Busy

Scratch that plan about blogging, moving-in and packing for that has become real hectic. Regular blogging will return at some point in the next week or hopefully this weekend.

Vacation

My tour of the country is now officially over, so I can resume normal blogging again come tomorrow (which looking at the clock is today already).

Unofficial Best Buy Employee

I made a terrible mistake today. I walked into Best Buy wearing a solid blue polo shirt of exactly the same tone the Best Buy employees wear. I'm walking through the store and was stopped not once, but twice to answer questions. Being the nice person I try to be, I answered the questions. The customers appeared not to notice that I wasn't a real Best Buy employee. I might have to go "work" for a few hours at some point in the future and answer everyone's questions with a joke and free sticker, now that would be a good time.

Tags: Best Buy

Good Luck

IMG_0783
Originally uploaded by compujeramey.

There was a quasi going away party for Natalie Weisensel (wearing blue) on Thursday night at the Jones house and as she's the first person I know leaving for college she gets a post to herself. She's headed to Missouri so she'll need all the luck she can get. Weis is going to be studying to be a big doctor (or something medical-ish like that). We were having a good time playing with the camera so there are quite a few pictures from the event.

Good luck Natalie and enjoy.

Pamela Anderson

Tonight was yet another night of summer fun. Burrow and John Dawg were over to watch the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson. An hour prior to the showing Burrow determined we needed Jones Soda from Target, so we headed out and picked up some Green Apple, Strawberry Lime, and Blue Raspberry (or a similar flavor). We also have a couple of cases of Mega Energy at my house and we attempted to drink the first cans (we've had it for at least a month without touching it). It was awful, you could smell the awfulness the minute you opened the can. If you're interested in having a really bad energy drink pawned off on you, talk to me. Quickly we headed back to the Jones Soda.

Back to the point of this post, Pam. The roast was incredibly lewd and left you wondering if it was Cable TV legal. I'm sure they broke a few rules, but it's all good because we got a lot of laughs out of it. If you're interested in a good show download/watch the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson. Jimmy Kimmel is an excellent host and the comedians rip on Pam wonderfully. A wonderful tribute to a woman that is now really old (38).

Good? Yes. Appropriate for the easily offended? No.

Tags: Comedy Central, Pamela Anderson

Packers First Game

Tonight was the Green Bay Packers first game. It was preseason of course so the starters didn't play long. I was looking for a real strong showing by the defense, because if they're bad now it's only going to get worse as the season goes on. I was impressed with Brett Favre and a lot of the defenses play. There was a few spotty moments, but overall I think the season is going to be okay. It should be a fight to the finish and I think we'll make it to the second round of the playoffs. There is a lot of things I could talk about, most logically Aaron Rodgers, but I didn't watch that closely after Favre was out of the game. That darn Catch Phrase will draw you in and destroy your concentration on anything else.

Tags: Green Bay Packers

Subway

I went to Subway tonight and ordered the usual, a 12-inch Pizza Sub on white with American cheese. It was great. I'm seeing a disturbing streak of bad things happening at Subway though.

First, they added the oven toasting and I don't like it. I'm sure people do, but to me it results in me having to answer another question (I order the same thing everytime). This isn't a very good point, but I just felt compelled to complain. I would be more than happy if they would quit asking me. I'll request it if I want it.

Next, most of the Subways (at least the ones I have been to) have eliminated the Subway Stamp program. This keeps me from coming back often. I want my free sub after every four visits or whatever it was. My customer experience at Subway is reduced as a result of this decision.

My third and final gripe for now is that they have switched to Coke products. I LOVE MOUNTAIN DEW. I also love Dr. Pepper, which isn't a Pepsi product, but they had it there anyways. I don't like the drinks they are offering now, Mello Yello just doesn't cut it for me. I typically don't buy a drink when I'm going right home, but when I'm on the road (50% of my visits) I do. I won't be now.

If I were running Subway they would have an 18-inch sub option, the stamp program, and Pepsi products. I would tell the employees not to ask about the oven either, it would be an on-request option.

Transferring iTunes Music

My phone has been ringing frequently now with questions regarding iTunes and transferring your music. In the spirit of destroying a technology consulting business model, I'm going to talk about the steps to make it work.

First we're going to burn all your music to a data CD. You can do this all inside of iTunes by going to Edit on the menu, then the "Burning" tab, and then set your Disc Format to "Data". If you have a DVD burner use it, you'll save a lot of discs. If you have to use CDs, let's hope you don't have 50 gigabytes of music like me.

So create a new playlist, just drop all the music you want to copy over to it, and then burn away. Take that disc and pop it into the computer you want to put your music on. Take that music on the CD (or DVD) and copy it from the CD into a folder on your new computer (typically "My Music" inside of "My Documents").

Inside iTunes on your new computer select "File" from the menu and then "Add Folder to Library" and add the folder with all your music in it. If you have songs that you have purchased off of the iTunes Music Store when you attempt to play that song you will have to log-in to your store account. Also, you can skip that step by selecting "Advanced" on the menu and then "Authorize Computer".

After completing these steps you should be jamming away to your favorite tunes. Hopefully this clears up any questions you may have.

Tags: iTunes

Cell Phone Tower Maps

Here is a nice little application of Google Maps to show you all the cell phone towers in your city. As I look at Janesville it certainly shows why the signal is so bad at my house now. It used to be great, but now the Cingular coverage at my house is marginal at best. I wonder if they took down a tower at some point?

Shouldn't we be to the point where we can not worry about what kind of signal we have and just pick up the phone and get a clear call. I spend way too much time wondering about how much of a signal I have.

Tags: Cell PhoneTowers

Inside Adobe

Via Robert Scoble of Microsoft here's a quick look inside the Adobe Headqaurters in San Jose. I stayed a few blocks away for a week, and yes the planes really do get that close many times a day. It's really amazing how much those buildings are built to handle that, at my house in Janesville when the planes approaching O'Hare come over it's pretty loud.

Neat look inside the huge towers that dominate downtown San Jose. It almost makes me hate how long it takes their programs to load a little less (not that I'm bitter towards them at all).

Tags: Adobe

Time

So I thought I would have all this time, ha, that's a good joke. I leave a position that demanded steady hours and I work more than ever before. Hopefully my phone will quit ringing sometime in the next week.

Not Switching

I had previously considered switching to a service like WordPress or Moveable Type because of the problems I was having with Blogger. I'm not going to be doing that anymore though. Apparently Google listens to their customers (or they just got lucky), because the quality of service I had received in the past four or so months has been excellent. I hadn't had any downtime problems with Blogger and the speed of the service has been much improved. Thanks Google for improving the quality of Blogger.

Tags: Blogger

Fed Ex Delivery

I wake up, I walk down the stairs and enter Jannene House Computer Lab 2 (also known as my area in the basement), and I start to wonder where my packages from NewEgg.com are. I pull up the FedEx tracker website and look up my packages, turns out they're sitting at my front door. I walk upstairs to grab my packages and bring them downstairs. Life is good, using technology sure beats looking out the window.

Tags: FedEx

New Chapter

Today for the most part was just like any other day. Following the exponential curve of phone calls and instant messages that has become typical of my life, I spent most of the day consulting people on technology issues. I don't charge enough to live on it, but I'm in the extremely lucky position of not having to worry about that. Today was slightly different though.

As of 6:00 P.M. yesterday my employment at the Boys & Girls Club of Janesville was over. Two weeks prior I had turned in my notice that I would be leaving the organization. My last day was similar to any other day of the four years I have worked there as the Technology Coordinator. The kids still asked a lot of questions, there was lots of technology administration tasks to complete, and there was staff training to be done. My employment at the Boys & Girls Club was incredibly rewarding and has served as an extremely valuable first step into the world of technology management. I couldn't possibly describe the experiences I have had and the knowledge I have gained. When I accepted the job during December of my freshman year of high school I had no idea I would grow this much as a person during my time at the Club. The decision to end my employment a month before school comes due to the demand to work with other technology clients to improve their operations and further my computing skills primarily in the C# area.

On September 1st, 2005 I will begin a new chapter in my life when I move to Milwaukee. I will be attending school at Milwaukee School of Engineering majoring in Management Information Systems. After considering a few schools in the UW system, I took the strong encouragement of Pat Phillips and decided MSOE would be a great fit for me. Initially I was tentative about that conclusion, but after meeting extensively with students, faculty, and alumni I'm positive that MSOE is the best school for me. I couldn't have fallen into a more perfect situation and 99% of that belongs to Dr. Sam Scheibler who I was fortunate enough to meet during my Presidential Scholarship interview. He is a tremendous individual who perfectly embodies the values of servant leadership that he spreads/teaches/preaches through his work at the school.

My roommate appears to be a pretty cool guy (we haven't met in person yet) and we share a lot of similar interests, which is always good. He unfortunately isn't a diehard Bucks and Brewers fan nor is he a liberal-minded individual. It's all good though, I'll have plenty of time to warp his mind.

Earlier in the summer after being nominated by Daryll McDade (who I was fortunate enough to meet by way of Pat Phillips) and interviewing I was selected to be a Microsoft Student Ambassador. I'm incredibly excited to start with that program (job? I don't really know yet) on September 1st. Without rephrasing all the information about the program, I'll point you towards StudentAmbassador.net.

As far as what's keeping me busy outside of fixing and advising on computers there is a few things. I'm working on getting a podcast ready to go along with coding away on a media management program (written in C#) that I will be licensing under the GPL or something similar when I'm done. I'm hoping to have both of those going before the end of August.

If you're ever in downtown Milwaukee don't hesitate to give me a call. I would be happy to meet up with you (provided you showered) and eat food or something fun like that. Goodbye Janesville, hello Milwaukee.

Update: I forgot to mention that Chad Dickerson moved on from InfoWorld, where he was the CTO, and is headed to Yahoo. A small bit of irony for me as Dickerson was my favorite InfoWorld columnist and I decided not to renew my free subscription a couple of days ago. Looks like I won't have to worry about missing any of his columns. At Yahoo he's going to be working at a company with a lot of incredibly talented people such Jeremy Zawodny and Russell Beattie. Three guys I wouldn't mind ending up being like when I graduate from college. I'm pretty impressed with Yahoo lately, take my advice and invest in them, the best is yet to come.

Tags: MSOE, MSA