Jeff’s Thoughts

As of late I’ve been consumed by work, but in the few moments of down time I’ve found two relatively new addictions on the internet…

lifehacker.com

Basically this blog posts articles about how to intergrate technology into your everyday life to make yourself more productive.  Among the coolest things I’ve found on this site is a link to mint.com. Security concerns aside, I took the plunge and it is freakin’ cool. I’ve come to not use any technology if it doesn’t do something for me that I wouldn’t want to do myself, and in this case its balance my check book and give me a clear picture of my finances across all my accounts and credit cards.

and

consumerist.com

This site has turned me into a customer service fiend. I came to the realization, i would estimate at over 2 years ago, that if you ever have an issue that requires a call to a customer service rep, be it for a cell phone bill, or other account issue you must have had some bad karma coming to you. A call to a comcast service rep is a pain in the ass I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This site documents egregiously bad customer service incidents as well as puts an ever brightening spot light on corporate Americas “screw the consumer” attitudes.

Powered by ScribeFire.

And I’m as pleased as ever.

A little over a month ago I installed Ubuntu Linux ’s Edgy Eft on my production workstation. I use this machine pretty much all day everyday. I’m a network admin/help desk/server admin IT guy and this machine needs to perform or I can’t do my job.
After a few obstacles, I wouldnt even call them obstacles so much as normal desktop set up routines, I had PDF’s displaying fine, printers printing,e-mails mailing, and file shares sharing. My box integrated into our windows network like a duck to water. The terminal services client let me interface with my servers just like the client in XP and with a little “apt magic” I had wine set up and it was quite content to run the windows ultra-vnc client we use to manage all our remote desktops when a user calls in with an issue.
After feeling very confident that I could do all that I could do in XP in my shiny new OS with a whirling 3D desktop, although some may argue sucks productivity actually aids in keeping me alert during monotonous trouble shooting calls from the field, I had to reset a domain password. I had to reboot to windows. First time in about 2 weeks.
I figured I’d do a little googling for linux active directory tools, then I kept digging and seeing if I could find LDAP tools that would work. No such luck. I was tied to “active directory users & computers”. So I set up 1 of the spare PC’s we have laying around and just leave ADUC running on it and it actually increased the ease of completeing tasks in AD as that admin console takes a a year and a day to open up…but thats another story.

More updates to come….perhaps a top 10 useful apps to know once you switch over.

2/1/07

I took the plunge. I upgraded to Vista. Well I made my first feeble attempt at it anyway. I downloaded the upgrade from Circuit City, backed up my data, and kicked off an “in-place” upgrade. It failed royally. The percentage bar reached 95%, my computer rebooted and I was greeted with a lovely BSOD.
My primal technolust and burning desire to have the latest and greatest came back and bit me in the ass per its usual style…meaning I now needed to reinstall my entire OS and tweak it to my desires. A good 3-4 hour process, maybe less if I’ve done it a couple times in the recent past. I do this exact task multiple times a week at work or on virtual machines, but this was my rig. My digital life boat in cyber-space. I was now hours away from listening to my iTunes music library, and a good 10 CD’s worth of game installs and patching on top of that from indulging in my digital heroin that is World Of Warcraft. I was less than pleased.
I am an admitted technology addict. Despite being burned by my upgrade attempt, I was uplifted by the fact that it was easy enough to click a few buttons and return my $260.00 Vista download. (Yes, I paid that much for a downloaded file.) My “genuine” install CD’s of Vista are in the hands of UPS now and my next attempt at the jump to Vista is fast approaching..

2/8/07

I’m back up and running my OEM copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. For 4 days now I’ve been getting acquainted with my new operating system and there are some perks and as with any major change in OS some growing pains.
For the first day and a half my hard disk was making thrashing noises as if in constant use. This worried me a little so I did a little googling and come to find out Vista is indexing all of my 750GB of HD’s. The iTunes library always campe up big in my books because I could type in any part of a song or artist and boom my library would trim down instantly to what I was looking for, I type “rock” it shows me my rock music or any song with the word “rock” in it, very intuitive. I now have that same type of functionality with my entire hard drive and document library. I tweaked the indexing feature to only index certain folders and the thrashing came to a finish quite fast. I have a good 4 years of IM logs and eerily I can type in almost any persons name or screen name and be staring at every conversation I’ve had with that person on AIM over the past 4 years. Nifty feature.
The eye candy. One of the features touted in many a Vista article is the “Aero Glass” interface. I do admit it is very pretty to look at, but I do think its not all that original. I mean look at beryl…and that is free. As far as responsiveness on the whole its about on par with XP. This will obviously change if you turn off aero-glass or vary dependent on system hardware.
The widgets or gizmos, aka wastes of screen space are very functional, some more useful than others. The clock, CPU, Memory, and HD widgets seem to fit just right in on my 24″ widescreen LCD, but on a smaller screen may just prove to be to much clutter. As of now the “live gallery” has pretty slim pickins as far as selection for additional downloads go, but as with most new OS releases time will remedy this issue.
Driver support. From reading on boards and other sites is peoples most frequent gripe. All my hardware picked up and worked, and if it didn’t have a driver Vista was kind enough to go out and download the ones I needed. For those of you wondering if your system will work with vista, if its less than 1 to 1.5 years old the answer is most likely yes. Anything older than that bought from the consumer market I would say would not provide the best experience with Vista.
I’m going to continue to use the OS for a few more weeks and provide some more impressions as I become more familiar with the environment.2/15/07

• WoW, iTunes (at least for me), BitTorrent, more specifically uTorrent, work without a hitch for me. The 3 major things I use my computer for all work flawlessly. DRM’ed tracks from iTunes play, DivX and Xvid files play in media player fine, and dead-aim works for instant messaging. Things seem sluggish at times but nothing to the point of effecting usability.

• Interface - nice, usable, nothing to ground breaking. Not so much an upgrade as a change of scenery. A welcome one, but still following the Microsoft formula of finding a good idea, stealing it, and then selling it to make a buck.

• UAC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80sWifG40B0 - the secret service agent in this ad…thats UAC. User Access Control. And it is FREAKING ANNOYING. For any enthusiast user or person that likes to change the desktop to meet their working style it is a major pain in the ass. Don’t believe me? Try changing around your start menu in Vista. It is most certainly a welcome security feature for Mom and Dad using the computer, but for anybody that likes to change things around I recommend turning it off while you get yourself settled and have everything how you like it and then go ahead and turn it back on.

Overall Impressions so far:

I’m on the edge, an early adopter, where I like to be and despite all the annoyances and growing pains I’ve experienced along the way with my jump to Vista I have not been discouraged enough to say “screw it” and go back to using Windows XP. Time, I can only hope, will help to remedy some of my gripes, but for those with the capable hardware and the burning desire to upgrade to the latest and greatest take the plunge…enjoy the OS as it matures. For the feint of heart and those averse to a little change enjoy the rest of XP’s still long and useful life span.

    For the feint of heart or technologically less-inclined you can get a host such as dreamhost that has one-click installs to get you up and blogging with literally the push of a button. I’m contemplating moving on over there as the features seem unbeatable and the host is run and owned entirely by its employees which seem to have been making an honest effort to improve there service quality and avoid, well as much as possible, overselling space on there servers.

On a seperate note these blogs are good reads….

http://www.steve-olson.com — no idea how I came across this one but he has some very original ideas, a few of which but not all appeal to me.

http://www.blogmaverick.com — .Com billionaire Marc Cuban’s blog. His topic are wide ranging but he always seems to be one step ahead of the main stream of just about any business topic, be it marketing, advertising, sales, or technology. This ability to be ahead of the competition is likely what made him the majority of his fortune.

So I decided to take a few of my hard(ly) earned dollars and invest them in the stock market.

To start out on this endeavor I picked up a book by these fools and did a little reading.

oh and read this…its pretty spot on.

New Work Station w/ Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2GB of ram

Score. First time I’ve had a cooler PC @ work than my rig at home.

And for those not in the know check out these links. Good Reading.

• The DailyWTF
• [H]Consumer

    Firefox has always shined in my mind as the browser of choice for people that know how to use the internet. Its fast, at least faster, than internet explorer and has features that everyone should have out of the gate when browsing the web, like  a pop-up blocker, a spell checker inside all forms, and for the love of god — tabs. But the main selling point for me now has become extensibility. I can bend the browser to meet my needs. Any of my needs. If I want to control my iTunes playlist from inside firefox I can find an extension to scratch just that itch. Weather updates in your status bar? Done. Score updates scrolled along the bottom line? Done.
    At first I was hesitant to embrace extensions as I never found any truly useful ones. Then I stumbled upon the few listed in this article and the list is now ever growing.
    Other alternative browsers to the dreaded blue “e” exist. In fact very good ones, such as Opera. Opera provides similar functionality as extensions through the use of  “widgets”, but I’ll save Opera and my praise and gripes about it for another article.

Here’s the low down on my essential Firefox plugins. These are the plugins that got me hooked and hopefully after using a few of them you will be too.

1)Google synchronize *made by Google

2)Customize Google *not made by Google

3)Mouse Gestures

4)Performancing

At the  mozilla add-ons page you can find oodles of more plugins as well as the documents to get you started on creating your own plug-ins.

Spread Firefox.

Pandora.com

iTunes is great about dividing up its streaming radio stations by genre. If you want to listen to Punk or Pop you can usually find a station that plays it. However what if you love Bob Marley, but want to hear him and other artists that sound similar? Or maybe Pink Floyd. Pandora fills this need in spades.

When you go to the site its as simple as typing in an artist you like, and I was hard pressed for it to miss any of the names I tried.

Next is when the magic happens. The music genome project, is a research project put together by Tim Westergren a Stanford Grad, that has set out to catalog music in a unique fashion. Screeners that “[have] a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance, [and have] passed through a selective screening process” rate each musical composition using some 400 individual characteristics . The project has been cataloging tracks since 2000, each taking 20 to 30 minutes each. In effect the project has created musical DNA. Using this classification system and an algorithm Pandora is able to create a “Radio Station” for you that will not only play tracks by the artist you typed in, but also tracks sharing the same DNA, so to speak. From personal use and talking to others the stations have an uncanny ability to introduce users to new music that appeals to their preferences.

The exact size or number of tracks included in the catalog I was unable to discern, but from using it for about 3 months now I can say it contains everything from the mainstream to the eclectic. It may not contain the rogue recording of that local bar singer down the street, but if you are interested in discovering more about a genre I’ve found typing in one of the big names, for example I was interested in blues and typed in B.B. King and as new artists that I appreciated popped up in the rotation I added them to the station, in effect creating a station of blues music composed of only artists and tracks that have musical qualities that appealed to me. All I can say is its freaking awesome. I went on to create stations of all my favorite jam bands, relaxing music, and angry music. I tend to vary my musical tastes on mood, and Pandora seems almost tailored to that style.

So this weekend Bigg’s came up for the weekend to cover the election for his Broadcast Journalism class at Columbia. Basically he was technologically inept and couldn’t get past recording sound clips to mini-disc.

• I drove him to Bridgeport.
• He forgot the microphone cable making it a worthless 3 hours in the car.

Wasted trip aside he was able to make it to an event in Hartford to hear Lieberman talk. Basically he wouldn’t have gotten any sound bites of the senator if I hadn’t have helped him with the technical aspects of producing a short radio spot

• I downloaded the clips to his laptop.
• I converted them to wave files.
• Showed him how to open them in audacity.
• Instructed him on how to upload files using FTP.

Take into account that he’s going to COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and he can’t figure out a couple of pretty basic computer programs for importing and editing audio and it really boggles the mind as to how he got into such a good school . He’s a Ron Burgundy in training. Good job bud, I hope you are lucky enough to get a very talented producer/engineer if you ever make it to be a reporter.

Last Tuesday Final Fantasy XII was released. I’ve gotten in about 2 hours of game play so far and I am more than impressed. My, and I imagine, others allegiance to the series stems from the fact that no other series can create such characters or universes that are so compelling as to make a gamer willing to invest dozens upon dozens of hours into a game.

I quit WoW cold turkey so I anticipate using this game as a sort of MMORPG patch. And as a plus this game has an ending that I can tell from the little bit of the battle system and gameplay elements I’ve experienced will prove to be very rewarding.

Unlike previous final fantasies where story elements revolved around coming of age events in a teenagers life this installment seems to be more political in nature. The fate of a kingdom with multitudes of people seem to be at stake versus coming to terms with teenage angst that a lot of the others contained heavy themes of throughout the game.