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I’m Hosting A Windows 7 Launch Party

/ joeygibson / 4 Comments

windows_7_graphicNo, don’t start checking your thermometers to see if Hell has frozen over. Believe it or not, I’m actually hosting a Windows 7 Launch Party. I know, I know. I’ve become quite a Mac Bigot™ over the years, and have not had anything good to say about Windows for a very long time. But things are different now.

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my netbook for a couple of months now, and it works wonderfully well. My company gave us Windows 7 the day it went RTM, and my work laptop has been rock solid since I 86’d Vista and upgraded to Win7. And last Saturday night, my son’s 2006 vintage AMD machine stopped booting. After trying to repair whatever might have been wrong with the XP that was on it, I decided to see if Win7 would run on it. I installed it and it runs better now than it did before. And Thomas loves the way Win7 looks.

I like the fact that it doesn’t BSOD every 2 hours, like Vista on my work laptop did.

So, why am I doing this party thing? Well, when I first heard about it on TWiT, I laughed. A lot of people laughed. But then I thought about it a bit. For doing just a little bit of work, such as inviting friends who probably won’t come ;-), I get some neat collectible Win7 stuff, and a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate “Signature Edition” which, apparently, means Steve Ballmer signed the box, or something like that. That seemed like a fair trade to me.

I have invited several people to the party, but most have not yet RSVP’d. So, I’m extending this invitation to people who know me in the real world, live somewhere near Atlanta, and are willing to drive out East to where I live. The “know me in the real world” bit is very important, as I won’t give my home address to some crazed maniac I only know through the aether. Crazed maniacs I know IRL are fine.

The party is Saturday, October 24 at 8:04 PM. I will have my netbook out if people want to look at it with Win7, and you can feel free to “ooh” and “ah” over it. If you’re interested in coming, email me.

Here’s the text of the invitation that I wrote for houseparty.com to send out in the invitations:

Hey Friend of Joey,

You’re receiving this because I’m throwing a Windows 7 Launch Party. Yes, you read that right: the Mac Bigot is hosting a Windows party. Why? Because I actually like Win7, and I thought it might be fun. (And I get a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate…) If you come, we can stand around my ASUS Netbook or my Dell laptop, both of which have Win7 loaded, and ogle them and their awesomeness, for which there is no charge. There will be a modicum of food and libation, which means Cheetohs and Coke, most likely. 😉 As part of the “party pack” we get Windows7 plates and napkins and such, which will only enhance the joy!

All kidding aside, I hope you can come.

So, if that doesn’t make you want to come, I don’t know what will. 🙂

So A Guy Comes To My Door, Wanting To Sell Me Some Meat…

/ joeygibson

As the title suggests, about 30 minutes ago a guy comes to the door, wanting to sell me some meat. That sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but it isn’t. My wife told him to wait outside, and then she came and got me. I went out on the porch and he proceeded to tell me that he was from “The Cattle Exchange” and that he had some great deals on “steaks, pork, chicken and seafood.” I walked up to his truck, and he proceeded to show me a box of nice-looking, vacuum-packaged steaks. After showing me all the meat, he whipped out a price list. Here’s a recap of the ensuing discussion

Him: Now, if you were to order this online, it would cost you $451. But when I’m out here, doing what I do, I’m supposed to get $299…

Me: Wow. That’s still a lot of money.

Him: … and if you buy the case, I’ll throw in a case of chicken for $20.

Me: That’s still an awful lot of money for meat.

Him: Well, what if I cut another $100 off that price?

Me: You know, I’m gonna pass. We just don’t eat that much steak. Plus, that’s still a lot of money, to a company I’ve never heard of, and a guy who showed up at my door wanting to sell me some meat. No offense. (That last was said in my best Paulie Walnuts voice, with the appropriate hand gestures.) I’ll look your company up online and maybe think about it.

He then packed up his wares and left.

The whole thing just felt wrong. My first thought was that either this guy is ripping off his company, and selling it for less than he was supposed to, or his company was ripping people off on their website. I came back inside and looked up the company. It turns out my Spidey Sense™ was spot on with this outfit. Check out this headline Atlanta Cattle Exchange Complaints – Door-to-door meat sellers rip off! The comments are pretty enlightening, too. Looks like I made the right decision in not trusting him. It’s basically a scam from start to finish.

So, if a guy shows up at your door trying to sell you some meat, you should… wait for it… send him packing. Get it? Get it? Meat… packing… Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal and remember to tip your waitress.

When One Job Ends, Another Begins

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

In April of 2008, the owner of the company I worked for told me that he was, effectively, shutting down the company and that I needed to find a new job by June. I was not happy. Over the previous 3.5 years, I had been the entire tech department, I had built every piece of software the company had, and I was extremely emotionally invested in the company. I started looking at opportunities and chased several opportunities, but none panned out.

Ironically, the company I was leaving was an online job search company…

Finally, I contacted an old friend to see if his company had any opportunities. They did, and I interviewed with the team the following week. It was a *six hour interview*, during which my friend stayed out of it, to keep any personal bias from influencing the team. A few days later, they made an offer, which I accepted. Did I mention the *six hour interview*?

I’ve been with them for nearly a year and I can honestly say it’s the best fit in a job I’ve ever experienced. While I enjoyed working completely alone, as I had done for the previous 3.5 years, the team I have joined is the best, and smarted, I’ve ever seen.

Looking at it now, my previous company closing was really the best thing that could have happened to me.

The Danger Of Living In the Cloud: No Backups

/ joeygibson / 5 Comments

Yesterday about 4:30 I tried to check my email, but got nothing more than a string of 502 errors from the server. My mail server is a Google Domain Apps account, which means my MX record points to Google, and they handle the rest. I was about to leave the office, so I figured I would just check later when I got home. I checked from my iPhone a few times on the way, but it was still borked. About two hours after the problem began, it cleared up again, and is still working fine.

During the outage, I started thinking about this situation. I have 916 megabytes of email stored in my Gmail account. That’s a lot, though it is only 12% of my quota. That’s three years of email that I don’t want to lose. And I’m completely at the mercy of “the cloud” with respect to my email. There is no way for me to back that email up and Google makes no guarantees about data retention. They give us 7G+ of space, but they don’t claim to do any backups or that they can get your email back if it goes away. Is this just a cost of living in the cloud? I wouldn’t trade my Gmail account for anything, so I guess I just have to live with the danger, right? Is there anything a Gmail user can do to ensure their email has some sort of protection? I know that I could open another gmail account and have every incoming email forward to that other account, but is that really the only choice? Google does offer a plan that is $50/email address/year, and while it does have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, it doesn’t say anything about backups.

What would be nice is an interface from Gmail to Mozy or Carbonite or some other online backup service. Each Gmail user could then decide if he wanted to contract with one of those third-party services for backups, or just take his chances.

w00t! Latest Wii System Update Addresses Storage Issues

/ joeygibson

I complained before about the abysmal storage situation on our Wii. Well, our troubles are lessened, if not necessarily over. On March 25, Nintendo released the latest version of the Wii OS. I only got it three days ago, because our Wii has been acting up, hardware-wise, and I’ve had it turned off. IGN has the full skinny on the update.

Basically, it makes much better use of your SD card, allowing you to keep things on the SD card, and automatically swapping them to the system memory when you need them. I bought two SD cards Monday night, and have moved all our lesser-used channels we want to keep to one card, and setup the other as my Rock Band 2 downloadable content card. I now have nearly 900 free “blocks” on the internal storage, which should mean I won’t run out when downloading RB2 songs again.

For those of you who saw my tweets about losing all my Rock Band 2 data, here’s the full story. A couple of weeks ago, I was buying songs from the RB2 store when I ran out of space on the internal storage. I figured I’d just try again later, so I went to play a song. After playing a song, the game complained that it couldn’t save my progress. I exited the game and restarted, only to be asked if I wanted to create a new save file (uh oh). I said “no” and it said that since I didn’t create a new file, my progress couldn’t be saved. I exited and restarted, this time saying “yes” to create the file. Of course, it created a new one, and all my data was lost. Actually, it was already lost, but this was the final nail in the coffin. I’ve reconnected the new save file to my online account, but all of my character and band data are gone forever. That really sucks, because I’d unlocked tons of songs, cities and venues. Now I have to start over from scratch. 😦 At least with the new OS upgrade, I shouldn’t lose my data again because of space issues.

As for the hardware issues I mentioned, the disc drive has been getting extremely noisy and, lately, flaky. Basically, the drive makes lots of noise and sometimes stops spinning altogether. Once it stops spinning, the game chokes and dies and you have to reboot. Based on some things I’ve read on the web, booting the Wii without a disc in the drive helps, and that’s what I’m seeing, too. I really don’t want to have to buy a new Wii, but we may have to before long.

Today’s Plinky: My Somewhat Lame Claims To Fame

/ joeygibson

I don’t know that I’d say I’m truly famous, but I am somewhat well-known, in certain circles. I am co-author of the book “Ant Developer’s Handbook”, published by SAMS in 2002. It sold moderately well. I have been published in Java Developer’s Journal twice, in 2002 and 2003.

I am also the creator of MiddleClickClose, a Safari plugin that enables the closing of tabs by clicking your middle mouse button, and for ExportToArchive, a plugin for iPhoto that allows exporting of photos to Zip and other compressed formats.

Some of my friends know that I was an uncredited extra in the box office flop, “Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers”, from way back in 1988. For three days in 1988 I sat around an abandoned YMCA camp in Waco, GA, waiting to be called to the set. I eventually made it into one scene.