A little over a year ago, we moved to Chandler as I took a job there. We bought a good house in a great neighborhood. However, I knew there were some things to fix. I already had the plumbing nightmare where every step of the way in replacing a bad bathroom fixture, and replacing a hot water heater valve, and ultimately replacing the main water shutoff valve. The concrete in the side yards looks...
Yesterday I was toying with the idea to give up the iphone and possibly go phone-less. Hard to imagine, as i have been a cell user since 1998 or so, but frankly, I rarely use the phone at all anymore. Of course going cell free is a crazy idea. 15 years ago you could walk a block and find 4 – 5 pay phones. But the ubiquity of cell phones has pretty much made the old staple payphones obsolete...
Well, my contract is up with AT&T Mobile, and not surprisingly it coincides with an Apple product launch. New iPhones are in the air, and I am due for an upgrade from my 4s. But instead of diving in and getting the new 5s, I have been thinking a different way. Do I really need a cell phone? Since I haven’t been traveling much I haven’t really used many minutes on my plan. I...
You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one. The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in. Oh boy, what a fun...
Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen. Fuck. Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm...
The local Fry’s Foods is a smorgasbord of people watching. A few days ago, I was in the mood for beer, so I maundered in the alcohol aisle. In front of the cooler with the microbrews and imports was a gentleman (and that is a loose interpretation) who was idling in front of the good US micros. I watched him hem and haw for a few minutes. I could almost see him thinking out loud: “I...
I have used several CMS’s over the years, from my time at Cisco with their internally developed system, and again starting in 2009 or so when I started working with WordPress and later Joomla! They are wonderful tools, but they do have some drawbacks. First the positives. Someone who is technically minded can setup a WordPress site, add a custom template, and have a pretty decent site in an...
A little over a year ago, we moved from our “edge of civilization” house in Tucson to Chandler, a much more standard suburban setting. For the most part it has been a pretty good experience. But there has been a soft underbelly. We live next door to a house with a just graduated high school baseball player (presumably he is playing ball in college as well) who seems to love having...
A while back, while we were on a trip, my wife dropped her 13″ MacBook pro. It was not the first time she dropped it, but it was enough to kill it. (it was a short distance on to a carpeted floor in the hotel). She got home and I did some diagnosis. The hard drive wasn’t recognized. I used all my tools, and assumed that it was just a bad HD, and that we could replace it easily enough...
While I am not a religious watcher of The Daily Show, I do take in 2 or 3 episodes a week captured on the Tivo, and I have long enjoyed it. Jon Stewart does a phenomenal job of entertaining, while actually achieving some semblance of journalistic integrity (mixed in with a healthy dollop of humor, there are many insightful perspectives). Jon had been out on a sabbatical to direct a film in Egypt...