MyVirtualLife.net

 

A few weeks ago, I bought a 2011 hi-res 15” Macbook Pro. I was thinking about it for months and finally ordered it when the back to school special came around. Good thing Steph is taking a sewing class! My pants my still not be fixed, but her class has paid for itself in student discounts.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it stock and the first thing I did was pull it apart and put in a SATA III 6G SSD and 8GB of RAM and it’s so fast! It boots OSX in 8 seconds and Windows 7 via bootcamp takes about 15 seconds. Almost everything about it is designed so well and so much thought has been put into it.  it’s easily the best computer I’ve ever used. I was a little reluctant to finally move off my home desktop, but the laptop can handle anything I do with the exception on Bluray burning.



I thought I’d use OSX for basic web stuff, Apperture and Final Cut and use Windows for everything else. However, I’m already finding that I want to do as little as possible in Windows 7 (which I like and think is very good). So now, I just use Windows to play games and occasionally do some of my work stuff, but that’s about it. The Mac software seems to be the best of both worlds since it’s built on UNIX but it also has the amazing applications and UIs that UNIX/Linux lack. It's made me even consider getting into Objective-C development even though I've made a living doing Oracle and Microsoft development.



I used Macs from elementary school to the early part of college, but I switched over to PCs when I went into MIS which was all PC and UNIX based. I then became anti-Apple because they made things so proprietary and were almost dead, but I still had to develop for and/or support them. And then they just came out with a color case for an iMac and that brought them back enough to eventually make the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. I’m sure I’ll pick up a new iPhone 5 in September since I still have the 3G and Steph wants and an iPad, so we’ll soon become an Apple household again. I would’ve never guessed I'd say that 10 years ago.

I also happened to watch, "Welcome to the Macintosh" on Netflix the other evening.  It's pretty good and makes you wonder how much Steve Jobs changed the world and what Apple is going to do once he's gone.

Life, Tech, Blog

Some politicians (California, of course) want to label some video games as hazardous to your health and want a skull and crossbones label placed on them. I won't even go into how stupid this bill is and how many other things we should be spending money on. However, I had a somewhat related incident recently....

About a month ago, I bought a new game (Dead Space 2) and decided to play it while Steph was taking a nap. I played it for about an hour while snacking on some chips. A few minutes later, I felt like I had something in my eye but I didn't think anything of it. A half an hour later, my eye was still bothering me and Steph woke up, so I paused the game and went to wash out my eye.

Now, it should be noted that I'm not normally one to get excited about things. I've seen a lot of bad things go down and I've seen multiple people die and my demeanor really didn't change much. But what I saw completely freaked me out! When I went to wash out my eye, it was so swollen and it didn't look round anymore. It actually looked like my eye was collapsing! So, I panicked and made Steph drive me to urgent care. On a side note, we went to two "urgent care" places but they were closed since it was Sunday evening. I'm not sure it should be called urgent care if it ever closes, but I digress. After I got mad at Steph for driving so slow, we ended up at the emergency room. Again, I've broken bones and have had a large third degree burn, but I've never been to the ER before.

Anyhow, after half an hour waiting for a doctor, one took a look at me and kind of chuckled and said I was ok. I said, "but, my eye wasn't even round" and I think that made her laugh some more and she assured me it was. What happened is that the white part of my eye got swollen (unevenly at that) but the brown part didn't, so it made it look the brown part was sinking in. So, after a rinse of saline and $300 dollars later I was able to go home.

So, what does all this have to do with video games? Well, I just finished the game this weekend (minor spoiler alert) and toward the end, there are two scenes where one lady gets her eye pulled out with a screw driver and another where another long needle is stuck in the main guy's eye. Maybe I'm a little squeamish when it comes to eyes, but after my experience and these two scenes, all I could say is WTF!!! And of course, I started having that feeling that something was in my eye again, so maybe video games are hazardous to your health, lol.

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It's been about a year since I put this site together, which is an eternity in internet time. I've made quite a few changes to learn and keep up with the technology, although it may not look like it. I don't think anyone cares, but here's what I changed (for my future reference):

Jquery Menu
Jquery was just getting popular when I started this site and it's really blown up since then. I used it on the image sliders and it's now used in the new mega menu. I don't like scripting languages, but Jquery is a big step up from normal Javascript.

Typography
I don't think most people really think about typography, but the standard web fonts are just horrible. I found a really nice font and it's much easier to use custom fonts today. I really like this new font because it's so clean.

BlogEngine 2.0
There was a big update to the blog program I've been using and it's been improved dramatically. I only use the very basic features, but the new comment system that uses Disqus is cool and I don't get spam anymore.

Flickr Galleries
I tried using Flickr a little while ago and while I liked their online slideshow the best I also realized that they have the worst user community. It made me not want to use the site, but I'm over it now and I moved all the photo galleries to Flickr. It's painless to update the galleries now, so I plan to update them more often. The funny thing is that I absolutely hate Yahoo, who bought Flickr a long time ago. I'd like to delete my old Yahoo account, but they make it tied to my fantasy sports leagues and Flickr.

SQL Server
My professional career has always been based around databases (usually Oracle), but for some reason, I didn't use one with my personal site. I guess it's always like that. I finally spent the 5 minutes to setup this up and now some of the things like the photo gallery are now being created dynamically from tables. It also makes it a lot easier to add or maintain.

The last thing I need to do is to change over my facebook page to use feedburner to import my blog since it doesn't seem to work using the normal RSS feed. I've been trying to use facebook more often, but I seem to hate it more and more every time I use it. I just realized that I sound so angry about a lot of the technologies, but it's hardly the case! I used to take one side over the other, but I really don't care anymore as long as things work, are easy to use, and are somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

Tech, Blog Site updates, blog, blogengine, jquery, flickr, sql server, facebook

So, I've been using Blog Engine for this blog and it was overdue for an upgrade. I chose this program since it fit my needs the best and I liked the simplicity of it. So far, I like the idea of open source software more than the realities of it. It's free and available, but the documentation is always lacking and there's no real easy way to keep the individual components up to date with the latest patches.

I used to run a site with a bunch of different PHP programs. They were pretty easy to get running, a little harder to customize, and then impossible to keep up with the patches. Maybe it'd be different if I maintained them for a living, but it's hardly something I want to do outside of work. So, I'd neglect them and I think almost everyone of them got hacked or overloaded with spam.

Maybe I just don't have the driving interest I used to either. I'm all for things like Windows Update that just take of these things for you.

Life, Tech, Blog blog engine coding open source

So, I've fallen behind on the blog like I was expecting, but I've been getting some stuff organized to post soon.  On a side note, I found a program to organize my bookrmarks like I've been envisioning for forever.  It's called xmarks and it lets you synch up bookmarks across browsers, across PCs, and it will be on the iPhone soon.

http://www.xmarks.com/

I use IE, Firefox and Chrome at work and home so it's been great at keeping everything straight.

 

 

Tech, Blog

I signed up for a .Net web host this time after 10 years of Unix/Linux servers. This hosting provider lets me use either technology stack though, so I like the flexibility. I've also wanted to be able to create some personal applications in ASP.net/Ajax so now I have the ability to do that even though I'll probably never get around to it.

Anyhow, I researched a bunch of CMS and blog programs and I eventually decided to just make most of the pages myself but use BlogEngine.net for the blog. It's a relatively new app but it's simple and yet is pretty flexible. I tried to make the theme match the rest of the site, but it's not quite right yet. We'll see how it goes...

Tech, Blog

Happy New Year and welcome to my new site and blog!  I know I'm only about 10 years late on the blog, but it's finally here.  I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to create one in the first place though.  I guess it's just another checkbox on the geek list.  I think I'm doing ok there though!

I'm not exactly sure what will be here, but my plan is to make an attempt to blog random thoughts as much as possible.  Although, I have a habit of writing something, deleting it, and writing it again because I don't like how it came out.  Sometimes I'll just delete the whole post all together, so that's why I end up writing nothing...   I guess my school teachers and parents made me too conscience of spelling and grammar, so it takes me too long.

As for the site, I created this one to consolidate other sites that I have started or worked on in the past and to also have a place to put things in the future. Although, I also tend to get really into my personal projects for a short time and then neglect them completely when I get busy.

Here's a Gizmodo style image edit for you:

 

Tech, Blog