blindsquirrel.org

While in Phoenix, we went to Carolina’s for lunch.  Excellent Mexican food.  I don’t know that we have anything like it in Pittsburgh.  I’d definitely go back.

I go through these strange bouts of spiritualism that make me wonder if there really is a God. Is He everything you learn about in the Bible, or does science get closer and closer to disproving His existence? I usually end up with more questions than answers.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been going to church with the family on Sunday. It started out as something I did just to keep a little peace in the house, but every week has been a better and better experience. I’m not dreading going anymore. As a matter of fact, I actually get a little bit of a charge, or a boost to launch me in to my week. I know, I know, get a life, right?

But today’s sermon could have been written just for me. Today it was the question you see in the subject line: Is God real? To our Pastor the answer was obvious – of course He’s real, but he never shoved that down our throats. Instead he challenged us to investigate the truth for ourselves. It ends up that that is one of the main reasons I’ve been attending this church – I’m on an investigation. We’ll see what comes out of it. I’d like to believe God is real, but so much suffering in the world makes me suspicious.

I spent the weekend trying to recover a friend’s lost pictures from a hard drive failure, so I had lots of time to kill while waiting. I figured I would use the time by installing a shiny new copy of Windows Vista on our trusty old Dell Dimension XPS R400 that we’ve had forever. It’s the last Windows machine in the house.

I thought I would just plow forward with an upgrade from WindowsXP SP2 when Vista stopped me before I could get too far. It seems that the trusty old Dell supports APM and not ACPI, and Vista will not load without ACPI support. Bummer. I figured I would give it a quick run and see how it functioned, but this may signal the end of the road for Windows in our house as we have no plans to purchase another PC any time soon.

There is a chance I will purchase a new MacBook Pro in the next month or two, so ironically I may only get to check out Vista through OS X and virtualization with Parallels or VMWare.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 30 hours you know that Apple announced, and demonstrated, their entry in to the enormous cellular phone market. With the introduction of the iPhone (if that name sticks) Apple intends to go after 1% of the close to 1 billion cell phones that were sold in 2006 – a meager 10 million phones.

It is a really slick looking device, and everything that you would expect Apple to release; cell phone, iPod, and Internet Communicator that has a full browser, mail client and a text messaging application that looks a lot like iChat. From the specs it looks like they did a nice job with size, weight, battery life and screen. So with all that is right with the iPhone what could be wrong?

I can only comment from the specs that Apple has made available, but here’s a list of things that worry me:

• With up to 5 hours of battery life when watching a video, the iPhone makes a great wide screen iPod. This is what I have wanted for a while. The problem I see is what happens on that flight where I am watching videos and run the battery down? Not only have I lost my iPod but now I don’t have a cell phone I can use.
• Typing on the virtual keyboard might be difficult without any kind of response from the keys like a regular pager or cell phone. As a plus at least the keyboard is QWERTY as I am nowhere near as fast on my cell phone as I was with my old Skytel pager.
• No 3rd party applications. I’d love to run Skype or Adium on something portable like this.
• Cingular only for at least a couple of years. I’m a Verizon customer and could possibly be convinced to switch to Cingular, but how does their data network stack up against EVDO for performance and availability?
• There is not enough storage to replace my existing 80GB iPod. I could live with less storage space but if I wanted a Nano I would have bought one in the first place. I need more space than 8GB.
• Price. I don’t care how you slice it, the iPhone is too expensive for me with a 2 year commitment. I realize that there is a ton of very cool technology in this little phone, but I’m not so sure I can cough up that kind of money for a cell phone.
• Yahoo mail? That’s nice, but before I spend 600 bucks on a PDA it damn well better connect to our Exchange2003 system at work. I know many of you don’t care about Microsoft and their products, but some of us make our living in that space and need that kind of connectivity. OWA via Safari is not enough. I was hoping for wireless Active Sync support.
• It has a camera, but why no iChatAV for video conferencing?

That’s the list I can think of off the top of my head. For all the things I listed I am still pretty sure that Apple will sell a ton of these. As an Apple stock holder I hope they crush that 1% goal and nab 5% of the market. I know I am looking forward to seeing the iPhone in action and have a bad feeling that once I actually get to hold one I will be sold.

My wife is going to kill me.

Anyone have any idea why Microsoft let the UltimateTV die? I’ve been in the IT field for almost 21 years now and their are not a lot of MS products that rank up there high on my “wow” scale, but UltimateTV was one of them.  (Exchange2003, SQL2005, and Windows2003 are a few of the better products)

I realize that you had to have DirecTV to use it, but it sure seemed to be as good, if not better, than Tivo at the time. I always thought that they should have made a model that worked along with cable as well. The final straw for me was HDTV. Once I purchased an HDTV I wanted more and more HD content. DirecTV didn’t have much HD content and they were a year away from providing my locals in HD. That was the final straw that pushed me back to Comcast, but the 6412 HD DVR that Comcast provides is the worst DVR I have ever used. Very, very slow. At times just changing channels is an exercise in frustration.

But, this is not about the Comcast DVR, this is about what a great device UltimateTV was. They eventually came out with a patch that increased the performance, which was one of the last things I wanted out of it – except for HD. So the speed was good, dual tuner support, picture in picture, and a nice Guide. It easily passed the “wife factor” in terms of ease of use and series recording was simple. The UltimateTV did a great job at managing its own space, something the Comcast DVR seems to struggle with as it gets slower and slower the more HD content you have on its hard drive.

My favorite feature of the UltimateTV was the fact that you could add a larger hard drive if you really wanted to.

I never realized what a great product UltimateTV was until I was forced to use the Comcast DVR from Motorola. Hopefully Microsoft took the UltimateTV technology and incorporated it in to the XBox360 as their new television feature that is slated to be released around the 2007 holiday season. That could be the thing to put an XBox360 in my house.

So far, so good.  No cheating.  No huge desires for sugar any more.  Results after 1 week – down 13 pounds.  Not too bad.  You have to like the first week where you lose some water weight along with the rest.  As much as I still don’t like it I am exercising 5 days a week.

On to week two.

And what have we learned from this resolution?

• Protein = good
• Carbs = bad
• Sugar = evil
• Exercise = sucks

That about sums it up. It’s never fun when you’re trying to break an addiction, and mine happens to be sugar and caffeine. Caffeine is gone, as well as the headaches that followed from dropping it, and the sugar is greatly reduced. Did I mention what a miracle drug Advil Liqui-Gels are?

Weight Watchers used to have a saying that “nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.” I’m here to tell you that nothing sucks as much as being fat feels. There’s nothing good about it at all, other than I may outlive you if we are ever stranded somewhere without food. Nothing. That stuff about fat people being jolly. It’s all crap.

Just curious. I was thinking about this as I was getting gas and realized I’ve never seen a celebrity pumping gas in person or in any picture. Do they have people for that or what?

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There’s a list of things I could resolve to do in 2007.

• I could spend more time with my family
• I could be a better friend
• I could be a better neighbor
• I could do volunteer work
• I could attend Church more often
• I could give more to charity
• I could catch up with old friends I haven’t seen in years
• I could get a band back together
• I could stop checking work related email at home every night

You get the idea. But although I will try to do most of the things on that list as just a normal part of my life, I will not make them in to resolutions. This year my resolution is completely selfish because it is something that has to happen or none of the rest of the things on the list can happen.

It’s not an exciting resolution. As a matter of fact, it is probably the number one resolution that people make, and break, all over the country. 2007 is my year to be selfish and make it all about me, which means the weight has to come off. No excuses. No more chances. Every year my weight sneaks up another 10 pounds and every year I feel worse and worse. Getting more serious about losing the weight was one of the things my wife wanted from me for Christmas, so my promise to her was that I would drop 50 pounds in 2007. My personal goal is much higher, but I am trying to do what I think is right this year and don’t want to rush out, drop 50 pounds by Summer and then gain it all back, plus 10 pounds, by the end of the year.

Our neighborhood is having a huge Biggest Loser contest where it is men vs women, so now I have a team that I can’t let down as well. I’ll keep you all updated with the progress here, or on a separate page on this site.

I hope you all have a great New Year and find a resolution that makes sense for you, and one that you can stick with. Happy New Year everyone.