Spaghetti, Not the food.

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Why is it no matter how much I clean my desk I always have a rats nest of cables?

Have you ever noticed where computers are wires follow?

All these wires and cables have a function and they’re used at least every other day.

Then you add the wires for the HAM radio… And this is a small little thing and yet, More wires… It’s a radio! you know, the English used to call them Wireless sets so what gives?

Then add the myriad of cables for connecting this widget or that one to my computer and it all turns into a rats nest pretty darn quick.

I’ve been looking for solutions.

What I really want is a thunderbolt hub with about 6 USB 3.0 ports and at least 2 thunderbolt outputs.That would give me a ONE cable solution to plug in to the computer and I’d be able to route all the cables to a point under the desk out of sight. The closest thing I’ve found that would do What I want is $329. Wow! It’s very nice, but still a little rich for my blood.

For $329, I’ll keep sorting through the cables and complaining about it. Maybe If I complain a lot… I’ll get it for Christmas!

Yeah, now there’s a plan.

I can’t resist…Yet MORE Techno-Drivel

Some of my friends are going to glaze over and possibly start bleeding from their ears and / or eyes.

Sorry


Yesterday was lost in a flurry of upgrades.

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some of you may be aware that Apple announced a number of new products yesterday, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Among the announcements were a couple of key things for me personally.

1) The delta between my current iPad mini and the new iPad mini isn’t great enough for me to begin lusting after a new iPad. Yes the retina display is nice and the processing horsepower might be handy but it’s not enough for me to chuck my iPad Mini in the bin.

2) Apple announced the release of their newest OS X called Mavericks and that it was FREE. Along with that announcement as that they were making their version of office suite applications free. As well as their iMovie, and Garage band applications.

Yipeee! I was downloading the stuff as soon as it became available.

Thus far this has been the absolute nicest OS upgrade I’ve ever done. Impressive as heck, and Mavericks runs just fine on a 5 year old MacBook Pro. Lets see you run Windows 8 on a 5 year old Dell.

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Oh and did I mention OSX is free? 

The systems upgraded perfectly, they were a bit slow at first mostly due to indexing and other stuff going on behind the scenes plus downloading application updates and housekeeping.

This morning the machines are their normal selves and fast as ever.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have all upgraded on my iPad, iPhone and on my computer too. Yes I still use the MS Office suite but for most things the Apple equivalents are just as good, read and write Office formats, and total cost is $60 instead of $200 or $300.

Some people in the news have called Apple a bit mean for their references to Microsoft during the announcements I personally think they weren’t mean. I think they were simply stating that the emperor’s got no clothes. 

I’m kind of hoping that Microsoft will take this as a challenge, or a red hot poker in the butt. I hope that they start concentrating on quality, and paying attention to what their customers want and need instead of the crap that seems to be coming out of focus groups.

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After all I do have to support clients running Windows. It would be far easier if Windows was stable and my clients liked it. As it is I’m supporting XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8 god help me.

Apple on the other hand is obviously trying to get all their users to the same OS and application versions. If they’re successful it will mean it will be a lot easier supporting their user base than having 4 or 5 variants in the field.

Another amazing number to me was the number of users that had upgraded to IOS7 in one month. It was something like 60% of their installed base. Dang! That speaks volumes and I have to admit I’m much happier since I drank the Apple Kool-aid and have a homogenous computing environment.

I think Apples catchphrase should be “Everything Just Works”

But then again…

I’m biased.

 

 

 

Warning… This is techno-drivel…

Sorry to my non geek friends…Stop reading before your eyes start bleeding.


I noticed that Blackberry is releasing a version of the BBM (Blackberry messenger) for iPhone,  in 2008 it was a pretty neat application.

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I used it a lot but it was only really useful if your friends also had Blackberrys.

The practical upshot is that I had a grand total of about 10 people that I chatted with using the BBM service.

I’ll admit that there was a momentary “OH Cool” when I read that BBM was out on the iPhone.

Then I thought about it.

I can’t think of a single person in my circle of acquaintances that still uses any blackberry device. 

Wow! 

I really hadn’t thought about how long it had been since I’d even seen a Blackberry, other than the one sitting at the bottom of my sock drawer.

So at this late stage in the game, why the hell is Blackberry even bothering? The single advantage to BBM was that you didn’t use your carrier text messages. BBM used Blackberrys servers and your data plan instead of .20 text messages. 

Who doesn’t have unlimited texting these days?

BBM used to be top of the line.

A big disadvantage was that you couldn’t just reach out to anyone. They had to have a blackberry and you had to exchange a PIN number. On the one hand, this completely eliminated SPAM on the other hand the initial sync procedure was a pain in the ass.

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How is BBM any better than Apples messenger or simply normal text messages?

There are far more of my friends today that have iPhones. Apples Messenger works across iPad, iPhone, and the latest Mac OS X versions.

It’s simple, efficient, and just works. Messenger sends via your data plan if it knows the other device is something Apple. Your iPhone will select text messaging if the receiving device isn’t Apple. 

Had Blackberry continued to dominate the smartphone market and serve their business market, BBM on iPhone and Android today would be a welcome application.

However with the minuscule presence of Blackberry in smartphone market and the growing BYOD (Bring your own device) paradigm. I think the BBM application will suffer a fate similar to Blackberry’s formerly ubiquitous phones, obscurity and eventual irrelevance.

Sad really, when a great company slips and falls like Blackberry has.

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Have you heard about Widows 8.1???


Apple will be releasing OS X Mavericks shortly.

As I think about Windows and how poorly the latest versions have been received by the general public.

It occurred to me, if Apple wanted to drive a stake through windows heart (too much TrueBlood), they’d release their latest OS for $19.99 on any Intel platform.

Compared to the outrageous cost of Windows, I wonder how many people would simply say, “yeah I’m done with Windows” and pony up the $.

Perhaps that would be a more merciful death for Windows than “The Death of a thousand fuckups” it’s experiencing now. 

Nah… Apple won’t be that merciful to Microsoft. 

We read your beads without ever talking to you…

 

NewImageWe know you don’t belong here.

We don’t have to ask, all we have to see or hear is the way you race your little wanna be drifter car with it’s flatulent exhaust into our neighborhood.

We know you’re out of your element precisely because of your dark windows.

We smile seeing you lock up your brakes when the pavement runs out.

We know you’re lost, led astray by your GPS.

We see your confusion at being lost because you don’t understand the failure of your technology.

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I’ll give you a little hint… Mountainous terrain and the mineral composition of the mountains can, and often does introduce errors in the GPS signal.

If you’re depending on your phone to give you guidance you better hope that you’ve got a cell signal too.

Not that I care… I personally wait for the day when one of your morons goes flying up my street, and straight into the wash.

I don’t necessarily hope that you die but I’m a big believer in Darwin awards.

Not that any of you would understand what the above sentences mean, you’re dumbfucks and you deserve what you get.

To you, technology is magic, never wrong, and using your mind, or eyes, or the barest shred of common sense is a totally foreign concept.

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You’re lemmings, sheep, Prey… People like you are why Americans in most parts of the world are thought of as morons and easy marks.

Thanks for that by the way…

When you drive off the road into the wash and your little POS car is broken, there is no doubt in my mind that you’ll try to sue the GPS maker or the county or the local residents for your stupidity. Because after all you’re not responsible for your actions are you?

Believe me, you hit one of the local kids because you were going too fast, on single lane residential roads & your bleached bones might be found in the mountains… eventually… if your family is really, really lucky.

Word of advice…

Slow down, remember that in your haste to get somewhere you often miss the beauty of where you are…

BTW, your phones navigation system will most likely work better too.

It’s one of those days.

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I fired up my computer and started rooting around for a link to a web site I know I have saved somewhere.

I can’t find it

What I did find is one of the strangest assortments of websites I’ve ever seen… And they’re all sites I actually took the time to save.

What was I thinking?

UH OH! 

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I just fell down the rabbit hole. The OCD is running wild (I’m actually only OCD about my computer…) I’m deleting tons of web addresses and wondering why the hell I saved them in the first place.

I’ve completely forgotten what I was searching for.

At the same time I happened to notice that I had over 3000 tweets… I found out that you can’t select them all and delete them. You have to delete them one at a time #lame.

But I found a little web app that will go through and delete your tweets. 

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I set it to automatically delete all my tweets older than 2 weeks.

Do I really need to leave online traces of my thoughts from a particular time? Nah…

Tweets are supposed to be ephemeral I think 2 weeks is long enough for a tweet to live.

I wish Twitter would allow us to set a “time to live” for our tweets. In fact, I just sent that request to twitter engineering.

OH! I remembered what I was looking for…. Oh crap! I forgot again. <– Damn senior moment! Squirrel!

I’m off to go be a grumpy old man…

“HEY… You kids! GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!”

I’m really going to go finish cleaning up my computer and try to get something constructive done today.

I hope you have a great day.