Before I get into it, I just want to put in a plug for pandora.com. Pandora is a site that gives you your own internet radio station, and judging by what you tell it you like or hate, it trys to give you songs that will best suit your taste. Thus far it seems a lot less scientific than it proclaims to be, but hey free music to listen to at work.

I have realized recently that try as I might I am only capable of having one major stress in my life at a time. For some reason when I am worried about doing two things I always think I should do whichever is most urgent first, but I usually feel like doing the one that is less urgent first. Unfortunately, instead of working on either I think of the more pressing task and how much I would rather do the less pressing and don’t seem to start either until the last possible moment.

It is strange to me that no matter what I am trying to accomplish, it always takes far longer and is way more stressful when I am scrambling to get it done. I am also constantly amazed at the unlikely problems that only seem to arrive when I am struggling to get something done last minute.

Everytime I go through the experience of having a relatively simple task stress me out, take twice as long, and generally make my life horrible, I always think, “I am going to get everything done early next time.” Unfortunately, I invariably fall into the before mentioned situation where I am unable to accomplish anything on time if I have more than one stressor.

As you are probably aware, I am enrolled in several business courses at a local college that is trying to become a university. It is fun that sometimes in class we actually talk about things I am interested in. Today we had a fairly extensive discussion on international mobile phone carriers. I have only known for a few weeks that Vodaphone is the largest carrier in the world. I have a very ethnocentric point of view, and I naturally assumed that america would have the largest mobile phone carrier. Anyway, our conversation eventually turned to Apple stock and the iPhone. As I have been trying to buy, win, or steal an iPhone for several months I contributed a lot to the conversation. Finally we talked about the mobile phone market and how the iPhone may not do well there because of its lack of features. This makes me once again realize how much Steve Jobs has it together. He started out by releasing an inferior iPhone that people were willing to pay $600 for. Then he lowered the price to make it more accessible. Just when the iPhone as we know it starts to break into foreign markets and become thoroughly uninteresting to Americans, he will put in all the features it could have had when it came out originally (i.e. G3, GPS, etc.) and people all over the world will love it and embrace it. Not to mention the far east’s fixation with America. I think that Apple could cause a small revolution in the phone world. That is until the release of the Google phone which may turn the whole cell phone industry upside down. All I can say is, hopefully Google has taken notice of the iPhones hype, because it has been more or less unecessary to market it as small blogs (like this one) and things have done such a good job of getting the word out.

I finally got my DAW computer working today.  I got a Dell D630 Core 2 Duo laptop a couple of months ago and have wanted to use it to replace my old Pentium 4 Dimension 3000.

Problems began when the laptop arrived with Windows Vista.  ProTools (the DAW software I use) doesn’t work on Vista, so I started by downgrading to Windows XP Pro.  Not as easy as you might think, because after paying 75 cold ones for the downgrade, I couldn’t get the XP installation to recognize the hard drive.  After spending a weekend with Dell, my local tech support guys, and completely erasing the hard-drive with U.S. Department of Homeland Security approved software, it still didn’t work.  Turns out I had to set the hard drive to compatibility mode in the BIOS.  After doing that, I got XP installed.

Next I installed ProTools.  But, of course, it didn’t work.  Playback would randomly terminate, and Stylus RMX would only play back about one note out of every 20.  The program kept telling me that it was having resource conflicts with the OS, and I was screaming “You have a Core 2 Duo!  You have 2 GB of RAM!  How can there be a resource conflict?!”

I contacted Digidesign tech support, and they told me that my machine wasn’t supported and so they wouldn’t do anything.  I was ready to give up on it, but I decided to spend this morning messing with it one last time to see if I could find a solution.  I disabled the internal network cards and WiFi, and booted up in diagnostic mode.  Still nothing.  Finally, as a last ditch effort, I disabled dual core support for the processor.  That was it!  Everything works!  Amazing!  I was dancing around for a few minutes with Winnie and Jo.  After two long months, the thing finally works.  It’s a miracle.

In other news, the Ring of Scribes will be featured on the WeasleyCast Halloween special this week.  I believe you can tune in to WeasleyCast on iTunes.  If you would like to help us out, tune in to the podcast and leave a comment about us.

Hope everyone has a very bad, very sad, disgusting Halloween.

So, last night I went to a birthday party for two of my friends. When relatively few guests remained, we decided to watch Watcher in the Woods, as we are getting close to Halloween. I don’t know if you remember Watcher in the Woods, but it was the one scary movie most of us were allowed to watch when we were in fourth grade. Since then we have all moved on to what we thought were bigger, better, scarier movies.

I was surprised (literally) to find that this movie induced more screams, jumps, and heart palpitations among our group of viewers than any movie I have seen lately. There are definitley some suspensful parts in the show, and it seemed like some of the girls even found the premise to be creepy. As I have always felt that most girls mainly live their lives in an alternate dimension, I do not feel that way. Although the movie itself didn’t tend to scare or startle me, I definitely jumped a few times as someone next to me let out a scream.

When the movie was over, we watched the alternate ending on youtube. In the alternate ending a large creature from the aforementioned alternate dimension actually shows itself and flies through the church. It takes Jan in to Ray Kinsella’s corn field and they disappear. Later a bunch of old baseball players come out with James Earl Jones. Or something like that. I would recommend this to anyone. I think this illustrates what I like best about older movies that are designed to scare. You know the directors of all the old scary movies asked themselves at one time, “How do we make this scary without any good special effects?” The amazing thing is, they usually found a way.

Whoa, two blog posts in a row. I’m like a machine! So its public service announcement time again and I hope you will all listen close. There aren’t too many websites out there right now that are willing to give you free money. But, there is one Ben and I have been making little bits from over the last few weeks. Its called moola.com. Right now the site is in public beta, but if you want an invite I will be only too happy to send one along. The concept of the site is simple, they give you a penny, and then you play simple games to win more money. Every time you win a game you double whatever money you had. Every time you lose, you lose your money. What this means is that if you win 30 times in a row you will make over $10,000,000. The best part about this site is that there are ways to make money other than just winning at the games. One of the ways is to use the booster zone sponsored search. The search is basically a Google sponsored search, and I am sure moola.com makes tons of moola from it. But once every six hours when you search the prize wheel pops up and you spin it for a chance to earn anything from $.01 to $9,000. Not bad eh. I am trying to build up my money so I can cash out. The big question will be if I am brave enough to play a game or two to try and make tons more money before I cash out. Anyway, leave a comment if you would like an invite and then four times a day you will have a chance to get excited about winning $9,000 and end up with a penny.

So I work at a company where everyone is allotted a certain amount of paid vacation. If you have worked there for more than a year your vacation is a set amount of time, but figuring your paid time off is hard for a guy who has been there less than a year. The other day I found out I had 9 paid days off, and the system is use it or lose it, so I have every Wednesday off until the end of the year. “Why Wednesday?” I have been asked. Well, here comes my opinion and I hope its true: everyone thinks of Wednesday as another day of drudgery at work, school, ice skate sharpening seminar, whatever. Well, having Wednesday off means that no one will think to ask you to do anything then because hey, you should be at work right. Leaving you, or in this case me, to do whatever I want with my spare time. I have two full months of no Wednesdays, so my Wednesday posts will now be a recounting of my “Wednesday Adventure”, which means I will have to have one, and for all who know me, my adventures are few and far between right now. Can’t wait, so until then love, luck and lollipops.

I met this guy the other day that really bugged me a lot. He was the systems administrator for a small web company. When he found out that I was a mac user he started to go off on how much he hates macs and what not. I’m not usually bugged by people who hate macs, but I’ll have to admit that I was quite bugged by some of the things this guy said. One of the statements he made was this: “Apple can’t do anything right so they just have to be critical of Microsoft.” Now if dominating the music player industry and having your stock rise from $7/share to $180/share in 5 years isn’t doing something right, then I don’t know what is. I’m completely accepting of anyone who has a preference of operating system, but to say that Apple or even Microsoft aren’t doing anything right is just ignorant.

Tomorrow Apple releases it’s latest and greatest OS yet. I will probably get a copy somehow, but I’m not sure whether I should be excited about it or not. Apple’s website lists about 300 new features, but I’ll have to be honest, there appears to be only a few features that even strike me as being features that I can be excited about. Here they are:

1. Time Machine - From the reports about the Time Machine feature, it looks as though with the help of an external hard drive you can back up all your files very easily, thus making it convenient to find files that you’ve deleted at some prior date. The time vortex of power interface also looks nice.
2. Desktop - With a more 3D-ical dock, the new desktop attempts to redefine the way we use a desktop. For example, the new desktop sports a new feature called “stacks.” These stacks allow you to remove the clutter that we all have on our desktops, including the grouping of files that have been downloaded.
3. Spaces - There have been third party virtual desktop solutions for awhile, but spaces gives it to you built-in to the operating system. I have tried a couple apps to accomplish this same task, but have been unable to find a completely satisfactory option. We’ll hope this feature does the trick.
4. Finder - The new finder features a more iTunes-like layout and style, including the popular coverflow view. You will also be able to do what is called “quick look” which allows you to view the contents of a file without opening a separate application.

So, out of the 300+ features that are supposed to be “new” in Leopard, these four have been the ones that I’m most interested in having. I’m sure I’ll find some other niceties along the way, but I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

So Ben and I are going to have one of our sometimes regular Saturday website sessions this week. I think of all the ways I could spend my Saturday, be it playing sports, or doing yard work, or possibly constructing something manly. I however choose to spend the day working out how our upcoming webcreation(I copyright that word) with Ben. Now if, as I have dreamed several times, a girl is actually reading these words, I want to know, does that make me less attractive? The answer may well be, “don’t worry, you can’t get any less attractive,” but I really feel like at this critical time in my life I need to start worrying about things like that. On another topic, I sold my Wii and the buyer seems legitimate. I can’t wait to get the money so I can ship it, because I hate having the shipping of an ebay purchase hanging over my head. Although, I love the thrill of the auction.

The ebayer who won my Wii was not a legitimate buyer, so now you can all have the chance to see it listed in all its glory HERE
I will probably auction off some more of my stuff soon because I have little money, and would like money more than stuff*.

*iPhones excepted