Jeff's Thoughts

I’ve picked up small books over the past couple of years…always with the best intentions of reading through them. They typically have some type of historical/motivational slant to them. I started thumbing through one of them and became obsessed.

And sure enough they had it on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Quotes-Leaders-Peggy-Anderson/dp/1564142868

Screw. You.

Drool…..

I don’t usually dig exotics but this one caught my eye for some reason. 270 mph? Come on who doesn’t need to go that fast?

Autoblog

http://wordpress.org/download/

pretty sweet. Figured I pay for the hosting space might as well play around with it.

This book has got to be one of the most visceral fictional books i’ve ever read. I won’t ruin the the story line, so much as touch on the premise. Imagine being alive but being robbed of all your senses. No legs, arms, hands, smells, tastes. Locked in your own thoughts barely being able to distinguish if you are awake or dreaming.

Freedom, liberty, country, all words and when framed and put in perspective next to what life really is the absurdity of any war strikes right at the heart.

This is a powerful thought provoking anti-war novel and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

Bored and seeing if this thing still workers….etc….likely WP is hacked to shit and needs to be wiped out. C’est la vie.

As of late I’ve been consumed by work, but in the few moments of down time I’ve found two relatively new addictions on the internet…

lifehacker.com

Basically this blog posts articles about how to intergrate technology into your everyday life to make yourself more productive.  Among the coolest things I’ve found on this site is a link to mint.com. Security concerns aside, I took the plunge and it is freakin’ cool. I’ve come to not use any technology if it doesn’t do something for me that I wouldn’t want to do myself, and in this case its balance my check book and give me a clear picture of my finances across all my accounts and credit cards.

and

consumerist.com

This site has turned me into a customer service fiend. I came to the realization, i would estimate at over 2 years ago, that if you ever have an issue that requires a call to a customer service rep, be it for a cell phone bill, or other account issue you must have had some bad karma coming to you. A call to a comcast service rep is a pain in the ass I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This site documents egregiously bad customer service incidents as well as puts an ever brightening spot light on corporate Americas “screw the consumer” attitudes.

Powered by ScribeFire.

And I’m as pleased as ever.

A little over a month ago I installed Ubuntu Linux ’s Edgy Eft on my production workstation. I use this machine pretty much all day everyday. I’m a network admin/help desk/server admin IT guy and this machine needs to perform or I can’t do my job.
After a few obstacles, I wouldnt even call them obstacles so much as normal desktop set up routines, I had PDF’s displaying fine, printers printing,e-mails mailing, and file shares sharing. My box integrated into our windows network like a duck to water. The terminal services client let me interface with my servers just like the client in XP and with a little “apt magic” I had wine set up and it was quite content to run the windows ultra-vnc client we use to manage all our remote desktops when a user calls in with an issue.
After feeling very confident that I could do all that I could do in XP in my shiny new OS with a whirling 3D desktop, although some may argue sucks productivity actually aids in keeping me alert during monotonous trouble shooting calls from the field, I had to reset a domain password. I had to reboot to windows. First time in about 2 weeks.
I figured I’d do a little googling for linux active directory tools, then I kept digging and seeing if I could find LDAP tools that would work. No such luck. I was tied to “active directory users & computers”. So I set up 1 of the spare PC’s we have laying around and just leave ADUC running on it and it actually increased the ease of completeing tasks in AD as that admin console takes a a year and a day to open up…but thats another story.

More updates to come….perhaps a top 10 useful apps to know once you switch over.

2/1/07

I took the plunge. I upgraded to Vista. Well I made my first feeble attempt at it anyway. I downloaded the upgrade from Circuit City, backed up my data, and kicked off an “in-place” upgrade. It failed royally. The percentage bar reached 95%, my computer rebooted and I was greeted with a lovely BSOD.
My primal technolust and burning desire to have the latest and greatest came back and bit me in the ass per its usual style…meaning I now needed to reinstall my entire OS and tweak it to my desires. A good 3-4 hour process, maybe less if I’ve done it a couple times in the recent past. I do this exact task multiple times a week at work or on virtual machines, but this was my rig. My digital life boat in cyber-space. I was now hours away from listening to my iTunes music library, and a good 10 CD’s worth of game installs and patching on top of that from indulging in my digital heroin that is World Of Warcraft. I was less than pleased.
I am an admitted technology addict. Despite being burned by my upgrade attempt, I was uplifted by the fact that it was easy enough to click a few buttons and return my $260.00 Vista download. (Yes, I paid that much for a downloaded file.) My “genuine” install CD’s of Vista are in the hands of UPS now and my next attempt at the jump to Vista is fast approaching..

2/8/07

I’m back up and running my OEM copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. For 4 days now I’ve been getting acquainted with my new operating system and there are some perks and as with any major change in OS some growing pains.
For the first day and a half my hard disk was making thrashing noises as if in constant use. This worried me a little so I did a little googling and come to find out Vista is indexing all of my 750GB of HD’s. The iTunes library always campe up big in my books because I could type in any part of a song or artist and boom my library would trim down instantly to what I was looking for, I type “rock” it shows me my rock music or any song with the word “rock” in it, very intuitive. I now have that same type of functionality with my entire hard drive and document library. I tweaked the indexing feature to only index certain folders and the thrashing came to a finish quite fast. I have a good 4 years of IM logs and eerily I can type in almost any persons name or screen name and be staring at every conversation I’ve had with that person on AIM over the past 4 years. Nifty feature.
The eye candy. One of the features touted in many a Vista article is the “Aero Glass” interface. I do admit it is very pretty to look at, but I do think its not all that original. I mean look at beryl…and that is free. As far as responsiveness on the whole its about on par with XP. This will obviously change if you turn off aero-glass or vary dependent on system hardware.
The widgets or gizmos, aka wastes of screen space are very functional, some more useful than others. The clock, CPU, Memory, and HD widgets seem to fit just right in on my 24″ widescreen LCD, but on a smaller screen may just prove to be to much clutter. As of now the “live gallery” has pretty slim pickins as far as selection for additional downloads go, but as with most new OS releases time will remedy this issue.
Driver support. From reading on boards and other sites is peoples most frequent gripe. All my hardware picked up and worked, and if it didn’t have a driver Vista was kind enough to go out and download the ones I needed. For those of you wondering if your system will work with vista, if its less than 1 to 1.5 years old the answer is most likely yes. Anything older than that bought from the consumer market I would say would not provide the best experience with Vista.
I’m going to continue to use the OS for a few more weeks and provide some more impressions as I become more familiar with the environment.2/15/07

• WoW, iTunes (at least for me), BitTorrent, more specifically uTorrent, work without a hitch for me. The 3 major things I use my computer for all work flawlessly. DRM’ed tracks from iTunes play, DivX and Xvid files play in media player fine, and dead-aim works for instant messaging. Things seem sluggish at times but nothing to the point of effecting usability.

• Interface - nice, usable, nothing to ground breaking. Not so much an upgrade as a change of scenery. A welcome one, but still following the Microsoft formula of finding a good idea, stealing it, and then selling it to make a buck.

• UAC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80sWifG40B0 - the secret service agent in this ad…thats UAC. User Access Control. And it is FREAKING ANNOYING. For any enthusiast user or person that likes to change the desktop to meet their working style it is a major pain in the ass. Don’t believe me? Try changing around your start menu in Vista. It is most certainly a welcome security feature for Mom and Dad using the computer, but for anybody that likes to change things around I recommend turning it off while you get yourself settled and have everything how you like it and then go ahead and turn it back on.

Overall Impressions so far:

I’m on the edge, an early adopter, where I like to be and despite all the annoyances and growing pains I’ve experienced along the way with my jump to Vista I have not been discouraged enough to say “screw it” and go back to using Windows XP. Time, I can only hope, will help to remedy some of my gripes, but for those with the capable hardware and the burning desire to upgrade to the latest and greatest take the plunge…enjoy the OS as it matures. For the feint of heart and those averse to a little change enjoy the rest of XP’s still long and useful life span.