I purchased an Apple wireless mouse today. It’s a Bluetooth device. I found that like all Apple products it just works. I literally took just a few seconds to open the box, insert the batteries, link to my iBook, and start using it. I have a D-Link Bluetooth key stuck in the USB port on my iBook. Now the ports are on the left side of the iBook and being right-handed the mouse is used on the right side. No problem… The mouse works just as if there was a wire connecting it with my iBook. I am impressed. I have the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for my PC. It’s great when connected. I have had to uninstall and reinstall its software several times. It seems that sometimes when it loses connection it won’t reconnect. I also noticed that when not in use for a few seconds, it seems to go to sleep. Then when you start typing or move the mouse nothing happens. Once it wakes up, all your moves are executed. So far I have not experienced this with the Apple mouse. I plan on giving it a few days. If no problems then I will invest in the keyboard.

Wonder whats on his mind?

I couldn’t stand it another day. Just had to have a Mac. I tried to live with an HP laptop. For a PC it’s a pretty good laptop. But, like all PC’s nothing every works right. You have to fiddle with the system every time you want to do something. With the Mac, things just work. You can concentrate on the task at hand instead of fiddling with the system. Guess I am not a fiddler.
My new Mac is a 12” G4 iBook. There is just something about this form factor that I really like. The system is full featured, yet small enough to take anywhere. The battery life is great. With the HP I got a full 30 to 45 minutes. While on the iBook its 4 to 5 hours. This iBook sports a new keyboard, 802.11g wireless card, slot loading CD-R/W DVD-R, and two USB 2 slots. When I installed additional memory and wireless card, I noticed that the Internals seemed to have changed. The chaise seems much more rigid and substantial. This is really a great system.

I still maintain a PC. I replaced the HP laptop with a Compaq Presario desktop. Since I primarily code in a Microsoft environment, C# and ASP.NET, this box supports my work needs at home.

I have learned my lesson…the Mac stays.

On Saturday, Sandy and I flew to Tampa. Rented a car and drove to my mothers. Mom is doing great. Only a few months ago she was in hospital and things looked grim. She is now pretty much back to her old self. This I wonderful, she is 86 years young, lives by herself, and adamant on maintaining her independence. Mom’s position is that when she gets old she will consider living with one of us kids.

This has been an enjoyable trip. Saturday night we played cards until the wee hours of the morning. We really enjoy our cards. It’s a time filled with discussion on family happenings, and lots of kidding and battering. Sunday we spent visiting with Mom and playing cards. Finished our card games early, like 11:00 pm. Tomorrow morning we get up early and it’s off to Disney World.

Sandy and I spent the entire day, Monday, at Disney Worlds Epcot. We arrived at 9:15 am and did not leave until 10:00 pm. It was a very long day. Our fist stop was the new Mission to Mars ride. What a rush. They cram you into a very realistic space capsule and send you on a space journey to mars. The heart of the ride is a centrifuge. Lots of warnings are given about dark, confined spaces and dizziness. Don’t know how many G’s they subjected us to, but it sure felt like what I envisioned a real rocket ride would be like. Definitely want to take this ride again. We eat dinner at the buffet in the Germany pavilion. The food and beer was wonderful, being October, they had an October Fest atmosphere with a band and lots of singing.

Tuesday and Wednesday we spent with Mom and playing lots of card. We had just a wonderful time together. I did manage to check my email Tuesday night. There were no emails from work. No news is good news.

Thursday we were back at Disney. Ended up spending the day at Epcot. Went on the “Mission to Mars” ride again. It was better the second time. We eat brunch in France, snacked in China, and had dinner in Morocco. Sandy and I saw and experienced all of the sites and activities we missed Monday. The weather here was relatively cool. It was 82 F, and the humidly was relatively low. In Florida it’s the humidity that gets you, not the temperature. We returned to Moms home about 7:20 pm. Played cards till 1:00 am.

Top to bottom – Oldest, Biggest, Youngest

It’s hard to believe that the last blog posted was August 31st. I have been unbelievably busy. My work situation has changed significantly. I have been given the technical lead for one of our companies. The company is DRMNetworks. What we do is provide licensing and business management for multi-media owners. Our system is based on Microsoft’s Document Rights Management. It’s a great way for media owners to manage their product. The system architecture is Microsoft ASP, IIS, and SQL Server. However, I will be moving us to ASP.NET and C#. The majority of my time now is spent reviewing all the existing code and documenting the design.

I never did get Linux installed on the HP pavilion ze5468CL. Have tried several versions, all with the same result. The system hangs trying to load the video drivers. I even attempted to run Knoppix from the CD-Drive to no avail. The only solution was to run Linux within VMWare. I have purchased a license for their workstation 4 and now run Red Hat 9, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 enterprise server, and Windows 2003 enterprise server. I find the performance to be very good. In the case of the windows installations, just give it 512 MRAM and they run great. You can sent each up to get their own DHCP assigned addresses. Then each will look like just another box on your network. Have had no issues with Red Hat 9. Using VMWare seems to have eliminates all the hardware issues. Don’t even have to worry about duel boot. Networking is simple. Don’t think it can distinguish between the wireless card and ethernet card.

I have been following the adventures of Matt. Stumbled onto his blog while following some Java links. What caught my eye was his discussion about moving form a Powerbook to a PC Notebook. At the time I was in the process of making the same transition. It was interesting to read about his experiences. It seems he did return his PC and I believe is now back with a Powerbook. I have stuck it out with the PC, but miss my Powerbook badly. I am still having withdrawal pains. However, with my work situation I really must have a PC. As far as PC Notebooks go, this HP is the best. Others will disagree. I can only say that it has handled everything I have given it with out complaint.

Really need these three days away from work. Have no special plans. Will just kind of hang around the house and mess with the hp and maybe do some C#. We have tickets to see the Diamondbacks this Sunday. It’s the third game of a four game series with the Giants. They won the first and lost the second. It should be a good game. Besides the hotdogs and beer are always good so it’s got to be fun.

Friday I added a new sub-domain family.my-list.com. It’s a place for our family to add and display photo’s. To do all the work I found a product SPA (simple photo albun) that does the job. Will modify it down the road. But for now it was a quick and easy solution.

Need to rename this blog. I just don’t do Newton’s anymore.

Still have the hp pavilion 5468. Managed to work through the problems. With a Mac everything just works. With a PC everything has to be forced. Never did get Partition Commander to work. Sent them email. However, they never responded. The only difference between Partition Commander and a bandit is that the bandit doesn’t lie about his intentions. Looks like the $49.00 price for this product was wasted. I also emailed hp about the Linux installation. They never bothered to respond.

Did manage to get Red Hat 9 installed and running. This was accomplished with the aid of VMWare. Downloaded a 30-day trial version from their web site. Having used VirtualPC in a Mac environment for many years, it was an easy solution. Performance is not what it would be with a direct install, but is very usable. Also installed Windows 2000 Enterprise Server. The beauty of this product is that you can install multiple operating systems and test developed product. The only negative is performance. Things work well but just not fast. The other drawback is the price….it’s a cool $299 from VMWare.

Where I work we instituted SCRUM. There is a book titled “Agile Software Development with Scrum”, by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. They do a good job of detailing the process. Interestingly this is the very same process we independently developed three year ago while working for another company. We didn’t name the process. But I like SCRUM. This is a great process and really works because it addresses real life development issues. Would strongly recommend the addition of this book to your library. It’s a good read. Another good read is Alan Coopers’ “The Inmates are Running the Asylum.” I laughed till I cried as I read this book. He totally nailed real world development. Need to read this book again.

Sandy and I are sitting in the local Borders bookstore enjoying café-mochas. They have a T-Mobile hot spot, so thought it would be a good chance to test out the new hp laptop. Found that it worked well. Connected easily. In fact this post is from the bookstore. Have had an eventful weekend getting this system set up. Managed to upgrade from XP Home to Professional. Successfully installed Microsoft Office 2000, SQL Server, Visual Studio .NET, SourceEdit, Netscape, Palm desktop, and VMWare. Under VMWare installed Windows 2000 Enterprise Server and RedHat 9 in text mode only. Have made at least 6 attempts to install RedHat 9 with miserable results. VMWare seems to work well when you install various Microsoft products, but can’t handle Linux. Even tried to install Suse. Sent VMWare email which detailed my problems. Hope they respond. Would very much like to use this product to run Linux, BSD, etc. on this box.

Purchased an upgrade to Partition Commander and attempted to partition the hard drive. All it managed to do was screw up my MBR. Seems that when Partition Commander attempts to display its GUI after reboot it can’t render properly. Since I can’t read the screen, I can’t partition the hard drive. Had hoped that RedHat would install on an empty partition. Have also sent them email.

Yesterday the plan was to return this system on Monday and get a Powerbook G4. However, I really need this XP for an upcoming project. Its only a three month project, so have decided to make the switch then if I am still unhappy.

Still need to figure out how to get Linux to run on this system (hp pavilion ze5468CL).