Month: August 2009

Mac OS 10.6

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Today I received my copy of Mac OS 10.6 (I refuse to call any Mac OS by their animal names). Last night I backed up my Media Center iMac using Carbon Copy Cloner so i could have a full copy of my old configuration in the even the install causes problems. I like to wipe my computer before installing any OS. Previously I was never happy with the left over bits of the old OS when upgrading any Windows OS. I know I have read that the Mac OS upgrade is seamless but I am still not 100% convinced. I have used the migration wizard to move my apps and configurations from one mac to another when upgrading but that was between like OS’s (10.4 to 10.4). I do selectively copy the configuration files and “Application Support” files in the Library, but generally I start from scratch. That unfortunately requires a bit of effort.

Since I read that several programs that I rely on are not fully compatible with 10.6 I decided to try out the new OS on my media center machine before trying my main computer. The last time a new Apple OS came out I backed up my macbook using CCC and just booted back to the old OS when I needed applications that wouldn’t work with 10.5. This was a pain, but the price I paid for upgrading the day the software came out. This time around I think more of the programs I use are supported but there are a few key ones that are keeping me from taking the plunge on my main computer.

The install on my media center went well. I have what I believe to be all of the apps I use on it setup. The only glaring exception is the screen saver I like Fliqlo does not seem to work. Other than that everything else seems OK. I wanted to try the iMac I use for a media center first since it doesn’t have anywhere near as many applications on it than my main machine. So far that was a good decision. I am in the process of copying back a few remaining media files but I think the new OS install was a success.

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Let the updateathon begin. Mac OS 10.5 to 10.6. I refuse to refer to them by Apple’s silly names!

Racist Puppets

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Well I told everyone I was going to see racist puppets in Manhattan and for some reason everyone knew I was going to see Avenue Q on broadway. I even told my mom I was going to see a show (she is the broadway show expert on my family and knows I almost never go) and when I told her what I was going to see she said that it was right up my alley, and I would enjoy it. Well with her I left out the racist puppet bit, but she has seen it and knows it was a funny show.

The friend I went with had seen it, but it was good enough to warrant a second time years later. Overall I thought it was a great show. I am not a show person, or a musical fan but this was worth the trip. I think I am off to Amazon to see if I can pick up the sound track because who doesn’t want to listen to hits like the internet is for porn or everyone is a little bit racist! Seriously, I am not kidding. I am going to find this sound track.

Before the show I had lunch at Juniors. It was the first place I have ever been that prepared a Grilled cheese sandwich open. Rather odd, but easily resolved.

Grabbed a drink and hung out afterward. Then it was off to home for dinner and laundry. Now I am writting a bit and off to bed. Thankfully I took tomorrow off so tonight feels more like Saturday night than Sunday night.

The Physical & Digital House Cleaning

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Over the past month or so I have been cleaning up my apartment and tossing out old stuff I don’t want or need anymore. It is part of what I call my digital summer cleaning. I have taken old school and medical records I got from my dad that he kept when I was a kid and scanned them into PDF files. I am amazed at how many report cards I found. I scanned a ton of old letters I kept (for some reason that I cannot recall other than I am a pack rat) from friends over the past 15 years. Many of the letters I received I had written on the computer so I actually have a complete back and forth correspondence. it is kind of cool reading some of them. Once everything was scanned into the computer I shredded the old paper documents to save space. My wall unit has so much more room now!

On top of that I cleaned up a lot of the files I had on my computer. When trying to open some old letters I sent back in the mid 90’s I realized that the latest version of Word (2008 on the Mac or 2007 on Windows) wont open old Office formats. I had read about that in the past but never ran into the issue much. It was a real pain. That got me onto another kick I have had, move all my old documents to modern (ISO standards when possible) file formats. I already have several PFS Professional Write files from early middle and HS from my Commodore 64 that I still have but cannot open. I didn’t want to be screwed with other files. To solve that problem I built a Windows XP Virtual Machine (well used a copy of one I setup with SYSPREP) and installed an old Copy of Office 2000 on it. I then opened up as many old file format items I could find and printed them as PDF’s. For the past few years that has been my format of choice for archiving stuff. For things I want to be able to read/write in the future I have been saving stuff in the new Office XML format. I am not a fan of it, but I still don’t really use Open Office that much.

Additional things I have been doing is taking old CD’s & DVD’s I have used to make periodic backups of my data and ripping them back into my computer as ISO files. I am putting them all on one hard drive. Drives are cheap. I have been buying Western Digital My Passport portable 320gb drives for like $80. Over time the DVD’s start to rot. About 5 years ago I had already consolidated my old CD archives onto two DVD’s. Now I am putting all the DVD ISO’s onto one drive. I will still make DVD backups but I want a copy on a hard drive for safe keeping. Since I am so paranoid about data retention I also am continuing my habit of copying most of my data (well the important stuff) onto a hard drive at the end of each year. I am not sure if i am going to recycle the drive i use each year. So far I have, but since drives are getting cheap I might just start accumulating old archives on drives.

All of this clean up and organization would not have been possible without my Fujitsu Scansnap 300M scanner for my Mac, Adobe Acrobat 9 for Mac, Cute PDF writter for Windows, VMware Fusion, my brother P-Touch label maker, and my paper shredder (with cross-weave). Save and secure digital storage brought to me by my Drobo Firewire 800!

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Friday Off

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I took today and Monday off. I needed to relax and burn some days off after a hectic month. I tried to avoid work but I had to make 2 calls in the afternoon. I also will admit i checked email a few times durring the day. It was hard not to since I know a lot was going on. It took every bit of self control I had to not reply to most of the messages. I am on vacation so I needed to act like it a little.

I slept in, but got woken up by a caller ID unknown person at around 11. That was not fun, but it wasn’t too early so I can’t really complain.

I meet up with Danny by Union Square for dinner and drinks. I called it a night early. I am thankful for that since I started drinking early. I wasn’t too bad, but lets just say I didn’t follow my self imposed 2 drink maximum that I almost never follow! Overall it was a nice relaxing day.

Digital Conversion Batch 3

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With the money I made selling off my old gear on eBay I more than was able to pay for my next round of digital conversions. I had about 1,000 photo’s and 35mm slides I got from my parents I wanted to scan. I also had a VHS tape my dad wanted on DVD, and my sisters wedding.

Once I send this batch out (hopefully over the weekend) and get the final product back I can goto my parents place and go through their remaining photos and see what else needs scanning. I think I have the bulk or at least over half of their photos already scanned.  Now all I need is for my mom to help me sort and date allot of this stuff.

I am still a fan of Home Movie Depot. They have been great. I just hope I don’t jinx myself as I am sending in another batch of stuff to be converted! Yes I am superstitious like that.

My Love / Hate Relationship With eBay

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This summer I have been keeping busy cleaning up my apartment and getting rid of or digitizing stuff. Part of that project has been to sell off stuff on eBay. I go through cycles of selling stuff and buying stuff. I am trying to offload stuff that I don’t need, is in good condition, and actually still has resale value.

In the past few weeks I have sold an old iPod Classic 160gb that I haven’t really used since I got an iPhone last year. I finally decided to part with it when I realized that it still has decent resale value. I sold my iPhone 3G when I realized it too could be sold even with all of AT&T & Apple’s limitations on it. I was amazed at how much one could go for. It didn’t pay for the new 3GS I bought at non-new contract price. It did come pretty dam close though. I also finally sold my old Airport extreme base station I had, and an old IP phone I had. I have a few more phones to clean up and sell, plus I am pondering a sale of my netbook since I like the size but the screen makes it hard for me to use it much. I am looking at some slightly larger screened stuff. There is a dell with an 11.6″ screen and some 12″ models are coming down in price. I am not ready to buy yet, since I think I want to wait till Windows 7 comes pre-installed but I am looking.

eBay and Paypal was nice and easy to use. I have used ebay for years, but the shipping of stuff was always a pain. I had previously bought some labels for shipping. After I realized that the USPS will pick up packages and my door man will hold stuff to be picked up my life of selling stuff got a lot easier. I can setup shipping and print out labels right from Paypal. That makes the system great. What really sucks about eBay and Paypal are their rules and all the fee’s. I had an auction that I wasn’t happy with the buyer so I refunded the money and canceled the auction. eBay only refunded me the final value fee. I still had to pay the insertion fee. Granted it was the cheaper fee, but the auction was made null. Why should I have to pay for buyers stupidity? What really got me was when I refunded the payment via Paypal I was charged a fee for returning the money. I could swear that in the past I was able to refund money without any fee’s. Now I have to pay money to return money? Come on. If there was competition I would say fine fee away, but Paypal is owned by eBay. What other payment system works with it like Paypal does? The answer is none. I won’t get started on the inability of sellers to leave negative feedback anymore. That is just stupid.

In the end my only real options on selling stuff is ebay or Craigslist. Both are good for some things, and not so good for others. I haven’t tried Amazon marketplace after they wouldn’t let me sell a mobile phone without a contract, but I should give it a try in the future.

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The Vegetative Weekend

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After 12 days of work, and several late nights I got this weekend off. One of the project’s I was on has a deadline today and we had lots to do. Thankfully I am now about to catch up on sleep for now. There was a few really late nights plus the weekend work. The funny thing is even with all the work I put in over the past two weeks it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I have lived through. I am not trying to jinx myself or anything. I just noticed even with lots to do the management is aware of the toll it takes on people and tries to alleviate the pain when possible. I like that. For reasons I have gone into many times I don’t go into details of my work on this site, but one of the reasons I love my current job is in a lot of ways how people are treated. It isn’t perfect, but it is a far cry from where I was for years at Partsearch for example.

With work over late Friday I took the opportunity to relax and do not much of anything this weekend. Friday night I meet up with Mike, Luke, Stanley and others for a few drinks. Saturday consisted of sleeping late, TV watching, and some apartment cleaning. Today consisted of sleeping late (a theme for the weekend) more TV watching, work on this site, writing, and general lounging around.

Now the weekend is gone all to fast. I am back to work tomorrow, even if it is working from home. I am thinking of taking Friday off to burn off some vacation time. I will see towards the end of the week if that will be possible. Right now I want to finish up some writing and then I am off to bed.

Ying and Yang, WordPress and Typepad

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I have been using WordPress since January and overall generally happy. Initially the ability to customize any aspect of the software was a hindrance since it required time to tinker to get things right. Then over time I got my WordPress site to be in some ways better than my Typepad one. The effort involved wasn’t trivial, but I enjoyed the tinkering. Once the site was right it has become an annoyance to deal with plugin updates, WordPress updates, etc. I know my Typepad subscription is up near the end of the year so I wanted to keep using WordPress to see if I would be comfortable enough to delete my Typepad account when the time came. I mean I hadn’t updated Typepad since January.

A few other annual subscriptions are up around now so I got thinking about what my plans are for everything. I was set to ditch Typepad all together since it would save some cash, but decided to check out their changes while looking at my current WordPress setup. My conclusion was mixed. I think overall I like both systems. They each have their advantages. The deciding factor was for some reason the performance on my hosting site I use was apparently really slow recently. Significantly so that I noticed it affecting page load times. That little thing made me realize why it is worth it to pay for an application suck as Typepad. I don’t host it, i dont’ fix it, I just use it. I like tinkering with the look and feel, but don’t want to deal with performance and stability and updates, etc. In the end I will stick with Typepad. I have used it for almost 5 years now. It just works.

That being said I spent the better part of this afternoon porting posts since January from WordPress back to Typepad. The migration process works, but is not as clean as I would have liked. Tags in WordPress show up as Categories in Typepad. That required some work. Then severing my domain hosting accounts hooks into my Powerz.org domain took some work since they controlled the DNS. After a DNS server migration my mail and blog are now safely working again. Now I have to wait for Google to rebuild my site index. Their goes my page rank’s but it isn’t the first time I have done that. Now lets see if I don’t want to change my mind again in 6 months. The reality is both systems are good, but I am happy where I am, and don’t want to mess with easy upkeep.

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