Category Archives: Geeky

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The Allure of a New Gadget

I was link-hopping this morning over breakfast and I landed on this post at “Steak and Legs” about the iPad. And with one exception (I’ve crossed those words out, you’ll know it when you see it) it is my exact feelings about the iPad in a nutshell. So much that it’s a little eerie and a relief simultaneously. (I’m not alone! It’s not just me!)

It just looks so cool! I spent a couple days trying to think up what I’m sure were probably the most incredible excuses Legs has ever heard. I need an eBook reader… But I never read books anyway. I need something to go browse the web around the apartment… but I’m never more than 3 feet from a computer in the Apartment anyway.

What it comes down to is that I don’t need one. I have no real use for one. I even went to Best Buy and played with one and couldn’t think of anything to do with it that I couldn’t do with the iPhone in my pocket. But I still want one.

I’m addicted. I just love the feeling of coming home with a new toy to un-box and play with. I love learning the new system inside and out and then showing my friends all the cool stuff it does. If only my toy’s weren’t $500 this wouldn’t be an issue.

To be fair, I do have an eBook reader already. If anything, it even reduces the need for an iPad further. But they’re still awfully cool. Fortunately I am in the process of trying to save up a lot of money, so concentrating on that long term goal is a good way to keep me from blowing all that money on something I sooooo do not need.

(But if someone is going out of town and needs an iPad babysitter, please, let me know.)

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Late Adopter

It’s funny, with some technology I’ve been an early adopter; I had a Wii before anyone else I knew locally, for instance, and I was using a second generation iPod before there was such a thing as Windows support. (Ah, back in the day where you had to use something like XPlay to transfer your music to and from your Windows machine.) I had my Palm Centro before the advertising campaign even really kicked in.

But in the past week I finally embraced the Bluetooth earpiece for cell phones, and bought an iPhone. Which makes me perhaps one of the last people on the planet to do so.

Dark Side of the Tooth [365portraits: 313]I’d actually given a Bluetooth earpiece a try a few years ago. The experience was horrible; constant crackles of static, echoing voices, and sound regularly cutting in and out. I try and use a hands-free device for if I have to use my phone while driving and after a week I gave up on the Bluetooth and went back to a wired earpiece. Said earpiece just died a few weeks ago, and after a trip to Target revealed no wired earpieces being sold, I did some research and gave Bluetooth another try.

The nice thing about not being an early adopter? They fix the bugs. It’s amazing how much better things sounded. So while I still feel like an extra in “Rise of the Cybermen,” I’m sold. Mind you I only use it while driving. I still draw the line at just wandering around with it on. It always makes me think that there are crazy people talking to themselves walking down the street until they get close. Why give people another reason to think I’m nuts?

As for the iPhone, while I liked my Palm Centro, there was a lot less functionality between it and what was coming out now. I thought about a Palm Pre, but a combination of there being far less apps available (and let’s face it, that’s half the attraction) and Sprint not offering a reasonable deal to re-up my contract and give me a discount on the phone, and the choice was easy. So, my contract expired on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon after brunch I walked out of the Apple Store with my new phone. So far, so good. (Although I am a tiny bit surprised that plugging the iPhone into the computer won’t charge it, like any other iPod-like device up until now. Slightly annoying.)

And of course, one nice thing about being the last of my friends to get an iPhone is that I already have their huge recommendation list of apps to get. I’m already on the third screen worth of apps…

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My Crossword-fu is Weak

I just got a new Nintendo DS lite; I already had one of the original Nintendo DS handheld game machines, but the DS lite is not only slightly smaller, but also has a much better display and is sleeker to look at, too. I picked it up because the sale price was so good that I thought it would be good for trips; you only need one cartridge to play multiplayer on two or more DSes, so that means that I could put Mario Kart DS into my machine and then Charlie and I could play against each other. That sort of thing. At that price, it was a steal and a half.

Crossword-fu is Weak [365portraits: 226]

Anyway, it also reminded me that I have games that I haven’t touched in a while, so yesterday and today I played some more of my New York Times Crosswords game for the DS. And, um… ouch. Apparently not playing in a long time (or doing any other crosswords) has dulled my abilities. I had to give up on my Wednesday puzzle and go back to Monday (easiest) puzzles. I finally tackled a Tuesday puzzle and… um… yeah, the expression says it all.

I eventually finished it, but it took a whopping 40 minutes to do so. Back to Mondays for a bit more until I regain my crossword legs, I guess. Going from hitting the NYT crossword every Mon/Tues/Wed to nothing at all has really taken its toll.

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2nd Edition Geek

I went to a morning spinning class today instead of my regular evening one; my evening instructor is on vacation and I also made plans for tonight. But anyway, the morning instructor was wearing an Ithaca College shirt as she pedalled away at the front of the class.

Only, the way she had her arms, it covered up the first and last letters of each word. So I spent the entire class looking up, seeing “THAC” and wondering why she had a t-shirt talking about THAC0. Boy, that’s a term I haven’t needed to know since, oh, 1995… apparently no matter how hard you try, you cannot remove your geekhood.

(I also suspect half of the people reading this will have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.)

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Getting Back to Normal

First off, before I forget, huge thanks to everyone who sent well wishes (both on my own website as well as the LJ crosspost). I think it really does help the healing process to know that people actually want you to get better. (Even if it’s just so they can then tackle you with impunity.)

But yes, things are definitely on the mend here. I’m back to normal foods (although with this hideous cold that’s blanketing a lot of the country right now, a soup diet is not such a bad thing!), although still being careful with what I injest. Hey, a little extra care on what I eat isn’t really a bad thing now. Friday was definitely the turning point of going from “I still feel awful” to “I am starting to feel like I am actually getting better.” By the end of the weekend, I was thinking, “I can’t wait to go back to work.”

At this point more than anything else I’m waiting for the Steri-Stripsâ„¢ to fall off of my four incision points (a process that takes “1 to 2 weeks”), and to hopefully get the all-clear next Monday to start exercising again. Honestly at this point I suspect that tackling the full National Marathon at the end of March is probably a no-go, but if I’m allowed to start running next week then we shall see how it goes. Until then I am being good and not lifting heavy objects, or going to cycling class, or using the rowing machine, or anything else of the sort. It is, of course, driving me a little insane.

Still, easy does it, so it’s just as well that I am having a pretty low-key Christmas. Charlie is visiting his family in Alabama, and my older sister’s visit was right before my surgery, so it will just me my parents and Suzanne (plus the adorable canine Bruno) during the day, and then relatives and family friends over for dinner in the evening. I did receive a tripod from Charlie as part of my Christmas present, so maybe this weekend I can finally try out some night photography that doesn’t involve the camera being perched on top of my car or a ledge. (Dear weather: please cooperate.)

Oh, and as a get-well gift to myself, I am now the proud owner of an Xbox 360. It came with two free games (Kung Fu Panda and Lego Indiana Jones) but so far what I am really playing on it are two games I purchased on the XBLA online store—Braid (a platform game which plays with the flow of time and is mind-bendingly wonderful), and Uno. No, really. Tod and Ed have been raving about Xbox Uno and yeah, it is awfully fun. So I certainly have things to keep me busy. (Oh, and my Xbox Live gamertag is “Greg McE” if you would care to add me. You can chortle at my pitiful number of Achievement points so far.)

It’s all good!

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No, I’m Not Going to Comic-Con

Earlier this week I had a dream about Comic-Con out in San Diego.

Karon and I had shown up to check into our room at the hotel, except the hotel had run out of rooms ages ago. So instead, everyone was being assigned a space on the hotel lobby floor where a sleeping bag was set up for us. And we didn’t even bat an eye, because that level of too-many-people insanity just seemed normal in a show that draws over 100,000 people each day.

And that is why I’m not going to Comic-Con. Sorry.

(Smell some rancid sweat and pay $15 for a bottle of water for me, though!)

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I feel the earth move under my feet

I’m sure there must be a “You can tell you’re an East Coaster when…” list out there that includes the item, “You get excited over a 1.8 magnitude earthquake.”

It certainly wasn’t as strong as the one a few years ago (that was around, what, a 3 or a 4?) which was piddly in its own right, so this one was even less so. With the previous one I at least got up out of my chair and stuck my head into the hallway to see if others felt it. With this one, the best I could muster was an instant message to Karon saying, “I swear I just felt our building shake.”

I’ve been feeling a little bleah for most of today, so it’s good to get excited about something. I skipped my run this morning (one of my legs was feeling stiff and tight this morning and even after several stretches today it’s still a bit that way) and I haven’t decided if I’ll attempt one this afternoon after work or not. (I am unfortunately leaning towards no.) I certainly didn’t sleep well last night, which didn’t help matters, too.

But on the bright side, my labels for Artomatic are printed and sitting on my desk, so I just need to pop by this evening and then I am completely done. People keep asking if I’m excited and the answer has been, “Not yet.” Maybe it’s because it was all so new and a learning process for me this year; I’ve already made a lot of decisions for potential future exhibiting on ways I would do it different. Hopefully once it’s all taken care of I will be a little more jazzed about it.

On the other hand, I have decided that if I sell some of the photos (which would be awfully cool) that I get to reward myself. So items I’m looking at include:

Mario Kart Wii just looks amazingly fun, plus there’s the online play aspect. I would sure like to experiment with a “prime” lens. And I haven’t had a printer for over a decade, since the infamous moment where Kate sent me a cursed manuscript and my printing it out literally destroyed the printer. (It started printing jibberish about 2/3rds of the way through—and no, it was not the manuscript’s actual text—and never recovered.) So for those, I am excited.

(Not that I’m actually expecting to sell any photos, of course. But the thought is pretty fun to think about.)

Overall, though, things are good. I have some friends moving into the neighborhood next month, some beautiful orchids blooming in my office, we had salsa lessons in the office yesterday for Cinco de Mayo (which was fun), and an older gentleman at the gym yesterday asked if that was indeed me at the opera last week—and that he and his wife also left before the end because they couldn’t stand it. Hee hee hee.

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Hotlinking

I was going through my web stats for Read About Comics last night, and noticed that a lot—make that a ton—of people on MySpace are hotlinking to my images there.

Now I actually don’t mind the occasional hotlink here and there. But these are people who have gazillions of visits every day to their profile page. And in that case, come on, save the image and put it on your own webspace. (Or get some free display space like Photobucket.) So I did a little research, and eventually I figured out a way to just block specific websites from hotlinking. (I could have turned them all off entirely, but it would mess up people’s RSS feeds big time, and that just seemed like a bit of overkill.)

So for now, whenever anyone tries to link to my images on MySpace? They get this image instead. (Just in case you are at a particularly stodgy workplace, I won’t put the image there. But I promise, no nudity.)

What can I say? It makes me laugh. And really, I could have been much more evil than that. This is actually not that bad all things considered. (I rather like it.) In a month or so I’ll swap it out to just being a broken image link instead, but I figure this should get at least some people to delete the links first.

Of course, for about five hours today I’d messed it up bigtime so anything linked out of my personal account was getting swapped into this, which probably made for some very funny looking images I’d posted elsewhere… Oops!