Geek

While many think that gay men hit all the circuit parties on Saturday night, Earl and I are proving to the contrary this evening. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a circuit party before. Anyway, Earl and I are sitting in the café at Barnes and Noble with our Macs back to back, meaning we’re facing each other. There’s not a lot of people here in the café this evening, perhaps they are at the circuit party. There is one guy who thought he was hot stuff with his newish computer until the boys opened up their Macs. Mac trumps newish every time.

Earl is listening to iTunes and being super studious and putting entries into Quicken as we sit here. This is a good thing, for I don’t think he’ll scold me for the receipts I have turned in for the week. At least not in public. At least I hope not.

I have a couple more blog entries waiting to be posted today as I’ve been messing around with vidcasts today but forgot to bring along the cable to upload the files to the computer. Much to Earl’s chagrin these will be posted by the end of the weekend.

I always find people-watching at Barnes and Noble to be such a fascinating exercise. There’s a woman ordering a mocha-chocha-la-la-loo-loo at the counter when in fact I believe she just wants a cup of Sanka. I think that Barnes and Noble should provide translator services for those that don’t speak snobby latte. There’s been several layers of confusion on all involved with the ordering process. I think it would have been easier to squeeze some Joe out of Juan Valdez. She asked for coffee with a little milk and ended up with a latte. She’s now returning it because there’s too much milk in it, even though it’s half and half. “I thought you meant a little creamer.”

There’s two kids (one boy, one girl) yelling at the top of their lungs and showing their somewhat rotund, bare stomachs at each other and yelling “cheese” in unison at varying intervals. Oy.

Earl has discarded the aforementioned receipts with nary a cross glance in my direction, so I think I’m safe as far as the checkbook goes for the week.

It’s fun to surf in public at Barnes and Noble.

As a diehard geek, I get excited about the new technologies that are being introduced on an almost minute-by-minute basis. We are seeing cool, new things everyday; for example, the upcoming Apple iPhone has a “wow” feature that a mobile phone rarely achieves. I don’t see me owning an iPhone any time soon (mostly because of price), but I think we’re about to see the next big leap in mobile communications.

While the iPhone is quite exciting and intriguing, there are few things that make me gasp with excitement when I see technology. I usually have this “yeah yeah yeah” approach when I see new ideas, especially when they come from the folks at Microsoft. However, Microsoft Surface made me say out loud, “now that’s cool.”

I never thought I’d be referring gentle readers to the Microsoft site, but take a look at the Microsoft Surface website. Talk about a cool piece of furniture!

And while I’m on a technology discussion, I’m just going to say that I’ve just about forgotten about the upcoming release of Leopard. It’s so yesterday.

I was just able to import all of my old blogger blog entries from July 2002 to May 2005 into the current incarnation of “Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity”. Looking back over these moldy oldies makes me realize a couple of things:

1. I babble on and on about the same things.
2. I’m constantly looking to improve myself.
3. I’m sort of eccentric in an odd way.

Now I just need to figure out how to get that first year’s worth of manual journal entries into the software. Maybe I’ll save that task for the next rainy day.

Michael at Manhattan Chowder has tagged me for a meme so now I get to write about Me. Me. Shocking!

So here are the rule of the tag:

* Post a similar post like this one and add a linkback to the person who tagged you.
* List down 5 reasons why you blog about the things you blog on your blog.
* Choose your 5 tag ‘victim’ and tag them nicely 🙂
* Write a comment on their blog letting them know that you tagged them. Voila!

And away we go:

5. I think it’s important to give the world the opportunity to see into the lives of your normal, everyday, low drama gay couple.
4. I like writing. I ain’t so good at it sometimes but nonetheless I love throwing words on a computer screen, arranging them in a sensible manner and making them stick.
3. I like the geek aspects of blogging, making everything look nice, arguing with my webspace provider on what I want to accomplish, keeping the software running.
2. People in my real life have grown bored of my bitching, now I can just bitch out loud to anyone that will spend a few moments on my blog. I have an opinion on anything and everything and it’s good to be able to share that.
1. I love making people laugh, giggle or at least chuckle. Hopefully some of my blog entries do that for the reader.

So now I get to tag someone else. As we spin the wheel of bloggers, we land on:

Sean at Idle Eyes and a Dormy
Séan at pretinama
Karl at Adventures in Gastronomy
Pete at It’s Just Nothing
Jeffrey at Allogenes

I’m not a big fan of leaving comments tagging people, as I feel like I’m trying to push viagara or something when I’m doing it, so don’t be surprised if I don’t mention it. Does that make me a bad meme-er? Gosh, I always feel so dirty with the tagging part, like I’m passing a chain letter or something. If this is a chain letter then I wish nothing but happiness for those that receive it, regardless of what they do with the meme.

Now I won’t feel as guilty.

So last night was the season finale for “Heroes”, bringing a close to this volume of the series. Be forewarned that I may mention spoilers if you haven’t seen the episode yet.

Earl and I were in his hotel room in Schenectady last night so we had to watch the episode in “real time” versus tape delay via TiVo. I don’t know how normal viewers tolerate the huge number of commercials in the show! It’s a little bit out of control. I highly recommend that those with access to iTunes download the episode if they can’t watch it without the ads via a TiVo or something.

It looks like I’m running contrary to the fans on the 9th Wonders message board (one of the many sites devoted to the show). Most of the fanboys felt this episode was a let down but I have to say that I truly enjoyed it. The writers would be fools to bring complete closure to the series with this episode, so we were left with some lingering questions that will undoubtedly be addressed in Volume 2.

This was the first episode where I actually cheered for Niki when she whacked Sylar across the face with the parking meter and when she knocked out that increasingly irritating Candace. One little nitpick: previous episodes alluded to the fact that Candace never appears as her true self because she’s heavy, and when she was knocked unconscious (or dead) by Niki she went back to the pretty version of Candace. Should she have reverted to some person we’ve never seen before?

I thought the teaser of Volume 2, with Hiro in 17th century Japan, looked interesting but it didn’t engage me as a viewer. I’m not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for next season.

On the whole, though, I appreciated the fact that the Heroes were all working together at the end of the episode and I was pleased with the manner and amount of resolution we were presented with.

The only downside to the showing was the preview of “Bionic Woman”. That looks like it could be a good show but it is definitely NOT the Bionic Woman we know. They should have come up with a new Bionic Woman and then got all Buffy or Alias on us. I wish they would change the name of the lead character to something other than Jaime Sommers.

So I’m back on my PowerBook G4 full-time again. Last night I had to catch up on some web site work for my various sites, as well as some sites I maintain for various charitable organizations. While I don’t use a lot of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing functions unless I’m in a crunch and use the same text editor on both Linux and OS X (Vim for the most part), I had a dilly of a time trying to create graphics and maintain the sites using the tools available on Linux. I could accomplish the task, but it wasn’t as easy to do as it was on my PowerBook.

Plus, any and all fonts look infinitely better on OS X and that makes a considerable difference when you’re staring at the screen for long periods of time.

So I moved all my files to the larger server in the house (we have two here, yes I am an übergeek), powered down the HP computer and powered my PowerBook back up. The rest of my editing flew once I switched back and the whole experience felt more comfortable.

If you don’t want or have a Mac, I still recommend Ubuntu Linux for the everyday chores. I had a weird thing going on with YouTube videos locking up the system that I couldn’t solve and I couldn’t make any vidcasts using Linux due to a lack of webcam drivers, but for everything else I must say that Ubuntu was adequate. It’s not as nice as Mac but it’s not as vulnerable as Windows when it comes to security and the great part is the fact that it’s free.

I guess it’s true that once you go Mac you never go back.

Some of my readers have noticed that the “Made On A Mac” badge in the right-hand corner has been replaced with a “Made On Ubuntu” flag. It’s true, and I may have mentioned it before, but I have moved off of my beloved PowerBook G4 onto my HP Pavilion laptop full time. There’s a couple of reasons for this, the primary being that I had this beautiful laptop that we had purchased last fall for school that I wasn’t using. It was just sort of sitting there on the other desk, occasionally being used for school work. I couldn’t post my homework to my online classes using it, because Windows Vista isn’t compatible with the industry standard “Blackboard” software (for online classes) used by thousands of college.

The other thing that has been sort of bugging me about Apple, aside from the delay of their latest version of OS X, Leopard, is their advertising campaign. The “Hi, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads have been on for a year or two. They’re starting to get on my nerves because I’m finding them somewhat hypocritical. Apple makes fun of the fact that Microsoft delayed Vista for five years and then delays Leopard six months. Apple’s latest ad makes fun of the trial software installed on Windows computers, which I find exceedingly annoying as well, however, Earl and I have had to remove trial software from our new Macs. Plus the guy that plays the Mac is getting entirely too greasy for my tastes. I like my Macs to look clean cut.

As a former commercial copy writer for both television and radio, I always worked under the thought that the best commercial is the ad that points out the positives of a product instead of harping on the negatives of your competition. At the very least, don’t harp on your competitor for doing something and then doing the exact same thing.

So I wiped out the hard drives on my new HP and installed Ubuntu Linux. The setup survived the acid test of the 12-hour ride in the car yesterday, with several stops in wi-fi spots.

I’ve made the switch. To Linux.

Well, I’ve messed around with this blog layout on and off all day today. After a discussion with Earl regarding our website, we’ve decided that we’re going to completely revamp the site, so this is the new look of the blog.

I hope that you find your reading experience in this new format to be enjoyable, please let me know if there are any quirks that you encounter. I’ll still be tweaking here and there as my moderate OCD kicks in, so you might see a few improvements once in a while.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program!