Archive for the 'Misc Othr Stuf' Category

Windows 7: Now Available at CompUSA

Published on January 19, 2009 in Misc Othr Stuf. 0 Comments

I have been playing around with Windows 7 on a couple of computers. I have it on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop built for Vista Home Premium and on a Dell OptiPlex 170L barely built for XP. It runs very well on both.

Today at CompUSA, I was looking at their systems on the clearance shelf and one of them caught my eye. Yep, it’s running Windows 7. Someone there has a quirky sense of humor.

I was also next door at Circuit City to see the beginning of the end. They must have had some good sales in there last week because the stuff I was looking at is way over priced now.  That Lumix DMC-T4Z I have been looking at went from $219 to $279 – %10 = $251 which keeps them under Ritz Camera and Best Buy, but nowhere near Beards and Hats or Abe’s.

They are probably going to be selling the carpet squares before it gets to the prices I am looking for.

Tips: Pumpkin lights and Undelete Plus

Published on October 26, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf and Techie. 0 Comments

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Some back-to-back tips:

1. Lighting a Jack-O-Lantern with Solar lighting.  Last night my daughter and I carved a pumpkin during an Adult Bible Fellowship (aka. Sunday School) class party. I did the cutting and scooping while she told me to use triangles for eyes. When we got home I was looking at the solar power lights along our entryway and decapitated one (mwahahaha!) to use as the pumpkin’s light. This works better in the Sunshine State than in darker places up north, but it is perfect for us.

2. Keep a copy of Undelete Plus portable on your thumb drive and memory cards. When editing the above picture with Windows Live Photo Gallery I forgot that it automatically saves the file when you close the gallery.  Since I knew the image was still on my SD card in spite of it being deleted, it only took a few seconds to recover it. You may not like Undelete Plus, but keeping one of these portable apps on all portable storage media is a great help. i have used it to recover files on hard drives since it gives a place to run it without writing to the drive andyou immediately have a place to start exporting the important recovered files.

Baboon Vs. Chimpanzee

Published on October 6, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf. 0 Comments

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Q: Who is smarter, a Chimpanzee or a Baboon?
A: A Chimpanzee. That is why we have trained chimps that have gone into space (but they still have trouble with bulk mailing)

Q: Who is smarter, a group of Chimpanzees or a group of Baboons
A: The group of Baboons.
Chimps are under threat because chimp populations have trouble adapting to changes as humans encroach on them, but baboons are under threat because they have adapted too much and get threatened when they encroach on humans (note: Brief research relying heavily on the assertions of the scientist mentioned in this post).

I was listening to an interview of Howard Bloom talking about his book “The Global Brain” and a few things caught my attention. One is how much more effective you are when working as a well functioning team built on respect for one another’s gifts, and the other is how repeated failure causes mental apoptosis and destruction of an individual.

Lessons: Communicate, respect, and grow.

“Dude, It Was Massive!” – 10 Years Later

Published on February 23, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf and Personal Issues. 2 Comments

Good Samaritan: Tornado Debris

February 22 & 23, 1998 was an eventful night in Central Florida. I was in my Junior year at Florida Christian College (map) and I was preparing to start working on a paper due the next morning. It was the second nasty storm of the month, we had spent Groundhog day without power just a few weeks earlier. One of my roommates mentioned that there must be a train nearby and my training from years of tornado drills in southern Indiana kicked in and I rushed everyone into the bathroom. 2 minutes later the awkwardness became overwhelming and we went back out.

That night, several tornadoes cut through central Florida. One of them went through the sports complex across the road where it killed someone who was working on the fair equipment they were trying to get out due to the storm. It crossed the road  and destroyed the Ponderosa RV Park (map). It shut down the turnpike and destroyed a traceable line of homes for another mile. In the words of one student quoted by a local newspaper, “Dude, it was massive.”

Due to a lack of resources to support all the displaced students (although about 15 of us stayed a night with Prof. Bundy), I came up to Jacksonville with my future wife, my roommate, and his future wife (my future wife’s roommate) and stayed a week up here with my family. While we were gone there were many funerals and President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the RV park. After our return we helped out where we could. I helped to dig through the remains of the RVs and trailers of victims to recover mementos for the families. They were water soaked piles of rubbish, but we found photo albums and other personal items with a lot of meaning.

I did pocket one item while serving, and I have it setting on my desk today in a small frame. This portion of a shredded Bible has been a reminder for me over the past decade that when it comes down to it, the greatest thing we can do for God is to care for his beloved people even if nobody witnesses it other than God.

Robotic Nativity

Published on January 18, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf and Techie. 0 Comments

I am looking at this from a pure administration mindset, but I am sure that if we took what we budgeted for Christmas programs this past year we could purchase a robot to it all automatically. Less hassle and stress, something not being done by every other church in town (nobody will hurry out of our service saying “Hurry, the robot show at the Baptist church starts in 20 minutes”), and we could even do a wax-drip free candle lighting service.

Just check out this video:

And for all you trying to recruit volunteers for the tech oriented parts of your ministries, just think of the geeks this will bring in. Not to mention the fun you will have making use of this investment throughout the year to come.

Follow-Up On Yesterday’s Dreamhost Post

Published on January 16, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf. 1 Comment

This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post about Dreamhost. You can skip this, it is just a lot of blah, blah, blah. I’ll post something with a useful application to it later.

Anyway . . .

There is a Dreamhost blog post entitled “Um, Whoops.” which further explains the problem and has reactions. Some are positive in response while others are very negative.

“…and i am now aware that this company is ran by a whole bunch of kids, and the affordable just became plain cheap. Making childish decisions with no executive control. In many aspects, GROW UP! this is so dumb.”

“I’m going to agree with some of the people on here–the flippant attitude probably wasn’t the best choice for a blog post about something this serious.”

“I have to echo the sentiment that your flippant tone isn’t appreciated, Josh.”

How much trouble did the mistake cause me? None. Well, unless you count the time I have spent following up on it out of curiosity. I don’t believe my sites were suspended, I know that my credit card was able to handle the $119.40 charge, and I didn’t have any client issues with it. So, it is understandable that I am not mad.

The problem I have is with some of the responses.

  • Those users knew they were not getting the highest quality, Dreamhost wildly oversells space and data transfer.
  • They knew that the backend systems were proprietary and not overly robust because it is not being used anywhere else from what I can tell.
  • They knew that Dreamhost is a bit amateur by looking through the weak support documentation wiki.
  • They knew about the informal but open nature of the company itself, you have got to see the newsletter in order to believe it.

There is a reason why I consider Dreamhost to be the place for bulk hosting and got-hosting.com as the place for more reliable hosting. The church sites are hosted with this service while the gigabytes of audio and video for podcasts and the like are stored at Dreamhost.

I haven’t seen this big of a fight over since hosting at McHost.com. The difference there was that while servers were hacked or crashing and billing was being mishandled the owner was uncooperative and secretive. Honesty was not part of the policy. More time was put toward deleting forum posts than explaining the situation.

Does anybody reading this use Dreamhost?

2 Errors, One Better

Published on January 15, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf. 0 Comments

Today I received 2 corrections in my email. One was to something sent in a newsletter earlier in the day while the other was a billing error from DreamHost (I host some separate sites over there). The newsletter correction was very factual, yet lifeless while the other made me smile. There are so many ways in which the following issue could have been handled badly, I like the way they did it.

Hi Robert!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attemptedto charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY(it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#******) and already refunded the $119.4 charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

Isn’t that great? It is apologetic yet neither sniveling nor lifelessly corporatized. I don’t think thir platform is anywhere near the quality of the host I use for this site, but I like their attitude. As a trailing edge Gen Xer yet not quite Gen Y (or whatever) I appreciate the newer manner as something very different from what has been around before. I am, after all, a loyal Wooter and one who enjoys the read if not the product each day.

Some CompUSA Fun

Published on January 13, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf and fun. 2 Comments

Last Wednesday I stopped into CompUSA.com just to see what is going on. I was hoping they would have a list of stores bought out by Systemax (aka. Tigerdirect) and the local CompUSA would be on the list. Instead, I saw that someone on the CompUSA web team had been having some fun. This image contains some of what I saw:

Some Modified Monitors at CompUSA.com

If you would like to see the full context I printed the page to PDF: CompUSA.com’s Modified Monitors. Do note that I created the image above using their monitor images. The logo is from their site, but the “MONITOR MANIA” was added by me (Futura Extra Bold Oblique).

I would love to know the story behind this. It’s just great that they got their faces into the site at the last minute.

I am leaving the following search bait for others searching on this topic:
ViewSonic VA2026w 20-inch LCD Monitor, Black/Silver
AL2216Wbd 22-inch LCD Monitor, Black
H190L 19-inch LCD Monitor, Silver/Black – Product Number: 342045 – Brand: Envision

PopDrive: USB Thumb Drive Bottle Opener

Published on January 7, 2008 in Misc Othr Stuf. 0 Comments

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Years ago, a friend of mine inexplicably went country. Soon after that bizarre event, the song High Tech Redneck came out (*gasp* ~14 years ago) and she claimed it reminded her of me. For the record, nothing in the song was anything like me, but you know how confused women can get.

Anyway, as soon as I saw the Popdrive 1GBUSB Flash drive and bottle opener that is what immediately popped into mind. Being a teetotaler, I cannot remember the last time I needed to use a bottle opener such as this, but can still picture the niche market for this. After all, the number of rednecks here in Northeast Florida with Borg-style bluetooth ear pieces is amazing.

Some off rambling here, but this did remind me of a friend of mine who recently had a computer question and I explained that “hackers” are people who figure out how systems work and how to work within the systems while “crackers” are people who try to compromise systems for the sake of breaking in. I saw a confused look on his face and then once I explained again that the term comes from cracking into something he started laughing. He said that for a moment he was quite impressed that his fellow “Crackers” would be that good with computers.

Do you need mouse balls?

Published on December 28, 2007 in Misc Othr Stuf. 0 Comments

While searching for some equipment online I found this page: Replacement Mouse Ball, 2cm. So, do you have much need for replacement mouse balls? We may have one or two old style mice around here, but that is all. I’m sure that by the time the ball goes bad it would be worth just getting a whole new mouse. I am of course discounting sentimental connections.

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Yes, you may joke about it but replacement mouse balls are one of our most requested products. Why? Mouse balls get caked with dust and lint and are difficult to clean. Inexpensive mice use inferior, lightweight foam mouse balls that can easily skip and mis-track. In schools, kids (and adults) take the balls out and play with them like marbles-so they’re always getting lost (or getting dirty). Our replacement mouse balls are made from a heavy rubberized steel ball bearing that offers the best tracking and reliability. Works with most PC mice and some Mac mice (2cm.)

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