Geek

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!

I’m in the process of migrating my blogging software to a new platform (WordPress). It should be done by the end of the weekend. You might see some weird messages or changing formats untiI I get everything in place, but fear not, my entries and your comments will not be lost. I would never let that happen.

Update! If you’re using an RSS Feed to monitor this, you’ll probably have to update your bookmark/favorite.

I am sitting in lovely Syracuse, N.Y. in the food court at Carousel Center as I type this blog entry. I had no intention of coming here today, but I’ve been riding around in the car and decided that this was as good a place as any to stop for a bit.

I’ve been riding around because I’ve decided to take a new approach to my vidcasts. I have retitled the feature “Let’s Go For A Ride”, and I videotape them as I’m driving. I’ve done two so far and as soon as I get my YouTube channel set up properly I’ll be sure to post the link so the curious can indulge themselves.

Carousel Center has high hopes of becoming the largest mall in the United States soon. For the past ten years or so the developer has wanted to turn this into “DestiNY USA”, which would be a huge tourist attraction with hotels, an expanded mall, an indoor park and many other visitor friendly attractions. They’ve also mentioned developing a monorail system through the city of Syracuse to go hand in hand with this venture. So far a few symbolic beams of steel have been pounded in the ground as the developer and the local politicians fight back and forth about tax benefits and other assorted widths of red tape. I’m not as informed on the topic as I’d like to be, but I’d really like to see something positive happen in this area and I can’t help but think that this venture would be a positive thing for all involved. But what do I know, I’m just a college student with a big mouth and a blog.

One little delight I hadn’t planned on was the new Chicken Salad Frescata sandwich at Wendy’s. I usually don’t equate “yummy” and “Wendy’s” together, but I found this sandwich to be quite enjoyable. I highly recommend it.

In between homework assignments, class and watching news coverage today, I worked on the little “Alumni Band Project” I started a month ago. I have this crazy notion of gathering a bunch of my high school alumni together and forming a marching band for the village parade (we call it a ‘Field Days’ in these parts).

Part of the activities included putting an informational website together, pricing fabric for homemade colorguard banners, searching for sheet music and printing flyers to be included with the alumni newsletter.

Just for kicks I dug out my old “band jacket” that I got when I was a sophomore in high school.

It still fits!!

I’ve updated my blogroll over there in the right column of my blog pages. Now my blogroll is up to date and if I’ve forgotten any that I read then I guess I’ll have to add them too. I’ve also changed my picture just for the heck of it. I just thought I’d throw that out there.

I’ve adopted this quasi-superhero sounding screenname of jp2.0 for various sign-ons I have scattered about the web. It makes me feel all techy. I guess I needed a change of pace or something.

I did have someone recently ask me about “Owl”, which usually appears up in the address bar of your web browser when you land on this site. He looks like this:

Owl has been with me since 1990 when I was using Microsoft Windows/386 (that would be Windows 2.1, golly I’m old). He represented a maintenance program on an old IBM PS/2 and I thought he looked pretty groovy, so I copied him and brought him along for the ride with this geek. I used to drop him on the desktop of any computer I worked on so I’ve spread some owl love back in my day. I also put him somewhere on every website I maintain (including the ones I get paid for). He appreciates the gesture.

Green On The Horizon.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

While Earl competed in a poker tournament at Turning Stone Casino today, I decided to drive up to my hometown area and visit with my dad at the family lumber yard and hardware store. It didn’t feel very springlike with temperatures in the low 30s and some interesting snow squalls. I grew up in the heart of the Lake Ontario Snow Belt, and today the area lived up to it’s reputation.

Sooner or later it’ll start acting like spring.

I decided to take the long way home, as I’m inclined to do, and passed through a rather remote region of the area. I discovered that a large wind farm has been built on the Tug Hill Plateau. The Maple Ridge Wind Farm is one of the several wind farms that have recently cropped up here in Upstate New York. These wind farms get a lot of opposition, but I applaud their efforts for harnessing Mother Nature’s gift of the wind for our energy fulfillment purposes.

I am hesitant to write this blog entry for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s about the geeky subject of computers, and some looking for some beefcake shots may find that boring. Perhaps I should pose with the computer naked or something. Secondly, and this is the primary reason I was hesitant about writing this, I’m talking about the latest incarnation of Microsoft Windows and that would be: Windows Vista.

Where oh where has the Mac fan boy gone?

In our large stable of computers in our Macinhouse, we do have one relatively new HP Pavilion laptop computer. We purchased this back when I started school so that I would be able to keep up with my civil engineering drafting assignments, and remain compatible with my teachers and peers since Microsoft Word for Mac can occasionally get a little wonky when trying to convert to the PC platform.

Since we bought the PC during the “Vista is coming any minute” time frame, we were offered a free upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium. The CD arrived while we were away.

The upgrade process was rather painful as I got several “blue screens of death” on my “Windows Vista Capable” computer. I finally just backed up my documents and wiped the hard drives completely and started from scratch.

I hate to say this but I really like Windows Vista. It’s a smarter, better looking version of Windows XP and believe it or not, there are some things that it does better than Mac OS X. (I didn’t think Windows Calendar would trump iCal, but I like it better and find it a little more intuitive to use.)

There were some drawbacks to the upgrade: my virus protection software is not compatible and there’s a few programs that complain about not knowing what Vista is, but on the whole I’m rather enjoying my Vista experience. And I’m surprised by this.

I no longer feel guilty because I’m ignoring this brand new school laptop. I’m rather enjoying it now.