The Adventures of a Digital Sensei
For many years Hip-hop has been held up as the boogie man, by both whites and blacks, as a major contributor to the ills in the African American community. When this has happened I often found myself wondering to what artists and music these detractors were listening.
Hip Hop is one of the few modern day art forms which can reach across cultural and racial lines to inform and inspire. When done correctly it can speak to our youth in a way that few individuals or other mediums can. It can brutally address societal issues and injustices all while forcing us to take a hard look at our own strengths and weaknesses. With that said, I Continue reading “It ain’t finished yet”
I am upgrading the standard hard drive in my 2007 17in MacBook Pro to a solid state drive (SSD). “Winona” has been showing her age in recently years and I wanted to spruce her up a little bit. And yes, I name my computer equipment (shout out to all of those Farscape fans out there).
The ram in “Winona” was already maxed out so the best bang for the buck upgrade in terms of price and performance was a solid state drive upgrade. Now that I have more leeway in my research and profession endeavors after receiving tenure, I am planning on doing more work with Apple related programs such as iBook Author, Adobe DPS, and xCode to develop interactive teaching applications for the students in the programs that I oversee. It will help to have a decent backup machine for basic tasks, and baring Apple Continue reading “New Year Technology project: 2007 MacBook Pro Upgrade”
The new Mac Mini I bought last Christmas is finally hooked up and added to the network. I waited because I wanted to use it in a shared dual monitor configuration with my custom built Windows system. I will be leveraging the quad core i7 Mac Mini with 16gb of ram more in the coming weeks. Because while I am more than capable of building and maintaining a Windows/Linux DIY desktop, I don’t want to spend time dealing with conflicting dll files, viruses, and system corruptions when I should be building something creative. So now I have been using the Mac Mini over the past few days and the only thought going through my mind is why in the hell did I wait so long to hook it up.
The Mac Mini can’t play games for crap because of the under powered graphics card, but everything else is great. The system is Continue reading “I shall call him…… Mini Me.”
I saw my girl off to the airport today as she heads to Norway for a few weeks to catch up with family and friends. We are gonna miss her. The upside, the kids and I are planning a series of wild parties. She said that she would be checking in to see if I can handle two weeks alone with the kids. Oh I can handle it. The DJ booth and the full bar should be installed by tomorrow afternoon, just in time for the weekend! Let the debauchery begin! I just have to make sure that the kids don’t starve–or worse: have a steady diet of pizza and McD’s burgers & fries! But that might be so bad. I heard that the tomatoes in Pizza counts as vegetables. The same goes for the lettuce on top of a Big Mac.
I am wondering if I can get something like this completely done to the house before she returns.
http://thechive.com/…/girl-drops-30k-converting-house…/
I spent the evening hanging out with my moms. We celebrated her birthday in grand style. We ate some White Castle (her idea and not mine), and then she put me to work hooking up her new cable boxes and DVR that the Time Warner installers screwed up. We had a nice time but I am gonna pay for that White Castle tomorrow.
I hate having to spend time troubleshooting system problems when I need to be working on projects. I have some type of system corruption on my PC desktop so now I have spend hours either repairing (which rarely works) or reinstalling the OS. I really hate windows right now. I have stayed away from Windows 8 precisely because of the problems with it. While it isn’t as bad as the infamous Windows Vista, it is still pretty bad. Thus when I built my newest desktop I decided to stay with Windows 7. But even Windows 7 is still Windows.
So I spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting a problem on my PC only to find out that there was a minor glitch in the system that caused a process to over consume memory. The process was spawned as the Windows 7 OS tried to generate thumbnail previews for the mp4 movie files in my library. I disabled the thumbnail process and replaced it with a third party freeware app to generate the previews and it fixed one of the major problems in about two minutes. My system is still only able to use half of the memory in the machine, but it is a start. Oh, did I mention that I am learning to hate Windows again.
The glitch had the system trying to generate the thumbnail previews until it got stuck in a loop. The loop caused the system to continue Continue reading “I got 99 problems and this glitch is one!”
I got the Obi Wan Kenobi lightsaber for Christmas to finish out my Ultimate FX saber collection. Hasbro makes a Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul. Qui-Gon Jinn, and a Obi Wan version. The problem is that I think my wife has stolen one of my sabers. I think she took it and sold it on eBay. I had two Darth Vader lightsabers and she is trying to tell me I only had one. I am a grown ass man. I know what I spend my money on!
Ever since I was a little kid Christmas has been my favorite holiday by far. All of my family members have known this for years. I guess when all is said and done, I just love getting presents, and this Christmas I got some pretty cool stuff. The hat shown in the above picture is from the official Indiana Jones collector series. I also got the Obi Wan Kenobi lightsaber to finish out my Star Wars Ultimate FX saber collection. I already had the Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn models but I was missing Obi Wan’s saber. The Obi Wan model finishes out my Ultimate FX saber collection for now. I am still hoping that they make a Mace Windu saber.
As for the rest of my presents, my Continue reading “I love Christmas!”
My wife is accustomed to celebrating the holiday on Christmas Eve as per some obscure Norwegian tradition. As a result, this has also become a family tradition for us over the past few years. Every Christmas Eve we head out to one of our favorite restaurants for dinner. We still celebrate on Christmas morning. We just try and make sure that she doesn’t miss being home too much.
