Thu May 08, 2008
Our Move to San Francisco (New Blog)
I try to keep my blogging separated into different topics and not just dump it on one site so I have a few different places on the net that contain my ramblings. Today I'm announcing a new site that Laura and I will co-write together. It's called http://adamandlauragowest.com/.
We have a lot of questions and figuring those it will be challenging but documenting everything we learn about this move and adding photos, video and small updates is going to be very interesting. Check it out and subscribe!
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Tue May 06, 2008
San Francisco Here I Come
I generally say that each year while boarding the plane to SF for Macworld Expo but this time, it will be a permanent change. Last night, after nearly 4 years of “planning” my relocation to the bay area, Laura and I decided that we’re going to do it. We deliberated and talked about it for nearly 5 hours yesterday and reviewed all of our options. Here’s what we have:
1. Take the money that’s currently in savings, pack up everything and just leave. We’ll arrive, put everything in storage then stay at the hostel and begin job searching. The hostel is $15 a night per person so we could do that for 2 weeks while we find jobs. This plan has the highest likelihood of failure for a few reasons so we threw this one out. (ETA 3 weeks)
2. Sell everything that we own in a super eBay / on-site Internet promoted garage sale. Combined, Laura and I have nearly 1000 local friends on Myspace and Facebook and creating an event with photos of everything that we own then inviting them all to an open house where you name your price and buy all of our worldly possessions. We’ll use that and cash we have saved, fly to San Francisco, move into a furnished apartment and start job hunting. (ETA 4 weeks)
3. The last option, which I feel is the best plan, is to update my resume and begin applying for jobs. I’ve already started the application process. I’ve also started looking at rentals. We’ll probably sell most of our big furniture and ship some things like my computer and clothes to a friend in SF then Laura and I will have a rental and job waiting for us when we arrive. This is the best option but it also means that we’ll be living in Florida longer. Getting a job from another side of the country is difficult. It works but takes a little longer than being able to do an in person interview. (ETA 45 days or more)
All of these options involve selling things. This sell off includes our cars too which are both used with over 150K miles each but in SF we won’t need a car at least initially. I plan on getting a motorcycle after getting established. Here’s a list of some other items that are for sale:
1. Living Room Furniture (couches, tables, entertainment stand, 32” CRT television and DVD racks)
2. Nearly 400 DVD and CDs that are all in perfect condition
3. Camping Gear (dry bags, lanterns, tents, sleeping bags and misc. survival gear)
4. Bedroom furniture (bed, furniture and tables)
5. Office items like my coveted glass desk, miscellaneous Mac and PC electronics, lava lamp, old Mac software and my “electronics junk drawer”
6. My collection of 175 vintage technology T-shirts from the past 15 years. I have nearly 200 shirts from conferences, companies, product releases and shipping them all is a pain so I’m putting them up for grabs.
This will help us raise some extra money. An issue with taking everything over there in a moving van is the cost of gas. The smallest personal van one-way from Florida to California would be about $1400 dollars and an additional $1200 in gas. We could make that much money by selling off everything and just starting new. It sucks to get rid of everything but would be a fresh start and the more cash that is in the bank, the easier things will be initially.
It’s scary to think that I’ll be leaving my life behind and making the move. A year ago, I did sit down with Laura and review other US cities as options for our move but nothing had the appeal of San Francisco. I’ve personally traveled throughout the southeast from Tennessee to Louisiana and as far south as Miami. I’ve been to Boston, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Los Angeles, Orange County, Reno and San Francisco. I have no interest in central US and of every city I’ve been to, SF is the best. For many of you, I don’t have to say why this is the case and no one has an extra 3 hours to read that so let’s just say that for me and Laura both, it’s the best place to start over.
I’m throwing this post out there with a request for help. I don’t need your money. This is simply asking for advice on our move. If anyone knows a realtor or any open rentals in SF or perhaps your place of employment has an opening for someone in my field. A place that also pays for relocation would rock but I’ll do fine without that and I’ll need 2-3 weeks to notify my employer of the departure but if you have any recommendations or advice, comment below or send them my way to adam@dailytechtalk.com
Here is a link to my resume: here
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Mon May 05, 2008
Home Office Changes
Each year, I make a radical change to my home office. This is the 14x10 foot 2nd bedroom in our apartment that is used to develop my online presence, work from home when I’m sick, create podcasts, watch movies and edit photos that I take. It’s very important to me and that’s why I still have a 30” CRT television that I bought from my dad for $150 dollars 2 years ago because I keep taking money and putting it into my office instead of finally getting that flat screen TV.
Timeline:
2005: Purchased a dual 2.0 PowerMac G5 and Dual 1.5 Xserve and a new Klipsch 5.1 speaker system. I also got an EyeTV system for watching TV.
2006: Purchased a Core2Duo MacBook (2GHz) and 20” Dell LCD. Laura gave me a beautiful big glass desk which I still use today
2007: Purchased a MacBook Pro (2.33GHz), my speakers died to I bought a 5.1 Logitech system and added some more hard drives to my system. I also jumped into virtualization by installing Windows XP via Parallels Desktop.
2008: We moved and so my office grew larger.
My job has changed drastically in the past 12 months and I’m training more and more on Microsoft technology. So I have some new gear. I didn’t buy all of this. A lot of it was part of my job.
1. I got a Dell Inspiron 530 with a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, NVIDIA 8800 GT graphics card and a terabyte of storage in Raid1.
2. A Dell 24” monitor for my MacBook Pro and I moved the 20” monitor to the Dell.
3. Upgraded Laura’s PowerBook to Leopard and finally updated the software on her iPod and iPhones to the latest versions (she’s so bad about that)
4. Moved to VMWare Fusion on my MacBook pro cause VMWare kicks so much ass! Installed Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro, upgraded the ram to 4GBs and installed a 7200RPM 300GB hard drive (up from 2GBs of ram and 5400RPM 160GB HD).
5. Upgraded the Dell to Windows Vista Ultimate and virtualized Server 2008 Enterprise on it and installed Adobe CS3 Design Premium on my MacBook Pro, Laura’s PowerBook and the new Dell.
6. Consolidated my Mac’s external hard drives so now I have 4 external drives equaling 2 terabytes of storage.
7. Setup a domain using server 2008 and connected all Windows OSes to it configuring login scripts and using group policy through the domain.
8. Installed Microsoft Office 2008 Professional on mine and Laura’s Macs
9. Installed Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate on the Dell and the virtual guest operating systems.
As you can see, this was a complete network upgrade that also consisted of reloading the operating systems on both of our Macs. Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve installed 4 instances of Windows, 2 Macintosh reloads and configured a crap load of software and hardware. I’ve also rearranged and managed all office cabling and reconfigured mine and Laura’s backup plans so we now have a single NAS backing up important documents off-site using Mozy (that was just released for Mac). Don’t worry. I didn’t buy everything here. I can attest that every software title was purchased legally by my work or me and, luckily, I have a job where they really take care of their employees. The latest technology helps employees learn more and progress.
If you’re wondering why it’s been so slow lately, that’s why. There was a complete network deployment going on at my place and it feels nice to have all of that completed. Now, I just need a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for the Dell and some audio equipment so we can setup multiple microphones. At this point, I can only use two microphones for our podcasts but would like to use 4 so that’s the next step.
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Fri May 02, 2008
Tech Conferences are Irrelevant
They are. Tech conferences have no merit or value anymore. Those of you that travel thousands of miles to hang out with the same people that live in your town need to get a clue and open your eyes.
I want to write more on this subject but I'm planning on recording an episode tonight and embedding it here. Keep watching this space.
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Mozy for Mac: FINALLY!
Mozy is a rocking backup system and it's a system we've been using at the office for over a year. Actually, we use Mozy Pro and offer it to clients who want a cost effective per gigabyte system to backup misc. databases or folders. You can't do a bare metal system restore using Mozy but for backups of files and folders, it's simply fantastic. Mozy Pro is great for servers since it runs as a service. This is geek speak for it runs without logging into the server.
Mozy home is a fantastic system but you must be running it and logged in for backups to occur. Mozy gives you 2 gigabytes of free storage which is enough for all of your word documents and a few tunes and all you have to do is sign up. I, however have Mozy installed on my Vista box at work, Vista at home and now my MacBook Pro.
A year ago, Mozy released a beta of their backup client for Mac but I didn't give in since I usually don't run anything in beta. Now that the client is 1.0, it was time to give Mozy another $4.95 a month and add my Mac to the backup plan. It's funny because my Mac is the primary machine in the house and my backup selection may be a little too much for my cable Internet connection.
See, after I selected the items that I want to have stored off-site, Mozy is now chugging away at my home trying to upload 435 gigabytes of data. I have about 2 terabytes of data consisting of movies, music, documents, photos and digital archives of my life that I can't afford to lose. A 1 terabyte Time Machine drive backs up my absolutely critical bits but my 100 gigabytes of music and an extra 200 gigabytes of videos never get backed up and if that drive fails, I'm relying on a 160 gigabyte iPod to restore as much as possible.
Bare in mind that I have a 1 megabit upload which, based on my calculations means that I can upload a gigabyte of data in 3 hours assuming I have nothing else going on. Mozy is guestimating that I'll have all of this data completed in about 2 weeks. I'm just waiting for Mozy to call me and say that I'm abusing their service.
Anyway, that's Mozy and I'll be updating if any problems arise but you should go out there and get setup even if you're on Windows of Macintosh and already have an external drive or NAS for backups, off-site is the very best because if a fire of flood occurs then you're shit out of luck. Mozy FTW! http://mozy.com
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Tue Apr 29, 2008
MacBook Air Parody feat. IBM ThinkPad X300
Simply fantastic. I agree whole heartedly. If you have no interest in running Mac OS X and love the "strictly business" look of a black IBM Thinkpad, then the X300 is for you. The two are similarly priced.
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Fri Apr 25, 2008
Live from ROFLCon
There are many people that weren't able to make it to ROFLCon this weekend but the folks over at Ustream.tv are covering it live!
Folks from the coolest blogs and the coolest web celebrities are there. Join in the action!
Ustream.TV Live from ROFLCon
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Thu Apr 24, 2008
Stats, Stats and more Stats!
I was asked how do I figure how how many people visit the site every day. I should't check it often but I do. On the hour, "ooh 1 more person just visited!" Anyway, there are a few things I use to check this.
Mint is the primary tool that is used for this. It's a fantastic lightweight engine powered by PHP and MySQL developed by a very cool guy. I have it licensed for all of my sites and absolutely love it. He answers every email and is constantly updating the application and modules. On top of that, there's a huge community of users constantly developing new add-ons. This is the hour to hour tool I use because it's in real time showing visitors, their info and where they came from.
Google Analytics is also pretty cool because it breaks things down a little differently. It does not show up to the minute stats for your site but it has some additional features I like if I'm trying to breakdown the last month of visitors.
1&1 Web statistics comes from my ISP and I use this to see what files are being downloaded most. I used to host my podcast here and would use that to determine how many listeners we have. Now, the AdamJackson Live podcast and DailyTechTalk Live cast are hosted over at Libsyn which has a really cool statistics engine.
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Wed Apr 23, 2008
Silverlight is Taking Over
Microsoft released Silverlight a year ago and it was dubbed as a flash killer. Flash is Adobe's product and makes services like YouTube possible. Flash is fantastic and has been around fore more than 6 years and has quite a place in the market. Microsoft's Silverlight system is giving Flash a run for its money and there are a few reasons why.
First, Silverlight is much more lightweight than Flash and it's built for web 2.0 and dynamic web applications. At first glance, it has an Aqua look and feel (the pretty aspects of OS X) and even better is that Microsoft's platform is brand new where Flash is still bundling components and lines of code in their product to maintain compatibility with applications that were built on Flash 1.0. Silverlight is brand new so they don't have the worry of dealing with backend support and compatibility with older implementations since it's so new.
Microsoft also got it right when they built Silverlight to work as many platforms as possible. Flash also does this but it's very un-Microsoft to build something that works outside of the latest version of their OS. Many expected Silverlight to be Vista only and require Direct-X 10 or some crap like that but it works with Windows 2000 - Vista, Windows Mobile 6, Mac OS 10.4 / 10.5 and there's even a development of a Linux version underway.
Why is Silverlight being adopted so fast? Microsoft is huge and they've made it pretty difficult to avoid Silverlight if you're on a PC. Go to Microsoft Update and you'll see Silverlight as an option or head over to Microsoft.com and the whole site has Silverlight embedded asking you to install it so you'll see "the new look." They even went as far to add, "get Silverlight" buttons right below the Microsoft logo on every MS support page. Microsoft is really pushing the technology where Adobe had to wait for people to adopt their product.
I think Microsoft certainly hit a home run with this product and the power of Silverlight greatly surpasses Adobe's Flash product ten fold.
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Tue Apr 22, 2008
Eee PC for Me!
My sister got an ASUS Eee PC for my sister for Christmas last year and I had the opportunity to play with it for a week to get it setup for her. What an awesome notebook for a blogger. As a MacBook Pro as my only computer, it's nice to have that tied to an external monitor when at home but blogging on the go isn't so easy when you're pulling out a 15" 6 lb computer. The iPhone has helped me keep up with social networking sites and Twitter but on weekend trips where a computer is needed, the Eee PC fits the bill.
There's nothing about it that you don't need. It has Firefox, a word processor and Skype. You can connect to Wi-fi anywhere in the world or bring your own USB wireless solution from your cell phone carrier and connect to the cellular network and blog away from anywhere!
If you're a YouTube person, it has a built in camera and microphone for mobile updates and with a little work, you can record a podcast and send it to the web as well. 8 gigabytes of storage (soon to be 16) is a bit limited but this is not meant to replace your MacBook or other notebook but when a blogger has to go on the road it's Eee for the win.
I'm waiting for the upcoming larger screen Eee sporting the Intel Atom processor, 16 gigabytes of storage and running Windows XP. The great thing about this new model is that the form factor won't change and will be around $499 USD. Compare that to the MacBook Air. The MBA is a much more equipped system but it's also more than the price of 4 Asus Eee PCs. Think about that.
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