She is wearing my sweater.

My first computer was an Apple 2e.

When I was a student/employee at Northeast Broadcasting School in Boston I used a Mac. I don’t know anything about the unit itself, but I think it was running System 7.

When I was at Middlesex Community College I took an elective that I think was called Intro to Computers that basically taught you the basics (used basic twice there… now three times) of office packages. They used Clarris Works (been a while, did I spell that right?) which meant I lived on the Mac side of the computer lab.

When I was at UMass Lowell (the second time… computer science, not music) working in Dr. Canning’s Systems Lab I needed to be able to edit audio easily so while everyone else got a Linux box on their desk, I had a Mac.

Since graduating in 2004 I haven’t been much of an Apple guy.

iTunes for Windows and the iTunes store changed that somewhat. My first iPod (2 gig nano) changed that a little more. The second iPod (30 gig video) changed it some more. The third iPod (80 gig classic) changed it even more. The iPhone however has found me firmly back on the Apple wagon. I haven’t used Jen’s macbook much, but I have used it enough to feel good about life just having it in our house, and it (and garage band… and my quickly becoming ancient ADAT setup) has pretty much sealed the deal that at some point in 2009 I will personally own an Apple computer. (I was thinking about burying a macmini in the cellar with my musical stuff. Jen thinks I should go for the full iMac experience, but if I go with a real system I want to be able to cart it to the cellar easily, so that would probably mean getting the next generation of macbook.)

Today however I found out just how much of an apple fanboy geek I am.

I saw a twitter post that said Apple will be previewing iPhone OS 3 on Wednesday March 17th.

I started to drool.

I went to search.twitter.com and saw “iPhone OS 3” at the top of the list of trending topics. Most of the tweets referenced this article from engadget.com.

The overactive imagination immediately took over. What will it include? Multi-media messaging? Copy and Paste functions? Video recording?

Probably none of the above… but I’m still drooling.

Well… probably not. Forgive me for getting caught up in the network news’ habit of phrasing every news story in BE AFRAID! format.

The crew of the International Space Station is at this very moment locking themselves into the Soyuz capsule as a precaution against a piece of orbiting debris that is within possible collision distance.

Here’s the release from NASA:

Station Crew Takes Precautionary Measures due to Space Debris

International Space Station Expedition 18 crew members are taking precautionary measures due to space debris that has been determined to be within the range where a collision is possible. News of the close approach came too late for flight controllers to coordinate an avoidance maneuver. A portion of a spent satellite motor is within the distance of the station’s debris avoidance maneuver requirement “box.”

Crew members are entering their Soyuz TMA-13 capsule and soft-locking the hatches, in case the debris should affect the space station and they are required to undock. The closure of the hatches ensures the safety of the crew and the ability to quickly depart the station in the unlikely event the debris collided with the station causing a depressurization.

The time of closest approach of the debris to the station is 12:39 p.m. EDT. Once the object is clear of the station, the crew will exit the Soyuz and reopen the hatches.

The crew will be in the Soyuz from 12:35-12:45 p.m. EDT. They will remain in the Soyuz until the debris risk has passed. Moving the crew into the Soyuz is a precaution, as the probability of impact is low. The crew is currently putting space station into an unmanned configuration, including several interior station hatches.

I saw this posted on twitter at 12:28… they will be in the capsule at 12:35. I love this new media stuff. Up to the second news reports. It’s enough to make a news nerd’s head fly clean off his shoulders.

Good luck to the crew. Let’s hope this thing flies right by and goes on it’s merry way.

Before we do anything else please click here:

Top 100 reason why Captain Kirk is better than Captain Picard!

There, now that that is over with. My last post promised I’d get up at 5:00am today and do some recording. Yeah… right. I got up at 6:30 and did some scrambling to not make everyone else late. So much for RPMotivation day. I’ll try again tomorrow.

We’re having company on Saturday. Our house is not cleanly enough for company, especially when one guest will be a toddler. Our mission for the next three days is to Clean The House! This is a mission that will be successful. It would be easier if I could keep up with the 10,000 tons of laundry. One of the downsides of being a ridiculously oversized person is that your clothes take up a ridiculous amount of space in the washer and dryer and therefore more loads must be done.

But again, we will succeed!

Okay I can’t resist… here are some favorites from the Kirk vs Picard link:

7. When Sisko met Picard he told him he hated him. When Sisko met Kirk he got his autograph.

11. When Kirk screams it echoes across the entire planet.

12. When Kirk blew up the Enterprise, Starfleet built him another one and had it ready by the time he got home.

13. Kirk collects antique guns. Picard collects antique matrioshka nesting dolls.

4. Picard’s Enterprise was destroyed by a couple of Klingon chicks while he was stranded on a desert planet. Kirk’s Enterprise was destroyed when he blew up a crew of Klingons, stole their ship, and resurrected Spock from the dead.

5. Kirk has caused computers to self-destruct by out-thinking them on three separate occasions.

1. When Data died, Picard had a funeral. When Spock died, Kirk reconstituted the body, forced it’s soul back in, and even got him laid along the way.

2. When Picard senses that Wesley is having emotional problems he sits down and talks with him about it. When Kirk sensed that Charlie X was having emotional problems he took him to the gym and threw him around on the mats until he got over it.

3. When Picard went back in time he brought back Data’s head. When Kirk went back in time he brought back a blonde.

28. When the evil aliens use a stun ray on the crew, Kirk always stays conscious for a minimum of 15 seconds longer than everyone else.

31. When Sarek mind melded with Picard, Picard cried a lot. When Sarek mind melded with Kirk, Kirk decided to hijack the Enterprise and bring Spock back from the dead.

48. Kirk has punched out at least one member of over three thousand known alien races.

49. Kirk would never allow his first officer to get more tail than he does.

50. No matter what world Picard goes to, Kirk was there first and probably has an illegitimate child somewhere on the planet.

Right, I have to stop before I just copy and paste the entire freakin’ list.

Good Day!

RPM(extended)… I haven’t done a single second of work this week. Why? Why is my motivation gone after the hard (and lets face it, with my voice the embarrassing) part is done?

All that’s left to do is overdub the lead guitars and mix the damn things. Those are the fun parts damn it!

I am getting up early tomorrow. 5:00am (ok, probably more like 5:15 with the snoozing) I am going to start recording guitar leads damn it! I am!!

I know all 10 of these songs suck royally but that’s never stopped me before. Just listen to the garbage I have posted on alonetone. Granted, the new stuff is worse, but how much worse can you get?

Right. Motivation. That’s it.

Now, to go to bed and get some sleep so I can function at 5:00am.

Night folks!

As Neil wrote and Geddy say: Endlessly Rocking

(okay, that’s the lamest closing I’ve ever done. Ever.)

I just found this on twitter…

The Space Shuttle launch scheduled for tonight has been scrapped. There is a leak in a gaseous hydrogen (GH2) vent line. Don’t you wish you knew what that meant? I do.

Hopefully it won’t take long to fix.

Good luck NASA.

Before Jen and I met I used to keep a pretty regular blog on myspace. She said that reading it was one of the things that first made her interested in me. I liked it. I would write about whatever came into my head and put it out there for anyone to read it. I really enjoyed watching the hit counter rise. I never gave any thoughts to who was reading it, because I was writing it for myself and any potential audience was irrelevant.

Once I started dating Jen and things got serious it became time for the kids to get involved. Along with blogging like a demented retard I also tend to take pictures of everything I see. I asked Jen if she had a problem with me posting picture of the kids and she said no. So… there are pictures of the kids everywhere.

When I started writing here I wanted it to be a daily thing at least. I wanted to be able to spout off everything I thought of or did here. If I saw something online that interested me it was sent here. If I saw something worthy of a quick picture, the picture came here. If something went down in my daily life that I thought was interesting, or at least would be fun to write about, it made it’s way here.

Recently however we’ve been feeling a little uneasy. Let’s face it, I over do it here. I’ve let things slide into the text that shouldn’t be public. I’ve posted tons of pictures of a bunch of little kids who should be allowed anonymity. There are a lot of scumbags out there, and while I while I steadfastly refuse to curtail any of my rights on account of the scumbagged fuckery of others (you are reading this publicly after all) I have decided that those who are two young to really decide for themselves if they wish to be included in this ramble will no longer be included. Any post that includes any references to anyone I know who is under 18 has been deleted.

Also, my myspace page is now completely private. My facebook page is even more private than it already was. Tumblr and friendfeed were set up just to see how they worked, and they are now gone completely. I’m 50% through with twitter too. Everything is private there. I see that being more of a news feed now. I will follow anyone who catches my eye (that is the point of the service after all) but no one will be following me and I will not be updating it anymore. I see twitter as more of a newsfeed kind of site now. (I actually heard about Guy Carbonneau getting fired by the Canadians on twitter before any of the major sports outlets or newspapers had it.) So all that I wish to keep out of the public eye has been deleted.

Sort of.

I don’t want to stop posting here (obviously, I’m posting this aren’t I?) I just want to be less private. Jen suggested I just make this private and I did an exceptionally poor job telling her that, while that is a very good idea, it sort of defeats the purpose for me. I want to spew all of this on the unsuspecting public. I want some random person on the other side of the globe to accidentally come here and maybe laugh at what a twit I am, or get thrown into a jealous fury at how much happier I am in my life than he/she is. (just kidding about the rage part) I love knowing that Jen is reading all of this, and it is written as much for her benefit as for mine, but if I wasn’t going to profess all of this publicly it would be no different than sending her an email. I send her email and instant messages all the time, I wanted this to be a place where I am overhead telling her how happy she makes me and how much I love her by potentially anyone anywhere. That’s the appeal of this for me. It always has been.

At the same time, writing all of the stuff I write here without including anything about my family is a huge let down. I want to write about how awesome the kids are. I want everyone to know how much I adore them. I want everyone to know how amazing my siblings and friends kids are too. Not being able to write about any of that sucks.

So I decided to compromise. Anything that is fit for public consumption will be posted to this blog in my usual blather fashion. Anything that is personal and dealing with the inner workings of my family will be posted some where else. Somewhere that is not open for public viewing. A private blogspot page with the spur-of-the-moment-no-thought-put-into-it-at-all title, “The Inside Scoop on Rob.” (catchy, ain’t it? no? not really.) Click that link. I dare ya!

The new blog is open by invitation only. If you want an invite you have to ask me. I sent one to Jen and that’s the only unsolicited one there will be. Wanna read it? Gotta ask me. Simple as that. (and I think you need to have a google account too, but that’s easy to get) If you ask to read it and I know you I will probably give you an invite. I say probably because I reserve the right to say no. If I do say no it doesn’t mean I don’t like you, it just means I think you’re an evil scumbag. I AM KIDDING!!! Seriously though, if you know me and ask for an invite and I say no it’s nothing personal, it’s just me being as kid-safety conscious as I can possibly be.

Last night when I set the new page up I found out about a very cool blogger function that allows you to export your entire blog as an xml file, and then you can import that xml file into a new blog. So the inside scoop (gonna regret that name real soon) was born as a copy of importance of being (already regret that lame name) as it was before the decision to change things was made. After I finish this I will probably post something similar over there just to mark the place where the one blog became two. (it’ll be shorter though… and probably a whole lot less confusing and lame.)

Anyway, if you like reading what I post here you are welcome to continue. If you are a friend or a family member and want to read all the stuff that was deleted and any new family related posts that will be added in the future send me an email. If you don’t know my email you can leave a comment here with your address. If you know me on facebook or myspace or any other site I may have linked here you can send me private messages there too. I am hoping I’ll get a few followers for the new page, but if I don’t it won’t stop me from writing there.

Hope this isn’t too confusing.

Yup, its time for another embarrassingly geeky moment.

NASA has set up a webcam feed from the International Space Station. The release I read said that during the astronauts’ off-work hours (roughly 1:00pm central to… I think it said 1:00am central) you can view the Earth from the station’s point of view.

Right now however it is showing an external view of the station, and I believe I just saw two cats spacewalking.

This brings geekitude to a new level for me… oh who am I kidding, I’ve always been this much of a geek.

Click the link.
Enjoy

Jen is a World of Warcraft fan. She played it a lot before we met. Not long after we met she wanted to play again and I said I’d play with her. I like games where you get to kill lots of stuff. It’s fun.

We played occasionally for a while and then scrapped it in favor of Warhammer Online. The games were virtually identical. The graphics on Warhammer were a little better. Jen likes to say that Warcraft is cartoonie. That’s an accurate description. They were equally as violent, but Warhammer was a little more graphic with splashing blood and what not.

The downside of Warhammer is that while it was really popular right after it’s release, it is losing subscribers at a seemingly fast clip. Every time we log in we get a message saying that the server we logged in to has been merged with some other server. It sounds to us like there aren’t enough people playing to justify the hardware. (I suppose it could be due to outright hardware failure, but that doesn’t seem as likely.)

So Jen decided she wanted to go back to Warcraft and it’s 11,000,000 subscribers. (that’s eleven million) The other night she installed it onto her Macbook. I installed it onto my laptop which runs Windows 7. It doesn’t work. The launcher opens up and starts patching and crashes at 612KB every single time. Okay, screw Windows. Jen then takes on the awesome challenge of installing the game onto Ubuntu. She gets Wine running, she jumps through a few dozen hoops and gets Warcraft installed and it starts patching. When we ran it last night though… the graphics card and the Ubuntu drivers can’t seem to keep up with it and nothing renders much at all. I was so impressed with how far she got that I was swooning. I love that woman, and her mad hacking skills are only one of the billion or so reasons. Still… in a nerdy way, it was sexy as all hell.

Next we’re going to try and just dump a fully patched and installed Windows version of Warcraft onto an external drive and dump again onto my laptop. Some people have posted on WoW forums that they successfully used this method to get the game running on Windows 7. If that works I’ll just play on my desktop while she plays anywhere she pleases on her macbook. It’s just a matter of time before we’re killin’ stuff again.

This makes me happy

http://www.matadorrecords.com/matablog/2009/03/05/exclusive-mission-of-burmas-privacy-invaded/