Category: Life in General

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s plugged in and take up a lot of space. If it works for me, it can work for you too! Now, seriously, this sucketh mightily. I was toying with the idea of going out and plunking down a large amount of $CURRENCY for one of them new-fangled big-screen, flat-panel dealies–especially being that the PS3’s graphics are totally wasted on the old CRTs we have had, Read more…

I have discovered how to save millions on Christmas and birthday gifts. Just have something shipped to you that is packed in bubble wrap. The “something” goes to you, and the bubble wrap keeps the wife and kids entertained for hours!

Old Geek Receipt! Originally uploaded by vanRijn I finally broke down and bought an HP C5180 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier dealie. It’s a sweet little device, I must admit. Very Linux-friendly, comes network-ready, and now all of our computers at home can scan and print via network, out of the box. So, said new scanner has enabled me to pull some of my geekly receipts of yesteryear and scan them in, thereby throwing the gauntlet down for this year’s “You Can’t Be Geekier Than Me” competition. As one item of proof, I offer this receipt from 1996, wherein yours truly laid down $279.07 for a state of the art, Megahertz 28.8 PCMCIA modem. Also of note is a receipt from January, 1996 Read more…

I just sent off an e-mail about some of the challenges and surprises that I’ve hit as a Remote-Working Geek and it occurred to me that not only have I not blogged as of late (I suck, what can I say–but I have a list of like 10 things I need to blog about), but that the contents of my e-mail were downright blog-worthy. Here it is, minor edits notwithstanding: So… I’m not sure what your background is, but I came from 10+ years of in-corporate-office worker-ville. And there’s some things that I didn’t expect to be challenging that turned out to be, and there’s things that I didn’t even think of that have surprised me. And there’s things that Read more…

My Replacement Moleskine! Originally uploaded by vanRijn Dude, seriously, my faith is much more than restored in Moleskine due to this. I had blogged previously about the premature death of my beloved Moleskine, and had forgotten all about Moleskine’s excellent warranty. Well, I e-mailed them and exactly as they’d promised, today I received a brand new, replacement Moleskine straight from Milano, Italy. Awesome!!! I know I’m a gushing fanboy, but as of this moment, I am a Moleskine customer for life. If only every company had this kind of commitment to their product and excellent customer service!

My apologies to Huey Lewis and the News. And warning: this is a wandering, brain-dumping, meandering post which may very well be of no interest to you. There’s nothing like spending the weekend in a hospital to give you a little perspective. I blogged previously about feeling dizzy and nauseous, and I attributed it to the in-ear, sound-isolating headphones that I bought. Well, I don’t think that said headphones were the cause as much as a possible contributing factor. Things got so bad on Friday (I couldn’t even sit still without the room spinning on me and me feeling like I had to throw up) that I went to the local Emergency Room, which led to my being admitted into Read more…

100_5656 Originally uploaded by vanRijn I’ve been looking for a better screen protector for my PSP than the one I had (a Hori) and was just about to go out and spend $20 on an Invisible Shield, but I found people talking about using 3m Scotchgard instead. It’s certainly less expensive, and if it works, $11 gives me more than enough for everything I could possibly want to cover (Palm Treo, PSP, 3 iPods, Swatch watch, etc.). So I gave it a shot. Pretty good results too! In my first trial run, I used Windex to apply the Scotchgard to the PSP and there were really tiny bubbles that I just couldn’t get out. But the second time, I used Read more…

The Hori screen protector that I have on my PSP has managed to become poked and has subsequently created a bubble on my PSP’s screen. So I was looking at getting an InvisibleShield screen protector, being that they’re all but bullet-proof. And then I saw a couple of crazy nuts that talked about just buying some 3m Scotchgard sheets (you know… the stuff they put on the fronts of cars now to protect them from rocks, dirt, and small farm animals) and cutting it to size and saving vast amounts of coin. Wellsir, that’s just crazy enough that it simply has to work! So I scoured around a bit and came across this little gem to help you Prep Your Read more…

Now, this one I’m really speaking out of the side of my head on… This is totally based on first impressions of NetBeans, albeit after 3<x<5 hours have been invested in said first impressions… I’ve been using Eclipse and CDT for a while for my day job at VMware (which, by the by, totally rocks!!!). And for the most part, Eclipse+CDT really does a nice job at helping me maneuver around our very large code base and lowering the learning curve after I’ve figured out how to teach it about include paths that it can’t figure out on its own. As a C++ IDE, it’s very nice, responsive, stable, and it definitely helps in learning the code base via being Read more…