Bathroom Wall Art

 For some reason,  I like this piece of art (left) hanging in our basement bathroom way more than I should.  It does a good job of covering up a boring white wall and it seems to work in the space very nicely.  It also compliments the piece to the right.

I found this painting at the Goodwill and they match the pieces I used on the garage.  Probably all part of the same Home Goods or Hobby Lobby set.

My full inbox is lonely, the demise of Email

I wrote a semi-formal post about The End of Email on ChicagoNow.  This is gonna be a more down to earth follow up post. 

I was a relatively early adopter of email. Having gotten free access to a unix based account in college, I loved the ability to send a message to a friend in another city without having to find a stamp, an envelope and their snail mail address. And getting a response the same day instead of a week later was very addictive.

The thing I really appreciated though was the fact that I didn't have to hand write a letter. Since my handwriting and even my printing is atrocious – top Egyptologists can’t decipher some of it – I have used a computer to write letters to my friends since word processors became more prevalent. I thought it was cool because I could not only edit and re-write a letter more efficiently than with a typewriter, but I could also save a copy so I knew what I wrote them when they finally wrote back and referred to some forgotten comment I made in the previous letter.

Unfortunately not all my friends jumped on the email bandwagon even after it had been around for decades beyond the AOL form. Some just would forward jokes. Others just wouldn't email back at all, not even to acknowledge that they got your last message.

Chalk it up to a combination of some people were busier than me, or didn't have the ADD thing I have or didn't sit in front of a computer most of the time. Some people didn't discover email until they got a work account and didn't like mixing work life and personal life. I couldn't understand what was so hard about hitting the reply key and saying "got your email, I'm still alive, still working at my mind numbing job which doesn't afford me much time to write emails all day."

It took me a while to realize that these people just weren't built that way. They didn't hate email, they just weren't designed to stay in touch. In the physical letter era, they liked getting mail but didn't didn't like the obligation of having to return the favor hanging over their head.  Even though e-mail made the process easier, the resistance to effort was still there.  If there were a technology that would take the thoughts from their head, put it in a note and send it instantly and effortlessly, they still wouldn't do it.

These days I don't get very many personal emails.  Most of my emails are retailer mailings, newsletters, blog subscriptions and the like.  Most people use FB-mail for email which I absolutely abhor because it is so user unfriendly.  What you gain in speed, you sacrifice in functionality. 

Texting has replaced email for the most part.  I have some friends who insist on only using text messages and I just give up when something needs to be communicated beyond the 140 character limit.  Ironically these same people have smart phones that get their email too. 

Thanksgiving Day picture

Happy thanksgiving to my readers, subscribers and commenters.

A rather boring post about my home computers

So I bought a new desktop PC off Woot.com back in October.  It was a HP desktop suitable enough for my needs.  I didn't like that it came with Window 8 but also recognized that is the leading-edge OS in the Windows world and I might as well join the avant-garde party.  I could have got a Windows 7 if I had jumped on one quickly enough but by the time I ran it past my fellow geeks the option that gave me the best hardware for cheapest price was gone.  All in all, I'm quite happy with the $400 savings on this one then the custom one I might have built on the HP website.

Before this new PC arrived, I had three desktop PCs that I used for the following purposes. 

• My main desktop, a dell PowerEdge 400SC class PC which I got for $20 at a yard sale in 2009.  I got it to replace the dinosaur Dell (named Orion) that I had been using since 1999.  I threw a copy of XP on it and added the data drive from Orion.   I really only used it for storing emails, some web surfing and blogging. 
• PC that I built in 2007 that was supposed to be an Application Server but I changed jobs and it ended up really being just a glorified storage drive.  I had plans to use it as a NAS but never got around to it.  When Nightingale and I merged households, one of my many time wasting tasks was going through a box of 3.5 inch diskettes and seeing if there was anything of value worth saving.  A few got copied to this machines hard drive.  Alas, somewhere between all the moves, the HD got fried and it won't even spin so I've lost whatever was on it.  I do have redundant copies of most of it, but there's always a chance one file was missed over.  You know, the one with the next great American novel on it, about a vampire who loves a zombie and they go to wizard school or something like that.
   
• A Windows Media Center PC that my in-laws gave us.  It took me a couple days to get all the
  
  malware, spyware and other junk off it and convert it into a clean poor man's Roku that we used at the condo so we could watch a few things online since we didn't have cable.

Anyway, when they were all working they were fine machines and I had geek-visions of re-purposing the machines as media storage, surveillance camera servers, firewall and whatnot.  Alas, it's too much work and we aren't there yet.  Hence the new PC -- this is probably the last traditional desktop I will ever buy because the leading-edge trend is to go tablet.  

So over the last month I've been slowly migrating the data from the old pcs to the new one.   I decided I'd get rid of the App Server and the SBS machines.  I'm keeping the Media Center one because it still a pretty good piece of hardware and it can support my XP apps that I don't want to upgrade.  I put the outlook archive on it.  The only potential issue is that the hard drive makes a lot of noise when it spins.  I don't know if this is because of its age or from all the moving I put the PC through in the last year (condo to new house, basement to attic, to first floor, now to office.)

The final two

On the new HP, I just have my current email on Outlook 2013 -- I was fortunate to be able to purchase Office 2013 for $10 as an additional benefit of my current employer and the fact that Micosoft is ready to move on to Office 365.

I figure another month or so and I will be confident that I can drop these machines -- stripped of their hard drives of course -- off at the recycle center.

I figure if I don't come across it in a month,  I won't likely need it at all.  Yes, I do have a a backup of the HD on an external Maxtor drive, but I'm not convinced everything got copied.  The problem is that I'm using a maxtor that is already very full with other backups so I cannot simply select the copy the entire drive option and for some reason I cannot select or even see certain folders.  I could trouble shoot it but I rally don't want to invest that much effort and energy.   

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A reasonable goal to achieve by Year's End

According to my Daily Mile account, I've run 623 miles so far this year.  With less than 40 days to go until the end of the year, it's a likely that I can make a reasonable push to hit 700 miles by EOY.  While I generally run all year long, this time of year it can get tricky.  Running outside can be hazardous when there is snow and ice and we get like 10 minutes of sunlight per day.

I suppose between treadmill running and a good weekend LR I can easily do it without too much effort.  In years past to hit a particular number meant I had to find time for a run at the busy end of the year when i might not have felt like going out for a run or had other things to do.  Usually I find that I need to run way more miles than I can fit in to reach a certain round number milestone like 800 or a 1000. 

Roaring Fire

The only thing that would make this day better would have been a Bears win instead of that poor excuse for a game they delivered against St Louis today.

100th Post of the Year

Since this is the 100th post of the year, I thought I should put some thought into it....okay enough thought, time to write.  Looking back, I see that I have written some good stuff longer posts at the start of the year before I started posting nothing but pictures and quick blurbs.  It was a very busy spring and early summer at work but now that project has died down and I'm at my wits end trying to make the day go faster so I can get home to my not so new house.

We had a tornado warning Sunday...with an actual tornado to back it up.  Growing up in the city all my life, I don't recall ever having a tornado come through here.  I know we did the tornado drills back in grade school and I suspect they were also combined with air raid drills so I probably don't know what to do.  Nightingale grew up on a farm so you'd think she'd be the one to know what to do.  We mostly just hung out in the basement waiting for the Bears game to restart.

I know a lot of people lost a lot of things and a few even lost their lives.  That said, once the tornado passes, there has to be a better way to air the news without preempting every show on TV for 8 hours to repeat the same 5 facts over and over again. I am grateful that we didn't experience any issues.

The class that launched the rebellion

Last week I got to spend some time in Exciting and Exotic Schaumburg at the Learning Tree training center.  it was a virtual classroom and I could have done it from home but going onsite keeps me honest and gets me out of the house.  In the summer of 2005, I spent some time in Arlington Heights because of an ex girlfriend who happened to work at the Motorola campus in Schaumburg.  She would tell me that when she did take a lunch it was to go shopping.  Little did I know that half a decade later I'd be doing the same thing.  If I worked in Schaumburg I might be more broke than I am because of all the stores.

When I worked at the Big Bucks Law firm a few years ago, my dbag boss sent me to this training course on communication.  It was one of those soft skills courses and I asked Anakin why he sent me there.  He said it was because he had extra money in the budget that he needed to use up.  It turned out to be a blessing in disguise course.  Ironically, a short time later I end up working down the block.  So hopefully this isn't foreshadowing of things to come.