Kastang Ramblings of a Geek

11Jan/090

The Past Month…ish

Twitter has ruined any form of blogging I used to do. I really have to work on that. Here is what has been going on the past month or so....

iPhone

My LG enV started acting up a month ago, I brought it to Verizon and they gave me a bunch of crap that they would not replace it. I was not eligible for a discounted upgrade for another three months unless I wanted to extend my contract two years. Instead of selling my soul to Verizon again for another two years, I made the switch to AT&T and the iPhone. AT&T rocks in my area, I have yet to see "No Service" on my iPhone. So basically AT&T + iPhone = WIN.

I have been testing out many Applications on my iPhone. Top 5ish favorite apps:

  • Facebook - Feeds my Facebook addiction while on the road.
  • BeejiveIM - Best IM client for the iPhone. Worth every penny.
  • AroundMe|Yelp - I like AroundMe more, but I keep both.
  • Amazon App | Snaptell - Take pictures of books at amazon and upload to Amazon reminders, but later for cheaper. Same with Snaptell for books or DVDs.
  • Remember The Milk - Still working with the free trial, but will be buying a year subscription when it runs out. Best GTD app for the iPhone with a nice web interface.

Other apps: Shovel(Digg App), EverNote, Last.fm, Now Playing, Shazam, Weather Bug, Google App, Urban Spoon, SnapTell, 1Password, WarcraftStat, Characters, Chest, WoWTalent, Stanza.

College

College went very well this semester. Classes I took: Comp 1, Introduction to Object Oriented Programming(Java I), Discrete Structures, Intro to Symbolic Logic, Intro to Sociology. Easiest classes were Intro to Sociology and IOOP. Finals were not nearly as bad as I expected them to be. Finished the semester with a 3.756 GPA.

Next semesters lineup is: Calc 1, Computer Organization, Foundations of Computer Science, C++, Java II. Hoping this semester will go as smoothly as the first.

World of Warcraft

Started playing WoW again the day after finals were done. Went from 70 - 80 in about 13 days. For those interested, I did 70-72 in Borean Tundra, 73-74 in Howling Fjord, 75-76 in Grizzly Hills, 77-78 in Zul Drak, and hit 80 in Sholazar Basin. Still haven't really touched Ice Crown or Storm Peaks yet. I am geared for Naxx according to be.imba.hu Getting into a group will be the difficult part. I don't for see myself quitting WoW again anytime soon. I really enjoy the new WoLK content, BC content just got boring that is why I took my break.

I will have to start balancing WoW with College in a little over a week. I hope it won't be too difficult or I will have to force myself to quit WoW and only play in between semesters which I hope does not happen.

Christmas

I asked for books this year. I hated having nothing new to read when I wanted too. This collection should last me for a bit hopefully:

Most of the books I received for christmas were from suggestions from friends. My friend Snowchyld currently has me hooked on the Dresden Files. I am currently on the 4th book of the Dresden Series. After completing Summer Knight, I am going to start World War Z based on suggestion from Nelson Minar.

End

Well, Thats about it.

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9Sep/080

First Week of College

If I had to pick one word to summarize my first week of college it would be "interesting." The college experience is completely different from High School. The classes/professors and very unique along with the people at college. I had a good idea of what I thought college would be like, It seems that my thoughts were quite accurate so far.

The work load was one thing that really surprised me. After my first week, I have 3 quizzes, 3 tests, 1 report, and 2 homework assignments due in the coming days/weeks. I am amazed how much the workload piles up compared to high school. Also, how fast the professors go is quite impressive. Covering one chapter of a book in one lesson rather then spending a week on it in high school. Instead of dedicating my nights to WoW or hanging out with friends, the majority of my time is now spent recopying notes and studying. The only time I get to hang out with my friends is on weekends.

I like the majority of my professors. Some of them are off the wall and interesting, some are just interesting, some are challenging, and some are just downright boring. After talking with some of my friends at different schools, I am happy to say that I do have great professors.

The lunch is good, Its a buffet style lunch. They have loads of different stuff, Asian, Pizza, Hamburgers, Italian, and much more. I can see the lunch getting a bit.. boring after awhile, but for now I am happy with it.

I would love to write more, but I have a quiz and a two homework assignments due tomorrow.

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30Jul/080

Prepping my Macs for College

I am writing this partially to help get in the "College" mindset and also to help a few friends who have recently gotten Macs that have been asking me for Application suggestions and help. This particular post will be concentrating on syncing data for those who have two or more Macs.

Here is my current situation. I have three Macs in use. An iMac(Primary Machine), a MacBook Pro(On the go Machine), and a PowerMac G5 (MAMP server, Backup Machine, base of command at my house). The MBP will be accompanying me to college every day for the next 4 or so years. The ultimate goal is to have everything automatically sync'd up is for saving time, and greatly reducing the chances of losing data incase of theft, hardware failure, etc.

The wonders of Mobile Me:
I am currently using MobileMe to sync my iCal, Address Book, Mail Accounts/Settings, Dock Items, Dashboard Widgets, and Transmit Favorites(My SFTP Client of choice, partially due to the fact of its great integration with the MobileMe service). I believe that MobileMe is almost a must for syncing data between macs. Mainly for the fact that it just works. It is integrated into many of OSX native applications. Also, as soon as you add a contact to Address Book, or add an event in iCal, it will automatically push that data to all your computers linked to your MobileMe account, it also stores that data on the MobileMe servers. This is a great thing to prevent data loss incase of a Hardware failure or theft.

I am not a huge fan of iDisk, mainly because it is slow compared to other services, (such as AFP/(S)FTP.. Which I have setup on my home box, but I plan to write another post with more details on that). I usually only use iDisk for saving small documents to it. Mainly Essays, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Pictures, etc. On Macs, its possible to save directly to iDisk which makes life very handy. Also, something everyone might not know is, when you save something to iDisk, it is stored locally on your hard drive and also automatically pushed to all other computers on your MobileMe account (also storing that file locally on the hard drive of the other computers. This means that you can access all your files offline, make changes and when you connect again to the internet, all modified files on iDisk will resync to all your other MobileMe computers.

Firefox:
Okay, so I haven't found a great way to fully sync Firefox yet, Cookies, History, Extensions, Bookmarks, etc. I currently use Foxmarks to sync my bookmarks from computer to computer. It works great! The good feature about Foxmarks is it allows me to sync with my MAMP server at my house. I haven't personally tried this yet, but I have heard good things about it. I am trying to get my hands on a Mozilla Weave alpha testing account. This seems like it is going to be the ideal way of syncing Firefox on multiple computers. Weave seems to be everything I am looking for, Cookie, Password, and Bookmark syncing for starters.

Okay, I think this is enough information for Part 1. I will cover more parts in Part 2 closer to college since I am still working on some of these things. Hope everyone enjoys. Does anyone have any more suggestions for syncing?

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24Jun/080

College Orientation

I returned home from College Orientation at Rowan a little bit ago. It was a two day event. While it wasn't the most exciting thing, I did found it very educational and informative.

Day One of the event was very busy, It started off with dropping off my bags in a dorm room for the overnight stay. From there we were split into 20 groups with about 20 in each. I was lucky enough to have someone in my group who I knew from school so it made things a little less weird. We went to different buildings and heard different lectures throughout the day. The majority of Day was was just general information about the Campus and its Policies. Our group leaders tried several activities to help us get friendly with each other, they really didn't work. I have to say, I was bored most of the day until the evening.

The highlight of Day 1 was Robert Kelly coming to perform at the end of the night. He is one hallerious man, I had never heard of him before lastnight. He had me laughing so hard I thought I was going to pee my pants at times. For those who never heard of him, check him out.  After Robert Kelly preformed we had a DJ/Dance, and several Wii's and Xbox 360's setup to play along with several other board and table games. After the dance, people were either hanging in the Lounge in the dorms, or raiding the computer lab. I was one of the 20 or so kids who decided to go check their email before heading to bed. We ended up finally getting to bed around 1:30am.

Day 2 was more geared to our individual majors. After a group session in the morning we went to meet someone from our departments. I learned about different options available for Computer Science. I am considering doing the "BA Math, BS CS" double major route. I was relieved to see that the CS department seems to be incredibly friendly and very willing the help in any way they can with our schedules and classes. In my opinion, Day 2 was much more interesting and informational then Day 1.

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