Wednesday Digest
Get ready for a long and scattered post. I'm going away for the weekend and have a lot of stuff that I've been meaning to post.
Shoes
My new job doesn't really have a dress code, which is cool because I can now build up my wardrobe with clothes other than khakis and polo shirts. The best way for me to start thinking about new clothes is from the ground up. In the past two weeks I've purchased three pairs of shoes that should get me through the fall. I present exhibits A, B and C.
Slow Ride
Now this is cool! A web designer left his job and is crossing the country from Seattle to Boston on a Segway scooter. Visit his website to look at some great pictures, watch video clips or to sign up to meet him and his crew when they're in your state. (source: Wired)
Around the web
iView Media Pro gets updated to version 2.6. Is this a little thank you gift to me for purchasing it just days ago? I think so. Details of the upgrade can be found here.
You can listen to Ebert and Roeper's review of Vincent Gallo's "Brown Bunny" here. I don't care what Roeper says, I liked it.
I brought my spare iMac into work to keep me company and stumbled across Cocktail, a really cool application that seems to do what TweakUI does for Windows. It helped me get the songs off of my iPod and into iTunes.
PHP iCalendar is another cool little application I found that let's you put your iCal calendar up on the web. I'm going to check this out in detail after I get back from my trip.
Finally, Jeremy pointed me to iPodder, a program for OS X that "automatically downloads new mp3 files when they become available from any of 5 sources (you can change these if you wish) and copies them to playlists in iTunes based on the channel name. If you have an iPod, connecting it to your computer will load the songs automatically."
Home
I'm home from Cali and had a great time. My aunt and uncle were amazing hosts and the weather was perfect. Lots of wine was consumed and each night was topped off with a half hour in their outdoor hot tub. I haven't been this well rested in months and wished it never had to end...but it does.
I have to get ready to head back to work tomorrow, so detailed stories will have to wait until later this week.
Another Boring Post
I don't want to bore anyone with all of the details about my Sacramento/San Francisco trip, but I will say two things. One: If you are down by the wharf, go to the Buena Vista and get at least one Irish Coffee. However, I recommend getting two. The guy in the b/w photo on this page served us and was really cool. Two: After your drinks, head up to the Washington Square Bar and Grill if you're in the mood for a nice dinner.
Now, back to regular programming.
I'm thinking about getting an iSight camera for my mac. I think it would be really cool to be able to talk to people and to have a live webcam up again. Does anyone recommend a particular webcam software for OS X? The best I can find so far is Evo Cam.
Before I forget to mention this, The Screen Savers is back live on G4techTV and I think it will be better than ever. Kevin Rose is still with the crew and I think that the new co-host Alex will be great, just give him time.
Finally, I watched the Dave Chappelle special on Showtime and it was perhaps the best stand-up I've seen. He's so raw and hits hard. He's our generation's Richard Pryor. There, I said it.
Booya!
Booya! Irish Girl is back from summer vacation.
The Watcher
I started playing around with iTunes Watcher and was impressed with how easy it was to set up and how well it seems to work. I've found a couple of problems so far that I'll need to try to fix, but it's nothing major and may be more Amazon Web Service related than a problem with iTunes Watcher itself. My playlist will be much more active when I'm at work, but you can check out what I'm listening to here.
Oh, before I forget, congratulations to Brian for making his 200th post at the fantastic photo.hipoxia.com.
Broken Seal
I think I just almost got poisoned. I'm a little freaked. I bought a bunch of stuff at Target this afternoon and was just now putting it all away. I opened the box that some pills came in and noticed that the lid on the bottle wasn't on all the way.
All the warning signals went off in my brain, so I looked more closely. The foil underneath the cap was peeled away! Now I'm creeped out a little so I take an even closer look. Holy shinto! There's an odd brown stain around the inner edge of the cap near where the foil was lifted.
So now the question is this: Do I return them and hope that they check their entire stock? I think I just answered my own question. I have to return them and hope that this is just some bizarre accident.
iSight
Yesterday I bought an iSight webcam. So far I really like it and have found out that a few of my friends have them. I can't wait to try some live video chatting.
I was really hoping that it would be flexible enough to point at something other than my face, but so far I haven't figured out how to do that. The included stands seem a bit limiting. I found a pretty cool product called SightFlex that I'll probably end up getting to solve this problem. Anyone have a better solution?
Take this Jabra and Shove it
It hasn't been a good week for luck with gadgets. As I mentioned yesterday, the iSight stands leave a lot to be desired and now I have another problem.
Yesterday I bought the Jabra 250 Bluetooth headset. Setup was a breeze and it works fine, as long as my phone is in my hand or pocket, which defeats the purpose of Bluetooth. If this were the only problem I'd keep it and be singing songs of praise. However, there's a much worse problem.
This headset causes my Nokia 3650 to reboot at random. Whoops.
Tomorrow I'm going back to T-Mobile to exchange it for a corded and much cheaper headset. I'm more disappointed than anything. I really wanted this to be as cool as it seems. Maybe it is, just not with my phone. That said, I did some searching around and found that a lot of people have similar problems with a host of different phones.
The 20D Lives!
I just got a call from the photo store to say that my 20D has arrived and is being held for me. I really wish that I didn't have a class tonight, but I do. I'll have to go pick it up tomorrow. Stay tuned...
20D in hand
I picked up my 20D over lunch today and it seemed like a covert operation. When I went in and asked for it, the guy went into the back room and came out with the camera concealed in a plain brown bag. Apparently they don't want people to know that they have a bunch in that are on hold for people. Anyway, I got it and am pretty happy.
It definitely feels more substantial than the Digital Rebel. That's not a knock on the Rebel, but I was always glad that I had the battery grip attached to it. Speaking of which, I'm a little surprised that the battery grip for the 20D won't be coming out for about another month. I can't wait until I can get one because I'm really used to having something more to hold on to while shooting.
One other thing that I noticed right away was how loud the shutter release is. It sounds more substantial and "real", which will make it a little harder to stay secretive about taking shots near other people.
Well, I've got to go study the manual so I can start using this thing.
Cold
I've been pretty stressed this week about how much stuff I have going on and all the little projects I can never seem to find the time for. Most of this pressure comes from school and feeling like all of my after hours creative energy is sucked up by doing or thinking about homework.
My job gives me a certain amount of satisfaction, which is a good thing. I like what I do. However, since I was young I've not felt right unless I had projects to work on just for myself and am easily freaked out when my free time is not my own.
I set this weekend aside to do nothing but homework. Depending on how it went I was either going to stick it out or drop the class that is causing me the most grief. I'd still be in one class and I think I could handle that, but doing this might push my graduation date off by a semester.
Well, the weekend is here and I got hit hard with a cold. I want to take this as a sign that I'm not meant to be in school right now, but I'm trying to hold judgment until I get this out of my system and am in a better state of mind to make a decision.
Nessus Messes
On top of studying and doing homework this weekend, I somehow got obsessed with running Nessus. I went out and bought a cheap KVM so I could hook up my Linux machine and off I went.
I'm basically a newbie when it comes to Linux, so getting Nessus to install proved to be a challenge...a big challenge. I'm running Suse 9.1 Personal, so none of the cool security applications, compilers, or other needed libraries were pre-installed. I almost broke down and bought the pro version, but I was determined to figure this out on my own, which I did. Not only did I get it running in Linux, I also got it installed under X11 on OS X. Pretty sweet.
Don't worry, I'm not going to give the step by step install instructions. Actually, I'm not sure if I could give step by step instructions at this point. I basically just stumbled around the net getting advice here and there. I thought I'd share a few of the sites that really helped out:
If I think of any other resources, I'll update this post. Stay tuned...
Quitter
Against the advice of many, but true to myself, I decided to drop the class I wrote about this weekend. It was a tough choice to make, but I needed to do it to keep my sanity and to keep work from suffering. I felt myself slipping away and was starting to get burnt out to the point where I wanted to get in my car and drive far away.
I only decided to drop the class last night and was already feeling better about everything today. I tossed and turned all night, not sure if I did the right thing. As I was falling asleep a flood of creative ideas rushed into my head and I had to get up to jot them down. It was then I knew that I made the right choice. Work even seemed better than normal today. I almost didn't want to leave because I was fleshing out an idea that I had for an interface. I loved that I didn't have to rush home to study and could wait until I was at a comfortable place with my project.
What have I learned? I'm still figuring that out, but I do know that I'm not going to try to take more than one class at a time anymore.
VW Jetta, now with Popup Blocking!
I think we can all agree that fast food drive thru experiences can be annoying, but my local Taco Bell has taken it to a whole new level and it REALLY sucks. They now have human popups!
I went through their drive thru yesterday and everything seemed to be going as planned. I placed an order, got my total and proceeded around the corner to pay.
I barely got two feet from the gigantimenu when two ladies jumped out with some sort of marketing materials. Thankfully, I already had my window rolled up, so I just gave them a polite "no thank you" through the glass.
Is this what I get for skipping over all of those Taco Bell commercials with my Tivo?
Outlook Users Anonymous
My name's Craig and I'm a recovering Outlook user. I've been clean for three days. I've tried to give up Outlook in the past. I even bought a mac and swore that I'd use its mail application. I could never make it stick. I would always go back to my pc to manage email. For some reason email doesn't feel right on a mac. I use my mac to do more creative tasks and my pc for the more mundane tasks.
On Thursday I decided to go cold turkey and install Thunderbird on my pc. To my surprise I was hooked right away. I think my Outlook days are over.
Shuffle
I'm shuffling around of the right column a little bit. Since I'm dedicating more energy to my photoblog lately, I decided to add a thumbnail of my most recent photo in place of the picture from my phone's camera. For now, my phone cam picture got bumped down "below the fold" and may find its way off of my site or in a different spot. I'm not really sure what to do with it just yet...
Okay, I've decided that it's gone for now.
Whoops!
Okay, this one needs some setup.
1. Let's say that you're using the latest version of Firefox.
2. Let's also say that it's 2004.
What do you get when visiting the website of one of the biggest video game companies in the world?
This:
It's not all bad though. They do give you the option of continuing through this splash screen without "upgrading" your browser.
Someone on their web team should become a hero and push for using standard code. Then, if they need to check for Javascript support, they could use simpler detection, like this.
SimpleViewer
My friend Brian turned me onto a great photo gallery software called SimpleViewer. It's Flash based and really easy to use.
I liked it so much that I decided to convert my gallery of scooter shots from Skooter Du 5. Let me know what you think of it. If it seems okay and works across browsers, I'll probably use it when I have a series of photos to post.
