To All the Veterans Out There…
Thank you. Being an American wouldn’t be possible without your willingness to risk life and limb to stand for the ideals of Democracy. God bless you!
Thank you. Being an American wouldn’t be possible without your willingness to risk life and limb to stand for the ideals of Democracy. God bless you!
Recently, I’ve been feeling something I haven’t felt in a really long time: A sense of excitement about technology. For the past 8 years or so, it seems as though innovation and competition in the tech industry has slowed to a trickle. Microsoft killed Netscape and left us with the dead Internet Explorer 6 code base for nearly seven years. In the wake of the ever-exciting browser wars, we’ were left with what felt like a wounded soldier with a wooden leg. Then, the wizards in Redmond heap Vista on us, which did absolutely nothing to excite me. (In fact, it lead to a great deal of screaming and renting of garments in the Smith household.) On the hardware front, Intel and NVidia thwarted the lackluster AMD/ATI combination. Sure, we got faster CPUs and GPUs out of ’em, but who cares…Speed does not equal more fun or innovation. What’s a geek to do?
Thankfully, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate these days. For the first time in a long time, nerds everywhere are buzzing about a choice of quality operating systems. Apple has done a great job continuously improving OS X, which, for my money, is very stable and user friendly at version 10.6. In the wake of Apple’s ever-improving market share in both the laptop and desktop segments, Microsoft has gotten its act together to bring us Windows 7. The interesting thing to me is that neither OS X 10.6 nor Windows 7 are revolutionary products. The improvements are small on both fronts, and at first glance, it seems as though the OS upgrades are nothing more than marketing fodder. But, in the midst of all this, it’s easy to tell that both Microsoft and Apple are seriously trying to one-up each other by making systems more stable and user friendly. In short, end users are being treated to the fruits of healthy market competition. (On top of the OSs that are here now, rumor has it Google is launching its own low-power OS soon!)
Even more exciting to me is that the browser wars are back. Thank God for Mozilla, which delivered the first stable version of Firefox in 2003 and hasn’t looked back since. Again, Microsoft had to wake up and do something. Out of this panic, we were treated to Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8, which actually do a pretty good job at following standards. But the fun doesn’t stop there: The WebKit folks have given us Safari and provided Google with the foundation it needed to launch Chrome. What we’re left with are fast, secure, standards-compliant browsers. And, more importantly to me, we have several choices in browsing for the first time in a long time!
There’s less to be excited about on the hardware front, but notebook makers are doing a great job making specialized laptops for just about any purpose. The buzzword soup actually has a lot of differentiated products behind it: notebooks, business-class, ultra-portables, netbooks, media stations, and desktop replacements. No matter what your personality or needs, there’s probably a sweet little portable out there to suit you.
To sum up, I’m simply pumped about all this competition. If I don’t like one thing, I can jump ship to another option. Now, if we can only keep the lawyers from stifling all this…But that’s a rant for another day.
For the first weigh-in, the scales reported: 211 lbs.
Beck recently put a king-sized comforter on our queen-sized bed. I’ve enjoyed it greatly because now we no longer fight for the covers as there is plenty of the cheerful, pastel-colored material to go around. It occurred to me a few minutes ago that if we both could lose a few pounds (*cough* 30 or so is a few) then we could use our other comforters comfortably. It takes a heck of a lot more material to cover us than it should.
We have started walking/jogging on our treadmill. Beck’s doing a lot better than I am, though. Today, I walked at 3 mph and nearly had a stroke…It’s pathetic to be so out of shape. But I guess, my stroke-inducing steps tonight are as good a start as any toward not being so pathetic.
I’ve decided to do something rather drastic: Tomorrow morning, I’m going to weigh myself and post the results on here, and continue to do the same once I week. Maybe public scrutiny and the fear of ridicule may motivate my fat ass to take action…Who knows, I may actually start feeling better about myself along the way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
On a final note, I apologize to the world for letting this blog become a fat blog. But, as I’ve said a million times, the Internet is a big place and I’m sure you can avoid it if you really want ;)
Anybody that’s known me for awhile knows I’m not a fan of vegetables, other than potatoes. But for whatever reason, I have been addicted to eating white rice for the last few weeks. Beck and I went to Peking’s in Hazard and I had sweet and sour chicken (which was great). It came with a side order of steamed white rice. I ate some…I really enjoyed it. Since then, I have eaten two boxes of instance rice. Beck says rice looks like maggots, and I’m inclined to agree. Dad always said my taste buds would change as I got older, but who knew it would be toward the end of the spectrum where rice lives.
I’ve been debating on whether or not to switch to WordPress for about a year now. Part of the reason I held off is because I like to write my own software. My custom-written PHP blog setup was tweaked over a period of 6 years. It served as a proof-of-concept for a lot of things I learned how to do in PHP. For being the active testbed, I thank my old blog.
That being said, I just couldn’t resist WordPress any longer. A lot of really smart coders that I admire use WordPress to manage their blogs and sites. If it is good enough for the best, then it is good enough for me. I think this will really help me get more ideas out there. I have always enjoyed posting fixes and whatnot that I figure out, but my custom blog was nowhere near this slick. And, I must say, migrating my old blog to WordPress is the most fun coding that I have had in a long time.
So, I have installed WordPress 2.7 on my long-forgotten TravisSmith.us domain. I have been considering migrating JerryTravis.com to WordPress, so for now, this is a testbed to see if I really like the platform enough to do so.
This semester has been very hectic. Teaching is going well enough. For the most part, I have really good students, which is nice. It’s our Program Assessment year, which is a big part of our school’s accreditation, so that’s made things a little more hectic than I’d like, but that will be over in less than two weeks. The most challenging part of the semester has been my college classes. Global Information Systems has kept me and my group very, very busy. I’m still here, though. It’ll all be over on December 6, at which point I’ll let loose a huge sigh of relief.
A colleague of mine has just opened a new trading post site at EastKYPost.com. It allows you show the world items that you currently have for sale as well as request items that you are interested in buying. The best thing about it is that the postings are targeted for the people of Eastern Kentucky.