crazyskillsbloginitiative

So.. I ‘ve got an iPhone and a chocolate touch ….the iPhone has a much larger screen.. The chocolate touch has better Audio quality and touch feedback on the screen … Where the iPhone has a cool completing the words for you. The touch feedback is really nice . You can actually feel the scrolling and when you click a key.. Nice features.

iPhone performsmuch much better on video. But the chocolate touch has much much better sound

Right now I am listening to my chocolate touch and writing to you lovely people on the iPhone !,,, which brings me to another comparison - wi-fi . Iphone’s got it.. Not supported by chocolate touch. Huge disappoinent there. . But then it sure does sound good . Looks like ill be carrying them both for awhile.

Qed

So.. I got this wild idea the other day that I could make my computer faster by setting up a raid. I hadn’t done a redundant array of inexpensive disks for quite some time, and figured what the hell. It is amazing…. Everything is faster. I highly recommend it.

G-Force from SoundSpectrum not working properly? Disable the bonjour service (mdnsresponder.) It will automatically run itself again when it is needed (like to sync your appleTV or iPod) but is not needed other than that!

Microsoft Web Apps Beta:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=27d81b1c-18ae-4983-8e1c-224bb747eb99 [microsoft.com]

Testing out posting from the iPhone.

Well, today a customer asked me about “a free alternative to Microsoft Office.” I of course responded with praise of OOo (openoffice.org) and went even further to write down Thunderbird and gIMP for them to recommend downloading.. But part of my job is selling software. So I should have said that MS Office was what they needed.. or should I have? I may have earned a customer for life. Always a possibility. What do you think? I am being paid to provide solutions to customers BY SELLING OUR PRODUCTS.

Is it more important to gain a few hundred bucks’ sale or a customer’s trust? What is worth more?

Alright - I am locked in for at least another year with Verizon. What is the best phone that I can get at a reasonable cost (I am not going to qualify for welcome-to-verizon sales) that has at least 40G of mp3 storage on it, is extensible, and just generally kicks ass.

The Droid seems like an option, but they’re going for $500 on eBay unlocked (or $199 through a welcome-to-verizon sale)

But you know what? … I already have a phone. And it works fine. I just have to carry it and my iPod anywhere I’d like to be able to talk on the phone or listen to music. If I wanted to access the net, I’d need my tablet or notebook too. I want all of these things - in one neat little package. And I am hearing I can get it through Droid. But if people are bidding upwards of $500 for these on eBay, what is the true cost of the Driod to an existing Verizon customer? And how do I go about making this thing happen?

My wife got a kickass new phone, can you tell?

Symantec has tossed me a copy of Norton Internet Security as a thank you for hosting the Windows 7 launch party.

Usually, I wouldn’t consider running a Symantec product on my system, but I figured I’d give this one a shot to see if it is one that I would recommend. Well, I started the process last night at 10, and let me tell you - it was a process. Mostly just because I registered for NIS using a different address than I gave Microsoft for the launch party. So that took awhile, but I have to say, I went to symantec.com and chatted with a representative who eventually really took care of the problem and gave me the registration key I needed.

Ahh but the trouble didn’t end there. I consider myself somewhat experienced in working with firewalls and such, but I just couldn’t get certain programs to run and connect properly to servers.

The trick, as it turns out, was that NIS and Webroot do NOT get along. Really, NIS has adware, spyware and virus protection as well as the firewall, so Webroot is not really needed. But *bam!* I uninstalled Webroot and everybody started working. So the two do not get along.

Once I got this issue resolved, everything is running great. The rules I created are doing what is expected of them and the running processes of NIS are using about 2% of my processors, which is fine by me - I have power to spare.

So, a couple of things: If you are running a low-powered PC, I don’t know that I would recommend NIS as it does have a lot of “features” and does use processing resources continuously. Also, if you have a different firewall, I’d probably recommend Webroot for your spyware, adware, malware, virus protection needs. If you need a fully-featured suite of all of this and more, and have the processing power to spare, NIS 2010 seems like a strong choice.

“Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. ‘That’s the day,’ Kleinrock tells The Reg, ‘the internet uttered its first words.’ …A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word ‘log’ — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the ‘log’ and SRI would respond with ‘in.’ But after UCLA typed the ‘l’ and the ‘o,’ the ‘g’ caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. … ‘So the first message was “Lo,” as in “Lo and Behold,”‘ Kleinrock says. ‘We couldn’t have asked for a better message — and we didn’t plan it.’”

I am not really sure how to go about this. There was a time, right around the time when the Challenger exploded (1986) when I thought the space program was pretty cool. You know? You have a government and private organizations investing in a program to explore the vast regions of space - probably eventually with the goal of colonizing other planets or something.

But am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time and money? When you have a space program which costs the average American taxpayer 67 gazillion dollars a year and a national deficit of $11,904,908,462,105 as of 28 Oct 2009 at 07:55:47 PM GMT, it just seems like a luxury we can’t afford. I mean has there really been any positive monetary gains as a result of our space program? If there have been, please let me know.

Look, I think the ideas of colonizing other planets, discovering we’re not alone in the universe are pretty cool, but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just paying repeated visits to a dead rock and building and modifying a space station that doesn’t do anybody any damn good either.

Next time we have trillions just laying around after we pay our debts and really do something about our health care system, then what the hell - let’s explore space. But until then, please stop wasting my money.

engadget.com/2009/10/26/brother-nec-look-to-invade-your-retinas-next-year [engadget.com]

Engadget.com reports today that NEC is developing a new type of computer display, one which beams an image directly onto your retina using lasers. This image will appear to be about a meter in front of you and be about 10cm wide.

You may have heard, GeoCities is shutting down today. To commemorate the occasion, one of my favorite sites, xkcd.com [xkcd.com] has redone their site in true 1995 fashion. You’ve got to see it!