Ups and Downs and Everything In Between

Thanks to Danica, rollerblading has become routine. In the past week, we’ve rollerbladed at least three times at night. The first time we skated on the pedestrian walkways, but the next times we made it onto the bike path. Yesterday, we managed to skate all the way down to Chambers street and back. Yesterday also marked the first time I saw Danica fall on her skates. I’m glad she has: now she won’t be nearly as afraid of it anymore.

In addition to skating, we’ve simply been going out more. The school year is starting for her in less than a week, and a few days ago she received a call from an ex-boyfriend-now-friend. After rollerblading yesterday, the three of us went out to see a midnight showing of the movie Hero together.

I think the best way to sum up the night is, "great movie, horrible seating choice." We were sitting right in the middle of a typical crowd of thug kids who kept making the most idiotic remarks at the movie. "Stupid Americans," I kept thinking to myself, feeling more Chinese while watching the movie than American myself.

Anyway, I’m happy with the way things are right now with work and with Danica. In both, patience is the single most critical virtue I have needed to demonstrate. I credit all the good things to the successful execution of the "count to ten and breathe" technique.

After quite the ordeal over the last two days, the Web site for Sapphire Group, LLC finally launched today. It marks my first work-for-hire Web site that launches (semi-)publicly.

During the process, I found myself scrambling to learn as much as I could about DNS entries across the Internet. Did a lot of reading over at Wikipedia about it and had to communicate and translate some of the technical aspects of how to achieve what we wanted to both tech support folks and business folks alike. In the end, though, the biggest lesson I learned is that proper previous planning prevents piss poor performance. (Thanks, Char!)

On a side note, I’m really happy to see HBX Networks’ free shell project back online after a lightning strike took out Nova, their old server.

1. This new blog design! I struggled with a few very strange IE bugs while trying to create the look of this page, but thankfully Position is Everything was able to help me out with them.
2. A new Chicago Cutlery chef’s knife.
3. The milestone of having my first work-for-hire web site publicly launched.
4. Visiting Burlington, Vermont to help my brother move in to his new dorm at UVM college.
5. Driving outside of New York at aforementioned college town.
6. Programming a small web application from scratch.
7. Rollerblading with my sweetheart in the on the Hudson River Park bike path.
8. My own business cards!
9. Scrabble! My first game garnered 306 points, which, according to the instructions is in the range a "skilled player playing a two-person game" would score. Nevertheless, I still lost to my sweetie.

Why not ten? Because I don’t want to make things up. :)

Just took my first look at Ben Hunt’s Web Design from Scratch tutorial articles.

Just wondering, but am I coder trying to be a designer or a designer trying to be a coder?

Um. Help.

This morning was horrible. It reminded me exactly why I’ve been using a Mac as my primary computing platform for years.

I woke up after a bad dream and after grabbing a drink, I turned on my Windows laptop to check my mail. As I was downloading my new messages I tried to scroll my inbox with my mousewheel. Didn’t work. That’s when I noticed the Synaptics TouchPad™ system tray icon was missing. In addition, none of the TouchPad’s features would work: no tap zones, no edge motion, no nothing. Now, this is not really that big a deal (at least my cursor was still moving around), but it just goes to show how much damn babysitting these computers need. Isn’t the whole point of technology that things should just work and make our lives easier? ::sigh::

Ultimately, uninstalling and then reinstalling the driver fixed my problem. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place, though and I didn’t bother to do any digging.

This Macintosh PowerBook is now officially on my wish list!

I finally got around to doing something about the horrid state of the old Ups and Downs web site. Specifically, I began playing with new design ideas utilizing my increased knowledge of XHTML and CSS.

Earlier today, I got that familiar restless feeling that happens whenever I haven’t done anything productive for too long. It’s ugly: makes me feel like I don’t know what to do with myself and like I just want to crawl out of skin. Thankfully, Danica and I were able to leave the house and head on over to Saint’s Alp Teahouse with my laptop in tow. The Saint’s Alp by us offers free Wi-Fi access so it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite places to hang out.

While chowing down on some great minced pork I SFTPed myself a few sample pages from the Ups and Downs site and began working on redesigning the whole things in a standards-compliant and accessible way. It was actually quite a lot of fun besides being something I had been telling myself I’d do for over three months already.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that I get real irritable when I don’t keep my promises to myself. No, wait, scratch that: I get angry at myself when I feel like I’ve been wasting my time. While the solution is laughably simple (don’t waste my time) it’s not very easy to do on a consistent basis. I don’t know why, but I think it’d help me out if I did.

Feeling productive, like I’ve done something with my time, is absolutely crucial to waking up day after day and not becoming totally apathetic about life.

I woke up this morning after having a bad dream involving lava, rhinoceros made out of water and evolution, and spent the next two hours fighting with my Windows PC laptop about my Synaptics TouchPad™ driver. I had the worst feeling this morning that the rest of the day would be just like that.

It takes some effort on my part to actually go and do something — anything — when I haven’t in a while. I’ve had minimal work to do this week (which is because no one seems to be returning my calls [I've tried to get the Basil Rouskas people to look at my redesign for them for more than a week already! AUGH!]) so I got addicted to Sim City 4 for a while. For the past two days or so I’ve been watching lots of Twin Peaks episodes with Danica. Anyway, take a look at the work I’ve done so far (I’m taking the road less traveled and making all my changes live). I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do in my apparently too-ample spare time. Suggestions are more than welcome, they’re appreciated.

On Sunday I went to my mother’s for a chance to get new sneakers (tax-free!) and to help out with the computer situation there. My brother is headed to college in a week which means that my mother will be alone with two Windows computers in the house.

One of my main concerns, which I refuse to get paranoid about, is her online security. I love my mother so she’ll understand when I say this, but it would be more effective to try to teach a chicken to fly than to try to teach her about staying secure online. Phishing scams, viruses in email attachments, and spyware are all things that pose a threat, and even though she knows some good online safety ground-rules they are an ever present threat.

But the absolute worst of all of these by far is spyware, or malware, or scumware, or whatever you want to call it. Even I’m scared of it, and I like to consider myself somewhat of a competent technophile. Case in point: when I came over I wanted to clean up some of my old files from my brother’s PC (which I had an account on), and so he asked me to help clean up the whole thing. I spent the next 4+ hours going through the computer and deleting various programs.

At first, I didn’t understand where all these programs came from. Things like AdDestroyer and VirtualBouncer, to name a few. When I asked my brother about them he said he didn’t recognize them but they had been popping up on his desktop at every system start-up. I grabbed AdAware 6.0 and ran a scan, and sure enough it found over 300 files, folders, and registry values and keys. I think I did a pretty good job of cleaning up that computer. I did the same thing just yesterday with my father’s old Windows 98 machine. It had been crashing every time he hit the shut-down button and running AdAware discovered more than 350 data miners and malware programs running on it. Removing them fixed all the crashing problems he was having.

Today, I ran across this entry from Tris Hussey who has had a similar experience as I have. And I must agree with him: SPYWARE MUST DIE! The very fact that someone may write a program that begins acting on its own on my property, on my computer, without my explicit permission is a problem and criminal. This is exactly why programs need to be activated by a user to run! I expect and demand that no program on my system run unless I have started it! Spyware does exactly the opposite. Grr.

Congress is getting involved against Spyware, which I think is a step in the right direction. But unless the technology industry itself grows up a little and begins behaving with some social maturity, I’m really scared for all of our privacy and security.

While showing my mother what to use SharpReader for, I decided to illustrate the concept by writing this blog entry to create a real-time example of the uses of RSS. Hopefully, this will be a successfull experiment.

Update: Well, it turns out Mom’s not using SharpReader at all, really, and she hasn’t subscribed to any newsfeeds on her own at all. Figures, but that’s all right. At least she’s emailing with some proficiency now. ;)

Update: I just learned from the Tao of Mac that there is another problem with Windows Service Pack 2: it breaks raw sockets.

Well, according to several news sources, Microsoft has released the long-awaited Service Pack 2 to manufacturers. Starting next month, computers will come pre-installed with the software. But in the mean time, I’m anxiously awaiting the moment SP2 becomes available via Windows Update.

Why am I so nervous? Microsoft has had a bad habit of making software updates go horribly wrong. My Windows PC laptop is not yet 2 months old, and now I have to subject it to this major OS upgrade. If something goes wrong, I know what will happen: Microsoft will blame it on the manufacturer (HP in my case), and the manufacturuer will blame it on Microsoft. At the very least, when something goes wrong with a Mac (which has rarely personally happened to me) Apple doesn’t jerk anyone around.

As soon as SP2 comes out, I want to get this ordeal over with. And for those of you wondering why I’m not really looking forward to any of the so-called “improvements” I suggest you take another look at what’s really going to change and what’s not.