August 9th, 2006 Yvo
Alright for those interested… some things have happened the last 2 months.
First of… here is a good summary of events
1. I am no longer working at digital.forest
2. Working for any hosting or data center equals dealing with customers on the front line
3. I now work for McGraw-Hill Education (currently as contractor but definitely has potential to become permanent). Yes thats the the company responsible for most of our education in K-12.
I work as a Systems Administrator for MHE and so far its been great. The guy, who is supposed to be my boss, treats me as an equal and doesn’t have to pull title on me (unlike other bosses I have had in the last 12 months) nor does he have to use big words to tell me what I could improve on. A definite step in the right direction. Not to mention that the pay is about 50-60% higher then my last job. Only bad part is that its in Bothell (on 120th Ave NE), so two (or three if its raining because I dont want to walk the last part) buses and I am at work in about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Cam and I are still doing great. We have been doing some fun things the last few weeks (Bite of Seattle, Seafair, just relaxing). Not to mention that we have also rescued a dog from the Animal Shelter (she was very sick when we got her) but a few benjamins later and she is up and atom. Her name is Maya. I’ll post a pic of her after I repaired my gallery.
Posted in general | No Comments »
August 8th, 2006 Yvo
The blog is back and hopefully here to stay. I have paid for at least 1 year for hosting at bluehost.com. 15gb of space, lots of transfer and for only $7.95 per month (6.95 if you pay for 2 years). I am definitely not complaining.
Stay tuned for an explaination on what exactly happened and what I have been up to.
In the meantime, I decided to checkout (via SVN) the latest copy of k2 @ getk2.com. Includes some new features such as the scrolling page feature and AJAX powered live search.
Posted in general | No Comments »
June 8th, 2006 Yvo
Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday that they have pulled another big feature from Windows Vista. This time PC-to-PC Sync, a P2P-based technology for keeping files up-to-date on multiple machines.
Is it just me or are more and more announced features being pulled every single time I open up a tech magazine. The infamous delays and constant feature pulling really shows that their company leader is truly a dancing monkey. Sure I am an Apple fan but that was only recently, before then I was always in the latest and greatest from Microsoft. I remember running Windows 2000 & XP as my primary OS when they were still barely beta quality. I coped, dealt and learned but what made me go through it was that Microsoft was truly trying. They released bi-weekly updates to their code so bug hunters could fix the developer’s fixes and what not. Now they barely do a bi-quarterly release. Kind of sad really.
But in the end, people will buy. The same people that must completely stop traffic in order to get into the left lane. People are sheep. Which is the only reason why Microsoft will succeed with Vista. Apple is doing the same thing with their iPod, so who can blame a company. I just hope that more and more people realize that their are free alternatives available.
Posted in general, rants | No Comments »
June 6th, 2006 Yvo
Upgraded from Wordpress 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, nothing broke!!
Also I finally completed my external bootable hard drive. I now have
OS X 10.4.6 non-server bootable installation
OS X 10.4.0 server bootable installation
OS X 10.4.6 non-server bootable desktop
Misc / Utilities (like data rescue, and various system utilities)
All partitioned on an external firewire drive. So in case of failure I can carry drive, power cord and firewire cable to a dying Mac and attempt to salvage whats left [of it].
Posted in general, work related | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2006 Yvo
I found another show to rave about, this one is properly titled ‘Rescue Me’. With Denis Leary writing, producing and also acting in the show it is definitely worth check out.
A proper google search can help you out what the show is about. My personal opinion is that this is the type of drama I look for when I watch a TV show I can rave about. It has great character development, plenty of action & drama with a cup of weirdness on the side (the main character tends to see his dead cousin/best friend more frequently then anyone should see their dead relatives).
Requirements:
TV and Expanded Basic Cable (channel 53 in the Seattle Comcast area)
or
An internet connection, bittorrent client & knowledge on where to go.
Posted in general | No Comments »
May 29th, 2006 Yvo
Bon Echo Alpha 3 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 3 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 3.
read more | digg story
Posted in general | No Comments »
May 26th, 2006 Yvo
Their motto is “A place for friends”
But it should be….
Late night photoshopping = late night fun.
Posted in funny stuff, general | 2 Comments »
May 26th, 2006 Yvo
It isn’t every day where I come across a posting where I think to myself, wow that is nicely written. Recently Alexander Kjerulf of postiviesharing.com wrote about on how not to lead geeks. I have seen articles like this before but what sets this one apart is that it is written clearly and its not a ‘rant’, rather it is an open letter to managers of geeks worldwide. Personally I’d like my “fearless leader” work on #8, #6, & #4 (thats in proper order as #8 is truly bad at times with a #6 trailing in a very close 2nd).
Here is the read up….
http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/how-not-to-lead-geeks/
Posted in general, tech related, work related | 1 Comment »
May 23rd, 2006 Yvo
Well it seems spammers (prodominately spammers advertising credit cards or viagra) have found my blog. Thank god for comment moderation and Akismet, the built in anti spam tool in Wordpress. So far 0 spam comments posted but 1521 deleted.
I wish spam filters were as good as this :-).
Posted in general | No Comments »
May 11th, 2006 Yvo
About two weeks ago (and two posts below) I reported that my Mac was back. Well that lasted about 2 weeks. On Friday last week it started spontanously freezing up at random times to. It could go hours without freezing up but at other times it would insta-freeze at the moment it was done booting up.
This bothered me greatly. Here was a company I basically represent at my work and my product at home was sucking badly. Hell I even convinced my mom to switch over to Apple (who is still happy to this day). On Monday night I vigorously started a report on bbb.org’s website and sent it off (first doing a triple check for unnecessary attitude as you will get no where with no company if your first, of possibly many, emails is a nasty one). I included all possible details I could such as receipt numbers, repair numbers, times I brought it in, etc. I also mentioned that the last time the technician failed to plugin the CPU fan. For the resolution I wrote that I wanted a refurbished rev C G5 or refurb rev A/D Intel Core Duo as previous companies had offered (such as HP in the past) as I certain that the machine I owned had gremlins and that I still see PowerMac beige G3s perform fine in our datacenter to this day (and they been on non-stop for 6-7 years).
However the bbb.org can sometimes take weeks to contact the company as it has to go through all these official channels. I remember that a year prior I sent an email to sjobs@apple.com asking if the iMac G5 was a good product. Considering I was going through these problems, now would be a great time to tell the team that responds to that email address that it has been far from wonderful. So off went a brief summary that I had contacted the address a year prior and that I basically have been going through hell with it. Attached was the BBB report stating that this is coming down the pipeline as well.
Less then 24 hours later I was contacted by Apple’s Executive Customer Relations team. Someone named Arin contacted me. He left a message on our answering machine at home and Cam relayed the information to me stating that someone from Apple had called. I returned Arin’s call from my desk at work but got his voice mail. We played phone tag throughout Wednesday.
Thursday morning I contacted him early and he picked up directly. This time we talked about the problems I have been experiencing and he was in full agreement that my unit needed to be replaced. At this point he offered me a new unit straight from the factory or store shelf if they had stock. I was surprised, in a very good way. All those bad thoughts I had about Apple the last few days simply were put aside by the fact that they are the extra mile to replace my bad unit. This is unlike HP where I had to convince the lady to possibly be open to providing me a refurbished unit (which I didn’t go for as it was far less superior to the unit I owned).
So summary… tomorrow I am going to the Bellevue Square Apple Store and picking up a new 20″ iMac Intel Core Duo. I am still going to be slightly reserved about the iMac and remain careful to judge it, however Apple Corporate certainly has done their part by providing me a new unit. The only cost for me is the new memory module I will have to buy as it doesn’t take DDR400 but rather DDR2667 SODIMMs.
Posted in general, tech related | No Comments »