Finally. After being grounded behind my desk for I don't know how many months, I am finally back out on travel. Yeah, ok; I don't need to be out here 80% of the time like I was for a 2 year stretch. But some time in the saddle out on the open range is always healthy; at least for me.
If you track the Twitter feed, you'll have noticed the contents of my Pack-Up kit for this week. I brought a lot of gear. Some of it is working out great. Some of it, not so good. Out of necessity, I took along two laptops: the Gateway P6860FX for entertainment, and the HP EliteBook 2730p for work. The HP, as always, is working out fine, but I have not spent a ton of time on it, as my workday (training) activities are leaving me little time to dial back into the home office. The Gateway is working great now as an iTunes player and web-content creation workstation. I also got to watch The Talented Mr. Ripley on the big (17") screen, so that, in some way, justified me having lugged it along.
What the Gateway has not done well, or at least has not done well in conjunction with Windows 7, is play legacy PC games. I tried to get both Freedom Force and Darkstar One to run on the Gateway to no avail. Freedom Force ran, but had a sound glitch and a click-move glitch (when I would click on one spot on the map, the characters would run to a different spot, or the mouse indicator was always the attack symbol, so that whatever I clicked on the cahracters would attack instead of just move or talk-to). It [Freedom Force]lost its chance at survival on my hard drive when I was unable to reliably save content in-game, or load datafiles that I had saved from my campaign. Darkstar One I could not even get to launch.
And so I was off to work on developing more content for the site. Which requires web access in a lot of cases. Which brings me to my next hairball.
First of all, I think any hotel that does not provide free internet access is an atrocious business model. If a Best Western or Days Inn offers it, a business traveler ****hotel like a Hilton is just being greedy by not providing the same, in my opinion. So I have had to rely almost exclusively on my Sprint Sierra AirCard 598U USB Wireless Modem. I have been on travel with the modem before, and it works great. Even in a place like Bridgeport, WV, which is not a major metropolitan hub, my service has been great.
Can Sprint not figure out how to get it right in Baltimore, of all places? I am less than a mile from the airport [BWI]and you would think I was out in the boonies somewhere based on the speed and reliability of my connection. To be truthful, we did have a spot of weather last night, so I'll check my connectivity in the AM and see if the problem is endemic to this area, or if it was the weather that caused all of my woes this morning. [update: it is the next morning, clear skies, and I'm on 1XRTT, not even EV-DO, and my signal strength is between 1 and 2 green blips; for whatever reason my signal was much better the first night in the same hotel room, but has been poor since yesterday).
It has been a while since I used the model of generating my blog posts offline for a later upload. I have been using GoogleDocs as my central draft engine in order to get away from the problem I used to have of starting a blog post on one machine, not being done when it came time to switch workstations, and winding up with a half-dozen half-written article ideas strung out across multiple machines. To say nothing of my lack of motivation to pick up a stream of consciousness some number of weeks old and trying to finish it out.
The lack of free wireless and my spotty 3G connection have forced me back to generating content locally again, at least until I get back to Virginia. The interesting thing this has turned up is the new functionality within Sticky Notes in Windows 7. Sticky Notes now supports text entry, as well as ink (in fact I wrote this post out in that very app). This might now give me a way of putting sticky notes up about article ideas I get while working on a given machine instead of some of the other data repositories I had been forced to use (and lose) under Windows Vista. Now where is that blasted MS Word file again? - Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>
Before I get into what I've been into this week, I just want to show some props and give my host provider a shout-out. I have been with Hostmonster a skosh over one year, and my time with them has been nothing short of excellent. The 'WERKz has been in existence in one format or another for some 10 years. In that time I have been with 3 host providers. The first was utterly abject from jump. The 2nd grew long in the tooth, initially offering excellent customer service, and then sliding into complacency. If you have been coming here for some time, I reckon that the number of times you come to the site to find it unavailable are few and far between. I know because I check its availability just about every day, and typically several times a day. Hostmonster provides both the backbone for the main site, as well as my email and some of my other online services. I can not even recall so much as an email blip in the last year. Kudos to you HM; and here's to another great year ahead.
Now, on to what has been going on in the batcave. First of all, I am hanging out at Panera Bread for a little blogging time. I am working from the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T, in the Ubuntu partition. I have been a little cranky with the Acer's performance this week (again, when using it in the Ubuntu OS). My web surfing experience in Firefox has been spotty at best, and there have been some wonky episodes with interaction with my home network. I suspected a slightly wonky LINUX driver/Acer HW interaction. Switching to Opera as my browser has made things a little better. That combined with watching my first video on the Acer's LINUX partition (an MPEG4 encode of an episode of the Discovery Channel's "How It's Made"), has lead me to a "smile's up" outlook on the Acer as I continue through the weekend.
Most of my computer time this weekend has been spent in a vigorous effort to move my entire workgroup over to Windows 7. I have migrated all of the Windows-based machines over to Win7 successfully, with only the Acer remaining. Not a big deal, as it was the last machine I submitted my request for my free upgrade for. While I am entitled to a free upgrade to Windows 7 on the HP 2730p EliteBook, I wound up ordering a separate license for Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. When I registered for my free upgrade, HP could see that I had Windows Vista Business 32-bit installed, and so that is all they would send me. Despite the fact that my TabletPC actually came with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Vista Business 32-bit, and Vista Business 64-bit. Oh, well, not a big deal. I have Win7 Pro 64-bit installed and the 2730p is positively humming along now. It was the right call.
Most of the installs went down without a hitch. The only thing bugging me now is that on the Fujitsu U820, I have been unable to get the hardware buttons and keys on the laptop chassis to work. While some of the buttons are not important, I would like to have the functionality of the light, the display rotation button, and the scroll keys. These are buttons I actually use and I consider the Fuji as not giving me the full functionality that I want without them operable.
I had some time slated to get some gaming time in on the Gateway P-6860FX, which would have marked my first opportunity to observe gaming performance in a Windows 7 environment (since the official release). Unfortunately, my Playstation 3 crew threw a wrench in that plan, so it will be a little while longer before I can comment on my own perception of gaming in Windows 7.
My video interests this week have swung towards watching some of the video I have downloaded to my XBox 360 Elite from the XBox Live Video Marketplace. Specifically, I had time to catch two of the History Channel specials I had on the Elite's hard drive. I found both 10,000 BC and The True Story of Charlie Wilson's War entertaining and educational. Since my specialty in History was European Diplomatic History and post-World War II History, I missed a lot of the stuff on the ancient world, so seeing some of the theory's on North American development just after the ice age was interesting. I had already seen Charlie Wilson's War (the Hollywood movie), so tying it together with a presentation of the actual history behind it was poignant.
I am hoping that this will be the configuration of the 'WERKz for some time. I have done too many OS installs this year, and re-set the clock too many times on my own gear. Now I am just ready to put this stuff to use:
Main Tower - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, GeForce 8800GT, 4 GB RAM, 200 GB + 250GB HD, 23" Acer Primary LCD and 19" Viewsonic Secondary LCD, Blu-Ray Drive and DVD+/-RW - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Gateway P-6860FX now running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
MacBook Pro February 2008 Update, running Windows XP Service Pak 3 via Boot Camp
Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T (soon to be) running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit alongside current install of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope
HP 2730p EliteBook TabletPC running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Fujitsu U820 running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
Ok, that's it for now from the coffee shop. Hope all is well with you and yours. On the agenda for tonight: figure out how to create my new comic book in LINUX, record the November edition of the CAG Podcast with the crew, and then maybe some gaming in between?
- Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>
