Not doing things the easy way – Page 2

Evolution of a Workspace

So I was cleaning my office yesterday… and by cleaning I mean I took out three garbage cans of stuff and I still have more to go. In the process of cleaning I ran across some photos from Kingman and entire stack of photos from my time at NAU. One of those photos was of my desk at NAU and since I often use my desk for various picture testing moments I thought it would be neat to examine the evolution of my home workspace since that is where I tend to spend alot of time.

So first off is the NAU desk circa June 1999.

Fun things to notice in this photo… flat bed scanner, Zip drive in the tower, and of course the 19 inch monitor of doom. This evolved pretty quickly, as I remember it the scanner was put on top next to the printer sometime that summer and shortly after the new year I purchased my first laptop. The first laptop was never photographed neither was the desk in the apartment I had my senior year at NAU.

I had pretty much maintained this type of setup for the previous four years… monitors and CPU’s changed but other then that everything else stayed the same.

So next up is the office my house in Kingman, this photo is circa spring 2004.

This photo is intersting… it’s from right before I completely changed my workspace at home. You will of course notice that there is a video game up so you can probally guess what i was primarily doing at this point. What you don’t see are the three computers on the floor (1 windows box and 2 linux boxes running whatever I was running at the time) attached to the KVM. There is a laptop around at this point but it’s off to the left if it’s anywhere.

Shortly after this picture was taken I ended up with a large corner desk that I broke out the linux boxes to one side and the windows box to the middle then put various network devices and what not towards the other end. That worked out pretty well but I never really utilized the space liked I had hoped I would. That would feed into design decisons later. Also the corner desk was ultimatley left with the house when I moved.

Next is the most compact and probally efficent workspace I’ve ever had and this circa late July through October 2005.

Ah Mesa, so incase you haven’t been reading the blog for 10 years or your last name doesn’t start with the letter “K” this was when I was living with Curtis and Kristina. For the first time things really start to come together in terms of workspace and making things work together. And once again you will notice that I have a game up on both screens. And this type of setup would continue to serve me well for for the next couple of years. Other things to notice; no printer the iPaq is up and out of the way and the iPod is down low where I can get to it very easily. What I can’t figure out in this picture is why does the laptop of a PCMCIA wireless card when I know that the laptop had a built in wireless card? I’m sure there’s a good reason…

So flash forward six months I am no long restrained to one desk and have version one of the home office.

Not much change in terms of technology. The laptop would go on the left side of the table and there is another table directly behind me that keeps various other computers and networking gear. Which it turns out is really nice when you need to work on a computer that is not yours.

From this point the work space remains pretty stable… in the summer of 2007 the first MAC makes an appearnce.

This marks the transition to the laptop as the primary computer. Slowly over the course of the next year or so I transitioned off of the desktop and onto the MAC for most all of my day to day computing that wasn’t gaming. The montior on the left was also shared between the MAC and the PC for times when I needed a dual screen it stayed primarily attached to the PC. This also marks the first time that workspace decsions are being made for ergonomic reasons versus gaming reasons. Of course I say that and this is the first picture without a ergonomic keyboard or game on the screen…..

Which brings us to today….

The PC is the same as the last picture, the MAC and iPad are new. Other changes, the MAC now has a dedicated secondary screen that is physically and logically located above the primary screen. The iPad is off to the side for illustration purposes I really don’t have a good place for it yet. Right now the main purpose of the ipad is couch surfing and email.

This setup is really nice when I get my vmware on and decide I want a couple of machines going when I’m working on a project and insist on seeing the desktop of more then one VM.

So that’s the evolution of my workspace in the last 12 years but you know some people just never move past a half built toliet.

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 🙂

Phoenix….

And I’m not talking about the city here.

So one of the things about the “modern” internet is it’s insistence on moving to more of a “cloud” based set up. I’m about to go on a old man (at 31) rant here that will basically be “Get off my lawn you damn kids” If you don’t feel like reading the comments of a lone person as they go into what they think is a structured argument against the cloud stop reading…. otherwise you have be warned and you are not allowed to complain.

Ok so while I appreciate this whole cloud thing, I also fully understand that the data that is up there because someone (most likely) me put it up there. Now in some cases the cloud isn’t so bad… pictures for instance photography has gone almost completely digital and pretty much anyone can do really nice pictures with nothing more then a mid-range SLR and some editing software. Hell with the CCD setups in some of these cell phones who needs a point and shoot.

Other things while not practical make sense… off site backup for insistence I recently signed up for carbonite for my MAC since you know it has those photos of my grandmother that mean alot to me and if anything happened to them pissed would not begin to describe my general attitude. So a few photos is no big deal…. My home folder on my MAC is ~115GB between documents, photos, music, videos, and virtual machines. If you take away the virtual machines and about 30GB of various applications and temp data you are left with ~82GB of either my purchased or generated content. It took the better part of a week and half to upload all of this information. While that part I don’t have a issue with it would have been just as easy to make a copy of my data on a portable hard drive and mail it to my parents and say “Put this in the gun safe and hope I never have to ask you for it” But I don’t because when it comes right down to it I’m lazy and if I can have a daemon run in the background and upload stuff to the internet I’m going to do that rather then wander down to FedEx and hope my parents don’t lose a portable hard drive.

Lord knows they can barely keep track of a super Nintendo left out in plain sight 10 years go.

And then there are the parts that I really should be doing on the cloud but insist on doing them on a application on my computer because that is where I’ve always done them. Of course by this I mean email. Now while I do appreciate the advances that Google has brought to email and that I can hook up to a Google email service either through pop3 or imap accessing email on a client sucks! No I don’t want to use a browser window that gives me easy on line access to everything in my every growing mail box… I want to use Outlook damit because it’s what I use at work and it does what I need it to do well! I want to read my email and reply with either a Ctrl-R or a Ctrl-shift-R and send with a Ctrl-enter I don’t want to use what ever new thing that Google has come up with I want to use the same keyboard commands I’ve been using since 1995… you know when the only way to get a pretty gui interface was to buy a MAC!

Basically I want to do my email through a text only client on a telnet/ssh session using pine.

End of Line.

Creative snooze button….

So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything…. so hopefully this little tidbit will answer your burning question yes I’m still alive.

Honestly there hasn’t been alot to talk about in a forum such as this when I have 4 readers and 3 of them live within two miles of me and the 4th visiting before heading to the East coast was the highlight of October.

Which is to say that we have truly been there done that with what is going on.

To that end however I do miss the somewhat public pieces parts of this little old blog and it’s a nice hobby so I’m more then happy to keep it going.

If I were to be writing about the things going on that I wish to publish I would probably be writing about the following….

– Conundrums of games available on PC vs Xbox… they look better on the PC, but I have 6.1 surround sound and a 51 inch HD tv hooked up to the Xbox.

– The merits of dropping to a ipad as a portable computing solution

– The merits of dropping a desktop PC out of my life entirely and becoming a one computer house hold… and by one computer I mean a mac book pro.

– The merits of keeping a desktop pc and dropping the laptop to purely a backup computing device and a iPad as a primary mobile computing device

– The merits of taking only a phone and watching cars turn left for the weekend

– The merits of maybe just maybe expanding the beer operation

These are the things I would probably talk about, each having their own merits and stuff.

Also pie would be a big topic too.

How to kill a fat kid’s dream….

So most of you my dear readers know my brother in one form or another, so use your context of my brother to fill in the gaps of what follows…. Or you can take it as it is and just run with it. Run all the way to the hills with it.

My brother used to come down on a regular basis once upon a time, but due to changes in his personal life and scheduling conflicts he hasn’t been able to come down in almost a year. Sometime last month he signs up for a conference in Phoenix so he can have an excuse to come down and try and hang out with his brother… at least that is what he told me. At the very least he saved his work a few dollars by crashing at “Chateu de me” instead of a staying smart at a Holiday in Express.

So I roll in from work at my usual time and there is my brother watching TV on my couch… strange how he always has a key to my house, but yet “the key to his house can’t be copied and he has only one” very very very strange. So we chat for a bit and I ask “what do you want for dinner?” because as you all know I keep exactly enough food for one person for about 2.5 days in my house. After the usual hemming and hawing he doesn’t really have a answer.

At one point he was wanting to do the “Man VS Food” challenge at Chompies in Tempe, but he backed out of that because “he wanted to make sure he like the sliders first”…. Ok kind of weak, but I will give him the pass our family is known for having notoriously sensitive stomachs. So I suggest the “Tilted Kilt” the following conversation ensues…

LilBrother (LB); What’s “Tilted Kilt”

Me; Bar food but more of a Irish flavor, even though Kilts are Scottish.

LB; Uh ok, I guess.

Later on in the truck as we are pulling into the Tilted Kilt on Baseline and Gilbert in Mesa….

LB; So really all this way for something we could have gotten around the corner from your house?

Me; Food yes, but the service is really good here.

And as we walk up to the door and I open I all I hear from my brother is…

LB; whoa (just loud enough that I could hear it)

So yeah, he enjoyed the “Tilted Kilt” after we finish he says “I saw this place called ‘Aunt Lena’s’ by Chandler Mall we should go there…. OK the boy doesn’t get out of the sticks much I will indulge him…

Turns out that using his smart phone to look up directions is not something that ever occurred to him… I finally have to pull over to look up the place… and it’s nowhere near Chandler Mall it’s over on Arizona and Ocitllo… The following conversation ensues…

Me; how did figure this place was near the Chandler Mall?

LB; I saw it on “Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives” and I when I saw the background shots it looked like the strip malls around the Chandler Mall.

I guess nobody told him that all the strip malls in that part of town look the same. So we trek out there… and sure enough there are two identical strip malls across the street from one another the only difference is one has a Lowe’s and one has a Home Depot. So we drive through both, I do the Google maps thing, and we can’t find this place. Finally little brother calls the place listed on Google maps page… and the number is disconnected….

LB; Man way to kill a fat kids dream there

So we begin the trek home… somewhere along the way we get detoured to a cold stone and a movie about a guy who kills people with carrots… The movie was almost as good as the Kilt…

As a interesting side note on why you should research before going anywhere, after I put in a cursory Google search I found this article and it’s #1 on the Google results!

http://thedish.freedomblogging.com/2009/01/05/restaurant-closings-aunt-lenas-lucs-carrabbas/2660/

I think someone missed the boat just a touch.

10,000 ft and surprisngly I feel pretty good…

The day after the event.

So I’ve probally mentioned a hike in August to go up Longs Peak in Colorado w/ a few friends… well on the way to that final hike Curtis and I did what could best be described as a “midterm” hike to gauge our progress.

The results are encouraging.

From a gear perspective; I picked up new shoes, a larger day pack with true hip support, and large hydration system. The shoes I’ve been using for a couple of weeks now on hikes around Phoenix and they have done well. The back and hydration system were taken out for the first time this week. Overall I’m pleased with how the pack worked I was a little surprised when I pulled out the hydration pack and it was dry all that was left was the water in the tube. So 100oz in the high country of Arizona on 11 miles of trail is probably juuuussstttt enough. Provided you don’t hit it hard and early and tap out on the way up. Longs will probably require a couple of nalgene type water bottles to supplement the hydration pack.

From a food perspective; we ate mainly trail mix fruit and jerky on the way up along with water. I had a couple of energy packs. For a buck a pop they actually work surprisingly well, I will definitely be bringing a few extra with me on the longs hike. As for lunch at the top Curtis and I both had sandwiches from Safeway… I’m thinking some a bit more substantial may be in order.

From a physical perspective; the time in the gym paid off in large dividends. Unfortunately there is no way to train for altitude at 1,500 ft above sea level. I started to having issues around 10,000 ft on the climb up, going 40 or 50 feet stop for a couple seconds catch my breath go another 50 or so feet which is pretty much what I expected. Curtis started having issues around 9,000ft when we started gaining a fair bit of elevation. 9,000 ft and flat he had no problem with.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the results. Longs Peak is still going to be 14,000 ft of damned interesting though.

In the end…

At the end of the day I have a choice… I can wallow in my own self pity or I can do something fucking about it.

I choose to do something fucking about it.

But first… I need another beer.

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. 🙂

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!

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.