Still a computer geek

Even as a fully grown up person, edging ever closer to 40, I still have a great love of video games. I don't even question this, I would still rather spend my recreational time gaming above so many other activities...

This year for Christmas, my gaming needs were addressed with this gift from my mother:

I was already a firm fan of Rock Band and I have been a Beatles fan for many years. This was a particularly good pick as the music selection is more accessible to Claudia should she want to play with me. She is not a fan of many of the more modern songs in Rock Band (regular) that I tend to enjoy, like the Pixies.

Liam also loves this rock band, but for him the entire game is about playing "Yellow Submarine" over and over again. Liam also liked Beatles music from a very small age, but for some yet to be explained reason, he always referred to them as "car wash"

I think he may have first heard them in the car on a trip to the car wash, but I can't be sure. He may have just randomly selected that name.

TRAGEDY STRIKES

I was shocked and sad to hear that the Joneses had a break in to their flat over the weekend while they were up in Germany visiting us.  Getting robbed sucks, but I think the important thing to remember is that it is just stuff.  No one was hurt and you can always get more stuff.

Apparently the police have advised that there is a problem with “Georgian gangs” conducting burglaries.  This of course led me to the best source of information that exists, Google.

By typing in to Google “Georgia Gangs” the first image that popped up was unfortunately this one:

Which is apparently a still shot from a film about English School girls, one of whom is named Georgia.  As much as I would like to think that an apartment could be burgled by a group of schoolchildren, I think this was likely not the gang I was looking for.

I refined my search to “Georgian Gangs Geneva Robbery” and came to this article:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/index/Georgian_gangs_behind_rise_in_Geneva_burglaries.html?cid=685424

Apparently there is an organized crime presence in Europe and it has recently come to Geneva.  the article states;

“ Georgian criminal gangs are chiefly responsible for the large rise in burglaries in French-speaking Switzerland over the past year, the Geneva police have confirmed.”

Apparently burglaries were up 20% in Geneva last year, that is pretty shocking. 

Another Google search on “Georgian Robbers” gave me this nice photo of Dick Turpin, who really has nothing to do with either, but again I like to think of robbers escaping on horseback over the hills.

I also had a look at the Wikipedia entry on Georgia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_%28country%29 and it had zero mention of Georgian mafia gangs.  I am going to go out on a limb and say the robbers probably looked more like this:

You can clearly tell he is a baddie as I think it’s pretty universally known that baddies have masks, striped turtlenecks, crowbars, moustaches and smoke.  Also, he is yelling in Georgian and has a sack of Loot.

I have to say, I am filled with a tremendous dislike for all things Georgian and the entire nation of Georgia at the moment.  A few bad eggs have now ruined an entire country for me as I decide to paint them all with the same brush.   DO YOU HEAR ME GEORGIA!  I DON’T LIKE YOU NOW!

Well, that all being said, I am very sympathetic to the poor Joneses brush with EVIL GEORGIANS and I hope that the Police catch and punish the robbers in the most Swiss way possible, perhaps force feeding of cheese fondue while wearing decorative cowbells and having alpine horns blasted at them by traditionally dressed mountainfolk.  Oh, and also endlessly reading “Heidi”

If it is possible to think that any good has come of this situation, I think we can all agree that it has given me the idea for my new TV series “Swiss Justice”

So…. The iPad…..

Well, I am quite a tech loving guy, and like most of my kind I keep one eye on Apple whenever they are sending out their reality warping events promoting the latest giant bump in their product portfolio.

Yesterday was finally the announcement of the worst kept secret in the industry, the iPad.  I don’t know if I would call myself an Apple fanboy, since I have never owned a Mac computer.  There have been many occasions where I would have liked to, but have gone the way of windows for one reason or another.  I am an iPod guy, and have owned a few since the first gen of the iPod mini up through my current Nano.

Also, I have wanted an iPhone for a while, but absolutely refuse to consider it as long as T-com is the only provider.  I have deep personal feelings about T-com and will not be allowing them to have any of my money.  If the iPhone moves to another provider… it will be on my radar.  But that is another story.

I watched “the Steve” do his thing yesterday, and as usual he was very compelling.  As I watched the announcement and demo, I thought it looked pretty great.  But I have learned that the presentation style of The Steve really does distort opinions of the products, so I had to think about what he showed before I allowed myself to like or dislike this new product.

After much consideration, I would say the iTab is a good, but not revolutionary product.  To me, it is basically a super size iPod touch.  Perhaps a netbook replacement, but i don’t even know if that is the case.  What I like on the iTab

• Screen looks very nice.
• the iPhone OS was already pretty easy and fun to use.
• the Kindle reading application looks well implemented.
• Pricing was far better than I thought it would be.
• Ability to store and display PDF files is great.
• It looks like something from the future.
• 10 hour battery life?  sounds too good to be true.
• Wireless access plans (for US at least) is reasonably priced.

What I don’t Like on the iTab

• No Camera/videoconferencing.
• Any widescreen media (films) will have LOTS of black bars and bezel.
• OS does not support multitasking, not that big a deal, but on a “netbook killer” it should be there.
• Too many adaptors needed for everyday connections.  You need an adaptor for USB?  come on…
• No Flash in web browser.  This is a must if it is a real web appliance.

Will I buy one? very very unlikely.  It would be an amusing toy, but I think all in all I would rather have an iPhone with a few modifications to the OS, or even an iPod touch with a couple more features.

Not much going on...

I have really failed to take any new photos since Christmas, and I really did not take all that many over the break. Such a shame when I find myself with nothing to say.

The Playmobil Castle….

Liam’s big gift this year was a Playmobil knights castle.  I cannot stress BIG enough.  this thing is giant.

I wish I had taken some photos of the building process, as it was a nightmare of tiny parts.  It took me over 2 hours to get the whole thing together, and it was long after Liam was asleep.

Here is the thing in all its beastly glory… Basically every place there is a different colour of plastic, there was at least 2 pieces or more.  The walls and towers had many segments, and all of them needed tiny plastic fasteners inserted with a special tool.  It was very fiddly and slow, but the instructions were clear and nothing was missing.  They are one up on Ikea in that department.

Here is the view a little Playmobil munchkin may have riding through the front gates.Liam was of course overjoyed to see it all put together and ready to play on Christmas morning.  He was so excited to get it the night before and a little disappointed that papa was not a faster builder.  He wanted it to pop out of the box ready to play.   Just look at the size of the thing next to Liam.  We had to clear out a big space in his room to house this beast.  The Ritterburg has seen extensive play since that first day, and Liam of course makes everyone join in the fun.  Of course, Liam always gets first (and second) choice of which knights to use.  In keeping with a feudal themed toy, we poor peasants are left with the scraps once royalty has had its way.

Christmas gift time – Liam

A very memorable moment on Christmas eve was when we all came home from the church, and brought Liam into the living room.  We had sneaked all the gift down while he was getting ready to go a little earlier, so for him, they had magically appeared while we were out.

He stood there and looked at the tree and gifts and was totally speechless, something that we thought was impossible for the little chatterbox.

Here is a selection of Liam opening a few of his many man gifts.  The Knight’s castle was his big gift this year and I will feature it in a future post of assembly nightmares.

 

Christmas Tales

Christmas is of course long gone now, but this will not stop me from posting my Christmas photos. As usual, our house was all decorate up for the holidays, with a few new features this year.

First we have the paper crafted advent train. This came from a book that was a gift from Aunt Doris to Liam. The idea was that every day in December, you read another page in the story and assembled the next part of the display. Of course the reality is that it was way to delicate for Liam and Claudia did the entire project under his supervision. It did turn out very nice though.Next up, we have the winter display made of course by decorator Claudia. She took her domed cake plate, put down some powdered sugar snow, then added our little wooden Santa that we bought at a market some years ago. Of course the missing piece of that puzzle was the deer, which she bought at the hardware store in town. For some reason, they also sell some little toy animals there. Of course the centerpiece of every Christmas display is the tree. We had a nice one this year, although a touch on the short side. Liam would not get out of the way so he struck some slick poses instead while I was trying to get a photo. They worst thing with this year’s tree was that I seemed to be allergic to it. 10 min in the room and I had uncontrollable itchy eyes. I was not sorry to see it taken down last week.

My Latest Project - Home Media Network

So one of the things that has been keeping me very busy is setting up my home media network. This is something I wanted to do for a long time, and certainly something I had envisioned using my Xbox for. I actually don't play very many games on my Xbox, but use it extensively as a media server. I had been limited to the Xbox HD, memory cards, or other fiddly things to get my media on there though.

Over the Christmas break, I assembled the various hardware I have been slowly accumulating over time/holidays/birthdays and got everything together and running.

The files for my video, music, and photos now reside on my NAS (network attached storage) which is just a hard drive with a network card in it basically. This is then attached to my nice new (Christmas) router, making all files available to devices connected to the router.

So, I acquire new media via normal sources, iTunes, digital Cameras, etc.. and these are routed inwards via my old desktop to the NAS, which stores them all. Then I pull out the media I want to use via the Xbox in the living room, my iPod, or any computer that is on the network. It basically looks like this:

It is all up and running as of yesterday and so far everything works perfectly.

The next phase would be to enable web access to the NAS, at which point I will be able to use the NAS from any computer with an internet connection (and my address and password of course.)

I could even go so far as to stream audio and video files directly to an iPhone or iPod touch, neither of which I currently own. I am sure that audio would stream to them no problem, but I am curious to see what happens when I stream a video file to an iPhone that is not already in the correct H.264/MPEG-4 video format.

According to the manufacturer, the NAS will “render content properly for display on the smaller screen…” I am still not sure if this just means that the video resolution is downsampled, or if it is somehow reformatted. I would be quite impressed if the NAS could actually re-code and stream an H.263 file to an iPhone… I may need to enlist a tester with said hardware on that project.

Finally…

OK, i finally got around to unloading my photos and I can start to make some posts again.  I have to say there has been quite a bit going on these days.

I will start off with the usual family Christmas group photo.  This year we were missing the Joneses, who were off in the USA visiting Ryan’s family, and you can see Franz is still recovering from his surgery there.

This will be the last photo of ours with just one little troublemaker in it.  Claudia’s belly is not so visible here, but the next little munchkin will be joining us in future Christmas photos.  Oh, and if Claudia has her way, this is also the last Christmas photo with this couch.  She is desperate for a new bigger one.

Liam’s Photography

Last year (i think) Liam’s wonderful Aunt Shona gave him the gift of a kids digital camera.  I threw a largish memory card in it and let him off into his little world to have some fun. 

Since so many of the photos he took with the camera were really random, I kind of forgot about it and stopped checking up on them, but a week or two ago, he complained that he needed some new batteries.  I took that opportunity to see what he had been up to.  Surprisingly, there were 800 pictures on the camera.

some themes recurred:

1. Liams room
2. The living room
3. Mummy and Papa’s feet.

Here are a couple of the better ones he took.

 

Night Before Christmas

To say Liam likes Christmas is like saying fish are fond of water.  He has been Christmas crazy for weeks now.  Having many exciting phases of singing, dancing around, and wearing a santa hat everywhere he goes.  We had a few arguments already when he wanted to wear the Santa hat to kindergarten in the last week of November.

The latest mania is that he watched the classic 1964 Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer animagic (puppet) show and he latched on to the Flying Lion who is king of the island of misfit toys, Moonracer.  He has been callling himself Moonracer for a week now, and flying around the house roaring.  We have to address him as Moonracer or Liam-Moonracer if we want an answer.  It started off funny, but Claudia and I have both heard about enough from Moonracer.  Oh, he also has a crown made of gold pipecleaners that he wears around the house.

Liam is also very active in his Christmas art.  There are drawings of santa with reindeer and his sleigh all over the house.  He normally glues some cotton to the page for the beard.  Below is the most recent drawing and I love the maniacal looking Santa.  I think he looks like a crazy in a red top hat, but hey, that is just my interpretation.

I did mention that Liam wears the Santa hat a lot.  really a lot.  It had come to the point where we could only get it off him after he was asleep.  Here is a typical image of Mr.Christmas in the evening.Well, Germany has the big day of gifts and fun on the 24th, so this evening the Christkind will be paying the wee man a visit.  I hope that the post-Christmas come-down will be OK for him and we can get back to some normal routine. 

Firemen

Recently, Liam invited over the next door neighbour Annika for some play time.  After some brief noisy action, we were informed that Annika needed to wear Liam’s fireman costume.

It looks like she was not allowed to wear the coveted hat though.  That is only for chief Liam.

Entringen Christmas Market

It is the market season once again, probably the best time of year in Germany.  Most of the big markets are a little too packed for me to have the energy to navigate this year with a hyper 4 year old and a tired pregnant wife, so we are visiting far less that usual.

So far, we have only gone to our village market.  Entringen, population around 3000 of course still needs to have booths. Entringen has pretty much the same booths each year and this time was no exception.  Some crafts, and lots of food ones run by the local clubs.  I enjoyed a yummy gluhwein made by Liam’s former daycare group.

Liam had a waffle with powdered sugar from the sports club kids.  He likes his winter outfit and is eagerly awaiting some snow.  He really wants to make snow men and a snow fort as soon as possible.  Of course, he also wants his own reindeer to pull him and his friends to kindergarten on a sleigh.

Giving up on Subtlety…

I think that by the time they were making these posters, they were all out of clever, nice ways to ask people to shut up.

 

• Space – Celebrations are great and even better when held in common spaces away from work areas.
• Space - Avoid gatherings & group chatter in the open office.  Please use common spaces or e-Clubs.

First, I think that there has been no official definition for a “common area” I can only assume they mean meeting rooms and coffee corners.  Although there is no indication that these are actually common areas, I guess it must be them.

I would also love to know what an e-Club is.  This remains a mystery.

Sometimes things need to be explained carefully

  

In case my colleagues and I did not fully understand the subtle message behind the “VOLUME” series of posters, we are gently reminded with these delicately worded works of art.

• Noise – Be considerate of others working in your area
• Noise – Please ask colleagues to modify their behaviour if they are creating nuisance noise

I interpret these two in the following sequential way:

• Noise – shut up big mouth.
• Noise – Don’t be afraid to tell bigmouth to shut up.

I particularly like the expression “modify behaviour.”  I think the definition of “nuisance” noise is also open to wild interpretation.  I know for a fact if all the noise stopped that I consider a nuisance, it would result in more than a few deaths as so many would be holding their breath.

MORE MOTIVATION!

Well, Here are the next two motivational posters in the series “how to behave”

• Volume – Sitting down and using a headset while on the phone is quieter.
• Volume – Walking and talking can be disturbing to others.

Now, perhaps I am being picky, but surely those are things I should not need a 1.5 metre high poster to remind me of? they seem to be in the realm of what I would call “the obvious.” I am pretty sure that everyone in my office could come to these conclusions entirely on their own. But since these posters exist, they must imply that management perceives these two activities to be a problem in the office.

I would have to say that if these are a problem it is not because people don’t understand the concept of volume, but more that they are choosing to ignore the concept of volume. I would suggest the following to be more appropriate:

• Volume – Don’t be a noisy jerk.
• Volume – No one wants to hear you.

I can absolutely throw stones as far as this topic goes since I am probably the quietest guy in the entire building. I shun human contact and get about two phone calls a year. I communicate almost entirely via email and IM with colleagues.

I also think the guy in the first poster looks really angry. Second poster walker-talker at least looks like he is enjoying his work.

Friendly reminders from the company

In recent days, the office has started to put up some interesting posters all over the place.  They are supposed to be reminders of how to behave in our environment.  By that I mean of course our office environment, which is:

• Open concept
• Shared desks (sit wherever is free)

I will go ahead and say that the move to this office system was not popular with everyone, myself included.  I preferred having my own, fixed desk.  It is not as bad as I thought it would be, but if I have to choose, it would be for having my own desk.

I thought I could share some of the office propaganda in the next posts while I accumulate some topics to talk about on the site.

When we arrive in the office, of course the first thing you have to do is find a place to sit.  Thank goodness I have been guided in how to do so by these posters:

“CHOOOSE – Select a workspace to match your needs.  Use meeting or team areas for collaboration”

“CHOOSE – Choose the type of workspace you need… Lively, collaborative, common, or quiet”

I thought these were a bit amusing , thinking that I start each day knowing what my daily style will be.  Of course, not a single one of the options cater to those who would like to choose “isolated from humanity by thick concrete sound proof walls.”  That would be my ideal setting.

I would say the true way that most of my colleagues actually choose their workspace is:

1. those arriving before 8:30 take all window spots.
2. those arriving after 8:30 take whatever is left.
3. preference is given to a seat as far away as possible from “noisy people”

Without naming names, there are absolutely specific noisy people that are well known to all and avoided like the plague.  I think I am a preferred neighbour since I am a very quite office worker.  I strive to be as not-noticeable as possible so people don’t bother me with their problems.  I never talk on the phone, preferring email or messenger, so really my cube is normally like a nice little vacuum zone.

OK, without generalizing too much.  “noisy people” = “the French”

Soooo many Windows….

OK, I know i have not posted too much lately, but all I can say is that it is out of pure lazyness.  I have not taken a whole lot of photos and my computers have been in a bit of an mess recently.

I have for the past years been managing all my photos, music and posts from my work computer, mainly since it is way newer and better than my 10 year old desktop at home.  I keep all of my data on an external HDD, and then run the management software on the laptop.  I used iTunes for music, Picasa for photos, and Firefox for browsing and blogging.

All this changed recently when the office decided to give me a nice new PC.   I was delighted to unexpectedly get a new laptop a couple of weeks ago, and due to the office’s “self serve” IT, i had to set the whole thing up on my own.  I am a reasonably technically proficient guy, so that is ok, but it was time consuming.   However, I only set up work applications on the work laptop, so I lost access to my music and photos, which put a slow down on the blog posts.

It also forced me to add yet another windows to my everyday use.  My work is currently using Vista as the official OS, something I had hoped to totally bypass.  So at the moment, I have XP on my home desktop, Vista on my work laptop and Windows 7 on my home laptop.  The home desktop is used almost exclusively by Claudia for teaching these days, but as the household tech support, I need to be on there pretty regularly.

I thought it would be a good moment to briefly reflect on all the windows I am using.

 

XP is the one that has been in front of me daily for quite a few years now.  I thought it was a pretty good system, but now after living in the new windows worlds, I can see how clunky and unfriendly many aspects of it were.  I still like that it is stable and I am used to it, but I have to say I dont really miss it now that I have moved on.

Windows Vista is the OS that I had taken great pains to avoid since its much maligned release.  I was pretty much against it from launch, for no good reason at all.  I just totally bought in to all the negative hype I read.  After using Vista for about a month professionally now, I have to say it was a lot of hub-bub about nothing. 

Maybe the initial release of Vista had driver issues and was slower and buggier, but as I recall, XP was so bad as to be almost unusable almost until the second service pack  dropped.  At this point, Vista runs quite fine and I think it is fast, better looking and adds quite some improved features over XP.  The search window on the start menu alone has changed the way I do things.

I have not yet added back iTunes and Picasa, but all of my work applications (office, SAP) run great and my non-work applications like firefox and photoshop also run great.  The Windows Live writer for blog posting is also pretty wonderful.  I do most of my posts (when I bother,)  in this program now and I really like it.

Windows 7 is of course the new big sexy and I had to get on board with that the day it dropped.  I run it on my home laptop, which is a slightly older, but not ancient one.  I really think it feels like Vista++ rather than a whole new OS.  It lost some of the things I disliked (the silly widget window) and added great things like the way you manage windows on the desktop.

My primary uses of the Windows 7 box are internet browsing (firefox again runs perfectly,) Light gaming (Warcraft, Torchlight, Team Fortress 2) and some video watching.    The OS handles all these applications great.

Now I need to decide where my music, photos and video needs to live… on my work PC or on my home laptop.  Ideally I will set up an HDD as a network drive (or maybe a NAS for Christmas if work gives a nice bonus.)   Once I get all my media set up to be accessed easily, I hope I will be able to motivate myself to write a few more blog entries.

Oh, and since we have another baby on the way (not sure who knows and who does not) that will no doubt provide a bunch more content for me both photos and stories.