Month: April 2008

2 Weeks Notice

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It has been only 14 months since I started, but today I gave my two weeks notice at my current job. In many ways it was a hard decision, but in many others it was an easy one. You may or may not have noticed I have not talked about work on this blog for some time. Part of that was due to my schedule, and another reason was my employer frowned upon it. But I also didn’t have anything interesting to write about. For that reason and a few others I decided to take a new opportunity that came up. The last company I left 14 months ago I was simply burnt out and frustrated. This move is less emotional.

If I had to boil down the reasons why I decided to look to leave I would say it was because this position never transformed into the job that I signed on for in the first place. For that I am disappointed. I like the majority of the people I work with. I think the direction the department is trying to go in is a good one, but I am simply bored and not doing what I enjoy. When you wake up and don’t want to goto work, it isn’t a good sign. I will probably talk more about this decision in the coming weeks, but I wanted to write something today. I will also try to write about some of my experiences that I went through once I am gone. I also hope to be able to discuss more of what I am going to be doing at this new organization, but I can’t be sure.

I am really excited about my new position. It is a smaller organization but the opportunity is huge for me, so I can’t wait to get into the thick of it!

The Harmony

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I am like most people (or at least people that I know). I have allot of remote controls needed to watch TV. At last count I had 6. I have wanted a universal remote for years, but for almost as long as I can remember there have been universal remotes that just haven’t done what they were supposed to do. I remember my teenage years at home and my dad had at least 3 “universal” remotes sitting along with the remotes for the TV, VCR, & Cable. None of them did everything they were supposed to. I have also had the same problem, so for years I gave up.

I had almost lost hope in technology solving this problem that it had created, until I read the reviews of the Harmony 1. I had read and heard great things about the Harmony remotes, but they were expensive and seemed difficult to teach the remote how to do stuff. Because of that I avoided them. Then I read about the Harmony 1, and I was impressed. Now granted it did seem that other of the more recent Harmony remotes by Logitech did the same thing, but 1 was the latest model that was in my price range. After reading CNET’s review and talking to a friend or two I went and shelled out the $250 for the remote. Yes you heard me right, it was $250 plus tax for a remote control. Let me tell you it is worth every penny!

I have what you would call a slightly more complicated entertainment system setup than most. I was skeptical that it could be programed easily enough for all the stuff I have. I can safely say now more than a week later that this remote works as advertised. It took me about 30-45 minutes to program in all my devices, and activities but after that it worked on the very first attempt to use my setup. My entertainment setup is complicated because I have a TV, Tivo HD, stereo receiver, DVD player, Apple TV, Xbox 360, and a HDMI switcher (KVM) to cycle between everything. That means the Harmony needs to know to switch the KVM to one channel, the receiver to another channel, use the receiver to change volume, use the Tivo to change channels and know all the special Tivo buttons just for me to watch some TV. It also needs to know what to do when i want to switch to the Apple TV to watch TV and listen to music, but like i said on the very first attempt the remote knew what to do. I was amazed. The only remote the Harmony needed a little extra assistance understanding was my Tivo remote. Everything else it knew how it functioned right away. The online database of devices was very thorough. It even knew my HDMI switcher model. I was impressed and still am. I am waiting for the day I come home from work and the Harmony just gives me a run down of what I missed on the TV that day!

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Blog Theme Change

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My previous theme on this blog has been around in some for or another for a few years. I have wanted to change it for some time but frankly I hadn’t found a better one to switch to. I had used a stock theme from Typepad for a while but the column for the blog content was too small even on a large monitor. Because of that I kept going back to my old custom blue theme. It at least had a flexible column setup so if you read the site on a larger window the columns would resize to fit accordingly. Well I finally found a new theme that I wanted to give a try. It isn’t as flexible as what i had but it doesn’t suck as much as the other ones i have tried. It also looks nice! It was this or try the radicle option of doing my blog over in WordPress on my regular hosted site account (that is still something i am pondering).

I Can’t Sleep Again

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I have been having trouble sleeping for weeks. I have a few ideas why, but I won’t go into them here just now. A by product of my lack of sleep is a noticeable increase in the number of migraines I am getting or rather the number of times recently that I have needed to take my migraine medication. I even left early from work one day this last week, and worked from home another because I wasn’t up to my normal 100%. I am hopped up on meds right now because I woke up not feeling so hot today. Normally on a weekend day I would just suffer through the head ache because I don’t like to medicate when I don’t absolutely have to, but you can only take so many migraines before you break down and just take something. Sleeping helps, but if you can’t even do that you have to take something. Thankfully the stuff I took is working and I have been fine since about 1PM. Today is wasted but at least I feel semi normal.

I am afraid that the Johnnie Walker Blue I had last night might have been the trigger for this mornings issues. It is the second time that I have woken up with a head ache after drinking some, but i have had other scotch’s and bourbon’s before without any problems so I can’t see how it is a problem, but I don’t believe in coincidences.

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Passover Weekend

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This weekend was the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Now I never claim to be a religious person but on a holiday like this I do get together with my family and do the whole family holiday thing. If anything, it is nice to get together with my family.

On Saturday I went with my parents to my mom’s friend Martha’s house for the first night of Passover. It was a nice night. Thankfully I wasn’t the only person my age there. I was the only guy, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Overall it was a nice evening. Carrie and the kids were in Jamaica, or shall I say coming back from Jamaica so we didn’t see them on Saturday. What is so weird about going to my mom’s friend Martha’s is that my mom actually met her through me. Martha was actually one of my High School history teachers. I actually did well in her class, and ended up doing service work for her in I think the attendance dept. Turned out that she went to the same beach club my family went to, so my mom and dad would meet up with her and her husband every so often. After I was out of school I guess the began hanging out more, and last spring my mom went to europe with her. Martha is a knowledgeable traveler. Well I just find it a funny side story, so i decided to throw it in here.

Sunday the entire family went to my sisters father in law’s apartment in Manhattan. That meant that besides Zachary & Morgan there where 3 other little ones. Lauren and andrew were there with the twins (Ethan & Tyler) and Evan. There was lots of yelling and running around, but they are all so cute! It wasn’t a restful night but it was fun getting together with everyone.

My Presentation

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We had our annual division town hall meeting last Friday. It is where the entire division gets together to talk about what we did and where we are going. It is kind of boring, but very informative at the same time. On Monday I ended up volunteering to present my departments slides for the presentation. The other manager who did the slides ended up scheduling a day off on the day of the presentation and they needed someone at the last minute, so I volunteered. I know why would I volunteer? I don’t know. I figured the other manager in my department isn’t a native english speaker, and if I didn’t volunteer he would get stuck with it or my boss would have to do it. I figured not a big deal i’ll do it. Sorry dad, I know you always said never volunteer for anything unless there is more money in it for me! I am a disappointment!

As it turns out the preparation for the presentation (an hour plus long meeting) was worse than the actual presentation. I did my slides perfectly or so I think. I only started fumbling on my words when I tried to ad lib my summary. Oh well. It was a long afternoon but at least I got out of work at 4PM and headed over to the House of Brews to celebrate John’s birthday.

Personal Wiki

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Years ago Gus showed me a personal wiki software package. I think it was active words. I am not even sure if you would call that a wiki, but it was a personal organization program. At the time I wasn’t interested. Recently however I have wanted to have a place where I can put important or repetitive personal information in. I had been keeping notepad items on my smart phone for years, but when I last looked I had like 50+ notes. It was too much to manage in that system. After some searching my favorite productivity sites (Lifehacker, 43 Folders, etc.) I stumbled across VoodooPad for the Mac. I actually remember reading about it a while back but never used it. This week however I downloaded the free version and I already moved all my notepad items into it. I am about ready to buy the paid version to get the extra features. I like its functionality, and also the ability to export everything to XML, TXT, or HTML. With that option if I ever feel like leaving the program I am not locked into some proprietary format. I like that.

More opinions as I use the software.

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Deduplicate Photos

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My entire childhood memories are stuck on 35mm slides and tons of photos stacked in baskets at my parents house. The storage of the photos has caused allot of damage to the photos. It has also caused everything to be disorganized. I have tried to get my dad to scan as many slides and photos into the computer as possible. I have also taken as many photos as I could and scanned them. I figure i have the ability to do it, so why pay someone to do it. The issue is it is time consuming and not a perfect system. I have had a problem with duplicate photos in my photo archive for some time. It has been really annoying, but I haven’t put any effort into fixing it. This morning after cleaning up my apartment I decided to figure out how to solve my issue. 5 minutes of google searching later I found Duplicate Annihilator for iPhoto.

One dry run with their shareware version of the software got me hooked to buy the full software that will scan my entire iPhoto library. For $7.95 it was worth it! My only issue is that I keep the original photos and my iPhoto archive. I don’t trust a program that won’t let me get easy access to my original data. My paranoia paid off a few months ago when my iPhoto library got corrupted and i needed to restore an old one and then re-import the more recent files i created. Once I am done de-duplicating my images I now need to export what I have from iPhoto to replace the stand alone files.

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Too Much Drink

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Last night I went out to celebrate my friend John’s birthday. It was John, Jayson and a bunch of John’s friends. We went to the House of Brews. It was fun, but I didn’t realize I drank as much as I did, or the desert I had for dinner hurt me. Either way I had a horrible night. I felt sick all night and barely slept. I ended up lying around my apartment the entire day trying to recover. So I learned that no I shouldn’t have chocolate peanut butter cake for dinner, and I shouldn’t drink that much! I knew the later part, but I never learn!