This Should Work

This holiday weekend, my wife and I spent some time in the mountains of Asheville North Carolina for a friends wedding. In between wedding stuff, we decided our time would be better spent focusing on the offerings of the downtown area rather than paying lots of money to see The Biltmore Estate.

We walked around and checked out the street vendors, ate at little hole-in-the-wall places, browsed through used bookstores, and did other things that reminded me of living in Northern California during my late high school/college years.

We were having coffee in at Malaprop’s Café when my wife said something about how nice it was to just hang out in a place that felt like a city. I responded by saying that Asheville is a lot like Berkeley, CA, but without the smell of urine or naked hippies that hang out on the corner of University and Durant.

I’m looking forward to going back, maybe in the spring time when the trees are green, and remember the feeling of being young and idealistic.

No Xbox 360? Join the club; I didn’t even try to buy one yesterday. And I’m not desperate enough to rob an EB Games at gunpoint for one. Don’t get me wrong, I want one but I don’t need to be the first on my block with one. So for all of you who are 360-less here are some good reasons why it might be beneficial to wait for a product that even had curmudgeon tech reporter John C. Dvorak clamoring “I have not seen a hardware/software system this well thought out for a decade or more.”

• Most old Xbox games don’t work- The 360’s graphics card (ATI) has different manufacturer than the original Xbox(NVidia). So in order to play old Xbox games the 360 runs something called an emulator. It’s ready for the popular Xbox games (Halo, Project Gotham Racing, etc) but not all games.
• Crash and Burn- Many Xbox 360 gamers are already complaining their Xbox 360 either locks up or crashes during game play. Apparently many of the racing games barely get through one lap before crashing.
• Motherboard issues- Someone took the time to closely examined a couple of pictures of the 360’s motherboard and noticed that they are not the same. Hopefully the later models will have the better of the two.
• Games will look and play better in three months- It takes game developers time to fully understand the capabilities of any new hardware device. In three to four months games makers will know what they’re doing on the 360 platform and then games will be great.

Then again, I could also be trying to convince myself that it’s okay not to own one right now.

Last night NBC’s show Medium tried to do something cool by broadcasting their show in 3-D. How very 80’s of you, NBC! But it was intriguing enough that my wife bought two copies of TV guide so we could watch the show with the flimsy 3-D glasses provided in the mag.

When the time came to watch the show, we furiously tried to punch our cardstock eye wear out while a Rod Sterling type character explained the “magic” of 3-D. Once our glasses were ready we put them on and . . . well. . . I started getting dizzy. I took the glasses off to make sure it was a “Medium 3-D moment” indicated by a little marker in the top corner. Yep, it was there so I put the glasses back on and tried adjusting my place on the couch. It didn’t work and the first 3-D moment was over.

The next moment came and I put the glasses on, once again I started to get dizzy. I tried sitting closer to the TV, then further back, tilting my head, etc. nothing worked. In fact it looked worse with the glasses than without them.

We tried it one more time, but neither me nor my wife saw a meat clever flying at us, or blood coming through the TV. At one point I look at my wife and realized not only are the glasses not working, we look stupid sitting on the couch with them on. Luckily the only witnesses to ours 3-D glass wearing fiasco were our dogs.

So my wife and watched the rest of the episode without them. I think it was a good episode, but I can’t say for sure; I was too busy trying to get the right angle to see the 3-D effects and not paying enough attention to the plot. Nice try NBC, but next time just give us a good story with a special guest star for sweeps months and drop all needless special effects.

I’ve spent the last week working on a new problem and finally had a breakthrough. After staring at the program and changing a bunch of lines of code, I found that in a couple places I had changed the variable “$description” to $descriptoin.”

Sure I could also learn how to spell and type, but I wish my computer would cut me a little slack. The lesson: writing computer programs is not like playing horseshoes.

Alright, it’s only been two days since I re-entered the workforce, but here are some observations about returning to work:

The Good

• Shiny Happy People-The folks I work with at the University of Kentucky are so nice that it’s almost scary. But I have to say, it’s great to just be around a people again; I’d been hanging around the dogs too much.

The Bad

• Nap time no more-Around 3:30 or 4:00 I start to crave that afternoon nap that I had come so accustomed to taking.

The Ugly

• Starbucks may soon own my soul-Less than 30 feet from office door is Starbuck’s Coffee. I pass it four or five times a day when I’m walking through the building. For the moment, I’m using them to help ween myself off the afternoon nap but it may become a habit. I’ve already been there three times in the past two days.

Our renting days will soon be over! The wife and I just bought our first house! It larger than we need right now, but we’ve got plans to fill it out. It’s two-story house with a finished basement and a two-car garage. It’s got a great office with built-in bookshelves and the house is even wired with Cat5 cable (that’s computer cable for the non-geeks).

While it’s not finalized yet (it’s subject to inspection) we’ll be home owners at the beginning of next year!

Here are some more pics of the house

I’ve wanted to change the presentation of my blog almost from the first day. So I finally broken down today and started looking at different Wordpress themes hoping to find one that I might like. While there are many to choose from, I didn’t find one that exactly fit, so I modified this theme a little.

Changing Wordpress themes is really easy (just upload the folder into the “themes” folder and then select it under “Presentation” from the admin page) and personalizing the themes is realitively easy as well. I just opened the logo.jpg file and Photoshop’d a new image over the top of it.

I’ll probably make a few more changes to it in the future, but for now I hope you enjoy the new look.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as a “case mod” or not, but it’s an ingenious use of a computer. I ‘ve worked on many computers that should have been turned into hibachis long before I tried to revive them. Seeing this, I kinda wish I’d kept our old computer around.

(image from PragueTV)

It official, my days as a Gentlemen of Leisure will end on Monday. I’ve gotta job!!

I’ll be working for the University of Kentucky doing IT support for Student Health Services starting on Monday. This means that I only have three full days left of unemployment. So while my ass may miss the couch, my bank account will love the monetary deposits.

Of course, this also means that I’ll need to set my alarm clock. I’m not looking forward to this, but I am looking forward to having someplace to be in the morning and working with-at least from what I can tell-a great group of people.

I started working on a program at 10am this morning. I thought it worked, but there was on line of code that wouldn’t process. I went over and over this line all day, re-typed it so many times that I lost count. I’ve spent my entire day working on this one line of code.

Now, at 8pm, I find that I missed a semi-colon on the previous line! This so sucks! I’m glad I’m not a programmer.