Geek

I have officially fallen in love with Netflix’s streaming service. We have used it on and off since it was introduced a few years ago, but after watching the entire single season of “The Event” at my convenience, I am now seeking out other series to watch in the same way.

A couple of weeks ago I started watching “Downton Abbey” from the beginning of the series. I just finished the season one this morning. I’ve also picked up on “Heroes” again, starting with the plot reboot midway through the third season, and that is something that I have been enjoying for the most part. (“Heroes” went way off the rails for a while, there).

Even though I used to make my living writing ad copy for radio and television commercials, I have come to absolutely loathe ads. I can’t stand to watching advertising during television broadcasts, I always buy a paid version of an iPhone or iPad app so I don’t have to see ads floating all over the place, I dislike the ads that are constantly being flung around the LED ribbon at the Carrier Dome during SU games and I go out of my way to avoid internet services that are ad supported. Ads are one of the reasons that I also struggle with Hulu Plus; after paying $9.99 a month I don’t believe I should be watching ads, even if they’re less in number. I’m canceling the Hulu Plus subscription this week but keeping Netflix because there’s no ads being sent my way on that service.

With the ad supported internet services, it’s not that I worry about data mining or sharing my personal preferences, my life is hardly that interesting, I just don’t want services trying to sell me something that I most likely don’t need.

I’m looking forward to starting the next season of “Downton Abbey” tonight. The writing is smart, the score is brilliant music and the show has done a good job of keeping me engaged. And the cool thing about Netflix, of course, is that I can pause watching the show on my computer, pick up in the bedroom on the Apple TV right where I left off while I fold laundry and then pick up again on my iPad when I go to workout or something.

Wicked cool. That’s probably not a phrase in any of the scripts of “Downton Abbey”.

Originally posted on my Google+ stream.

Today I added a new clock to my master-slave clock collection in the house. This one is from 1940. All of the clocks in the collection were made by The Standard Electric Time Company. The are minute impulse clocks, so the make that click-click sound once a minute that was common in American schools in the 20th century. They run on 24VDC and are controlled by a relay board connected to a Pentium II 233Mhz running Debian Linux. The program used to advanced the clocks was written in BASIC by me a couple of years ago and compiled using FreeBASIC. Uptime on the server right now is 340 days.

This particular clock hangs on the wall in my office, replacing a bigger version of one from the same era. It is a smaller, 9-inch model, which would usually found in small offices scattered through a school. Most classrooms had a 12-inch clock hanging on the wall. Gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, etc tended to have the 15-inch version.

I started collecting these clocks in the mid 1990s. I became fascinated with these clocks on my first day of kindergarten back in 1973.

One of my friends from high school wrote on her wall that she was disappointed with President Obama because he was wining and dining with Hollywood celebrities while poor people starved. This was the first thing that I read this morning and it ticked me off. I promptly deleted her from my friends and it made me wonder why I even bother with Facebook in the first place. People say really stupid things on there. I also wondered if her breath was still as hideous as it was in high school.

I’ve been ranting about Facebook on and off for the past couple of weeks but I think I have come to the point where I have seriously OD’d on it. Aside from a photo of a 1970 Amana Radarange that another friend shared today, I stared at the stream and wondered why the hell I was wasting the time. It’s kind of like watching TRU-TV’s crap reality shows with people that you allegedly know. It got me to wondering, do I really still ‘know’ people that I went to school with 30 years ago? There’s a few on there that I still enjoy very much, but there’s also a couple that were downright cruel to me during high school and now they want to be “friends”. You scarred me for life, why would I want to continue that sort of frivolity? And yes, being told that “you’ll never fit into society because of your mannerisms” will scar a person for life. You’re lucky I don’t hunt your computer down and put a virus on it.

Now while I’m ranting about Facebook friends, I have to share flipside and say that there are a couple from high school that I have been happy to reconnect with. It was amazing to see a bouquet of flowers from “The Lunch Table Crew” at my father’s services last December. That was a bright spot in a bleak time. I have enjoyed thanking old teachers for helping me even though they didn’t really know they were doing it at the time. I like seeing what former bloggers are up to, those I have met in person and those that we haven’t crossed paths with yet and only met electronically. With the decline of personal blogs and the tendencies for folks to microblog in its place, you have to kind of be on Facebook if you want to stay connected with those folks you knew from the ’00s. But for the most part, the platform seriously pisses me off.

I think I need to cut my Facebook consumption by 9/10ths and seriously prune my friends list down in the process. This might make things more manageable and less irritating.

But I’m seriously keeping the friend with the cool Radarange.

So I spent the entire weekend being a geek. This is something that I like to do from time to time, and on-call weekends lend themselves to being of a geeky nature anyways, so I figured I might as well just jump into the geek with both feet. It was a wonderful feeling.

A geek weekend for me is kind of like a weekend for Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory”. A few seasons ago he mentioned that he had delightful plans for his weekend by installing several different Linux distros on his laptop to see which one he liked the best.

That’s what I did!

I tried several different variations of Linux on both my non-Mac laptop and my old desktop PC that resides in the darkest corners of our basement. Just for kicks I threw in a second test install of Windows 8 and determined that I still hate the learning curve associated with the completely new interface of Microsoft’s latest offering, so that quickly gave way to another Linux test. I laughed manically as I wiped out Windows. I haven’t done that in a long time.

Earl and Jamie were off to a concert on Saturday night so I had the house to myself. Being alone in the house and in complete geek mode is one of the most recharging things I can do. I suppose that if I were in the same situation a century ago, Earl and Jamie would have been going to a different kind of concert and I would have either been reading a book or taking apart the Victrola. I’m sure I would have felt that “recharged feeling” on the Monday after that weekend a century ago, just as I am feeling recharged today.

Part of my geek weekend was inspired by the fact that I upgraded the studio iMac to Mountain Lion. We purchased this 21-inch iMac in 2009. With the upgrade to Mountain Lion, I now have a dark band across the screen, 1/8th of the way up from the bottom. The gradients of the gray background now look like the stripes in one of my favorite Atari games, “Super Breakout”. I don’t know if Mountain Lion gave the iMac a heart attack or if it was just a coincidence, but I’m really disappointed that an Apple piece of hardware is failing at only three years old. With the premium price paid for Apple hardware, one would expect further longevity. The aforementioned desktop PC is nine years old and it’s holding it’s own just fine and it was cheap!

I’m going to continue to use the iMac for as long as I can still see what I’m doing but when it comes time to replace the studio computer, I’m probably going to reconsider the Apple approach and go with something that can run Ubuntu Studio (Linux). The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software I use (Ardour) works in both Linux and on a Mac, we might as well save some bucks if the hardware experience is going to be the same. I get a tingle of delight thinking about the geek weekend involved with changing out the studio computer someday. I don’t usually tingle very easily.

So after trying out all these different distros of Linux (and the two instances of Windows 8), I have decided that Ubuntu Linux is my distro of choice. I am making a concerted effort to not purposely break the install on my laptop to see if it can hold its own for a month.

Being a geek for the weekened does have me recharged. I guess it’s the ISTJ* in me. That’s not a bad thing.

* I’m not usually a fan of labels, but this one doesn’t bother me as much. Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging.

Photos taken with my iPhone4.

I don’t know if this is actually a conundrum, because technically a conundrum needs an answer in the form of a pun. This is definitely a “first world problem”, as I’m about to somewhat complain about one of my technological arrangements that I am currently pondering. I know, many should be so lucky to have these problems.

I am typing this blog entry on Jamie’s laptop whilst sitting in a hotel room in Saratoga Springs. I didn’t bring a laptop, because I have pretty much relegated my 2008 MacBook Pro to being my DJ computer. Adding the additional stuff necessary to make a vibrant blog would bog the older MBP down too much. Plus, I like the ability to travel with just my iPad. I don’t have to worry about backpacks and all that; my iPad is available to me just about anywhere and pretty much fits all my needs.

Except when I want to write something, especially if I didn’t bring along an external keyboard.

Apple purists have a fit when someone mentions using an external keyboard with an iPad. They say that Steve didn’t design it that way and if we really need a keyboard, we should buy a MacBook Air or something similarly sized if we dare stray outside of the Apple Reality Distortion field. The truth of the matter is, when you’re capable of typing at nearly 100 words per minute, you’re going to find the iPad virtual keyboard on the screen to be quite frustrating. I know that there’s videos of people typing at nearly their native speed on the virtual keyboard, but they are people with less than 5% body fat and therefore have fingers that are bony (and usually kind of ugly without the accompanying hand makeup). My fingers move quickly but I find the experience of typing a blog entry directly on an iPad to be vexing. Frustrating. Not worth the effort.

This is a shame because there are times that I really just want to write, whether it be on my blog, in my journal or just to get my thoughts down in a text document. It’s what I do.

Here’s where the first world problem comes in.

On my lunch hour I have the bluetooth keyboard that is stored in the Jeep. The iPad (and cover) are draped over the steering wheel, the seat goes back to its farthest position and the keyboard sits on my lap. The problem with this, for travel outside of the Jeep, is that I need to remember to bring that keyboard along in my suitcase. I barely remember to turn off the lights in the house let alone grab a keyboard from the Jeep. But I definitely don’t want to incur the expense of another computer (besides, that would NOT fly with my budget views nor my husband’s views).

So, for folks that have an iPad, do you think that I should get one of those cases that comes with a keyboard and makes it look pretty much like a Macbook Air? Do you have any experience with one of these keyboards? I tried one like that a while back, but it was made of plastic and the keyboard was tiny. From what I understand, the new versions of these have full-sized keyboards and are quite sturdy.

Any recommendations would be most welcome.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled weekend in Saratoga Springs. If have included a link to all my Instagram photos in the menu bar across the top of the blog. Erik helped out with getting that working.