http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/in-which-i-fix-my-girlfriends-grandparents-wifi-and-am-hailed-as-a-conquering-hero

http://krypted.com/sites/removing-a-domain-name-from-a-google-search/

http://www.therestartpage.com/

http://thinkvitamin.com/code/create-your-first-wordpress-custom-post-type/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/

My friend Terry was kind enough to give me a tour of the KTCA/TPT studios in downtown St. Paul tonight. I’ve driven by that building for years, but had never been inside. It was also pretty cool to see the new central corridor light rail lines in the street outside.

Terry does lots of different things at the station, but I seem to have forgotten most of the “official” titles. I got to see the air control center, most of the sound stages, a number of edit bays, a recording booth, their cool autograph wall and the IT and marketing departments.

I was really impressed with all the digital workflows – can’t imagine how that all worked using tape. Lots of encoders/decoders, IP and fiber connections, giants DVRs and tape storage, time servers, sweet video monitors and satellite feeds all come together to bring 24/7 programming to your TV (more photos after the jump).

Thanks Terry!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Snow-White-Macbook-Air-Pro-Sticker-Vinyl-Decal-art-Skin-/190530415862?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item7217570879#ht_7280wt_1024

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/29/2595691/hp-laserjet-printers-pose-massive-security-risk-say-columbia

As they say in the commercial, I’m a Mac. Have been for a very long time. Lately that’s meant a laptop and the 17-inch MacBook Pro has long been my weapon of choice.

Until this week.

The casino where I work runs a lot of old technology. One of my first steps was to help the marketing department upgrade to a quartet of MacBook Pros with Cinema Displays. Later I added an 11-inch MacBook Air to the floating IT laptop pool. A sliver of PCs have been upgraded to Windows 7, with the majority still on XP. Don’t even ask about the servers…

I was tired of 1) having a PC tower plus my personal laptop and 2) not having a work laptop. When a friend of mine was selling his lightly used 13-inch MacBook Air, I had accounting cut him a check and started planning my new setup.

When the 13-inch arrived, I loved the size compared to the smaller Air. The screen resolution of 1440×900 was a big drop from the HD 17-inch, but still good enough to place Chrome on one side and Twitter/iChat on the other. Combined with careful configuration of hot corners, Mission Control and Dashboard, the smaller screen size is really a non-issue.

The limited number of ports has caused a bit of cord shuffling (and a run to the Apple Store for a USB-Ethernet adapter). My friend sent along an external SuperDrive, which has come in handy a few times so far. I had an extra USB hard drive that I’m using for an encrypted Time Machine backup, but that needs to be unplugged when I want to charge my iPhone. The Thunderbolt Display looks mighty tempting with all those extra ports…

The build quality on these machines is just amazing – so solid. I love the size and feel of the lighted keyboard keys and the screen is bright and crisp. Wireless connectivity has been flawless and battery life seems OK (although I usually have it plugged in). This model has the upgraded i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB solid state drive. Performance has been wonderful so far, handling most everything I throw at it (which usually means 8-10 simultaneous running apps). The clean install of the OS seems to have eliminated most of the negative Lion experiences I had on the old laptop.

Going from a 1TB normal hard drive to a 250GB SSD created a few challenges. I realized a lot of that space was consumed by music and photos. I kept all of my personal photos on the old machine (although many of the “best” images are already online here) and just loaded work photos into Aperture. Google Music came along just in time to solve the music issue – I uploaded 17,000+ songs to their servers for free and just listen to them in Chrome. Overall, I’ve used up about half of the space on the SSD so far.

My primary goal was to run everything on this machine, eliminating the need for the PC tower in my office. I really only used that computer for payroll, our golf reservation system and Outlook. There are a slew of other Windows-only apps we use in the company, but I never really ran them much. I wanted the new laptop to have all of these programs too, so I could finally learn and use them effectively. Enter VMware Fusion 4.1.

I’ve used virtual machines for years, but always reluctantly due to performance issues. The specs of this machine, combined with the just released 4.1 version of Fusion, make it tolerable (if not damn-near equal to the PC). I started with a clean Windows XP environment, loading all of the virus/spyware/adware/firewall crapola and system updates. Once that was ready, my staff installed Office 2010 (including Access), multiple casino, resort and marketing apps, along with the aforementioned payroll, golf reservation and Outlook stuff.

I can basically run a full-screen Windows XP environment in one of the spaces, bound to our domain, that acts just like the PC tower. Just for kicks, I added Windows 8 and Ubuntu VMs for testing and training. Everything installed smoothly and the Fusion preferences for shared networking, file sharing and printing just work.

Back on the Mac side, I purchased (or transferred) licenses for Photoshop CS5, Pixelmator, Coda, Transmit, BBEdit, Aperture, OmniGraffle Pro and Pages. Free or included apps include Chrome, Firefox, Twitter, iChat, Dropbox, CoRD, Terminal, Screen Sharing, NetNewsWire, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Google Music Manager, VLC and Perian. Configured the VPN and localhost web environment and now I’m good to go.

Well, almost. Still need to troubleshoot an Oracle connection issue, finish setting up HP’s ProCurve Manager, optimize some firewall/VPN/wireless settings and download my old MySQL tool. Oh yeah, Coda needs to be configured and hooked into our hosted SVN solution too.

Not bad for a 2.96-pound sliver of technology, eh?

http://www.pixelmator.com/

Apple Product Diagram, Pop Chart Lab

http://www.magpies.ca/

Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide, Charles Edge

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/technology/personaltech/windows-phone-is-back-full-of-great-tricks-state-of-the-art.html?_r=1

http://www.retrospect.com/products/mac

Epson R2000 Color Inkjet Printer, IT Office, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204505304577001980486025736.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_careerjournal

Like many others, my brother ordered a new iPhone 4S last week and asked me what apps he should put on it. This is his first smartphone, so this got me thinking about how I use my phone and what apps actually get launched the most. Here’s what I decided (in order of usage):

#1 – Tweetbot

I spend a lot of time on Twitter and this Tapbots app is my favorite client. $2.99

#2 – Mail

The default email app has a few quirks I don’t like, but it interacts with my Exchange account at work better than my expensive laptop does. FREE

#3 – Words with Friends

This is probably number one, but I was too embarrassed to admit it. Scrabble + social networking = brilliant. $2.99

#4 – Facebook

It doesn’t have all of the features of the full web site, but still a decent app. Each new revision gets better and better too. FREE

#5 – Camera+

Forget the default camera, Camera+ is better in almost every way. $0.99

#6 – Angry Birds (Original, Seasons and Rio)

Three stars, every level, each game. $0.99 each

#7 – My-Cast

Even if my friend Jake wasn’t the author of this app, it would still be my favorite weather app. $3.99

#8 – QRANK

Daily bar-like trivia, but I always skip sports. Will never get that Balls Out award either. FREE

#9 – Weightbot

Another Tapbots creation, this one is for all you scale watchers out there. $1.99

#10 – Tiny Wings

Strangely addictive (and more difficult to master than it appears). $0.99

—

Honorable mention (built-in apps):
Photos, Calendar, Messages, Maps, Clock, Calculator, Music, Safari, Phone.

Honorable mention (games):
HoldEm, Canabalt, DoodleJump, Mondo, Skee-Ball.

Honorable mention (everything else):
Shazam, Netflix, Urbanspoon, Fandango.

Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota

I had the pleasure of witnessing the “reality distortion field” in person many times over the years at several Macworld and WWDC keynotes, ranging from San Jose to Boston to San Francisco. At a Microsoft party in San Francisco in 1998, I stood nearby as I tried to work up the courage to actually talk to him. I was too shy at the time to say anything, but I remember being shocked when I saw him in the bathroom later that night and he didn’t wash his hands before leaving.

That unpleasantness aside, what can you say about Steve Jobs’ contributions to the world? I first read the news today via Twitter on my iPhone while walking down the Las Vegas strip in front of the Bellagio. I stopped and watched the beautiful fountains, then headed to the Cosmopolitan, where a literal hoard of hipsters ran wild with their requisite iPhones. iPads are everywhere at the convention I’m attending and iPods are given away as prizes at multiple booths. MacBook Pros and Airs are the laptop of choice for millions and Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Personally, much of my technology career is based on the products and ideas that have originated from Cupertino. I literally would not be where I am today if it were not for the work of Steven Paul Jobs. And his association with Disney and Pixar cannot be understated either. Thank you, sir.

We all knew this was coming, especially with the way the resignation announcement was worded. Cancer sucks (curse you, Bruce McCullough). Condolences to the Jobs family and thank you, also, for sharing him with the rest of us.

56 is way, way too young, but as Steve said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Namaste, Mr. Jobs.

With the new work site about to come online, I’ve been experimenting with various options for displaying photo galleries in WordPress. I’ve used Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for quite a long time on many of my sites, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Gallery3 hasn’t seemed to get a lot of traction yet and I really wasn’t too impressed with the other WordPress gallery options I tried.

There is a Lightbox plugin I’ve been using for a bit on this site called jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries. It works with built-in WordPress galleries, which I also didn’t really like much. After reading more about them, however, I’ve decided to migrate from Gallery2 to native galleries and use the Lightbox plugin for all of my images.

There is another plugin out there that’s supposed to help automate this conversion, but I have so many images and albums, that I really want to do it manually. I’ve already culled some albums and might decide to only repost the best images in some of the larger albums (especially with golf and hockey shots).

I still need to research a way to replicate the random photo in the sub-footer (and not include private photos), reload several photo categories, decide how best to handle URL re-directs and/or 404 issues with the old Gallery2 URLs and decide if I want a better way to deal with titles, captions and EXIF data.

So far, though, I’m pretty happy with how things are working. Here is a sneak peak of the new look – feedback is always welcome.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time this week finally studying up on the latest and greatest features of WordPress, CSS and JavaScript. This was mainly in anticipation of the work I need to finish this month on the new Fortune Bay website, but I also wanted to change up the look and functionality of this site.

The biggest items involved adding post formats to my custom theme (which now supports standard, link, quote and image posts) and integrating a three-column formatting structure based on the jQuery plugin Masonry. I also modified the RSS feed to deal with post formats, tweaked the Twitter section and cleaned up the style sheet.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how I spend my time online and how I present myself in various venues (I’m currently on a Facebook hiatus, quit Google+ before I really started and came very close to shutting down my LinkedIn profile). The simplicity of Tumblr drove the implementation of post formats and I like the idea of having full control over my content. Also have high hopes for the next version of the WordPress iOS app.

All of these things will hopefully mean I get back to posting more often, but no promises…

Dragonfire, Demon Attack, Beauty & the Beast, Atlantis, Swords & Serpents.

I really liked Imagic games back in the day. So much so, I guess, that I actually wrote them in 1983 (when I was 14) asking when their stock will go on sale. Kathleen Booth, Consumer Affairs, wrote back and said I should contact Merrill Lynch to see what information they could give me. She also enclosed an application for the “Numb Thumb Club.”

Such a nerd.

It’s sort of easy to see how I came to work in technology, isn’t it?

I really was spoiled growing up – I’m pretty sure I owned every one of these games at some point.