This Pilgrim's Progress

New PC for the Family

Earlier this week I tried to order Dell's new  "Ueber-maschine" the XPS 700. The next day I took a closer look at my order confirmation and the estimated delivery date was late September!! I sent their customer service an email asking what the deal was. I got a phone call later in the day, and the explained that there was a part on backorder because the original delivery failed quality control.  I was supposed to get a call Thursday on the status of my order. No call, so I called them. Again, from the same CS facility somewhere in India, a nice Indian lady told me that there was no change on the status, so I cancelled my orders which she gracefully handled for me. She wasn't able to tell what the part was, so I didn't have an opportunity to change the configuration.

I then checked online on the model that's next down from the XPS 700, the XPS 400. Well, the  estimated delivery date on that one was just 2 weeks away. So I configured one that was pretty much identical to my original order except the chipset was going to be an Intel Duo 940 3.2 Mhz, rather than the 950 3.4 Mhz. I then called Sales at Dell, got a nice lady from somewhere in the South (accent was easier to understand!!), who was able to tell me that the est. delivery date would be just two weeks and the 400 didn't have the same problem as the 700.  So, I went ahead and ordered the 400.

Now, you'd think that the first guy I talked to could have helped me change my order to the XPS 400. But no. I wonder how many sales they are losing because of this supply problem and they way they are handling customer inquiries? And I just got a new catalog in the mail from Dell where they were selling some new machines with the same 950 chipset. Is it the chipset that's the problem, or some sort of mother-board problem??

Well, the machine I ordered is a nice one and should be a good one for the family. I'll report back later.

Update: Here's an article that explains the problem that Dell is having: http://news.com.com/Dells+XPS+700+on+summer+vacation/2100-1042_3-6093539.html

New toys on the blog

Typepad has added some new "widgets" that you can put in your blog for various functions.  I've added the Pandora widgets on the sidebar.

Pandora is a kind of internet jukebox/disc-jockey that plays a selection of tracks based on what you've selected as example songs or artists.  It's pretty neat, and they play new releases.  The only down-side is that they haven't extended it to classical music. But for most popular music you can get just about any kind of genre.

I've added the "favorites" in which you can listen to my top 5 favorite songs that I've listened to lately. Also you can try out my "stations" to hear what my taste in music is.

Try it out, and have fun!!

Safe Blogging for Teens

Laura Ingraham had a segment this morning on an article in the Washington Post about the popularity of teen blogging and some of the dangers inherent in the activity. It was a fairly balanced article and it focused on some of the dangers and abuses of the technology. Apparently some teens are posting personal details and in some cases even provocative or pornographic material on their blogs. What was surprising in the article were some quotes by parents who didn't feel they had a right to monitor their child's use of the internet!!

Blogging can be a safe activity and even a fun one for your teenager. But...you need to monitor their use and help protect them from adult predators that scan teen blogs and protect them from exposure to the seedier side of the internet. My daughter loves to blog, but she does it under our monitoring and protection.  Some basic rules that I recommend if your teen wants to blog:

1) No secret email or blogging.  Use monitoring software to check the family usage. We have access to their blogs and email accounts.  Use antivirus and security software, including a firewall if you have broad-band access. The better internet security software allows you to block internet sites by content, and you can even select sites that you don't want your child to see. One package that I highly recommend is "BSafe Online". It's affordable and easy to install and use. Some Internet Service Providers (Cox, AOL, Earthlink, etc.) offer free security software or services. Take advantage of those if you can't afford a stand-alone package like "BSafe".

2) On public blogs, don't post your real name or any details of where you go to school, or where you live except vaguely geographical (i.e. Southern California, West Coast, etc.).  Avoid using anyone's real name, use their blog alias or refer to them obliquely..."a friend", "my brother", etc.

3) Use blogs that allow control over posting comments and allow you to block IP addresses of those who violate the rules of service.

4) Avoid mentioning anything that would cause hurt or embarrassment to others ("golden rule").  Don't discuss incidents or details of your job or workplace, don't use anyone's real name.

These are actually good rules for even adult bloggers to use, and I try to use them diligently.  Sometimes I need to go back over posts and edit out names of family members, again to protect them from predators.  I've been blogging for about 2 years now, and generally it's been a good experience. 

On Laura Ingraham, some parents calling in said their solution to the problems of the internet was to keep their children off web access, no email, and some even don't allow cell-phones and texting.  Our approach is to teach our children to use technology and the internet responsibly and safely, and spend some effort to help them do so safely. It's better to learn to use a tool correctly and safely rather than hiding the tool from your children. 

GPS & Maps

Spent some time this weekend with my TOPO map software and my Garmin Foretrex 101 GPS toy.  I plotted all the hikes we are planning to do at Toulume meadows in a couple of week, along with GPS waypoints in UTM coordinates. I thought the TOPO software was pretty easy to use and I figured out how to print the maps out in the right scale so I can plot positions on them if I need to.

I played with the Foretrex 101, figuring out its functions and how to use them. I had some problems using the Mapsource software to imput waypoints and routes, the device couldn't be recognized by the s/w on my PC. Reading the Garmin site, I finally found a FAQ that revealed that I needed to turn off the port if it was used by my PDA for synchronizing my calendar and contacts, etc. So, after switching off the port in "HotSynch" I was able to connect the Foretrex 101 and down waypoints and routes to it perfectly!!! My main gripe is that that information should have been part of the standard install procedures, because most techno-geeks that I know also use PDA's. Too many manufacturers write their procedures and manuals like their product is absolutely the only peripheral you use on your PC!! I spent a good 3 hours messing with and figuring that all out.

Using the Foretrex was sort of interesting. I found the compass-like navigation tool wasn't that good or accurate. It seem to be more effective if you are moving, but standing still it gets confused which way is which.  The little map-track screen was way more useful, because if gave you a kind of bird's-eye view of your progress and general direction of travel.  I certainly wouldn't depend on this device alone for navigation, a good topographic map is a must!!  The automatic track tool is a good feature, it creates a 'cookie-crumb trail of waypoints every so often, that can be used to navigate back to the trail head or used later to create a route.

Of the two "gadgets" I think I'll probably get more use out of the TOPO mapping software, but that's probably because I'm more experienced in using maps than I am using a GPS device.

Tech-Ed 2005

Well, it was a good conference. I learned a lot about the new features of Sql Server 2005, especially the BI features that have been overhauled in a major way in this release.  Didn't like Orlando or Atlanta for that matter. Very hot and muggy!! I'm not used to having all my pores open at the same time!! Glad to be back though. I'm a real home-body and family man, so I don't really enjoy the travel.

Blondes with Brains!!!

Stop the presses!! BZ-Berlin has found 7 successful blonde women with IQ's of 120 or above!! This ranks up there with the prehistoric hobbit bones found in Indonesia!!!! Must have been a slow news day in Berlin, or the reporter just wanted to hang out with 7 beautiful and smart women?? It's nuggets like this that have made me an addict of reading BZ and the Sun Online . That and the distinct European world view that's so different from mine they might as well be writing from Mars. Oh, and they sometimes have pictures of pretty women...wait...that's the connection. These guys know how to generate circulation on the net!!  I just hope the corporate firewall doesn't tag them as triple x sites and set off the content alarms in my bosses office!!!

Proves I've had a slow day too!!!

Waterfall in San Diego Mtns.

This is the waterfall that my family hiked to. I don't know the name of it yet. I'll update this post when I find out. (It's called "Cottonwood Creek Falls"). My daughter took some pictures also, maybe she'll post them on her site. This photo was taken by my wife with her little cell-phone camera!! Not bad, considering!!

4/25/05  My daughter has a beautiful picture of the falls on her site. Check it out!! She has quite an eye for photography (father's heart swells with pride!!).

Miscellany

Well, it turns out that my co-worker and I weren't totally responsible for our database server's demise. Seems it was a fiber-card failure. So now we are waiting for the vendor's tech support to come and replace the card. Hopefully that's the only problem and we can get back to work. These things always happen when you are actually trying to get something done!!!

Desert Wildflowers

I've been busy lately catching up with my photo's. I've just uploaded the ones I took a couple of weeks ago out in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.  The flowers were beautiful, and there was an amazing amount of greenery from the heavy rains we've had this winter.
I've also reloaded my Yellowstone and Glacier photos, after resizing them so they wouldn't take up all of my space on the blog server!! I've been using Adobe Elements. I found that if I create a collection, then caption the individual photos on the organizer module of Adobe Elements, the captions come on over when you export out to another folder while reducing their size for the web. I then zipped them into a file and uploaded them to my photo album. It worked like a charm, and I didn't have to type  in the captions in Typepad.  Lately I've been having problems with Typepad, but maybe that's a symptom of some of the system problems they are dealing with. But not having to do all that typing within the Typepad album is a great convenience.  Plus I have a file on my system with the captioned photos also!! In the past, I always thought that it would be nice to download these albums back to my system to get the formatting and captions, but now I can do that before I upload them.

Adobe Elements

Last night I started to learn how to use Adobe's "Photoshop Elements" to edit my digital photos. It's a pretty powerful suite of software, but I was trying to watch "24" while editing, which is NOT a good combination!! But I got good results in spite of that, which is a testimony to the ease of use of "Elements". I used it to create the .pdf slideshow in the previous post. That worked well, except the octillo picture should be in portrait instead of landscape, and I haven't figured out how to make the slideshow wizard handle that correctly.

I also used it's "multi-file" processing feature to take a folder full of digital photos and resize them for uploading to the web. I've pretty much maxed out my space on TypePad, because I forgot to reduce the size of my vacation photos before uploading them. So last night I ran the Glacier pictures through, uploaded using a zip file. The only drawback is I have to re-type the captions, but I reduced my space usage by about 23 megabytes (I have 100 mb. limit). I'll do the Yellowstone photos tonight, and also the desert photos.  I'll probably end up deleting the slideshow until I can figure out how to get the octillo from laying on its side!!

Anyways, I highly recommend "Elements" to those of you out there wanting a little more power in a photo editor, but not willing to spend the money and time to acquire and learn the full-fledge "PhotoShop". It has a lot of features that I haven't learned yet, so I'll discuss those as I begin to explore it's capabilities in more depth.

One warning though, I'm finding it loads real slow in Windows XP, SP2 and sometimes hangs up in the middle of a wizard or module. Closing the app down and restarting it seems to alleviate that problem. The slowness may be part of the ongoing problems I've been having with SP2, but that's a whole other story!!