Jared’s Blog

Last week, Julie brought a little jar of pistachios into the office for all to enjoy (it is a Halloween themed jar!). I really love pistachios, but inevitably I never remember this while I’m at a grocery store.

There I was sipping my tea and crunching away on nuts when I noticed something strange. The nut I’d just cracked open wasn’t separating from it’s husk. I also noticed it was a very dark, almost black. Normally, the nuts are purple, green, and brown in color. I got the nut dislodged to find some sort of dead insect had made it’s home inside the pistachio. I kind of chuckled to myself and went on eating the rest of the nuts taking extra care not to get any extra doses of protein.

After Caroline got off her phone call, I showed it to her and she promptly freaked out. I know it wasn’t intentional, but thanks for the laugh Julie. Happy Halloween all!

Back in mid August, my work computer decided one day that it wasn’t going to let me set the desktop resolution to anything over 1024×768. That’s a problem because my preferred resolution is 1280×1024. Some people say it’s too small, but I really can’t deal without the extra screen real estate.

The problem started after the power went out one day. After I rebooted, something had happened that caused the problem. What likely went on is I read about some tweak online, changed my config files, and never rebooted. For those who don’t know Linux, you can do things like that and still have the program running. I probably was working on something at the time and didn’t want to restart the computer (Yes, I know all I’d have to do was restart X, but rebooting is cleaner).

After hammering on the problem for about a day and a half, I was unable to fix it and I gave up. There was much more important work to be done than tweaking my desktop setup.

I’ve tried a few times since then to figure out a solution to the issue without any success. Today, the Ubuntu gods saw fit to bless me with the ability to select my desired resolution!

Of course and odd problem requires and odd solution. Yesterday, I upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu, Edgy Eft. I was secretly hoping that would fix the issue, but it didn’t. Today, I downloaded the CD and was contemplating doing a full reinstall. I booted the disc, and just waded through the options to see if I could keep my files intact. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me do that so I rebooted out of the CD environment. Right away at the login screen, I noticed the resolution was back to 1280×1024. It was not the same for my desktop, but I was able to now select 1280×1024 from the Screen Resolution window. The only thing is it didn’t actually take the setting. It said it was at 1280×1024, but the size didn’t actually change. I just happened to log out and log back in and that was it!

Now I can work at my full resolution in happiness. I better get back to work.

In my haste to get to work this morning, I left my cellphone sitting on my dresser. The realization that I was without my means of contact with the world hit me as I was driving to work this morning. Immediately, I began getting panicked. What was I going to do without my phone?

It took a few seconds, but after really thinking about it, I don’t really need my phone at work. Most of the time it just sits there in my pocket taking up space. When it rings at work I rarely answer it. In fact, I think I’ve only answered it twice and one of those times no one else was in the office. Of course, this was the one day someone actually called me during the day. Just my luck.

With the tragedy averted, my mind was left to ponder other great things like “If Leonardo DaVinci was alive today would he have a Flickr account?” I say he would.

Online shopping rules! Why? Part of it is not having to go out and find whatever it is I’m buying. Part of it has to do with me being OCD about privacy. Unfortunately, I can also be an impatient bastard. I hate waiting for my shiny new toys to show up in my mailbox.

Recently, I’ve been ordering a lot of computer parts online through the always solid NewEgg.com and ZipZoomFly.com (formerly GoogleGear.com). First I just had the itch to buy some new parts, then my computer died on me and last night I had to order a part for a machine I’m doing some work on.

One reason I always go back to those sites is because of the service I get. Both companies are great about order processing and returns. It’s impressive when I place an order late one day and it gets shipped the next. However, I have noticed of late how their shipping has gone downhill.

It used to be almost everything on NewEgg had free 3-day shipping. Mostly it was the cheaper, smaller items that cost less than the shipping would. Anything over $30 definitely had free shipping. ZZF was even better. Most of their items had free 2-day shipping. The hard drive I ordered yesterday (from NewEgg) had an additional $6 tacked on for shipping. While I was comparing prices at ZZF, I found many of their items no longer had that 2-day shipping. It was still free at least, but that 2-day shipping was almost always a deal maker for me.

Despite my gripe, these are still two excellent companies even if you do have to pay a few bucks for shipping and wait a week to get your goods.

So what gives? Are rising gas prices to blame? Have NE and ZZF just gotten greedy? Plenty of ecommerce sites have free shipping on orders over $20. Couldn’t these sites do the same?

I’d almost go so far to say as you could build a whole business around the fact that you have fast and free shipping. I’d certainly be more apt to buy something from a site where I knew the product would be on my doorstep by the next day or two. I think others would too.

With Firefox on the eve of it’s 2.0 release, I have a question. Where are the commercial Firefox extensions? It seems to me that there’d be many a computing geek who would be willing to fork over $10 for access to say 5-6 really great extensions.

As far as my knowledge of Firefox and it’s license, I don’t think selling extensions rubs any legal noses in the dirt and I think the community would really be willing to pay if the value those extensions added was real. There would no doubt be a ton of press on the subject. Everyone would want to know what Mozilla thought and how they were going to “handle” it.
Having never developed a Firefox extension myself, I wonder if it’s the format itself that is causing a hindrance. From what I know, extensions are little more than some Javascript and XML. Knowing how extensions work in Firefox, I would say it’s pretty easy to transfer them from one computer to another and that’s a hurdle that said fictional company would have to overcome. I think it would be doable and rather profitable if done though.

All this coming from an avid open-source user? Maybe the real question is where are my morals?

Is it October already? Geez, where did September go?

When Rick asked if I was planning on going up to St. John’s for homecoming, my first thought was “Why not?” I figured it’d be a perfect time to hang out with Brenna and maybe catch a few college friends.

Saturday’s weather was wonderful. After forecasts of rain, I was relieved to see blue skies with little white clouds as we made our way towards campus. Temperatures were in the 60’s. In fact the weather was a little too warm for how we were dressed. I in my black St. John’s hoodie and Kristi in her 4 layers of clothes found ourselves sweating bullets after only walking from where we parked to the stadium.

If there’s one word to be said about St. John’s football, it’s definitely ‘dominant‘. OK, 2 words, the other being tradition. I walked into Clemens Stadium to see the throngs of students, alumni, parents, kids, and fans draped in red. The legendary John Gagliardi still helms the ship. The entire roster suits up for every home game and takes the field together. As I told Kristi and Rick that day, “It feels like coming home.”

The Johnnies got off to their usual breakneck pace scoring a touchdown on their 3rd play of the game. Carlton followed up on the next drive with a touchdown of their own, but the defense managed to block the extra point. That’s my Johnnies! As the dust settled at halftime, the score was 14-12 Johnnies. The Knights missed a crucial field goal that would have put them up by a point right before the end of the half.

The second half, was all Johnnies. They racked up another 15 points while only allowing 7 points bringing the final score to 29-19. All without their injured starting quarterback. According to Brenna, they are 5-0 on the season.

I guess I wasn’t wearing enough red because by the end of the game, my face was showing red from being in the sun all afternoon. A small price to pay for a good game.

The rest of the day we spent hanging out with Brenna which included a trip to Chipotle in St. Cloud. I also arranged to take her laptop and stop it from “sounding like an airplane” as well as fixing a few other ailements it’d accumulated since I shipped it off to school with her. My geek pride took a hit knowing that my own sister is less than proficient with computers. On the ride home, I once again realized I’d forgotten to buy a SJU window decal for my car. I swear, one of these times, I’m going to remember to buy one.