So I didn’t watch the keynote yet. I’m not really a fanboy. I do love my iPhone like most of you already know but I am not really that excited to get the new iPad.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’ll change the world just like the iPhone and iPod have.
See, Apple isn’t in the computer business anymore, Continue reading
So I started a new health/fitness/diet program. I’m mostly making it up by myself but it goes something like this: Get up at 5:50AM and exercise, wait for at least an hour after exercising to eat breakfast, eat normal food but try to avoid candy and snacking on carbs, make sure I stop eating for the day at 6:30PM.
So far it’s working. I have lost about 2 pounds each week. And I have been Continue reading
I remember when I was growing up and we got our first microwave, first color TV, first push-button phone, first answering machine, the list goes on.
My son is turning 10 next month and I was just wondering what it is like to not be able to fathom a world without any of these things.
We just got him setup with his first email address yesterday. And he was so excited. I have received about 15 emails from him already. One that caught my eye was a one-liner about how technology is cool. I think he gets it but I still wonder. And I know he is going to read this and email me something about it too.
I am amazed how much of my life is dependent on the Internet now. I wonder what I would do without it. I barely remember how to write a paper check. I don’t what I would do if I needed the know the annual rainfall of Sri Lanka, I suppose I would try the library but I can’t remember the Dewey Decimal system and I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I could spend a whole afternoon just to find out that it’s 2540 mm to over 5080 depending on what part of the island you are on. And shopping… I don’t suppose I would have any clue how to find a good price on anything. I wouldn’t know what most of my relatives are doing and I would still have to attend high school reunions to know what old high school friends are up to. I would have had to buy a ton of books to understand marketing but then, 90% of what I know would be irrelevant.
I remember my second quarter in college, there was this rich Japanese kid in my Chem 106 class that had a cell phone. One time it rang during class. The whole class stopped. “Hello. Yeah I’m in a class right now. blah blah blah… Ok, I’ll call you later” Even the professor politely waited for him to answer the call, chat for a minute and hang up. We all didn’t want to be rude so we all just patiently waited. And then we went on, honored that we had been able to witness such an amazing thing. I had seen it happen in movies but I didn’t know what to do when it happened in real life.
So my wife is back in school. She has a math class that just started this week. And it’s a lot of work. I remember when I went back to school, I wanted math out of the way so I took it first and it kicked my butt. I’m glad I took it as early as I could and got them out of the way. I wouldn’t have had the strength to stick with it if I had waited til the end.
Jonathan has been learning about order of operations and being thankful that he’s not doing algebra. But he still thinks exponents are fascinating. I have always enjoyed explaining a new math concept to him and just seeing how he soaks it up like a sponge. And then you can watch as he wraps his head around it and figures out applications for it. I wish I had been more like that when I was his age.
Jonathan likes math. And he’s pretty good at it. He has been doing multiplication since 1st grade. Last year his teacher was so impressed with him and supported him in wanting to learn faster. In second grade his teacher let him take some time and introduce multiplication to the class. She didn’t let it go too far though because there were only 3 kids in the class that could even grasp the concept.
This year his teacher is one of those public school indoctrinator types. He’s been starving for learning. He told me a few months ago that he feels like he’s being forced to do little kids work. So I mentioned that to her when I was there for parent-teacher conferences. Her response caught me a little off guard.
“I’m a professional teacher, that’s what they pay me for. So please don’t teach him at home. It’s my job to teach him here at school.” I didn’t know what to say I was so shocked.
So he has continued being bored in class, “learning” what the slowest kid in class is ready for.
Way to maintain the status quo. I wonder if this has anything to do with the current situation that our country finds itself in. Actually, I don’t wonder. I know it does.
Well I did it. I have successfully moved this blog to a blogging platform. No more hard coding…
Honestly, I’m not very excited about this. I am going to miss the hard coding. But I am looking forward to being able to just log in and write. And it’ll be done. When I publish it anyway.
I guess I’m a purist. An HTML purist if you will. Or even if you won’t, I don’t care.
I cringe when I think of hitting CTRL+U. (Get Firefox, you’ll understand) I believe HTML is poetry. Or it can be. WordPress is the anti-poetry.
So “Why are you doing this?” I can hear you ask. Well I’ll tell you.
It’s time to move on. I’m still a purist, and soon you’ll all be able to see what CMS looks like that was built by a purist. Think clean, simple, powerful, pure.
A while back I designed a site for DLXEasyBackup.com. In fact, they haven’t changed it as of today. It’s been about 6 years now. They offer an online backup service, Kinda similar to mozy.com. It’s quite simple really, they are just running an install of Novell’s iFolder. A fine little product. In fact, I started using it not long after I designed it. I had 50 MB of storage and I could share the account with my other computers so that I could easily transfer files to and from all my computers. Later Will started using it when we started Main10. That worked pretty well. But it still wasn’t everything it could have been. And it wasn’t free. Eventually we set up our own file server and stopped using the iFolder.
Since we stopped working for Main10 full time and started working on QJuice, we have had some other options for sharing files but still nothing that felt perfect. Until now.
Enter DropBox.com. I don’t remember who showed it to me but I love it. http://www.dropbox.com Use this link please, it’ll get me some additional storage space.
I setup dropbox on my iPhone, home computer, work computer and my wife’s computer. Transfering files is about the same speed as you would expect but updating is lightning fast. The way they do it (as I understand it) is that they only update the parts of the file that are different. So I update a 30MB file and I have only changed about 50KB worth of its source, the update takes about 1 second. Maybe less. Depends on what Internet connection I am using.
Then it gets better. I can create a shared folder. I can send non-dropbox users a link and they can open the file in their browser. I can also send my friends a link to the shared folder and it shows up in their dropbox. So right now, I have a ton of things notifying me that Peter is saving and updating files in the MonaVie share, Will is updating things in the QJuice share, and Adam has updated a file in the Main10 Share. No one has to send me any files, no one has to use a little thumbdrive, we all just have the latest files.
So jury is still out as I haven’t been able to REALLY test the conflict resolution yet but so far it’s perfect. Yes, perfect. If I could go back in time and join up with a company when they were in startup mode, it would be dropbox. I’ll get around to the conflict resolution test sooner or later. Until then, just go try it out for yourself. https://www.dropbox.com