For example, I’ve already made my first “tweak”: I added a lightbox “plugin” to the site. “Plugin” in quotes because it’s not a plugin for Octopress, but rather a library for displaying lightboxes that I bolted onto the site manually; so much more satisfying than clicking the “Install Plugin” button in Wordpress.

The lightbox solution I chose was FancyBox, which depends on jQuery, so really I guess this could be counted as two tweaks. I went with FancyBox mostly because I couldn’t find anything I liked built on ender.js (the JS library that Octopress ships with / uses by default), and I’m not really a designer, so I didn’t really want something that would need styling. (As an aside, I think I’d love Octopress that much more if it were built on Python and jQuery instead of Ruby and ender.js, but that’s a different post.) Getting FancyBox up and running wasn’t too difficult, and I did find that someone else had already encountered a few of the issues I’d run into (link), and I followed a similar path to get it up-and-running. For examples of FancyBox in action, click this link or one of the thumbnails below (or an image in almost any post in the archives).

The why

Basically, I was tired of Wordpress. Tired of managing my site through a panel. Tired of my site being buried beneath layers of PHP abstraction. I’d also been wanting to move to a “baked” model for my site. A baked site means there’s no dynamic generation of the site for each user that views it (like PHP, etc), but rather it is generated elsewhere and the site viewed by the user is entirely static. I’d read a few articles on various approaches to this by Brent Simmons and Matt Gemmell. The concept isn’t new; apps like iWeb and RapidWeaver have been doing this for years, but those apps aren’t really geared towards web developers; they’re geared towards people who don’t want to get their hands dirty with hand-coding things… I’d rather get my hands dirty than not.

After doing some research on various frameworks for building a baked site, I chose Octopress. Octopress is basically Jekyll, which is basically a set of Ruby scripts for generating a static site from plain text files written in Markdown (or a couple other text formatting languages). Octopress builds on top of Jekyll by providing a good set of HTML templates, CSS, JS, and a few custom plugins, which makes getting started with your site much easier. I preferred this approach because I don’t know much Ruby (I looked for a good static site generator written in Python, and surprisingly, there’s not one), and I didn’t feel like starting from scratch on the templates. I also liked the propsect of writing posts in Markdown, which is much more awesome than any WYSIWYG editor.

The how

Exporting content and comments from Wordpress

Once I’d determined I wanted to make the switch, I started by exporting all my content from Wordpress to an XML file (Tools -> Export), and then I processed that XML file using Exitwp (python scripts for turning Wordpress XML exports into Markdown-formatted text files). I did make a few modifications to Exitwp before running it; namely turning on comments by default, removing categories (everything was in the “Posts” category), and removing the author information (so that Octopress/Jekyll would attribute posts to myself instead of “admin”). I also had to modify the part of the script that downloaded all the images because it didn’t have any error handling for unretrievable images:

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if download_images:
    for img in i['img_srcs']:
-       urlretrieve(urljoin(data['header']['link'],img.decode('utf-8')), get_attachment_path(img, i['uid']))
+       try:
+           urlretrieve(urljoin(data['header']['link'],img.decode('utf-8')), get_attachment_path(img, i['uid']))
+       except IOError:
+           print "Could not retrieve: %s" % urljoin(data['header']['link'],img.decode('utf-8'))

Finally, I also downloaded and modified html2text.py (used by Exitwp) so that I could remove the line breaks that the system version was adding (I’d rather my paragraphs in Markdown be on one line). This one was a little odd, since the comments in html2text.py note that to remove the line breaks, I should’ve set the BODY_WIDTH variable to “0”, but this resulted in the removal of all line breaks, thus also removing breaks between actual paragraphs. Instead, I set BODY_WIDTH to “100000”, which as far as I can tell was large enough to accomodate the length of my paragraphs.

Getting the comments out of Wordpress was a little easier. I decided to use Disqus for comments on the new site, so all I had to do was install the Disqus plugin for Wordpress, let it import my existing comments, and then set disqus_short_name in _config.yml. The one thing that’s not well documented anywhere is that for the comments to show up correctly on your new site, the permalink format for Octopress has to match the permalink format you were using in Wordpress. Not a big deal to me, but I’m not sure what you’d do if you wanted to change your permalink structure (perhaps change it in Wordpress before importing to Disqus?).

Source control

The Octopress instructions recommend pushing any changes you make to Octopress to your own repo on GitHub. I didn’t really want to put my site up on GitHub as a public repo, and nor did I want to pay for a private repo, so I set up a private git repo on Dreamhost and set my git-cloned copy of Octopress to use that as origin.

Publishing

Originally, I had planned to symlink a folder in my Dropbox as the _posts directory, but eventually I realized that wasn’t going to help me achieve the ability to “write anywhere”, since I’d still have to regenerate/deploy the site via shell commands. So instead, I cloned a local copy of the repo on Dreamhost. This way I can write posts in any editor at any time, and then log in via SSH and run the shell commands to create the new post, drop in the text, and regenerate/deploy the site. This method also means I can’t accidentially publish a draft of a post prematurely because I forgot to mark it as a draft, etc.

As far as the actual writing and deploying, I picked up the wonderful and much-lauded ia Writer for Mac and iPad, and Prompt, a nice SSH client for iOS from the crew at Panic. iA Writer lets me write posts in Markdown (it somewhat auto-formats Markdown in the editor) and store them in iCloud, truly giving me the ability to write from anywhere, and Prompt means I can create/generate/deploy new posts from my iPad or iPhone (and of course I’ll just use the normal Terminal app if I’m on my Mac).

Other tweaks

• I pulled much of my .htaccess file from HTML5 Boilerplate; stripped out the PHP-related stuff I don’t need anymore, and modified some of the browser cache rules.
• Added a custom 404 page (written in Markdown, no less).
• Added the “About” page
• I plan to go back through most of my posts and do some post processing; little things like cleaning up formatting and such, but that’ll happen slowly over time. If anything else, it’ll be fun to look through the archives.

What’s next?

I’ll probably tweak the theme a bit, but honestly, the default theme is beautiful, sleek, and handles various viewport sizes very gracefully (go ahead, make the browser window as small as you can width-wise).

If I can think of anything else or if anybody asks stuff that I think would be useful/relevant in the comments or on Twitter, I’ll update this post.

Yet again, my renewed interest in writing here again is heralded by a change in the architecture of the site, and this time, I’ve totally ditched Wordpress in favor of Octopress. I’ll post a retrospective on that later… for now, I should probably start with where I left off: interviewing for a job in Austin.

I got a job

So, “company A” turned out to be Bazaarvoice, and after a couple more rounds of interviews, they offered and I accepted my first job out of college. Looking back on it now, I had no idea how incredibly lucky I was, as I’ve not only been with them since, but the company has grown and flourished during a time of incredible economic downturn. I started on July 16th, 2008 as an “Implementation Engineer”, helping Bazaarvoice’s clients implement the BV solution on their websites. In November of 2010, I moved into a new role with the same title, but on a “SWAT team” of sorts that helps ensure that new features coming our of our Product Management and Development groups are ready for mass-consumption and by our clients and . In August of 2011, I was promoted to “Senior Implementation Engineer” on the same team. I’m coming up on 3.5 years at Bazaarvoice, and it seems pretty surreal.

I moved to Austin

Working at Bazaarvoice necessitated moving to Austin. So, on July 12th, I loaded up a U-Haul truck and moved from Abilene to Austin. Stephanie and a high school friend attending UT helped me move into my first apartment. Austin is an interesting city, and after living in the Dallas metro area (the “Metroplex”), Abilene, and now Austin, I can tell you that it’s better than Abilene for sure, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s better than the Metroplex. Austin definitely has a better restaurant scene, but Dallas and the surrounding areas have much better traffic infrastructure (roads and public transit)… not that good restaurants outweigh horrible traffic, but the verdict is still out.

I got married

On August 15th, 2009, I married my best friend and the love of my life, Stephanie Welch. I had asked her to marry me just 6 short months earlier, to which she obviously said “yes” (despite it being Friday the 13th of February). I honestly only remember bits and pieces of the wedding day, but I do know it was one of the happiest days of my life. We were married at my home church, First Baptist Church of Carrollton, we spent a couple nights in downtown Fort Worth, and we moved Stephanie to Austin just a couple days later. We went on our honeymoon a couple weeks later, which was nice because it gave us time to get Stephanie moved and settled into our apartment. Our honeymoon was a cruise on Royal Caribbean that sailed from Port Canaveral, Florida, and went to Labadee, Haiti; Ocho Rios, Jamaica; George Town, Grand Cayman; and Cozumel, Mexico before returning to Port Canaveral. … We’ve been married for a little over 2 years now!

Other stuff

Stephanie now works for Marsh USA, the country’s largest insurance broker, as a “certificate specialist”, processing insurance certificates. It’s not an incredibly exciting job, but I think it’s pretty much exactly what she was looking for.

I made my debut on national television via a CBS Evening News segment on Austin’s job market. The entire video is a good watch, but skip to around 0:55 to see yours truly.

In August of 2011, we adopted a pair of kittens; a brother and sister named Reginald and Romona. They are literally the sweetest kittens you’ll ever meet.

Today

That should bring you up to speed as far as major events and changes. I probably won’t post very often; I’ve never been good at doing that. What I will probably do though, is use this space for thoughts that I can’t fit in 140 characters over on Twitter (@jlgoolsbee). There have been several things recently that I’ve wanted to post about (through naturally, I can’t remember those things right now), but didn’t want to post on the old site because I didn’t feel like messing with it or posting one of these “catch up” posts. We’ll see how long I keep it up though.

I left Thursday at about 7:30 PM and checked-in to a hotel a little after midnight.  I booked the hotel before I left on Hotwire.com (which was super easy), and I got a pretty good rate for a decent room.  This, in and of itself, was great because that’s something I’d never done.  I’ve never traveled to another city and stayed in a hotel by myself, so this was yet another experience that made me feel more “grown up” (I’ve had a lot of those lately).  I stayed up a little longer to do some research on the companies I’d be interviewing with in the morning, and then crashed.

I got up in the morning and was ready at 11:00 AM for my first interview with company A.  Company A is looking for a front-end web developer to implement their product on client websites (though, they give this position the fancy title of “Implementation Engineer”, which I think I like better).  I met with a panel, then a group of two for a “culture interview”, then with one guy for a “technical interview”, and finally with two of the managers of different divisions there.  I think the interviews went really well; I feel like I made a positive impression with everybody I interviewed with, and I had fun at the same time.  I was there for about 2 hours, yet it didn’t really feel like that, though I’m not sure if it’s because I was enjoying the interview or if I was just so nervous I didn’t feel the time flying by.  After finishing up at company A, I had just enough time to grab a chicken salad sandwich combo from Chick-fil-a before going to my 2:00 PM interview with company B.

As a sidenote, can I just mention how elated I was to discover that my favorite item on the Chick-fil-a menu has finally become a combo meal?  I’ve always loved the chicken salad sandwich, so much so in fact that once (I think I was 10 years old?), my mother asked what I wanted from Chick-fil-a (and for some reason we hadn’t had it for awhile)… I told her I wanted “the Chick-fil-a sandwich”, and I was shocked when she brought back a regular chicken sandwich!  I had believed until that point that the chicken salad sandwich was THE Chick-fil-a sandwich!  Anyways, combo #7 has instantly become my favorite combo number.

Company B is entirely different sort of company and as such the job there would be totally different.  However, they’re looking for a junior web developer (they’re expecting to have to teach stuff), so it would be a great learning experience.  On the other side of that, I would have to be learning a lot, because I don’t have much experience in the platforms they use.  The interview was with one person, and was interesting; he had me work through solving a logic puzzle, and though he had to guide me a little to the correct answer, I found the answer pretty easy once it was revealed.  I’ll type out the puzzle at the bottom of this post and you see if you can figure it out.  Anyways, I think the interview here went well, but we’ll find out soon because I should hear either way from both of these companies next week.

After finishing my last interview, I found somewhere to get out of my suit into normal clothes (I didn’t see a single person wearing a suit all day), and called up an old friend from high school that just graduated from UT.  We had dinner at Hula Hut, and once again I’m going to digress to talk about food.  The Cowboy Band eats at the Hula Hut every year following the Chuy’s Children’s Parade, but we always get the same shortened menu, and when I say shortened menu, I mean there’s like 4 or 5 items to pick from on there.  So, this was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to go to Hula Hut and order off the regular menu, though I didn’t really need the menu; I already knew what I wanted.  Every year CBB went there, and every year I saw someone (not with us) get a sizzling plate of fajitas topped with… pineapple.  Crazy, right?  NO.  AMAZING. I’m not kidding; today I think I ate some of the best fajitas I’ve ever had the opportunity to digest.

I hit the road at about 7:30 PM once again and got back to Abilene a little after midnight.  It’s late and I’m running out of things to write about, but it was an interesting day for sure, and I’ll be sure to post here if I get a job!

Logic Puzzle:

You’ve got 8 balls, all the same size/shape/weight except for one that’s defective and weighs less.  You have a balance scale; use the scale to find the defective ball in only two weighings.  Note: you cannot cheat by just holding them and feeling the weight difference.

That’s not to say I’m done with this; I still need a place to write longer thoughts like this that won’t fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit.  So, while I draft my next post, here’s everything I’ve “tweeted” on Twitter since my last post here.

Finally enjoying IMAP-flavored Gmail… and it tastes goooood. 09:52 PM October 31, 2007 from Hahlo

It’s taking everything within me to not go home and finish setting up the new 24” iMac… must work… must make money to pay for iMac… 03:21 PM November 02, 2007 from web

Installing Leopard; 37 minutes to go. 05:59 PM November 02, 2007 from PocketTweets

I’m running the Windows-only software for my Systems Analysis and Design class… on my Mac! VMware Fusion in Unity Mode FTW!! 11:29 PM November 04, 2007 from twitterrific

How can Pixelmator expect to be a serious contender against Photoshop if it doesn’t have support for guides or rulers? 12:24 AM November 11, 2007 from twitterrific

Why am I still up at 2:30 am, and why am I so hungry? 02:36 AM November 12, 2007 from twitterrific

Thank you, Discount Tire, for charging me the sum total of $0.00 to patch my flat tire this morning. Much appreciated. 10:15 AM November 12, 2007 from web

Trying to decide if Pixelmator is worth the investment, considering I can’t really afford Photoshop at the moment. Thoughts? 11:10 PM November 12, 2007 from twitterrific

Home for thanksgiving; using my iMac plugged into the 46” HDTV with wireless mouse and keyboard… twittering from across the room FTW! 01:44 PM November 21, 2007 from web

Really wish I didn’t have class in the morning. Like really, really wish I didn’t. 01:32 AM November 26, 2007 from web

bored bored bored. 08:44 PM December 09, 2007 from web

I just finished my last final in about 5 minutes flat… everybody in the room gave me the “you bastard” look, but hooray for studying! 11:31 AM December 12, 2007 from web

Home for the weekend, then back to Abilene for one more week of work. 12:16 AM December 15, 2007 from Facebook

Just realized I haven’t twittered(?) since last week… oops. 09:32 AM December 21, 2007 from web

Trying to decide if I want to install the 1.1.3 update just yet… me likey my 3rd-party apps. 05:03 PM January 15, 2008 from web

Thinking about switching from Wordpress to Movable Type… I’m really digging the new Action Streams plugin… thoughts? 04:01 PM January 31, 2008 from Facebook

I’m finding I don’t much like Movable Type… will somebody please just make an Action Streams plugin for Wordpress? 01:38 AM February 11, 2008 from web

Terminal, TextMate, Firefox 3, NetNewsWire, Mail, iTunes, Aperture, Photoshop, & VMware Fusion without any noticeable performance drop FTW! 05:52 PM March 12, 2008 from web

My sister: “Isn’t an albino a type of goat?” 03:11 PM March 19, 2008 from web

The next release of WordPress (2.5) looks pretty darn good, and the new admin interface is actually better. Thanks @photomatt. 11:26 PM March 19, 2008 from web

Also, Safari 3.1 is… awesome. Especially awesome is the Network Timeline. Thanks Apple. 11:45 PM March 19, 2008 from web

It’s 3am… and I’m not tired. At all. WTH. Tomorrow will not be fun. Wait, today will not be fun… 03:06 AM March 20, 2008 from PocketTweets

Still sick… third day in a row… temp around 101… WTH. At least it’s giving me plenty of time to work on my senior project… ugh. 08:03 PM March 26, 2008 from web

Almost done with this senior project… wish I had time to flesh out a few more features, but I don’t think they’ll even use what’s there. 12:44 AM April 04, 2008 from web

Anybody know what happened to the “Networks” menu item and drop down on Facebook’s main navigation? Mine is mysteriously missing… 02:37 PM April 07, 2008 from Facebook

Somehow missed the post on The Facebook Blog explaining the demise of the “Networks” menu item… apparently, it just never got used. 01:03 AM April 08, 2008 from web

I’m a little perplexed by these random people following me; am I interesting, or is it just a game to see who can follow the most people? 11:31 AM April 16, 2008 from web

Why can’t I go to bed at a normal time like a normal person? Perhaps going to bed at a decent hour just isn’t normal anymore… ? 12:52 AM April 17, 2008 from web

Wearing khaki shorts for the first time this year… don’t know why that’s twitter-worthy, but there you go. 10:42 AM April 22, 2008 from web

So, Saturday evening, armed with my $100 iPhone rebate (not much, but hey - every bit helps), me and my dad set out for the Apple Store Willowbend in Plano (only a few miles from my house). Dad’s not really a Mac guy; I think he sees how form and function complement each other in Apple’s designs for some of their products (for instance, he really likes the new Nanos), but he has yet to take the plunge on a Mac for himself and/or the family. Anyways, we browsed the store for a few minutes and I showed him a few of the finer points of Leopard. After a few minutes, I let one of the Mac specialists know I was there to buy an iMac of the 2.8 GHz variety… he paused for a minute, and said the words I was most afraid of hearing at that point: “We’re out of stock.”

Now, I’ve never known an Apple Store to be out of stock of something, but then again this was Leopard release weekend and so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised. The specialist let me know he would go check the stockroom just to make sure, and then call the 3 other Apple Stores in the DFW area to check their stock. As he expected, the stockroom check confirmed they were out. However, what I didn’t expect (and I don’t think he did either) was that all the other stores were too! The entire DFW area was out of stock of 2.8 GHz iMacs. Can you say bummer? I did, along with some other things as me and dad walked dejectedly back to the parking garage, stopping only to play with the lightsabers in Sharper Image.

Not to be completely depressed about the evening’s events, I placed the order online as soon as we got home, and it should be here (in Abilene) by the end of the week. The specs, for those of you interested in this sort of thing:

iMac - 24”

• 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB
• 500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of GDDR3 memory
• 8x SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

Overall, I’m happy with the configuration I finally settled on… I probably spent hours reading benchmark test after benchmark test, scrutinizing minute details here and there, and forever configuring and re-configuring different variations at the Apple Store online, but this is what I ended up with.

The end of the week can’t come soon enough.

First, if you’ve hanging on for dear life just to read my review of the iPhone, you’re about to be sorely disappointed because this is not it. While I may still do that someday when I’m really bored (read: not anytime soon), I feel like enough has been said already, by people who said it much better than I can. If you really want to hear my opinions, my gripes, and what to consider if you’re thinking about getting one, just ask me - I’ll be more than happy to give an answer to any/all of that.

Second, many of you want to know why I wasn’t in band Monday afternoon, and why my Facebook and Twitter statuses alluded to my having some sort of medical problem. Well… here’s what happened. I was sitting on my bike on the “porch” of Hunter Hall, waiting for Erin and Amanda to come out the door to go to one of our weekly meetings. When I saw them come out the door at the other end of the building, my brain went into some weird mode where my thought processes were in line with the thoughts of a 7 or 8 year-old… I knew they were over there, and that I was over here, and that I needed to be over there… so I proceeded to ride my bike off the 2.5 ft ledge of the porch. The problem with that was two-fold: I didn’t have enough momentum to make it work, and worse, I realized what I was doing just as I was about to roll off the edge, and I squeezed that front brake hard… too hard. Essentially what happened next was that I fell over the front of bike onto the rocky concrete below (from where I was sitting on the bike, easily 4 to 5 feet), and then the bike fell on top of me. Now, I’ve done worse - just ask my mom. I’ve had more bruises and scrapes from my shenanigans as a child than I care to remember, but that period of my life was at least a decade or more ago… so I honestly don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I could just ride off that ledge. Anyways, I scraped up my elbow, and I’ve done something to my foot, thought I’m not sure what other than that I know it’s not broken… I just can’t really put any weight on it. And that is why I wasn’t in band on Monday.

I’m not sure if anybody noticed, but the site went through a major redesign about a month ago. It was a long and arduous search to find a clean and good-looking theme I liked that I could build on, and I finally found it. ColdBlue by WebRevolutionary is a very well laid out theme, and it was relatively easy to modify the design to give it a little touch of me. If it looks weird in your browser… use a modern browser. If it still looks bad, let me know. Seriously.

But, there are a few content changes as well:

• The Photos page still serves up my photos from Flickr and uses Lightbox to show the images in their galleries. Click on any image in an album to open the Lightbox, and then click on the left or right side of the image to go backwards and forwards (respectively) through the gallery.
• The News page no longer shows my “dugg” stories from digg. It now shows my Newsgator clippings, which is even better. Everyday, I read tons of news in feed reader, and the clippings are news stories that caught my eye or that interested me for some reason or another. Until recently I had no way to share those clippings with anybody, but some recent changes at Newsgator now allow me to do so, which is fantastic. Also, the sidebar module that showed digg stories is gone as well.
• The Weather page is gone; if you used it, sorry.
• The HSU page… will be back to its previous usefulness soon. EDIT: Actually, I don’t have time to give the ‘ole HSU page the attention it needed, so it’s gone as well.
• The Archives have been redone, and it should be much easier to find one of my older posts, assuming you know about when it was written and/or what the title of the post was. If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, the search bar can be your friend too.
• Colophon… is pretty much the same, with a few updates to plugins here and there.

I’ll try to crank out a post more often than once every two months; we’ll see what happens.

All that to say: It’s coming soon. Promise.

EDIT: Almost forgot, if you have an iPhone, feel free to browse this site on it; I’m making use of an excellent Wordpress plugin made by the guys over at ContentRobot.com that serves up this site in a very iPhone-esque theme.

So last night as far as I got was waiting for activation, after having tried it once already. The first time I just figured maybe AT&T got overloaded with the volume of number-transfer requests, so I didn’t change anything the second time around… it was only afterwards that I did the research into number portability over at the FCC’s website, and learned that if you’re moving your number and you are changing the metropolitan area your phone is registered in, the FCC doesn’t allow the transfer. Now, I never really got the chance to test this using iTunes, because here’s what happened the next morning…

I had expected to get an email back from AT&T letting me know something - either that the transfer had succeeded, or that it had failed - but I had no email… I waited till about noon to call an AT&T rep, and after about 10 minutes of explaining where I was in the activation process, the rep had no other advice than to just wait it out, and said that when I was able to, that I should restart the activation process, and instead of trying to port my number over I should just get a new number, and then call AT&T’s number-transfer department (888-898-7685) and handle it in that fashion. So, at about 4:30pm I got the email from AT&T letting me know that the number could not be ported over… bummer, but it was what I’d expected. I restarted the activation process, this time choosing to get a new number… about 10 minutes later, my iPhone was unlocked and I was up and running on AT&T.

After syncing and playing around with the iPhone for a bit, I called AT&T’s number-transfer department… it’s an automated system, and it asks you to type in the number (I assumed it wanted the number I wanted ported over). After typing it in twice (and it telling me something about not having that number in its records), it transfered me to a human. The rep asked me a few security questions to make sure I was who I said I was, and then asked for the number I wanted transferred, the T-Mobile account number that the number was on, and then a couple security questions to verify I had access to that account… 2 minutes later, the rep told me it was done, and that in exactly 6 minutes, I should power-cycle my iPhone and turn off my T-Mobile phone, and that when I powered up my iPhone the number should be switched, and good for making and receiving calls - instantly… no waiting for it to transfer the receiving calls part. 8 minutes later (for good measure), I power-cycled my iPhone, and BINGO! It was an instant and total switch, in the space of 6 minutes, where as I had waited 5 hours and then about 16 hours on my previous attempts through iTunes.

So… if you’re trying to transfer your number and are having similar difficulties, I’d recommend this method of getting a new number and then calling to have your number transferred… in fact, both of the reps I spoke to seemed to bemoan the fact that AT&T was using that iTunes-based method, hinting that it was causing more problems than it was solving and that it was much easier to just call in and do it manually. I for one agree with the reps - calling in was definitely easier and quicker.

More on my opinions of the iPhone itself later.

Yes, I waited in line for 3 and a half hours for an iPhone, and I had a great time. I met 2 ACU students, a guy in the Air Force, and another guy that used to be in the Air Force (we never got around to what he does now)… but we all had something in common – a love for Macs. Turns out the Air Force guy was a collector of sorts, and has one of almost every generation of Mac since the Apple II… even a 20th Anniversary Mac (extremely rare). One of the ACU students was a CompSci major, and the other a PT major considering the PT doctorate program at HSU… and we all had an interest in Macs, so we all had a lot we could talk about. In short, I had a great time.

The iPhone is a marvel of engineering. It’s construction is impeccable, and it looks fantastic. Unfortunately, I can’t really speak for it’s functionality aside from the few minutes I spent playing with one in the AT&T store (which was awesome), because I haven’t been able to “activate” mine yet. I’m trying to move my number from T-Mobile, but my first attempt to do so came back with my number being “not eligible to be transferred.” So I’m trying again. Worst case, I’ll have to get a new number, and just deal with the multitude of problems caused by that. To AT&T’s credit, as far as I can tell it’s nothing AT&T has any control over - it’s T-Mobile’s prerogative to decide if my number can be transferred… which sucks… I’ll be pretty upset if I have to change my number.

So much I could’ve written about in the last few weeks…

EDIT: I think I might have figured out the number portability thing, though it will take several hours to test. After reading through a few FCC documents about wireless number portability (since it is federally mandated), I came across this statement:

“Wireless LNP (local number portability) allows consumers to switch from one wireless carrier to another within the same general metropolitan area. It does not allow consumers to keep the same phone number when moving to a new town or city.”

It just so happens that one of the fields in activation asks where (primarily) you will be using the iPhone… of course, I put Abilene - but my T-Mobile number is a registered Dallas/Ft. Worth area number… hmm… so in about 5 hours (or in the morning), when I get the email back from AT&T (that I expect will say) that the number isn’t portable, I’ll try yet again… this time not specifying Abilene as my location… we’ll see what happens and I’ll post the results. I realize most of the 4 or 5 of you that read my blog probably won’t find any of this information useful, but maybe it will help some other poor soul Googling the Internets with a similar problem.

Well, I gave it to Copper for about 5 minutes, and here’s what he did to the thing.

Ouch.

In nerd news, Apple has released 4 television advertisements for the iPhone in the last couple days. What’s interesting to note is that originally the ads had fine-print at the end that said a 2-year contract would be required… but, sometime yesterday that fine-print mysteriously disappeared from all 4 ads. Here’s hoping we’ll learn more about the pricing structure for the iPhone and its service next Monday (WWDC keynote, 11am CST), but not being locked into a 2-year contract sure would be nice.

The end of the semester was really rough for me… probably the worst semester I’ve had school-wise - though not for lack of hard work; I just couldn’t keep up with it all.

I’m a senior now. It’s weird to think about that. My last 2 semesters of Cowboy Band, my last 2 semesters of classes… this will be my last fall semester of college… ever. Well, undergraduate college at least - I’m not sure if or when I’ll take on some graduate studies, but still… it’s an eerie feeling. So many people go into this last year of college knowing (or at least having a clue of) what they’ll be doing on the flip side (grad school, job, etc.)… but I don’t. Not a clue. Part of me likes that, part of me is scared $#!%-less… but I’m sure God’s got a handle on things.

There’s been a lot of good news lately… I’ve wanted to share some of it with you, but again I was too lazy to actually do it… so here’s some high points:

• The Wachowski brothers’ live-action Speed Racer film begins filming next week in Germany, and they’ve released an image of the Mach 5 that will be used in filming.
• Facebook introduced “Applications” a few days ago, and they’ve really hit the nail on the head with this one. The openness and the flexibility of the Facebook API is amazing, and the applications that have already shown up are great, though I think it may be a little bit before we see applications that truly harness the full potential of the API.
• Apple updated the options for the Apple TV to allow for including a 160GB hard-drive, and announced integration with YouTube coming in a software update this June, though only a few thousand videos will be available at launch, with the rest to come in the fall. Reportedly, the reason for the wait is that YouTube is in the process of converting its entire library of videos from flash to H.264…
• Google’s new application called Gears will enable online applications to function in an off-line mode, asynchronously updating when you reconnect to the internet. Example: A Gears-enabled Google Reader will be able to download news stories for you to read offline, and then when you reconnect it will mark the news stories you read offline as read, without you doing anything.
• Adobe’s Apollo platform is working closely with Google to make sure that Gears integration into Apollo applications is as easy as possible.
• Google also released 2 new additions to Google Maps. The first is Street-view; in some major US cities (with many more to come), you can click on a location on the map and be presented with a 360-degree panorama street-level image of wherever you clicked. Also new (though not really released to the public yet) is Google Mapplets - little applications to layer data onto a Google map. For instance, say you want to look up movie showtimes for a movie in your area, but want to actually see on a map where the theaters are and when the showtimes are, or maybe you want to see where cheap gas is with data provided by gasbuddy.com… Google Mapplets provides a way for developers to do just that.

My trusty 12-inch PowerBook has been with me now almost 3 years, and while it’s still great for casual use, my purposes for it have changed since I started college, and I need something a bit more powerful. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I need to be able to run Windows and other alternative operating systems for my schoolwork. So, it will soon be time to upgrade… but to what?

When I purchased my PowerBook, I had visions of carrying it to class every day - but to the contrary, it’s been tethered to my desk (external monitor, external hard drive, etc.) for most of it’s life. Thus, I don’t intend on getting another portable. So that leaves 3 choices - the Mac Mini, the iMac, and the Mac Pro - but really only 2 of those are even viable, the iMac and the Mac Pro - and they are two very different machines.

But, I have very different uses for my Mac. I read news online, I browse the web, I check email, I chat online, I manage my schedule; in these respects I don’t demand much from my Mac. However, I also take a lot of pictures (a couple thousand a year) and have a need to store, catalogue, and review them with some degree of speed. I edit images and graphics in Photoshop, I edit audio and video in Final Cut Studio from time to time, and with that comes the need to process (export/compress) large files from time to time. I also tend to do some of these things at the same time, compounding the need for a faster machine. Add to this the fact that my PowerBook is based on what is now twice-replaced technology (the G4 processor in my PowerBook was superseded by the G5 in June of 2003 and then again by the switch to Intel chips last fall), and that the 12-inch PowerBook isn’t even in production any more, and my poor PowerBook starts to sound even older than it really is.

So… I’m having some difficulty deciding between the iMac and the Mac Pro… both have their strengths and weaknesses.

The 24” iMac

Proposed Configuration

• 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 3GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 1x2GB, 1x1GB
• 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 1.5 Gbit/s Hard Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB SDRAM
• SuperDrive 8X (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

Strengths

• Has a built-in 24” LCD display - means I would still have a dual display setup
• Easy to transport entire computer if need-be
• Has a FireWire 800 port for faster file transfers to external devices

Weaknesses

• Overall not as powerful as the Mac Pro
• Internal drive is SATA at only 1.5 Gbit/s
• Not upgradeable

The Mac Pro

Proposed Configuration

• Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processors
• 4GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory - 4x1GB
• 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3 Gbit/s Hard Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
• 16x SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

Strengths

• More powerful than the iMac
• Support for 3.0 Gbit/s SATA
• Ports galore
• Many upgradeable options
• 4 drive bays means almost limitless storage, and opportunities for RAID configurations
• FireWire 800 and eSATA (with adapter) for faster file transfers to external devices
• Extra 5.25-inch drive bay means potential upgrade to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD in the future

Weaknesses

• No included display means I’ll have just one display
• Not easy to transport entire computer

So… the Mac Pro is actually about two hundred dollars cheaper, but I’d have the added cost of replacing the included 250 GB hard drive with two (or more) larger Seagates… I can get them cheaper off the net than buying them installed from Apple, but in the end the iMac and the Mac Pro would cost me about the same. The iMac gives me a second screen but no upgrade path… with the Mac Pro I have many upgrade paths, but no second screen. Also, with the iMac I get an Apple Remote and Front Row capabilities by default… with the Mac Pro, I could hack Front Row to work pretty easily, and I’d have to use my phone as the remote, but…

Any of my Mac-minded readers have any ideas/input/comments?

• Spider-Man 3 (May 4) – The previews for this look amazing…
• Shrek the Third (May 18) – It’s YASM (Yet Another Shrek Movie)… still, it should be good.
• Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End (May 25) – The second one sucked, so I really hope this does better.
• Ocean’s 13 (June 8th) – This isn’t on my must-see list, but I enjoyed the first two… may end up seeing this on DVD.
• Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (June 15) – As with Spider-Man 3, the previews are great, and I have yet to be disappointed with the current trend of superhero movies.
• Evan Almighty (June 25) – Tom Shadyac + Steve Carell = comedic genius.
• Live Free or Die Hard (June 27) – While this franchise does seem a little old (it’s been 12 years since Die Hard: With a Vengeance), who’s not ready to see John McClane in action again?
• Transformers (July 4) – I’m not too familiar with the Transformers franchise, but with the hype surrounding this movie…
• Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix (July 13) – I may not be a kid anymore, but the Harry Potter movies are great, and anybody who says otherwise is probably a Death Eater.
• The Simpsons (July 27) – This one’s a little iffy…
• The Bourne Ultimatum (August 3) – I still need to see The Bourne Supremacy, but The Bourne Identity was awesome; hopefully this one won’t disappoint.
• Rush Hour 3 (August 10) – I’ve been waiting to see Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in this for a while now.

It looks like I’ll have to break my usual (though not intended) habit of not seeing any movies during the summer.

That said, HSU had it’s own little tragedy Friday afternoon… a 4” water main in the ceiling of the 3rd floor of the Johnson Building busted, flooding the third, second, and first floors. While I didn’t see it, I hear there was a nice waterfall flowing from the 2nd floor balcony. What I think is remarkable is that we had class in the damaged portion of the building on the following Tuesday - the company that came to take care of the water damage actually had the building mostly dried out in about 60 hours, using fans and giant dehumidifiers that pumped out barrel after barrel of water, and the construction team re-painted and re-tiled the ceiling of most of the building in just a couple days.

Tuesday evening I attended an awards dinner for the Kelley College of Business. While I didn’t actually receive an award, I was a nominee – though I didn’t think I’d win anything this year. Several people had wondered why I went alone (no date)… but it actually ended up being a good thing – President Turner’s wife was unable to attend, so I had the honor of sitting with President Turner and Doyle Kelley – the man for which the Kelley College of Business is named - and it turned out to be a very interesting evening to say the least!

Mom bought me and Copper some squeaky tennis balls for him to play with… problem is, he doesn’t like the squeaking sound, and I – being the mean person that I am – have been scaring Copper with it the last couple days… so when I heard Copper making a lot of noise behind me just now, I turned around to see him attacking the tennis ball with paws of fury… oh Copper.

Ok, so this got a little longer than I anticipated, but I have one last thing. If you listen to internet radio (being any kind of music you listen to on the web, examples include Pandora and Last.fm, but also services provided by Yahoo, AOL, MTV, and RealNetworks) listen up. The Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC has decided to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites, and the new royalty rates are irrationally high - more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. What this means is that broadcasting online just got a whole lot more expensive – expensive enough that most if not all internet radio broadcasters will have to shut down, and what makes it worse is that the fees are retroactive back to January 1, 2006 - which will mean instant bankruptcy for many internet radio broadcasters. That being said, if you listen to and enjoy internet radio, please visit www.savenetradio.org, read the information, and show your support. They’ve made it quite easy to send an email to your local Congress officials, and there’s a petition you can sign. I listen to Pandora when I’m at work, and I know several of you use Last.fm… it would be a shame to see these great internet radio broadcasters shut down because of a misguided (by the RIAA) decision by politicians.

I adopted him last weekend from a friend of mine, and he’s the most wonderful dog ever. We know he’s part beagle, but we’re not sure what else he is… but he’s adapting quickly to life at Fort Awesome. He knows well enough now that when I open the gate to his fence that it’s time to go inside, and he definitely knows that when I walk in with his blue food bowls that it’s chow time.

I had more to type here… but for now it escapes me because Copper is trying to lick my face.

Links for 4/13/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit «
• Daring Fireball: Some Facts About AAC
• Daring Fireball: Bottleneck
• The Macalope » Blog Archive » Don’t hate the phone
• Digg - Firefox Inside Firefox
• Digg - LBJ Ordered Assassination of JFK Says Hunt On Deathbed
• Digg - 2 New Get a Mac Ads: “Flashback” and “Computer Cart”
• Digg - John Edwards: “We Need Net Neutrality”
• Digg - Vista Makes Backups You Can’t Restore From
• Digg - This is Why You Shouldn’t Clean Your HDTV with Windex

Some of you know that I read a lot of online news - most of it being technology-related - but news nonetheless. I’ve been testing an early version of NetNewsWire 3 (a popular news reader for Mac users) for the last couple weeks, and I think I’ve found my favorite new feature. As I read news, I can open the actual site for the story in a tab of the application, and one of the new features of NNW is the ability to send those tabs to del.icio.us or to a weblog as list of stories with the links… what this will allow me to do is share some of the news I read with you, and do it very easily. So… here they are.

Links for 4/7/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

• How To: Using your Mac as a NAT router - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• Digg - Racial slur on sofa label stuns family
• Digg - Apple’s new Mac Pro uses exclusive quad core 3 ghz Xeon
• Digg - George Lucas Says First ‘Indy 4’ Trailer Coming This Thanksgiving
• Morpho Towers: ferrofluid sculptures that groove to the music - Engadget
• iPod Slows Enemy Bullet, Saves Life - Gizmodo
• 8-Bit Tie Not a Joke Any More - Gizmodo
• Asus C90 Will Be First User Upgradeable Lappie - Gizmodo
• Two Grandpas Building a Flying Car in their Garage - Gizmodo
• Lightsaber Umbrella Uses the Force to Stop the Rain - Gizmodo

Friday night I went to see 300 (IMDB). I’ll sum it up for you like this: holy crap. I honestly didn’t expect it to be that good, but I think it was the most badass movie I’ve ever seen. It made me want to grab my spear and shield and go run around the countryside killing Persians. Not that I have a spear or shield, or that we have country side or even Persians around here for that matter, but… wow.

Saturday, I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.

I’m home for the break… if you want to do something, call me or message me on Facebook.

[begin rant] I’ve got a new idea for car horns. Maybe it’s not new, but since I thought of it last night and I’d never heard of it before, I’m counting it as a new idea - pressure sensitive car horns. With pressure sensitive car horns, you’d be able to decide just how loud the horn should be for a given situation. Sometimes, you just want to honk to let someone know they have right-of-way and should get out of the way, and in those cases, you don’t need the horn to be so loud and rude. However, when someone just about clips your front bumper merging into your lane on the highway and cutting you off for no reason other than their apparent idiocy, it’d be nice if you could, by the loudness of your horn, let them know that such a move was indicative of the actions of a complete idiot, not just a partial idiot. [end rant]

I start a new job tomorrow with University Communications, working on the HSU website. From what I can tell, my job will be to push updates to the website - something that makes me happy because I have long felt that the HSU website isn’t updated quickly enough when it needs to be (case in point: the bad weather days we had recently… yes, they posted that school was cancelled, but by the time it got on there it was almost too late to be of any use). Not that the team behind the website isn’t top-notch from what I can tell so far, but maybe I can bring some speed to the need-to-know updates.

Most computers these days have hard drives measured in gigabytes, the largest of which is currently 750 gigabytes. Common sizes are 60, 80, 120… more than likely your computer has a hard drive somewhere in that ballpark.

ILM (International Light & Magic), the special effects department of LucasArts produces cinematic effects for tons of films. Those source files for those effects generally pretty large, so ILM has a great need for having a large amount of hard drive storage on hand. The chart above (courtesy of CNet.com) shows “Available vs. Used High Performance Production Storage”; the blue shaded area shows the used portion of the available (the red shaded area). I had to resize the picture to fit it here, but you can see just at the right edge of the chart a jump in the available storage, topping out at… just under 135 terabytes. For the uninitiated, 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes, or 1,048,576 megabytes. This means that ILM has 138,240 gigabytes, or 141,557,760 megabytes of storage.

Lets say you have an 80 gigabyte hard drive in your computer… that means ILM has 1,728 times the capacity of your computer.

If you’ve got a 30 gigabyte iPod, ILM has 4,608 times the storage of your iPod.

Based on Apple’s estimate that a 30 gigabyte iPod will hold 7,500 songs, that means that ILM could store 34,560,000 songs. Also based on Apple’s estimate of 4 minutes per song, those 34.5 million songs would total up to (take your pick of the following):

• 138,240,000 minutes
• 2,304,000 hours
• 96,000 days
• 3,154 months
• 262.84 years

I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of storage in my book.