My sack

I had to leave my wife's backpack in RVA over thanksgiving, trading for a $10 pack with a bigger central pocket from my dad. It was terrible and smelled like cigars.

I was looking for a new backpack. It needs to carry one laptop, DSLR, water bottle and additional space for misc stuff / books / sketch pad / food. If there are two slots for laptops that would be grand but I recognize that's a niche need and can live without it. When I travel I take a backpack with laptop and travel amenities and a seperate bag for camera and that's a hassle. If I can combine them into one pack it would make everythign easier. I also drive a moped so transporting all my gear in one pack would be a fantastic boone.

I was briefly interested in military backpacks, I figure the military could offer something rugged and they use laptops from time to time, right? I was able to find ALICE and MOLLE style packs locally but they were more oriented to camping than tech, no surprise there. No dice on the ILBE in town. Ruling out the military line puts me in the prosumer grade equpment.

1. The leader has been this Tenba Gen3 for $172. 
2. The Tamrac 5549 is in second but it looks like the camera section is camera only, when I'm not carrying the camera I'd like to be able to utilize that space for somethgn else.
3. Finally the LowePro CompuRover for $250. This is really geared toward professional photographers, it has a mount for a full size tripod.

After I purchased a friend suggested a first responder pack aimed at Fire and EMS. This would be a good option but for the price.

The winner is the Synergy. The price is right, and it has lots of space inside. Two main compartments, the main also having a padded area for laptop. Six pockets accessible from the outside and another two inside along with a few mesh pockets. It has a place for cards which I put my new business cards in it feels like it was actually designed by an engineer, as though they wanted to make a quality item.

I only have a few complaints and if I had design control I would've probably removed one or two pockets but it's not too bad. There is no place to put pens; I like to carry a pen and sharpie but there is no specific place fo these, I fit them into the pocket knife section. The chest strap is non removable, so either you use it or it flaps annoyingly and gets caught.

Now I need to make some protective fittings for the DSLR but there's plenty of space for it and I enjoy crafts.

ToDo: Make to do list

How do you keep track of your to dos? I'm a fan of to do lists, but I think that a hard copy of a to do list is not nearly dynamic enough for my needs. I like something I can access from work, my pda, home and any other internetted computer. A widget that works on my google hompage would be nice too.
Google does make a To Do list and there are tonnes if you search. I guess my needs in order of importance

mark items as completed but not removed from the list
ability to share specific items with specific people
Works with Google start page
easily synced with an offline pda

And just for kicks, here's my to do list this weekend:

• Buy car washing soap
• wash car
• put NIN sticker on bumper
  
• burn CDs / DVDs for friend
  
• assemble tattoo

What's on your list this weekend?

music

Princess Superstar. I'm pretty sure she's my new favorite music person. She does this song about quitting smoking. I wish I'd had it when I quit. If you recognize her buuurilliance and want the rest let me know.

Yikes, what tiny worthless posts. It's not my fault I'm going through a dry spell.

Oh! Wait. I forgot to tell you how awesome Frontalot is. I came across a pirated copy of his new album, which I like immensely. I didn't want a physical CD because.... well I keep all my music on a computer but I wanted to pay him for his efforts. So I shot him an email and we worked out a solution. I ended up donating $25 to his fan club. How cool?

One of the few groups that have embraced digital music and realized that many of their fans use computers is NIN. In a cool move Trent released all the master tracks for many songs for free on his own site. The idea being you can download and remix them. Here's a bunch of these remixes: http://www.9inchnails.com/remixes/
If you head to NIN.com you can find videos, high quality widscreen backgrounds.
You might also notice that the last stop on their tour is a slice of meat in the sandwich isles on which I live.
Mrs PI and I have tickets, plane tickets, hotel reservations and a car rental. My plan is to catch up with them on Waikiki the next day as it's the last stop on their tour. Of course they'll be on the beach.

HA! Still a worthless post.

Published

I've been having trouble getting to bed at a reasonable hour recently, often staying awake until 2 or 3 am. Most nights I try to play some video games until I'm tired. Last night I found my way back to wikihow. I discovered a poorly written Guide to preserving your privacy at an Internet Cafe.

I work at an Internet Cafe so I lent my experience and wrote the newer and improved guide. It's not incredible by any means but it's always fun to publish on the internet and it's a big improvement over the original guide.

Reinstall Checklist

I had a difficult time finding a good checklist of thigns to backup before formatting your computer in the 15 seconds spent searching so I decided to make my own. Please add to the list if I forget anything. I'm also assuming in this case that a computer with XP will need to be backed up.

Use the FAST wizard to backup every account you use on your computer. This is the easiest and most complete backup you can do to save your account. If it doesn't work, you don't have an external drive, aren't connected to a network or have a serial cable here's a list of things to get:

• Bookmarks/favorites from IE & Firefox
• My Documents
• My Desktop
• Drivers for modem/ethernet card (with these you can get the others)

Paradigm Shift

I have a new email address. I'm guessing everyone that sends me email reads my blog as well so this can be my big coming out party. We'll see.

My new address is: myfirstname [at] mylastname dot com got it? Mind you this is not mylegalfirstname@mylastname. If this is too complicated for you or you don't know my last name leave a comment and I'll get back to you. This is also a great opportunity and excuse to send me an email and say hi if it's been a long time since we've talked. I would love to hear from you. YES YOU

Here are some statistics from my current email:

• I am currently using 1977 MB (68%) of your 2887 MB. ::flex::
• I have 2671 emails archived
• I signed up for gmail on 08/24/04

Here's why I'm switching addresses:

This thanksgiving when I'm in NC with my paternal family, I along with my brother will be pushing the entire family to switch to a family based online presence managed by me and him. This isn't exciting to anyone else and that's fine.

We're using Google Apps, which gives you free hosting among other things like gmail, docs and calendar to share with everyone in the domain. This is just about perfect for a small business or family to keep in contact. Of course with free hosting it's perfect for anyone that wants a small domain of their own.

If anyone is interested in running their own site, Google Apps is what I recommend, it's a great place to start. If you read all the instructions and would still like some help, give me a shout and I'll be happy to lend a hand.

I ordered two two x one gigabytes of ram. Two packages of two ram sticks, each one gigabyte. I've been frothing ever since I submitted the order. I've never had a computer with maxed RAM, I've been looking forward to this moment since around 2001. Tonight I installed it to find that only 3 of the 4 gigs is available. Also it hasn't made that much of a different from the 1 gig previous. What a let down. My Vista Experience Index won't refresh either.

In more upbeat news, this is the bathroom sign I'm going to print up and use at work on Thursday:



Update: Vista apparently just can't see any memory above 3 GB. I removed one stick of RAM and while the BIOS noticed it had changed, Vista didn't even bat an eye 'cept the BSODs stopped. I'm now in possession of a single 1 GB ddr2 800 mhz stick of RAM and also four 256 MB of varying speeds. If you need, let me know,
They're priced to move.

2nd Update:
This is the article where MS explains that their 32-bit OSes only support 3.1 GB of RAM

Google Docs lets you publish documents to your blog, how sweet. So I did. I also provided a link on the right column. It points to this document which lists things that I want. Just in case you're ever wondering what to buy me, now you can know. I also like flowers and hand written letters.

Remote controlled vehicle
subscription to 2600
ZombAID T Shirt
Cordless drill
any used technology. Digicam, PDA, mp3 player, cell phone
Gigabit Router

Where's George?

I've received two $1 bills recently with markings on it. They had a web address on it: Where'sGeorge.com? You enter in the serial #, denomination, series and zip code then it shows you the path this bill has taken. It looks like bills are entered fairly infrequently, I guess nobody pays much attention to their money.

The 1st bill arrived on June 12th. I know this now thanks to my browser history.

The 2nd bill arrived today, I found it in the till when I came in to work.

a new low

Tonight I overheard one of the regulars talking to a friend who also had come in to the store. He introduced his friend to his grand daughter, whom he was chatting with on an IM client with a webcam. That's right. You can now introduce people over the internet. This is probably old hat to some, but it's new to me.

Until now the geekiest thing I've come across was Instant Messaging someone sitting right next to me. This was useful because we both had headphones in and were in the middle of several different trains of thought, not to mention what we had to say to each other was not dire, it could wait.

Maybe it's that I don't particularly care for the person in question, maybe he's just not geeky enough for me to appreciate this as a normal thing to do. Maybe I shouldn't judge an eavesdropped conversation.

PSA

Backup your data today. Right now. No one ever plans their drive failure, it just happens. To everyone. If you have a flaky computer, you move a lot, you only have a laptop that you travel frequently with or your data is irreplaceable you should consider off site storage.


Amazon's Simple Storage Service. $.15/gig
GDrive works for small amounts of data.
If you're really good friends with me, you can ask for an account on my ftp.

2nd only to losing your spouse, losing your data is the worst feeling.

Geekend

I took my lady to a show last Wednesday. A friend of mine was DJing at a bar and it was a good chance to get out after dark. The highlight of my evening was when J was kind dance shimying near me and I suddenly got excited and exlaimed: "Street cleaner!", as there was one driving by.
I was more interested in the bristles it would leave behind (to make lock pics) than I was about the music, DJ or dancing.