Been a long time…

Yeah it has, and in most cases, it could be considered as reasonable and/or understandable. So I’ve had a lot of things happening, and I thought I would finally update people here…

So, where to start? How about the most exicting part: my career!

I finally got a position with a company called Netsmart Technologies (http://www.ntst.com) as a Systems Engineer/Admin. This is a HUGE step for me as it means that I am FINALLY back into the technology/IT field in a role other than “Independent Consultant/Contractor”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great title, but the pay I was getting as an independent was a little on the slim and irregular side. The good thing on at this position, I am getting some seriously great experience and exposure to several platforms. The OS’s include AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Linux, and all flavors of Windows. I’m also learning more about MUMPS databases, Java programming, scripting in Windows and Linux, OS tweaks, etc. This position is opening a lot of doors for me, and I am so excited to be there! I was recently placed as their first third-shift person, and while there are some who can complain about the shift, for a company willing to give me work to do and a paycheck to match, I’m not going to complain. After two years of unemployment, it really puts things into perspective. There is only really one down side, a 1 – 1.5 hour commute, one way.

So what would be next, how about a 6 month review of my new cell phone?

So after getting my job, and checking finances, cell phone plans, etc. I ended up getting the phone I REALLY wanted; the HTC Evo 4G. After using it for 6 months, I am still in love with my phone. While I have had a LOT of issues with Sprint’s service, including spotty service during my commute, lack of signal in my home, and even with a VOIP-relay for our phones, we are still getting messages of “Please try your call again later”. So what have I done with it? Well, it’s still stock; I know, I should have rooted it by this point, but when looking at benefits of doing so I would only get minimal benefit. Basically I would be able to remove the stupid Sprint software (Stocks, NASCAR, Football, and Sprint Radio apps), and I would be able to tether my laptop to use the phone’s 3G/4G service. So not rooted…. YET. I have installed a few games, Irssi Connect, Google Sky, and CarCast. Of all of these apps, CarCast HAS to be the one I use the most. I have had some issues with battery life, but a lot of that tends to be resolved by killing certain applications (Facebook tends to be the biggest offender), and generally just watching what I am using throughout the day. My wife is already talking about leaving Sprint’s service when our contract is done, which I am starting to side with, but there’s no telling at this time as I will have to watch what Verizon does with their Data Plans. If they go back to unlimited, I’ll probably go for it, but if not I don’t think I can jump ship as I am really dependent on high download rates.

Okay, the next big news is my Ubuntu upgrade. This one was more dramatic than the ones I have done in the past as I actually went through two versions of Ubuntu. I was previously running 10.10, and I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to 11.10. I did have a lot of problems, but I think I have figured them out after the fact. For some background. I am using a System76 Pangolin (Panp4n), which just recently went out of it’s 3 year warranty (wish me luck). I needed a larger hard drive, so the only change I have made since I’ve ordered it has been the OS versions and went from a 320GB hard drive to a 750Gb hard drive (ONLY because the 1TB hard drives will not fit in traditional laptop cases. I have the drive partitioned in 3 parts, first is the primary / (root) partition (20-30gb), secondly is the /home directory (appx 715gb), and finally (although this has been a hotly contested issue lately in the Linux community) a 5GB swap file. The reason for the separate /home directory for those that are not familiar with Linux, all user files, settings, bookmarks, emails, personalized items, etc are all store in this location. So you can erase EVERYTHING else on the system, and you would not lose anything important (unless you’re a kernel hacker, application customizer, or just working every else other than /home). With that said, here’s what happened. As I have previously mentioned in other posts, me and PulseAudio DO NOT get along; particularly with Wine application. So as I proceeded with KPackage’s upgrade method, I let it complete both upgrade (10.10 -> 11.04 -> 11.10) and awaited eagerly until it had completed. This took approximately 6 hours for both parts. Since I had upgraded, I thought I would show off Unity to my wife, and install XFCE-Desktop since I’m thinking more on resource usage. After installing Unity, it attempted to completely take over my ENTIRE system. Even my KDE menus were altered, and my wallpaper was changed to some Firefox screen capture that I don’t recall. When I went into Unity, the menus were missing, and just looked and handled horribly, so maybe the upgrade method wasn’t a good process for that one. Downloaded the newest Kubuntu image, burned it, killed all my .kde, .gnome, and all other non-essential directories. Everything installed just fine, and possibly even cleaner now than was before. Now that I was finally into the system, I checked to see if Pulse was there, and indeed it was. Okay, so I purged out the PulseAudio server, this was no problem, but when I went to remove the client libraries, it wanted to remove ALL the applications (not just the meta packages). So I had to leave those. The system was working fine with two exceptions; Firefox is being extremely laggy, and the game that I play in Wine is crashing before I can even complete loading it. Firefox is a relatively easy fix; I pulled down Chromium and it was not lagging like Firefox was (lag while changing tabs, minimizing/maximizing, etc). So I added a link on my desktop to Chromium and we are using that exclusively now. Now for the Wine game… after much thinking, etc I started looking around on my system (as the game worked rather well previously, so I know it’s not hardware) and really started thinking through the loading process. What I ended up trying first was my video drivers. And once I updated those, everything worked perfectly!

Now my final piece of news is more on the “Health Front” and mostly off-topic for this site I guess, but there is a tie-in, I promise. Ever since Ohio has increased the taxes on cigarettes, the prices have been getting more and more outrageous and expensive. Since the new laws went into effect over 5 years ago, prices have gone from $2.50 a pack to between $4.25 – $5.50 a pack. I wouldn’t consider myself a heavy smoker, as I had only smoked about 10-15 cigarettes a day.  So I have done all sorts of things to make it cheaper, between going to generics (even the really cheap generic sold by the stores on a military base)  to “rolling my own” with an injector type machine. The rolling had to be the cheapest, but took a considerable amount of time to do so. I have tried to quit a couple of times as well, and didn’t last long for one reason or another. “Okay, so what, what does this have to do with computers or anything technology related?” Okay, so this is more of a gadget piece. While at work, we recently got a new employee who at first appeared to be a smoker, until I noticed WHAT he had in his hand. Looked like a marker or something with a cigar tip on it. When I ask him about it, he tells me that it’s an e-cigarette. Now I have seen ads for these online, but never in person, nor have I heard of anyone using one until now. He tells me a couple things that highly intrigued me; no more wheezing/coughing, no more after-smell, and “cheaper!” This got me so interested that I had actually stopped at truck-stops, gas-stations, supermarkets, and even called smoke-shops asking about inventory for them! So what it is? If you haven’t heard about these, it’s a battery, a cartridge/tip, and an atomizer. It uses “juice” that produces a smoke-like vapor. No burning, no tobacco, according to the ingredient list of the “juice”: distilled water, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, pure grain alcohol, and flavorings; notice the lack of 400+ other preservatives, cancer agents, etc. The “vapor” is the same thing as the fog-machines, aside from the nicotine added in. So here’s what I ordered: from The Vapor Pro I ordered an eGo Mega Starter Kit, 30 mL Vanilla with 18mg nicotine, and30mL MLB2 (tobacco flavor) 18mg nicotine. I have also ordered some other accessories from Good Prophets. So what do I think? It is definitely a lot cheaper! This as well as the “no more cigarette smell” has definitely sold me on this, everyone’s excited that I’m quitting smoking. At first I didn’t think of it as such, but I guess it is. I have noticed some other benefits as well. I’m not coughing as much, I can run up the stairs at work and not get winded, and my hands don’t reek from burnt tobacco. I would definitely call this a BIG WIN for smokers considering quitting or just an alternative, now as long as the FDA keeps their hands off of it, or limit their “legal” aspects to a printed FDA label on the juice. Will I decrease my nicotine strength or stop even “vaping” altogether? That remains to be seen at this time.

So that’s all for this update, I will have to be more regular, but I can only post when I have something to actually talk about… sigh… Until next time!