Cameron's Thoughts

Here's some fun pics of Hailey's bad hair day!

This is some news. Daily Gadget is reporting that Gateway has purchased eMachines. Not only that, Ted Waitt, of cow commercial fame and also the founder of Gateway is passing the CEO title to eMachines CEO Wayne Inouye. Waitt will still be the Chaiman though.

Back in November, I mentioned a chance to win a free SD card. It was a long wait, but I finally received the card I choose a couple days ago. I signed up for the Atari Retro game pack. It's pretty cool and has some of my favorites like Missile Command and Asteroids. It was advertised to be on SD cards, but in fact it was on an MMC card. For those who don't know, the cards both have the same basic form factor, SD card format is a little newer, but adds a write protect switch, a couple pins for a security setup and is nearly twice as thick. Almost all SD cards slots will accept an MMC card, but some devices will only take MMC. This was nice, because my good 'ol 3650 only takes MMC cards and this Atari Retro pack works for that too. Actually, it is playable on all Palm OS5 systems with MMC/SD card slots, all Pocket PC 2002 and above systems with MMC/SD card slots and all Symbian Series 60 phones with an MMC slot. When I signed up, I thought it was only for Palm. And my Sony Clie doesn't have an SD card slot, only Memory Stick, though I was hoping to copy the files from the MMC card to the MS using a card reader. I tried it, but it would never work no matter what I did. I also tried playing the games on the 3650, but it just was not the same playing with the little direction arrows on the phone. So, my experience hasn't quite been what I was hoping for. If I could get it to play on the Clie, I would probably enjoy the game more. But, I have instead decided to sell the game, so I will probably be putting it on EBay shortly.

We had a ton of snow today. Had to been almost a foot. I know the weather forecast was calling for 10 inches and they were right for once. I had a lot of fun shoveling. My car still got stuck when I came home from work though, since I assumed that I shoveled most of the snow earlier, my car would still make it into the driveway. Didn't happen. Just the snow from the 5 hours I was at work (closed early due to lack of business due to snow) caused my car to get stuck. I took some pics while I was shoveling and will share them with everyone who is brave enough to read this.

Is anybody interested in having their own Movable Type blog hosted for them? Or even an image gallery? I have been thinking of doing a hosting service where I would do all the setup of an image gallery like the one I have set up for Hailey. I could install all the software, and do some basic configuration. Even set up a domain name for it. This would be for a small fee of course. Plus, I could do some blog hosting. This blog here is using the Movable Type software and is very customizable. Right now I am hosting a friend of mine, Neil Vitale. For an even smaller fee I could do a blog hosting with a domain name for that also, and you could get some web storage space and your own custom e-mail . Basically, whatever you wanted. Well, if anybody is interested, just post a comment here, or e-mail me cbulock(at)cbulock(dot)com.

I had a couple of interviews at CoreComm back in October. I probably mentioned it here, don't remember. They told me there were no openings, but Brian Oakley (he's my wife's step-mom's brother, not really related, but kinda) told me that I was at the top of the list when they had an opening. He has been helping me get this job there, and I really appreciate him for it. Anyhow, I was expecting there to be an opening sooner, but for some reasons that I can't really say, they couldn't do any hiring for a little while. But, today they called me and asked if I was still interested in the job. Of course I still was, so they said it would be one to three weeks while they did some background checks and let the paperwork run through the HR department. I am pretty excited. McDonald's has been a shit job recently (well, it's never been great, but now is worse than normal). Let's just say it's been going on two years since I have seen an increase in pay. And now they are working our asses off. Not sure if I can quote the expected labor percent McDonalds policies expect a store to follow, but I can say that we have been running WAY under the correct labor rate. At some times the labor percent is half of what it should be (each person is on average doing the job of two people, and when you figure in the lazy asses you can barely do their own job, some people are doing the work of three or more people). Ah, so is life. At least the owner of the store is able to spend more time on vacation in Florida than at home. And that's no exaggeration either. The first two months of this year he is going to be in Florida over six weeks, and last year he was down there at least half the year. At least my lack of raises has been going to good use.

OK, after a bit of work figuring out how to do it, I was able to add some RSS feeds to the right column here at my journal. I got the code from here. Was a bit complicated as the a couple of Movable Type plugins had to be installed, and the code had to be added to the page here and set up to fit in with the rest of the design. Then, I had to set up a cron job on the server since Movable Type doesn't dynamically update the pages every time someone loads then, they are rebuilt when needed (content is updated, or manually when code is updated). So, a cron job had to be set up for the pages to rebuild every once in a while (I have it set for one hour now, will adjust if necessary) so the news will be fairly up to date. Hopefully it will all update properly. I am also adding a GeoURL link to this page. It's a pretty cool service where you tell them the exact location your website is at (well, at least where I am at), and then it will show you other websites physically near yours. It's a pretty cool setup I think.

Today I have been doing a lot of updating to my website. I updated the About Me page here with some updated info. My biggest project for today was updating Hailey's image gallery to a newer version of the software. The newer version allows for a lot of newer feature including a user system where you can register. Then you can vote on images, and receive e-mail updates when the site is updated. I haven't even seen all the changes yet, but it's pretty cool. This software update also has a skinning feature, meaning the website also looks a lot nicer now since I really didn't spend much time editing the code to begin with. Now, all the work is already done. I am still in process of finishing some updates to this journal.

Well, it has been a bumpy month for this website. Due to a number of outages and basically crappy support from Cirtex Hosting, I decided to move on. They did provide me with free hosting, which was nice, but I was getting what I paid for. So, in some crazy error on my part, I moved the site to EQ Servers. Bad idea. Within days of getting the site up and running, a hacker broke into the server and defaced all the websites. No big deal, was able to restore. Then days later after I made a number of minor updates to this site (which I will be redoing here shortly), EQ Servers restored my site from a backup days before. So, days worth of info were lost. I contacted the host, Kane Hart, and he said he could probably restore the data from another backup. That was the last I ever heard from him. Now he will never respond to any support tickets or e-mails.
Well, now the site has been moved once again, this time to PersonalSites.org. They have some pretty nice deals and seem to have a good reputation. Hopefully this will be the last move for a while.

This is a test posting to make sure the latest server move has been successful.

After owning my 3650 for a little while now, I have never been able to get the thing to sync with Outlook. I think the install of PC Suite must have been corrupted or something. I had uninstalled and re-installed numerous times (as seen in the Bluetooth fun posts), but that was to get the PC Suite to just see the phone. I didn't want to attempt another re-install just to get the sync to work as I figured another reinstall would probably do more harm than good.
I read through the instructions very closely, and it said to hit this 'New Task' button to tell it to sync with Outlook. Every time I hit 'New Task', the app would look like it's doing something for a second, then just do nothing.
Well, today I upgraded to the latest version of PC Suite. I don't really notice anything new about it, probably just some bug fixes, but now when I hit 'New Task', it actually allows me to choose a task. Now all my contacts are syncing between my PC, Nokia 3650, and my Sony Clie NX60 (thanks to Intellisync). I feel so much more organized now, but at the same time wonder how much longer my Clie NX would be of use. Now all my appointments and contacts are on my 3650, all my Clie does is store my shopping list, some handwritten notes, and it has some spreadsheets that I use.

Silicon Valley has a re-print of an article that announced the original Mac 20 years ago. Some interesting quotes:

For $2,495, Macintosh buyers will get a computer that operates unusually quickly and is directed by a mouse - a handheld device that, when slid across a table top, moves the cursor on the Mac's screen.

The user also will be able to divide the screen into a variety of compartments, or ``windows,'' that each can be used to perform different jobs. For example, the user could be writing a letter on one part of the screen, then create a window and begin another.

Gotta love how they had to describe what a "mouse" and "windows" are. Crazy to think that only 20 years ago these were not everyday terms.