Where I don't care what others think

Roomba, HD, HP, Hello

July 17th, 2007 Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

Wow, its been 13 days without a post. I don’t know what got into me. I’ve been busy in the past 2 weeks, I “automated” cognos to the best of my ability so generating cool looking html reports is pretty easy to do and requires 0 knowledge of javascript. During the project I learned a lot about AJAX, and I’m slightly more comfortable with it. Note how I said slightly. I might be able to take on Digital Signage soon now that I have some skillz.

Let me think, what else.. my primary job has become my secondary job, and my tertiary (third?) job is now to find Jason Bourne, who I saw in a trailer Saturday night while watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I really enjoyed it, even though I was in the up close section and I had to have my head at a 30 degree angle up to watch, no biggy. I’m rather excited for the next Harry Potter book to come out on Friday, time to emplore some speed reading skills. Actually, its out on the torrents already in case you’re looking. But I wouldn’t, I think books are worth the paper. (The new HP is like 100% recycled). My humble predictions, Dumbledore might not be dead, and Voldermort will be dead. As for Harry, I dunno.

Lets see, what else is new. Katie has 2 electric scooters that I want to fix up so we can ride them and save gas, I’ve never had an electric scooter and they look cool! (Segaway please). She also has this paper camera that we must build sometime, I like paper and am not half bad with it; I can make a pretty decent airplane. Cool stuff I can’t wait to do!

So I finally acquired a 500gb external HD, as in under 15 mins ago. I’ve been looking at it for a few months, the prices were cheep (100$ + 20$ for the case) so I moved on it, I added in a car charger for my cell phone. Its the same model as my current one, I’m hoping I can chain them with the firewire.

I also just bought a Roomba, some refurbished one off Amazon. It cost me about $50, which isn’t bad. I had to spend >100$ I’d collected in coins then turned into gift cards because it was going to expire, and I said hey.. why not spend it on a replacement for my mom! While some people say they don’t play nice on high carpet, I look forward to testing it out. Robots are cool, and household ones are something I like. I can’t wait until cars drive themselves. Why? If you think you can go fast now, just imagine a computer driving you down the highway in sync with all the other cars, no more traffic, etc. While I haven’t done any math or actual thinking, I would bet speeds >100mph wouldn’t be impossible in the ideal situation.. its a computer for petes sake!

I don’t know who my roomate is going to be next year, nor do I have my room number readily available. 4th floor, BARH. If you’re my roommate I would greatly appreciate it if you suddenly found somewhere else to live, even though I haven’t met you yet. Don’t take it personal, I’m just strange.

Ah ha, another Cpanel error, time to open a support ticket!

Goodnight moon.

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Happy Birthday America

July 4th, 2007 Posted in Life, Problems | No Comments »

Today is the 4th of July, so I say Happy Birthday to America. Right now I am not feeling like doing the math, but the US is approximately old. What does this mean? Well it means I have the day off from work, which I’m not sure I like so much. I’m not sure if the “founding fathers” would approve of taking days off to celebrate, its not like I personally did hard work to found America or anything, and my bet is that those who really did the hard work wouldn’t want to take a day off. But I don’t really have a choice I guess, day off it is.

I’m not doing very much, I might take on some programming shortly because there is nothing better to do really. Last night were the SH fireworks, I did not attend. I haven’t been in a few years actually, usually I’m at Boy Scout camp or last year I was on vacation with Katie. This year, I was in my basement. I don’t fit well into large social gatherings or anything like that. Maybe some year I’ll go, who knows.

Besides that, yesterday was a moderately bad day. My parents threatened to “ground” Kevin and I for not attending the fireworks, tho I had no clue what this “grounding” would do. I also learned a cool company is hiring in Boston, which would be good if I was out of college and stuff. And something else made it a bad day, I clearly remember having three reasons. Hrm. Well Katie wasn’t here, but thats a continual thing, nothing that would have made yesterday any worse than today or tomorrow. Mom and Dad expect Kevin and I to go to Vermont on Friday after work, yuck. I have to build a cantenna before then or something!

I’m having trouble formulating my words, but I find it hard to stand out sometimes. I continually come to realize I’m not like most people my age or in my age range, I don’t drink, party, drugs, sex, or more generally, have fun like other people do. I don’t spend my spare time “having a good time,” and I’m ok with that. For me a “good time” consists of getting a project finished, learning something new, or doing something cool.. more like an accomplishment in a more professional nature. I continually fall back on the “how to I get people to realized I’m different from everyone else” concept. I’m not asking to be treated “special” or anything like that.. nor have I been, may I reference the 6-7th e-learning experiment at Middle School where the top of the class was chosen to take a class online. I wasn’t chosen. I don’t win many awards, probably because I don’t play sports. But thats much more a debate of sports and stuff. Ok its probably tied into work, thats where this is going. I live work. That explains most of it, if theres a problem requiring thought I’m thinking about it just about all the time I can. While I rarely dream in math, people will agree I get ideas at the most random times. People seem to think that being only 19 I’m not capable of thinking of any solutions or ideas and following them through to implementation. Well I’m bored of writing now, and iTunes is playing a good song by Justin Kopec, he’s not that bad. I would provide a link but I don’t have one off hand.

Enjoy the 4th!

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Lets talk tech

June 29th, 2007 Posted in Problems, Stupid People | 1 Comment »

Ok, so the IPhone is coming out today. I have mixed feelings, I really don’t want or need the phone part of it. My Motorola V325 places calls and text message’s fine so there no real big issue there. I also have a Dell Axim x30 which was great for keeping my calendar and todo list in high school. Recently I haven’t touched it. It has wifi and all which is great, but it just doesn’t do what I want it to do. I don’t want to sync with Outlook, my calendar is in Google Calendar and my Todo list is my Gmail inbox, but the Windows Mobile 2003se device is only compatible with Outlook. For a time it was great, specifically the time I wasn’t syncing it. The device had Wifi, which sorta worked well where there was wifi, but you can’t “upgrade” the device to the current versions of Windows Mobile. If I could upgrade to Windows Mobile 2005 or whatever the lastest is I would be much more pleased.

I wouldn’t mind having an up to date PDA that kindly runs Google Calendar and my Gmail, for some reason Windows Mobile 2003 feels like Windows 95, everything is very blocky, square, nonfunctional. If getting the Wifi to connect was easy I would be fine with it, but it doesn’t work with the RPI wifi (I don’t believe the Iphone will work either, tho Mac OS X does support the 802.11x).

Another point that I have mixed feelings about is the IPhones ability to jump onto Wifi very easily. With Windows Mobile this was a pain, but I feel uneasy knowing people with the Iphone will randomly be able to connect to my internet. Yes, I do run a secure AP and stuff, but I also have a public one which is more or less for that purpose, but if they are paying so much to connect, I’d like to see a return. (This also applies to the T-Mobile phones). I feel like bringing out my Fonera and having it actually work as a Fonera. Maybe I’ll just setup a Radius server for general use, oh wait, I’m working on that.

I dislike the monopoly over Mobile phones, when it comes down to it you can’t change 99% of the setting, you are stuck to X number of supported devices, in the PC world (note how I didn’t say Mac) if I want a new hard drive, I go buy it. If my internet is slow, I can tweak some settings or disable applications, with cell phones you can… umm.. buy a new one?

This dislike probably extends to all large telecoms, but thats just me.

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