Work In Progress

Category: Technology & Entertainment

  • Love My New Mac

    I just bought my first Mac Computer since college! That would be around 1996. You’d have to be living in a cave not to know how much has changed since then. Back in the day we used dial up and your modem was a separate box that connected to the phone line. High-speed wireless internet and home networking? Forget about it. It is now 2009 and the game has completely changed. What will we be saying about all of this in 2022?

    My new machine is a Mac Mini 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. More importantly, it is one sexy little machine.

    Now that I work from primarily my home office I wanted to have a central hub for all my music. After work I have also been enjoying all of the other applications that came with the mini. I am learning how to use the simple but powerful iLife apps. My first foray has been with the iPhoto app which is proving fruitful. I’ve been able to easily upload, organize, and even share some of the pictures I took during my trip to the Grand Canyon with my Dad directly from the app to Flickr. More news as I learn more.

  • What Do You Like to Read?

    It would likely be an interesting study but I bet most of us can track milestones in our lives by the things we were reading. As a kid I read Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. In college I couldn’t afford anything aside from what was required for class. After college I was interested mainly in books on sales, marketing, and negotiation. I gobbled up anything written by Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and Og Mandino. I soon moved on to books that promised to help me strike it rich; non-fiction business. Books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Beat the Street.

    There was even a lengthy fiction phase. Love that Harry Potter. My wife and I call them crack-books; not very good for you but hard to put down.

    I feel like I am entering a new phase, which is analogous to economists saying the United States economy is in a recession before it’s over, but nevertheless. I decided to start with a book I’d recently overheard folks talking about in the gym. Trip to the bookstore!

    Before Ultra Marathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, by Dean Karnazes, I had not read a truly memorable book in years. This guy is, and I am sure would be the first to admit, a little sick in the head. Folks, that’s what make these stories absolutely fascinating. The author is an ultra endurance athlete; he has run 350 miles without rest, completed 50 marathons (26.2 miles each) in 50 days, and run a marathon at the South Pole. If that doesn’t peak your interest then endurance sports are just not your thing.

    This is an easy read but very real. Grab a copy and tell me what you think.

  • My New Hewlett Packard (HP) Media Server

    I set goals. Never been much of a new year’s resolution type of guy but every few months I do write my better ideas down somewhere. Then I let those ideas simmer in the back of my mind until one day they decide to hatch. I have had two ideas like this in 2008. First was triathlon. The second was going digital. This is a post about the latter.

    We live in a digital world. Analog is out. From mobile phones, music, television; soon it will all be digital. So, what does it take to go digital? Digital storage.

    Let me frame the experience. You are buying a new personal computer, look at the hard drive space and think “I will never use up this much space.” Odds are good you have. Earlier this year my wife and I bought a 500 Gigabyte My Book external drive. We’ll never fill that up, right? Wrong. With my former obsession with ripping CD’s at fully uncompressed file sizes (WAV) we ran out of drive space in a matter of months.

    Enter HP Media Server. This, my friends, is a ten plus year solution. Here’s the skinny. The server has four slots or “bays” that hold internal hard drives. That’s good because internal drives are almost always cheaper than their external counterparts. Each bay holds a separate internal drive. The HP MediaSmart Server EX470 comes with one drive installed. Run out of space? Just add another drive.

    Here is the part that really gives this solution legs. What if at some point we have all four bays loaded? Tell the server you are replacing a drive (take the smallest drive). The server takes the data on that drive and moves it to the other three. You are now free to swap out your smallest drive with a much bigger one. Rinse and repeat!

    What makes this possible is the fact that there are no lettered drives to fool with; just the server. By contrast, run out of space on your external storage device and you have to:

    1. Buy a bigger external storage device
    2. Move all your old data to the new device by the manual click and drag method
    3. Retire the old device

    At the end of the day you wind up with a dozen different external drives of increasing sizes lined up on your desk. With the media server we avoid all of this. With my digital storage problem now solved I am now free to envision movies, television, music, and whatever else the entertainment world throws at us can be saved and streamed to my X-Box 360 sitting in the living room underneath our 62” 1080P HDTV.

    Gadgets rock.