Geek

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.

jpnearl.com is moving to a new host. This blog entry will only appear on the old host. If you see it, then you’re still looking at the old location of jpnearl.com. Your ISP will catch up with the internet within 72 hours. 🙂

See you soon!

Update (3:10 PM EST): I’ve decided to wait until after our trip to Florida to do this maintenance. I need to pack first and I can’t be going away with my blogging software in flux! 🙂

I took a few moments to finish up a project I’ve been wanting to do. Using an extra webcam, an old blue and white PowerMac G3 and some nifty software, may I take a moment to introduce our “weathercam”.

This is a view of our backyard. Why did I do this? Because I can.

jpnearl.com is up and down like a yo-yo again today. I’ve been trying to post a blog entry, complete with pictures, since 9:00 a.m. this morning and have not been successful. I find this frustrating. Hopefully things will be better tonight.

We’ve used this hosting company for a long time. I think I’m ready to move to a new company though, at least for this site. Since I’m such a Mac Fan, I really want to move to a hosting company that uses Mac-based servers. Not that I have anything against Linux but if I’m going to drink the kool-aid, I might as well drink it in gallons.

So I apologize if the site has been wonky for the past couple of days. I hope to have the problem fixed soon.

Tonight’s “Heroes”. Amazing. Unbelievable. The best episode yet! That’s what good television is all about.

And no Nikki/Jessica two weeks in a row!

Yay!

I have made an absolutely fabulous discovery on the internet. It’s called In2TV. It’s AOL’s free video streaming service. It has a TON of classic shows that you can watch on your computer.

Now I’m going to say that I like this service very much. I’ve already watched a number of episodes of “Alice” (from various seasons so that I could get all versions of the theme song stuck in my head), the unaired pilot of “Gilligan’s Island” with two secretaries named Ginger and Bunny, an unaired episode of the series “Aquaman” and early “Superman” episodes. And I just discovered In2TV last night around midnight.

Unfortunately, it’s an AOL product so naturally it’s not done as well as it could be. For example, you can download many of the shows to your computer in DVD quality and watch them in full-screen. The bad news is that AOL decided to utilize Windows-exclusive software to do that, so you can’t do it from a Mac or Linux computer. Non-Windows users are forced to watch a smaller picture as it’s streamed and they can’t save the file. From what I can tell (since this is a Macinhouse), Windows users can download the files and watch them full-screen but they expire in a couple of years and you’re limited to the In2TV player, so there’s no transferring to an iPod or anything.

Now this service may have been around for a while and you may already know about it, but I’m hooked. In fact, I’ve become so excited about streaming video over the internet that I’ve also started downloading more videos on iTunes in the process. Those we can watch full screen on our Macs (all bow before Apple).

So get over to In2TV for complete Visual Lavinzation.

Update 10:20 a.m.: OMG they have “V: The Series”! OMG.

I’m not a morning person. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I barely speak English before noon. But in an effort to be a worthy, contributing member to society, I’ve been getting up around 7:30, even though my first class isn’t until 11:00. After getting up I usually mess around on the computer, feed the cat and watch The Golden Girls for a bit before getting in the shower and officially starting my day.

As a quick aside here, I must say I don’t understand those who don’t shower first thing in the morning. I am not awake, functional or pleasant if I have not showered in the morning. It’s the way I wake up. Those that don’t shower aren’t bad people, I just don’t understand how they can get started with their day. That’s all.

Anyway, this morning my mother called to reschedule our planned outing for this evening. I was already awake but I could tell she was hesitant to call me because she knows how I can be in the morning. While we were talking I noticed that the call was full of static. This has happened on and off for the past couple of days, since the completion of my wiring projects in the cellar.

So before I took a shower, before I was dressed and before I was speaking English, I rewired the phone connection to the outside world (including making custom cables), installed a shelf in the server room and relocated all our network equipment to the new shelf.

Now there’s no more static on the phone, the internet is faster and life in general is good.

And I haven’t even showered yet. Viva la productivity!