely necessary when driving to new places in New England. Grid doesn’t exist out there, except in small pockets of residential suburbia or inner-city areas that happen to be uninterrupted by a river or a coastline or a humongous hill. Most roads go diagonally at some time or another, very few are straight for more than a mile at a time. If GPS is unavailable, a printed out set of directions from a map service is ok, if you have a decent navigator to read them to you. Getting directions from locals works in a pinch, but be prepared for landmarks that don’t really exist anymore (“bear left where The Fair used to be, then go up past the old closed Texaco and turn left at the building that used to be the high school. When you pass the parking lot that used to be the Ford Dealership you’re almost there, you just have to take what was the third exit of the rotary at that big intersection where they installed a light. Then it’s on your right, after the where the mill used to be…”). Of course, if you live out there, you just know which roads go where. I used to have mental pictures of where each road ended and which important roads it might intersect with along the way. Maybe I can start clearing out all the brainspace for other things, now.
- My little laptop could might be able to get me through a weekend or maybe even a week of regular use. It’s pretty beat up and kinda sad, in that it has no CD-Rom and has to have either wireless network or USB ports, since it’s internal USB port fell out. But it gets me to my mail and the rest of the web. It does just fine with that GPS stuff, when it doesn’t do that 25-minute blank screen before booting thing.
I wish the rest of the computers here had such minor problems. Frank’s is due for another upgrade, to be able to play Call of Duty 4. He thinks it’s the graphics card, it probably is, but that’s gonna require a Power supply upgrade … and since we left it in the crazy Gateway case, it’s gonna be easier and cheaper to do a case transfer. Not a huge problem, but still a big project. The fish tank computer was due to have the Reserator added to it, but after successfully fishing out the molex power lead that tells the reserator when to turn on, the machine won’t boot. It seems like a power issue, and the power supply was just the crappy stock Gateway… possibly not the best candidate for oil submersion. Maybe, after the upgrade, I’ll submerge Frank’s equally crappy power supply, instead. removing that tray from the oil seems like a really messy project that I’m not especially looking forward to. And then Sarah’s uncle Paul left his laptop here on Christmas… it was ridiculously infested with spyware and malware and adware, but it also can’t see its audio card… or, more accurately, it can see it, and install drivers for it, but only the line-in gets installed. For output, it says “no audio device.” It’s annoying. It also has a power jack issue, which, I believe i saw something about needing a re-solder in a quick google search. I’ve never been good at soldering.
