Author: Greg
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Reboot
9 years ago I decided to drop out of college and do things my way, at the time it seemed like a good idea but being the shady, secretive person I was I didn’t tell anyone for 6 months… It was a combination of boredom and not wanting to be taught or something like that, but shortly thereafter I began to teach myself the ins and outs of HTML and began my long journey down the web path.
And I learned the old fashioned way, finding pages I liked and hacking away at their source code. Yes, I was one of “those” people…
Not having a college education can sometimes be a hinderance, luckily 9/10 employers here won’t even bother to check into my UK education history and I can usually “blag” my way around most questions. But the lack of that education and my method of only learning what I needed to know just to get by is hurting me now. I basically list myself as a “jack of all trades, master of none” and know enough to be dangerous, and right now most employers are looking for experienced professionals who are skilled in a great many programming languages, some I don’t even know like Ruby On Rails or Python.
So now I’m going to undergo a personal reboot of sorts. A definate change of direction is needed…
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The Multiverse
A wonderfully descriptive account of how 282 TV shows are linked together in a common universe. Everything from I Love Lucy to Heroes, from Gilligan’s Island to The Wire, the entire Law & Order series and even the new X-Files movie… It all takes place inside the mind of Tommy Westphall, an autistic child in 80’s drama series St. Elsewhere.
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Testing, Testing… Is This Thing On?
Like every other WordPress user with an iPhone, right now I’m trying out the new WordPress app that promises true blogging on-the-go.
Seems pretty nifty so far, might even reignite my fading blogging career… And you can also use it for moblogging (is it even called that anymore?) purposes by including pictures direct from the phone camera, which this post *should* have.
I’ll be interested to see how it all looks…
EDIT: Well, the image upload failed… Not sure if it was me or the app…
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More Actual Conversations
It’s been a year since I did the last actual conversation between Robyn and me, not saying we still don’t have them, cause we do, but it’s easier to document via instant messengers. The set up for this one is Bravo and their reality series The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I honestly hadn’t heard of this (I don’t watch Bravo since Project Greenlight was red lighted) but imagine my surprise that it’s not really Atlanta at all, but Alpharetta, Sandy Springs and Duluth. Duluth? Metro Atlanta at a push…
Me: I found out something hella funny that made me snort out dr pepper
Her: what’s that?
Me: Bravo are showing a prog called the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” which is more like the Real Housewives of Alpharetta, Duluth and (get this) the exclusive area of Sandy Springs
Her: I take it’s not the “real housewives of the granville”
Me: I have no idea what part of teh Springs of Sand that “exclusive” enough to warrant a reality show (except maybe Cops)
Her: LMAO
Me: I’m *almost* tempted to watch 5 minutes of it so see how horrific it is, I mean Duluth??? That’s closer to Commerce outlets than Lenox or Phipps
Me: I can just picture some “fabulous” women lunching and shopping at the “fabulous” Mall of Georgia… but where? maybe at Chili’s or the Olive Garden, too many choices…
Her: LOL
Her: maybe it’s “real ghetto housewives of Atlanta metro”Now we lived in Sandy Springs for a few years, and I really have no idea where this “exclusive” area is, I’m guessing it’s not off Roswell Road… And how comes they couldn’t wrangle in some Buckhead women? that would be a laugh.
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Batman Breaks Box Office Record
Batman film The Dark Knight has set a box office record for best opening weekend ever at the US box office, the sequel took $155.3m (£77.7m) surpassing the previous opening weekend record set by Spider-Man 3 last year, which took $151.1m (£75.5m). By comparison, Batman Begins grossed nearly $49 million (£24.5m) in its first weekend back in 2005.
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Belgian Budweiser?
The US brewer Anheuser-Busch has agreed to be taken over by Belgium-based InBev, in a move that will create the world’s largest beer maker. Might we see some real beer coming out of St. Louis for a change?
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3G Or Not 3G?
No, I don’t have one of the new fangled 3G iPhones, I’m happy with my current one, personally I’m holding out for a larger capacity iPhone, 32gb in White would be nice, but I am overjoyed with the 2.0 software update…
It’s like getting a whole new phone (just minus the 3G network and GPS stuff), I’ve been finding so many new features these last few days I can’t help but smile. It started when I downloaded the leaked 1,2 2.0 update and then met up with Robyn for lunch, I was showing her the new calculator that becomes a scientific calculator when you rotate the phone when I discovered the maps now have an auto-updating feature that mocks GPS capabilities. Sure it’s not as accurate, but it’s fun watching the little target move with you, and in downtown Davidson it was going down to street level and updating nearly every block. Pretty sweet, but beware, constantly updating like that drains the battery… This would be a recurring theme. My one issue was due to our coverage, depending on where I stand and what connection I used, I was placed in 3 different locations…
The front of the house on the EDGE network thinks we live in Davidson (close, but no), the back of the house says Cornelius (actually correct) but the WiFi thinks we still live in Huntersville (just plain weird).
Now back to the battery, my battery doesn’t last very long nowadays as we get next to no service in the house, in fact most of the time it just says no service, so I use the Wi-Fi connection, which drains the battery much faster. Now, like everyone else, I went pretty crazy with the new apps feature, downloading anything and everything and a lot of these apps drain the battery pretty bad, such as the MLB At Bat one with it’s option to watch highlights of games. I now have to recharge my phone at least once a day, sometimes more. It would probably be much less if we had EDGE coverage (not even sure of our 3G coverage yet) but the battery life is pretty worrisome all the same. I also imagine this will be even worse if and when Google’s Gmail has a push email option, as right now it’s fetching every 15 minutes and that has been known to drain the battery back in our old townhouse that had 5 bar coverage.
Battery drainage aside, the introduction of Apps Store and native apps over web apps is great, after my downloading frenzy I’ve managed to whittle it down to 4 or 5 I’d actually use but who knows what new ones are around the corner… Currently the iTunes remote one is probably the best out there, using a Wi-Fi connection to control your iTunes library from anywhere the signal will go, this would be extremely handy if you used AirTunes via an AirPort Express but I enjoy sitting away from the desktop and controlling the sounds. I also downloaded the usual suspects in a Twitter, Facebook and Flickr related apps as well as the aforementioned MLB At Bat one.
I don’t know when or if we’ll upgrade, but I’m very happy with the latest update.
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Fourth
For our Fourth of July weekend, we were visited by my brother and his family (by way of Chicago and Washington, I might have mentioned this before) and even though they were only here for 3 days/4 nights and even though they insisted they were only here to relax after 3 days of driving, we were run ragged the whole time…
Even before they arrived on Thursday evening, we spent pretty much the whole of the day running around, cleaning up, preparing guest bedrooms and what have you, as well as renew Robyn’s tags and clean her car. So they arrived around 7pm and we gave them the 5c tour, helped unload their SUV, and then took them for dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse for some hardcore flaming hibachi action (as well as Colin trying to impress us with his Kobe beef knowledge). Apparently they liked our beds as they slept for most of the next morning, in fact we had to crank up the early morning Rock Band action to wake them.
We then took them to Birkdale Village in Huntersville for some lunch at Maddi’s Southern Bistro (a place we take everyone) and to show them the village and also show where we used to live. Robyn and Heather decided to run in the central fountain to cool off as it was hot and humid the whole day, and with it being hot and humid that meant there was a nice big thunderstorm brewing away while we toured the Davidson 4th Celebration. While Heather was enjoying herself on the kids attractions, I managed to lose my phone in a quick dash for some shelter. I didn’t even realise I had for maybe 25 minutes, and a quick search of the path I took revealed nothing. Now coming where I come from, if you lose something like an iPhone, it’s as good as gone before it even hits the ground, but in sleepy Davidson it’s a different matter altogether. A quick chat with a police officer revealed it was found and it currently resides in the Davidson PD, and a quick walk there and a quick call to it proving it was mine was all that was needed. Crisis averted.
In fact, we discovered this morning that Davisdon PD emailed Robyn’s work email from it to let her know that “The owner of this iPod lost it. Davidson police has it.” and gave a number to call. My faith in humanity has definitely been restored.
Now, for the evenings entertainment we had a literal front row view of Davidson’s fireworks display, due to where we live, we’re right on the Cornelius/Davidson border and they were launching the fireworks within 150 yards of our front door. It was very loud, and smelled of sulphur for hours afterwards, but we sat on our upstairs patio and took them in at close range and it was awesome. If they do the same next year, we’re going to set up a little lemonade stand out front and make a killing!
Saturday, we took them to Mooresville for lunch at a Cracker Barrel before doing a little shopping before we met up with Jill and Ryan for a cheesesteak dinner and some bowling. On Sunday we were invited out on Jill and Ryan’s boat on Lake Norman, Heather really enjoyed herself both in and on the water but in the end we had to high tail it back to the shore as a lightning storm quickly rolled in. We rounded off their weekend with a trip to Concord Mills.
They left early on Monday morning and we basically collapsed for the rest of the day.
All in all, a good time. Now we’re gearing up for our UK visit later next month…
