Author: Andrew Huey

PC Mag on Kindle

This is kind of interesting. PC Magazine is now available for the Kindle.

PC Magazine stopped publishing an actual magazine a while ago, and has just been maintaining their web site, and publishing a digital version (which I think is in a weird format, not a PDF or any normal e-book format) since then. And, just this week, it was announced that ExtremeTech, a related Ziff-Davis site, would be shutting down. Or at least almost shutting down. So, I’m wondering exactly what they’ll be publishing on the Kindle. I’m guessing it won’t look much like the old print PC Mag. It’s interesting that they’re trying to keep it going in some form, but I wonder if anybody cares at this point. Is anyone interesting writing for it? Do they have enough of a budget to do benchmark tests and stuff like that?

GTD

I haven’t spent much time thinking about GTD this year. I’ve got a system going that mostly works, so I have just been working it and not worrying about it. A few things have come up recently that have made me start thinking about it again though.

First, I have started offloading most of my programming-related task management into Jira. This has been working pretty well. I’ve got about 100 issues in Jira right now, over a variety of projects. I’ve got the other two developers in my department using it too. From a GTD perspective, I look at a Jira “issue” as a GTD “project”, though sometimes it’s a pretty small project. (Other times, it’s a pretty big one.) I don’t really have a great way of tracking next actions in Jira, but my basic goal is that any open, in-progress, issue in Jira should have a next action on it. I just add comments to the issue as I go, detailing what I’ve done, and what I still need to do. This has gotten most of the programming stuff out of my previous GTD system, which has basically been the Lotus Notes to-do list. (I’ve set up my to-do list based on the system set forth in this document.)

I just recently listened to a podcast from DavidCo on the eProductivity add-on for Notes. This appears to be a really great package that would take care of a bunch of issues I’m having now. It costs $400 though, and I know my company wouldn’t pay for it, so I don’t think I’ll be going that way.

I’ve also been looking at Chandler, an open-source program that looks pretty interesting. Chandler integrates with your e-mail in a bit of a weird way, using IMAP. It might be workable, or it might be too much of a kludge. I’m really not sure. One of the things I like about Chandler is that it’s multi-platform, and you can sync across multiple installs using Chandler Hub. I think I’m going to try it out, though I’m not sure when I’ll have to time to really sit down and mess with it, and see if it’s workable.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good description of the problems I’m having with my current system, but it’s hard to describe. To some extent, it’s really convenient to have all this stuff right in Notes, in my mail file. But, there’s really no intermixing of the mail and the to-dos, so I find myself copying & pasting a lot, both text and doclinks. Notes has some nice features for copying doclinks, but I run into trouble when I have old projects that I haven’t started yet, and I’m relying on doclinks to old mail messages that I may already have archived. It gets kind of confusing. Basically, I’d like to either move the GTD stuff out of my mail file (which Chandler would do), or just go nuts and integrate completely with my mail file, and just manage it really well, which eProductivity would do.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how I could access or manage any of this stuff on either my iPod Touch or my BlackBerry Storm. I don’t even come close to having a good solution for that!

too many games

For the purpose of convincing myself not to buy any new games, here’s a list of all the games I have sitting around that I haven’t played yet, but which I fully intend on playing through:

  • Final Fantasy IX (PS2)
  • Final Fantasy X (PS2)
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
  • Metal Gear Acid (PSP)
  • Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)
  • Force Unleashed (PS3)

Okay, that ought to be enough to keep me from buying FF X-2 or FF 12 for the PS2, or Metal Gear Acid 2 for the PSP, or, well, anything new for the PS3 or Wii. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s a lot easier to plunk down $20 for an old PS2 or PSP game than it is to find the 50 hours to play it through…

Final Fantasy VIII

I spent some time playing FF VIII today. I think the last time I played it was about a year ago. For some reason, I go through long stretches where video games don’t really interest me at all (or I just don’t have time for them). Then, I get on a kick where, for a few days, I really get into one game or another.

AnimeNEXT

So I went into work on Friday and found out that there was an anime convention going on at the Expo Center across the street from my office building. And more interestingly, they were using part of the first floor of our building too. So, we got to watch cosplayers wandering around in our lobby all day. Cool.

I had to work this weekend anyway, so I went to the con (AnimeNEXT) after work yesterday and today. There was a lot of stuff going on. They were using space at the Expo Center, the Doubletree hotel, and the Doubletree “training center” in our building. I picked up some random toys and candy in the dealers room, and the Samurai 7 box set. I paid $40 for the box, which seemed like a good deal at the time, until I got home and checked Amazon, where they have it for $26. Oh well. It usually turns out that Amazon is the best place to get anime or manga, though it’s more fun to come home from a con with a few things in my backpack, even if I overpaid for them!

The space in our building was being used for video rooms. They had 5 rooms going, and they were showing some good stuff. I didn’t catch anything new and great, though. (I remember discovering great stuff like Master Keaton in the video rooms at San Diego.) I kind of like the idea of having a bunch of anime video rooms running in my office building, so I can just go downstairs and watch some Eva any time I’m feeling stressed at work. Maybe I can just hide some DVDs in the server closet.

stupid boot camp

So I decided to mess around with Boot Camp tonight, and maybe install Win 7 on my Mac.
First problem: I figure out that Boot Camp Assistant isn’t installed on my Mac. So, I have to get the OS X install DVD, and figure out where the installer is, and run that. OK.
Next problem: When I set up my new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago, I used 400 GB for my Mac partition, and left 100 GB for a possible Windows partition. Thinking ahead is good, yes? Apparently, no. Boot Camp Assistant doesn’t recognize that. It cheerfully offers to subdivide my 400 GB partition, so I can use part of *that* for Windows, but it doesn’t even see that 100 GB unpartitioned space.
So, now I’ve re-sized my main partition to take up the whole drive. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll run BCA again and see about breaking it back up into two partitions.

Tetris

All the talk about the 25th anniversary of Tetris last week got me feeling nostalgic. Tetris is one of my favorite games of all time. I think I first played it on my Amiga back in college. I’m pretty sure the version I played on the Amiga was a freeware knockoff, but it was a straightforward implementation of the basic Tetris game. I later played it a lot on my original black & white GameBoy.

So I decided to look for a version of Tetris I could play on my PS3 or Wii. Surprisingly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a version of Tetris out for the PS3. At least not anywhere in the download store, as far as I could tell. On the Wii, though, there’s a relatively new title under WiiWare called Tetris Party. I was actually kind of hoping there’d be a Virtual Console version of some old version of Tetris from the NES or something, but no luck.

I kind of vaguely decided to buy Tetris Party on Sunday, but I hadn’t used my Wii in so long, the batteries in the controllers were completely dead. I left them charging overnight, then put them back this morning, turned on the Wii, and went through the obligatory system update that was, of course, waiting for me. Then, tonight, I had to go through the silly ritual of buying more Wii points, so I could spend them on Tetris Party. Eventually, I got to the point of buying & downloading the game.

In a nutshell, it does, indeed allow you to play good old, regular, Tetris on the Wii, in glorious 480p. With cheesy music, and your Mii of choice dancing around on the side of the screen. I could probably do without the dancing Mii, but it’s a pretty good implementation of Tetris, and there are a lot of oddball variations I can try out later, if I get tired of regular Tetris.

fraud

I found out today that someone has been using my AmEx card number. They’ve used it for airline tickets, FedEx shipping, and opening up a couple of accounts for online dating sites, I think. AmEx identified the suspicious activity and called me, which is nice. I’ll have a new card in a week or so.

I think this was limited to just the AmEx card, and isn’t a full-blown case of identity theft. At least I hope so!

random stuff

Some random notes, since I haven’t been doing much blogging lately:

I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook with a new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago. It’s working pretty well. At first, I thought the fan on the MacBook was coming on too often, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem now. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the old drive to the new one, then just switched drives. No problems. I did de-authorize iTunes before switching drives, just in case. I really don’t know if switching to the new drive would have caused me to have to re-authorize iTunes, but I thought it might. I got the drive, and an external enclosure from Newegg.

I upgraded the OS on my BlackBerry Storm to 4.7.0.148 on Sunday, when Verizon released it. I couldn’t do the OTA upgrade, since I didn’t have enough free space for that, so I did it through Desktop Manager. It worked OK, but I had to manually restore my apps after the upgrade. DM backed up the apps, but couldn’t restore them for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal to do the restore myself. All my application settings, though, apparently got lost in the upgrade. I had to re-enter user names and passwords into a few apps, and re-enter authorization codes into a couple of apps. I also found that QuickLaunch 1.x didn’t work right with the new OS, so I paid CrackBerry $2 to upgrade to 2.x. It works fine now, and the new features were certainly worth the $2, so I’m glad I upgraded.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Mother’s Day. The first week, it was pretty much a standard cold. In the second week, I developed a really bad cough, but all the other symptoms pretty much went away. I went to the doctor, and she basically told me that it was a post-nasal drip problem, and just gave me some samples of Zyrtec and Nasonex. I’m not sure if either of those did me any good. When I ran out, I switched back to Claritin (actually, a generic equivalent). I’m not sure if *that’s* doing me any good either, but I think it is, at least a bit. The cough, and the throat tickle, come and go. I’ve learned to keep my windows closed at home, with the air conditioning on, and (sometimes) my air cleaner too. I definitely sleep better that way. I’ve also signed up for allergy alert e-mails from the Claritin site, and from pollen.com. I’d like to see if I can really correlate my problems with any specific allergy levels, or particular allergens. I remember having this same problem last year, right around the same time, so I’m guessing it’s a seasonal thing that I might be able to manage, if I can figure out exactly what’s screwing me up, and learn to stay away from it.

Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, catching up on my reading! I’ve read all the Hugo-nominated novels that were in the Hugo packet. I’ve now started into the novellas. Honestly, I thought all the novels were great, and I’m not sure which one deserves the Hugo. Conversely, none of the novellas has stood out as really great so far. I’ve only finished two though.

Storm OS Update

It looks like there’s finally going to be a new official OS update released for the Storm this weekend. I haven’t had many problems with the Storm, so I haven’t bothered trying to install any of the leaked updates.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, since I’ve been fighting a cold for the last couple of weeks. I’m feeling a bit better now, but I had a lot of trouble with allergies today. I think I’m going to stay in my apartment over the weekend with the windows closed and the A/C on.