I'm amazing

at the scene of the crime

2009-06-23T05:42:00.000-07:00

Well Well Well

2009-05-07T07:27:00.001-07:00

exactly how I am at John Mayer shows

2009-05-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

JK Harris

2009-04-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Washington Nationals Jersey

2009-04-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

Someone made a small typo

Baby Roller Blades

2009-04-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

Susan Boyle Is Ugly and Sings Well. Who Cares?

2009-04-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

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)

Business Card

2009-04-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

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

Another Blog about John Mayer

2009-04-16T14:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Texican Whopper

2009-04-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Dell Adamo - Should be featured in the next mac commercial

2009-04-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Hackintosh Weekend - Issues I've had

2009-04-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

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.

mysql-xampp on a mac

2009-04-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

Favorite April Fools Day Online Thing

2009-04-01T17:01:00.001-07:00

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.

Stuff Like This Never Happens To Me

2009-03-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Audi A5

2009-03-27T06:37:00.001-07:00

So I want an Audi A5 really bad, and I found this audi color chart online and thought it was pretty funny

Digital TV conversion

2009-03-03T16:58:00.001-08:00

Overheard in programming class

2009-03-03T16:51:00.000-08:00

"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?"

School Stories

2009-02-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

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:

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.

garbage fail kids

2009-02-24T09:42:00.001-08:00

computer drama

2009-02-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Expensive Purchases

2009-02-03T12:33:00.001-08:00

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 :)

Blog Post from 2005

2009-01-16T06:06:00.000-08:00

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.

---------------------------

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...

The MobileMe Web Client Couldn't be Worse

2009-01-13T07:52:00.001-08:00

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.

I want wendy's every day

2009-01-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

Champs

2008-12-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

AFC East Champs

Windows Mobile on an iPhone

2008-10-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

I didn't really post this because I'm interested in it... although it is pretty cool. I posted this because of the ridiculous last question the woman asks the poor kid.

dinner tonight

2008-09-20T15:51:00.001-07:00

Side Work

2008-09-19T14:05:00.000-07:00

With everything going on with the possibility of being unemployed soon, I spent a lot of time updating my resume and looking at sites I've built. I remembered recently another site that I designed about a year ago, and passed on to another colleague to ad the content, and searched and found it. I'm glad to see they are still using my design, and I'll have to add it to my portfolio.

http://www.laacademy.org/

Now I just need to push the Maryland Recycle people and the Columbia Tech Partners people and I'll have quite a little portfolio to show off while I hope phocus designs takes off.

How to draw anything in one step

2008-08-23T07:28:00.001-07:00

http://a.viary.com/bizblog/posts/how-to-draw-anything-in-1-step

silent film shows!

2008-08-22T15:18:00.001-07:00

Bike Ride

2008-08-20T17:37:00.000-07:00

So I bought a bike today from costco. Everyone online seems to think that it's a piece of junk cause I got it from a store that isn't a bike specialist, but I'm just starting to get into riding, and I have enough expensive hobbies, so $250 will have to do.

I took the front tire off which was super easy, took it to the gas station on the way home and filled up the tires, got it home and sat in my driveway for about 15 minutes trying to get the tire BACK on (that's the hard part) I then ate some food and went for a 1.5 hour bike ride. It's impossible for me re-do my route online to see how many miles I went, but I know it had to be close to 20 since the average guy cycles about 15 mph, so that's pretty exciting. my legs hurt, and so does my stomach, so I'm going to pass out and probably not make it to work on time tomorrow, but it felt great to get out and ride around.

EDIT: I mapped it out and from everything I can remember, which probably isn't everything I got about 18 miles.

unboxing video

2008-08-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'm normally not one to post or really get into the unboxing thing. It's cool and exciting when you get something new I suppose, but not exciting enough to video the entire process.

anyway, this video is pretty amazing, so I figured I would show this off. I've never seen packaging like this before, and it's obvious Samsung is really trying to compete with the iPhone.

video game FAIL

2008-08-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

Mobile Me Idea

2008-08-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe this has been passed around and I didn't know it, but I got a great idea today. While at work, my phone has to stay in my car. I miss calls, and text messages all day, and then check them all once I get out to my car.

Wouldn't it be nice if mobile me was able to sync sms and the call log as well as everything else? it would be great to be able to manage sms messages, send them form my computer, see any missed calls, get my visual voicemail, etc.

I'm sure this is in the works or should be if it isn't.

too soon?

2008-08-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

First Anti Smear Campaign, and now a Zunephone

2008-07-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

it's got the megabytes!

Vista Anti-Smear Campaign

2008-07-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

This made me LOL:

So apparently, thinking Vista is a piece of shit is the same as thinking the Earth is flat... sounds reasonable.

John Mayer - Merriweather

2008-07-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

I think it's obvious that I have what you might call a man crush on John Mayer. I recently got his live bluray dvd which I actually had to turn off half way through because he embarrasses me as a guitarist. He's super talented, funny, and rich... pretty much 3 things I want o be eventually, and I only have the funny part in the bag.

So Jess surprised me with tickets to the show, although she kinda put on fora little too long that she got them for me, she's not 100% at surprises.

So anyway, we went to dinner at chevy's, and the rain started coming, and I was a little worried that she got lawn seats. I would sit through the rain no problem, but I knew she would be miserable, and I didn't want her to have to be miserable at a concert, but luckily she got pavilion seats so it was pretty nice to be dry through all that. I came up with a money idea also while there. I think they need to come up with a social networking ticketmaster. When you buy your tickets they ask you a series of questions, how old are you, how many drinks to you plan on drinking during this show, are you a dancer at shows, are you overweight, etc. Your answers to the questions will allow someone buying tickets to be able to see who is sitting around them and make an informed decision before getting their tickets. Who wants to sit in row b if they will be surrounded by 22 year olds who like getting their drink on and dancing like idiots around them... the answer is other 22 year olds who like to get their drink on. If you are 26 and hate all that shit, they should have a section for you with older people who just want to enjoy the music. I have to work on a few parts of this, but I think it's genius.

Anyway, the show was amazing. Other than our annoying seat neighbors. John proves to me again that he is amazing. I think his best guitar song was Mercy. His solo was out of control. I was surprised during the show to see him use a gibson and a PRS throughout the show, as opposed to Fender only which is how he usually plays.

Vultures
Waiting on the World to Change
I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Bigger Than My Body
Crossroads
Mercy
No Such Thing into Why Georgia
Free Falling
Belief
Say

ENCORE
Who Did You Think I Was
Panama
Gravity

I think the highlight for me was the cover of panama by van halen. His black rhythm guitarist sang during I don't trust myself, and I was like, man that guy can sing... He should just do his own thing. So during the encore, John came out alone and did who did you think I was.. when the song was over, he was talking about how he never gets the opportunity to just take his shirt off and play guitar and have someone else hold the show down, so the black guy came out and sang for him while they covered panama. It was amazing. I was surrounded by people that had no idea what the song was, but it was great.

Another highlight was a girl had a sign that said "John, I'm legal in 2 years" and John said "Well, I'm a pervert now".

He also introduced his band like a 1920's radio announcer.

I know I read that he was thinking of doing a standup thing, and I think he could do it.

Anyway, you can check out an awful pic I took with my new iphone on my mobileme gallery. This link will take you there... As I take more pictures with the phone, they will be uploaded there right after the pic is taken so you can check that out for real time updates when I'm doing something cool.. I'll write a review of the phone soon, as well as a review on the John mayer signature strat I just bought. Happy early birthday to me!

Apple's Mobile Me - Awful Logo Decent Product

2008-06-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've been a member of Apple's overpriced suite of tools dotMac for almost a year now. I knew it was overpriced when I first got my iMac about 18months ago, and turned down the discounted rate after my month free trail. Back then it was 1gig of space shared for web pages, and e-mail.

About a year ago they updated the product. The promise of IMAP e-mail, and the addition of the web gallery which is seamlessly tied to iPhoto was what helped me make the jump. the syncing of my contacts was also a benefit, and having a place to put things to be easily accessible of the web helped as well. They also bumped the storage from 1gig to 10gigs.

Shortly after my purchase, I noticed a few things. Number one, the web gallery couldn't be slower. I liked the interface, I liked the idea of people being able to add to the gallery, but the speed was terrible. I've noticed a similar issue with picassa though, so it's not only mac struggling to keep speedy galleries. Number two, Gmail began offering IMAP email for free. Plus the dotMac email system is ridiculous. It looks like yahoo mail looked in 1998, and it automatically logs you out after 10 minutes, which sucks for people like me who are used to keeping their gmail open all day. I also found dropbox (which I will blog about soon) which is a money alternative to dotMac's iDisk. I can store 2gigs for free of files that are shared to any computer I want them to, and also all changes I make to the files are synched as well, in case I need to go back to an old file. I have the ability to easily share files, and they have a much faster smoother (yet with less features) web gallery option.

With all these shortcomings, it was easy for me to decide to drop dotMac when I needed to renew in August.

Of course, that all changed, as usual with Apple, when they announced that they were dropping dotMac for MobileMe. The logo is awful, it reminds me of Windows ME, and we all now how well that Operating System ran. But the demo showed serious promise, a much nicer looking email, new servers could mean speedier galleries. But the killer for me was the ease of syncing between my iphone (which I'll buy) and my computer. Over the Air syncing of contacts, calendar, and e-mail is a great feature, and well worth the 100 bucks.

Currently My web contact list still lists Dave (our new drummers) phone number as his old phone number that he changed 4 months ago because I haven't synced the contacts from my phone to my computer to the web yet. This would happen automatically with mobileme. Another example is last year while we were playing a lot of shows, my cell calendar often was different than my at home calendar making it difficult to book shows while on the go in case i booked something that didn't sync back to my phone, this is another thing that won't happen with mobileme.

They are transitioning to the new system in mid July, which will give me about a month of free use before I decide if it's worth keeping, or if I should just still drop it. I'm sure I'll post about it once I get to use it.

wussha drank?

2008-06-05T10:23:00.001-07:00

when did this become an acceptable way of asking what you would like to drink while at a drive through. And it's not like I can complain, because it happens at EVERY drivethru (except Chic Fil A). Checkers, Wendys, McDonalds, BK, Hardees, if they have a drivethru and some sort of combo option, I can guarantee you've been asked "wassha drank?"

surprisingly enough, they guy who made this is richer than me

2008-06-03T20:53:00.003-07:00

why can't I ever think of anything like this?

Makes me hungry

2008-05-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

John Mayer Writes a Song

2008-05-08T14:04:00.001-07:00

Now that Silent Film is back to rocking, and we need to start making music again, I look to John Mayer for inspiration.

Silent Film is Whole Again

2008-05-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Back in January Rob, Brad and I decided it was time to start rocking again and we started advertising for drummers and singers. We fell upon little Dave Kliensmith (not jewish, don't let the name fool you) and he started beating the skins, but we still needed a singer. After dozens of tryouts and a few almosts, we think we finally found our guy. Tim used to sing in Aisle of View and he is going to be rocking out with us. We are going to be practicing the old stuff to catch him up and work on the new stuff we already have written, plus a few ditty's he's written and then put it all together in one big mix of rock and start playing live. I can't wait and neither can you.

Saves the Day in Philly

2008-05-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

I've seen Saves the Day live about a dozen times.. Probably more. I've seen them open a hardcore show and get booed for not being hardcore enough. They are always at the top of my list for favorite bands. I've seen em acoustic 3 times. I've seen sets consisting of a majority of new shit (usually after each CD release) and I've seen them do sets of classics, usually their acoustic shows, and the time I saw them after their B-sides release. I've seen em with like 4 drummers, 3 bassists, just Chris, let's just say, I've been through the gamut of possible Saves the Day shows. If I were to have to pinpoint my favorite show it would be tough. I really liked them at Recher with Thursday after Stay What You Are came out. Chris was still only singing and not playing guitar, the setlist was all Through Being Cool and the new CD which I really liked, and overall it was just a good show. I really didn't like them at Recher with the Deerhunter. That would probably be the worst show I saw of them. Mostly In Riverie tracks, nothing really old, and just boring.

Last night all of them have been trumped. I don't think it would be possible for them to have played a better set. The last few times I've seen them, they have been big on taking a few requests during the set, which is great, because most Saves the Day fans, like me, prefer the older stuff. There are a few quality tracks on each of their newest CD's but there are also some really really bad songs (she on In Riverie as well as Monkey, and a few off of Under the Boards could be better as well). Last night they changed it up by playing all requests. Every song was a request... All THIRTY THREE of them. 33. That's 2 hours of rock. I found the setlist on Absolute Punk:

1.) Shoulder To The Wheel
2.) Always 10 Feet Tall
3.) The Last Lie i Told
4.) Jukebox Breakdown
5.) Sell My Old Clothes
6.) You Vandal
7.) Ups and Downs
8.) A Drag in d Flat
9.) Handsome Boy
10.) Tomorrow Too Late
11.) This Is Not An Exit
( brief pause for shots of tequila courtesy of Set Your Goals )
12.) In Reverie
13.) Kaliediscope
14.) As Your Ghost Takes Flight
15.) Wednesday The Third
16.) At Your Funeral
17.) Holly Hox, Forget Me Nots
18.) I'm Sorry I'm Leaving
19.) Hold
( Second Tequila Shot )
20.) The Choke
21.) My Sweet Fracture
22.) Sometimes New Jersey
23.) Where Are You ? (Chris's favorite)
24.) What Went Wrong
25.) Bye Bye Baby
26.) See You
27.) Bones
28.) Stay
29.) Woe
( Third Tequila Shot )
30.) Take Our Cars Now
31.) Deciding
32.) Nightingale
33.) Rocks Tonic Magic Juice

That's 5 off of CSD
6 off TBC
6 off SWYA
3 B-Sides
3 Acoustic CD
5 IR
1 STA
4 UTB

That is out of control. At one point Chris said, we have a 120 song catalog, and we only know 70 of em, so we might not know it. We don't know Banned from the back porch or Jodie (two I would have liked to hear) I also would have liked firefly and through being cool. But I think I'll deal. It almost felt like a going away show, the drinking, they played everything by request... it was weird. People were doing everything to hear their requests. Throwing paper on stage, typing what they wanted on their cellphone and giving it to chris, making hand motions, and just screaming. People were tearing paper off the walls to write their requests on signs and holding em up... it must have been a great experience for Saves the Day as well. I did actually like the requests for newer stuff too... You could tell Chris likes playing the newer stuff even if the audience doesn't like it as much. The only songs I didn't like of the evening were Woe and Stay off of UTB, I don't really care for either of them, and they did them back to back.

I also realize why Rob loves Manny. That dude is a beast on the bass, but not only that, he is so chill when he does it. Everything is effortless, and he's just bobbing up and down, chilling, with a toothpick in his mouth. And damn, him and the new drummer learning 70 songs is also impressive.

Holy shit. I almost didn't go to this show. I feel I'm getting a little old for shows. I'm 25, I'm usually about 10 years senior to a majority of the crowd, and I don't like being cramped up front, and I can't hear as well in the back. Meghann talked me into heading up with promises of beer and cheese steaks(this will be another blog) and I'm really glad she did.

New Bathroom

2008-04-14T04:50:00.000-07:00

We are in the process of updating the downstairs bathroom. New tile, new fixtures, and having a shower put in to up the value of the house. While looking for he stuff at lowes, we decided we would also update the upstairs bathroom as well. While we are waiting for the contractor to get started downstairs, I figured I would post a few pictures of the upstairs update. I'm pretty proud because I did all of it myself.

I removed the old sink, vanity, mirror cabinet, and lighting fixture. I put the new vanity together, rebuilt the drain which was made of steel before, and is now using much easier to deal with PVC. I hung two shelves over the toilet, a new towel rack, and a tp holder. I did all the electrical work on the lighting fixture and it worked on the first try without me electrocuting myself. Everything is level, nothing leaks, I even installed a new shower head. Big props to Jess for doing all the painting while I assembled all this stuff, but we were able to knock it out together in 2 Sundays. The first sunday was paint and sink, and then this sunday I put up the new medicine cabinet, and hung the new light.

All in all it cost about $400 for everything and the difference is huge. Here is a link to my mac gallery to see the pics. While there, also stop by and see all the pretty pictures form when I was snowboarding in Utah.

Rendering a site in IE on a Mac

2008-04-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Every since I switched to mac, there have been a few unavoidable problems. I had to install Windows XP when I first got it because of two main reasons. There was no Universal Binary for the Adobe and Macromedia suite of products so I needed to boot into windows whenever I did web work. The other reason had to do with synching my windows mobile phone. The only software available to synch my phone was the missing sync which was buggy and lacked pretty much any decent support, and it was like $40. Once the Adobe suite was released in Universal Binary and I found a freeware sync application that works wonders (syncmate), I was able to cut ties from Windows for good.

One thing I seemed to have forgotten about though, until recently is the ability to check the rendering of a website in IE. As anyone who codes websites knows, IE is the devil. They ignore all standards, and just do their own thing. I did some searching for people who maybe could write a plugin for firefox or something to make the page behave like it was rendered by IE so I can debug. Unfortunately most developers see this as a step backwards... why would we cater to IE.. IE needs the fixing, so make them fix their product, not cater to it.

I was able to find this nifty online application (netrenderer). Basically put a site in the box, and what version of IE you are trying to use. They offer IE7, IE6, IE5, and even the new IE8 beta. It returns only a screenshot of a maximized 1024x768 window, so if what you are trying to check is far down on your page, you won't be able to see it, but obviously there are workarounds for that.

Overall, it's free. I don't have to instal XP on my mac, and I don't have to leave a windows computer laying around just for this anymore. It has it's shortcomings, but it's helpful to look back at only one version ago in IE when they didn't render transparent png files...

It also gives me hope that at first glance, IE8 seems to have fixed their box model.

I wish I knew why everyone in the web community used:

Margin - Border - Padding - Object

but IE felt it necessary to use:

Border - Margin - Padding - Object

Amazing

2008-04-12T20:49:00.000-07:00

I Wish This Was My Dad

2008-04-09T20:20:00.001-07:00

T-Mobile's Parent Company is Retarded

2008-04-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

So apparently T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom believes that they can send threatening letters to people who use magenta on their website because it is a copywritten color. They sent basically a cease and desist letter to engadget mobile because of their use of magenta in their logo.

A bunch of phone blogs out there have been changing their color schemes to now include this shade of magenta, but since I'm not going to spend the time doing all that, I figured I'd fight the good fight, and post this image which I took from Ryan Block's personal blog.

Who's the King of Pop Now?

2008-03-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

2 hour layovers and jet lag

2008-03-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

So we arrive in Denver CO last night at 7pm their time, 9pm Baltimore time under the impression we were about to have a 2 hour layover. "Don't worry about it though" Jess said, "they have this money mall inside the airport that's really cool to occupy us." We get off the plane, and head to the big departure screen to find out our plane is delayed and won't be taking off until 11pm their time, 1am Baltimore time. ugh. I'm already exhausted. We've been in airports since 2pm, and I just want to go to bed. Plus our destination is still an hour away from the airport. And the mall Jess talked up, was a tie store and food court.

We did however get to watch Gone Baby Gone, which was pretty decent. All in all, I got to bed at 5am Baltimore time, and I am pretty miserable. The Utah mountains however are really nice, so thats a plus. I'm off to hop in the hower, we are getting breakfast, and then diving n hour back to the airport t pick up our rental car. The rental car place was closed by the time we got there because of the layover.

Dreamweaver security flaw? helpful to me

2008-03-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting ready to embark on a trip to Utah to visit Jess's family, and on the way there I figured I would do some side work to keep me busy on the ~6 hour flight. I installed dreamweaver, and photoshop on her macbook, and started setting up the site for the site I'm going to be working on. Then I got to the FTP password field. W.T.F. I haven't had to update this bad boy since I started working on the site over a year ago, and there is a zero percent chance that I'm going to remember this password. I have to change my password at work every time I drop duke, and with every other password I have, I cant be expected to remember client passwords too. In a panic, I first hit up my email. no dice. Although I did find the SQL server password which will come in handy when I'm doing DB work, but I probably won't be doing much of that on the trip.

I go upstairs to my iMac and hit up the site there, and of course it's a password field so I can't view it. I try copying and pasting, and that doesn't work. I start cruising the inter-tubes, and nothing there. I have no idea at this point what to do... I could pull the files over my network that are already on my mac, and then ftp them when I get home, but I was planning on doing some testing while gone, and my computer doesn't have coldfusion, and I'm not about to set up jess's laptop to be it's own server, just for this short trip. As a last ditch effort, I highlight the password on my iMac, and drag the highlighted text to another form field, and it magically appears. I dunno if this is SUPPOSED to happen, but it worked, and I was able to connect to the server.

This exited me enough to post. If this interests you, drop me a comment and see if this works in other password fields, or if it's just a problem with dreamweaver. I'm currently setting up my phone as a modem, because I hear they only have dial-up in Utah still. At least that's what my old co-worker Wilson led me to believe.

Flock -Your New Favorite Browser?

2008-02-24T18:00:00.000-08:00

At least that's how they advertise it. It was enough to grab my attention. So far it's not too bad. It's got a lot of things built in, letting me check email, blog, check feeds, pretty much everything internet is built in to it. Sounds like a swiss army knife of browsers.

I've always been a fan of Firefox. From when I had a windows xp computer, and since I do web work, IE has always been a joke, so I've always preferred Firefox. It really takes a toll on memory usage though, but it's the price to pay. When I moved to the Mac world, I tried using safari for a while, but I never really liked the experience so I stuck with the memory hog Firefox, I also had a short stint with Camino which seemed to marry a lot of what I liked about Firefox without the memory issues, but I ended up going back to Firefox. With Leopard and the release of Safari 3, I've been really happy with it, and I've been using Safari pretty much exclusively.

My school's online courses don't really work well with Safari, so whenever I'm doing school work, I have to switch to Firefox, and I've been using Firefox beta 3, and I really have been liking that, and I actually would say it's about 50/50 with Firefox and Safari.

I grabbed this new one from an ad, and so far it's just okay. I like the idea and direction it's going. It shows the digg feed so I can see what's going on with digg without going to digg. If I had a facebook, which I don't, I would be able to see when people commented me and updated their profiles. When I get new e-mail the browser tells me. With all this stuff going on, it's kinda hard for me to concentrate on just surfing the web. The interface is really busy with a bunch of small buttons that I'm not sure what they do. I'm sure its a work in progress and I'll keep an eye on it, but hey, it got me to post a blog, so it has that going for it.

iPod Touch January Update - No Thanks

2008-02-11T19:56:00.000-08:00

So a few weeks ago Apple put out those nifty iPhone apps for the touch which I already had on my jailbroken touch for a few weeks, so I thought it was lame for anyone to drop the 20 bucks on them. Who is going to use their iPod to check their stocks? But I did like the rearranging of the desktop. So I upgraded to the new software, 1.1.3, however skipped the 20 dollar upgrade. Well you don't get the customizable desktop without shelling out the 20 duckets either, so I found someone who already made them available for the jailbroken community, so I went ahead and jailbroke my 1.1.3 touch, and added that software. Everything was fine.

A few days ago, I was rocking out to the touch in my car, and Saves the Day, Under the Boards came on, which I legitimately purchased form the iTunes music store. It didn't play. I didn't hear anything. So I went hunting through my library to find some other stuff that I got legit, and those songs didn't play either.

I went online, and looked around, and figured there was probably some checkbox I had to check or something to get those songs to work. When I plugged my touch in to update it I got the same ol' ad again trying to get me to purchase the space agreed January upgrade, and I politely declined again. This time I was taken to another screen, AGAIN asking me to buy the upgrade. When I clicked the okay button at the bottom (the only button available), I was shot right to the iTunes music store, to purchase their upgrade. I don't want it. okay! leave me alone.

So I get to thinking. Maybe this is cause my touch is jailbroken. Maybe they figured me out. So, I looked around and found out that the only way to un-jailbreak my phone is to hook it into itunes and restore the iPod. Well, I CAN'T DO THAT. Becuase when I hook my iPod up, I'm forced into an endless loop of "Buy the January Update" and I'm never able to get to that nifty "iPod Management Screen" that lets you pick the photos to upload to your iPod and everything. So I went to the delete all information from your ipod option on the ipod to get rid of everything, hoping that maybe that will suffice. Nope. Still trying to sell me the January update.

I went downstairs and hooked it up at this point to my girlfriends macbook which seemed to fix the issue, at least, I was able to restore the iPod. I brought it back upstairs, and I'm getting the same thing.

She didn't upgrade to the new version of leopard that was released today, and she still has the last version of iTunes. I'm guessing that one of those are the culprit for this bug, but now I'm without an iPod until they fix the situation. This is worse than microsoft. Damn.

Superbowl = Lame

2008-01-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Out of the 4 possibilities of a Superbowl, the one that ended up happening has to be the least interesting.

Giants-Chargers: See which QB is better after the whole draft deal from a few years ago.
Packers-Patriots: Potentially the best QB of all time (Farve) against potentially the best QB of all time(Brady)
Packers - Chargers: Actually I guess this one isn't very interesting either. But I hate the Patriots.

I guess I just hate the Patriots. I hate their surly coach. I hate Junior Seau. I hate Wes Welker. As a Dolphin fan, i hate that 80% of the fins ended up on the Patriots and they thrive. I think a lot of that has to do with crappy coaching that the fins have had over the last few years, and I hope that Parcells changes that, although it seems like he is running the organization like Bush runs the country. He's getting all his buddies jobs, and that usually means trouble. But I liked the Saban hiring, I liked the Cameron hiring. And I was way off on them, so maybe I'm wrong about Parcells too.

I kind of went on a tangent there I suppose... but yeah. The Superbowl is lame to me this year. I think it's obvious who is going to win. They just played a few months ago. I'll be rooting against the Pats which I've been doing all season, and that hasn't worked very well, but who knows.

I'm tired of hearing people complain about the Mac Book Air

2008-01-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

Just a little background as we get started here on the macbook air. Let's go back a year ago when the iPhone was announced. Bloggers everywhere began attacking it's shortcomings. While I didn't have a blog at that time, I expressed my displeasure for it as well.

It had quite a few shortcomings. The glaring one to me was it's lack of 3g. Considering I already had a phone with 3g, and cingular was offering phones for free with 3g, I didn't understand why apple would skip that little antenna. The claimed it was for battery life, but with a full size touch screen, I assumed you would be charging it every night anyway. After benchmarks came out, I noticed that this omission wasn't really that bad of a decision. Considering two iPhones next to each other, one using wifi, and the other using edge were able to view pages in the same amount of time. Turns out the bottleneck isn't with the data network, but with the slow cellphone processor. The only way you would really see a change in speed is if you were tethering the phone, which we all know is a no-no according to AT&T.

Other complaints were the fact it was tied to AT&T. (A must for GSM phones that don't want to be on T-Mobile) a lot of people don't understand how phone networks work, and would like to think that a phone made to work on Verizon would work anywhere else in the world outside of America.
No replaceable battery but not a surprise as it's the Apple way.
No Physical keyboard was another huge complaint. By myself as well, as my last 3 cellphones have had full keyboards (Treo 650, Samsung Blackjack, HTC Mogul)
Cost. People bought a RAZR for $50, why would they pay 8 times that for an iPhone?

What I am getting at is apparently, everyone was wrong. Everyone except Apple. The iPhone is still selling ridiculously and everyone wants one. I bought a touch, and the interface really is terrific. I've jailbroken it, allowing me to install the maps, mail, weather applications that Apple now wants me to pay $20 for. (No Thanks) And for what it's worth, it's a great little device.

The same kind of people are now out, and again (it seems worse this time) are complaining about the new product released by Apple, the MacBook Air. The complaints seem eerily similar. Complaints about no replaceable battery, cost, the omission of different wireless networks. Apparently people wanted Apple to put a 3G antenna in it, which would of course give them another thing to complain about as the laptop would be tied to Cingular, and you would have to pay Cingular's ridiculously high data fees to use it. One thing I will agree with, is Apple seems to think that every city is like San Fransisco with WiFi all over the place, and that simply isn't the case. I always struggle to find a connection to WiFi in Baltimore, but I think it makes more sense than including extra hardware that would thicken the laptop that many people wouldn't use because they would have to pay monthly for it. A solution to this problem is bluetooth tethering to a cellphone if your cellphone company allows you to. (Sprint does) Allowing me access to the web from anywhere, just by hitting a button on my cellphone. Plus Sprint is fast. Much faster than Cingular.

It seems as with the iPhone, people are skipping the positives and constantly pointing out the things Apple, "shoulda" inculded. Insisting that an optical drive is a necessity, considering that I used my optical drive on my laptop frequently when it was my only computer, but don't think I have opened it since I got a desktop. I do not think Apple is marketing this as a desktop replacement. If this is your first Apple computer, or only computer, I'm sure you would be more compelled to get the cheaper macbook, or for a desktop replacement, the macbook pro. Either of those computers would be much better suited for someone like that. If you are a graphic artist and you want to do animations on the go, it's not the computer for you, but you probably wouldn't be looking for a portable solution in the first place.

I say portable and not ultra-portable because I don't believe this is an ultra portable. However I've used ultra-portables, and they are not for me. The screen is just too small to see anything, and if I actually wanted to write a paper on it, I would go blind. Plus most ultra-portables run Windows, which out of the box doesn't have a solution for multiple desktops, which in my mind is a necessity when working on such a small screen.

I've heard people complain about a bunch of other problems with it, but I haven't heard many people praise what Apple has done, which surprises me. People will complain about everything.

I go over most of the complaints I hear, and then ask you a question before you continue to bash the product.

You can't remove the battery. It has a 5 hour battery life with WiFi on. How many times have you changed out your laptop battery since you got it. Actually removed the battery and put another one in it's place? My answer? Zero. I've never done this. According to Apple's site, if the battery goes dead when the warranty is up, it will cost $129 for the battery and be installed in a matter of minutes free of charge.
No Optical drive. If this isn't your only computer what do you use the optical drive for? Installing applications, Apple has you covered with the remote disc application. Get music on your laptop, pull your music over the network from your desktop. Watch movies? rip movies to your desktop and handbrake them and get them that way. (I am in no way recommending renting a movie from i-tunes and paying a ridiuclous price for something that shouldn't cost half that price. The only way I can see this as a benefit is if you are in a hotel and you wanna see a movie, becuas eI know how much hotels charge to rent a movie over their TV system)
Only 1 USB port. What are you dragging around with you that you need more than one? thumb-drive or external hard drive? that's one port. mouse? get a bluetooth mouse or unplug it when you need to use the hard drive. It's not like these things are running windows 98 and you have to reboot when you unplug the mouse. Plus if you are using this for the portability, you shouldn't be lugging around a bunch of peripherals anyway. That's not the point of this.
No Firewire. If you plan on editing movie clips on your MacBook Air, shoot yourself.
Same footprint as the macbook, I want smaller in footprint not in weight/thickness. Then get the macbook. footprint wise, if you go smaller you get a smaller screen size, making it more difficult to work, in my opinion.
Too expensive. Compare it to the Sony which has worse graphics, smaller screen, and a slower processor for more expensive. While I agree that 3k for a laptopis ridiculous, a quick search on newegg shows how much solid state drives cost. I'll probably get the ipod hard drive anyway because of that.
Not enough hard drive. Again, this baffles me. People say it's too expensive, and then want a larger solid state drive. I think one of my main gripes is that I want a SMALLER solid state drive. it would make costs lower, and again, this isn't my only computer, I'm using it to take notes in class and code some coldfusion pages. I have a networked hard drive to store files I'm not using. I would have loved a 32GB drive.

What I'm getting at is, the people who bashed the iPhone (and I was one of them) were way off base. The iPhone has been ridiculously successful and there is no reason to think that the MacBook Air won't be either. I'll let you know either way, because I plan on buying one after I'm able to use one in person to make sure it's sturdy enough. Because all this is null and void if it falls apart if I fart with it in my lap.