Big Dan’s Site

It started snowing Wednesday night and didn’t stop until early this morning here in Eldred. What to do when there’s a major snow storm and you cannot get out? I tell you what, change your bedroom around. Yesterday I dove into that. I changed it over to my ’summer’ configuration, with my bed against the windows and computer tabled laid out end to end instead of in an L shape. I like the  L shape better but I have more room for both computers this way.

Now my TV stand is right near my bed which is good because the screen is kind of small and I can see it better. I’m looking into getting a new bed frame so I can get my bed off the floor and put up the headboard which hasn’t been up in quite a while. What I’d really like to do is get a new TV stand that has a proper mount for a flat screen TV. My current stand is designed for the old TVs with a long back. That’s a little while off though. My next furnature purchase is regular computer desk instead of two tables.

Today I got to shovel. I actually had to shovel out my door way just to get outside. I’d say we got closer to 3 feet than the 2 feet the news is saying. It took me a half hour just to shovel out a small path so that my mother could get to the store across the street. Then it took me 2 hours through and two trips to shovel out the car. Which we moved into to the town hall’s parking lot next door, so that that plow can come through and make a clean sweep.

During my first break from shoveling I wrote my review of the Samsung R451c from Straight Talk over on Almost Geek which I’d been planning to write for quite a while. I also decided to cancel my Straight Talk service and just go with my old Tracfone for now. As I really don’t use it much now that I’m home and therefore can justify the $50/mo bill for it. My Tracfone is only $20 every 3 months and I renewed my Skype incoming number and subscription for unlimited US & Canada calls. I’m able to text through Google Voice, so that save me a bunch of Tracfone credits.  I also started collecting my thoughts for my review of the iPod Touch which I got Monday.  Here’s a spoiler alert, I love the thing. I’ll probably write the review tomorrow.

Here’s a few pictures of my desk that I just snapped with my camera phone:

That is my main desk where I sit most of the time, has my main computer and most stuff use all the time on it.

This desk has my Mac Mini on it. I bought a monitor for it not to long ago thinking I would use it more and I do but the trouble is all my files aren’t on that computer so I wind up having to switch back and fourth. I’m not really sure what to do with it anymore. It may go out in the living room for everyone to use or I’ll throw it up on top of my entertainment center for media streaming.

How are you dealing with the storm? Do you change your furniture around often?

I left for Florida the first week in February, spent two weeks there, and have been home for a week now. I’m finally getting back into the groove of things. I had mountains of correspondence piled up along with a good amount of website maintenance that needed to be done. My trip to Florida was unplanned a buddy of mine was moving back to Florida from New York. I took the trip to help him drive down and get setup in his new apartment, stayed a week then took Amtrak back.

The trip was nice overall, 24 hours straight through in a car was no picnic but as they say “You gotta do what you gotta do”, I had a blast with my friends kids’. They’re all young, between 2-6 years old so I have lots of fun playing with them. The worst thing about Florida was the limited internet access I had. I could only get online at his mother’s house which has DSL but the speed is only marginally better than dial up. Then there’s the kids — you try getting anything done on your laptop with 3 kids running all over the place. :p I’d rather hang out with the kids then muck around on the computer anyway. I was able to keep up with my email on my cell phone at least.

Every time I go down to Florida I’m reminded of how much I love it down there. I lived down there for a few months in 2008 but my job didn’t pan out. The weather is always nice even though it was relatively cold this time around but still a helluva lot better than New York’s weather. People seem to be much friendlier. Friendly almost to the point of being nauseating but you get used to it. I’m trying to convince mom to make the move down there, she wants to get away from the cold weather too but mom’s not quite sold on the idea yet. I’d save up and make the move myself but mom’s not in the best of health and I’d rather be close to look after her.

The trip home was uneventful other than someone on the train getting alcohol poisoning and us having to make an unscheduled stop but that unscheduled stop turned into a smoke break. I guess that serves him well, his party bought all the alcohol on the train before we were even out of Florida. I couldn’t even get a beer before going to sleep.   Despite everything bad I’ve heard about Amtrak I’ve traveled to and from Florida 3 times and had no issues other than the train being a little bit late. 24 hours on the train is a bit much but not to bad considering they have regular smoke breaks and a dining car. When the train stopped in DC to switch to electric power I got out for a smoke break and seen the snow. Ick, I hate it! I got off at Newark Penn Station instead of my normal New York Penn Station thinking that I could more easily catch the NJ Transit train up to Port Jervis near my house. I still had to switch trains twice so it wasn’t much different other than me getting a little lost because I’m unfamiliar with Newark Penn Station. It turns out I’d been misinformed and my train to Port Jervis still runs out of Hoboken and I would’ve been better off just going into New York Penn Station like I normally do.

Sure enough while I was in Florida I missed two snow storms. Last night we had about 6 inches here, I just shoveled out from that and now tomorrow night into tomorrow we’re supposed to get over a foot of snow. Something tells me I should have stayed in Florida.

Anywho now that I’m back home and online you can look forward to seeing some more blogging from me as well as me being more active on the sites I regularly haunt. How is everyone’s winter going so far?

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!

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?

I wrote this for my DJ Forum, for this thread: Want to work for the city? Hand over your facebook login info but it’s probably more suited to my blog:

It’s funny as we move more and more into the so called digital/information age less and less of our information is personal or private. Think about it on face book, myspace, etc we broadcast our relationship status list our name, address, phone number, websites, etc.

Most of the times we share this information without even thinking about who has the ability to see the information today who will have the ability to see the information tomorrow. There have actually been many newspaper articles on weather or not to ‘friend’ your parents or coworkers.

How many of you have ‘friends’ on facebook that you rarely if ever talk to? Are they really friends or just people you’re too polite to ‘defriend’? No offense, to anyone who is on my facebook page but I have many people on there whom I never talk to yet they have access to all my current information. At no time in history has this been possible unless you wrote or phoned your old friends they had no way to get your information unless it was through a friend/family member of yours who would more than likely know if you didn’t want that other person to have your information for what ever reason.

For me it seems like it’s an all in or all out thing. It seems that you either put the information there for all to see OR no information for anyone to see. It would be nice if you could control what information goes out to who. For instance maybe only real life friends and family should be able to see my address and phone number. As it is today, once you’re my BFF on facebook you know where I live.. Is that smart? I don’t know personally I don’t think I make very many enemies and those that I do make enemies out of probably aren’t crazy enough to do something like try and shoot me through my front facing bedroom window.

But what happens if I friend someone who I don’t realize is a crazed lunatic and down the line I piss them off in some way then they try and off me through my street facing bedroom window?

I’m joking a bit and perhaps taking things to the extreme but it is something to think about.

I promised I would post pictures of my new desk setup, without further ado here they are you can click on each image for a full description:

I know I had promised pictures of my new setup yesterday but I was busy trying to get our new car on the road so I didn’t even get my surround sound done yesterday. Long story short, our  current car is a money sink. We just put over $1000 into and it still doesn’t run right the icing on the cake was when the rear air shocks dropped and the car was practically sitting on it’s tires making driving it a bad idea idea all around. Add to it that just when you think nothing else can go wrong with the junker something else goes wrong. We were planning on getting the shocks replaced just so we had something to drive as out in here in the country you need a car.

Long story short, last week mom was looking at a car on the side of the road that was for sale. She hymned and haed with the guy but he wouldn’t take payments. So, we left it at that figuring we’re not getting the car.

Yesterday out of now where he called dropped the price by $200 and decided to take payments so we made the down payment and got the title and keys.It’s 1996 Buick Regal Custom. Aside from fading paint and a few dents on the trunk it looks pretty sharp. The interior is all leather although a bit cracked and stained but that can be taken care of with some cleaning or worse comes to worse a seat cover. I checked out everything all the fluids look good and the electrical system works just fine. The only problem with car is it’s not made for tall guys, I’ve got the seat all the way back and sunk (power seat) and I still have bend my neck to see out the windshield. I don’t think I’ll be driving around to much in this.

As luck would have it, I wanted to take her to the car wash to wash, wax, vacuum, shampoo, and armor all the car but no dice it’s raining.

But for what we paid, if it lasts a year I’ll happy. It seems like a solid car though we used to have an older one just like it a 1992 it was a great car I think we finally got rid of it at over 220,000 miles because the tranny went aside from that I remember we used to run through brakes every couple of months.

Tomorrow I’m going to do my surround sound take pictures of that and the new car.

It’s been a while again, I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to posting with any frequency as I’ve been quite busy with other projects however today I took most of the day away from the computer and spent it changing my room around again. I changed everything around for two reasons. 1) I gave my mother my air conditioner and wanted to move my bed by the windows so I can get air flow on those hot summer nights and 2) I wanted my TV closer to my bed since the screen is smaller.

I spent yesterday fixing up all my computers the laptop is now dual booting Windows 7 plus Ubuntu and with the desktop I opted to keep Vista on since it’s the current stable version that dual boots with Ubuntu too. I tend to spend most of my time in Windows anyhow.. Ubuntu become more of a hobby OS for me.

The Mac Mini is back on my entertainment center with the screen being close to the bed, it’s more comforatable to view text from the bed which is great for a quick email check or IM session plus I can stream Hulu & Netflix direct to my TV now.

I don’t have any pictures yet, I was planning on posting some however I’m pooped out. Tomorrow I just have to re-run my surround sound speakers, that should only be an hour job but it’s still a major pain in the arse. This time around I opted to my two  4′ tables which I use as my desk in a stright line rather than using them in an L shape. So far it’s working out pretty good.

That’s that I’ll post pictures tomorrow.  Aside from that I’m back to walking again, I won’t bore you with the details and I’m still trying to quit smoking.. Big surprise.

Pics tomorrow.

Lots of little things have been keep me away from my blog lately. From it just being spring time and me wanting to be outside with da bird and the bees, hopefully some fine ladies too. ( ), to exercise, to work and the frustration of lack of work, and the chasing around of people to pay there bills boy can that be frustrating. Let me give you quick run down of what’s been going on.

I last posted about my new TV, it’s great I really like it, I think it’s better than my old one albeit a 9 inches smaller, it’s still better. On the HD TV front I’m really dissatisfied the cable companies are marketing HD TV like it’s the holy grail meanwhile out of the 20 or so HDTV channels I get, I’m lucky if half of them show HD shows all the time, it’s like a bait and switch, IMHO…Anyway, I’ve got my RCA switch hooked up along with my ‘old school’ (PS 2, Game Cube, Xbox [original] ) game consoles they all look 110% better on this TV especially with the games that support 16:9 format. Ya know it’s funny I consider myself somewhat of a geek although I’m not much of a gamer, I think if I’ve played all my consoles combined for more than 6 hours in the last year that would be a lot. Well last year was a turbulent year for me BUT I only switch on my PS2 or xBox to watch a DVD, I only actually play when I’m bored out of my mind, Grand Theft Auto 3 (PS2) and the Sonic Mega Collection (GC) are my favorite games to kill an evening with hence my hesitance to upgrade. If I were to upgrade, I’d buy the PS 3 first as Playstation has always been *the* game console for me but if GTA 3 and Sonic Mega Collection, which is all the old sonic games from Sega rolled into one game cube game CD do it for me, why should I drop $400 on the PS 3?

Other than that I had my Mini Mac hooked to the new TV via it’s VGA (dated computer monitor) input it was nice for while but I decided I wasn’t using mini enough due to it being on the TV stand rather than my desk, so I moved it back over to my desk and switching between the Mini and my workhorse desktop via one monitor. I really like OS X’s presentation style and eye candy BUT OS X, contrary to what the I’m a Mac ads would have you believe isn’t without it’s drawbacks and need of maintenance just like any other OS, don’t be tricked into buying a computer with the Apple upcharge thinking it just works, it doesn’t. However I could use and adapt to OS X very easy if I had a more powerful Mac computer, I’m just not prepared to pay the apple tax for an iMac. For now my Mini is used primarily as my morning/before bed email/feeds/instant messenger checker and whenever I have any ‘heavy’ work to do I switch to my Windows desktop.

What else? Ubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope was released last month I upgraded both my desktop and laptop to it then was shocked!! to see that Intel graphics cards weren’t supported under the new kernel without the driver desktop effects don’t work.  I was shocked only because the community makes such big thing about proprietary, closed source drivers and Intel gave them them the whole source and they still couldn’t make it work. So, I boycotted Ubuntu for about a month but realized how silly it was to discount a whole operating system just because one thing doesn’t work and this weekend I reinstalled Ubuntu on both my desktop and laptop. So far, so good. I’m actually typing this in Ubuntu right now. Although Firefox is abysmally slow under Ubuntu compared to Windows or the Mac. I don’t get it and cannot understand why. It seems other people have this issue and no one has figured it out yet. Firefox still ’ships’ with the Great Britain English dictionary instead of giving the American users their own for some reason too, this makes build in spell checking a minefield of sorts.

Also on the OS front, Windows 7 RC 1 (release candidate) was release at the begining on of May. It’s awesome it’s really what Vista should have been. It’s so good that I’ve wiped Vista off both my Window’s machines and am using W7 RC 1 and Ubuntu (just this weekend) exclusively. Me running a non-stable version as a production machine because I like it so much over it’s predecessor is a major win for MS

Other than that I’ve upgraded to a premium dropbox account after playing with the free (2 GB) account for about a year. For $10 a month I get 50 GB of space which is more than enough for me. I’ve really fell head of heals for Dropbox. It’s not really a back up tool than it is a sync tool. Basically if you have two computers, you put files in your dropbox on one computer and when you turn on your other computer the file automatically updates. Or if you have the other computer on at the same time, it updates as fast as you can upload the file then have the other computer download it. It’s just a great tool, I have nothing bad to say about it. It also supports verisoning which for you non-geek types is where when you change a file the old file is still saved for restoration. It’s saved my kiester a couple of times, by having the auto-save feature of a text editor wipe out my TODO.txt file. one trip to dropbox’s website and the old file (version) is swapped out for the new one. A vast majority of my files are now stored in my dropbox. With dropbox being cross platform whenever I load a new OS, I just install dropbox and let all my files download for a couple of hours.. Presto most of my files are all accessible from the new OS.

Outside of the the tech front and geek stuff:

I’ve been dieting and exercising like crazy since the nice weather got here. I started off walking about a half mile a day with my long Johns on, in the begining of April and I could barely do that, now I’m up to 2.6 miles a day with some resting on the walk, a lot less resting than when I started. I push myself a little further every week, I’m hoping by July to be up to 5 miles a day. That’s probably what’s taken me away from blogging the most; I have to leave by 5p or else I’ll be walking in the dark on the way back and with the bears I just cannot do that. By the time I get home I’m wiped and really only have the energy to force myself to do what I have to.

On the eating front, I’ve drastically reduced my intake. There is still some stuff to cut like how much coffee I drink and late night snacks BUT overall I’m doing very well.

My birthday was two weeks ago. I was wished Happy Birthday many times over via email, forums, facebook, myspace, etc that always brings a smile to my face, so if you wished me a happy birthday and didn’t get a personal thank you, I’m sorry consider this your thank you.

Mother’s Day was nice, I was a little low on funds so it wound up just being flowers and a cake but we still had a nice time. My mom-a-lah is a great woman and treats me better than any man could ask for.. Why do we celebrate her gifts to us only 1 day a year?

Other than that the normally working on issues behind the scenes of my DJ forum and chasing after people for bills they owe me has been the norm lately. I realize this has been a long post covering several topics hopefully you stuck with me. As always, thanks for reading.