It's News to Me

Last year, my son, Jeff, bought himself an iPod and so far he loves it, as do apparently a lot of people who own them. Recently at MacWorld 05, Steve Jobs announced the iPod Shuffle, a scaled down, more reasonably priced model ($99) of the same technology that is sure to appeal to others. I told Jeff about its availability because I know his son and daughter, Dustin and Maegan, and his wife, Deanna, may also want to have one of these cool devices. Who doesn't?

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During my first two weeks of training at my new job, I've been sitting next to a young man named Marc Bryant. His computer training station is just to the left of mine. During our down time in training, he and I have chatted about a number of things, and I learned that he has a web page which I visited this morning. I was pleased to get to know him in a different context than our work environment and surprised to learn that he is a writer of stories for comic books. He has had a few of them publish already. Quite interesting and creative. Check out his site if you are into that sort of thing.

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Last night, my friend Tom Wright, sent me a link to an article and asked my opinion. He said, «Wondered if you might be interested in reading this discussion of blogging and reactions from bloggers. http://www.slate.com/id/2112621/«

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Last night Shannon Kamer and I spent about an hour on the phone tweaking various things about TightVNC to make it more secure. We added SSH and PuTTy to my system. But what excited me even more was that Shannon helped me configure my system to serve up podcasts and other things I might want to make available to others over the Internet via TCP. This is a big step forward for me because it makes it unnecessary for me to find a service that will host my podcasts as I begin to record them.

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I have returned from the grave. Well not exactly, but this is the first post in quite some time. I've discovered that in some instances that posts to my blog seem to be in inverse proportion to the number of things going on in my life at the time. While a lot of activity would seem to provide the material for a new post, the fact that many things are going on means that I have less time to post than I would normally. But I am due to catch you up on what has been going on since my last post.

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Trying out a brand new product can be both interesting and not just a little bit frustrating. Beta testers, as they are called, are those folks who are willing to exchange the chance to see a product in the making for the risk of a possible system crash or the disappointment that the product won't perform as expected because of the peculiarities of the system you are testing it on.

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Have you, as I have, ever wanted to be able to connect to your computer when you were not at home but been unable to do so? Or do you have friends who solicit your help in knowing how to use or perhaps fix some problem on their computer? If so, then what I'm about to introduce you to could prove very valuable to you.

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This morning I went for a second interview, a so-called «performance-based» interview, with my potential employer, U. S. Cellular, at 9:00 AM. I felt good about how I presented myself in the interview, and afterwards the interviewer said that the company had a new training class starting on January 17th, next Monday, but that I probably wouldn't be in that class because my application wouldn't be processed in time to be included in it. He indicated that the next class would start either the middle of February or at the first of March. So I was a little concerned that I might have to endure 4-6 weeks of unemployment between the end of my current job at ClientLogic on this coming Friday, January 14, and the beginning of training with the new company. And even that optimistic assessment was based on the assumption that I would be hired by U. S. Cellular which, of course, wasn't assured, despite my good feelings about the various interviews I have had with them.

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Stereo Y-Adapter

Originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

I spent about 2 hours this afternoon and nearly spent $40.00 trying to solve the problem of how to avoid having to swap the plug on the back of my computer between the headphones I use for making Skype calls and the system's speakers. It serves to illustrate for me that once you fixate on a solution, it is easy to lose all perspective and perhaps waste a lot of money. Fortunately, I have a very smart son with some common sense (that apparently came from his mother's chromosomes rather than mine) who saved me from myself.

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This evening when I arrived at home from work, I had an email from either «the author» or one of the authors of MixCast Live announcing that he had accepted my request to be a beta tester for this software. I'm delighted, and can now hardly wait to get my hands on it and try it out. Stand by for news about my first Podcast, coming soon to a weblog near you.

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