My Rants and Thoughts

all I can say is yay. Christmas is over. Now before you go calling me a Scrooge let me tell you why. I have a 9 year old son who loves gifts. He just had his birthday and is already telling me what he wants for his next birthday. He gets so wrapped up in the season that he can't slow down. In fact, at Christmas 2003 he woke us up at 4:30 in the morning! We were only able to put him off by 1 hour so we were done all the unwrapping by 7AM. That made for a long day - especially when you've invited the family over for the traditional turkey dinner with all the fixings. So this year we did things a little different - we had Christmas dinner on Christmas eve, and prepared what's called a "Wife Saver Breakfast" for Christmas morning - basically you throw this thing in the oven before opening gifts and after your done with the festivities you have a baked breakfast that's ready to eat. So anyways, this year we were prepared - dinner was out of the way and breakf...

Just saw this documentary on the weekend. Scary stuff. Being from Canada I can't believe the sizes of food there, and how American's can consume so much. Really opened my eyes to the excesses we all go through.

I'm not in the market for one yet, but a thought occurred to me as I watched one of many car commercials which interrupted my regular Sunday night programming. Why do cars have options? Why can't they just sell cars (and trucks - virtually any vehicle) with all the options. Then, if someone doesn't want, say, air conditioning, it could be removed, and the price lowered. Why does everything else have to be added on? It really bugs me when I see a car commercial. They show this really nice car and say "Prices start at X" but in small print they say "model shown is Y" usually many thousands higher. It reminded me of the movie "Tucker" (and of course the history of the man) in which the idea was to bring the most advanced car available (with all the options of the day) in one package, for one price. Of course the big 3 didn't like the idea, so the Tucker never got off the showroom floor. Too bad, because he would have shaken up the indust...

So I am feeling more comfortable with linux. I was able to install Wine to run windows programs, and even got a demo of VMWare on which I currently have windows 98 running (winxp is next). Yesterday I set up remote access into my home computer from work, and can even use my desktop (via VNC). I also found a java based SQL manager, so I can now do some simple DB admin. This is part of my longer term strategy to get more into PHP and web programming. So far I have to say that I am impressed. I've done the updates that are required and haven't had to reboot once! My computer has been running for a couple weeks straight now and I haven't rebooted yet it runs as if I have. I also was able to convert my NTFS drive to fat32 (using another computer with windows and partitoin magic on it) so that I can better access the data on it. My next step now is to figure out why I can't seem to burn discs. I put in 700 M discs and it says that even with 650 M data I have too much dat...

So we finally finished moving - now it's just unpacking. also, there was some work left to finish in our house, so we couldn't use the whole space yet. the basement needed new carpet which just got finished. But at least now we can begin rearranging everything Yay!

So we are almost done moving. It seems like it takes longer and longer. Could it be because I am getting older? Used to be I could do 4 or 5 pickup truckloads a day - even could do 2 after work. Nowadays, in a full day I might get 3, but most likely 2, and on work days - lucky to get one. Anyways, so we had a huge garage sale, and cleared out a ton of stuff so I thought "great - this move won't be too bad." I was wrong. We started Friday (Today is Wednesday) and my goal was to be done by Sunday evening. Well today there is still stuff there!!! Still a couple truckloads. I guess part of the difference is that for most of our other moves I had help. This time I didn't. It's not that I couldn't it's just that usually help=broken stuff. So I decided to do it almost all by myself. Big mistake. I think a couple broken glasses is worth the time and pain saved. I did have help for bigger things, but that was just on Monday, and today I have help to move...

So I found out last night that I was running a slightly outdated version of Fedora. I was running Core 1 and it appears that Core 2 is released to the general public and is stable. I did some research on how to upgrade and got results from "easy as cake" to "a nightmare - don't do it." I thought "what the heck" and tried the in-place upgrade. I downloaded an image that I burned to CD (using the Linux free cd creator of course) so that I could do an FTP upgrade. I figured - what the heck - lets really go for broke. So after a couple false starts (I had the path to the "stage 2" image wrong) I was able to complete a fully GUI upgrade from Fedora core 1 to Fedora core 2 in about 2.5 hours. I didn't even have to do much. Also, it fixed an application I broke when I was experimenting (Evolution started generating errors). FYI - Mozilla for Fedora is not the same as Mozilla for windows. I was trying to import my Outlook PST into Evolution ...

So a few days ago I posted about how I decided to dump windows and go with Linux. Yes after I sobered up the next day I stuck to my decision :) and you know what - so far it's been relatively painless. Before I go on let me give you some background - I have an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) designation, so I am very familiar with computers. In my spare time I build computers and sell them, so am familiar with both the hardware and software. Up until recently it's only been Windows software though. I'm telling you this because I believe that while I found Linux ok - I do believe that part of that has to do with my background. When comparing myself to, say my brother, who while younger isn't as computer adept as me and then I consider what he would do were he to attempt the same thing (switch to linux) it makes me shudder. It's not that Linux is hard. Far from it. In fact, for the average person it's probably great. Although it's a little tr...

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column This is what I'm going to do when I get better at Linux - a media/VOIP server - sweet!

So, I made a decision to dump windows (after a few beers) and go with Linux so I thought I'd post my progress so far. I'm not entirely a linux newbie, although I haven't done much with it. I've had it running no Virtual PC, and on its own partition, but all I've ever done with it in the past is install it with various options and keep it up to date. I started with Redhat 8 and then moved on to 9 and now Fedora. I like fedora. My biggest concerns were email, word processing, chatting to friends and family online, and newsgroups. So I found an old 4 gig drive (scavenged out of an old Pentium 133) and decided to install Fedora. At the time I was doing this, my goal was to install a windows emalator (Wine or VMWare) so that I could still run Windows, just on linux. But after installing linux (and having a few of those aforementioned beers) I started to think, and I said to myself "Do I really need windows?" I decided right there and then that no, I do not n...

So - my windows XP crashed again. its been good up until the last couple months - now it's toast again. I don't know why - I rebooted my computer after adding a cd-rom and it said I had disk errors. I didn't do anything with the disk - just installed a cd NEAR the disk anyways, it saved the bad blocks, and did restart but I couldn't do anything - I couldn't get into outlook, or any office app for that matter, nor could I add or remove programs. So I made a decision which I'm going to stick to - I stuck a smaller drive into my computer and installed Fedora Linux. I'm going to dump windows altogether and jump into Linux. I've been threatening to do this for some time, but I thought now the timing is right. I'm going to use WINE to get access to my windows Apps, mostly so I can open outlook and export most of my PST settings to my Gmail account. Then I will wean myself off the windows apps as I find comparable linux apps. eventually I will reformat...

Welcome to The Console Conspiracy: The blog they didn't want you to read Here's the other blog I work on

I found a cool app the other day - actually about 2 months ago - it's called Blinkx and with it you can search your local computer and the web simultaneoulsy. Further, it "watches" pages you are on - either web pages, or word docs or pdfs (to name just a few) and can actually search for you and find matching content. It's a pretty sweet (and free) app that I recommend downloading.

Some way to record thoughts right into our computers? I lay in bed at night and my mind goes a million miles per minute. I have this, my own blog which I post to, as well as another one called the console conspiracy and of course I write for my company's sites, and a couple other industry related sites. So I post regularly on quite a few websites. That's because my mind doesn't stop. If I could post just by sending my thoughts to the various sites I post on, I'd probably produce thousands more pages per month! I was thinking about it last night in bed. The way I see my mind is that there's 3 little men sitting in my brain. One on either side and one on the middle. The sides are either creative or analytical (just as the human brain is) and the center is the gatekeeper. The 2 sides compete for the attention of the gatekeeper, and he decides what I focus on. If the creative side wins, then I start thinking creatively. Lots of "what if"s come from the...

I love holidays - I just got back from a week of camping - no stress, lots of fun. Lots of beer, etc etc. Come bake here and the stress level rises as I get closer to home - back to normal life. It would be nice to have that relaxed holiday attitude for the other 50 weeks of the year. Why can't we? Why do we place ourselves under so much stress? I guess it's kinda like that joke where the high school principal walks up to the kid banging his head on the locker door. "Why are you doing that?" The prinicpal asks. "Because it feels so good when I stop." Was the answer.

I'm sitting here at my desk (on the 3rd floor of a new building - we just moved) and I can see the highway from where I am - it's just after 4 PM and traffic is already backing up. I don't understand where they are all going?

So I work for a company which performs search engine marketing . I work with some high profile clients but a good part of my job is watching search engines to see what they are doing and try to figure out what they are going to do. I have been pretty successful at my predictions. I predicted that Yahoo! would by Overture, and that they would launch their own search engine. I've been pretty good at predicting what Google would do, but the Florida Update caught me off guard. I figured out what it was a few days later, and after reviewing the history, the signs were there, I just never put them together. (i.e. purchases they had made the previous few months - seemingly unrelated companies, but in light of the Update it made perfect sense). Now MSN is getting into search and I've been watching it trying to nail when that will happen. MS says sometime in the fall. I've been watching but not seeing too many drastic changes - their results are getting a little better, but they...

I've been looking for another outlet for my mind. I can't help it I can't control it. I also post on a couple other blogs but I think I need my own and this is my first post. And it's about food I seem to be "in to" lately. I'm talking about Wraps - where you take a tortilla shell and fill it with whatever and that becomes your meal. I had them last night for dinner and again this morning for breakfast (ham and scrambled eggs - yummy) and I think I may have them for dinner again tonite. I seem to go through these phases where I can't get enough of a thing. Now it's them wraps. Oh well....