musings of a back porch

On the iPad Pro.

So last week I mentioned I had started taking classes for a masters degree… One of the things that became very quickly apparent to me was that while I have a really nice computer setup at home. It sucked like portable hole going to a vacuum dimension. I’ve had a iPad of some sort since the iPad2 days. I’ve always found them to be handy but never really good for much more then keeping track of my fantasy football teams and surfing the internet on the couch. The best use I’ve ever found for it is watching movies on a plane or something similarly single focused.

So with this class I made a concerted effort to use my iPad Air 2 with a Bluetooth keyboard for class for taking notes on reading and doing outlines for papers. I knew that writing full blown papers wasn’t going to happen but I was going to go for 70% of my homework. The first week of class it blew up in my face so hard… the keyboard was just to small, my gorilla sized sausagesque fingers were missing and double tapping keys constantly, along with just being generally uncomfortable. The process did show great promise though the ergonomics sucked. Which I kind of already knew from using the iPad at conferences for taking notes, good for a quick thing or two but hands on keyboard for more then a minute or two and things started to be “no bueno”.

So this led to a deep discussion of replacing the iPad with a portable device that could act as a writing and research device and fill the remarkable small iPad sized niche in my life. One of the things I have noticed over the last 2 years since I got a iPhone + is that I used my iPad much less and just defaulted to my iPhone. I seriously questioned if another iPad was warranted or would I better served by a low end surface or MacBook.

Chrome books have merit, I’m not just there yet…

I kicked around the concept for a week and what I finally landed on was. While a second laptop to carry around would be nice, I would already be behind the tech curve on a piece of gear that I knew had a limited shelf life and low resale/hand down value. That’s what killed the laptop and 2in1 situations and ultimately landed on a iPad Pro 10.5 with… a keyboard….

So basically I have a single app focus laptop with a small keyboard that isn’t to cramped for my gorilla like hands that is reasonably powerful, integrates with my workflows, and can fill a iPad sized niche in my world. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how nicely the iPad has worked fill some roles and I’ve already found uses for it outside of the original scope. It’s not a daily carry device in the work bag… I may not use it every day, but it’s there and I only need to charge it once a week. The down side is with the keyboard and the smart connector it’s tough to use it on my lap… and I kinda despise the on screen keyboard. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Oh yeah… this thing….

So ummm it’s been a while…. like just a tick over 2 years a while…

So what’s new?

Same old same old huh?

Yeah same here…. I got a new MBP… hostname “I Am Groot” it’s interesting looking in logs… there are much more verbose then the namesake….

So where have I been? Same place as always, just on a different page…. or pages as the case would be.

I’m still paying for this domain and I like the Word Press platform much more then some of the other platforms out there… and there seems to be something much more authentic about the personal site then using a “FriendFace” or “Tweetgram”.

I don’t know I do like “Tweetgram”

So ummm yeah… I think this is officially going to get re-lit for something other then chronicling the journeys of nothing… I’ve missed the writing and I stepped away for various reasons that I won’t get into here. Feel free to ask me next time you see me and we have a beer…. until then you’re just gonna have to watch me make beer and go through the whole beer brewery process.

One day I will get there… today is not that day… Tomorrow isn’t looking like it either.

Hello I’m Johnny Cash…

You know maybe just maybe I shouldn’t use the line from whatever song is playing on iTunes when I start writing… you know it may be a good idea… but you have admit I have your attention now don’t I?

So I took a few days last week and just checked out of reality for bit… and by checked out of reality I mean I had a “staycation” and by “staycation” I mean I’m to f*cking cheap to go anywhere with out a damn good reason. And even then there is going to be alot of damn whining.

From here on out we are going to call the “staycation” what it really was… “Tom fucking around” (Tfa).

So on my little Tfa excursion, I had two markedly different experiences for the about the same price…. on one side I went a picked up “Medal of Honor” for the PC… on the other side I got some zombie novels. Guess which one I enjoyed infinitely more?

First “Medal of Honor” not the greatest game ever, but decent for a single player campaign and lets face it these things are built to be multiplayer and almost no attention is played to the single player experience. I have to say after playing this game it was almost enough to turn me off to first person shooters set in anything close to the real world at anytime. It’s hard to describe and honestly I don’t want to write about it anymore.

OK so after the depressing experience that was “Medal of Honor” my brother had texted me and said I need to check out “Day by Day Armageddon” he then tells me that since I liked “World War Z” I will really like this (great now my brother is amazon.com). So I pick it up on the kindle (more about that in a minute) and sometime around noon on Friday I sat down to start the book… my plan was to read for a hour and then text Curtis to see if he wanted to go shoot guns… As Curtis will tell you he got no such text. I honestly didn’t put down the damned kindle until the battery ran out at around 6 that night. I finished it the next day. So on Sunday I’m going through zombie withdrawal and pop on to amazon to see if there is another book coming out soon, and to my pleasant surprise there is another book available on the damned kindle. Amazon one click purchase for digital goods is very dangerous… especially for zombie books. I read the second book in a afternoon it was just as awesome as the first book. Now granted I don’t have high standards for zombie books, but if you thought “World War Z” was good you will probably like “Day by Day Armageddon”

OK so now a word about digital books… I find that I’m having the same issue with digital books that I had with digital music some years ago. My first issue is apparently I’m not to be trusted with books in digital form since when I went to go “loan” the “Day by Day Armageddon” books I found there were not eligible for loaning, then I started looking at all of my kindle books and sure enough none of them are enabled for loaning. What the hell I thought Kindle could loan books now… so a quick search through the Amazon FAQs section reveals that loaning books is restricted by publisher…. well hell I guess I’m not going to be buying the next book on Kindle. Which now leaves me at a interesting crossroads… while I enjoy having books digitally across multiple devices I have to say the no loaning part (for the most part for me) is a major impediment to the platform. I know that nook has some sort of loaning functionality but I need to research that more before I think about going down that path.

Lets be honest if I got a nook color I would so hack it and put android on it….. On which I would read my Kindle books 🙂

More migration notes… bootcamping

Ok so this one is going to be quick… I got a new mac… yea!

I posted previously on the migration process after a about 24 hours things started to magically get faster, which tends to make me thing there is some sort of background system process running that updates things to the new mac from the old mac. I don’t knot it’s just conjecture or maybe I just need to reboot the damn thing.

I’m thinking I probably needed to reboot the damn thing after dumping some serious knowledge on it.

Ok so if any of you have heard me gripe about my apple store experience in 2007 when I bought my first mac…. you know the story where the dude selling me a very expensive looked down his nose at me and said “windows isn’t going to be the first thing you install is it?” I find that I’m back to a kind of circle of life moment with my mac and windows.

It seems that my upgrade Windows7 that I bought for my old mac is tied to that hardware so I couldn’t use it on the new mac, ok not a huge deal I will use winclone and clone the dmg into the bootcamp partition… yeah that worked not at all. Which left me with… well maybe I can suck up my bootcamp windows into vmware… nope no dice. Honestly after about three hours of dicking around with I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

So now the real question comes out, do I really need to bootcamp my mac? Part of me says yes I do! Then the rational side of me kicks in, 95% of the time when I booted into windows was only to download updates and that was a bit of a pain. I can’t say that I have any real intentions of using this mac as a gaming rig… ok I do have steam on it and compared to my old mac Left4Dead is pretty sweet. When it comes to gaming though at least the kind of gaming I do the PC is the platform of choice. Yes mac are starting to do games, here is the other side of that coin I have no real desire to build a new PC other then my CPU is getting to be a bit long in the tooth. The GPU isn’t far behind.

From a overall perspective what I would like to do is move off of the PC entirely and run all of my media on a apple platform… that however seems kind of expensive but man that shit would work. I can say from a IT guy perspective it’s in my best interest to be familiar with all platforms out there so I guess I will be keeping my PC around even if it is just for gaming and looking for aliens.

Keep until the end…

Long time readers of the blog… and I think there is a grand total of 4 of you now. Probably remember the last round of upgrade fever that hit the batcave which resulted in a TiVo, a MacBook Pro, and a sooner then I would have liked upgrade to my current desktop rig. That last bout of upgrade fever was 2007. Honestly it was pretty much kicked off by coming into a couple of bucks because of a house I sold. I think I may have gotten into beer brewing at about that time too, and I have yet to hear anybody complain about that (when enjoyed in moderation).

So flash forward to 2010 it’s 3 years since the last major bout of upgrade fever… and honestly I don’t think it’s returned. Do I look at the new Core i5 MacBook Pro’s and go “damn that is one sexy machine”? Oh hell yes I do. Am I going to stick with Mac as my laptop platform of choice…. at this time I’m going to say that the answer is yes. I don’t feel this over riding urge to go and purchase a new laptop simply because it’s new. Other then a different body style and upgraded guts what does this new mac do that my existing mac doesn’t do?

In a word not a damn thing. Actually I’m starting to think that I may pull windows off my mac with the exception of a vmware environment. Why install windows on a mac? well in a word “games” and I have to think about the last time I played a game on my mac (spring of 2009) after that I’ve booted into windows just to update it and the AV software, I’m normally back to the mac os within a hour or so. At this juncture it seems kind of dumb to keep a windows partition on my mac. Vmware has matured as a product that it’s pretty usable for those one off devices that won’t work with mac (which in my world are far and few between).

What I find interesting is what I choose to do on my mac vs my pc….

Photos… mac
Videos… editing the one time… mac… watching pc
surfing… pc unless I actually unpug the mac and take it to another room… and honestly I would just assume leave the technology in the office when I get home / get done working.
games… pc
blogging… what ever is most convenient… which again depends on what I’m doing quick dumps seem to go better on the pc… longer sessions (pretty much anything with the category of “musing of a back porch”) tends to be written on the mac. Not that the mac is any better it’s just more portable which lets me get creative in other spots.

When I think about how I use mobile technology I know that a iPad while cool would probably not be used as anything more then a media tablet and digital photo frame. And if I had pictures that I wanted to show off in HD on a 10 inch screen I would so buy one. But I don’t and I tend to be more old school in my technology usage (I still prefer a command line for Christ sake) and combination of mac-book air with a mac mini seems like it would do well for me. At the very least the mac-book air wouldn’t burn my legs like my mac book pro.

Why a Mini and a Air? The Air would be for the day to day stuff, surfing and writing… The mini would be for more cpu intensive apps (vmware, iphoto editing, something with more then a 12 inch screen) of course the cost of those two items is just about to the point of a mac book pro and why buy two when you can have one at the same price.

The part in all of this that drives me up the wall the most? Other then a slightly undersized hard drive (which is fixed very easily by a afternoon and $75) I have zero problems with my mac and it does everything I need/want it to do! I don’t know if I’ve finally hit the point of not needing the latest and greatest or if maybe just maybe I have found technology that can fulfill my needs for a extended period of time.

God it’s hell to have my problems. 🙂

How can you have more pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Traditions are good… some traditions die because the are no longer needed or are no longer cared for. Others die simply because something better comes along and becomes the new tradition. And sometimes your fucking neighbors are working with large power tools at 7pm on a Sunday night because they are just that annoying!

I can’t wait for the heat to get here to put people in of doors until the fall.

One tradition that has fallen by the way side or me is the blogging/writing/whatever on Sundays. It’s been supplanted by football in the fall and movies on Sunday afternoon for the rest of the year. So just like last month and blatantly ripping off the death-by-blog crew yet again, I give you the return of Sunday night blogging. Since I seem to be doing ok with small changes over the course of the last year or so it seems like the time is right.

In the last week there has been alot of beer drunk, and alot of cars turning left which is to say I’ve been on vacation and on internet hiatus other then my phone. So that basically means I’ve been using the living bejesus out of my phone for the last couple of days. Now what I find interesting is my cell phone billing period starts on the 7th of every month. And since I took off for Nascar on the 7th I thought it would be neat to share some quick numbers on cell usage by one guy sending text messages and emails to people who really don’t care that much about NASCAR. Which is to say my friends.

So from Wed 4/7/2010 to Sunday 4/11/2010
-Voice Minutes — 12 (includes all kinds of minutes)
-Txt/mms — 309 txt / 68 mms (inbound and out on both counts)
– Data used — 15MB

For me this is what I would call “heavy usage” basically I was burning through a full battery charge every 36hours. The blackberry I currently have (9630) is notorious for having poor battery life. So that is one guy, now multiply that by the 20k to 30k that are out there for the week and it add in that there are 5 towers to cover the whole space of the track and affiliated parking/camping. And this all happens for two weeks out of the year (one in the spring and one in the fall) when there is no racing going on the local area has a population of probably less then 200 people.

Kind of makes you have a little bit more sympathy for the kinds of things that wireless engineers have to deal with.

I’m just really happy that the guy next to us had a 3ton floor jack in his camp when I had to replace the tire on my truck.

Gravity zero see me through….

So before I get to the main content of this post… a quick request. If this site is taking longer then 15 seconds to resolve and longer then 10 seconds to load on your Cable or DSL or FTTH connection drop me a comment with the approx times and your connection type. The site has been really slow for the last couple of days and I can’t decide if it’s just my internet or something else.

OK now on to the main cruxt of the conversation this evening.

So you may have heard that I started doing the gym thing on what amounts to a pretty consistent basis last summer. Now while I may sometimes say I was “duped” into going I really can’t say that since I was given every opportunity to say no on multiple occasions and duck out. Oh no… I went… and went… and went.

That started in August, it’s now March… I now get cranky if I haven’t had my gym time to burn off energy. I know this because I’ve had a couple of week long breaks in there (elk hunting, christmas, on call) (yes I take on call off from the gym…) and after about 5 days I start getting really angsty (not the best word but it’s the closest I can come up with). So I see this as a good sign since I’ve always have a certain amount of nervous energy that I’ve never really known how to burn off effectively. And I hate to say it but the time in does seem to have improved my disposition…. I’m not all sunshine and daisies, but at least now I will smile before I make a smart ass remark. So yes it’s been good.

In my time I’ve basically been doing cardio and some weight training, I’m not looking to go into competition more of build some muscle where it was just flappy before (mostly done at this point). For the last month or so I’ve been working on upper body (chest and arms) and to a lesser extent core, I’ve been not so good at mixing it up or the last couple of weeks and I felt myself getting just a touch bored which as we all know if the first step to the “ah fuck it I will go to the gym tomorrow” which ultimately leads to not going to the gym.

That is where I was about two weeks ago. I was talking to my partner in crime at work who is doing his own gym type thing and was having the same level of frustration starting to build. And it was there over lunch he remembered this nifty website for his Blackberry called “gymtechnik.com” and that help him over come his hump… ok I will try anything once, so I wander over there and sign up for a free account. And it’s actually pretty nice it’s just a online workout planner (which I had no idea existed until this website) and found a couple workouts that I could do on at my own pace that were hitting the same muscles in different ways. That and now I also have a way to track progress and what I’ve worked on which appeals to my analytical side (hmmm how interesting I work on curls in the weeks leading up to Nascar and football season… how very interesting)

So yeah, that gymtechnik site is pretty handy for me, yes there are others but none work as well with the Blackberry as that one and until I unload this phone that is the one I’m going to be using (so a solid 3 months minimum knowing me 🙂 )

Drown in the now…

I seem to have picked up a new hobby in the last couple of months and I didn’t even realize it until I got done talking to my dad. Apperntly I’ve stumbled into gun collecting or at the very least the old man is giving me first dibs on guns that he either already has or doesn’t want. Now the part about the old man offering me guns is nothing new. The new part is the quantity and the quality of the guns…

2009 and before… it tended to be new rifles and more of a informative “Hey if you want a new hunting rifle this is one you should look at”. In 2010 I’ve talked to my dad three times this year… twice he called about guns the first one was a heavy barrel .308. I already shoot a 30-06 elk and deer hunting so the .308 isn’t of that much interest to me… though if you knew the kind of country we hunted elk in (an area that we lovingly refer to as the “nuclear wasteland of elk”) a .308 starts to make alot more sense. Of course setting up what amounts to a sniper position for elk hunting doesn’t really appeal to me all that much… but then again that’s basically what I’m already doing.

The other gun my dad called me about was a Colt AR-15 .223 (post ban no flash suppressor) that one piqued my interest and I have no idea why. It’s a .223 round which at distance is a little light for elk hunting (figure 200 to 300 yd shot) but it would be good for just about everything else. So this gun truly comes into the category of “toys” or if your Curtis “zombie weapon”.

My issues are all my own and I’m torn, yes I would really like to get this “toy” but at the same time the responsible side of me says there are alot of other things you can do with that money (I get that alot from responsible side it’s all responsible and stuff, it’s really annoying) why am I posting this? because it’s truly the biggest drama in life.. and if my biggest problem is whether or not to buy a gun I know that I truly have no problems.

It’s out of my hands…

No it really is… mainly since it’s ethereal in digital realm and all no physicality…

OK let me start again, so there was this “fire” over the weekend, and if you haven’t already you can go read about it. However it did get me thinking if I was presented with a similar set of circumstances what would I do? Probably nothing since I would never pay enough attention to connect all of the dots. No really I probably wouldn’t notice until my couch was fully engulfed and even then I would have to be sitting in it.

No honestly what would I do? I look at my “house” and I don’t have any real attachment to it… I mean it’s a nice a house, the back yard is killer, and if I was just a tad more social I would probably invite people over more often then the divisional round of football playoffs. I think the best way to describe my relationship to my house is probably quite similar to that of “Tyler Durden” or rather the man the that spawned Tyler Durden to paraphrase

no matter what I had the couch situation taken care of, now it’s gone. I need a new couch…

I know it’s no where close (and I can’t find the exact quote just deal). The cruxt of the scene is it’s all just stuff. That you don’t need or more then you need. And that’s how I look at my place it’s just the Kingdom of stuff. Nothing that can’t be replaced. I don’t have any pets, I don’t have wedding pictures what pictures I do have are of friends or their kids and while the pictures of the kids are cute I’m pretty sure I will get more at some point, and lets not get me started on furniture or clothes. As for the electronics, I was due for a upgrade anyway! I have a bookcase of DVD’s that I’ve watched once or twice each that can almost all be replaced. And those that can’t will be out on Blu-Ray or whatever the format of the digital future will be.

The “stuff” that I have that matters to me is all digital in nature. My pictures from various hunting trips, races, trips to the East Coast, and as silly as this sounds I have a couple of cell phone pics from outings to where ever that I keep for the memories. Music, so much music from so many things that I listen to constantly (and all three regular reads know that I generally pull the title of each post from what ever song is playing in iTunes when I’m writing). Files… all of my files from school personal projects and writing that I’ve done (not everything I write ends up here). Finally records… tax, finical, and other various tracking mechanisms. All totally digital.

Now granted I have multiple backups of all of these files and if I lost ONE computer I could pretty easily recreate 99% of the content. In a total loss situation though I would screwed since I don’t take my laptop (which for everything but gaming I consider my main computer) everywhere. Heck I take it on trips and that is probably the single dumbest thing I could do.

Hey nice MacBook Pro, I’m going to take that now!

To top it all off I’m a IT guy for my day job, well I like to think of myself as a IT guy most days. And what do we preach in IT when it comes to backups? One copy onste and one copy off-site (more then 50 miles away, and on different media if possible) I mean it’s not rocket science though some days it seems like it. I guess it’s time to break down and look at something a bit more comprehensive then just “Time Machine” for my backup needs.

I need secure, automagic, high storage limits, and accessible anywhere. I would like neat, easy, and multi-platform. I don’t need to backup all my computers just one. Anything that doesn’t live on my laptop can be copied over easy enough.

Who would have thought a little fire could cause so much thought?

The only downside to this plan? When the zombies come I’m scewed for my data not so much for guns.

Singles awareness day…

I’m not a huge fan of most holidays… I like the summer ones where I get a day off of work and almost have enough time to take a short vacation, and if I do it right I absolutely do (thanks again to Boulder County / FoCo crowd for putting me up). I’m not a fan of the holidays where some obligatory amount of money is spent on a person simply in the name of being spent (I’m looking at you birthdays) I will admit it I do like spending money on others at Christmas (when else can I walk into a liquor store spend $300 and no one thinks anything about it?).

My level of apathy to Valentines day has always been low. I would think of all of the “Hallmark” holidays that I would hold the most anger and angst towards it. It’s the one holiday where the only reason I know it’s getting close is those little white bears start showing up at work at the desks of people who are not married but in some sort of relationship. I have bought flowers on valentines days for a woman before, she was worth it, it was early in the relationship so it seemed appropriate if nothing else to show that I had some sense when it came to close interpersonal relationships (boy did I fool her with that one). The following year it was a different woman and she at the time seemed worth it but proved herself not to be on multiple levels.

As for the here and now… it’s same as it ever is. Not much other then a seemingly causing a small avalanche of people to join a facebook group called “I hate Valentine’s day” and lets be honest if a 6 pack of beer showed up at my door every year that said “from your valentine” I would totally drink it. And I would probally like this day a whole lot better because I got beer.