Forgetting by xkcd – webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

I have a couple of ideas that I will bring to life as part of my blog in 2008. I want to improve my writing, be part of The Conversation, give back to the local community and I believe I can only do so with putting some effort and attention to my blog. There is a great technical community here in Phoenix and I would like to play an active role in said community.

2007 was a very good year from a personal point of view, I hope 2008 brings us all plenty of laughter, health and much success. Hopefully, it will also bring more content to this little corner of the Internet!

Why am I making the change? well, with the new role at the office, I needed to have some independence from my desktop machine. I found myself taking my own laptop into a few meetings over the last few weeks. In addition, we needed access to Apple’s Intel platform for testing and development purposes a the office. I also believe Apple better fits my current needs and computing habits. I will continue to have access to Windows and continue to support our staff’s machines so I don’t anticipate losing touch with developments on that area. As a matter of fact, we’ll be testing a Vista machine in the near future as well.

This will be an experiment, an experiment on integrating this machine into the ASU infrastructure and in particular within our own department’s infrastructure. Will I be able to access out network storage shares? What about access to the SQl server given the current security policies in place?

I already know of one application that is Windows-only and it plays a pivotal role in our daily operations. For that, I am running XP on a Parallels virtual machine. What about email? I am not quite sure at this point what I am going to use, probably be testing a few programs as I go along, navigating the Enterprise world with the new Macbook. Just like the home experience was a few months ago, this should be a fun adventure.

Note: It should be noted the laptop was bought a few weeks ago and shipping was delayed a few days. Why would Apple deliver the new machine on the same day the announce iLife ‘08 and will not allow me to upgrade for the $10? At least they didn’t announce a price drop, or worse yet, a processor upgrade.

• 10% of what we READ
• 20% of what we HEAR
• 30% of what we SEE
• 50% of what we SEE and HEAR
• 70% of what is DISCUSSED with OTHERS
• 80% of what is EXPERIENCED PERSONALLY
• 95% of what we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE

So it was like going shopping without spending any money. Among the missing shirts was a pink shirt that I knew I had but could not find, I even looked in Sarah’s closet thinking it might have found a home there. Well, at least I know I have not lost my mind and I now have the pink dress shirt to wear again among with a few others happen to be Sarah’s so I am still without that elusive pink button down shirt. I guess tomorrow will be blue stripes day.

Paint with the color that is underneath the tape first. This color will seep under the edges and create a seal. When it dries, then paint with the wall color. (link)

I finally took some time this weekend to do a couple of technology upgrades around the house. Saturday afternoon I upgraded the operating system in my Powerbook from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) and I am well aware of the fact that I am over a year late to this party. However, until recently I really never had the need to make the upgrade despite having the disk sitting in my cabinet for a few months now. What changed? well, I have noticed more and more applications required 10.4 as the host operating system and I also wanted the benefits of Safari 2 and the new Mail.app.

The upgrade went without a problem and I chose to do a simple upgrade over my current OS despite recommendations to follow the archive & installation method. I never had any problems with the previous version so I chose to use the simplest method to upgrade and things appear to be working just fine.

I also changed the wireless router for our home network since my parent’s gave me a new one for my birthday. We are moving up the wireless spectrum and have made the change to a 802.11g/b router from Linksys, the WRTSL54GS to be more specific. My powerbook can now benefit from the higher speeds available on the 802.11g mode, while still supporting our older laptop and the tivo through the 802.11b mode.

The best part about this router is the ability to share USB-attached storage throughout the network. So we can finally have a shared-folder without having to share it through a specific PC. I will have to write more this feature later on since I didn’t have a spare hard-drive to connect to the router. I am planning on moving our iTunes library and photo collections to this drive so we can access them all of our computers around the house.

I actually spent time away from the pc over the weekend in case you were wondering. We were invited to dinner by our neighbors upstairs and we had a great evening with them, specially after three bottles of red wine!. Today, we made the best of the cool weather and went hiking around Pinnacle Peak park but not before having a great breakfast at home which was a great surprise to wake up to.

We have a great office and plenty of opportunities for a successful future, two factors that make it a lot easier to accept this opportunity. My responsibilities will continue to include the technical infrastructure of our organization and continue the integration of our processes into the campus-wide enterprise applications. In addition, I will also support our staff through the day-to-day operations and make sure we all succeed.