Shouzer

I do not have a great reason why I went to my 12 o’clock Intro to Foods class today. But, I did. It is, what I would call, an easy high school class. Attendance not required. I walked away with a funny story. The class is 50 minutes long. 25 minutes in, two guys enter the class and sit one row behind me. The only though running through my head: “Why bother?”. They sit down, no notes, and one of them has chosen to eat an apple. Ten minutes later, I realize we’re getting close to the end of the notes packet, and we are going to adjourn prematurely today. I laugh a little on the inside, because not only did these guys show up with the maximum potential of only getting half the lecture material, but now they aren’t even going to get that. So class ends, and I stand up to leave. The apple eater asks me a direct question, “What class is this?”. “Wow,” I think to myself, “he’s gotten so little from today’s class that he’s not entirely sure he even entered the correct classroom.” No, I was wrong. “FSHN 101,” I said. The girl sitting beside me asks them, “Aren’t you in this class?” I was going to avoid that question. “No,” the non-apple eater remarks, “we just got out of our last class early and came for the comfy chairs.” I exited my row and left the building. That’s my story for the day.

One more thing before I go, which I thought of as I was walking back from said class. Why is it that we put salt on the ground to melt the snow, but in chemistry, we mix it with ice to make the ice colder?

This semester I’ve got a lot of reading to do every day, primarily because I’m taking two psych classes.  In general, I actually like reading, but I really can’t stand reading textbooks.  They’re long, boring, and overall can’t keep my attention.  I’d read a whole page and then realize that I was actually thinking about something else the whole time.  None of the stuff I just read is actually in my head now.  It’s horrible.

I wish that, in general, the books we had to read for class were more interesting.  They don’t have to be fiction or anything, but textbooks in general (the big hardcover ones) just seem so high school to me.  I realize there’s times nothing else will work, but for the most part I think lecture could be used for most of the “textbooky” things, and the books we have could be interesting supplements to the material.  Oh, I’d love that so much more.

The stupid Bears won the stupid NFC championship game, and our stupid neighbors wouldn’t quit yelling after all their stupid touchdowns. The stupid Saints couldn’t stop Chicago’s stupid run game, and now I’ll be wedged into a spot of reading and hearing stupid stories about stupid Chicago for a whole stupid week. I hope all the stupid fans know that the stupid NFC has no chance against either stupid team from the AFC.

I couldn’t let the weekend go by without mentioning the ginormous amount of karaoke that has been occurring in the apartment living room. We’re talking 10+ hours over two nights. It’s been more of an event than a gathering. I’m sure others will comment and describe the extravaganza better than I can.

Sexy Rexy Grossman enjoying a lovely dose of Rextacy from KGB of the Packers.

Well, as anybody of any sense, I realized long ago that the pink and red Starbursts are far superior to their yellow and orange brethren. Why they still insist upon associating themselves with such lowly members of the Starburst race is beyond me. So, obviously, I decided to email Mars, Inc. and find out if it was possible to buy packages of single colored Starbursts. Here was the reply I received, much to my dismay:

Thank you for your email.

Wish we had better news. Currently, there are no plans to package individual flavors. We appreciate your feedback and have shared your comments with our Marketing Team.

Have a great day!

It was certainly no surprise that they appreciated my feedback. After all, I’m basically an expert on candy. What did surprise me a bit was that they claim to have “shared [my] comments with [their] Marketing Team”. Hm… Did “Marketing Team” really need caps? I doubt it, honestly. That’s another issue altogether, I suppose.

More importantly, does that mean nobody over there has ever actually thought to sell those things in red and/or pink only varieties? Are you kidding me? Hell, the only reason I don’t buy Starburst on a daily basis is because I refuse to choke down the other flavors, and it’s simply a waste to throw them out. Kyle would probably eat them, but that’s much more of a workaround than an actual solution. As you can see, I’m confounded.

I’m thinking somebody should probably start a petition. As you all most certainly know, petitions always get the job done. Shoot, I can definitely almost guarantee you this one will work. So Scott, I leave it to you. I’ll even be your first signature.

I suppose with my recent update about the iPhone, I should also spread the love for my future employer. As most people know, I’ve become a recent Apple fan, but that hasn’t stopped me from loving up some of the recent Microsoft products. I’ve been a huge fan of their gaming platform ever since the Xbox was released. After modding that sucker, there was simply nothing that could beat it. For the record, it wasn’t at all about the piracy capabilities–Xbox Media Center blew everything else away (I still use it to stream media from my PC to my TV), and I owned something like 29 games. I also already own 11 games for the 360 (which is, in itself, a great product).

I recently reformatted my sister’s computer with Windows Vista, which she acquired freely and legally from her school, as she’s also a CS major. So far, I love it, and I think it’s a huge step above XP. Now, I do realize there are a bunch of silly DRM restrictions, but I haven’t run into them yet, so I can’t speak about them. As a user experience, though, I’ve really enjoyed it.

So, on to the new product. During his keynote at CES, Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server (I’ll refer to it as WHS from hereon out). As far as I’m concerned (at least from what I’ve read and seen), this is a must-have product. It’s the setup I intended to give myself once I started making some real world money and had a house/apartment of my own, albeit in a roundabout fashion.

From what I understand, Microsoft intends this OS to run on a computer that you’ll literally store in your closet. It’ll be headless, which means there’s no keyboard, monitor, or mouse attached. All you’ll give it is power and ethernet. So what’s it actually do? Well, first and foremost, this is where you’ll store your media. Anybody with a 360 (admittedly not a huge crowd) should know the strength of being able to stream your entire music collection to your system while you’re playing any and every game. Imagine having all your media in one place and easily being able to stream it to all your PCs. (Sure, you can do it now, but the point is that WHS makes this easy for you and has other benefits I’ll get to).

On top of this, it keeps your data safe with RAID-like system. Microsoft says this system allows for easier addition and removal of drives, with built-in redundancy. One of the smartest ideas, to me, is that it does away with drive letters (at least as far as the user is concerned). You throw in another drive, and you didn’t add a D: drive, you’ve just given the system more space. There is no user-level concept of drive levels. I say “user-level concept”, because my understanding is that the drive letters are still there for the OS, but you’ll never know it. Want to upgrade a drive? Great, it’s basically hot-swappable, because of the way the redundancy works. Replace a 60gb drive with a 200gb drive and you’ve simply got 140gb more than before. Your redundancy will be rebuilt automatically. Brilliant, especially for a consumer product.

Another benefit is that this data will be accessible remotely. You’ll log into your server thrown a Windows Live-allocated IP (or something like that), and you’ll have instant access to everything on the WHS system. Perfect if you’re visiting family and want to share a photo from your latest vacation (and you don’t have it already loaded on your iPhone, hehe). In addition, you can then open a remote desktop to any of the PCs on your network. They’re not directly exposed to the internet that way, as WHS acts as a proxy.

Another great feature is that WHS backs up all your networked PCs once a day. This isn’t some wimpy backup of your Documents folder, but a complete system backup. How can it handle all the data? Simply, it uses intelligent backups. If you’re backing up two system, it doesn’t store two copies of identical files, just one. Great idea there. The backups also store every copy of a file you’ve had, but does it through a revision-based system (think CVS or SVN). Basically, if you’re writing a paper, you’ll be able to grab the copy of the paper from two weeks ago if you want. Why? Because instead of overwriting the original backup with the current edition, it’ll store only the changes you’ve made in (what I assume is) a DB-like format. So if you only changed a word, it only keeps track of that word. It saves space, but it’s also a much more powerful backup.

What this backup also means is that you’ve got a complete working copy of every system on your network in case something goes wrong. Your hard drive crashed? No big deal, throw a new on in there, and restore your system from the WHS backups. No need to reformat and reinstall all your programs. It just works. Nice.

The media and data sharing is available to any system on the network, be it Windows, OS X, or Linux-based. Obviously it can’t backup an entire OS X system the same way it can a Windows system, but I read that Microsoft claims it makes a great location for Apple’s upcoming Time Machine. So, in theory, it should give you the same power on a Mac, though probably not as easily. Still, the ability is there.

I’m sure there’s features I’m leaving out, but that’s all I can remember right now. All told, this early January has left me wanting quite a few new products. Who knows what they’ll be like when they’re released, but there’s a lot of potential out there.

Well, as Kyle assumed, an Apple post was bound to be coming from me. I began to love the Apple brand about a year ago, when they announced the MacBook Pros (of which I’m an owner). It’s a great product, and with the switch to Intel, I’d recommend a Mac to just about anyone.

Today, Apple unveiled the iPhone (I’d really recommend checking out some of the videos they have on the website). From everything I’ve seen and read, it looks like it’ll be my phone of choice when it is released this summer. On the front, there’s only one button. Why? Because the rest of it is a monster touchscreen. The idea is that every app you use might want a different UI, so why limit you to a set number of buttons that just take up permanent real estate?

They’ve really done some great things with the touchscreen UI, which you’d really just have to see for yourself to appreciate. If you’re looking at a picture, put two fingers on the screen and spread them apart, it zooms in; bring them closer together, and it zooms out. Let’s say you’re looking at a list of songs on it (oh, that’s right–it’s also an iPod, hehe), you just scroll your finger down the screen and it scrolls. Then tap on a song, and it’s playing. Tilt the phone horizontally while it’s playing a video, and it flips the video to play widescreen. Nice.

The phone’s OS is actually OS X (the Mac operating system), so it includes a full-features browser, mail app, and supports all kinds of widgets. It has built-in support for Google search, Google Maps, Yahoo! mail, and more. During his keynote as Macworld, Steve Jobs demoed the use of Google Maps, and it was very impressive. He searched for a Starbucks in his area, clicked on it, and it began to dial the specific location. It also has built-in WiFi, so that these features are much faster when you’re around an open network. That’s a great idea, IMO.

Now as excited as I am about the phone, it does have a few issues. First, it’s Cingular only. Boo. I’ll be willing to make the switch, I’m sure, but still… Secondly, Time reported that although the device has Bluetooth and WiFi, you can’t sync it wirelessly with a computer. That’s ridiculous. The ability to sync your phone through a Bluetooth connection is a standard features nowadays. As of yet, there’s also no mention of games. My personal hunch is that they’ll be there. If it’s running OS X, there’s no reason they couldn’t be. Still, it leaves a bit to be desired when they don’t explicitly mention it.

Finally, it is rather pricey. For 4gb, it’s $499. For 8gb, it’s $599. That’s with a two year contract. Yikes. On the other hand, it’s basically a Nano and a smartphone in one. A nano will run you $200 for 4gb, and right now Verizon is telling me a Treo 700w will cost you a clean $400 with a 2-year contract. The math is pretty simple. That doesn’t even take into account that the technology difference between a Treo and the iPhone’s touchscreen.

[Update:] I figured I’d throw in a link right here to the Time article I got a bit of my info from.