Posts Tagged ‘Tech Stuff’

The beast that made me forget my MacBook

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Maybe I’ve talked about my current work laptop before, maybe not.  I don’t think so.

I posted how much I was going miss my MacBook Pro way back then.  Well, the laptop I’ve had for the past months has made me forget about my MacBook Pro.  A day or two before Thanksgiving vacation, my Dell arrived.  I immediately stripped off the Win7 it came pre-installed with, put Ubuntu64 on it with Win7 running withing a Virtual Box.  Things have worked amazingly since then.  I went from 10 minute database bootstraps on my old WinXP machine to 50 seconds bootstraps on my Ubuntu machine.  The thing rocks!  I love being able to go to the command line when I want to.

So why did it enable me to forget about my MacBook Pro.  Well, it probably would’ve cost less to buy me a Mac.  8 gigabytes and a solid state hard drive have a way of causing deficiencies to disappear.  I loved the thing over these past months.  It will be another sad day come next Wednesday when I hand it over.  :(

On this day…

  • 2008: The Part Time Developer 3: Hibernation Mode — I got probably a good 3-5 hours in this weekend concentrating on working through another Hibernate tutorial, experimenting with the [...]
  • 2005: Friday! — Not much going on today. Did some extreme grilling tonight for a pretty big meal by our standards. [...]

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Surface

Friday, October 30th, 2009

When is this going to be widespread enough that I can buy one for $100.  Too bad I can’t write things for it in pure Java.  Google needs to start designing one of these babies.  Microsoft has been at it for what seems like 5 years and we’re still no closer to having it as your average home appliance.

On this day…

  • 2007: Body Doubles — They say everyone has a twin. I’m starting to believe it, though I’ve not found mine yet.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/1789772531/
    By the way, [...]

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The future is near, tomorrow

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

You have got to check this out from TED conference.  Some pretty cool ideas here.  It’s pretty futuristic, I don’t know who besides us geeks would walk around with painted nails and that lanyard.  I don’t think I would, but I’m sure it will get smaller in time.  Perhaps the next generation of programming will use this for input.

My fear would be what it would display as I’m going to the bathroom.

On this day…

  • 2005: Another game — One of my latest acquisitions on the board game front is called Circus Maximus. It’s a chariot racing game [...]

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What’s the probability you know the probability?

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

I remember taking a probability class in college.  I found it very interesting.  I wish I would have kept the book, but I think I sold it back for quick cash.  Here’s an interesting little brain teaser for you.  I admit I got it wrong.  Probabilities are something you really need to take the time to think out in some cases.

Here’s another interesting thing I happened upon today.  Just when you think there are no good useful ideas left to be created on the web, here’s a great example of something useful.  It’s gives me hope that maybe I still have time to be hit by a good idea.  Sure you could manually do the same thing with Google Maps, but they piece everything together in one package.  I could see myself using this to find a golf course between here, Sixftunda, and L-town for a golf scramble with him, Poobah, and brother of Six.

I heard about this on a DotNetRocks podcast.  It was at CodeMash and Carl and Richard interviewed Joe Fiorini and company about a 48hr Ruby programming contest that their site won.  (.Net?  Yep, I subscribe to the CodeMash philosophy of finding something useful across the language divides.  While there’s a lot of episodes that don’t give me much, there’s enough programming and design philosophy discussions to usually maintain my interest.)

I actually met Joe at the 2008 CodeMash though I doubt he’d remember me.  He and Kevin Fonner spent some time at the bar that first night, wagering for my soul as they tried to convince me which dynamic language I should learn.  Joe was for Ruby, Kevin for Python.  Took me a while to get to it, but I’m finally getting around to tinkering with one, though it’s Groovy.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it back to the mash next year.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there are a ton of people from the Cleveland area doing cool tech stuff these days?

On this day…

  • 2005: Time — Well, I finally got around to attacking that little punchlist from Friday. Here’s the update. Haven’t imported any CD’s, [...]

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