Craft Corner Project Done

Since we have moved in here at 14th Court we have have been trying to decide what to do with the second floor stair landing. The space is really rather large, but not large enough that it can be permanently blocked off. After several months of Julie taking over the living room with her scrapbooking we decided that she was in need of a craft corner.

Well last weekend my Dad and I got to it.



As you can see we found some cabinet doors at Ikea that match the house cabinets closely. Utilizing a butcher block top we created a very workable space for Julie to scapbook.



I ordered more matching handles (even though the less than intelligent Home Depot lady f'd the order up). Julie and I found ourselves a place to hang the mail sorter, and the cabinet on the right is a roll out with both the recycle and garbage.

Tmobile data sucks, but damn the family plan is so good

I believe Tmobiles 3g strategy is something like "Hey guys we just bought our 3g spectrum and hope to have it up the 3012". Thats right, I am concerned that Tmobiles head honchos cannot find the collective thought process to get out a 3g network this Millennium(all kidding aside they have a 3g network slated for the end of this year). Oh, and way to go on the whole 1700mhz spectrum there fellas. Way to make your 3g phones not work with anyone else(vice versa really being the big miff here). I have been with Tmobile for about 3 years now and not once have I used a Tmobile phone.

I am currently running an unlocked Audiovox SMT5600, and though my windows mobile 2003 device is long in tooth, it still beats the SDA and in my opinion has a more appealing form factor than any of the Windows mobiles that Tmobile manages to puke out. Dash, MDA, and the wing can all take a leap. My current plan is to jump ship to Helio. The announcement of the Fin was all it took (my wife only likes flip phones). My one and only lament is the completely missing family plan options from Helio. I realize that as an MNVO they have limited ability to be too innovative with their service plans, but damn it the service plans is about the only thing Tmobile does right, so I would hope that others would emulate.

Oh and someone hire Zeta back, best spokes model ever.


Tags: Helio, Tmobile, MNVO, 3G, Catherine Zeta-Jones

Damn, the iPhone may actually be cheap

As a person that adamantly resents of all things Mac, I was deeply saddened to see the one windows mobile coming to market that is comparable(superior on almost every detail) to the iPhone is $300 more. The HTC Advantage available now, carried its own lesser amount of hype, and carries the laptop price of $899. For a phone. Seriously.

Many Analists[sic] decried the iPhone as expensive at $599 (apples to apples here people I know there is a cheaper one, put the HTC smokes that one just warm up the bowl). Feature for feature, the only things that iPhone has that the HTC Advantage does not is the auto-rotate, and some gesture based browsing. (I think, there is less press for this phone, and I'm lazy).

The HTC does have expandable storage(anathema to Mister Jobs), and HSDPA. Seriously Jobs and Co, I realize that you choose to forgo 3g because the battery life on your toy already sucks, but taint much mobile on GPRS. Its more like slomble[sic], just ask a Tmobile customer.

So listen, the HTC Advantage is a really nice phone with 8gb on board, the nice WM6, expandable via MiniSD, a real Keyboard, 3G, a normal headphone jack and last but not least an SDK. None of this web 2.0 bs Steve gave developers. All for the cost of a laptop, or even the Everun UMPC.

Tags: Gizmodo, iPhone, HTC Advantage, Everun

Helium is improving

For the past few months I have noticed more and more Helium ads around the net (especially on small blogs). The idea and market position is relatively simple, pay users for content they produce. If it gets pageviews and clicks on adverts the article has value(I am sure a healthy portion of it goes to Helium), but not much if any different than the blogging phenomenon.

Make content
get views
get click throughs
Profit

Relatively straight forward, and in theory with a large content trove, and high CPM (because of high traffic) content on Helium has the potential to make the authors a little money. The benefit to authors is they don't have to wait the obligatory 6mos to get picked up by Google's spiders, and the work to get started creating content is much lower than getting hosting, installing blogging engine, registering domain names, and then producing content (or using blogger what ever floats your boat).

The problem with the business model is the same as Squidoo's model, spam. Last time that I looked over at Helium, the content was mostly mediocre. It seems that time (and maybe some editors?) has turned that around, at least on the section front pages. From the 30 or so articles that I browsed on the sections main pages there where some thoughtful and well written articles. Almost all written in the casual voice, readable, and telling personal stories, or offering advice.

None of what I found was so compelling I might have paid for it, even if it only cost as much as a newspaper, but the opinion section for topical items in the news was as interesting to me as most letters to the editor in the Seattle Times so they where at least coherent, and not vile. I plan on writing something, just to see if it sticks and will report back with experiences.

Tags: Helium, Squidoo, User Generated

Xbox 360, meh?

For the geeks on the internet the entrance of Microsoft to the console arena a few years ago was a blessing and a curse. It challenged Sony to get off their collective ass, and gave Nintendo continued reason to innovate (well hello Wii, wanna stop by my place later for some multi-player?). In all Microsoft was the grown up coming to the cool kids party, sure they had lots of money and bought you beer(Halo) to make you think they where cool deep down you knew they wanted to use you(for money you sicko), and you where using them to have a good time. On the whole during the last console round this I-wanna-use-you-while-you-use-me relationship worked but I was in college and roommates/dorm mates made Halo(and MarioKart64)better it was social and fun. I never got into the XboxLive and doubt I would enjoy it for the same reason I don't enjoy WoW, yelling at people is more fun when your spittle has the potential to contact them.

Where does this leave the Xbox360 for me? Well I am married, and my wife was never any good at FPS game play, or really anything that isn't frogger. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all have identified that gaming is increasingly social, each attacking that value proposition from a different angle. Microsoft in typical Redmond fashion aims to suck every dollar they can from that potential revenue hole with the large and looming Xbox Live infrastructure and content delivery platform. They want to own the living room with your Xbox as the portal. From the ecosystem perspective, I see how this could be a successful endeavor if only I didn't feel so shackled by it. I am not only on board the Media Center bus, I also drink most of the koolaid they hand out, and yet I resist the urge to buy a 360. It would fit nicely in my home theater setup, is one of the cheapest HD-DVD players the market, has lots of games that let me shoot and destroy things, and once that movie content distribution system thing gets worked out beats having to go get someone else's Set Top Box.

Still I resist. I don't have a great set of reasons for it, but I do have a few.

• I don't actually have all that much time to devote to gaming any more, it is an excessively antisocial (yes talking to strangers you meet on Xbox live still counts as anti-social) hobby


• I own a home and projects to improve that take precedent over entertainment


• Married, and want to stay that way

In order of toys I want Everun, Neo1973, 42-52" LCD, a Core2 Duo or Quadro pc (I'm easy) , then a Wii, then Xbox360. Sure the 360 is on my list, but it is like $6000 dollars down the list.

If Microsoft wants to climb my list they could do a few things

• Make the internal drive HD-DVD


• Fix the reliability issues (few people like having to RMA things)


• Make it cheaper (this should be a no brainer)

Tags: Xbox360, Wii, Microsoft, Console Wars, Home Entertainment

Media center woes again

If you read my blog, you likely know that I am a little bit of a media center fan. I might even be called fanatical, in my support of the product line that really inspired in me a feeling of hope for the greater Microsoft universe. In 2004 is was bad enough that no one should have used it, but in 2005 and after the update roll up 2 later I thought that Microsoft might have gotten their groove back. Though divergent specialized sku's for products likely caused a few headaches internally I was a fan of having a support team that was focusing on making the Media Center a fantastic must have product, so naturally I was leery when I heard that MCE functions had been rolled into Vista proper. I have been running MCE2005 on several different hardware platforms for the last couple of years and feel that I have a firm grasp on the potential, and short comings of MCE but my most recent (re)install because of a failed hard drive has been far from worry free. I have managed to damage my install discs and was using a XP SP2 disk to give the installer any of the files that it was having trouble reading from my Media Center Disks. The moral of the story is that this was not a good idea, and the machine is very unstable. It records flawlessly, but frequently hangs during playback of recorded and live TV. Restarts were required basically every 8 hours of watched TV.

My setup is on a Gateway 901 Home Theater PC, with a All-In-Wonder 2006 special edition 256mb agp TV tuner/video card and a Hauppauge 500 dual tuner. This special setup required some registry hacking to get working (2 analogue tuners are the official limit) but is well with in the capacity of this 3.2ghz Pentium 4 machine especially with the 1.5gb of ram I have installed. Finally the whole bit is run off of a 500gb Maxtor with 16mb cache. Certainly there are better boxes out there, but this should be a more than adequate Media center setup. It is very sad that my setup is unstable, so maybe I will either follow this Instructable or pull a torrent of iso's, maybe even look into Vista. Whichever way I go something needs to be done to fix this situation before the other members of the household take it upon themselves to kill me for breaking the TV.

What is your value in the work place

The value of IT is hard to quantify sometimes because of the way we identify, and fix problems. Much of my works begins with questions posed by the users I support.

From cutting login times from over 5 minutes to less than 1, or improving the performance of a SQL server (more ram, and turning off hyper-threading) or just improving the queries being used. These are small improvements, but if all you do all day then drops in the bucket should add up.