The next few weeks I won’t be able to post or write very much as I’ve got a lot of reading to do for classes and then I have a lot of packing, moving, rearranging and cleaning to do in preparation for the summer.
One thought that occurred to me this morning is that in the past year or so, I’ve been very lax on what used to be a very strong policy of mine to keep a daily log in some form or another. When I stopped using my Steno pad as an organizer and journal so much, the way I did in high school, I switched over to blogging on nearly a daily basis, one or two of the big events or things that occupied my mind on that particular day. After that, I went back to the Steno Pad again, thinking it would be easier and even was telling people I liked it because it turned on instantly, it had a huge display and great user interface.
After that, when I’d decided to try using my iPhone as a daily log, I pretty much stopped having one most days. Admittedly most of those days weren’t necessarily incredibly important, but it’s still nice to be able to flip through my life as it had been once in the past and see what I was doing and thinking about. Necessary? By no means, but it’s also a way for me to record thoughts, quotes and anecdotes to be used later on my blog, or referred to later while reminiscing, or whatever.
One of the things I tried to do with my TouchPro2 was to determine the best possible way to get take these notes in a digital format, as my desire to be dependent upon paper products continues to decrease. I love paper, but I hate buying it, hauling it around, not having it when I need or want it the most, and the variety of other inconveniences it can pose, such as my inability to read my own handwriting, the inability to quickly send any bit of the text to somebody else, and the inability to search it later on. I can’t just search my old steno pads for the text “Geometry the Musical” — unfortunately.
So far, there have been two solutions I tried on the TouchPro2. The first of which seemed the most obvious at first, synchronizing a “Notes from Phone” section of my OneNote notebook between SuperSlab and the phone. This produced a situation where I could pre-create notes for all of the days in the month, then write on them, hypothetically from either the PC or the phone, and then just bring them together with synchronization.
Unfortunately, OneNote is mired in problems with synchronization. It simply can’t sync, or it copies in an entirely new copy of your mobile OneNote notes if you do something like edit the notes on your PC when you have made other unsynchronized changes on your phone. It can’t just keep a phone and a PC version of that page, it does up a copy of the entire notebook, leaving you to figure out what changes need to be merged manually. Additionally, my phone can be synchronized through either bluetooth, or by hooking it up to USB. However, changing the way you sync the phone actually creates a new notebook in OneNote, which means if I’m not paying attention, I could easily (and have) end up with a half dozen different notebook files with different versions of everything in it. There’s some very huge room for improvement here.
The idea of using OneNote was that eventually Microsoft was going to release the Office OneNote Web App, which promises to be just about as awesome as the OneNote desktop app, but accessible from the Web. There are a few ways this works. Firstly, you can use it in a browser, just like all other web apps. However, the real power that’s supposed to be available is the ability to create a notebook on the web from within the desktop app, and sync it either at an interval, when changes are made, or just on command. Then, you are purportedly able to sync your OneNote web notebook (or one of them) with your phone Again, either continuously, on-demand, as needed or at an interval. I know Office 2010 isn’t officially released yet, but this functionality would have made the beta way better. Way better.
Then, I re-discovered (or initially discovered, I’m never sure which it was) Evernote, an app that lives on the web and in a huge variety of desktop and mobile applications, and that does exactly what I wanted the OneNote web app to do. Except in a far more terrible fashion. The idea is pretty solid, and the execution is, I’d say, at least 70% there. The missing 30% though is the exact reason that I still can’t bring myself to use EverNote for in-class note taking. It just lacks the formatting capability and ease that OneNote has, which won me over to the program for notetaking and information gathering compared with a traditional word processor, outlining app, or text editor. So while Evernote is 70% “there” for me, OneNote is probably 85% so, just because despite some idiosyncrasies with synchronization, it lets me very easily create pretty flexible tables, insert drawings with a mouse or a tablet, and it has better note organization functionality, at least for me. I think the remaining bits of OneNote being suitable for note taking will be fixed by me either setting up a WebDAV server that OneNote can use for note synchronization
The other part of daily recording is willpower and remembering to do so. Part of why I remembered to write things down was that I had the thing in my pocket or carried it around, and a lot of people had this really weird interest in it, often saying things such as “Ooh, what have you put in it today?” or “Oh, can I write something in it?” Odd, but it helped keep me interested too. These days, there’s no real interest in somebody who writes everything down in a mobile phone, and the steno pad is a little bit too cumbersome, especially as sometimes I’m on my computer and sometimes I’m just walking around. I carry one around, but it tends to be for special use cases, like when I have an appointment where I need to take notes, or where I’m working on a specific project or information gathering task where I will need to write information down.
We’ll see what happens from here. I’ll probably continue to try to find new and interesting ways to record things that happen to me throughout the day. I may try doing things like becoming a more active user of Twitter or Facebook to record things as they happen, or I may continue to search for (and find) other notetaking solutions, maybe even choosing to have separate solutions for the phone (where evernote has all the formatting I’d legitimately need) and the computer (where the added complexity of OneNote is very easy to use and helpful) and even a physical note taking “platform” like provisioning a new steno pad for the fall 2010 semester.
As of late, SuperSlab has been acting odd, not in that I have caught spyware or that the machine needs massive physical repair, just that the machine and its OS are in need of some tuning up. The OS needs to be updated, I need to re-do and update a lot of the ThinkVantage tools and drivers to get the display brightness controls working properly again. The whole thing has had a lot shorter runtime as of late, quite suddenly. Additionally, the system has been running hot due to what I suspect is a build up of dust.
I had originally wanted to keep the thing maintained better through it’s lifetime, but I’ll admit I’ve been way too busy to randomly disassemble my main computer in order to clean things and remove the dust.
I’ve already gone through a lot of the software cleaning, and hopefully just that will help improve the battery life again, and I intend to clean out the hardware sooner rather than later — over the summer at the latest. We’ll see what happens with its battery runtimes and temperatures at that time, even though I suspect I may need to look at getting new batteries at the end of this summer, just due to the very diminished capacity of my two batteries. Something to think about later on though.
Due to my switch a month or so ago to the use of a VPS slice to host my web site and other shell tasks, I had the opportunity recently to begin doing just about anything with Flatdell. These things ranged from virtualization to making it a minimalistic linux-based SETI box, to configuring some NAS software for it.
The thing I chose to do, which seems to happen a lot with me, was to run Windows Server 2008R2 on the machine. Originally I had planned on just-208, but switched to R2 when I found out that it was basically “Windows 7 Server” – and that it was also available through the Dream Spark program that Microsoft runs.
I got it installed, set up, and installed Terminal Services, and then got to work installing applications on it. I found out that Sophos Antivirus that the university provides runs and is supported on Windows Server operating systems, so I ran that, and found myself at a loss for what to do next. Creating a standalone terminal services box is, except for the cost of doing it legitimately, very easy. I was even able to install the Adobe Creative Suite and the 2010 betas for Office and Visual Studio.
It was also at about this time that I upgraded flatdell from the good-but-not-great Pentium Dual Core E2180 chip it came with, to the great-but-only-two-cores Core2 Duo E7400 (with VT) chip that I am now using, which gave a fairly significant boost in terms of things like SETI, photo conversion and management with Bridge, and ultimately, virtualizing servers and allowing even more people to log in remotely to the same machine, just depending on what usage I ultimately find and decide upon.
This coming summer, I have what I think may or may not need to re-do flatdell, either as a Server 2008 R2 box again, but with better planning, or as a virtualization box so I can prototype some ActiveDirectory and Terminal Services stuff, which I understand but want to see in action.
We’ll see though, but the ultimate moral of this story is that right now, I feel like Windows Server has the best learning potential for me right now, and it’s not like flatdell is a super necessary computer these days anyway. If it were necessary I could just leave it turned off.
My spring break ended about two weeks ago and as you can imagine, it was epic. It was epic in a lot of ways. Not only was it quite enjoyable, but it was, to use what is probably a trite expression, “of epic proportions.”
The fun began the week before Megan and I were scheduled to leave, with tensions running high as we worked on doing laundry and finding Megan a place to sleep, as her air mattress had started going flat.
On the Thursday before the break officially began we left just after my work shift at 2 p.m. and started to drive west on the 40. We got to a point just before the 40 intersects with route 66 and swapped, at which point I drove, rather successfully, nearly all of the way to San Francisco, which I would say is about 12 hours. That evening we slept in the car before Megan woke up, feeling oddly energized I suspect, or at least not dead, and decided to tour the area. I woke up just in time to see the facade of the Pixar animation studios. We then proceeded to a small cafe within walking distance of California College of the Arts, called CCA from here on out. Naturally, right after breakfast in the local cafe, which was set up in an oddly accomodating way for somebody who needed or wanted to change clothes and brush their teeth, it started raining– the explanation for which is apparently just “well its Northern California after all.”
CCA itself is fairly unremarkable. The campus is way old looking on the outside, and consists of an odd collection of buildings, seems like it isnt exactly the place you go for a very modern facility. After the tour, we headed through Berkeley, which was a terrible, terrible idea, then over some body of water toward Benicia, where Megan has a cousin and their family along with an aunt there. We got to the house and almost immediately napped, then had some pizza from a local place, then napped again until the next day, which was to be spent in San Francisco.
The next day, we got up, had some breakfast (I think) and then hauled ourselves out toward the bay, where we purchased tickets on the Bay Link ferry to get to San Francisco. The ferry ride was incredibly fun. On the way there, we spent much of our time on the top, rear deck of the ferry, watching as we puttered fairly peacefully through what was apparently a fairly narrow part of the bay, and then sped rather rapidly through what was apparently a wider part of the bay where the ferry had more freedom. Immediately I started snapping photos of everything. Even more than the day before when we were in Oakland, primarily at the time because it had been raining, and the majority of the best pictures in Oakland were outside. We meandered up to Chinatown, where I purchased (but haven’t yet listened to, now that I think of it) a music CD, as I tend to do for all of my vacations where I go somewhere cool and want to remember it. Afterward we went up this epic segment of hill, to find this adorable Chinese restaurant tucked into a corner where we would never have found it otherwise. By the time we were done with Chinatown, we decided it would be cool to walk back down another way toward Market street, and, of course, the Apple store, where I had all kinds of fun, as I often do. We then perused a little bit more on our way down Market street toward the Ferry Building, where we sat for a bit, totally worn out from the huge day of walking.
The next day, after having made it back to Benicia of course, we had breakfast at a McDonald’s, then started to head toward and down the 1/101, also known as the pacific coast highway. Let me just say that for being a coast highway, it’s actually really hard to stay on the coast for very long, primarily due to the fact that it just seems to end in certain towns, then you need to follow roads with no actual instructions (because there’s no Verizon Wireless signal with which to pull down instructions from Google Maps) and then stumble further south. We eventually just figured out where I-5 was so we could get to the hotel in Valencia, which is near Los Angeles.
The LA area was fantastic. The first day we were there we perused the hotel, got some food and turned early for a big day on Monday visiting one of our friends who is from the area and was home for spring break, along with walking around a bit of a self-guided tour around CalArts, which was nowhere near as awesome as the actual tour, and then, visiting the mall, two T-Mobile stores (to see how much G1s are going for these days) andthen found food.
The next day we went on the CalArts tour, and let me just say, the entire thing is accurately described as a sprawling monster of arts. There’s something fantastic behind nearly every door and it seems to be the type of place where you just need to look, take a class or ask in order to be granted access to almost anything you might want. You can gain access to what they call the “supershop” in the wood working area just by taking a basic woodworking and safety class, and then you can use it any time, almost 24/7, for what ever project you have in mind. It’s the type of campus that doesn’t shut down. Not in the same way as NAU where we have the SLRC and used to have Java.com, but in the way that there are a lot of people around, all the time. It’s very fantastic, and both Megan and I know that she’ll love it if she’s accepted.
We also had Pinkberry at least twice in the LA area.
And then finally we drove home, and the Thursday of Spring Break, a week after ours had begun, found ourselves, as we so often do, in the IKEA down in Tempe, buying another mattress — but that’s another story, that may or may not get told.