Geek

So I have been on call for work this week. This in itself is a regular occurrence and something I knew fully well that I would be doing on a regular basis at my current job. It’s not the most pleasant time of my life but it’s bearable. There are some aspects I really enjoy about on call; mostly because it keeps me at home and I do stuff around the house but also because I feel like there’s an extra boost in the team camaraderie department when all of us on call folks are working together (one of us from each relevant department). I get a better sense of teamwork with those I don’t work closely with during the normal workday. It’s not a bad feeling.

One of the things that on call does is make for some irregular sleep patterns. I opt to sleep in the boys’ room when I’m on call because I occasionally have to get up in the night and I don’t want to disturb Earl with my trips back and forth to my office. I sleep on top of my pager, which has been set to vibrate, because the dinging of the pager makes me insane to the point of a rabid response: I foam at the mouth, spout out obscenities that would make a person with tourettes blush and then I throw something. I am not wired to handle the wide variety of the pseudo friendly beeps from the pager but I can easily handle something vibrating under me in bed. Go figure.

Erratic sleep schedules make for some interesting dreams. If I sleep for an hour or two, get called for work for an hour or so, go back to sleep for another hour or two, rinse and repeat a couple of times, by the last sleep cycle before morning I usually am in the midst of intense, whacky dreams. Such a thing was happening this morning around 7:45. I was in the middle of a very vivid, engaging dream that was taking place in a palace of some sort. Smells, sounds and color by technicolor was involved and quite frankly I was enjoying the experience immensely. I was in some sort of third person role and simply observing the action taking place in the dream when everything just froze with the “freeze” sound effect from “Bewitched” (you’d know it if you heard it). From here I walked around my surroundings a little bit a looked at everything frozen when I heard another “ding”. With the sound a Windows XP dialog appeared right in the middle of this frozen scene in my dream. Still fully asleep and dreaming, I was standing in the middle of a palace with all action frozen and a three dimensional Windows XP dialog box in the middle of it all. I walked all the way around the Windows XP dialog box that hung in mid air and then read the contents:

Wake Up And Look At Your Pager
[OK]

I remember reading this message in my dream, musing to myself about the contents of it and then I awoke with a start. Next to me, my pager had accumulated 20 pages in about three minutes and I had slept through the vibrations because the pager was lying on the bed next to me. My subconscious found a creative way to communicate to me and proved one thing to me at the same time.

I’m odd.

See, I’m not the only crazy clock guy.

I’m cleaning up the seemingly hundreds of e-mail accounts I have spread all over the internet. It’s part of yet another attempt to be organized when we kick off the new year in five or six weeks.

I have two e-mail addresses now. jp@jpnearl.com has become so bogged down with spam that it isn’t even funny and the others have unwieldy web interfaces or are a little too public for my tastes, so all the others are getting shut down at the end of the month.

The primary e-mail address to contact me is:
imachias-at-me-dot-com¹
(You have to make that look like a regular e-mail address when you send me mail. Robots like to grab e-mail addresses from blog entries.)

jp@jpnearl.com will still work but your e-mail won’t get read. Don’t send anything to my work e-mail address because that should rightfully be used for work only. If it has my last name in it it’s my work address. If you’re sending me something dirty (sorry, mom) you probably already know the other e-mail address I use for that. You can send me dirty stuff at imachias-at-me-dot-com and I won’t mind at all. My Gmail, Hotmail and Live accounts are all going away at the end of the month.

¹ So much for that Windows 7 hype I was spun up about a month or so ago.

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles unveiled the new license plate design slated to start appearing on vehicles in April 2010.

All vehicles in New York will be transitioned to the new license plates over a two year period, replacing plates that debuted in 2001. The official word is that the current plates are losing their reflectivity and were only guaranteed to last for five years anyway. Unofficially, the extra $25 fee to buy the new plates (which you must do to renew your registration) will add a lot of money to the Empire State.

The new design harkens back to the plates used prior to 1986 and will feature the states official colours with blue characters on a gold background.

The official name of the plate series is the “Empire Gold Plates.” Motorists wishing to keep their existing plate number will be required to pay an additional fee. Like the current plate series, NYSDMV will not identify which county you are from by the letters in the plate number, opting to start with “AAA1000” and moving on from there.

I like the fact that there are no fancy graphics on this plate series and that it appears that a huge amount of money was not spent on the design of these plates, since the Empire State is experiencing an unprecedented fiscal emergency.

The official press release from NYSDMV is here.

271b.365, originally uploaded by iMachias.

Today marks the third part of the geek-trifecta that was underway as Canonical released the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. One of the most popular desktop distributions of Linux, like it’s brethren Ubuntu is free to download, burn to a CD and install on your computer. On the desktop it is generally thought of us a replacement for Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.

Now I know that last week I was excited about the release of Windows 7 and I’m always excited about my Macs (well, for the most part) but I have a special place in my heart for Ubuntu as well. There is a part of me that is suspicious of all things corporate. I don’t like not knowing what my computer is doing, how it’s doing it and who it’s telling my business to. I have a bit of an issue with Facebook and Google in this regard as well as I don’t quite fully trust “the cloud” yet, but with Linux you can see all the source code that makes up the operating system if you wish, so there is nothing to hide. There are no hidden switches, no secrets calls and no privileged code in Linux and to me that can only be a beautiful thing. Not only are bugs discovered faster, they are squashed even faster than that. And by the way, viruses are not an issue on Linux.

I’m going to install Ubuntu tonight on one of the non-Macs here in the house. I’ll probably yak on about how it went in a couple of days.

By the way, in the picture at the top of this entry I was enjoying my hot chocolate in my Ubuntu Linux mug. I have contemplated getting that symbol as a tattoo as a branding of my geekiness.

So last week I was all excited about the launch of Windows 7. I proudly installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my computer, I hosted an official Windows 7 Launch Party and I was 99% sure that I was ready to jump back on the Windows bandwagon again.

Why, oh why, Windows 7, did you fail me this morning?

I attempted to install Google Chrome as my browser of choice on Windows. I dutifully downloaded the file and then ran it. Windows 7 bonked at me for my permission and I granted it.

Then the screen turned blue. I was thrown back to the days of yore. That’s right folks, Windows 7 shunned me by showing me the Blue Screen Of Death.

That’s just mean.

I don’t know if the blame lies with Google Chrome or with Windows 7. The betrayal of trust I felt with that BSOD made me remember why I switched to Linux way back in the days between Windows 98 and Windows Me. It also made me happy that my trusty ol’ MacBook Pro was sitting there, patiently waiting for me to come to my senses.

Do I still recommend Windows 7? Oh, very much so. I need to figure out why Windows 7 and Google Chrome had their little skirmish this morning, but that all-too familiar flash of blue on my screen chipped away at the foundation of trust I had built with Windows 7. I still think it’s the best operating system to date from Microsoft.

But is that enough?

I know typing that title is going to make my Mac fans gasp in horror but at the very least I can proclaim that last night I was a PC. It was last night that we celebrated all things geeky with a Microsoft sanctioned Windows 7 House Party.

Our party was a happy hour.

Now I know that visions of nerdy types with pocket protectors drooling around a laptop in a dimly lit room instantly come to mind when one thinks of a party celebrating a computer operating system, but this wasn’t the case at all. Thursday night Earl and I planned out a relatively nice menu for the event that was pulled off well. The only problem with the food was the vegetable tray; apparently the catering service we ordered it from had new help or something because the broccoli was frozen broccoli that had been cooked and was turning brown. It  was arranged quite nicely but it looked, tasted and smelled awful. The ranch dip was bleu cheese and the tomatoes looked like they had already hit a politician. So we skipped the veggie plate but the rest was quite nice. Beverages flowed, conversation ensued and fun was seemingly had by all.

The actual Windows 7 part of the party went on a little longer than I anticipated. I set up my Lenovo desktop computer in the living room and used our 42-inch plasma television as a monitor, which was great for the presentation. There were several themes that you could pick from for your party and I chose to focus on the media capabilities of Windows 7 and the User Interface enhancements. I went into instructor mode and kind of lost myself in the demonstration a little bit in that I was really enjoying it; Earl said he never realised that I could show computer stuff like that because usually I shove him aside and hastily click click click my way through his latest technological problem. I told him that I would remember that conversation and in the future be kinder when he needed help from me.

At the end of the night I gave away some Windows 7 swag; everyone got enviro-friendly shopping bags with the Windows 7 logo on them and I had some drawing for door prizes, including a puzzle and a deck of cards. The grand prize was a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. I think that was well received.

All in all the party was a great success. I have to admit that spending yesterday finalizing ideas of what I was going to show off during the little presentation really made me appreciate Microsoft’s efforts to make the Windows 7 experience simpler for their users. Last night I made constant comparisons between Windows 7 and it’s older siblings and it’s biggest competitor OS X. It is obvious that Microsoft was inspired by Apple on some of the new User Interface elements of Windows 7 (the Dock-like taskbar being one of them), but as I said last night, I have used every version of Windows since Windows/286 and this is clearly the best version of Windows I have ever used. It looks good, it feels solid and it behaves itself. And ironically, the company doesn’t feel as Draconian as Apple these days.

I have pretty much made Windows 7 my main operating system of choice. So I guess it’s true, I’m a PC once again.