Category: Observations that no one else cares about

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.

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.

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.

For the lust burn in hell…

How I know I’m getting old to fast…. I just mumbled to myself “I’m starting to get sick of this CD” in reference to a album I had bought on iTunes a few weeks ago. I haven’t bought a CD in almost 4 years… and that was such a sour experience I doubt I will buy a CD ever again. Just weird I still refer to a group of songs as a “CD”.

Ok maybe it’s just me… but it’s my blog so you have to deal with it.

How do you know you have a f*ck’d iTunes library on your PC and not your Mac?
There are differences between the two folder like this…

Perfect Circle (4 Albums) Mac 45 Items, 3 hours — PC 116 Items, 7.8 hours (Ok if Cody came down to a PC he could probably have that much perfect circle but Cody works on a whole different level then I do)

There is 14 hours of Tool on my PC… there isn’t that much Original Tool material in the whole world (I know I have everything I can get my hands on)

I might as well put my neurosis to work… I’m going to take a page out of the Death by Blog crew… and start something new this month… I won’t do it every month like them but when the mood strikes and I’m pretty sure I can follow through I will do it. We’ll see how well this works. Anyway the change? The tags on the entries going forward will be tagged with artists that popped up while I’m writing… at the very least the artist that I lifted the title from.

So now you don’t have to be on Google talk/skype list to see what I’m listening to.

Even if it is a bunch of CD’s on iTunes…

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.

And that’s why they call me Bad Company….

Not only do I drink all your beer and eat all of you food… I blame the tall lanky engineer that is generally with in a seat or two of me either direction.

Ok so last time I posted I was extolled the virtues of how great the iPod Touch w/ Google active sync integration was right? Yeah I’m pretty sure that was me since I’m the only person that writes anything extolling the virtues of Apple devices 6 to 12 months after they have been released.

I would like to amend that statement now. So facebook on the iPod Touch is fully integrated by default with the address book on the iPod Touch which when you have active sync integration turned on (aka exchange integration) your address book is also integrated. Which is fine and all but I’m really one who likes to keep the various pieces parts of my life compartmentalized… if I wanted my facebook to talk to my iPod Touch I would ENABLE IT…. call me old school but when something goes out to talk to another device shouldn’t have to enable that? I don’t know maybe it was there and I just glossed over it but I’m still not real happy with that little snafu.

Ok so why am I not happy with that Snafu? Well there is a picture that I attached to a Outlook contact to a friend back in the days of “Prometheus” (for those of you keeping score at home “Prometheus” was my main computer from 2002 to 2004) Anywhoo that was 2 main computers ago (not including laptops). Well said picture made the transfer to Gmail when I started to migrate my contacts and mail off of Outlook and onto there (so whenever that was…. lets call it the first half of 2007) In October of 2007 I had the great crash of Heretic (Lost the CPU and as it would turn out didn’t exactly have the most complete backup). In that crash I lost a few pictures that hadn’t been uploaded to various websites or services. 99.9% of these pictures were of no great meaning and I could have cared less but this one picture I had picked for my friend and I though fit her perfectly was gone off of my computer but still in my gmail contact. Until last week when the iPod Touch doing what it was told… synced my contacts with facebook and then my contacts synced with Google. Which then destroyed the picture. And it’s gone… am I whining? Yes… why basically because I don’t think that syncing contact pictures is the most efficient method or use of resources… but what do I know I’m just some dude who lost a totally awesome picture for a friend.

As for the other reader who has a facebook… I removed yours from Gmail… I like you gtalk icon way better even if it is a touch weird.

So to sum up… Active Sync integration is still cool… I just wish that I had thought it through a little bit more.

It shouldn’t have to be that hard….

So I got a iPod Touch (32GB) for Christmas, it’s a 3rd gen touch and really quite nice. I’ve written of my love of Apple devices before (something about fighting with a Mac and windows 7 comes to mind) and once again this device has captured my attention. I fully understand why people who use iPhones love their devices. As a phone it’s OK at best, but as a personal pocket computer it’s a rock star.

I refrain from using Personal Digital Assistant since that implies a dumb device that only knows what it knows (generally from syncing or some other method of input). The PDA sector has not been that for several years now (really ever since the first windows mobile phones/blackberries/treo’s of the world). But even having used Windows mobile on my last PDA and Treo/Blackberry for the last 3 years I’ve never thought of them as more then phones with calendar and some extra functionality. Never once did I think of my blackberry as a “Pocket computer” I always thought of it more as a tool than anything else a powerful network enabled tool, but a tool none the less.

Now comes the iPod Touch and it’s this platform that is open enough to allow applications to be developed that there is literally a application for everything you can possibly think of (the one that tells you where the closest bar is located is my personal favorite) about the only thing I can’t do on my touch that I can do on my computer is play PC based games (I’m thinking MMO type games here) and honestly I think that is only because no developer has sat down and created a client for the iPod touch/iPhone for any of these games. It’s truly what I’ve been looking for (today) in a personal device.

I think the thing that finally pushed me over the edge from being “happy” with the Touch to being “wow’d” my it was I setup full syncing between my Gmail account and the touch… and when I say fully syncing I mean full exchange type Email, Contacts, Calendar between my touch and my Gmail account. Now I’ve been doing a bastardized version of this with my blackberry using a couple of Google apps for the blackberry, but it’s been a less than ideal situation (mainly issues with double contacts, keeping email sync’d, and keeping calendar appointments from disappearing from one or both calendars (actually putting events into the phone calendar and having them reliably show up in my Gmail calendar would be a nice start)) Now I realize that the blackberry is a “secure” environment and you need to have additional items setup to get things to work that seamlessly, but when my MP3 player can do better calendar/contact/mail sync then my phone which is supposed to do this stuff that well out of the gate I think we may have a issue.

Then again it may just be that paradigm shift that happens from time to time, no I don’t need all of this additional security I just want something that keeps my personal stuff organized as well as all of these tools do for my professional life I just don’t want the two parts of my life to cross any more than they already do. And I think that last sentence is the true crux of the problem.

Windows 7… Mac… And you… Part 2

So the Bootcamp Windows 7 install on the Macbook Pro (MBP) has been not nearly as nice as the original XP install in 2007. Research has turned up that the machine I have (at just under 3 years old) is right at the cut off for 64bit Win7 compatibility and if I were one rev newer I wouldn’t be having nearly these problems. So with that in mind, my experiences are far from typical. However in the hope to save some other poor soul who has the same model MBP as I (and this is my way of documentation in case I have to do all of this crap again) i present to you now part 2 of the MBP/Win7 saga.

After getting the ISO built the next trick is to install the OS which isn’t so hard you just kick bootcamp in MAC OS to start the windows installer and a reboot later your off and running. Where I had issues was after the first reboot I kept getting a hung install on the “completing installation” screen. The trick here is to have nothing but the power cord plugged into the computer and don’t touch the damn thing… If you see the three little dots (…) stop moving for more then 5 minutes… Start over with the install and do it again. I had to do it three times, I can’t tell you why it does it just that it does.

The good news is once the install completes and you start filling out all of the stuff to finally setup windows most all of the networking stuff is going right out of the gate. So now you have to install the bootcamp drivers for Windows 7 (bootcamp 3.1)… and here is where more fun starts.. you have to start with the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers on the MAC OS 10.6 DVD, but if your using the Santa Rosa Mac and a 64 bit install of Windows they 3.0 bootcamp drivers won’t work…. easiest way to get around that is to follow the instructions here…. http://blog.andersonshatch.com/2009/01/11/windows-7-x64-on-a-macbook-pro-guide/ And in case you can’t follow directions like me, you need to right click and run as administrator on the cmd.exe not the setup.exe on the DVD.

So after that… you now can load all of the updates to Windows

And hopefully be on your happy trails…