jeffpollard.net

Musing over people

I really enjoy sitting out on the deck in the evenings. It's fun to watch people. They're funny. Kids in their Hondas with big exhaust tips run the crap out of their cars. Planes gracefully soar overhead. A random older gentleman shows up in a Miata. Never seen the car before. 3 hours later, he and a woman walk out of an apartment downstairs. They sit in the car for a few minutes, exchange papers, envelopes and some other things that I can't make out from up here. The lady goes back inside. 10 minutes later, the lady comes back out with some clothes in her hand. She and the older man sped away in the Miata. Weird. Think he picked her up? Probably. Think she'll return tonight? My guess is no.

We walked over to our new shopping center again tonight..just to walk. Things are coming along nicely. The Pier One is chock-full of merchandise. And they finally got their sign up the other day. Barnes & Noble is looking good, too. It looks like it's going to be a pretty small store, though.

A (different) lady from downstairs must have jost gotten a new car. The tires are still shiny from the dealership. And the beat-up faded old Toyota Paseo is no where to be found. That makes 4 cars between her and her husband(?).

Ok, it's starting to get cold and the Screen Savers is coming on. Later. Look for a big big announcement from our favorite fruit company tomorrow. Possibly new iBooks and a chain of Apple retail stores. One should be opening in Tyson's Corner sometime in the future. Very cool.

Day at the river

Hi everybody. Sorry for the lack of updates the past couple of days. It seems like every time I sat down to update the site, something would come up and I'd have to put it off until later.

Friday night, I went back over to that co-worker's house to install their new ethernet card to replace the one I diagnosed as fried from the lightning strike. I installed the card, called Road Runner to tell them the new MAC address, and they were back online almost instantly. I was pretty proud that I had diagnosed the problem correctly. I figured I was correct, but I always seem to second-guess myself on these types of problems.

Olivia and I decided that we needed to do something different on Saturday. So, we headed downtown to the (James) river. There's a couple parks and two islands that are great for walking around, riding bikes, etc. Apparently, one of the islands housed a prison back in the civil war days and so there are some historical landmarks down there, too. We parked the car and walked around (at least 3 or 4 miles, probably) the river bed. It's really neat looking down there because part of the river bed doesn't have water in it anymore, so there's just a "desert" of boulders to climb on and over. I took a bunch of pictures down there, so go check em' out.

Today is another lazy Sunday. We took Gizmo outside for a little walk and now we're watching the race. Gizmo was so funny when we took him out for a walk. When he gets really hot outside, he starts panting, just like a dog. I swear he's part dog.

Back to OS X...again

Howdy. Today was a little busier. Perhaps somebody at work read my post from last night and decided to answer my request. One thing I really enjoy about my job is that I almost always learn something new everyday. Sometimes it's useful stuff, sometimes it's not. for example, today, I learned that there's some incompatability between Filemaker 4.1v.3 and Photoshop 6.01. Some large clipboard items are too large to tranfer from Photoshop to FM, so Filemaker locks up, causing all open applications to crash with a type 1 error. Facinating. It was rather frustrating trying to figure this out, though.

On a similar note, I went over to a co-worker's house tonight to help with some computer problems. We had a relatively short but violent storm go through the other day and apparently lightning struck in their backyard, striking their cable line. From my testing tonight, it looks like it fried their cable modem, their 10/100 hub, their ethernet port on her G4, and the Jet Direct (ethernet)card in their HP LaserJet. Amazing. So, I'll probably be back over at their house tomorrow evening installing a new ethernet card and hoping everything works again. I felt bad havijng to diagnose the fried components (and then getting paid for it), but if it's the truth, I was doing what I was paid to do.

And...I decided to boot back into OS X this afternoon and give it another shot. So far, it's been great today...We'll see how long it lasts this time. I was able to sucessfully sync my Visor, so that's one less reason to boot back into 9.1.

Shocking..

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: A UPS package arrived today from Godfather Customs. It didn't appear to be large enough to hold the entire suspension kit, and I was right..it was only my replacement shocks that go along with the kit. It turns out that the kit is being shipped out from California. It'll probably still be another few days until the rest of the kit arrives. It was pretty exciting to at least have my new shocks here, though. :)

Am I really ready for that?

Today was another boring day. It was pretty busy this morning with some confused people not able to connect to our new and faster server. By noon, though, things slowed wayyy down and by 4:00, I was bored out of my mind. Maybe I should start playing Java-based games, like Olivia.

We both got home and professed our hunger to each other. Notice I said "to each other", not "for each other". hehe We ended up going to Taco Bell for dinner because we didn't feel like fixing anything. we've been getting in a pretty bad habit of eating out fairly often because of a lack of energy to fix dinner here at home. We probably need to try to break that nasty habit.

After Taco Bell, we decided to drive down to the apartments (and houses) down the road and look for a water spicket. Why a water spicket? You see, our apartment complex offers a "car care area". It's a little bay designed for washing you car. When we moved in (back in July 2000), the water-hose-machine charged $.75 per cycle AND there was a regular water spicket so that you could bring your own hose and use their water. It was (in my mind) a good deal, mostly because the option was there to use thei water to fill your bucket, rinse your car, etc. Very cool. Over the winter, however, two changes were made: The water spicket was taken completely OUT and the price-per-cycle was raised to $1.00. I couldn't believe it. They had made their "ammenity" into a rip-off! What's the use in calling it an ammenity when I can go somewhere else and wash my truck for CHEAPER?

So, back my original story: We decided to drive down to this other (nicer) apartment complex to see if they had a car care area with a FREE water spicket. It turns out that there was a guy standing there washing his Jeep with a hose in his hand. It looks like the hose is even attached to the spicket, so I don't even need to bring my own hose! GREAT! So, it looks like I've now found a new place to wash my black beauty. YAY!

While we were down in this little neighborhood, we drove around and looked at all of the new houses. they look pretty nice, but they're priced pretty high. The one that we stopped at and grabbed a flyer from the "For Sale" sign in the front yard had a price of $238,000. WOW. It was 2,000 sq. feet in a really nice neighborhood. I don't even think my parents paid that much for their house in Bridgewater, but I'm not that suprised..this neighborhood borders a nice golf course, so I'm sure that raises the property value, too.

And now I'm relaxing and watching, you guessed it, the Screen Savers on Tech TV. Let's all hope for a more exciting Thursday. :)

Extended weekend..extended a little further

Hiya folks. Sorry for not updating yesterday. I have no excuse, really. I didn't really have a whole lot to talk about, so I decided not to.

Today was a pretty fun day at work. It was pretty slow, which gave me time to play with some things that I've been meaning to play with for a while. One of these was playing around with installing alternative operating systems on Virtual PC. For those of you who don't know, Virtual PC allows you to run any operating systems that run on Intel (or AMD) processors, such as Windows 3.11/95/98/CE/ME/NT/2000/XP/can anybody think of any others?

Jack received a fresh copy of Red hat 7.1, so I stole it and began installing it. I realized that with my drive partitioned in half for OS X, I didn't really have enough drive space for yet another OS on there. So, I decided to install it on an extra G4/400 desktop I had laying around. In the process, I discovered that Connectix is developing a PC version of Virtual PC. I'm sure all of you PC users out there are thinking, "Why would I want to emulate a PC? I've already got one!" Here's why: Let's say you'd like to test out a new operating system. Let's say you have Windows 98, but you'd like to try Win 2000 to see if you like it. Rather that wipe your drive(s) and repartition them so that you can try out another OS, why not just make a VPC disk image and load the new OS on that!? If you decide that you're happier with your current OS, ditch the Virtual PC disk image and no harm is done to your current configuration! I think it's a great solution. And I think Connectix is an exceptional company. Just as a note, my other favorite product from Connectix is their Virtual Gamestation, which allows you to put Sony Playstation games in your CD-ROM drive and play them. And it works really well! I highly recommend Gran Turismo!

By the end of the day, I had convinced Jack that he should use the PC version of Virtual PC for his Red Hat testing. Pretty cool. And I think I convinced Tommy that he should give X-10's DVD Anywhere product a shot for his remote video needs. I feel good knowing that I helped them find cool solutions today. That sort of thing really makes my day. :)

In the next few nights, look for a little story about an eBay predicament that I'm in. And it looks like Apple will announce new iBooks next week..and from the rumors I've read, they're gonna be great. If they come out at the price point that is rumored with the features that people are whispering, it may be time to trade in Olivia's Lombard Powerbook. We'll have to wait and see. It seems like the rumors almost never come completely true.

Enjoy the new survey: What do you think is the most annoying commercial on TV right now?

From the did-I-really-think-it-was-going-to-go-smoothly? dept.

Well, I headed in to the office yesterday, met up with Jack (one of our network engineers), and got the file transfers started for our big server migration. Things seemed to be going great, and then one of the transfers bombed out about 1/4 into the transfer. Luckily, we had loaded Timbuktu onto both of our transfer machines, so we were able to control them from at home and get things rolling again.

To make a long story short, Olivia and I ended up going back downtown for about 3 hours last night around 9:00 and started two more machines copying files. Most everything is copied now, thanks to Jack styaing up late "babysitting" the file transfers last night. Thanks, Jack! As long as everything is done before 6am Monday morning, we're good.

Today has been pretty lazy. We're sitting here watching the Talledega race and I'm catching up on some old email that I've been meaning to take care of for a while. I'm pretty terrible at keeping in close contact with my friends sometimes, so hopefully this blog takes care of that when I don't have time for it. I know it's not quite as personal as directly emailing everyone, but sometimes it's the best I can do.

Special hello to Mike & Carrie Diehl and Mark Muse today! Hopefully, they'll start being regular visitors. :)

Evening at the track

We met Tommy and his wife Teresa at the Agency at 6:30 and headed south to the speedway. I didn't realize that when they say "Southside Speedway", they really mean it! But check this out, between leaving downtown and arriving at the exit for the speedway, we passed through THREE tolls, costing us a total of $1.50! All of the tolls down south of the city really aggrivate me. I think I've ranted about that at least once before on here, so I'll leave it at that. By the way, they raped us for another $1.00 to come back north this evening.

The race was awesome. It brought back lots of old memories from the Radford days of going to New River Valley Speedway. Southside speedway was cool, but it didn't seem at as nice as New River. The stands were smaller and the whole place had a pretty "cheap" feel to it, when compared to New River. I'd like to go back there sometime. But, the race was the enduro race, which made it very entertaining. You put 45 old beat up cars out on a TINY track, and you're sure to have some great wrecks. And that's what we saw. Olivia really seemed to enjoy it, too. Now, it's time to take her to a real track. We may be off to Charlotte in October for the GM Quality 500. I think she'd enjoy that, too. Anyone suprised that Olivia actually enjoyed her trip to Southside speedway?

Tomorrow(Saturday), I've gotta get up early and head in to the office to start the server migration. With 2 G4s running at 100Mb full duplex, the file transfer shouldn't take more than 25-30 hours. We'll hope things go smoothly with it when everybody comes back to work on Monday. There's also a car show at J. Sarge Community College today, so I may drag Olivia over there, too.

Drop the Chalupa!

Drop the Chalupa! Yes, folks, I've done it. I finally reared the cajones to order my DJM 3/4" kit and all 4 shocks. I'm psyched. Patrick (my buddy here at work that's gonna help me) got word from his other friend that we could use his garage, but only if I help them get their website going. Sounds like a good deal to me. Now, I just have to wait for the kit to arrive... Don't ya hate waiting??!! :)

It's off to the races!

It's been a great day so far. It looks like we'll be moving our HUGE creative server over to a new Dell server tomorrow. The new server has 8 processors, 8gigs or RAM and 1.2 terabytes of storage. Pretty amazing. The current server has been rather unreliable and currently runs Novell, so you can't connect to it via TCP/IP, making it pretty inefficient. So, this new server should rock..and we're migrating all of the data on the current server over to the new one tomorrow. I don't even mind coming in on a Saturday morning because I know how much better this will be for my customers. :)

It looks like we're going to the races tonight. Yep, Tommy invited Olivia and me to head down to Southside speedway to watch the enduro race (he's got a friend that built one of the cars that's racing tonight). These guys get out there in their old beat up cars and race as long as they can until their car either blows up, crashes, or runs out of gas. It's pretty funny because it ends up closer to a demolition derby than a race. Brian and I really enjoyed watching this same type of race at the Radford Speedway when we were in school. You can be guaranteed of seeing at least one fight break out. It should be fun.

I think I may have found someone to help me install the DJM suspension kit for the Tacoma, so I may go ahead and order the kit. I'm almost sure I could install it myself, but I asked a co-worker that used to be into mini trucks and he said that he'd be happy to help me. He's got a buddy that has the most coveted of all assets-- a garage, so, he's going to ask him if we can use it one Saturday in the future. Once I know that we can use his garage, I'm ordering the kit. Life is just too short to ride that high. :)

Happy Friday!

Retrospect and Mac Vs. PC

Not too much to talk about tonight. Olivia and I did some pretty major grocery shopping, then we came home and watched TechTV, chatted with Mike and Brian, and watched TechTV. Meanwhile, I worked on installing retrospect and Retrospect Client on our computers. I now have a not-so-organized backup schedule that backs up all important data on both Olivia's Powerbook, my TiBook, and the "server" G3. It's pretty cool: basically, I tell it what needs to be backed up, how often I want it to be backed up, and where to back it up to. So then, every two weeks or so, I just burn a CD of all of the backup files on the server. Pretty easy. And it only cost me $10 on eBay for the network clients.

On techTV tonight, Silicon Spin featured a discussion on the future of Apple. Our favorite fruit company announced a quarterly profit of $43 million today and expects that to be even better next quarter. So, the debate on Silicon Spin was about whether Apple is a leader in the PC market or a follower with a dim future. With John C. Dvorak anchoring, the debate was fairly one-sided, but the lead editor from MacWorld gave some great arguments why the Mac is a great platform and will always survive because it innovates, not immitates. It was pretty frustrating listening to those guys give totally bogus reasons why Macs are inferrior. For example: PC Guy: "Macs aren't expandable." MacWorld guy: "That's totally untrue. The new Power Mac G4s have 4 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot, 4 DIMM slots for up to 1.5GB or RAM, 2 extra slots for Zip or other removable media, 4 internal slots for hard drives, plus Firewire and USB, which is used in almost all peripherals on the market." The PC guy came back with: "Well, but the iMacs aren't expandable at all" Well, that's sort-of true..but that's only ONE COMPUTER. The iMac is designed for people who don't care about expanding..and the G4 is built for people who DO. It's just amazing what arguments people come up with. Arguments that have no backing.

Anyways, it's off to bed for me. And I'll sleep well now, knowing that all of my data automatically gets backed up often. :)

More Intranet and a long meeting

Today was more time spent working on this new project for our research department at the Agency. I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but basically they want every person in the company to be able to do their own research. As it is now, everyone sends their demographic and comsumer research requests to two guys upstairs. This new website will empower each person and allow them to do their own research. Yay progress. The research guys have some great ideas, it's just a matter of us executing them and making it easy to use. today's loooong meeting was with two of the partners of the company and some other execs top show them how this will improve efficiency. It was kinda neat to be included in such an "important" meeting. And after engaging in the discussions in that meeting and planning out the future of of the site, I'm excited. And with Tommy being back, I should have time to make all of their wishes come true.

When Olivia and I checked the mailbox tonight, we found three..yes, folks, THREE pink slips to pick up packages at the post office. Now, that wouldn't seem like such a bad thing for most people. The only problem I have with it is: we have large boxes for the mailman to put large packages so that they don't NEED to put those pink slips in our mailboxes and make us drive all the way to Innsbrook to pick up our packages. What a pain in the ass. This is the 3rd time they've done this in the past few weeks. Pretty frustrating.

Let's all pray for warmer weather later this week so that I can change my oil and wash the Taco. For those of you enjoyed the flower picture I posted yesterday, here's another close encounter with some daffodills (did I spell that correctly?) in Mom's flowerbed. Click for the larger image. Enjoy!

Another Monday

Pretty slow day for me at work today. I started building another part of the Intranet. This department does marketing research (studying demographics, trends, etc.). We've gone through 6 or 7 different designs in Photoshop and they finally decided on one. Their site should be a very useful resource for everybody to use.

I started looking closer at the information for MacWorld New York for this summer. It's going to be a LOT of fun. It's gonna be SOO neat to finally go to one of these events. I can't wait. That's going to be July 17-20.

That's about it for now. Happy birthday to my boss, Glen Groat! He's 40 today. We celebrated by eating cake and poking fun at him for a few hours this afternoon.

Easter Weekend

Olivia and I had a nice time in Bridgewater Saturday and today. We went to chuch this morning and enjoyed dinner at a local family-owned resturaunt after that. Olivia finally got to enjoy her cherry pie that she's been craving for a while now.

Today was pretty dreary. I tried to fix the license plate light on the taco, but with no luck. It looks like I'll have to call and order a replacement unit from the manufacturer of my roll pan.

Tonight, we've been watching TV (including "Deep Impact", one of the corniest movies released in the past 5 years) and I've been burning backup CDs of our important data. I've been trying to be better about backing up personal data (email, photographs, etc) more often, just in case I ever had a bad crash.

Enjoy the picture of a red bud tree near Mom and Dad's house. Click the image for the full-size image. beware, modem users, full-size image is very large. It makes a great desktop wallpaper!

Gettin' my money's worth

I'd like to share a little story with you all from tonight's activities. But you can't tell anyone. Oh wait. This is a public website. Oh well. So much for this being a secret. But here goes anyway:

Ever since Brian and I got our Handspring Visors, Olivia has been wanting one. She can't, however, deny laughing at me for carrying a pocket computer during the first few weeks, though. She argued that you didn't need a $250 computer to do what her paper organizer could do. Since then, she's come to realize how many things you can do with a Palm device and now she wants one, too.

So, I've been watching DealMac for a good coupon deal at Staples. I recently found a coupon that gives $40 off any purchase over $200. So, in my time off today, I called our local Staples store to ask them if I could use an online coupon code in the local store. The worker told me that I'd need to bring in the entire email that I received from Staples.com to get the discount. Seeing as I never received the email, knowing the coupon code didn't get me anywhere. Luckily, I found a guy who copies many of the Staples.com email messages (all sent in HTML format) and makes a web page from them. The only problem with his pages is that none of the coupons he has are for the $40 off of $200. But, the coupons are nothing more than GIF files. So, with the help of my favorite Adobe software, I was able to -ahem- modify one of his coupons to reflect the discount I wanted. I inserted that GIF back into the "email", and printed it out. I now had a VERY REALISTIC printed email message from Staples.com with a $40 coupon.

We arrived at our local Staples, marched in, asked for an Ice Handspring Visor and proceeded to the counter to pay for it. The cashier rung up the Visor ($249.95). Olivia handed him the printout of our "email". He entered the coupon code. And then he told us the total sale: $219.43. Not bad. And, to top it all off, Handspring is currently running a $50 mail-in rebate, taking the final cost of Olivia's Visor down to $169. Not a bad deal at all.

So, that's my story. I haqve no guilt about my actions tonight because if I would have been on Staples.com spam--err- mailing list, I would have had that email (and the coupon). So, many thanks to Dealnn for having such great coupon coverage, to "tomguy55" (whoever he is) for having a great template that I could work from, and to Staples for assuring me that my image editing skills are still polished up.

We're heading to Bridgewater tomorrow afternoon to spend the weekend with Mom & Dad, but I'll probably update my site from there tomorrow sometime. Have a great weekend!

My day off

Ahh..it's sooo nice to be able to sleep in. It really is nice that we get so many holidays off. That was once of the reasons I couldn't turn down the Agency's job offer. It's not always the $$, but the benefits, too. :)

I'm sitting here watching one of my all-time favorite shows: The Price is Right. What an awesome show. I can remember being home when I was in elementary/middle/high school and I'd always make a point of watching Bob Barker. Wow, he's really getting old. I wonder, is he going to continue doing this show until he finally keels over one day while announcing the next contestant? And, I noticed something else today: Not half as many of the ladies kiss him as used to.

Ok, well, I have to go take care of a bunch of odds and ends that I promised myself I'd take care of today. I made a list and I plan on getting every single one of them done. More later..

A change to comment areas

Please note that all comment areas are now in the "correct" chronological order. Before, when you read through the comments, you had to start at the bottom and "read your way up" to read them in the correct order. That's no longer the case. When you post a comment, it will appear at the bottom of the comments. This should make it a little more natural to read. Anybody disagree?

It's a perfect night outside. Olivia and I are getting ready to go out and skate. First time for either of us in months. Wish us luck! :)

My 2.5 hour inspection

I arrived at BadYear this morning at a few minutes before 8am. I left there at 10:30. It turns out that my rear license plate light had burnt out. But, it's not just as simple as replacing the bulb. Nope, my Godfather Customs rollpan has a sealed light in it...so, when the bulb blows, you're screwed. So, the guy at BadYear jerry-rigged a little light up for me with duct tape so that I would pass inspection. That was a pretty nice thing to do, considering he could just have easily slapped a rejection sticker on it. It ended up being $10 for the inspection..and then another $9 to put that light in there. I feel violated. But, what's new? They really raped the lady that got her car inspected before me. "Ma'am, it looks like the rubber boot that covers your C-V joint is torn a little bit. You might want to replace that." Jeez.

On a happier note, it looks like we're getting out at 2pm today. YAY! So, my workday has been terribly hard: Come in at 11, leave at 2. I'll probably take an hour or so lunch here in a little bit. And then we've got tomorrow off, too. Not quite sure what I'll do tomorrow. Perhaps I'll install a new license plate light. Have a great day, everybody.

Inspection Crap

Virginia is about the dumbest state when it comes to motor vehicles. Not only do they have laws that prevent you from modifying your vehicle at all from the norm, but they also have dumb regulations pertaining to yearly vehicle inspections. To make my long story short, I went to get my truck inspected this evening after work. I get to the shop (I'll refer to them as "FirSeUsCtKoSne") and the guy tells me that they're too busy to do my inspection. So I ask the nice man if I can make an appointment for tomorrow evening at about the same time. He replies, "Sorry, Virginia law says that we can't make appointments for inspections." I go next door to the other shop (we'll call this one "Badyear"), where I get basically the same answer. And they only do inspections from 8am-5pm. So much for your everyday working person getting their car inspected. As it turns out, I can probably squeeze it in before I go to work tomorrow morning. I can't wait.

Well, it looks like my survey (see below)is a total flop so far. Of course, I haven't really told many people that I've started putting some new features on my site. Perhaps that would help. Or perhaps if they're that interested, they'd stop by more often. It's only been one day so far, so we'll see what happenes. I really can't complain, though. Site traffic is a little more than double what it was about a week ago. I really enjoy dropping in every once in a while and seeing the comments that you all leave. Thanks for making my day more interesting! I hope giving you a glimpse into my thoughts makes your day a little more interesting, too!

The red Taco on I95

This morning as I was passing through downtown on 95, I saw a slammed red minitruck up ahead in the next lane over. As I got closer, it started to look more and more like a red standard cab Tacoma. Cool. It had been a good while since I had seen a slammed one in person. I think I almost caused a wreck from craning my neck and checking it out. I think I'm obsessed. I've GOT to do it.

Run Away!

Run away! Run away! That was me after this weekend's experiences with trying to use OS X to get my work done. Yes folks, it scared me. What scared me most of all is when I was using GoLive to update my website and it locked up halfway through uploading this web page. DOH! I ended up with a 0K webpage. Not good.

So, it's back to OS 9.1 for me. I honestly didn't see that coming. However, now that I'm using Greymatter, I no longer need to use GoLive to update my site every day. Yay progress!

I've also decided to start putting a survey up on my site every few days. This week's poll tests your geekiness. I've been really enjoying The Screen Savers at it's new time slot (7pm and 10pm). Tech TV also sweetened the deal by making it a 90-minute show now. I'm loving every bit of it. So, do you watch Tech TV? How often? Post your comments in the discussion area.

It's been pouring outside for a good while tonight. It's interesting to watch Gizmo during a thunderstorm. He gets very scared..one of the ONLY time's he's ever scared. I think it's good for him, though. Sometimes I wonder if he believes that he's invincable. I see thunderstorms as God's way of putting him in check.

Netscape fixed

It looks like the incompatability with Netscape and my site has resolved itself. I guess in the change-over to this new format, some code got moved around..for the better. Now, all of you Netscape users can enjoy jeffpollard.net again.

DOH! I just read my

DOH! I just read my buddy Brian's blog tonight where he tells a horrifying tale of me stealing his thunder with my new format. I feel terrible now! The truth of the matter is: He gave me this wonderful idea (in which, I think, he stole from Leo) and I capitalized upon it before he had a chance to.

So, BK: this is my official (and public) challenge for you to get your Greymatter blog up and running and make it the very best that you can. We all know you'll get more traffic to your site before it's all said and done. :)

Oh, by the way..I have

Oh, by the way..I have to apologize for my complaint about not getting any hits the past few days. It turns out that I somehow deleted the code for my hit counter in this page! DOH! Hopefully, this new system will keep me from making that mistake again. Yay!

Folks, I'm bloggin' it now.

Folks, I'm bloggin' it now. I made a pretty dramatic change to the site today. This front page is now an "official" blog. It is run with the help of a software program called "Greymatter" (thanks to a genius named Noah Grey). Greymatter is actually a set of Perl scripts that make my updates MUCH easier to perform. I don't have to use a web-editing program to update my site anymore. Nope, I just go to a secret little web page, login, and update my blog!

The best part of this new system is that it allows you all to respond to my daily thoughts. So, when you're reading through my daily updates, please post a comment or two in the comments section. (Hint: you can access the comments area by clicking on the [# Comments] link at the bottom-right of this update.

Because this is so much easier to update, start looking for updates from me AT LEAST once day. Hopefully, this will alow you all to not only see what I'm doing throughout the days, but also hear more about what I'm doing everyday.

Look for another cool feature coming in the next couple days.... What do you think of this new format? What else would you like to see on my site? Sound off in the feedback area!

Well, I got a slap

Well, I got a slap in the face tonight when I checked out my hit counter for this page: 0 hits from Saturday and 0 hits from today. Oh well. I had hoped that more frequent updates would bring you all back here more often. I'll keep trying. Plus, I have a few more ideas that will hopefully make this page more fun (and keep you all coming back more often to see what's new).

I've been doing some thinking this weekend about my truck and where I want to go with it. You see, building a truck (at least for me) is not just as simple as performing mechanical changes. I try to look at it from a long-term point of view. I guess in other words, I try to rationalize it. It seems to me that many of the people who customize their vehicles don't put much thought into the reprocussions of altering their vehicles. For example: I'd LOVE to lower my truck about 4 or 5 inches, put 17" or 18" wheels on it and drive it like that. Even further away (in the future), I'd love to put air bags on it, REALLY slam it and be able to raise and lower the suspension as needed. But, the fact remains that I drive this truck everyday to work and I need it to be a dependable means of transportation. Going back to my previous sentence,it seems like many people that enjoy customizing their vehicles don't give this much forethought to doing it.

I'm reminded of the days when I first purchased my teal D-50 back in '94 or so. I was only 17 and all I wanted to do was fix it up and drive it. And I did for a few years and then the bug of Mr. Mark Muse caught me and I began customizing my truck in crazier ways than I had ever imagined. I started paying a lot more attention to detail and because of this became so afraid of ruining it that I didn't want to drive it very often. So, I drove it to shows, usually did pretty well, then took it home and put it back in the garage (or under it's cover). That was Ok for a while, but then I realized that I wasn't really having fun with it anymore. I wasn't doing what I had initially purchased it for..driving it and having fun with it! So, that was my main reason for selling it.

So what does that have to do with my current dillemma? I'd love to start working on this truck, but I'm afraid I'll head down the same path I went before and become
afraid to drive the truck. Or worse yet, perform modifications to it that deteriorate the dependability of it. So, I guess what I've been pondering over for the past year and a half that I've owned the truck is: How far do I REALLY want to go with this? The "fun" side of me says: "Hell yeh! Slam it!" And the more sensible side of me says: "Well, maybe this isn't such a good idea.." I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think I should do.

Aside from looking through Mini Truckin' magazines all day today, this weekend has been pretty boring. Olivia and I finally got out to the mexican restaurant near our apartment and had a yummy dinner there Saturday night. Have a great week, everybody.

Look at this! 3 updates

Look at this! 3 updates in 3 days!! One word, folks: OS X. I spent almost the whole day playing with my new-found-friend: Ten. And what a great friend it is. For most of the day it was extremely stable with only application crashes slowing me down. So far, I've had no trouble using the new classic apps like iTunes, ICQ, and OmniWeb. I've also had very good luck with my existing OS 9 applications like GoLive, Photoshop 6, and even classic Internet Explorer 5! It still seems funny to call Internet Explorer 5 (for os 9) "Classic". The only thing that I really wanted to do today that I was not able to do was hotsync my Visor. I tried a few times with absolutely no luck. I'll try again tomorrow. I hope Palm releases an OS X version of the Palm desktop software soon!

Performance is really my only gripe with this whole system. Opening windows and launching applications seems a little rough, but I've heard that the forthcoming update will hopefully fix some of those issues. I also read today that installing the developer's tools further optimizes OS X. It almost sounds like the engineers at Apple "forgot" to put the code to optimize the OS in the OS X installer..so, but running the dev. tools installer, it optimizes the system there. I may try this tomorrow. Everything I read today on the mac web indicated that doing this almost always helps a good bit.

So, there it is. OS X, day 1. And I'm still looking for a good reason to go back to OS 9. :)

Quick update tonight. I've spent

Quick update tonight. I've spent basically the entire night installing OS X (TEN, people..TEN..not Ecks!) on my Titanium G4. Anyway...I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! So far, EVERYTHING...let me repeat: EVERYTHING has gone smoothly. I've sucessfully run Outlook Express in Classic with absolutely no hassle, and now I'm running Adobe GoLive, updating my website using the FTP browser function. Very cool. And quick. However, I have noticed a few things that seem to be a little pokey (resizing Finder windows), but I feel sure that Apple will fix those shortly with 4L7 (10.0.1 for all of you non-Mac geeks out there).

Bottom line? I was scared for nothing. I feel bad that I doubted that Apple would make a kick ass operating system. I can't to continue using it tomorrow. As of now, I can't see any reason to go back to 9.1 on my PowerBook. I'll write more about this tomorrow night. Goodnight, everybody!!

Here I am again, updating

Here I am again, updating my blog for the second day in a row. Yay me! I'm sure some of you are looking at the last sentance and wondering, "Just what the heck is a "blog", Jeff? A blog is short for web log, or (in other words) a web journal. And that's basically what I've got here. I have to admit that starting my blog was inspired by Brian Korte. He's got a blog over at his website that he updates EVERYDAY. If you haven't gone over there, go check him out now! I've also found out recently that Leo Laporte has a blog that he updates at least once a day, if not more than that! I think it's great to see the "inside view" of a TV stars life. For those of you who aren't toal geeks, Leo Laporte is one of the hosts of TechTV's The Screen Savers TV show. He seems like a great guy..I'd love to meet him.

Today was pretty boring. I worked on making designs for a group of people in the Agency that want to put their content on our Intranet. However, they don't seem happy with anything I show them, so I continue to creat more and more prototypes. Hopefully they'll make a decision soon..I'm running out of ideas!

The monthly XMUG meeting was tonight where Bill Chin gave a GREAT presentation on MacOS X. Man, this is such a kick ass OS. I can't wait to get my hands on the final release. For those of you wondering why I haven't loaded it up yet: I'm waiting on our supposedly-pre-ordered copy to arrive at the Agency....but I'm getting a little impatient, so I may go grab myself a copy tomorrow. It's worth it. Apple really has worked hard on this and (despite it's shortcomings in the 1.0 version) it is truly going to be a wonderful OS.

That's about it for today. As a parting note, it's interesting to watch my hit counter on this page..it tends to fluctuate up and down, indicating to me that most of you don't come here everyday. To encourage you all to visit more often, I'm going to make an honest effort to start updating my blog more often. So, start checking back here more often..you won't be disappointed!