Month: November 2007

Vista Drivers Be Damned

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

I finally upgraded my home PC to Vista Ultimate. I was originally worried about compatibility issues and performance. It’s an older PC, approximately 5-6 years old, built by me. It’s a testament to home built PC’s everywhere that it’s still running at all.

From the point of its conception my Home PC has only been upgraded three times. The first was by necessity when the motherboard failed after a year of building it. The second was when I went from the ATI Radeon 9000 to the ATI Radeon 9600xt graphics card. The third upgrade was the combination of my Server and Home PC. In that case the only upgrade was moving the dual 250Gb SATA Raid 1 array and the Antec NeoPower 480 PSU from the server. I guess that makes it more of a migration than an upgrade.

My PC has now been running vista good and strong for over a week. I haven’t yet run the vista experience test yet, I’m worried it’ll flunk with flying colors.

I’ve only had two small problems thus far.

The first is my sound card a SoundBlaster Live! is no longer supported. Apparently there won’t ever be drivers released either, although I find that hard to believe because its a fairly common sound card. For me this wasn’t a huge issue as i’ve been using my onboard sound for years now. The only reason I still have the card in my machine is for voice communication (ie: TeamSpeak or Ventrillo) and I haven’t used that in over a year. I guess it’s time to take it out?

The second issue I ran into was my RAID controller was unsupported. My motherboard is a Soyo Dragon KT600 Plus v2.0. The RAID controller wasn’t detected by the Windows Update Advisor as an issue and so I knew nothing about it beforehand. The first place I checked was naturally Soyo’s site which had plenty of drivers just none for vista.

Hard Drives

Luckily the Raid Controller is still at least semi popular and after doing some searching (and asking a friend who has used vista for a few months now) I happened across drivers for the via vt8237 Raid Controller. And now my computer is all set and running pretty. Can’t believe it but the thing is running smoother than it did on XP Pro for the past 5 years. I even have Aero enabled and the machine only has 1Gb of RAM. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Some Hope In Todays World

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Hoover DamSomething reminded me today of a story from when Rachel and I were at the Grand Canyon. Well, actually this particular story is from the Hoover Dam.

The parking at the Dam sucks. If you want to visit you need to park along the east side of the canyon. I’m sure you’re aware that the Dam is pretty large and as such, getting to the entrance (which happens to be on the west side of the canyon) is quite a hike from the parking lot(s).

We’d been camping in Williams Arizona for roughly a week at this point. I’d been faithfully (like the good ol’ boyscout I am) carrying my knife the whole trip. This particular day was no exception. As we walked up to the entrance there was a sign that stated, among other things:

No Knifes Allowed

Well crap. As I shuffled my way back to the walkway to take my knife back to the car, one of the many vendors setup outside the entrance called me over. She darted her eyes around to check if anyone was looking and said:

Act cool, just hand me your knife. When you come out give me 5 bucks and it’s yours again.

Thoroughly puzzled (and entirely not cool) I said “you mean you can’t just hold it for me.” After some more quick glances around she told me that this is government property and they’ll fine you if they catch you with them. She could get fined simply for holding them if they find out. “Ok, $5 is worth saving the walk” and I handed it over.

It’s a good thing I did. There are metal detectors right inside the entrance and we would have been up a creek. A gentleman got pulled aside ahead of us and shown a knife he had placed in the bucket before going through the machine. I’m not sure what happened (they were still there talking with the security guards as we left the room) but I’m sure it wasn’t good.

I paid my 5 bucks when we got out and the government was non the wiser.

Originally I was writing this thinking about the helpful actions of the woman vender. After writing it though I also realize that I’m also thankful for the actions of the security guard and their no knife policies.

Gmail Windows Live ID

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Microsoft Windows Live IDIf you’re like me you use One E-mail address. I used to be a fan of two. One for junk forms, another for real use. Since spam filtering is so good now, and custom filters are so easy to customize, it became much easier to just get it down to one.

A very long time ago I created a Windows Live ID using an E-mail address from Time Warner. Actually, I created an MSN Messenger account. Later it was turned into a Live ID once Microsoft came up with the idea.

I have long since abandoned the Time Warner E-mail address but I have been stuck with the Windows Live ID that uses it. A short time ago I decided I’d switch. It was about time to combine accounts and utilize my one E-mail address as my Live ID account as well.

I never realized it would be so difficult to create a Gmail Windows Live ID. The first thing I did of course was to attempt to register using the normal windows live registration methods. Of course it instructed me that my account already existed. I thought this was strange but who knows, maybe I did create one already. I started the forgot my password procedure but was quickly told the account didn’t exist. Strange. After a bit of research, I learned that after a year of inactivity windows live accounts are disabled. No matter so I set out on the task of reactivating it. After several weeks of E-mails and live chats with microsoft I finally arrived upon the following E-mail:

Hello Randy,

Thank you for writing back to Windows Live ID Technical Support. I have read your messages with us and understand how inconvenient it can be when you are unable to access your account. This is Don and I look forward to providing you with the necessary assistance.

You can register your own e-mail account (Non-Hotmail or Non-MSN account) as your Windows Live ID if the e-mail address you are using is not part of a reserved domain. I would like to inform you that a company that controls the registration of all e-mail addresses within that domain manages a reserved domain. Recently, Gmail has reserved the creation of Gmail.com Windows Live IDs.

As of this time, users cannot register Gmail.com as their Windows Live ID using our registration Web site. I suggest that you contact Gmail support team for further assistance.

For the meantime, you can sign up for a Windows Live Hotmail which is automatically a Windows Live ID.

To create a new Windows Live Hotmail account, please visit:

some very long link

Please note that you will be directed to Windows Live ID Help Pane. If you encounter any issues, kindly verify which of the steps did not work for you as we want to make sure the instructions are easy to follow.

We appreciate your continued support as we strive to provide you with the highest quality service available. Thank you for using Windows Live ID.

Sincerely,

Don

Windows Live ID Technical Support

I had no desire to create a new hotmail account since I was on a mission to reduce my accounts down to using a single E-mail address. I’m quite positive that my Microsoft Live ID is the very last account remaining not using my gmail address.

So I was trapped. Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon this little gem. I’m not sure how or where I found this, but at some point I happened across a link that was supposed to work for Gmail address registration. I’m not sure whats different with the link, I haven’t examined it closely. I will, however, tell you that the following link does work to register a Gmail Windows Live ID.

Register Your Gmail Account as a Windows Live ID

The Modern Web In Plain English

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Stumbled upon this the other day and thought I would share it here.

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes.

Millennials and Their Jobs

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

What Drives the MillennialsMy generation has been classified as Generation Y, the Millennials, the Net Generation and the Echo Boomers. What does that mean? nobody knows what to call us. Maybe we should be part of the the Lost generation.

Yesterday I watched a special on 60 minutes about the Millennials and our tendencies towards putting ourselves first. I was at first appalled by this, but I felt much better after they classified it as:

Putting ourselves first over our jobs

The overall attitude of the show was that this is a bad thing. It seemed they thought we should, especially in our early 20’s put our jobs and careers over ourselves and grow up earlier. To that I say screw you CBS I think we got it right!

It’s not that we made a realization one day that we’re better than our jobs. We just made the realization that our jobs could be better. The fact of the matter is that there is always something better out there. Today’s society just makes it much easier for us to find it than previous generations. If you look at the job marketplace today its filled with networking sites like LinkedIn, Career centered sites like CareerBuilder and general job search sites such as Monster. None of these sort of resources existed for the previous generations. We don’t rely on the newspaper and word of mouth, and the sort of resources we do depend on spread information about jobs much farther and faster.

One of the most important things they said on 60 minutes was that our generation has realized that there are many more jobs out there than there are people to fill them. This puts the power in the workers hands and makes the employers pony up. It forces them to recognize that they need to create attractive jobs that our generation get excited about.

My generation doesn’t like to hold jobs. Well, that sounds bad and it’s not true. We like to switch jobs. No, that’s not true either. We like to have the best job possible. There we go. Doesn’t it make sense though? Why stick around just for that tenure when there’s a better opportunity right around the corner (and there always is)?

There is nothing wrong with sticking it out. Maybe you get lucky like I did, and you land a really sweet job right out of school that you love. Maybe it gives you all the freedom you’re looking for and you feel you really can last it out. That’s great! Our generation doesn’t have a problem with that either. I know that in my circle of friends there are a few on both sides. There are those that have switched numerous times (and I’ve only been out of collage for 2 1/2 years) and those that have remained loyal and show no signs of changing.

During the show they also claimed that once we got into the real world we’d have a different experience. They seemed to think that once we were asked to stay late or (gasp) work a weekend that we’d be appalled and would immediately jump ship for the next best opportunity (the loyalty thing again). I don’t know about jumping ship that quickly, but I do know that I wouldn’t tolerate a regular schedule that included nights and weekends. My job does not define me it is merely something I do. In fact, I define my job. I am not opposed to occasionally working a night or weekend when necessary. However; I lived through my father being on call one week out of every month for his whole career and I will not allow myself to do that. ever.

The job skipping will slow down for our generation once enough of us get into the careers and jobs we like. 60 minutes got it all wrong though. It’s not that we like the job skipping, it’s that its a necessity. Unless you get really lucky with your first job, it’s worth the skipping around to find that one job that you just love. After all, you spend close to 1/3 of your (working) life at your Job, you better like it.

As a side note, you spend 1/3 of your life sleeping, another 1/3 at your job… doesn’t leave time for much else does it?

Custom Youtube Players

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Youtube Custom PlayersA few week ago Youtube came out with custom players. I thought they were interesting but never gave them much thought. A few days ago I played around with them and found out some very neat features.

You can assign a playlist to a player. This means you can assign all of your videos to a single player, or just a subset. You can even assign videos you’ve found and watched that aren’t yours.

You can assign videos after the fact. Because it works off a playlist you can assign videos to that playlist after you’ve created the player and they get added to wherever you’ve embedded the player.

To create your own custom player goto my players and click create custom player. You’ll then be prompted with several options most important of which is the Content. Simply select the playlist, or group of videos (my videos or my favorites) you wish to include in your player and click ‘select.’

Once you’ve filled in all the options all you need to do is click ‘generate code’ and then copy and paste the code to wherever you want the player displayed. It’s very easy and its a powerful tool. I created the player below out of my posted videos. It will always be updated with my most recent videos.
http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFPs2iw3cqJ9pL9VChYoCF0vhlvxJabC9_0=

Chase Cafe

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Chas Building in Rochester NYToday while debating where to go for lunch my good friend Randy T mentioned a place I had never been before. The Chase Cafe. Its on the 2nd floor of the Chase building (pictured) in downtown Rochester. It reminds me of a smaller version of the Bausch & Lomb Cafe. A very nice thing about it was that it was quiet. It was completely out of the way, not very well advertised and practically hidden. Because of all of that, while the eating area was relatively large, there was only maybe 3 or 4 other groups there. The prices were decent too. I had Some sort of Mexican Tilapia with a side of vegitables and mac & cheese and a chocolate chip cookie all for $5.75. I think the Chase Cafe might become a new regular stop.

We’re always trying to figure out where to eat downtown and there’s really not that many good places. Some of our usual stops are:

  • The Pizza Stop – easily the best pizzaria in Rochester
  • Galleria – Chicago style pizza shop which serves wings and subs as well
  • The Stock Exchange – bar & gril
  • Wild Bar & Grill – chinese buffet
  • Dinosaur Barbequeue – A real honky tonk rib joint
  • Grill and Greens – wraps, salads and other sandwhiches (great chicken tenders)
  • Bausch & Lomb Cafe -lots of different food stations
  • Subway – sub shop

If anyone has any other ideas please let us know. We’re always looking for some new ones.

SideReel

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sidereel logoI just discovered a new site today called sidereel. As far as I can tell they don’t archive videos they just archive links to videos. Every (popular) TV show you can think of is there, along with links to every episode. The more popular the show the more links they’ll have, and the more versions of the particular episodes. They have all the shows from today (Lost, Jericho, Firefly etc) but what I found most impressive was their collection of old shows such as The Muppets. They also have links to movies but I have yet to try those out yet.
Some of the links are dead, others link to videos with foreign sub titles. In some instances they link to the particular networks version, but often that requires you to watch some advertisements and install some proprietary video software. This is an evolving (beta) service though so I can only imagine it will improve over time.

This just made me think about the current state of television and video entertainment in general. With services like this emerging and even better ones (Hulu comes to mind) yet to come we’re getting closer and closer to the streaming world. All that is left is to hook the current internet video sites into your TV and the battle between Blueray and HD-DVD becomes moot. With the ability to watch (stream) any show or movie you want at your fingertips who would want to own a limited library of tangible objects?

A big argument against streaming media has always been that people want to own something tangible. While I can see that argument for the older generations even mine, that need is ending. Todays generations are growing up owning videos and mp3s downloaded in iTunes and Zune. Once they become the buyers in the market the tangible need will disappear. This day is coming sooner and sooner and the market needs to wake up to it.