Big Dan’s Site

Thanksgiving was nice as usual mom put out an awesome spread. I helped out a little here and there, but she’s the mad scientist behind it all. I had a couple of friends over as they had to work tonight, so we figured to have them over this way they have a Thanksgiving Dinner.

You can see Tom before he went in the oven over there on the left. Aside from the turkey and stuffing we had candied sweet potatoes, asparagus, and pumpkin pie with coffee for dessert. It wasn’t a huge spread but with only 4 people what’s the point of making a huge thing the turkey, stuffing, and sweet potatoes were enough.

As seems to be tradition in our house we bought the cranberry jelly and forgot to put it out with dinner again. We seem to do that every year.

How was your Thanksgiving?

How ironic is it that I write “I’m back in the saddle.” Blogging wise and then you don’t hear from me for a few weeks again? Typical Big Dan

Things have been pretty good here, just normal stuff playing around with different operating systems and geek stuff but not accomplishing much of anything hence my lack of blogging both on here and Almost Geek.

A week after writing “When will cell phone companies stop playing games”, I went out and bought the Samsung R451C from Straight Talk, You will get a first hand review from yours truly in a few days. It’s my first smart phone although when compared to the iPhone and some of the Andriod phones it doesn’t seem all that smart. I’m still pretty amazed by it though, I find myself checking my email on it regularly, snapping pictures and sending them off to friends, updating my Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter status all at once via text message. Most of what I’m doing with the phone aside from checking email is pretty much useless but it is fun. :p

Well, it’s just after midnight here which means it’s officially Thanksgiving so Gobble Gobble! Happy Thanksgiving all!

..and finally give nationwide unlimited voice and data for a flat fee?

If you remember in the late 90’s it was a race to the bottom with land lines, free nights and weekend with $0.10/min then $0.05 a minute then they finally stopped playing games and now pretty much all our local telcos give us unlimited nationwide calls for a flat monthly fee along with a boatload of additional features: Caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, etc.

The cell phone companies are doing the same another race to the bottom with calling circles, and rollover minutes. What a waste of everyone’s energy.

Have you seen the new Straight Talk service? $45/mo prepaid unlimited everything courtesy of Tracfone and Wal-Mart. Sure the phones aren’t all that advanced but they just added a full keyboarded phone to the line up, I’m sure we’ll see more advanced phones down the line.

This tells me that if the company can charge you $45 with no long term commitment and they are still pulling a profit from it, there is no reason for these other companies to be charging upwards of $70 with a long term commitment most of it must be pure profit for these guys.

With the turn to cold weather, I’m back to blogging again! Around April-May of this year I decided to take a break from blogging as it was getting quite monotonous, sometimes it’s sort of like talking to yourself. Overall I took a break from pretty much everything all summer except for a few sites I stayed away most forums and just hung out wasting time on Facebook mostly aside from keeping up with my own sites.

This past week I’ve been working heavily on building content for AlmostGeek.com a domain that I’ve had for a while but never really worked on aside from installing Wordpress and leaving it sit. Almost Geek is going to be where my geekier stuff is posted, since BigDan.us is syndicated via RSS on a few sites, and most people don’t want to read the nuts and bolt geek stuff. . Over time I’ll link tutorials here on BigDan.us that have wider audience appeal.  I’ve already got a couple of tutorials and a few short tips published. The next tutorial I’ll be finish up this week is converting Roboform to Keepass with a Python script. Check out AG if you like. The Wordpress theme that I’ve got up there has to go as it’s too busy in my humble opinion, so that’s also on the agenda for this week.

Within the next month I will also be launching vBulletin Admin a blog for vBulletin forum administrators. I’ve had the domain for quite a while but never got much past the install Wordpress and let it sit stage.  I’m not quite sure what the layout or content strategy is going to be yet, I’m sure it will useful for forum administrators though.

On the home office front just this week I ordered a new 19″ monitor from NewEgg, for only $100 I couldn’t pass it up. I’ve been itching for a second monitor for quite a while. The new monitor  sits on my desk beside my main 22″ monitor. I’d planned to drive my Mac Mini with it but the Mac doesn’t detect it’s native resolution out of the box nor does the the resolution show in the preference pane (so much for it just works..ha), I refuse to pay $20 for SwitchResX, a program fixes the resolution problem, not because it’s a bad program or anything (although it does nag you on startup while in trial mode) but because this is something that should just work out of the box. Out of three monitors I’ve hooked up to my Mac it’s only detected one properly. What gives Mac folks? For now I have my Windows box hooked up to the 19″ monitor which Vista detected and it up automatically with no input from me. My main 22″ is driven by Mac which is cool with me as I’m comfortable using the Mac for all my every day tasks. I’d really like to get a real desk instead of just using to 4′ folding tables, maybe over the winter. Right now I’ve got a KVM switch just to share the same keyboard and mouse between computers, this week I’m going to try configuring Synergy and dropping the KVM.

Other than that, I’m back to exercising again. I took off a good month after a run with in a bear, I’ve finally got the nerve up to walk again; I started this week with about 1.5 miles a day. I’m hoping within a couple of weeks to do 1.5 miles twice a day. I got new long johns, two pair of insulated pants, and an insulated sweater with all that insulation I should be pretty good to walk all winter along although I don’t know how safe it is with no side walks and mounds of snow on the road shoulder where I normally walk. I really need a new knit cap and gloves, I definitely want safety orange just for visibility while I’m walking; not sure yet but I thinking of going with a ski-mask to keep my face warm, but really don’t want to look like a robber or something walking along the side of the road. LOL.

Today’s is a beautiful day it’s supposed to be in the low 60’s today and I’m looking forward to spending it offline after working on Almost Geek all week. I’m going to make some hot wings then go out for my walk, come home and just hang with the family. How was everyone’s summer?