Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
JK Harris
So while watching pitchmen tonight, I had no idea that the funniest part of the show would be a commercial. This commercial is for JK Harris tax people. I couldn't stop laughing at all aspects of this commercal.
Okay so first, is this woman so in debt she can't afford to turn on her lights while she cleans her pot? But then this guy talks for what seems like forever, and then jimmy the giant strolls on from stage left and totally overtakes the poor soul seated to his right. But the best part in my mind is that they don't even cut, they just slowly pan away while this poor guy stares at the camera saying "Please help me get away from this linebacker that just ran in and stole my thunder."
I couldn't stop laughing, I watched it about 20 times.
Okay so first, is this woman so in debt she can't afford to turn on her lights while she cleans her pot? But then this guy talks for what seems like forever, and then jimmy the giant strolls on from stage left and totally overtakes the poor soul seated to his right. But the best part in my mind is that they don't even cut, they just slowly pan away while this poor guy stares at the camera saying "Please help me get away from this linebacker that just ran in and stole my thunder."
I couldn't stop laughing, I watched it about 20 times.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Baby Roller Blades
Just heard I Get Around by the Beach Boys. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I think of the "baby roller blades" commercial. Drew had no idea what I was talking about, but a quick youtube search found the commercial, and not only did I remember the "BABY ROLLER BLADES" hook, but also about 90% of the rest of the song. I remember the weirdest shit.
Geocities Shuts Down
So Yahoo is pulling the plug on geocities. For those who don't know, geocities was the original social networking, they just didn't know it yet. There were neighborhoods (SunsetStrip for Music) street names (Palms, Alley) and then addresses (8871). Put it together (www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8871) and this was your website. It had the social networking aspect, because drop your address and check the site of someone next door to you, and they also had a music related site. People made web rings, where you would join a ring and add your address and then you would have an ad on your site that would display a random site from the web ring.
I was in 8th grade. Instead of going to the cafeteria and getting fatter, I would head to the school library every afternoon with a few friends (Jeff and Matt) and work on my geocities website. You were presented with a text block full and you filled it up with HTML and published your site for the world to see. I can still remember my first site. It was a website for guitar tabs. It's first iteration had a pale orange and green tiled background. I remember spending a week wondering why the background wasn't showing up (I spelled it backround). There was no spell check, there was no color coding. This was the original days of HTML.
I never understood it, but Jeff's site got a shit-ton of hits. All the time his site was geocities site of the day. There was absolutely nothing on his site of value. He had a few paint shop pro tutorials, some information about his Everquest guild, it was all over the place, pointless worthless information, and people went to his site (I think this was the beginning of the blog)
My first redesign to my site added frames. The top half held the content, the bottom half was split into three sections. The first section was a midi player that played all the hip midi jams like sublime santeria. the middle section was navigation, an image map created in paint shop pro, portraying the "Got Milk" monster with a t-shit that said "Got Tabs". Back then there wasn't a tool to help with image maps, I had to write down cordinates and plug them in manually. The third section contained a drop down list to choose different songs for the midi player. The tabs on the site were all written by me, and were all half songs. Elastica - the Connection, for instance, contained the main riff (DA-DANANADA-DANANADA-DANANA-DA-NANANA)... you know the riff... that was it. And thinking back it was probably wrong. Salt and Pepper - Push It, had the same thing for the tab. Main riff (DA-NANANANANANANANANANA DA-NANANANANANANANANANANA) and obviously that was the whole song.
I ended a friendship over a geocities site. true story. Another friend started making a tab site as well. He spent much more time working on it, and looking back, his was better. He focuses solely on Nirvana tabs, and even had a Kurt Cobain tribute page with animated gif torches burning on either side of a picture of him. I was pissed he stole my idea and then did it better. Looking back, I was kind of like Cartman in the whole situation. He later abandoned his tab site since there wasn't going to be many updates to a tab site where the bands front man blew his brains out, and he made a southpark animated gif site. He drew the south park characters scanned them and then animated them, but our friendship was never the same, I kicked him out of my band, and started a 3 piece and he joined another band with Herb, who turned out to be a furry.
If you go to the internet archive and look at my old site, you will see that I never set a "noframes" page, so it wasn't archived. It makes me sad because I would love to rehash all that all code and see what I was doing. Another fond memory I have from my geocities page is showing my uncle who worked for a computer company. He asked how I wrote it and didn't believe I wasn't using a tool to make it work. He went on and on about how his company bought a program called frontpage that made their website a million times better and I should get involved. Luckily I decided on Allaire Homesite instead of Frontpage, which then transferred me to dreamweaver, with a short stop at GoLive in between.
I think back and if it wasn't for these experiences I wouldn't be in the career field I'm in now. I wouldn't be doing this for a living that's for sure. I owe my entire career to Geocities and Jeff for dragging me to the library and trying to teach me HTML. So geocities you will be missed.
GEOCITIES.COM
I was in 8th grade. Instead of going to the cafeteria and getting fatter, I would head to the school library every afternoon with a few friends (Jeff and Matt) and work on my geocities website. You were presented with a text block full and you filled it up with HTML and published your site for the world to see. I can still remember my first site. It was a website for guitar tabs. It's first iteration had a pale orange and green tiled background. I remember spending a week wondering why the background wasn't showing up (I spelled it backround). There was no spell check, there was no color coding. This was the original days of HTML.
I never understood it, but Jeff's site got a shit-ton of hits. All the time his site was geocities site of the day. There was absolutely nothing on his site of value. He had a few paint shop pro tutorials, some information about his Everquest guild, it was all over the place, pointless worthless information, and people went to his site (I think this was the beginning of the blog)
My first redesign to my site added frames. The top half held the content, the bottom half was split into three sections. The first section was a midi player that played all the hip midi jams like sublime santeria. the middle section was navigation, an image map created in paint shop pro, portraying the "Got Milk" monster with a t-shit that said "Got Tabs". Back then there wasn't a tool to help with image maps, I had to write down cordinates and plug them in manually. The third section contained a drop down list to choose different songs for the midi player. The tabs on the site were all written by me, and were all half songs. Elastica - the Connection, for instance, contained the main riff (DA-DANANADA-DANANADA-DANANA-DA-NANANA)... you know the riff... that was it. And thinking back it was probably wrong. Salt and Pepper - Push It, had the same thing for the tab. Main riff (DA-NANANANANANANANANANA DA-NANANANANANANANANANANA) and obviously that was the whole song.
I ended a friendship over a geocities site. true story. Another friend started making a tab site as well. He spent much more time working on it, and looking back, his was better. He focuses solely on Nirvana tabs, and even had a Kurt Cobain tribute page with animated gif torches burning on either side of a picture of him. I was pissed he stole my idea and then did it better. Looking back, I was kind of like Cartman in the whole situation. He later abandoned his tab site since there wasn't going to be many updates to a tab site where the bands front man blew his brains out, and he made a southpark animated gif site. He drew the south park characters scanned them and then animated them, but our friendship was never the same, I kicked him out of my band, and started a 3 piece and he joined another band with Herb, who turned out to be a furry.
If you go to the internet archive and look at my old site, you will see that I never set a "noframes" page, so it wasn't archived. It makes me sad because I would love to rehash all that all code and see what I was doing. Another fond memory I have from my geocities page is showing my uncle who worked for a computer company. He asked how I wrote it and didn't believe I wasn't using a tool to make it work. He went on and on about how his company bought a program called frontpage that made their website a million times better and I should get involved. Luckily I decided on Allaire Homesite instead of Frontpage, which then transferred me to dreamweaver, with a short stop at GoLive in between.
I think back and if it wasn't for these experiences I wouldn't be in the career field I'm in now. I wouldn't be doing this for a living that's for sure. I owe my entire career to Geocities and Jeff for dragging me to the library and trying to teach me HTML. So geocities you will be missed.
GEOCITIES.COM
Friday, April 17, 2009
Susan Boyle Is Ugly and Sings Well. Who Cares?
So I've gotten emails, and seen countless articles on the web today about it, so I figured I would chime in. I'm sure you've seen the video, the ugly woman walks on stage, everyone laughs at her (why?) then she says she wants to be a singer, people keep laughing (no idea why?) she then sings, and everyone is blown away because she can sing. it's an inspiration.
Okay, so really, who cares? I mean, being attractive has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can sing. It's not like she came on stage and said she wanted to be a stripper or a model. There are plenty of ugly people that sing. Sure, she would never make it on American Idol, it's a different show. But this show is pretty low on the totem pole, different audience all together.
I don't understand the fascination with this story? Is it that everyone in the crowd was laughing at her for not being attractive? If so, yeah, that sucks... but then everyone stopped laughing she she sang well, and I think that's even worse. Don't feel bad for it... she's still as ugly as she was when she went on stage... if you thought it was okay to vocally express your displeasure of her appearance earlier, you should still think it's okay to laugh when she's done singing.
She's going to win the competition, based solely on the fact that if you watched the show and laughed at her, you will now vote for her, and in your warped twisted mind, think that now everything is okay and you can go back to making fun of ugly people, because you "voted for an ugly chick on tv that one time" (classic 'I have a black friend so I'm not racist' move)
The other group of people voting will be ugly people that are too ashamed to even leave the house that they are watching this show on Saturday nights while all the attractive people are out enjoying themselves. They see a little bit of themselves in Susan Boyle, but have absolutely no confidence so they will never be able to accomplish what she has, so they are content with voting for her to victory.
Good for her though. She exploited her ugliness, no makeup... shunned the stylists that would have ran a comb threw her hair. She knew what she was doing, it's not like she was shocked by the fact that people liked her singing, she knew she could sing, she knew that going out with a bit of makeup and a nice hairdo would have gotten the crowd to take her a bit more serious, but she didn't want this... she orchestrated an amazing scheme to not only make it on the show, but unquestionably win the show. Good for her.
Here is the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY&feature=related
(over 20million views already)
Okay, so really, who cares? I mean, being attractive has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can sing. It's not like she came on stage and said she wanted to be a stripper or a model. There are plenty of ugly people that sing. Sure, she would never make it on American Idol, it's a different show. But this show is pretty low on the totem pole, different audience all together.
I don't understand the fascination with this story? Is it that everyone in the crowd was laughing at her for not being attractive? If so, yeah, that sucks... but then everyone stopped laughing she she sang well, and I think that's even worse. Don't feel bad for it... she's still as ugly as she was when she went on stage... if you thought it was okay to vocally express your displeasure of her appearance earlier, you should still think it's okay to laugh when she's done singing.
She's going to win the competition, based solely on the fact that if you watched the show and laughed at her, you will now vote for her, and in your warped twisted mind, think that now everything is okay and you can go back to making fun of ugly people, because you "voted for an ugly chick on tv that one time" (classic 'I have a black friend so I'm not racist' move)
The other group of people voting will be ugly people that are too ashamed to even leave the house that they are watching this show on Saturday nights while all the attractive people are out enjoying themselves. They see a little bit of themselves in Susan Boyle, but have absolutely no confidence so they will never be able to accomplish what she has, so they are content with voting for her to victory.
Good for her though. She exploited her ugliness, no makeup... shunned the stylists that would have ran a comb threw her hair. She knew what she was doing, it's not like she was shocked by the fact that people liked her singing, she knew she could sing, she knew that going out with a bit of makeup and a nice hairdo would have gotten the crowd to take her a bit more serious, but she didn't want this... she orchestrated an amazing scheme to not only make it on the show, but unquestionably win the show. Good for her.
Here is the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY&feature=related
(over 20million views already)
Business Card
So I have been trying to layout a decent business card for my side business, and I've got what I thought was a pretty decent layout... until I came across this.
well, back to the drawing board. I need something that will shoot confetti out of it
well, back to the drawing board. I need something that will shoot confetti out of it
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Another Blog about John Mayer
This is more about writing music though, with a video of john mayer proving why I'm so bad at it.
I've been playing music since 7th, 8th grade somewhere around there, and whenever I start writing something, I always give up after I try the first thing. I think, 'nah, this isn't working' and I give up. And I'm watching this video of John Mayer working on a new song. And he's starting off, and he's like here's what I have so far, and I'm thinking to myself... this is kind of weak, I don't dig it. He then layers another vocal harmony and I'm like, okay this isn't as bad as I thought... after the 4th thing he does at the end of the video, and only 2 minutes worth of messing around, he's made it sound totally different.
I think this just boils down to me not having the patience to be good at this. I'm a "now" type person and when I don't see immediate results, I kind of give up. That's why playing with Matt was so beneficial, he did all this work, he sat and wrecked his brain to put together a shell for us to come into and noodle over to make catchy ass songs. After he left, even though I was surrounded by some pretty talented people (and dave), I tried really hard to accomplish this.
I think we actually did get there with one of the new songs, but because of my personality, Brad bails and I just think that I can't keep going on like this. I'm tired of playing in a band where all we do is try out new people. But I do miss it, I miss this part of it... even though I wasn't good at it, I miss it. Much more then I do playing shows. And that's weird to me, because I've always thought of myself as the show guy in the band. I wasn't one for studio work, I was all about sharing the music with people, and not so much arguing of the amount of measures before a bridge. Once I finish school and have a bit more time, I hope I can revist this stuff again and see if I can get passed this wall of mine and make some cool shit up... even without anyone around me that can sing worth a damn.
I've been playing music since 7th, 8th grade somewhere around there, and whenever I start writing something, I always give up after I try the first thing. I think, 'nah, this isn't working' and I give up. And I'm watching this video of John Mayer working on a new song. And he's starting off, and he's like here's what I have so far, and I'm thinking to myself... this is kind of weak, I don't dig it. He then layers another vocal harmony and I'm like, okay this isn't as bad as I thought... after the 4th thing he does at the end of the video, and only 2 minutes worth of messing around, he's made it sound totally different.
I think this just boils down to me not having the patience to be good at this. I'm a "now" type person and when I don't see immediate results, I kind of give up. That's why playing with Matt was so beneficial, he did all this work, he sat and wrecked his brain to put together a shell for us to come into and noodle over to make catchy ass songs. After he left, even though I was surrounded by some pretty talented people (and dave), I tried really hard to accomplish this.
I think we actually did get there with one of the new songs, but because of my personality, Brad bails and I just think that I can't keep going on like this. I'm tired of playing in a band where all we do is try out new people. But I do miss it, I miss this part of it... even though I wasn't good at it, I miss it. Much more then I do playing shows. And that's weird to me, because I've always thought of myself as the show guy in the band. I wasn't one for studio work, I was all about sharing the music with people, and not so much arguing of the amount of measures before a bridge. Once I finish school and have a bit more time, I hope I can revist this stuff again and see if I can get passed this wall of mine and make some cool shit up... even without anyone around me that can sing worth a damn.
Texican Whopper
So I've been seeing a lot of stuff about this ad that Burger King made for the Texican whopper.. I watched the ad, I'm not sure what's racist about it, but that's not the point of this post.
I want to know where I can get a texican whopper and what exactly the second patty is on there? It's a mystery, and for some reason people are more worried about the little Mexican guy, and not so much about how delicious everything from burger king is.
I am hoping that the second patty is made of 98% wheat and then 2% of something incredible so that I can go to Robs house and eat it every day and laugh cause he can't have one.
EDIT: Found an ad finally describing the second patty and yes I want it.
I want to know where I can get a texican whopper and what exactly the second patty is on there? It's a mystery, and for some reason people are more worried about the little Mexican guy, and not so much about how delicious everything from burger king is.
I am hoping that the second patty is made of 98% wheat and then 2% of something incredible so that I can go to Robs house and eat it every day and laugh cause he can't have one.
EDIT: Found an ad finally describing the second patty and yes I want it.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Dell Adamo - Should be featured in the next mac commercial
So I'm sure everyone has seen the new Windows commercials that send people to the store with $1000 or $1500 and tell them to buy a laptop, they of course look at mac and say they are too overpriced and the end up with a shiny new HP or Sony. Now I'm not one to ever say that mac's aren't more expensive then windows computers. I've always been under the impression you get what you pay for, so I don't mind spending a bit more for apple products. I also find it interesting that Microsoft would be doing this comparison since they don't build hardware at all, they should be doing commercials comparing OSX to Vista, or the upcoming Windows 7... that would make more sense, but I digress.
I think the next mac commercial could be golden. Set up the same voice over guy, have him say that apple gave a guy $1800 to go to the dell website and buy an ultra lightweight computer with a 13 inch screen. Then end the commercial with him getting the air because the air is cheaper and more powerful than the Dell.
I just got done reading a not too favorable review of the Adamo, calling it overpriced and underpowered, and for a moment, you would think you were reading a mac review. Points were made that you are paying strictly for the looks and build quality of the machine and the components suffer greatly from it. Just found it kind of interesting that Dell would try to compete in this market.
I think the next mac commercial could be golden. Set up the same voice over guy, have him say that apple gave a guy $1800 to go to the dell website and buy an ultra lightweight computer with a 13 inch screen. Then end the commercial with him getting the air because the air is cheaper and more powerful than the Dell.
I just got done reading a not too favorable review of the Adamo, calling it overpriced and underpowered, and for a moment, you would think you were reading a mac review. Points were made that you are paying strictly for the looks and build quality of the machine and the components suffer greatly from it. Just found it kind of interesting that Dell would try to compete in this market.
Hackintosh Weekend - Issues I've had
So the final parts of my hackintosh arrived Friday so I started putting this beast together. Here is a run down of the parts.
core i7 2.6Ghz processor. 4 cores and hyper threading means 8 addressable cores
12gigs of DDR3 ram.
620gig hard drive
the cheapest graphics card I could find that would do 2 monitors (Nvidia 9800GT)
an aftermarket heat sink for the processor
a gigantic antec case with 3 fans, and all sorts of bells and whistles
a 550watt power supply
so anyway, to start, I'm getting there, after spending all weekend with it, it still has issues, but I believe them to be hardware related. So I'll get there... here are the problems I had.
Friday -
assembled all the hardware went then went to the movies. (I love you man.. not that good) I then came home, got the htpc out of the closet and used that to install the operating system with drews Leopard disc. unfortunately his disc is an upgrade and not a retail disc so I had to go ahead and get a retail disc online. So that was pretty much friday, just needing to get the software ready so I can spend all saturday working on it.
Saturday -
woke up and leopard was done downloading so I installed it on the new harddrive. To do this, you need to put the harddrive in another computer because OSX doesn't know what to do with bios, so you need to do it from another leopard computer.
Issue #1: So once the software was installed and the script was ran, I put in the hard drive into the new computer, and nothing happens. The board won't even boot. Looking around at the lights on the board, I'm noticing the processor is overheating. So I take the cooler off, and I notice it's not even making contact with the processor. Figuring it's broke, I disassemble it from the board, and put the stock cooler on the processor. Now I can get it to post.
Issue #2: Keep getting an error that it can't find the boot drive. I have to plug it in to a bunch of different ports till finally the computer can find the hard drive and boot. So I finally get OSX to show up on one monitor.
I run the program that I got when I made the HTPC to get the graphics card recognized and now I have dual monitors. Pretty sweet everything seems to be great. I start downloading the stuff from the macheist bundle that I bought, start loading music into itunes, ect. I downloaded istat menus so I can keep tabs on everything going on in the system. istat is only reporting 4 cores, but I figure it's set up to only address physical cores so I don't think anything of it.
Issue #3: Kernal Panic (this is the first time I've ever seen one of these, it's pretty much a blue screen of death only on a mac.. you don't see them when running legit macs, but I've seen plenty of them this weekend) So while trying to recreate the KP I realize that it happened when the program finished downloading and the dmg mounted. I notice that I missed a crucial step in the process when re-reading the guide, and I forgot to run the EFI script. (Basically this takes all the tweaks that you make to the OS and places them in their own partition on the hard drive so that when you install updates to the OS or whatever, they aren't written over.) So I run this, and now I'm not getting a KP when I mount dmg files. I also have 8 cores showing in istat However...
Issue #4: Now I have no audio. I notice it because I'm trying to play some music over itunes and nothing is happening, I go into the audio preferences, and it doesn't even find any output or input devices. I also notice that I don't have access to the DVD burner I bought. I am still getting KPs and it's happening usually with stuff having to do with the ethernet port. I'm getting them constantly when trying to move the Adobe package over the network. I try it from computer to computer, and from shared hard drive to computer... I keep getting KP's. I'm also getting KP's when trying to move my music library to itunes all at once, so I split that process up into a few pulls and it works.
I go online, and find out that there was another folder in the install download that had some updated kexts that would fix the audio issue. I try installing them manually a few times and nothing seems to be taking, then I go to bed for the night.
Sunday -
Issue #5: I can't even get the computer to boot anymore. I must have screwed something up. So I bring the HTPC back upstairs, and put this hard drive into the HTPC and boot to the HTPC. I rerun the scripts and rewrite whatever I did wrong. Now I'm able to boot again but no audio, and I'm on one monitor again. I run the program to get dual monitors (when OSX doesn't know what graphics card you have, not only is it 1024x800 but everything runs slow because the OS is so graphics intensive.)
So now I start scouring the web for audio fixes... it seems weird that I'm not getting audio running the same scripts that other people ran and have audio. I find another set of audio kexts. I think that I moved the wrong ones in there, they are dated Aug 08 and I have Jan 09 kexts (obviously newer). So I take out the hard drive and put it back in the HTPC so I can get these installed instead and....
Issue #6: The HTPC won't boot. I guess when I was running all those scripts on it, I accidentally ran something that screwed it up. So now I have to backtrack..
Issue #7: I put the both hard drives back in the new pc, and boot, and it can't find the second hard drive. So I start guessing and putting in a bunch of different sata ports and rebooting until I finally find the drive. Now that it finds that drive, I go online and find the scripts I ran to get the HTPC to work, and I run those. I take it out put it in the HTPC computer and it's working.
So now I bring the new hard drive to the htpc computer and run the scripts again, being extra careful with them, and viola I have audio. I remember when OSX found the other harddrive so I plug the dvd burner in there and
Issue #8 KP. Apparently OSX has certain places it looks for hard drives and certain places it looks for dvd burners. So I just start rebooting and guessing where to plug the burner in until I have that showing up.
So now everything seems to be working. I have two monitors running gigantic resolution, I have audio, I have 8 cores showing up, the HTPC is working again. I'm able to mount dmg files and install stuff. So I start scouring the web for stuff that I need to install. Safari 4, Firefox, Dropbox ect. Everything is going well, but I'm still struggling to get adobe installed. I was able to finally get it across the network,
Issue #9: but I keep getting KPs during installation. I think it's a memory issue so I take out two sticks and try. By this time, I'd already installed a good portion of the programs, so it only had a few left to install and no more KP. This could have just been coincidence and not a memory issue.
I notice that I keep dropping connection while listening to music which is on a shared drive. When I go into the network preferences I notice that the entire network card isn't discovered anymore. The motherboard has 2 ethernet ports, which are labeled (en0) and (en1) by the mac. I've tried switching the cable to the different port when I lose signal, and I've even tried plugging a cable in both ports. I'm now noticing that when I switch cables to the other port, mac is picking it up as a different network card, not 0 or 1, but now I have 3 and 5....
Issue #10: it's at the point now, where I get KP just plugging a cable into the port. I'm thinking the motherboard is faulty and that's what is causing a majority of the KPs. When installing adobe, I was also listening to music over the network, so while I thought it was a memory issue it could also be a network thing.
I ran memtest for 10hours last night (recommended at least 8) with all 12 gigs installed, and it threw zero errors, so the memory is in good shape. I'm also thinking the mother board has faulty sata ports too which is why I'm having trouble with finding a place to plug in a hard drive. I am going to go to best buy and buy a cheap NIC card to plug in and see if I'm able to connect to the net that way.. if so, then I know it's the mother board and I'll ship it back. another option would be to install XP on another harddrive and see if it can find everything in different sata ports and if the network works with that. So I have two tests to make sure it's hardware related.
When the computer is running, it's ridiculously fast. the only time I've seen a spinning beach ball is when I'm connecting to the shared drive to start listening to music. Photoshop loads in like 2 seconds. it's nuts. I can't wait till it's stable.
core i7 2.6Ghz processor. 4 cores and hyper threading means 8 addressable cores
12gigs of DDR3 ram.
620gig hard drive
the cheapest graphics card I could find that would do 2 monitors (Nvidia 9800GT)
an aftermarket heat sink for the processor
a gigantic antec case with 3 fans, and all sorts of bells and whistles
a 550watt power supply
so anyway, to start, I'm getting there, after spending all weekend with it, it still has issues, but I believe them to be hardware related. So I'll get there... here are the problems I had.
Friday -
assembled all the hardware went then went to the movies. (I love you man.. not that good) I then came home, got the htpc out of the closet and used that to install the operating system with drews Leopard disc. unfortunately his disc is an upgrade and not a retail disc so I had to go ahead and get a retail disc online. So that was pretty much friday, just needing to get the software ready so I can spend all saturday working on it.
Saturday -
woke up and leopard was done downloading so I installed it on the new harddrive. To do this, you need to put the harddrive in another computer because OSX doesn't know what to do with bios, so you need to do it from another leopard computer.
Issue #1: So once the software was installed and the script was ran, I put in the hard drive into the new computer, and nothing happens. The board won't even boot. Looking around at the lights on the board, I'm noticing the processor is overheating. So I take the cooler off, and I notice it's not even making contact with the processor. Figuring it's broke, I disassemble it from the board, and put the stock cooler on the processor. Now I can get it to post.
Issue #2: Keep getting an error that it can't find the boot drive. I have to plug it in to a bunch of different ports till finally the computer can find the hard drive and boot. So I finally get OSX to show up on one monitor.
I run the program that I got when I made the HTPC to get the graphics card recognized and now I have dual monitors. Pretty sweet everything seems to be great. I start downloading the stuff from the macheist bundle that I bought, start loading music into itunes, ect. I downloaded istat menus so I can keep tabs on everything going on in the system. istat is only reporting 4 cores, but I figure it's set up to only address physical cores so I don't think anything of it.
Issue #3: Kernal Panic (this is the first time I've ever seen one of these, it's pretty much a blue screen of death only on a mac.. you don't see them when running legit macs, but I've seen plenty of them this weekend) So while trying to recreate the KP I realize that it happened when the program finished downloading and the dmg mounted. I notice that I missed a crucial step in the process when re-reading the guide, and I forgot to run the EFI script. (Basically this takes all the tweaks that you make to the OS and places them in their own partition on the hard drive so that when you install updates to the OS or whatever, they aren't written over.) So I run this, and now I'm not getting a KP when I mount dmg files. I also have 8 cores showing in istat However...
Issue #4: Now I have no audio. I notice it because I'm trying to play some music over itunes and nothing is happening, I go into the audio preferences, and it doesn't even find any output or input devices. I also notice that I don't have access to the DVD burner I bought. I am still getting KPs and it's happening usually with stuff having to do with the ethernet port. I'm getting them constantly when trying to move the Adobe package over the network. I try it from computer to computer, and from shared hard drive to computer... I keep getting KP's. I'm also getting KP's when trying to move my music library to itunes all at once, so I split that process up into a few pulls and it works.
I go online, and find out that there was another folder in the install download that had some updated kexts that would fix the audio issue. I try installing them manually a few times and nothing seems to be taking, then I go to bed for the night.
Sunday -
Issue #5: I can't even get the computer to boot anymore. I must have screwed something up. So I bring the HTPC back upstairs, and put this hard drive into the HTPC and boot to the HTPC. I rerun the scripts and rewrite whatever I did wrong. Now I'm able to boot again but no audio, and I'm on one monitor again. I run the program to get dual monitors (when OSX doesn't know what graphics card you have, not only is it 1024x800 but everything runs slow because the OS is so graphics intensive.)
So now I start scouring the web for audio fixes... it seems weird that I'm not getting audio running the same scripts that other people ran and have audio. I find another set of audio kexts. I think that I moved the wrong ones in there, they are dated Aug 08 and I have Jan 09 kexts (obviously newer). So I take out the hard drive and put it back in the HTPC so I can get these installed instead and....
Issue #6: The HTPC won't boot. I guess when I was running all those scripts on it, I accidentally ran something that screwed it up. So now I have to backtrack..
Issue #7: I put the both hard drives back in the new pc, and boot, and it can't find the second hard drive. So I start guessing and putting in a bunch of different sata ports and rebooting until I finally find the drive. Now that it finds that drive, I go online and find the scripts I ran to get the HTPC to work, and I run those. I take it out put it in the HTPC computer and it's working.
So now I bring the new hard drive to the htpc computer and run the scripts again, being extra careful with them, and viola I have audio. I remember when OSX found the other harddrive so I plug the dvd burner in there and
Issue #8 KP. Apparently OSX has certain places it looks for hard drives and certain places it looks for dvd burners. So I just start rebooting and guessing where to plug the burner in until I have that showing up.
So now everything seems to be working. I have two monitors running gigantic resolution, I have audio, I have 8 cores showing up, the HTPC is working again. I'm able to mount dmg files and install stuff. So I start scouring the web for stuff that I need to install. Safari 4, Firefox, Dropbox ect. Everything is going well, but I'm still struggling to get adobe installed. I was able to finally get it across the network,
Issue #9: but I keep getting KPs during installation. I think it's a memory issue so I take out two sticks and try. By this time, I'd already installed a good portion of the programs, so it only had a few left to install and no more KP. This could have just been coincidence and not a memory issue.
I notice that I keep dropping connection while listening to music which is on a shared drive. When I go into the network preferences I notice that the entire network card isn't discovered anymore. The motherboard has 2 ethernet ports, which are labeled (en0) and (en1) by the mac. I've tried switching the cable to the different port when I lose signal, and I've even tried plugging a cable in both ports. I'm now noticing that when I switch cables to the other port, mac is picking it up as a different network card, not 0 or 1, but now I have 3 and 5....
Issue #10: it's at the point now, where I get KP just plugging a cable into the port. I'm thinking the motherboard is faulty and that's what is causing a majority of the KPs. When installing adobe, I was also listening to music over the network, so while I thought it was a memory issue it could also be a network thing.
I ran memtest for 10hours last night (recommended at least 8) with all 12 gigs installed, and it threw zero errors, so the memory is in good shape. I'm also thinking the mother board has faulty sata ports too which is why I'm having trouble with finding a place to plug in a hard drive. I am going to go to best buy and buy a cheap NIC card to plug in and see if I'm able to connect to the net that way.. if so, then I know it's the mother board and I'll ship it back. another option would be to install XP on another harddrive and see if it can find everything in different sata ports and if the network works with that. So I have two tests to make sure it's hardware related.
When the computer is running, it's ridiculously fast. the only time I've seen a spinning beach ball is when I'm connecting to the shared drive to start listening to music. Photoshop loads in like 2 seconds. it's nuts. I can't wait till it's stable.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
mysql-xampp on a mac
I was having a hard time accessing mysql on my mac. I downloaded the GUI tools from mysql.com:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
but I kept getting can't connect errors. I had to find the my.cnf file to find out where the connection socket was located.
that file is placed in: Applications/xamppfiles/etc/my.cnf
and in there is the socket. I didn't change anything with the installation, so this should be the default location. In the gui tools you downloaded from the link I provided put:
/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock in as the connection socket,
localhost as the host,
leave the port alone,
root as the username
and leave the password blank.
That should get you in
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
but I kept getting can't connect errors. I had to find the my.cnf file to find out where the connection socket was located.
that file is placed in: Applications/xamppfiles/etc/my.cnf
and in there is the socket. I didn't change anything with the installation, so this should be the default location. In the gui tools you downloaded from the link I provided put:
/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock in as the connection socket,
localhost as the host,
leave the port alone,
root as the username
and leave the password blank.
That should get you in
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Favorite April Fools Day Online Thing
I think this is my favorite April Fools Day internet joke of the year.
http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=Mars_us&affcid=cj249294
This year was pretty lame, I guess the economy means no one can afford being funny, but this was still pretty good.
http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=Mars_us&affcid=cj249294
This year was pretty lame, I guess the economy means no one can afford being funny, but this was still pretty good.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Audi A5
So I want an Audi A5 really bad, and I found this audi color chart online and thought it was pretty funny
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Overheard in programming class
"Sometimes I just don't know what would make more sense... an IF statement, or a LOOP...."
"What's the difference between a thumb drive and a network drive?"
"What's the difference between a thumb drive and a network drive?"
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
School Stories
School is a joke. I am in the web technologies program in school, which is a small program, because a lot of the same people are in the same classes as me. I either recognize their names from other online classes or I see them in my other on campus class.
The reason I love online classes is becoming apparent to me, as this semester the courses I wanted to take were actually on campus. When online, I have a total disconnect from the things that everyone hates about school. I don't have to sit face to face with a professor, I don't have to listen to the girl that is in every class that asks question after question keeping everyone else from moving on (by the way, the same girl is in both my classes this semester). I also don't have to hear people talking about this class, and other classes in the program, because the only thing people talk about in the online classes are the assigned conversations.
From listening in on conversations in last nights class, I am certain the human race is doomed.
I realize that I'm not the standard student in these classes, I have almost 10 years experience in the web technologies field, and that's not counting the noodling I was doing all the way back freshman year of high school on geocities to learn how to do HTML. I understand that when I started I didn't understand any of this stuff either. I don't expect my fellow students to be at my level of programming.
That being said, I have students in this class complaining about how hard javascript was, and how they are struggling in the php class. These students have already taken, intro to object oriented programming, programming in java, programming in javascript, and now they are in php... they are complaining about struggles they are having in all of these classes. To me, at this point, basic programming fundamentals should be there. Now it's just learning syntax, and that's only a quick google search away.
The thing about this industry that these people don't understand is you need to be able to adapt. Sure they might be able to make an html page, but so can dreamweaver. You need to be able to keep up with growing technologies, learn new things, and be willing to change and learn a new language if the project dictates it. Ive' been in positions where I've had to learn:
And now I might be doing a side project that will have to be written in ASP. If these students are having such a hard time moving through all these programming classes, they are probably picking the wrong occupation.
If you are reading this and don't know programming, this might not make sense, so just understand that all programming is the same, each language has it's pros and cons, and therefore each language is used to do something different. In these classes, we are shown the benefits of each language, and the syntax those languages use. If you don't understand the fundamentals of programing, you will always struggle, no matter what language you are learning.
If you struggled in the first programming class, and couldn't quit grasp it, I understand, I'm sure it's a lot to handle in one semester. But since that class you've taken 3 maybe 4 programming class, all of which go over the fundamentals of programming, and you are still struggling... then you are in trouble.
For instance, one woman in the class was saying how much she struggled in javascript. She went on and on about how she bought extra books that weren't required, stayed up countless hours to work on the class, and still barely scraped by. Why then is she still moving on in this program? Where is the shut of valve that says "you know what, this isn't for me, I don't get it, I've given a fair shake at it, I need to move on." It isn't there... and that is what is scary. She was commenting all programming classes should be in class because online, you are teaching yourself. Well guess what, that's what the real world is, teaching yourself.
She's going to get a job in this field after she finishes. I don't know her back story, but either, the company she works for needs someone who can do web work, or she is trying to branch out to look for another job. Either way, she is going to go in to an interview with javascript, php, java all on her resume. She's going to end up in a position where she just pulls the whole team down because she is incapable of the tasks she is given. I've worked with people like this. They have the resume, they have the bullshitting down... and then they bring the entire team down in flames because they don't pull anything close to their own weight. Even worse, is the fact that she just got out of school, so she "thinks" she knows this stuff, which is even more dangerous. She'll take on projects way above her level, and then she'll start asking everyone how to do things on her team, and everyone will stop their projects to hold her hand, and everyone suffers.
So for the sake of humanity, I want to pull her aside and say, "look, I'm not trying to be mean, I'm really not. I'm looking out for you, and whatever web team you may end up on the future. Stop taking these classes. Find a new career path. Do something else with your life. Programming is obviously not for you. You will not make it in the web world, because the most important ability you can have in the web world is the ability to adapt, and you can not do that."
Or I'll just sit in the back and laugh at her on the inside.
The reason I love online classes is becoming apparent to me, as this semester the courses I wanted to take were actually on campus. When online, I have a total disconnect from the things that everyone hates about school. I don't have to sit face to face with a professor, I don't have to listen to the girl that is in every class that asks question after question keeping everyone else from moving on (by the way, the same girl is in both my classes this semester). I also don't have to hear people talking about this class, and other classes in the program, because the only thing people talk about in the online classes are the assigned conversations.
From listening in on conversations in last nights class, I am certain the human race is doomed.
I realize that I'm not the standard student in these classes, I have almost 10 years experience in the web technologies field, and that's not counting the noodling I was doing all the way back freshman year of high school on geocities to learn how to do HTML. I understand that when I started I didn't understand any of this stuff either. I don't expect my fellow students to be at my level of programming.
That being said, I have students in this class complaining about how hard javascript was, and how they are struggling in the php class. These students have already taken, intro to object oriented programming, programming in java, programming in javascript, and now they are in php... they are complaining about struggles they are having in all of these classes. To me, at this point, basic programming fundamentals should be there. Now it's just learning syntax, and that's only a quick google search away.
The thing about this industry that these people don't understand is you need to be able to adapt. Sure they might be able to make an html page, but so can dreamweaver. You need to be able to keep up with growing technologies, learn new things, and be willing to change and learn a new language if the project dictates it. Ive' been in positions where I've had to learn:
- HTML (first job)
- SHTML (end of first job, allowed me to have includes)
- CSS (start of second job)
- JSP (start of second job, never messed with this before, but had to learn it to connect to an oracle database, which was also foreign to me)
- Coldfusion (third job, to connect to sql server)
- Javascript (because we started bringing in libraries cause this is the newest technology and backbone for a lot of what makes the web what it is today)
- PHP (newest job, to connect to mysql, using all open source software)
And now I might be doing a side project that will have to be written in ASP. If these students are having such a hard time moving through all these programming classes, they are probably picking the wrong occupation.
If you are reading this and don't know programming, this might not make sense, so just understand that all programming is the same, each language has it's pros and cons, and therefore each language is used to do something different. In these classes, we are shown the benefits of each language, and the syntax those languages use. If you don't understand the fundamentals of programing, you will always struggle, no matter what language you are learning.
If you struggled in the first programming class, and couldn't quit grasp it, I understand, I'm sure it's a lot to handle in one semester. But since that class you've taken 3 maybe 4 programming class, all of which go over the fundamentals of programming, and you are still struggling... then you are in trouble.
For instance, one woman in the class was saying how much she struggled in javascript. She went on and on about how she bought extra books that weren't required, stayed up countless hours to work on the class, and still barely scraped by. Why then is she still moving on in this program? Where is the shut of valve that says "you know what, this isn't for me, I don't get it, I've given a fair shake at it, I need to move on." It isn't there... and that is what is scary. She was commenting all programming classes should be in class because online, you are teaching yourself. Well guess what, that's what the real world is, teaching yourself.
She's going to get a job in this field after she finishes. I don't know her back story, but either, the company she works for needs someone who can do web work, or she is trying to branch out to look for another job. Either way, she is going to go in to an interview with javascript, php, java all on her resume. She's going to end up in a position where she just pulls the whole team down because she is incapable of the tasks she is given. I've worked with people like this. They have the resume, they have the bullshitting down... and then they bring the entire team down in flames because they don't pull anything close to their own weight. Even worse, is the fact that she just got out of school, so she "thinks" she knows this stuff, which is even more dangerous. She'll take on projects way above her level, and then she'll start asking everyone how to do things on her team, and everyone will stop their projects to hold her hand, and everyone suffers.
So for the sake of humanity, I want to pull her aside and say, "look, I'm not trying to be mean, I'm really not. I'm looking out for you, and whatever web team you may end up on the future. Stop taking these classes. Find a new career path. Do something else with your life. Programming is obviously not for you. You will not make it in the web world, because the most important ability you can have in the web world is the ability to adapt, and you can not do that."
Or I'll just sit in the back and laugh at her on the inside.
computer drama
So I built a hackintosh over the weekend. it was a pain in the ass, and I can see why some people would just prefer to buy a legit mac then deal with that. My problem was, I needed something that apple doesn't offer, so I had to build it myself. With Rob hooking me up with a free case and power supply my total cost was around $350 and I was able to build a nice theater pc that will hide in the closet and provide all my movies and music and such to the living room. This was less then a mac mini, more powerful, and more upgradable.
One of the main problems I had was getting OSX actually installed on the hard drive. The mac can't read any IDE CD drives and needs SATA. I went to best buy, and the only sata drives they had were bluray and I wasn't interested in spending that much money for something I would never use. so I ran to target, and they had a cheap $40 internal DVD drive that would be perfect since all I would ever use it for would be to install the operating system. I probably would have just returned it afterwards.
I get it home, and it turns out that it's IDE, so that's a waste.. So I got this idea to install the OS by getting it on the hard drive before installing it in the new machine. Problem is, I only have an iMac and laptops, and there is no way to add a SATA drive to those machines to install. So I remembered a $50 thing at best buy that was basically an external SATA-usb2 device, and I could just install the OS on the drive like that... except, when I get there, best buy closes at 7pm.
I get home distraught because I can't finish the project, and then I get this genius idea. I bust open my mybook and it turns out, it's a SATA drive in there. So I unhook it, hook the new drive in, plug it in to the laptop, and install OSX right on the drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure, put it into the new computer, and everything is working great.
This long ass back story is just to show the irony of this part. Last night I get home, run upstairs to hop on the iMac for a second, and it's not working at all because the hard drive cashed. It's shot. The computer had been running really weird the last few weeks, and I upgraded the ram thinking that might be the culprit, I never once thought it was the beginning of a hard drive crash. I ran disc utility which was saying that the B tree was screwed up, I looked it up online and found a program that can apparently rebuild that tree called diskwarrior. I downloaded that, and that couldn't even find the drive. So I knew then the entire drive was shot. After spending my entire Sunday working with hard drive problems, and staring at the insides of a computer, I spent all Monday night doing the same thing.
This was a little bit different though. While the media pc is just a case with all the junk and guts easy to access, this was an iMac, an all in one pc that looks nice, but is a serious pain in the ass to access anything but the ram.
This is what I had to deal with to get into the machine... it's actually easier than it looks in that computer abortion picture above. Take the ram plate off, unscrew the other 4 screws on the bottom, lift off the front panel, unscrew the 8 screws around the lcd, lift that out. Now you have what you see in that picture. The hard drive, which I always thought was a laptop drive, is a legit drive. So I put the hard drive that's in the external mybook, and hooked that up inside the media pc, copied all the media off of it onto the internal media pc drive, and then reformatted it and put it in the iMac, and reassembled. I used the discs that came with the iMac, but that only installed Tiger, so I'll spend tonight after class loading Leopard and the slew of software I used to have on there.
Luckily I keep my important stuff in an online dropbox and on external storage so the data loss is minor. Just read this windy post and remember to back your stuff up, and remember that stuff always goes wrong.
One of the main problems I had was getting OSX actually installed on the hard drive. The mac can't read any IDE CD drives and needs SATA. I went to best buy, and the only sata drives they had were bluray and I wasn't interested in spending that much money for something I would never use. so I ran to target, and they had a cheap $40 internal DVD drive that would be perfect since all I would ever use it for would be to install the operating system. I probably would have just returned it afterwards.
I get it home, and it turns out that it's IDE, so that's a waste.. So I got this idea to install the OS by getting it on the hard drive before installing it in the new machine. Problem is, I only have an iMac and laptops, and there is no way to add a SATA drive to those machines to install. So I remembered a $50 thing at best buy that was basically an external SATA-usb2 device, and I could just install the OS on the drive like that... except, when I get there, best buy closes at 7pm.
I get home distraught because I can't finish the project, and then I get this genius idea. I bust open my mybook and it turns out, it's a SATA drive in there. So I unhook it, hook the new drive in, plug it in to the laptop, and install OSX right on the drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure, put it into the new computer, and everything is working great.
This long ass back story is just to show the irony of this part. Last night I get home, run upstairs to hop on the iMac for a second, and it's not working at all because the hard drive cashed. It's shot. The computer had been running really weird the last few weeks, and I upgraded the ram thinking that might be the culprit, I never once thought it was the beginning of a hard drive crash. I ran disc utility which was saying that the B tree was screwed up, I looked it up online and found a program that can apparently rebuild that tree called diskwarrior. I downloaded that, and that couldn't even find the drive. So I knew then the entire drive was shot. After spending my entire Sunday working with hard drive problems, and staring at the insides of a computer, I spent all Monday night doing the same thing.
This was a little bit different though. While the media pc is just a case with all the junk and guts easy to access, this was an iMac, an all in one pc that looks nice, but is a serious pain in the ass to access anything but the ram.
This is what I had to deal with to get into the machine... it's actually easier than it looks in that computer abortion picture above. Take the ram plate off, unscrew the other 4 screws on the bottom, lift off the front panel, unscrew the 8 screws around the lcd, lift that out. Now you have what you see in that picture. The hard drive, which I always thought was a laptop drive, is a legit drive. So I put the hard drive that's in the external mybook, and hooked that up inside the media pc, copied all the media off of it onto the internal media pc drive, and then reformatted it and put it in the iMac, and reassembled. I used the discs that came with the iMac, but that only installed Tiger, so I'll spend tonight after class loading Leopard and the slew of software I used to have on there.
Luckily I keep my important stuff in an online dropbox and on external storage so the data loss is minor. Just read this windy post and remember to back your stuff up, and remember that stuff always goes wrong.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Expensive Purchases
I have a slew of expensive purchases that I've recently made, or plan to make because even though we are in a recession, I'm rich, so I plan to flaunt it and take advantage.
During the remodel of our basement I bought:
new couch: $800
new window: $300
new drop ceiling: $300 (still to be installed)
outlets and paint: $200
plus probably $200 in trim and other related purchases... bring my spent total to $1800 so far.
But I'm not half done.. at least in my spending spree.
I'm going to get a TV to mount to the wall, luckily I'm taking advantage of Costco's generous return policy, so I'll probably only put out $600 for that. And I'm moving all my components out of the room and under the steps to hide them. This is going to require an RF remote ($450 including the ir repeater) as well as a bunch of other odds and ends. $30 piece to allow the playstation to receive ir signals, $30 usb hub so I can still play rock band (thanks drew for the idea) and hopefully that will be it. Of course I'm sure I'll be doing other things... I may end up moving the router downstairs if I can get verizon to send the internet through cat5 instead of coax, and that will be a few bucks for a cat5 cable, but oddly enough I will have more things that need to be wired to the internet in my living room than in my office.
Also on the purchase list is an HTPC. I've been toying back and forth with a bunch of possibilities. I've researched popcorn hour, the playstation, apple tv, the western digital box, mac mini and a home built computer. My requirements are the ability to stream every movie I have on my external hard drive whether it was ripped or downloaded, and access to hulu, and netflix streaming services. This leaves me to the mac mini or a home built solution because all other options are missing one or more of the features I want. I'm not spending $600 for the current gen mac mini, and they didn't update it last month, so I'll probably be exploring a hackintosh, which is something I'm really interested in trying out. This way I'll be able to built an HTPC for around the same price as a mini, only it will be a beast and not a 2 year old outdated junky computer.
All in all this looks to be ANOTHER $1800 in expenses on the downstairs, bringing my total to $3600. Hopefully I'm happier with the finished product more-so than I was the last time I re-did the basement. My roommate Sam was a huge help over the project and I couldn't have done it without him. The window in particular went from a 2/10 to a 10/10 easy. He also helped fix all the flaws in my original drywal installation and made that look like a million bucks too. Once we get the floor in behind the bar and drop ceiling finished, it's going to be a room I'm not embarrassed about anymore. It's crazy to think but 2 super bowls ago, Fuzzy and I were tearing out paneling and getting ready to put up drywall, and now it's finally almost finished.
After this I'm going to move on to the bedroom I believe. That's going to get a basic upgrade of furniture, and a paint job, I may look into replacing that window too since Sam did such a good job on the last one. I will also try to enlist his skills on fixing the terrible closet we threw together last time. It will be nice to have a completely finished floor of my house. then I can move upstairs. Oh and the front porch, and the shed. I'll never finish this house :)
During the remodel of our basement I bought:
new couch: $800
new window: $300
new drop ceiling: $300 (still to be installed)
outlets and paint: $200
plus probably $200 in trim and other related purchases... bring my spent total to $1800 so far.
But I'm not half done.. at least in my spending spree.
I'm going to get a TV to mount to the wall, luckily I'm taking advantage of Costco's generous return policy, so I'll probably only put out $600 for that. And I'm moving all my components out of the room and under the steps to hide them. This is going to require an RF remote ($450 including the ir repeater) as well as a bunch of other odds and ends. $30 piece to allow the playstation to receive ir signals, $30 usb hub so I can still play rock band (thanks drew for the idea) and hopefully that will be it. Of course I'm sure I'll be doing other things... I may end up moving the router downstairs if I can get verizon to send the internet through cat5 instead of coax, and that will be a few bucks for a cat5 cable, but oddly enough I will have more things that need to be wired to the internet in my living room than in my office.
Also on the purchase list is an HTPC. I've been toying back and forth with a bunch of possibilities. I've researched popcorn hour, the playstation, apple tv, the western digital box, mac mini and a home built computer. My requirements are the ability to stream every movie I have on my external hard drive whether it was ripped or downloaded, and access to hulu, and netflix streaming services. This leaves me to the mac mini or a home built solution because all other options are missing one or more of the features I want. I'm not spending $600 for the current gen mac mini, and they didn't update it last month, so I'll probably be exploring a hackintosh, which is something I'm really interested in trying out. This way I'll be able to built an HTPC for around the same price as a mini, only it will be a beast and not a 2 year old outdated junky computer.
All in all this looks to be ANOTHER $1800 in expenses on the downstairs, bringing my total to $3600. Hopefully I'm happier with the finished product more-so than I was the last time I re-did the basement. My roommate Sam was a huge help over the project and I couldn't have done it without him. The window in particular went from a 2/10 to a 10/10 easy. He also helped fix all the flaws in my original drywal installation and made that look like a million bucks too. Once we get the floor in behind the bar and drop ceiling finished, it's going to be a room I'm not embarrassed about anymore. It's crazy to think but 2 super bowls ago, Fuzzy and I were tearing out paneling and getting ready to put up drywall, and now it's finally almost finished.
After this I'm going to move on to the bedroom I believe. That's going to get a basic upgrade of furniture, and a paint job, I may look into replacing that window too since Sam did such a good job on the last one. I will also try to enlist his skills on fixing the terrible closet we threw together last time. It will be nice to have a completely finished floor of my house. then I can move upstairs. Oh and the front porch, and the shed. I'll never finish this house :)
Friday, January 16, 2009
Blog Post from 2005
I went to Jerry's a few days ago, and I remembered a run in I had there a few years ago. I blogged about t then on myspace, but since I don't really use myspace anymore, I decided to pull that blog over here so I never forget about it. This was written November 4 2005.
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Jerry's has quite arguably the best steak subs outside of genos in Philly. They are amazing... top that off with the hilarious commercials mocking bush, and it's the best place in the world hands down. The problem is, there isn't a Jerry's in the dena... at least, not one that I know of. It's very seldom that I'm in the vicinity of a Jerry's. The commercials while hilarious, leave my brain as quick as they enter, and I basically forget that the place even exists. Today I went to Jerry's because I heard the commercial on the way to drop off some papers in Annapolis-Junction (location of a Jerry's I used to frequent when I worked over in Annapolis-Junction). Of course the sub was delicious and terrible for me, and the bread was amazing, but this blog isn't about Jerry's. It's about Dave and Chris.
Dave is 38 and Chris is his 16-year-old son. Dave is about 5'9", skinny, long hair, and a gruff ass black beard. Chris is quiet, overweight, enjoys computers, but his heart is in shredding his guitar. He has a black jackson guitar that Dave bought him for Christmas last year, but he has been playing guitar for about 6 years now. His favorite bands are pantera and other assorted metal bands. Dave makes $17 an hour working as an apartment maintenance man in Laurel. That seems like decent cash, but also add on the fact that he gets to stay in this apartment rent free, and he gets free cable and electric, and that's the deal of the universe. Dave decided that it was too nice to work today, so him and Chris headed to Jerry's to get a pepperoni pizza, and a cheese steak. You see, outside of that salary, Dave also gets $350 a month child support from Jenny (his ex-wife). Seems that cheating whore was cheating on him since Chris told him that mommy had another man in the house when he was only 5 years old. It was probably going on much longer than that, but that was Dave’s first indication. Dave just went to the grocery store to get his father some stuff... his father had just suffered a stroke and was bed ridden. When he came home a few hours later, Chris told him what mommy did while he was gone. After leaving her, Dave kept taking her back... but after 3 strikes (like in baseball) she was out. On the third strike it was the ultimate fuck you because she was fucking 3 of Dave’s coworkers at the same time. Pretty much a Jerry Springer story in the making. Since then Dave has had a hard time opening up to girls. He checks em' out.. you know... always on the lookout... but he just can't trust them anymore. Fucking Jenny has basically ruined all women kind for him... He just goes to bars alone a lot, and hangs out waiting for a chick to approach him. At least then he'll know she is attracted to him, and he can start to trust them again. It's been three years since he finally split with Jenny and he hasn't hit any bait yet... but he's still looking.
You must be asking yourself right now. How do I know all these details? Do I know Dave from high school? No.
Have I seen Chris at a Silent Film show and he was talking to me? No.
Was Dave talking with a really close friend about all this, and I happened to overhear the conversation? Nope.
Dave confided all this to me, a complete stranger, while we waited for our food to finish preparation. This conversation was about 10minutes of him talking to me non-stop like we are old friends catching up. I was so freaking uncomfortable the entire time. I kept praying that his number would get called and he would pick up his food and leave me alone.... after he did, my food came up right afterwards. He was walking to his car, and I opted to eat in... he was looking through the window at me, gave me a wave and got in the car, and I thought... you know what, I wonder if Dave would like to sit here and keep talking to me. What else could I learn from Dave? How much of a crazy life story could he tell me if we were given an hour to talk as opposed to 10 minutes? Why is it that this was so crazy that I needed to blog about it? Was there ever a time in the world where strangers had conversation without being considered weird? This man gave me his address. Not that I can remember it, but he told me exactly where he lives (behind the pep-boys, make a left... I don't really remember). He asked where I lived... he heard Pasadena was a nice town, wanted to know if it was more country or built up. I didn't give him any details or anything about where I lived, but he was genuinely interested. He asked what line of work I was in... if I enjoyed my job. If I was dating anyone... wanted to make sure she treated me right. How lucky I was to go to work every day without my name on my shirt.
When Dave walked away, he shook my hand and said "You know what Chad, I hope to see you around man... it's a small world. Me and Chris eat here a lot, take care." Dave is probably a child molester, but dammit he just seemed like a really nice dude that really needed someone to talk to. Who else is he going to talk to? His son has heard it all before... he has no woman... his coworkers have all banged on his ex-wife...
---------------------------
Jerry's has quite arguably the best steak subs outside of genos in Philly. They are amazing... top that off with the hilarious commercials mocking bush, and it's the best place in the world hands down. The problem is, there isn't a Jerry's in the dena... at least, not one that I know of. It's very seldom that I'm in the vicinity of a Jerry's. The commercials while hilarious, leave my brain as quick as they enter, and I basically forget that the place even exists. Today I went to Jerry's because I heard the commercial on the way to drop off some papers in Annapolis-Junction (location of a Jerry's I used to frequent when I worked over in Annapolis-Junction). Of course the sub was delicious and terrible for me, and the bread was amazing, but this blog isn't about Jerry's. It's about Dave and Chris.
Dave is 38 and Chris is his 16-year-old son. Dave is about 5'9", skinny, long hair, and a gruff ass black beard. Chris is quiet, overweight, enjoys computers, but his heart is in shredding his guitar. He has a black jackson guitar that Dave bought him for Christmas last year, but he has been playing guitar for about 6 years now. His favorite bands are pantera and other assorted metal bands. Dave makes $17 an hour working as an apartment maintenance man in Laurel. That seems like decent cash, but also add on the fact that he gets to stay in this apartment rent free, and he gets free cable and electric, and that's the deal of the universe. Dave decided that it was too nice to work today, so him and Chris headed to Jerry's to get a pepperoni pizza, and a cheese steak. You see, outside of that salary, Dave also gets $350 a month child support from Jenny (his ex-wife). Seems that cheating whore was cheating on him since Chris told him that mommy had another man in the house when he was only 5 years old. It was probably going on much longer than that, but that was Dave’s first indication. Dave just went to the grocery store to get his father some stuff... his father had just suffered a stroke and was bed ridden. When he came home a few hours later, Chris told him what mommy did while he was gone. After leaving her, Dave kept taking her back... but after 3 strikes (like in baseball) she was out. On the third strike it was the ultimate fuck you because she was fucking 3 of Dave’s coworkers at the same time. Pretty much a Jerry Springer story in the making. Since then Dave has had a hard time opening up to girls. He checks em' out.. you know... always on the lookout... but he just can't trust them anymore. Fucking Jenny has basically ruined all women kind for him... He just goes to bars alone a lot, and hangs out waiting for a chick to approach him. At least then he'll know she is attracted to him, and he can start to trust them again. It's been three years since he finally split with Jenny and he hasn't hit any bait yet... but he's still looking.
You must be asking yourself right now. How do I know all these details? Do I know Dave from high school? No.
Have I seen Chris at a Silent Film show and he was talking to me? No.
Was Dave talking with a really close friend about all this, and I happened to overhear the conversation? Nope.
Dave confided all this to me, a complete stranger, while we waited for our food to finish preparation. This conversation was about 10minutes of him talking to me non-stop like we are old friends catching up. I was so freaking uncomfortable the entire time. I kept praying that his number would get called and he would pick up his food and leave me alone.... after he did, my food came up right afterwards. He was walking to his car, and I opted to eat in... he was looking through the window at me, gave me a wave and got in the car, and I thought... you know what, I wonder if Dave would like to sit here and keep talking to me. What else could I learn from Dave? How much of a crazy life story could he tell me if we were given an hour to talk as opposed to 10 minutes? Why is it that this was so crazy that I needed to blog about it? Was there ever a time in the world where strangers had conversation without being considered weird? This man gave me his address. Not that I can remember it, but he told me exactly where he lives (behind the pep-boys, make a left... I don't really remember). He asked where I lived... he heard Pasadena was a nice town, wanted to know if it was more country or built up. I didn't give him any details or anything about where I lived, but he was genuinely interested. He asked what line of work I was in... if I enjoyed my job. If I was dating anyone... wanted to make sure she treated me right. How lucky I was to go to work every day without my name on my shirt.
When Dave walked away, he shook my hand and said "You know what Chad, I hope to see you around man... it's a small world. Me and Chris eat here a lot, take care." Dave is probably a child molester, but dammit he just seemed like a really nice dude that really needed someone to talk to. Who else is he going to talk to? His son has heard it all before... he has no woman... his coworkers have all banged on his ex-wife...
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The MobileMe Web Client Couldn't be Worse
I've been using MobileMe now since the iPhone came out, so I guess that would set me at around July? I had .mac before that, and the webmail tool was awful. You had to log back in after 5 minutes of inactivity. I like keeping my webmail open in a tab at all times while at work and .mac never let me do this. I paid for the service because of the IMAP feature which wasn't available via google at the time.
MobileMe came along and has a much nicer looking interface, and doesn't have the same problem that .mac had, where I can keep it open all day. But it's the worst product I've ever used. I used to have frequent times where I would be composing an e-mail and then when I hit send, the message window would refresh to show the mail client, and the mail client window would display an error message and the email is lost forever. This was especially aggravating when writing a long important email.
This problem seems to have been fixed. Now the error is displayed in the message window, and the message is still there. but it still can't be sent, or saved to drafts. You need to copy it out of the client into notepad for example, go back to the browser and refresh the mail client which sometimes comes back, other times gives you an error, and then re copy the text back into the message window, and cross your fingers this time that it sends. While I'm able to at least work around this now, which is better than the initial problems, it's still awful implementation. gMail will auto-save emails as you type them, so this is NEVER a problem with that client, however, and more importantly, I shouldn't receive errors when sending mail frequently enough that it warrants a blog post.
On top of all this, it's slow. Painfully slow. Whenever I click the tab that mail resides in, I have to wait for it to refresh (unacceptable). clicking a new mail message often times forces the entire tab to refresh again. For all this touting that Apple has been doing for this Sproutcore framework, I can't say that I'm impressed. Considering the money Apple has to throw around, and considering I'm paying for the product, I expect things to work a bit better than all the free alternatives.
I can honestly say, my problem is ONLY with the web client. Mail.app on the mac works as advertised, though it's a bit slower than my phone at getting new emails. I love the application on my phone. I also love the push-ness of it, in that whether I'm at work, home, or out, I can see how many unread emails I have and everything. The wireless contact and calendar sync is also nice. That to me is what justifies the price. If they could just fix the awful web mail tool this product would be amazing. I can't be the only person who can't stand this web tool. I'm unable to bring my phone into work, so for 8 hours a day, this is the only way I'm able to get to my email.
MobileMe came along and has a much nicer looking interface, and doesn't have the same problem that .mac had, where I can keep it open all day. But it's the worst product I've ever used. I used to have frequent times where I would be composing an e-mail and then when I hit send, the message window would refresh to show the mail client, and the mail client window would display an error message and the email is lost forever. This was especially aggravating when writing a long important email.
This problem seems to have been fixed. Now the error is displayed in the message window, and the message is still there. but it still can't be sent, or saved to drafts. You need to copy it out of the client into notepad for example, go back to the browser and refresh the mail client which sometimes comes back, other times gives you an error, and then re copy the text back into the message window, and cross your fingers this time that it sends. While I'm able to at least work around this now, which is better than the initial problems, it's still awful implementation. gMail will auto-save emails as you type them, so this is NEVER a problem with that client, however, and more importantly, I shouldn't receive errors when sending mail frequently enough that it warrants a blog post.
On top of all this, it's slow. Painfully slow. Whenever I click the tab that mail resides in, I have to wait for it to refresh (unacceptable). clicking a new mail message often times forces the entire tab to refresh again. For all this touting that Apple has been doing for this Sproutcore framework, I can't say that I'm impressed. Considering the money Apple has to throw around, and considering I'm paying for the product, I expect things to work a bit better than all the free alternatives.
I can honestly say, my problem is ONLY with the web client. Mail.app on the mac works as advertised, though it's a bit slower than my phone at getting new emails. I love the application on my phone. I also love the push-ness of it, in that whether I'm at work, home, or out, I can see how many unread emails I have and everything. The wireless contact and calendar sync is also nice. That to me is what justifies the price. If they could just fix the awful web mail tool this product would be amazing. I can't be the only person who can't stand this web tool. I'm unable to bring my phone into work, so for 8 hours a day, this is the only way I'm able to get to my email.
Monday, January 12, 2009
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