questions for the ages – Rollingskull

I seem to be missing….

The boat on this whole “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”

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 🙂

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?

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 🙂 )

NCC-17OHYES

Star Trek movies have a rule that they are pretty good on following… the odd movies are bad(ish) the even movies are good(ish)… The 4 Next Generation movies were able to pretty much kill that streak (they were 3 bad to 1 really good one).

In the past I have measured my like/dislike of a Star Trek film based on my reaction the first time I watch it at home with no one around. I knew that “First Contact” benefited way to much from the big screen when I watched it at home and wasn’t nearly as interested as I had been in the theaters 6 months earlier.

JJ Abrahams must have done multiple things right… not only did I purchase Star Trek the day it came out, but when I watched it at home I have the same feeling at the end of movie as I did when I saw it in the theater. I once again state…. “Star Trek has no business being this good”

Extra Geek cred for the following…
Where is Paul McGillion (aka if you don’t know where he is from you can’t play)
Where is Wil Wheaton? (aka you have to look very hard)

Bluetooth War Sitting….

So one of the advantages to bringing your laptop with you to a conference is you can do fun things like bring up your wireless sniffer and see what’s out there like say Bluetooth devices!

So two things stand out to me here…

1. I’m surprised that some phones are still discoverable, since people by and large rarely change the default settings on Bluetooth from off to on. When I took this reading from my laptop there were probably 30 people with in the 30 feet of me which is about the maximum distance I can sniff Bluetooth with my laptop.

2. The laptop user is just asking for issues… Windows and Mac by default have Bluetooth discovery turned off so someone out there is just flat being a idiot.

a. So while I was typing #2 I saw another Mac pop up…. And here is what my wireless sniffer had to say about that, and the other Mac is close enough that I can see his entire screen.

b. So I guess my question is this… is it rude to go up to someone and say “Excuse me but your Bluetooth is showing” Especially on a MAC since you know most MAC users aren’t security minded like PC users are.

c. Also how wise it to have the “Remote Frame Buffer” (aka VNC) service out and advertising on bonjour? Along with Apple file sharing which at this point is really just SAMBA which is really just the open source version of windows file sharing?

I’m not at a IT security confrence but still these are interesting questions for those security minded people / security professionals that have been known to check around the old blog here.

Yes I know you come here… Google Analytic isn’t just for tracking my parents any more.

It’s still kind of surreal…

So as you all know I work in I.T. for hospital system in Phoenix… and as a rule I don’t talk about work. Well tonight your in luck… I’m going to talk about work!

To bad for you it’s going to be about nothing cool and will actually be a conversation I had at work yesterday over instant messenger

Me: Hey can you go to the Kidz clinic after you finish in the womens center they are having a problem with outside CD’s

Nathan: Where’s the kids clinic

Me: First floor next to the day spa and caddy corner from the marble fountain

Nathan: ok

Yes the hospital is in the North East valley but after almost 4 years I still find the day spa a little odd.

Pendelous type threads

So I know I can’t be the only one with this problem, but it’s kind of embarsing espically for someone like me…

How do you keep mulitple computer somewhat synchronized with contacts?

I know it’s stupid but hear me out… I have a blackberry Pearl and before that a Treo 700P that I sync’d at both home and work. Syncing the treo at work and home caused me some problems, namely that my business contacts polluted my personel contacts and vice-versa. Now I dont have much a problem with this but I don’t want the next great internet worm to come out of one of my computers and take down several large medical imaging device companies.

Not that it would happen I’m just saying…

So what do other people do with multiple computers and contact lists that they want on all of their computers?

I’ve thought about using google as my “master” archive and then feed down from there but that seems less then elegant and the more stuff I can keep off the cloud the better.

Oh and don’t forget I’m multi platfrom too… I use windows and mac and linux… I don’t care so much about linux, it’s more mac and windows I’m after.

5 fucking bars….

Little known fact… I’m a cell phone whore…

I upgrade cell phones on the order of every 12 to 18 months. Sometimes way less (6 months for a LG slider several years ago) and very rarely ever more (There was a samsung flip phone that I had for damn near 20 months and I finally just got sick of) So yes I’m a bit of a cell phone whore. I’m almost to 8 months on the current phone (a Silver Blackberry 8130) which works really really really well. The calls are always clear, it’s easy to txt message on, and I always have coverage with my wireless provider (Verizon, it’s the network don’t you know).

2nd little known fact… I’m a Apple whore…

I’m like all things Apple, Steve Jobs could shit diaherra call it the iShit and I would probally still think about buying it. And if it the “iShit” came in colors I would probally buy one, but it would just be the plain brown one because I’m too cool for a colored “iShit”

So as you can imagine I’m in a bit of a quandry since my two whorish tendancies are about about to come together again at a new lower price, bigger capacity, 3G, and a two year contract.

Did I mention I’m no longer under contract to Verizon?

As you can guess it’s been a rough couple of days… Really the only thing keeping me from getting a iPhone is the AT&T network in Phoenix. Which depending on who you talk to is either really good or really shitty.

Other factors?

The cell repeaters at work don’t do AT&T, you know thats kind of important when you spend a portion of your day in a led lined room.

Not 32GB, I will be honest if they come out with a 32GB version I will probally not be able to stop myself… unless it’s $400 in which case I will go buy a new blackberry not under contract and call it good.

I don’t want to be under contract again… yes it’s a little more expensive for the phones. I do like having the option to leave at any time merely because I feel like it.

Everyone at work uses Verizon… this shouldn’t matter but it does I use just as many in calling minutes as I do anytime minutes. If I switched I would have to doubly my minutes at a minimum

And so the iShit whore stays put for the time being and hopes that the black berry touch screen thing turns out to be a good phone and email machine… because lets be honest the only thing I care about it phone call quality and txt messaging.

And I won’t back down….

So I’ve been working with the dual blog setup for about a month and half now and while there are somethings that I really like about this wordpress blog there aren’t enough things to make me switch from blogger to my own personal Idaho of a blog.

What was the killer? The post by email is what pretty much killed it for me. One of my favorite things to do with my blog is post pictures from my blackberry. It’s not huge, but for me it’s a killer app that I don’t have here.

Also the first upgrade of the back end while not a huge deal made a few changes that I just don’t like at first blush. I’m sure if I give them time I will like them though.

What now? I will keep this blog up and get the whole email thing worked out at some point. It may be handy for certain expectant mothers in Colorado to keep an eye on this blog since this could be almost called “tom unfiltered”. I know what your thinking how could I become any more unfiltered?

Easy… full knowledge that people check this site infrequently. I do have google analytics setup so I know if you’ve been by or not.

And I now return you to your reguraly scheduled garbage.