Recently in computers Category

So, I've had the iPod touch for about three weeks and the news is bad: I love it. I'm not sure how, but this thing has become pretty ingrained into my life already. That's not just fast - its crazy.

I didn't plan on putting that much music onto it - I already have a 30gb iPod and love that, so this would be a good supplement, especially since it's very PDA like in many ways. I managed to get this 8gb model by chance, but I'm very grateful for it. I had to resist using it for the first day - we were doing NSO presentations and it seemed like it might have been a little distracting.....

So, after I plugged in, charged up and configured, the first thing I did was to setup the email. For the .Mac account it was a snap - and so was the GMail and Yahoo! account - Apple was kind enough to to include account "wizards" for certain mail servers to speed things along. Nice. I had some issues with my hosted email and the SMTP server, by that turned out - at least partially - to be my fault by being overzealous with trying to set the specific ports. Ooooops.

Anyway, after getting the IMAP servers setup, things went pretty smoothly in the mail department. Safari is very similar to what I'm used to on the laptop, but the animations that it uses for pop-ups and new windows takes a little getting used to at first. Very nice.

One of the great things about it is the email - it's at my fingertips all the time. I normally loathe the Crackberry addicts, but I find that I'm starting to turn I to one despite myself. The ease of being able to swipe and tap an email to delete it, or even just being able to check my email from anywhere there's a WiFi signal - without having to drag out my laptop - is pretty freeing on a couple of levels. Considering that just about everywhere on campus has some sort of WiFi access, it means I can do work from just about anywhere. Good stuff.

One of the nicest features, hands down, is that I can add content to my calendar or my address book at any time. When I as at the doctors office the other day, they asked me to make an appointment for 6 months from now. Normally I drag the laptop out and put it in right there - otherwise, I get the little appointment card, then promptly loose it and forget about the appointment until about a week before. Not cool. With the laptop, I can add it, but that's cumbersome - especially since this office isn't exactly spacious. With the iPod Touch, I just switch to the calendar, add the appointment, and then don't worry about it until it pops up a reminder 3 days before, and then 1 hour before - and I've also got it set to SMS my cell phone to remind me in case I'm not at my desk when the computer tries to warn me.

With the roll-out of Apple's new "Mobile.Me" service, things will get even easier - instead of having to plug into the computer every few days to sync, everything will happen over the WiFi connection in the Touch and my laptop - and I'll be able to view and edit my calendar or address book from any computer connected to the internet. Time will tell if this is a good or bad thing - but I think it will be all good.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

This is me, trying to stay awake while things happen around me. Joy.

Oh, and Skitch! is an interesting tool from plasq that allows you to do screen shots (or images captures right from your iSight or other camera), edit them, and the post them to the web. Right now I'm using their servers, but you can put it to flickr, .Mac (soon to be MobileMe), or right into your FTP account. It's pretty cool to play with, and I'm finding more things to do with it each day. Go check it out!

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

io9.com reports...
Arthur C. Clarke, Futurist and Scifi Legend, Dies
Arthur C. Clarke, author of scifi classics Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, died today at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka. Not only did Clarke create a legend with 2001 (he worked on the film with Stanley Kubrick too), but he also predicted many of the scientific inventions of the twentieth century such as telecom satellites. He was even knighted in recognition of his many mind-bending contributions to the worlds of literature and science speculation. [LATimes]

What's most disturbing to me is that I was browsing some Wikipedia articles about his novels: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, 3001: The Final Odyssey) at about the time that io9 posted the story. Weird.

And did you know that he was among the first to posit the idea of a geostationary communications satellite?

So, lately Ethan has this habit of staying up late. Really late. Like 11:00 one night. So tonight, when I finally convinced him to try to turn in, he decided to fall asleep on me. I'm not a fan of it, but if it helps the boy, what can I do, right? So he was talking to me while I did some work, and cuddling, until finally, he stopped talking. It took a minute to really "take" (he has played possum before, only to all but jump on me when I tried to put him in his own bed.

In case you're wondering, the photo is a la my laptop, and the "flash"/glow you see is the display - when the photo is taken via the "Photo Booth" software, it flashes the screen when it takes a photo. I don't know if that's part of the countdown it gives or if it's intentional for a flash, but it's there. Anyway, there the fat guy is, sleeping.

So, the problem with the new version of the backend that runs this site? It's that it requires a version of MySQL that I don't have access to. That's all geek to you, hopefully, but the long and the short of it is that an upgrade would need to be done to the server before I can upgrade my software. I don't really think that's going to happen anytime soon. This leaves me flustered, flumoxed, and irritated. But enough about that.

I bought a SATA drive a few months ago to go into a USB enclosure. It's super fast, but... not quite fast enough. So then I recently managed to get an external SATA enclosure (two drive) and an SATA Express Card for some super-duper high speed fun (editing a few videos, mostly). I tested it out a couple of times, and it was very nice.

Today, for fun, and since I don't use my computer much at work, I decided to see how long it would take to backup the computer via this new highspeed connection. A long time, apparently.

RIght now, it's doing about 130mb/min. I started it almost 3 hours ago, and it's done just over 20gb of backup, which is about 6gb/hour. That means that for the other 115gb, it would take about 19 hours. That's not... optimal. Of course, I have Mail, Photoshop, and a slew of other programs all running in the background, so that's not helping things. Regardless, it's not as super-duper fast as I had hoped it would. It is, however, still fast. And faster than the USB connected drive.

Now if only I could afford the 3TB of storage that I would probably need for all my data.....

Last night Ethan was cranking, so i picked him up and brought him to the kitchen - as he had been mumbling something about the kitchen.

We stepped into the kitchen and i said:
You have entered the kitchen. Cabinets abound. There is a sink and several counters. Exits are south, north and west.

He pointed at the fridge, so i turned, and said...

You are facing the fridge. Other objects available are a stove, sink and microwave. Cabinets still abound, and there are more counters. Exits are north, south and west.

He looked at me.

I said "Time passes....."

He looked at me again.

I did a little face sucker action and said "You have been eaten by a grue"

He didn't care what his final score was (5 points), but I think he might want to play again tomorrow.....

A quick note to say that I'm now completely off the internet. For a whole weekend. Part of me is really cranky, and another part doesn't care simply because Cablevision no longer gets my money (well, after they finally send us a bill for the correct amount).

The problem stems from cancelling the TV service - the phone rep didn't understand me when I said "I also have a cable modem provided by Cablevision under a separate account" and I didn't realize fully what "disconnect you from the cable system" meant. Mostly my bad, but I feel that the phone rep should share at least some of the blame. What happened is that Cablevision feels that since I'm no longer a paying customer, then I shouldn't be on their network at all. You see, you can get basic cable for free if you're still connected - they can't stop the signal without a physical disconnect. The problem is, as I said, that I get my internet from them too. I hadn't fully fleshed out all my options for a replacement for them when it came to the fore on Thursday night - no internet. I called to complain, and Cablevision was nice enough to offer to send someone out between 10 and 7 the next day - provided I would be home in case they needed to come inside the house to check things.

Not for nothing, but if the internet stopped when you disconnected me from your wires, why would your tech need to come inside the house? Needless to say, I declined. They said that they could see about getting someone out on Saturday, but that was also not much more than a "we'll see what we can do, but no promises unless you're willing to stay on hold for 15 minutes" sort of thing. I passed on that too.

I called AT&T from work and signed up for a DSL package. I'm not happy about it, but I think I've made it clear that I want Cablevision out of my life. They overnighted me a kit, and I hooked it up, and.... nothing. A call to their tech support for new installs reveals that they can't hook me up for some reason, and they'll get back to me about it. I expect to get a call on Monday, but who knows. I'm not happy, especially since what I received from them (a wireless router/DSL modem) is not what I requested (a DSL modem) since I have all the extra fancy stuff I need already at home.

At this point, I fully expect them to tell me that they need to replace the equipment outside the house (a terminal, I think it's called) since it's a few years shy of being ancient. Oh, and quite dirty. But we'll see how that turns out on Monday.

More updates as events warrant.

Oh, and thanks mom and dad, for letting me use your internet while Ethan took an entirely too long nap.

CL&P Blog: All Criticism of This Website Is Hereby Forbidden

CL↦Blog brings up the topic of Dozier Internet Law's website and, more interestingly, their "User Agreement."

Ooops. Apparently I've managed to mess up - I just linked to them, so I've violated the "User Agreement" of their site:
We also do not allow any links to our site without our express permission

There I go again - I quoted part of their website, which violates another part of the "browse-wrap" license agreement:
Dozier Internet Law, P.C. has a lot of intellectual property on our site. For instance, we are the creators of all of the text on this website, and own the "look and feel" of this website. We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so. In addition, you should not make any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us.

I think I might be in a lot of trouble now. Good thing I have a handy dandy user agreement of my own. (For the record, even thinking about my website means that you agree to the terms. Of course, I really should modify the agreement to say that you also owe me $5 for loading the site. I think I might have stumbled upon a new "revenue stream" for the site...)

Anyway, this type of heavy handed bullying has been tried before - and it usually fails before it even gets to the courtroom. On the rare occasion that it makes it that far, cooler heads usually prevail.

I wonder if Dozier will come after me? Time will tell.....

NIKE MISSLE BASE KC-SILO 60 - (eBay item 300156975741 end time Oct-31-07 05:23:14 PDT)

Sure, it's 60 acres. And sure, the Missle silos are filled with water. But there's an 800 sq. ft. fortified bunker you can live in. I'm thinking....
* 1 silo filled with water for free diving
* 1 silo with cargo netting for climbing
* 1 silo turned into a rock wall/climbing area
* paint ball in some of the land
* "agri-tainment" in other bits
* there's still room for the old homestead....

Of course, as Rudi pointed out, it's still in Kansas. Not that I have anything against Kansas - I just don't know if now is the best time to uproot the whole family and move.....