Author: Tom Kern

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. 🙂

It’s not football… but it will do… for now.

Just finished watching probably one of the best playoff basketball games that the Suns have been involved with in a long time.

Honestly I don’t care if the Suns make it to the Finals… I’m just happy they beat the Spurs. Even if Steve Nash had to take another beating to get the team a win.

One wild and crazy canuck...

Of course being a Cardinals fan… you don’t expect much out of your team… being a Suns fan…. all you expect is misery tempered by the occasional bits of joy. This is one of those occasional bits of joy.

Alt MAC

So STEAM finally comes to MAC next week while I don’t plan on loading it right away on my Mac, I thought I would share a tidbit of the improvements coming with the Mac version of STEAM. Please note that this is aimed at the Mac gamer set… so if you aren’t a gamer you probably won’t get these. If you’ve ever used Mac you will get them all.

Team Fortress 2

When engineers build turrets in the Mac version of Team Fortress 2, the turrets will cost twice as much (in metal) as the Windows equivalent. However, the turrets will be curvy and shiny, and emit a pleasant noise as they shoot the enemy down.

The Heavy’s chain gun will be lighter and smaller, and of course curvier and shinier. It will weigh merely 1.8 pounds and fold up nicely to ultra-thin dimensions, allowing the Heavy to move quickly at all times. It will keep track of the Heavy’s appointments and phone numbers with a stylish, yet elegantly functional, interface. However, it will only shoot rubber bullets.

And my current favorite…

Left 4 Dead

All custom maps in the Mac version of Left 4 Dead will have to be approved by Apple, which will reject any maps that feature nudity, suggestive content, political satire or zombies.

Two more main characters will be added: a balding, schlubby-looking guy in a suit, and a young dude with tousled hair and a semi-beard whom you will immediately want to shoot. However, you should not shoot the tousled guy, because teamwork is important to winning the game — and because it’s a lot more satisfying to see him dragged to his death by a tongue zombie.

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/05/alt-text-valve-apple/#ixzz0nHqReIup

I listen for the whisper of sweet insanity…

The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. While I would like to present evidence to the contrary, my own personal experiments have proven that if you do something consistently and change nothing you will get the same result each and every time. I killed alot of beer to bring that thought to the forefront of your semi-weekly blog reading. I hope you appreciate the sacrifice that my liver and I have done for you.

Speaking of insanity… so there is trip being planned to go climb a mountain… I’m still trying to figure out how I got talked into this one, but I’m pretty sure my easy going nature coupled with the news that I did not get a elk tag this year pushed me over the edge. It’s a small mountain only 14,000ft… so the air is a touch thinner up there then it is at 1,200ft down here in Phoenix. The bright side is the mountain will be climbed in August which means I have 4 solid months to prepare. So lets talk about prepare for a moment, almost all of my gear is designed for day work, which works out well since this will be a day hike. And when I say day work I mean walk the 1.5 miles from the truck to the blind/water/whatever and wait for the Elk. If we do walk it’s normally less then 3 miles, cross country with no climbing involved (other then the occasional barb wire fence).

So this peak while being 14,000ft high also has a bit of a scramble and it’s 8 miles one way. I’m going to need some new shoes, and get those puppies broken in. A new day pack that actually has some sort of support in it would be good too (since it can be re-purposed to other functions i.e. hunting).

Gear in the bag is a whole different ball of wax… that I’m going to have work on with a dry run or two here in AZ.

As for speed, I only have one speed and it’s the speed I’m currently going and as long as the direction is forward we are all in good shape.

I can already feel alot of moaning and groaning coming on about this trip, which means I’m beyond excited I can’t wait!

In my eyes… in disposed… in my disguise no one knows.

Everyone is very much into saving money these days… something about it being a down economy and wanting to not lose a house… I don’t understand it’s all just the kingdom of stuff and a credit score. But that is just me and as we have clearly established by almost 10 years of drivel (wow has it been almost 10 years?) I’m far far far from the norm and should not be considered a baseline.

With that being said one of the more things I find very interesting in how my friends perceive wealth. I’m talking not just money, but the other things in that make up a person’s little corner of the universe. Over the course of the last decade or so I’ve observed that for the most part that my perception of wealth has changed greatly. Once based entirely on amount of income and slowly but surely migrating to breadth of experince in life and not based at all on income. Don’t get me wrong, income helps but only so far as putting together the next trip to wherever. I don’t know where this shift originated from, I do know that it seems to be one extreme or the other with me (i.e. obsessed with the bank account bottom line or could care less).

So here is my question… is saving already built into the monthly budget or are you planning on having your spawn take care of you?

They don’t stand a chance…

A while back I talked about one of the pains of being me in that I had a excellent opportunity for a AR-15… well about 10 minutes after writing that I decided to snag it. So today I along with a few other individuals made our way out to the shooting range to basically shoot to our little hearts content.

In the process of this two things happened.

1. I fell in love with my AR-15… even though I can’t shoot the damn thing for shit right now.

2. Curtis had his first experience with a .50 Cal rifle… The gentlemen next to us were sighting in their competition .50 cal rifles at 300 yards with some experimental loads that they had concocted. Well we get to chatting…

Ok Don and Curtis get to chatting with these gentlemen and next thing I know Curtis, Matt, and Renee are shooting the .50 cal.

I don’t know the specifics of what transpired, and I will let Curtis tell the full story if he so chooses. I do however want to show what Curtis looks like with a .50 Cal.

There is a shorter video somewhere, but I do not care enough to edit this one and there is one bit in there that I find pretty funny.

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.