Into The New Year

December 31, 2009 Leave a Comment

New Year’s eve is a time to look forward and is also a time to look back. Looking back, it’s been a pretty good year. Here’s some things I accomplished this year:

And I’ve managed to do all this and more while remaining physically healthy, moderately sane and reasonably well behaved.

I’d say this has been a pretty good year.

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Bah Humbug!

December 25, 2009 Leave a Comment

In a nod to the holiday season this year, I decided to read Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol”. While I had seen the story as a play, any number of movies and such I have never read the original story.

We probably all know the story. Ebenezer Scrooge is a wealthy but miserly business man who lives a wretched life and generally makes life miserable for those around him. He’s visited by the ghost of his dead partner and three other ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas future.

These three ghosts show him what has gone on around him, what is happening elsewhere and what may be to come if he does not alter the course of his life. The last part, what might be, so frightens Scrooge that he decides to change his life and make amends.

This got me to thinking about the course of my life. What should I change in my life to avoid an unfortunate scenario like that shown to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Future? What will I regret when the future comes to pass? The end of the year and the beginning of a new year is a great time for change. What changes should you make?

You can download the public domain text free from Project Gutenberg here.

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Are You A Mac Or A PC?

December 12, 2009 Leave a Comment

I purchased a new computer recently. My MacBook was getting a bit long in the tooth. After four years and three hard drives, I figured it was about time to replace it.

As the concept of cloud computing is getting more practical, I have been migrating most of my workflow to the cloud. I do all my email via GMail, much of my writing is done using Google Docs, I keep my calendar on Google Calendar, my personal website is hosted on WordPress and my work related blog is on Blogger.

A few months ago, my MacBook hard drive failed for the third time. I was without my MacBook for a little over a week and ended up using my Dell Mini 9 netbook which runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix linux solely for that time. With the exception of iTunes, I barely noticed any changes in my workflow.

My wife gave me the go ahead to purchase a new laptop. Because of some writing and other projects I have been working on lately, I really have been wanting a laptop with a 17” screen. I looked at Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro. As I priced it, I found that I was looking at spending nearly $3,000 to get what I wanted.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much overkill this would be for what I usually do. If I can do nearly everything I need to on a $229 netbook (with the exception of screen real estate) $3,000 was just too much for me to spend. Instead I ended up purchasing a 17” Dell Inspiron for about $800.

TechCrunch had a good article on the difference in philosophy between Macs and PC’s. In it, they liken computers to cars. The PC would be a Toyota Camry and the Mac would be a Porsche.

That’s not to say the Camry sucks or that the Porsche is perfect. They’re just two different cars that cater to different markets. And they represent the two different goals that most Windows-based PCs have (market share) versus Apple’s Mac computers (high-end revenue share).

I was driving home from work the other day and someone in a Porsche convertible passed me. It was a really nice car and I am sure it’s a blast to drive.  However, as I continued home in my Toyota Corolla, I thought about the fact that as nice as the Porsche was, I would likely never own one. I just don’t have that kind of money.

I guess that figured in to my decision to purchase the Dell over the Mac. It’s really nice, but I really can’t justify spending that kind of money for what I want to do. I know this is likely to disappoint some of you but so be it. If my geek cred gets too low I’ll install Ubuntu on it and set it up to dual boot Windows 7 and linux.

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I See Your Naughty Bits

December 9, 2009 Leave a Comment


As I came home from work today I passed though an area known for it’s many bars and nightclubs in a town adjacent to where I work. As I passed one of the nightclubs, I saw this parked outside one of the clubs.

In case you don’t know what this is, it’s the Girls Gone Wild bus. (Don’t worry, the link goes to the Wikipedia article about this and not the Girls Gone Wild website. It’s definitely NSFW.)

I decided to stop in the parking lot and snap a picture of the bus. To be honest, I was a little shocked to see the bus there in Harker Heights. Not that the clubs in Heights couldn’t sponsor such debauchery, this particular club regularly advertises their wet T-shirt contests. I just didn’t expect to see it in our obscure burg.

Girls Gone Wild is a video franchise where the producers encourage young, usually drunk women to expose themselves or even engage in sex acts on video. In exchange for their performance the girls usually get a T-shirt or some other trinket. The Girls Gone Wild folks then sell the pornographic videos and probably make way more than the price of the T-shirt.

The reason this piqued my interest is I wondered why some women would think this is a good idea? Call me a prude if you will, but I wonder if this has to do with our culture being so attention driven that people will resort to darn near anything to get what Andy Warhol described as their “15 minutes of fame”. To make my one and only Tiger Woods comment, I also wonder if the “15 minutes of fame” had anything to do with Tiger’s plethora of alleged mistresses deciding to cuckold Tiger’s wife.

I wonder how many of these women will be proud to tell their grandchildren they made a porno for a T-shirt? Maybe, they can use some of the video of them showing their naughty bits for the video montage that’s become so popular at weddings when they get married. I am sure their parents and future hubby would be proud.

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Only In Texas

December 7, 2009 Leave a Comment

If you’re from Texas and you like good beer, you’ll appreciate this.

Shiner has a near religious devotion here in Texas and for good reason. Their beer is really good. My favorite is their Hefeweizen but I can’t say that they have one that I don’t like.

The Spoetzl brewer was founded in 1909 and this year they celebrated their 100th anniversary.

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Do You Speak Vim?

December 6, 2009 Leave a Comment

Every so often I get on a kick to change the text editors I use. While I have tried most of them, Emacs, Notepad ++ and a many others, the one I keep coming back to is Vim. For most of you, this discussion is as boring as watching paint dry. However, for some geeks who spend a lot of time writing or editing code or even just plain text files the choice of text editors is a big deal.

I don’t write a lot of code, but I do write a lot of text. The longer I have been using computers, and the more versions of word processors I have seen come and go, the more convinced I become of the value and beauty of plain text. A good example of this is found in a recent upgrade of Microsoft Office at work. We went from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and every since, I’ve gotten complaints from the few souls left on our network that are stuck on 2003 that they can’t open the new 2007 file format.

I don’t seem to have that problem with plain text. The things I write now, I want to be able to open in 10 or even 20 years from now. I mean, who has a copy of Word Perfect 5.1 to open all those old documents you created nearly 20 years ago.

There is also a subtle beauty in working with plain text. Vim, for all my experiments with other text editors, is the best. I don’t want to start a Emacs vs. Vi flame war but that’s my opinion. If you want to play with Vim, be warned there is a steeper learning curve than with some other programs but if you stick with it, I believe you’ll find it worth the effort. Who knows, you might even be convinced of the beauty of plain text.

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