a new year

Ah, a new year of computer adventures just ahead of me. Been playing around with Windows Vista Home Premium because the Call of Duty 2 Game won't run on my Windows XP Home version for some reason. So, it looks like Vista is a little more stable (and should be even more with the release of Service Pack 1 in First Quarter 2008). Haven't been using my Mac Mini much except for playing this old school game called Escape Velocity: Override. A little depressed right now because business was extremely slow for December which is completely opposite to all my predictions. Well, I have hope that January will be better than last year's January. Oh yeah, I just remembered that my business is now a year old! Yay me!

Wiijury

Pronounced Wee - jury, as in injury due to playing Nintendo Wii. I have heard of people hurting themselves from losing control of the Wii controller and smashing it into things but I never thought I would fall victim to this new gaming system. I was over at my Sister's house playing Resident Evil 4 on her boyfriend's Wii. During parts of the game you have to waggle the controller back and forth (think of swatting a fly over and over again). Doing this many times eventually caused a cramp in my shoulder. It was so bad I had to use my left arm only for driving later that night. However, I think this experience serves to boost my geek-cred.

picture of the day

Hopefully I don't look like this when I'm fixing a computer...

google calender with safari bug

Just encountered a little bug using google calender with Safari 2.0.4 where if I click on any of the links at the top it brings up a quick event box.

my customer base

Ok, I ran the data and here are the results of the types of computers my customers use:

Since the text is too small, I'll explain. Blue is PC's, Red is Mac's, and Orange is Linux. The percentages (rounded to the nearest % so it may not add to 100%) are 80% for PC, 17% for Mac, and 2% for Linux.

go mac mini!

So I got a Mac Mini (delivered in one day from Amazon.com even though it was 2nd day shipping!). It's the basic model ringing in at $600. I've been tooling around on it all day and I must say I am quite pleased. My only gripe is that it didn't come with Leopard (10.5) pre-installed. Fortunately, Apple is going to ship the DVD for $10.86 USD.

The old 15" LCD with a 15-pin VGA connection worked flawlessly. My generic USB mouse and keyboard were also a breeze to setup. The apple command key is replaced by the windows start key on the keyboard I use, so no problem there.

Haven't really dug into it since I want to hold off until Leopard is installed. I just changed my background, screensaver, and expose options. Adding a Dell AIO 946 printer on the network took at most a minute. Connecting to the WPA-protected wireless network was even easier. All of this just tells me that Apple is bound to have a majority of the OS market eventually. I wonder what the numbers are right now?

I will have to tally up all my customers and get a percentage of the Mac computers I have serviced. But I will also add the factor of how much money I've made in that arena (which I'm guessing is less since Mac's are more reliable).

electronic signatures

While reading through the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act here: http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/fnact99/1990s/ueta99.htm, I thought of some things. I don't understand why a complex digitally encrypted key has to be generated and read by the signee and signors.

Interesting Idea...

I tried Googling myself tonight and found that there are plenty of people that share my name. And I was happy to find myself in the first ten results (and it was good profile of me on the Cal Alumni website). An interesting thing to do is to catalogue the different professions of all the S.D.'s and see which are most numerous. Afterall, what's in a name?

vista and bush

The two subjects don't really have any thing in common, I just decided to combine two blogs. First, a couple weeks ago, I had the task of transferring data from a machine running windows xp to a machine running vista. Much to my dismay, windows decided to drop firewire networking support for vista. If it had been there, I would have been able to transfer files directly through a 400mb/sec connection. Instead, I ended up backing up everything to an external HD and then carefully moving over everything to the new machine. Needless to say, it was a hell of a job, and it makes me even more vehemently opposed to anyone having to use Vista.

The other subject is lighter. Here are two funny, fake pictures of our fearless leader:

sucralose

It seems that sucralose makes me very sick. Everytime I have tried a product containing it I have experienced headaches, nausea, and fatigue. I have read other reports of such symptoms and just thought that I would add one more negative testimonial of sucralose's effects. Maybe, in time, someone will collect all these reports and try to get it taken off the market. Who knows? It is just highly annoying that I now have to check every product for this poison. The End.

months go by

Much has happened. I'm now working less in the fixing-computers business and more in Academic Research at UC Berkeley. One thing that is relevant to both is that I'm now learning Python to help with experimental design and further my understanding of computers. Plus I'm working on the innards of Excel 2007 (which a customer graciously bought for me) to analyze bird egg bacteria data. That's right, bacteria in bird eggs. That's the biology lab. The other lab is cognition and action. Fun.

1 for 2 with ubuntu

Ok, so Ubuntu works on my laptop Dell. Great. Now, I try installing it on my shiny blue desktop PC. It kept showing IDE errors but it still loaded from the CD and I was able to install it. Maybe it didn't like the motherboard, maybe it didn't like my 3 internal hard drives and 1 external hard drive. I don't really know becuase I don't know too much about linux or ubuntu.

The end result was that I got a dead stop when I rebooted the machine. Grub loaded but then it showed "Error 22". Whatever that means is irrelevant... I am now doing a repair install of Windows XP Home to see if it will work again... Good thing I have backups...

so it is ok

to transfer my windows xp home from my now defunct e-machine PC to my new "blue test pc" as per this stipulation in the windows xp home EULA:
SOFTWARE TRANSFER. Internal. You may move the Software to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Software from the former Workstation Computer. Transfer to Third Party. The initial user of the Software may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and Software to another end user, provided the initial user retains no copies of the Software. This transfer must include all of the Software (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity). The transfer may not be an indirect transfer, such as a consignment. Prior to the transfer, the end user receiving the Software must agree to all the EULA terms.

starcraft 2!

i guess the FPS of "starcraft: ghost" never came about
so I guess a return to the RTS world for starcraft 2 is cool
I haven't played starcraft in a long time (or an RTS for that matter) but I may just have to regress and play the original for fun

here's a link to the new official starcraft 2 website:
StarCraft II

scribus and open office base

So I'm trying to create a meeting schedule in scribus. I decided that it would be prudent to try and create a database first given that I have plenty of time to do it right now (the number of computer services calls i'm getting averaging about 2 a week)

Unfortunately, scribus and open office base seem to have high learning curves. my aptitude for windows programs does me nothing for these programs given that they seem to require a good understanding of the underlying code. what was really bugging me was that after I created a table for the meetings with fields such as "time", "location", "day of week", etc.; I found that going back and trying to modify the fields was impossible. so after re-creating the table 3x, I got frustrated and gave up.

i'm thinking of just going back to microsoft access even though it's proprietary. it also makes me think that the programming community that works on these programs might benefit from more closely copying the interfaces and commands of the corresponding windows programs. afterall, if windows copies all of their stuff from apple, why can't the open-source community copy all their stuff from windows?

once a year cleaning

my computer performance has improved dramatically after a quick format of the hard drive and a reinstallation of Windows XP; Dell was nice enough to just send the OS (and I'm not being sarastic here) so I don't have all those extra programs that just take up space

Will now make a partition for Ubuntu edgy eft (6.10) and install that

the linux adventure!!!

I like this story about the adventures of installing linux. IMHO, very well written.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/review-linux-for-windows-users.htm

ended up doing OCW

I’m taking a self-paced course from the Open-Coursware project at M.I.T. It is a beginner’s IT class from the Sloan School of Management. If interested this is the link:

15.564 Information Technology I, Spring 2003

See more progress on: Take a computer class

legal mp3's

I have decided, after purchasing music from i-pod and before that illegally downloading mp3's from bit-torrent sites, to only buy my music directly from bands that sell their songs directly to their fans as high-quality (think 320kbs) mp3's.

as for the on-site computer consulting business, I'm in the "I don't want to do this anymore because it's not my dream-job". So, this week, I am making time on Thursday to meet with a Dean of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley to request a retroactive withdrawl for a semester that I went south due to psychiatric problems (which is a legitimate medical withdrawl that I have taken before for the same reasons). The effect of this being that my gpa will be highly improved when I apply to graduate schools in December 2007. Besides that, I will be spending time this week trying to talk with graduate researchers at my alma mater to get some kind of helper research position, paid or not. Oh, all this is for the field of neuroscience. My dream-job is to study the neurological basis for mental illnesses (including the psychiatric, geriatric, and developmental).

That is all.

too many choices

"we should not make the intellect our god.
it has powerfule muscles, but no personality."
-einstein

Yeah, I'm always asking 'why', 'how', 'who'. But that's ok. My hero says, "the important thing is not to stop questioning." So, I ask, why am I so focused on productivity and efficiency. How come I have to keep a close watch on the time so that I don't "waste" too much time on pleasurable activities. Jewish work ethic, right?

Eh, I'm falling asleep as I write this. Better stop...wait, one more thing...I've been through livejournal, facebook, and myspace. Now I'm blogging, expecting different results? Right, why is it such a good thing to have massive amount of knowledge at our fingertips, and tons of choices of what to do with that knowledge?

Here's an experiment I'd like to do one day: take one group of people with PDA's and one group with traditional planner books that you write in. Does it take more time to get all the events into the PDA than it would take just to do one of those events. In other words, is there such a thing as electronic organization over-kill?

soy un perdador, i'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me

so, now I'm regretting all my technological purposes and the assets I have required thereof.
it always comes back to utility and efficiency, does the laptop cooler really improve my life?
Does "researching" windows vista really help my customers? oh, if my grammar or spelling bother you, then all I can say is "relax, life's too short to worry about grammar and spelling".

now, let's hear it for rationalization. 1) most companies "waste" money on inventory that is never used or sold. 2) as a computer consultant, I need to have a diverse range of computer stuff so that I can diversify my knowledge and anticipate the needs of my customers. 3) if all else fails, I can sell or give a customer some of my used computer stuff, mainly to make them happy

enough!

some useful discoveries:
-doing the file and settings transfer worked when done over my home network
-the printer sharing was messed up because the drivers that worked in vista were, of course, incompatible with any XP computers that tried to access said printer over the network
-IE7 didn't know what to do when I tried to make a printable version of Google calender

After several other frustrations and a Power Supply that I had to fix, I decided to totally disassemble and reassemble, adding two more hardrives in the process. Now, I'm installing an OEM version of Home and perhaps later I'll have a dual-boot system (if vista allows that)

All in all, this experience will serve me in the future, when vista might actually be ready for the everyday consumer... right now, it makes me think of Steve Wozniak's quote, "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"

more complaints about vista

I think this has been mentioned in articles about Vista before it was even released but the security features are overkill! I have to click through three confirmation dialogues just to delete a file.

Another annoyance that was no surprise was when I used windows update to search for vista drivers for my unidentified hardware. Well, just like in XP, doing that search is pretty much a waste of time and returned no results. I'll have to go to each of the manufacturer's websites to find all the vista drivers. On the other hand, I have to give kudos to Microsoft for keeping me in business. I can already see me helping customers getting there new computers working correctly with this new operating system.

One other thing I did this morning was go to some less-than-reputable sites to see if I could get the machine infected with some adware or something. I was again not surprised to find out that the pop-ups still happened.

You know, I really wonder what they do up their in Redmond, Washington. I really think the problem with the Microsoft Empire is that of hubris. Like any empire, success breeds complacency and eventually ossifies into obsolescence.

the vista experience

So, I created this blog with the goal of journaling about my windows vista experience. I recently (read: today) built a new PC and installed Vista Home Premium. I honestly built a machine that wasn't up to my exacting standards. If it was that, it would have had Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, a 300 gb HD, etc. etc. As it is, it's a mid-line AMD64 X2 with 1 gig of RAM and 80gb HD.

Partitioned the drive in half so I can put Linux on one side. I'm not going to even have room to play my computer games. As for the Vista experience so far, it's turning out like most installations, not that great. Glitzy and all that, but not much simplicity. The installation was fairly easy and easier to understand than previous versions. Ok, fast forward to my first snag when I was using the "Easy Transfer" wizard. Got all the old docs and settings from the old computer but then when they were being transferred to the new system, it hung up. Well, not exactly hung up, it gave me "invalid data file" on a bunch of random .mp3's, ok, make that numerous .mp3's. And the bugger of it was that all I could do was keep pressing continue (with cancel and retry being my other two options) they was no "skip all errors" button, and there seemed to be a lot of "invalid data" .mp3's. Well, that's one bug I can put down as "found" during this research.

So, I got frustrated and cancelled the operation; thus, the "easy transfer" wasn't easy at all. I think I'll try it again over my home network and see what happens for that. Good night.