Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
Went to see 50 first dates last night with Alison. It was a really funny movie. I recommend it to all comedy movie fans. We did the low key dinner and a movie.
I did some work around the house all day Saturday. Organized some computer stuff that I have been meaning to do. Generally boring stuff during the day.
I need to clean my apartment up a bit. It is getting cluttered…
Friday I went to kingston for the day. Most of the trip was uneventful. That is good when traveling. I worked on the Group Policy Objects with Kai. I think we ironed out the kinks in what we want to do. For some reason our old profile we made would crash when we modified the security settings, but the new one I just created didn’t. Of course there is no major difference between the two. Go figure.
The trip home wasn’t that good. It took an extra hour or so to get home. Not sure why. the train was late. They said it was due to engine problems. Then we went slow and stopped allot along the way. I tried to sleep a bit on the train. I never do that so it was different for me. I used all my laptop battery power during the day and forgot to charge it. That wouldn’t be a problem if I sat on a window seat with a power outlet, but I sat on the aisle and couldn’t use it. The van wilder dvd I have been meaning to see will have to wait.
People on the train pissed me off. Like 4 people around me were either talking on their cell phones the whole time or one guy was playing a game on his phone with the stupid sounds turned on the whole time. People need to learn some etiquette.
I finally got my new Treo 600 Tuesday night. It is really cool. I installed most of my programs onto it. My first complaints are as follows: Polyphonic ring tones, can’t they make a regular phone ringer sound also? I have 20 ring tones, and they all suck. I want a normal ring. You can’t find that on the internet, but you can find anything on the top 40. What is going on? Until I find a normal ringer sound, I am going to use really annoying rings as a statement of my dissatisfaction. Hey, I suffer through everyone else’s crappy ring tones.
The second and I think last problem with the phone is the lack of a good case. Palmone doesn’t have one, and no third party company has one either. I have a $400 phone with a crappy case. Give me a belt clip or something!!!
On the plus side, I think the internet connects faster on this Treo vs my 270 using T-Mobile. The screen is much nicer. The speakerphone is great, and of course it is SMALLER than my 270.
I just bought The Missing Sync 2.0 for the Mac. It allows me to use the internet connection on my mac to sync avantgo. It also allows me to mount my SD card on my mac and move files. It is a nice piece of software.
Now I await the IMAP version of snapper mail. Other software wish lists is the distinctive ring tone software that I had on my 270. They don’t make a 600 version of it yet.
The screen protector for the Treo is on order and I have to find a docking cradle. I am buying accessories. This device is a keeper. Until something better comes along anyway!
I got an email a few hours ago saying my long awaited Treo 600 finally shipped out today. Fedex says that it will arrive tomorrow (Tuesday). Hopefully they are right. I hope I actually get good use of it. From what I saw when I had the AT&T Treo 600 for two days in november I think I will be happy. I will know tomorrow.
In recent history my website (except the lovely blog you are currently reading) has been languishing in disrepair. I think it is a nice little site, but I have done no new content or anything in a while. I have added one or two pages to the photo site, but that is it.
I am trying to think of what to do with the site. I still haven’t come up with anything. I am always trying to improve the interface on my Photo site, but other than that I have nothing. I want to get my access DB back online so I can query my DVD collection on my site. that is really only for me, but it is a cool function.
I have been pondering purchasing a new iPod. I like the one I have, but I am running low on disk space. Unfortunately I don’t use the iPod as much as I would like to, but sometimes it is a life saver on the train. I am trying to figure out if it is worth it to upgrade. I would make a few $$$ on my old one, and the new one would have a bigger hard drive.
I have over 9 GIG’s of music now. In order for me to get everything I want on my current iPod and still have drive space for other stuff I need to filter playlists in order to keep the music under 8 GIG’s.
I am starting to use the iPod as a portable hard drive. it is nice to drop stuff on it, and plug it in at work and use it. As a portable hard drive it is a bit expensive, but as a music player / personal storage, it is nice.
Instead of buying the new one, I am also looking at spending AMEX points for one. Not sure if I want to waste points on gear. A decision is forthcoming…
Now that Jayson is gone you would think I would leave my house normal time. Think again. Today I got up and ended up on the early train. It is funny because 2 years ago this early train was the normal train I got on, but now to me it is the early one.
Hung out most of the day sunday. I got Quicken to finally work on the Mac. I even figured out most of the online banking issues I was having.
Meet Alison for dinner. We ended up at Chillis. We always try to go there after the movies and never stay since the line is so long. Today we hung out for 30 minutes and got a table. It was a nice low key dinner.
I was going to see my family during the day, but my mom and sister took morgan shopping and they didn’t get back until after I left for my plans, so I missed them. Morgan is walking now. I can’t wait to see her. She is so CUTE!!!
Jayson has gone back to New Orleans. I cleaned up my place a bit Saturday. It is still a mess, but it is better than before. It wasn’t that he makes a mess, but I am not used to having others staying for a week. The air mattress in the living room was difficult enough to navigate around.
I need to find time to do my laundry now. Hopefully I will do it during the week.
Now that Jay is gone I need to figure out when I can actually go visit him and Gretchen. February is almost over and March is looking busy.
I am a long time quicken user. I have been using it since at least 1995. I have almost every version since then. I have also used Turbo Tax like 3 times. I am a huge fan. The problem I am running into is that I now have Mac’s. I used to only have a PC, so moving my quicken data from one PC to another was as simple as copying the files. Now if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I have to convert it. As simple as Intuit claims it is, it is not so simple.
Back in Oct/Nov 2002 I converted my quicken data to run on my Powerbook. Once converted it was not simple to continue using my PC files. So I just left a copy on my PC and used my Powerbook. In AuGust of 2003 I decided I wanted to have both a PC and a Mac copy of my files. I like having options. I converted everything back to PC format. It takes several hours because out of thousands of transactions at least a few don’t convert. Then you have to spend time figuring out what one didn’t. Once done converting I never did keep updating my Mac version.
Since AuGust I have been running Quicken only on my thinkpad. Now I decided I want it back on my Powerbook. Once again I have to go through the whole conversion process. This time it wasn’t as bad as before, but I still had some problems. Most related to how the two different quicken programs keep investment information. Intuit should get their act together and keep the feature set’s of both products the same. On the plus side I found an error in how I recorded some stock information. That I guess is the silver lining in my whole ordeal.
My last gripe with Quicken for the Mac is that sometimes it has problems moving the file from one machine to another. When I migrated to a new computer last year I couldn’t open my old data file. I had to export the data and create a new file and import the old data. it was a stupid waste of time. Hopefully they fixed the problem in the 2004 version that came pre-installed on my newest Mac.
Rich, Amanda and I went to Jillian’s. it is a game complex out on the island near Roosevelt Field Mall. It is cool. you can do arcade games, play pool, bowling, skeet ball and other stuff. They are on a budget, and I should be so for $20 we got an evening of fun and entertainment. We didn’t realize how late it was when we wanted to go bowling. We decided to put that off for another time.
Jillian’s is not as good as Dave n buster’s, but it is allot closer to everyone. I went to a Dave n buster’s in Chicago. it is really cool. Same concept but I think they do it better. It is just expensive.
We went to a decent Mediterranean restaurant in the source mall for dinner. I still have to get used to getting my meat on a stick!
We grabbed cheese cake from the Cheese Cake Factory for take home desert. it was awsome as always. I had the special edition godiva chocolate cheese cake. I still have half of it left. I am saving it:)