My Home Network Goes Traveling
So, Apple dropped the 40 gig AppleTV and dropped the price of the 160 gig version to that price a few weeks ago. It seems they waited till all the new 40’s had sold and there was nothing to put on clearance. I couldn’t resist picking up a refurb’ed 40 gig for $150. Of course, the plan is to put it in Dalton’s room or the living room. For now, I’ll take it to Jennifer’s house. You need an iTunes server to hold all the video for an AppleTV, which works great with fact that the old G4 Cube has been replaced by the nVidia Mini. Thanks to SuperSync for copying the iTunes library + meta data into the Mini.
The Cube by itself doesn’t have enough storage for the songs plus videos. That’s were the Drobo upgrades come in. Two new 1.5Ts in the big box put two 640gigs in the small box and two 500gigs came out without a home. These two can go in an external box and hold more than enough iTunes library to the Cube for the little AppleTV.
That means that videos aren’t limited to being played at my house. We can watch anything at Jennifer’s too. And it provides an offsite backup. Yay
It seems like my computers have sought to colonize every room in the house and to temporarily “go abroad”.
Moving Cats
So, we moved a couple of cats Sunday. Dora had two kittens some time ago and the plan was to move all three. Daisy and Dora moved, but Bella never came into the house.
It makes me sad to remember raising Tiger, Dora, and Goldie. Only Tiger is left. Goldie ran away in March. Dora became quite wild while Tiger became docile. It seemed that we weren’t going to domesticate her or her kittens. Taking the to the pound seemed very cruel. However, as wild cats they knew how to catch food be afraid of people. It seemed better to take them out to a known cat colony in the country where they would at least have a chance. Hopefully Bella can be caught next weekend and moved.
I loved little Dora. Wish I could have saved her.
Tiger is a furry ball of purring love. He’s good with a few people and seems to get better all the time.
Mitten, my mom’s cat, still chases him and tries to rule the roost.
Storage
I keep track of a number of things on the blog; Macs and storage space for example. And I was rather surprised to note that my capacity is doubled from last year; 3T to 6T. Most of it is on 2 RAID5 Drobos. Seems like a lot in one year. It’s also interesting the the largest drive capacity they sell has also double in that time form 1T to 2T.
iTunes 9
iTunes 9 looks exciting for a couple of reasons. One is the ability to share libraries across computers. This has become a major annoyance, because I have a few computers to act as servers and the current iTunes views other computers’ libraries as if all the content were songs in one long list. The other day we played an episode of a TV show and after it finished the next “track” played and we got random music. This was really a silly constraint. Other computers now show the nice clean delineated Movies, Music, TV, etc. that see on every iTunes. Maybe this signals something about the AppleTV. Certainly, adds to a shared media server type home environment. I wish the really big, old, G4 file server, which runs 10.3 could run this version. But maybe it can.
The other interesting item is the expanded Genius functionality. Not sure how well it will work, but it seems they have acquired a massive amount of data on people’s songs (54 billion).
Some stuff is kind of dumb. The LP functionality. Really? I’m supposed to want text and graphics that record labels stopped making 25+ years ago when we moved to tape. Uh, yeah, I’ve so been missing album covers and I would never have thought of going to the internet to look for that kind of stuff, because I’m so stupid.
And the sync by genre and artist functionality. What the? I thought Apple got it with the Genius feature. Show me music I like. Who cares who wrote it, sung it, or how it was arbitrarily classified. Most of my songs are ripped from a Windows machine anyway. There is no genre info on a lot of them and many are just wrong. Sync by playlist was fine. The rest just adds more complexity.
Gewürztraminer
LLano Winery from Lubbock makes a good one of this. Not an everyday wine, but a good, different white wine.
From Professional Friends of Wine
Gewürztraminer is one of the most pungent wine varietals, easy for even the beginning taster to recognize by its heady, aromatic scent. While the French have achieved the greatest success with this grape and its name may be German, the history of Gewürztraminer began in Italy’s Tyrollean Alps, near the village of Termeno (Tramin) in Alto Adige.
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Like pinot noir, however, traminer vines do have a propensity to mutate. One of these mutations, a few centuries ago, resulted in a vine that produces dark pinkish-brown, spotted berries and makes very distinctive and heady wine.
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While the gewürztraminer vine is prized for its wine, it can be despised for its viticultural difficulty. It buds early in the Spring, so it is particularly susceptible to damage from frost. Gewürztraminer also has weak defenses against viral vine infections. Even healthy vines are not very productive, with small clusters, so there is a great temptation for growers to over-crop, which results in dilute, lightweight wine.
The berries, with their thick and tough skins, can attain high sugar levels of amazing concentration. Alcohol levels, therefore, can get quite high in dry versions. Conversely, low acidity and high pH in Gewürztraminer are problematic. Close monitoring and precise harvest timing are critical. Early picking retains acid, but without long “hang time” distinctive varietal character fails to develop. Pleasant results are nearly impossible in warm climates.
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Why is Business Objects Code So Slow?
It is damn frustrating to use the code below to get to the label name of a specific Universe object. It just loops over and over again looking for a specific object id in a specific class. The object id is unique across all classes. So, the class part is redundant. There is inexplicably no function to obtain the object by giving the unique id. So, we loop and hope the desired object id is near the top.
Set oDesignerClass = m_oUniverse.Classes.FindClass(sClassName)
For nIndex = 1 To oDesignerClass.Objects.Count
Set oDesignerObject = oDesignerClass.Objects(nIndex)
If oDesignerObject.id = nBIObjectID Then
sLabel = m_oUniverse.Classes.FindClass(sClassName).Objects.Item(nIndex).Name
Exit For
End If
Next
When we know everything about the object that we want and could just get it with one line of code that doesn’t need to execute uselessly and repeatedly.
m_oUniverse.Classes.FindClass(sClassName).Objects.(Name).Name = sLabel
Or better yet, by ObjectID (SHOCK!!! I know)
m_oUniverse.(nBIObjectID).Name = sLabel
If someone knows who the idiots are that thought this was a good idea let me know their address. I would have no problems sending the team a book from Amazon on the binary search algorithm were learned in Computer Science 101.
Computer Changes
I’m very excited about the changes to the computers in the house recently. The wires are moving off the floor and computers are going in and out of the computer room.
One Mac Mini was moved into the bedroom to make video files from TiVo and VCR tapes. It’s a new one and unfortunately they only work with digital TVs (none of mine) and I had to resort to dragging in a computer monitor to put on the floor. This really bugs me. Now though, I have run coax cable from the bedroom to the kitchen and computer room and move the computer. The new Mac OS 10.6 should arrive on Friday and this little gem is the only box to get the upgrade. It’s been working great at transcode DVDs to AppleTV and iPhone formats. The VCRs can move with the Mac Mini too. Clears up a lot of clutter.
The cable used to run along the floor and stop in the guest bathroom. Now it goes through the walls and runs down the hallway (still visible) to the kitchen TV. We’ve been using the AppleTV a lot and it only spits out digital, which is very expensive to move around the house. VCR, DVD, and TV all work fine over the coax. The new wire cleans up the signal a lot and we want AppleTV in the kitchen without spending $200 to do it.
So, I checked an older Mac Mini that I wasn’t sure of, one that can output analog composite video, and discovered that it works fine. Better than fine since it can play on any of my TVs. With the proper cable that is. Which will come in on Friday too. This Mini was 10.4 and is upgraded to 10.5. It’s flakiness came from a possible botched upgrade from 512 meg to 2 gig. Seems like the upgrade was successful. This little gem will go in the kitchen TV. I need to run an Ethernet wire to this spot, but the wireless is ok.
Running the wires along the wall is annoying, but the attic is just too hot, cramped, and awful it’s worth it. The drop in the kitchen works for both the kitchen and living room. That’s very handy. This wires most of the house; kitchen, living room, master bedroom, and one bedroom (computer room). Though I still need coax and Ethernet to the bathrooms and a bedroom. And the “server closet” in one bedroom might need to move to the garage or hall closet.
I’m really hoping for new Macs in September or October. Not so much to get a new one, but to get a current one on clearance for $200-400 less. Maybe, a 24″ with 4 gig and a dedicated video card. The Minis are fine and I love my overheating upgraded Cube, but I would really would like to have transcoding take 1/3 of the time and to have at least one powerful machine. For a long time I wanted a Mac tower, but I just don’t have enough work to make up the $2200+ price tag. This box would replace the Cube as the desktop machine and I could use it as a spare web browser. It will output S Video to a TV, a very handy ability.
A little separate note on cutting off the cable..
The antenna works well and money spent on cable has gone to buying cheap movies and TV series at Walmart. The AppleTV has been a gem, but only because we rip the DVDs we buy and transcode them for it. All the shows are in one enormous list. Purchasing though Apple is ok, but they have not obtained new episodes and shows for everything and rental fees and terms are outrageous compared to Hastings, and downloads take hours or days through standard DSL. There are cheaper boxes that do the same thing, but without iTunes, and I would have chosen one of those if I were doing this again. The Mini going in the kitchen is saving transcoding time and space and $200+ worth of hardware. It’s outrageous how expensive it is to push a component video signal 50′ vs coax.
Puerto Vallarta Vacation 1
We set out Thursday morning with passports in hand and bags full of 6 days worth of clothes headed to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Jennifer found a really great deal for an a package that included flight, hotel, and food for 6 days and 5 nights. It was in the off season or rather the rainy season. When the weather is nearly 100F and the humidity seems somehow to reach beyond 100%.
This was to be the first airplane flight for her son, Dalton, a very large nearly 13 year old boy. The plan was to fly down and then book 3-4 tour items like dolphins, a show, snorkeling, etc. Neither of us had been to PV before and all that we knew was from Jennifer’s two previous Mexican trips and the internet. The hotel looked workable, though a bit far from the airport on the south side of the bay, where PV is in the center. It was in a little town, Mismaloya on the Mismaloya river right on the beach. Two months ago we had applied for passports when booked the tickets and the whole thing seemed a lot more academic. Now passports in hand, we got ready to leave the country.
The flight was routine down to Houston Intercontinental and to Mexico. As soon as we landed in PV the plane was warm and going through the entrance proceeds was muggy. The air pressure is sea level combined with heat and humidity it was like a persistent pressure on everything; skin, lungs, chest, face,.. Within minutes we were sweating or rather dripping. Everything drips in PV often for no apparent reason. Maybe you can point to condensation as the cause sometimes.
Entry was a bit of a joke. The passport checking official looked bored and sleepy repeatedly writing, scanning, and tearing bits of paper. Once our luggage was restored to use it was X-Rayed again in Mexico for illegal substances. Then, unbeknownst to us we were through. There is a significant lack of signage at the small PV airport, which has a larger terminal than Amarillo, but a much smaller airstrip.
Going through the foreign airport in a throng of people from the 737 we came upon this big room with desk along each side featuring tropical floral pictures and men with standard airport security badges around their neck. A man in the middle of the floor called out hotel names and directed people to various counter, which oddly did not have any names as you might expect of say rental car companies sharing counter space; Avis, National, Hertz.
Internet Censorship Quote
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore
Portland Vacation Photos
The Portland post ride/vacation photos are here. Very nice. Some scenic waterfalls and family.
Quote of the Day
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
From iPhone
First post
Training Status
Training this year by month and miles:
Jan 86
Feb 267
Mar 359
Apr 135
May 238
Jun 400
——–
Tot 1485
The recent rides have included lots of near 100F weather, 40-50 miles, and rain 80 miles to Miami and headwinds on almost every ride. To make up for the lack of miles in the beginning of the month due to rain and scheduling I laid it on the past two weeks and I’m feeling overtrained. Muscles are tired, thick, and heavy making me fall asleep very fast. The plan is two days of rest, which isn’t really enough, then some long rides while I can the end of this week and resting will the bike and later myself are in transit to Seattle. Hopefully, I should be energetic enough to bounce off the walls on ride day. Cross my fingers that my miles are enough.
Top Cell Phone Suggestions
Palm Centro(?)
LG Envy
Apple iPhone
Blackberry Pearl
New Cell Phone Suggestions
I use a 5 yr old Motorola V551 on AT&T and I was thinking of replacing it with a keyboard phone. Does anyone have any suggestions. The E71 looks interesting.