Sparktoblog!

Sucking

Yesterday sucked. It sucked for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being stupid people. Now when I say stupid people, I mean everyone who lives in Seattle. You would think in a city where it rains for nine months of the year people would learn how to drive in the rain, but whenever the weather changes (to sunny or rainy) people panic for a couple of days and traffic gets shitty.

Last night it took me almost two hours to get home from work. I was stressed out to begin with (more on that in a couple of days - I promise) and then when you threw the traffic on top of it I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I could just see poor Skype panicking at home and feeling abandoned. He ended up spending a good 90 minutes longer home alone than he's used to. Luckily he did not have an accident, but I don't think I've ever seen him so eager to see me! I spent a lot of time playing with him and giving him love to let him know I was sorry.

I can't wait for this week to be over. I should have a good weekend, then hopefully next week will be awesome on a number of levels!

Long week already - thank god it's almost over

This has been a long and stressful week. Given my current mood and recent posts it has also been a fairly ironic one as well! Unfortunately I can't go into detail right now about all of it, but here is a general recap:

Work has been going alright - I had a couple of deals fall through earlier this week which put a sense of urgency and demand on me, but I've been catching up and have a lot of other things coming up that will replace them. A friend of mine emailed in a role to me and I had to spend Tuesday and Wednesday rushing around to get some people lined up for them. Luckily I got some great candidates and they are quite pleased.

Skype has been doing well - he gave me quite the panic on Monday - he did not want to wake up in the morning, and wouldn't eat. I was very worried about him during the day until Dom called to let me know he finally ate his food mid-morning. Skype has been getting along with his training very well. I'm down to one house-breaking accident a week or so, and for the most part he is behaving very well. We are still working on the "down" command, but everything else seems to be down pat.

Yesterday my dad hurt his knee while working in the ER. I'm a little worried about him, but he should be OK. He's got to spend at least a couple of weeks at home, and we will know more as the doctors run more tests. It's funny talking to him - he's so paranoid about becoming addicted to painkillers because he see's it every day - a single dose of vicoden after his accident and he's already worried about it.

There will be much more information about my week posted soon - I just don't want to jinx what I'm working on. If all goes well tomorrow I'll be able to share the good news!

Microsoft no more

So I never thought this would happen but Microsoft has managed to fall out of favor with me. Between numerous security updates, nightmares of upgrading to SP2 (it ate a hard drive in an ugly way), and Outlook being fully featured but bloated as a sun ripened whale corpse I have fallen off the beaten path. Don’t get me wrong – I love some aspects of Microsoft software – the way most of their products work well with each other and are “aware” of other products installed to integrate with each other is nice, but the lack of speed, security, and stability has finally pushed me over the edge.

The other night I got sick of Outlook taking 5+ seconds to open a folder, and god forbid an IMAP folder – then it would take upwards of 30 seconds to check and make sure the folder contents had not changed before it would even display offline files. I uninstalled the entirety of Office, and started looking for replacements. First came Thunderbird – the Mozilla mail project. It’s not as fully featured as Outlook, but the way I look at it is that it does what I need to, and it’s fast! The entire installed (including the RSS reader and PGP extensions) is 8.7mb and it installs in less than a minute. After about an hour of tweaking I had it behaving the way I wanted it, and boy is it zippy. I can’t comment on stability yet, but so far not a single error or crash.

Now as for the rest of office – I decided upon Open Office – something I’ve used before and like. It offers most of the MS Office functionality, while being 20% the size, 8 times faster, and free (not to mention open source). It does not integrate quite as well with Thunderbird as well as Office integrated with Outlook, but again I’m willing to make that sacrifice for the speed and ease of use.

In a way it saddens me to leave Microsoft products – I’ll still use Windows and MSN Messenger, but given my recent negative experiences I’m taking giant strides away from their products. I’m the last person I ever thought would do this – I’ve always been one of Microsoft’s more vocal supporters.

Go on – give Mozilla a try, I dare you!

Update:
Oh yeah – and my Microsoft 802.11g router just failed. I guess I'm going to call Microsoft in the morning and see if I can get it replaced. Although at this point I'm almost tempted to go buy something else.

You know – if not for the fact that Adobe Photoshop - my most treasured application – only runs on Windows and Mac I would be half tempted to make the switch to Linux tonight!

Holy fastness!

So today has been a relaxed day around the house – a change from the normal lethargic drudgery at the office. I took the day off to get my DSL connection set up. I decided a couple of weeks ago to ditch Comcast and their crappy un-reliable service (and file a BBB complaint for good measure) and switch to something I could count on - Speakeasy.net. My new service got installed and I have to say I’m impressed as all hell with it so far. It’s 6m down and 768k up and the ping times are unreal. Even just browsing the web or checking email is almost twice as fast as it was with my old cable connection.

If anyone else in the Seattle area wants to sign up click here. I got a discount through the ODSN, and you will get the same discount, as well as give me a referral service credit! W00T!

The darkness

It's here already - 15 minutes before I get to go home from work and it's dark outside. Another couple of weeks (a month at most) and it will be dark when I'm driving to work in the morning too. I hate the winter, the lack of light really gets me down in the dumps. I wonder how Skype will deal with it. At least he gets to go on two walks with Mili during the day.

Spread Firefox

For all you luddites out there living under rocks you should check out Firefox! It’s officially launching on November 16th and everyone should at least try it out. I’ve been a hardcore IE fan for years and it took a lot of convincing to get me to even try it, but after 24 hours I had it installed on all of my machines and won’t touch IE with a 10 foot pole (except at work where the Orwellian policies won’t let me install it).

Firefox (for everyone out there that has not yet tried it) is small, fast, and stable. It’s got a great extensions system (think plugins) and is very developer friendly. And the best part for all you geeks out there is that it’s entirely open source.

They are trying to raise donations for buying a full page ad in the New York Times for the launch. Check out the website, and consider donating $30 to become a part of history!

*UPDATE*
You should really consider donating - it's just $30 and helps spread an amazing free resource! I just made my donation - why don't you!

(Happiness x 2)^news

So I have two pieces of good news to report. I'm going to give the good news about me first because damnit - it's my blog and I can be selfish on here. The good news is that I'm starting to feel better. I'm still a bit under the weather, and have a cough but with Dayquil I'm going to make it through the day mostly painlessly. I think getting a good nights sleep last night was essential for this. I'm going to do my best to get another good nights sleep tonight so that I can hopefully be back to 100% by tomorrow or Thursday.

For the second piece of good news I have to report I admit I should have reported sooner, but in my weakened state it managed to completely skip my mind. My sister has finally been popped the big question by her man Dave. She graciously accepted and sometime in the near future (date not yet set) I'm going to have a new brother-in-law. Congrats Janet!

Miserable at work

Yet again I've managed to go an entire week without updating my blog. At least this time I have a bit of an excuse - I've been feeling a little under the weather for a while, and over the weekend it blossomed into full on sickness. I'm sitting here at work today feeling like crap, but I don't dare go home as I have plenty of work to be doing and new people started today that I'm involved in training up.

This weekend was crappy all around. The high point was taking Skype to the vet on Saturday morning. He got a clean bill of health and I discovered the shocking news that he has grown to a giant 19.75 pounds. They gave him his 3rd round of immunizations and sent us on our way. Skype was out of it for a good 28 hours as the vaccine did it's thing, which was good considering I kept feeling worse and worse. By Sunday he was starting to feel better, but I was starting to feel really bad. I ended up going to bed at 6:30 last night and getting 12.5 hours of sleep which helped a bit.

The week prior was fairly mundane. The most exciting thing I did aside from watching movies and playing FF9 was go over to Eric and Sylwia's new place with Skype on Friday night. We ran down (he loved it) and had a grand old time introducing him to their cat and lizard. After a couple of hours of chilling out puppy style they gave us a ride home on their way out for a night on the town.

Tonight is going to be a quiet night at home. Hopefully Skype will be somewhat chill tonight. Brien has graciously offered to come play with him and wear him out a little bit after work, so hopefully between that and getting a good run from Mili today he will be good.

Updated at last

So it's been over a week since I've updated my blog and it's good to finally have a few minutes to spare to get my thoughts and experiences out there for my lone loyal reader. The end of last week was abustle with helping Brien move in and getting things settled in with that. I'm still of mixed feelings about him living in my building, but things are settling out much better than I had feared.

The weekend was fairly sedate. On Saturday Skype got to go to the dog park for the first time, and meet a co-workers dog, Bella. Bella is a large sheepdog and it was good for Skype to get to meet a more aggressive dog. Bella scared him to death and helped to teach him some manners. After getting worn out by all that we went home and he slept the rest of the day.

On Sunday I went with Brien to go buy his TV. I got suckered in by him and Ian and ended up buying a TV of my very own as well. I settled on the Sony WEGA 34" 1080i HDTV. It's an amazing piece of work, and impresses the hell out of me in terms of color response, sharpness, and contrast. It has the best black levels of any TV that I've ever seen. It's a big heavy bugger and it took 4 people to muscle it up into my condo. I'm going to have to get a better TV stand this weekend because my old one is simply not up to the job.

This week has blown by in a slow menagerie of work and play. On Wednesday a co-worker and his wife came over to my place to watch Return of the King. Brien came down and we all ate Indian takeout while watching the movie. It was nice to get to know Jason a bit better outside of the working environment - he's a really nice guy. Wednesday was also my mom's 50th birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!

Tonight is the second presidential debate and I'm having a bit of a party at my place for it. I have a bunch of friends coming over for beer, food, and general Kerry related madness. I'm leaving work early today so I can go home and get ready. I'm sure that Skype is going to love all of the attention and love he's going to get tonight.