I want to vote for this guy and support this new law!
Archive for May, 2010
Travis Winn Analyzes/Makes Suggestions For UI Improvements at Shopfiy
Technology is so crazy sometimes I have been coming to realize that we always do so much then forget how we did it, that’s why I have been blogging things like how to network a Mac and PC or hack an iPhone without WiFi or things like that because usually after you do it once, you forget!
See, I don’t always stay in front of the computer, went out dancing with Marcia last Saturday night, short, but sweet!
Didier Rosa's Raw Food Site, Los Angeles, California
Keep it up Didier!
Didier Rosa’s new website for fine cuisine.
My friend Mary showed me a link to her LACC blog today. It’s pretty cool. I was really saddened to hear about the LAPD killing yet another mentally disabled/autistic person from her blog.
So sad. I love the way the world is getting so connected though! Keep up the great work Mary Eng.
ICE Finally giving High Speed Upload
As anyone who has seen my internet 3G woes, today is a happy day. I bought a new chip the other day in the hope that the APN kolbi3g would help me get faster upload speeds, but this sort of voo-doo networking has come to an end now that they have kicked off all of the freeloaders getting the high speed for cheap and people like me who recently signed up for the high one finally are getting 340kbs upload as opposed to the 120kbs throttle I had been experiencing, I am so happy, just in time, too, since I am finishing up a website and it is great for me as I need to get some stuff done!
Pantech Duo C810 For Sale
Needless to say this was sucking big time: I had been paying $10/mo for a better service and then I paid $27/mo and got worse service for the past month. (I use my Pantech Windows Mobile Phone as my main modem to get online here in Costa Rica, so it’s kind of a big deal.) On Friday, I went and got another 3G chip and phone/modem line (much to the chagrin of my wife whose name it is in), and signed up for the cheap unlimited 3G dataplan (128kbs down/64kbs up) with the assurance we could easily upgrade to the more expensive service. Well, I was hoping it would be open and free on upload/download like my first card/chip. No such luck. They have it throttled, too.
However, as the weekend progressed, my service on my full $27 upgraded GSM to 3G line was consistently high even at times when it would normally really slow down (6:30pm, or when the kids get out of school in the afternoon.) So it seems that they have throttled all of the cheap plans and this is freeing up space for people like me with the higher speed plan. This is great, but they still have it throttled on the upload if you use the icecellular APN, but I found on Saturday I was able to Skype pretty well even with the low upload speed, I imagine this is because there’s less bandwidth being used and it is more consistent for the upload, and the download was pretty stellar. I am going to change my new 3G card on Tuesday or Wednesday for the higher speed plan, to see how it goes on the upload. Their advertised rate on the high speed $27/mo. is 1mb/384kbs download/upload. So, I am hoping that I can get it. When you go in in Turrialba, they know less about it then me (for the most part, the average person), and they say no assurances or we called about this issue on the upload and they said something crazy about battery being low… ha ha that’s a good one!!!!
Anyways, I have two of these phones and want to sell one for $225 if anyone is interested in having one because they can’t find the Datacard. It’s both a phone and a modem and actually has been running really great as a modem, just using internet sharing on Windows Vista. I can get it to work on a Mac as a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network), but it’s dog slow. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work on USB on the Mac which sucks, and the phone only has Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, so I couldn’t go that route, which I did on the iPhone (both USB and WiFi). Instead I have set up an Ad Hoc network and use a Proxy server on my PC to get my Mac online. Costa Rica really makes you work if you want to get your technology to work. That’s for sure.
Let me know if you are interested in buying one of these phones. I can send a PDF and here’s an image, too.
A friend of mine, Sidney Genette, put this link up about value vs. hourly. I have been basically freelance for 15 years, including a long run in the middle that was freelance, but in-house, hourly.
The client basically paid me hourly, but the reality was it was value based. This was great for both of us, except I had to show up to get the check, check out the article. Hourly is a hard paradigm to break out of this much is certain!
I kind of love the transition we are technologically right now with the smartphones, Facebook, privacy and the net.
I found this article and kind of agree with a lot of it. The Apple iPhone is an amazing tool and will be. Being in a country outside of America for a year struggling to get internet has been educational and lovely for me. A lot of pain, but I have learned a lot as a result of it.
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331
My HP was shiny and black and silver, I loved it for about one year. And then, it failed. I still have it and the four discs they told me to burn when I just purchased it (thanks HP, at my hourly rate the cost of my computer just went way up) were pulled out to restore it. Didn’t restore, it choked. Hmm, not so good (to say the least). HP support couldn’t help, they tried sending me disks, still didn’t work. In hindsight, two years later I think it was the internal DVD/CD player that was failing. It took at two or three months later, couldn’t get it to work, kind of gave up. It had been running XP which I liked.
Then one day I remembered that I had MS send me a copy of Vista for free because my computer was purchased around then, I thought, okay, I will give it a shot. I managed to use it with Vista but I hated it. At least I had a computer. By then, about two years ago, the battery was dead really quick, and then the sound card was starting to go. I was getting into music at the time. Everyone was you need a Mac, you need a Mac, I was in L.A. and they love their Mac’s there, I loved agonizing everyone there saying the PC was better… However, i was finding all I was doing was technical stuff to get the thing to work. I finally got a Mac and then three months later, of course, put a duo boot Boot Camp and Parallels. Tired of carrying around two laptops. Well, as soon as I did that the problems began on my Mac. I had a 100 programs PC or so and lots of fonts and keyboard commands. But then last year I dropped it. Hard drive dead. Luckily I had a clean and easy copy of my Mac side of the computer made from Carbon Copy Clone. The PC side is so hard (some linux guy tried to help me for like 8 hours a couple months ago making a 80 mb .img file I know I will never use for an old Compaq, no thanks!) The moral is HP isn’t going to win, Palm blew it with their buggy 650 or whatever it was that I loved but that broke and screwed all the early adoptors. My $1300 HP printer is a beast, too, and bad support the one time I made the mistake of calling (the guy was pretty smart and informed. The iPhone and iTouch are brilliant and are the only game in town. He’s a maniac (Jobs) and I hate the closed nature of it, but as my music teacher told me about a Mac vs. PC. It works. That’s the main thing. And one of the guys above is right, the virus thing and all that bloatware is killing it. Bloatware is currently killing Adobe, too, and all of the nag screens to reinstall. My Mac never bugs me to install stuff or update. Everytime I turn on that Piece of Crap, it tells me it’s an emergency and I have to download this, do that, or tells me this or that. You know what? Just leave me alone to do what I want to do today, the distractions on the internet are already enough!
I love how they are saying Jobs hates Flash, if you read what he wrote, it’s very interesting and accurate. H.264 is great but reading that Microsoft is only going to ship I.E. 9 with ONE CODEC is frightening. However, if it works. I was waiting to buy my new Canon camera based on it’s codec (the old one sucked!)
Apple is going to kill it (until they get to greedy, too, already kind of are, but it’s worth the price for their products!).