Writing about Fruit

Since I have been talking about this company a lot recently I might as well write about what I read about them. Of course I am talking about apple which recently announced a new product iPad. Immature jokes aside I have a feeling this product is going to sell really well. If iPod touch sales are any sign of how much people really like paper weights then this is going to sell like hot cakes!

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/the-chess-grandmaster-apples-i.html

The writer talks about Google in the article's title but only mentions the company a hand full of times.

on a side note my laptop is finally in the US!... Alaska! yes After spending a day to travel through china it makes it way into the states by way of Alaska. It's not even one of the continental United States! Oh well it is estimated to be delivered at 10:30 am tomorrow and has some 4K miles to go! if it was being driven than it would have to go 200+ MPH to get to me by then so I have a feeling it's in the sky now thinking of me as fondly as I am thinking of it.

I hope Laptop's don't get jet lag!

I am not illiterate, I swear!

One of the greatest critiques that I have of myself is that I don't read enough. I used to read all of the time but something clicked in my head a few years before High school and now I can't pick up a book without dreading the concept of having to actually flip through pages to learn information. I feel stupid looking at my wife's almost filled library where I only have one shelf filled mostly with Comic books. I know she has read most of those books and the last novel that I read all the way through was Harry Potter and I didn't really enjoy it. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the escape of reading the book, it took me three days to finish which is quite a feat if you know how big some of the Harry Potter books are. I just thought the plot was awful and the characters were too whinny and afterwards it left the same bad taste in my mouth that stopped me from reading years ago.

But as I mentioned in the title I am not illiterate. I can write! ...badly in every sense of the word write ... and I can read! ... I just choose not to...

I am going to prove that I am not illiterate by forcing my self to read and I am going to share what I read here. No I am not going to read novels. I hate reading novels. things like plot and setting bore me to tears. I realized that I read articles on the internet all the time and while I don't have a library like my Love to show off my novel prowess I do read as much as she does. I just don't have any way to prove it. This is not me me proving to you that I can read more than my wife. This is me proving to myself that I am not illiterate, I swear!

First up is an article from the red tape chronicles. say what you want to about MSNBC this article is educated and well written. Bob Sullivan puts into plain English a very upsetting new trend in computer viruses. Although it is a scary subject the article is not about fear mongering and offers some nice tips on how to avoid the viruses and what do to if you get infected.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/01/turning-hijacked-computers-into-cash-is-still-hard-work-for-most-computer-criminals-theyve-got-to-trick-the-infected-pc-into.html

The Red Tape is one the newer blogs that I have started to follow I will probably read.

My Apple Experience - Part 0.5

My Laptop has been shipped yay! and it only has to make it's way to me from... Shanghai...China... No wonder my Laptop is taking forever to get here! Really Apple? China?! Could you have picked a farther away sounding country? Nothing is more upsetting to an impatient American waiting for something to arrive then to hear it is in China. I shudder at the thought of how long would have it taken to get to me if I hadn't paid extra and how much of what I am buying was made in China? Is the only benefit to the US of me buying this product go to Apple Stockholders and FedEx for shipping my product?

My Apple Experience - Part 0

I have decided an Apple product and not an iPod. I purchased a Macbook Pro and I decided to write about my entire experience the good and the bad.

I have not yet received my Mac but since I had such a good experience, I am going to go over the purchasing of the product.

I walked into the Mac store just to check the product out and it was nice. The sales man did his job well and it is obvious they don't get paid commission. I wanted something that was only offered online and he pointed me straight to the website. I walked out buying nothing and feeling no pressure.

Purchasing online was a breeze and I even got some pretty nice financing options. I thought since I was getting something I might as well get something top of the line. I even spent $18 for speedier shipping. I am excited!

Pro's:

• Quick. easy, and relatively pain free. I was even able to change the shipping address in less then 10 minutes (before the item shipped of course).
• I have the feeling that what I am getting something top of the line and I will no longer have any of the woes that I have had with other computer purchases.

Con's:

• Price tag: I know I am getting something top of the line but still it hurts to think about how much I actually spent on this. I was able to use a $700 laptop for 5+ years my new laptop had better last! spending an extra $250 ish for better support later on almost added insult to injury but I still have the feeling this money not wasted.
• I walked out the apple store with nothing! Come on guys what is the use of having a brick and mortar store if I am going to walk out of there with nothing? I am not saying pressure me into buying something i don't want but have what I want at the store. now I have to wait for shipping which brings me to my next point
• even paying the extra for faster shipping I still have to wait close to a week to have my product and I am willing to pay more to have it shipped faster. I don't want to be patient I want my laptop NOW! *throws tantrum*

Side note: I am very concerned about being upset in a couple of months because they will come out with a better product and if I had only waited I could have bought it. Seriously I had a dream last night that could only be described as Steve Jobs dangling a I7 chip in front of me on a stick and having me chase after it.

Honestly?

It is 2.5 in the morning and I cannot sleep. I feel I have hurt my wife and let her down. I have always tried to do the right thing and now I have no idea what to do. Let's start at the beginning; that has and always will be a very good place to start…

In the beginning of spring before Breanne graduation we go apartment shopping in Cincinnati. The process is difficult and long. We find ourselves getting discouraged as our options are running out. We accept an offer to sub lease Breanne's cousins condo. The Home Owners Association does not approve of this but the condo is really nice, big, and is really close to Breanne's place of work. Everybody involved understands the risk. There will be a fine involved and we will have to be kicked out if the HOA ever finds out that my wife and I have taken residence over. We have been living here since the beginning of summer 2008.

After we get married at the end of summer 2009 we start looking for a house. When Breanne and I first discuss whether or not to talk with her Cousins about us looking into moving out we decide not to right away. There is some work that needs to be done on the Condo and Breanne's Cousin is over here on a daily basis. Feeling bad about just leaving them in the dark I bring up the subject again with my wife about our decision to not discuss our plans with her Cousins. We decide that we are going to mention it sooner than later but don't actually mark a day to on the calendar to do so. The next day they decide to bring the topic up with us and we are truthful with our response. We tell her Cousins that we expect to be in the condo for one to six months. Two weeks later they accept someone's offer to buy the condo and tell us that we have to out of the condo by the middle of December. Did I mention that we hadn't bought a house yet?!

There is no one person truly to blame here. But I feel guilty. I have always felt that it is best to be honest with everybody because I would hope that everybody would want to be honest with me. I always push my wife to be honest and because I know her I can often tell when she is not being honest and I find myself pushing a lot. I know my wife is upset at me for pressing us into telling the truth to her cousins and now we are going to kicked out of our really nice and big condo long before we have anything resembling a house.

Am I wrong or self righteous to think that we should be telling the truth especially when asked point blank? I feel like my world is coming apart, up is down, black is white; that kind of thing. I cannot understand how making the decision to do the right thing can totally come back and bite me in the ass like this. My selfish want to be the good guy has caused me to hurt my family. So what? I am supposed to be the bad guy now? The one lies and cheats and doesn't care. That is totally not me! Is it wrong that I want to surround myself with good people and to want my wife to be more honest? Is it wrong for me to call her out when she isn't being truthful and to want her to be more truthful because the consequences of her being truthful will backfire? What has this world been coming to when we can't even be honest to family? Honestly!

Funday

I have found an idea to post things on Fridays. I am going to find a something geeky funny on line and explain it so that other people can appreciate the geeky and funniness. My first post is from The Daily WTF and is called The Program Accelerator. Please take a minute to read it over… you are probably wondering why this is funny right about now or more importantly wondering why she is trying to copy information from a program.

First thing I want to explain is ./a.out. Computers and humans speak different languages. I write a program using code that then goes through an assembler to form the binary data that tells the computer what to do. I have the option of telling the assembler what I want the name to be but if I don't there is no reason for my assembler to not do its job if I don't and a.out
is the default name for assembly output. Lost yet? I am going to get to control-c at the end so if you want to skip over this it's ok. Every time the article mentions a.out he puts a "./" in front of it. The "." at the beginning represents the current working directory. File names can get long and confusing. Instead of making the user type it out every time they want to run a program or work inside the current directory the operating system default of a directory named "." is whatever directory you are typing the command in at the command prompt. Every time the user types ./a.out it they are telling the operating system "try to execute the file name a.out inside the file I am currently inside"

Next the article mentions "cat'd" and I can see people worrying about strange things being done to cats with a computer but I assure you no cats were hurt in the writing of this post. cat is short for concatenate which basically means link things together. When you type cat and then a file name on a command prompt the command will display the contents of the file you specified. cat'd is the action of performing a cat command on a file.

Finally the moment you have all been waiting for what is Control-C doing that makes this joke so funny? At a command prompt the keyboard shortcuts are very different Control-Z will not perform an Undo action like most of your word processors these days it will tell the command that you are running to go into the background (this is kind of like pausing). Control-C on the other hand means stop the program entirely no if, ands, or buts about it. So the reason why the student's % prompt kept coming up quicker after she typed Control-C is because she was ending the program quite prematurely. Thus she got her command prompt "%" back and her output was not fully created.

Well I know a joke isn't funny if it has to be explained but I wanted to see if this would be something fun. If there were other confusing terms or concepts that you would like defined leave a comment about it!

WTFnesday 2

Today on WTFnesday there are two submissions. The first comes from texts from last night a website I happened upon through userfriendly.org's LOTD. It's goal is "to create a site that was revealing in nature while concealing the identity of everyone involved. This is why we only ask for an area code to accompany your text messages." What you can do is submit your funny texts and they will post and people will vote on how they feel about it. For example, "(334): The only thing I've had to eat today was the half eaten sausage biscuit I found on my chest when I woke up this morning." Or "(518): Anthony wouldn't know good sex if it sat on his face", or even "(407): i went to disney world today with my friends, met snow white, then saw her later at a bar. she is naked next to me in her bed, passwed out. when you wish upon a star..."(that one is currently second place best night of all time). But the one I found to be most WTF like was this little beauty:

(212): i want you now
(916): you need to stop dating girls with the same name as your mother...or stop drinking so much...I don't want to see this

Read it twice if you aren't laughing yet. There have been plenty of times that I have sent my love similar such messages and I cannot imagine the horror I would have if I accidentally sent such a message to my mother. I am going to chalk it up to the fact that I have use Love and Mom instead of their names in my cell phone book because they do have similar names … but enough about Freud. My second submission is Google making me go WTF today while changing the way my Gmail page looks. Let me explain, Gmail has a wonderful feature called Labels. Instead of folders you mark an item of interest with a label and later on you can find all of the messages associated with that subject matter by simply clicking on the label. (Breanne has 1, it is "wedding". I love her ... 65ish more days! ) I have 40+ and they are used quite frequently. I was super excited when Google decided to experiment and let me put my label on the right side of the web page because I don't like have to scroll down to my frequent label "work" (damn alphabetization). Today they changed the functionality of labels and took away an experimental feature for the first time and it happens to be the one I really was using. Come on! They couldn't have removed "Mail Goggles" or "Old Snakey" they had to remove "Right-side Labels" [sigh] Oh well this way not exactly a deal breaker for me so I will go one using Gmail just slightly annoyed again whenever I have to reach in the bowels of my list of labels.

It is interesting to me as a computer person. I have the ability to change it back myself but I won't. Even though at any time Gmail can change a feature and I don't think I could stop using its features and it doesn't upset me in the least. Microsoft on the other hand adds a "Ribbon" to all of their programs and I feel it is too gimmicky and it upsets me when I can't change a feature I don't like even though I won't. Just the fact that there is the ability to change Gmail to the way I like it I feel better about the product… hmmm… interesting…