Monthly Archives: February 2010

If I post this here, I will be motivated

Anandtech is looking for writers – I’ve been an incredibly faithful reader of this site since I went to college back in the fall of 2002 and it would be a dream come true in a literal sense if even once I was able to get an article on there.  Even more awesome than making the front page of Slickdeals.net wight my first deal posting.

What I plan on writing in order to submit for this position are:

  • A review on the powerline network adapters I bought from woot.com right before the new year.
  • A “how to” on how to P2V a XP machine with all free software.   This is a useful approach for a number of reasons.
  • An opinion piece on something.   Probably the current state of XBMC and how it can be useful and where it seems to come up short.
  • Some new “news blog” posts and a mix in of some of the posts I have already published.

There it is, out in the open.  I have pretty much psyched myself out of even trying to do this – but I owe it to myself to give it a shot.

Wish me luck.

–Nat

Shows I am currently watching…

30 Rock, Season 1:

I am about eight episodes in and this show is just fantastic!  Some of the humor might be lost on me, but I think this show pulls humor from many levels so I am still laughing at every episodes… I’ve had to pause the Zune at points because of this.  I recommend this quit hitting show to anyone who likes to be actively entertained in a show where the brain has to be exercised just a bit in order to keep up.  Tina Fey + Alec Baldwin == priceless.

Drink Snapple!

Dexter, Season 1:

One episode in and I am hooked.  If the pace and complexity remain at the same high level through out this is going to be great ride.  To some extent if feels like a “The Pretender” but with a static location, complete with flashbacks to a childhood that built the protagonist into who he is today.  Jared and Dexter have a slightly different mission in life, however.  Who would ever have thought that you’d be pulling for a serial killer in a TV show?

What are you watching?  Anything I should DVR or find online?

–Nat

TV Consumption

Since I started my new job and bought a Zune, many seasons of different TV shows have passed before my eyes.  I am going to setup a page to document what I watched and when that transpired and what I thought of each season.  Maybe watching the shows more critically will give the experience more meaning… or in the very least will make me feel better about my time investment.

The current plan is to create a static page, linked on the right side of the layout here.  The shows I have watched will be listed in chronological order, and each show will have a hyperlink back to a blog post that describes what I thought of it.

Link to TV show page.

Heck, I might do this for movies too…

–Nat

A walk in the park

It is hard to come up with a good reason to go outside during the Winter, especially if you aren’t into the multitude of Winter sports that Minnesotans have contrived in order to convince themselves it doesn’t suck to live north of the snow belt.  Taking pictures is worth it, though – I took quite a few but it is so bright there were only a couple that seemed to be worth sharing.

— Nat

An hour of my day.

This sounds like basic functionality to me – the ability to export a VM from Hyper-V into a single file for mobility/delivery.

10:00 am – logged into SCVMM to perform the task.  Couldn’t find it.

10:10 am – typed “export” into the help console.  Nothin’ – I don’t care about exporting reports.  I want *vm* related help.

10:20 am – Google-fu hit paydirt – except this most only pertain to Hyper-V in plain 2008.

10:30 am – Technet Hyper-V forum, let the fun begin.

10:55 am – realize you need to actually log in to one of the Hyper-V servers directly and run the Hyper-V manager.  Evidently the central console doesn’t have this functionality.

10:56 am – queue some reading about GUIDS & such pertinent to Hyper-V exporting.

10:57 am – decided to just export a VM to see what happens.

10:59 am – realize there is no local space to drop the exported files.  Need to map a drive or something to make this work…

11:00 am – lunch.  Tasty.

–Nat

A *good* day…

1) Kristin and I drove to work this morning, no drama.

2)I got some things done this morning at work.  It feels nice to have taken care of something.

3) Kristin and I walked out of the building and got lunch.

4) I heard back from the Forest Lake FFA Chapter, they might want some help with Ag Marketing.  Finally, a volunteer effort I feel excited about.

5)xkcd.com and meninhats.com

6)It was still light outside when I left.  Hello, Sun.

7) Your friends love you anyway.  Sometimes you just need to hear that – or read it on the wall at Jimmy Johns.  Either way, I feel relieved for no reason I can put a finger on.

8) Class tonight – but Friday tomorrow.

9) With any luck, I’ll get to talk to some distant friend on the drive home tonight.

10) Guilt free Mass Effect when I get home to wind down the day.

11) Going to bed 🙂

–Nat

PS:  Yes, I know that number eight is borked.  I am just not messing with an accidental smiley today…

Interesting article on attention spans…

Over on my new fave tech/news site, Ars Technica, a interesting opinion piece has been published.  Basically the author chronicles a back and forth blog exchange between a more classic journalist and “futurist” on whether we are being consumed by the amount of information that is presented to us.  Is the constant information hampering our ability to make sense of any of it?

In an age of instant information like Twitter and the ever domineering presence of Facebook, it may be easy to write this off as nothing more than exaggerating the benefits of how things were in the “old days” versus our current frontier.  There is more to it than that simple superficial take though.

How many people spend hours on Facebook reading about friends rather than doing things with friends?  I am certainly guilty of this and I also don’t believe that this was ever so prevalent in the past.  On the flip side, it seems to me that fewer people just park in front of the TV, rather they are sitting there with a laptop or phone “multi-tasking” or maybe they are using the TV or computer to watch a movie or play a game.  Is there really that much value to most of this stuff?  Why do we spend so much time on this type of activity? Because it is easy, cheap and convenient?   What human need is this fulfilling?

Time is incredibly precious and it is mind boggling that we spend so much time on this stuff.  On the other hand, don’t we go to school and work so that we can do “what we want to do” in our free time?  Who is to judge that reading a novel or playing a video game or going to a park and taking some photographs of trees are activities or reading about someone elses adventures doing these things on Facebook are “better” or “worse” ways to spend this supposed free time?

I agree that we are faced with information overload.  I agree this could be a bad thing.  There are a lot of big important activities going on everyday that many don’t participate in (local government, education, etc.) that could benefit from extra input.

That doesn’t change the fact that I also want to go home and spend a few hours playing Mass Effect.

–Nat

Adblock Plus, you rock…

There are some pretty annoying advertisements out there.  Facebook is annoying enough since the whole right pane of the page is ads.  Other sites like Dailytech are worse with their “Vibrant” advertising, where the popups come when you mistakenly move your cursor over highlighted text.  There is a simple remedy to get rid of this crud when using Firefox, and its name is Adblock Plus.

  1. Install the latest version of Firefox from www.mozilla.org
  2. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  3. Click “Get Add-ons”
  4. Type “adblock plus” into the search box
  5. Click “Add to Firefox”
  6. Click through the installation
  7. You’ll have to restart Firefox
  8. *Important* – now you actually have to enable Adblock Plus
  9. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  10. Under extensions, you’ll see Adblock Plus, click “options”
  11. Open Filters –> Add filter subscription
  12. I’ve been using the first one, Easylist USA, make sure you hit “apply”
  13. Under options, make sure Adblock Plus is enabled
  14. Viola, all done!
It just works...

All the usual garbage on the right is gone.

Do you have any awesome browser extensions you’d like to share?  Leave feed back below 🙂

–Nat

New Sections!

I’ve added a couple new areas to the good ol’ TeamJuchems blog.

The first is the addition of the “NATLAN” section.  Updates to this annual/semi-annual LAN party will appear there, along with pics and videos as they are available.

Second is the “For Sale” section.  Take a minute to read that page, I’ll put in a blog post when I add items to it.  For now, I expect it to be full computers that need to stretch their legs and be put to use by other folks.  With two people, there are only so many computers that can be used in one house.

–Nat