It’s been pretty busy around here lately! I’ve been Mr. All-Go-No-Quit. Today we changed that, if only for a few hours.
Like I mentioned above, it’s been busy. I was in California, then a weekend of nerd stuff capped by a grilled cheese throw-down (yes, it was as awesome as it sounds) and just non stop work. Even this weekend I had mad chores to do, but they did result in a very clean garage.
We decided an adventure was in order. We tossed around a few ideas and decided to do something that I haven’t done but was still relatively close to home. We made a trip out to Queen Creek Olive Mill for lunch and to see what’s what.
Turns out this is a pretty awesome place! First of all, they produce all of the olive oils sold in the store and used in the restaurant. Straight oil, infused oil, specialty oil. Not only that, but as you can imagine, they also do more than a few things with olives including pickled and stuff with things you would have never thought about before.
Besides the store and cafe, they also have a huge picnic area! Today it was populated by people enjoying a local wine and having their lunch. Or just sitting out and enjoying another beautiful Arizona winter day. I also found out they are working toward using the space for hosting weddings in the very near future, and it’s a perfect fit for that.
The only item we brought home was a 4 pack of cupcakes (made with thier infused olive oils, of course) and a few photos. Oh, and Stella made me fetch a letterbox prize for her since it was buried under some scary rocks.
Pretty great way to end a pretty good weekend. Enjoy the photos below and if you ever need something to do on a Sunday in Arizona, a trip out to Queen Creek might be just what you need!
WordPress. Open source and free. I use it everyday. I make money from it almost weekly. It’s a giant part of what I do.
Since it is open source, anyone that uses it should feel compelled to somehow give something back to the WordPress community. Many people think that you need to spend time squashing bugs in the core code, or developing sweet plugins and themes. Sure, those all work, but I’m not really good at either of those things.
What am I good at? Training, implementing and thinking so far out of the box you can barely see the box. That’s what I do to give back and part of the reason why I volunteer at my local Wordcamp in the Rockstar Bar. That’s just a fancy term to say that if you have a question about WordPress or a problem with your WordPress or you are looking to have a discussion about WordPress, this is the place with nerds that are available to help you out. And this year I did.
Overall, it was a pretty great day of WordPress and I’m glad I was able to take the time to participate. As an added bonus, because I showed up, I received a free-for-life account at WP Engine, a premium, WordPress-only, web host. Expect a full review of that in the coming weeks.
If you have to use WordPress, are curious about WordPress or looking for a place to meet other WordPress users to swap stories and tips, I highly recommend hitting up a Wordcamp near you.
I was in need of a power accessory for my car. Sure I could have gone anywhere, but to save me driving all over town, I decided to hit up my local Radio Shack store. They had the parts that I needed, a power adapter splitter and a USB power adapter, which I took up to the counter after ‘the manager’ helped me find them. He rang me up and asked for my phone number, which has been common practice at Radio Shack stores for a few years now.
Number given, somehow my customer information had mysteriously vanished from their system. Odd since I’ve been in that system for as long as I can remember. He asks for my name, again, my phone number, again, and my home address. I give him all of this, but then he asks for my email address. To which I say no.
Instantly he goes on the defensive.
I say no.
He continues his offensive.
I continue to say no.
He continues his offensive even more.
I interrupt him, rudely, and tell him in my dad voice No.
Which makes him almost cry. So, against my better judgement, I let him continue with his bullshit reason for needing my email address. He swore to me, crossed his heart and hoped to die to me, that he left the ‘checkbox’ unchecked that should keep me off the ‘please send me Radio Shack Spam’ list.
He lied. Not even 24 hours after I made my purchase did I get my first ‘welcome to the club’ email from Radio Shack. I was not happy, as you can imagine. Do I decided to let them know about it via the very well hidden email form. And this blog post. And the above Twitter post.
Remember gang, no means no.
Do what you can to avoid Radio Shack at all costs. They are rude. They are unprofessional. They aren’t terribly knowledgeable about anything on their shelves beyond what’s written on the packaging and I’m pretty sure that when their employees aren’t on the phone with their friends while on duty, that they are in the back doing unspeakable things to kittens and old people.
Well, maybe not that last part. But don’t shop with them. Really. But if you do, give them an enemy’s email address. Trust me on that, you’ll be glad you did.
When we last spoke, I had done the math and research into cutting cable television service, the cord, at home. This weekend, I took another step in that direction with a few additions to the entertainment center. We are currently planning on 100% disconnect after the Oscars.
Needing a way to get live television into our home, I added an antenna. Nothing fancy, just an amplified indoor HD antenna from GE that I picked up at Target for $25. Luckily, here in the greater Phoenix area, over the air service, from what I have heard, is pretty great. Those stories were all correct. There are about 40 channels that I’m able to pick up, all with varying quality, over the air. For sure I get the 3 major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), all in full HD with great sound. Picture quality as good as it was with FiOS. We are also able to pickup our local Fox affliate in ok quality and 3 PBS channels. Add to that about a dozen different hispanic channels and a very low power music video channel, and we are looking pretty good.
Wanting a way to watch shows that we miss live or aren’t available legally otherwise, I am temporarily repurposing a first gen Macbook into the entertainment center. It’s not ideal since it needs a keyboard attached to work with the lid closed, but for now, it’s a good start. I’ve bookmarked about a dozen sites for viewing television content, internet videos and photographs. I’m also going to turn this into the plex server which I hope will improve performance.
Since this is an older Macbook, video performance isn’t as good as I would like, but it does drive the 44″ LCD TV without any issues at 1280×768 (75mHZ) through the display port into the television’s VGA port. Audio will come from the headphone jack into the receiver via a Monster cable made specifically for that job. That cable was acquired back when I was still rocking an XBox in California.
Here is our current setup that we are using to make the leap into cord-cutting.
Next step is storage. While we don’t lack for storage, we do lack for organized storage. In total, we have almost 6TB in external storage available, but it’s scattered over 8 drives attached to 2 iMac’s. I’m going to put 2TB of that into a Network Attached Storage device that I have been testing and like quite a bit.
Overall, we are looking at saving more than $100 per month by doing this and are very excited to get started!
Something Stella and I have been talking about for a long time is cutting out cable TV. It’s expensive, and honestly, we don’t need it. With technology and some clever, here is how we are going about getting rid of the TV portion of our cable bill.
Of course, all of this is made possible by the Roku box that quietly lives in our entertainment center. While it’s not as slick or matching-with-the-rest-of-our-Apple-gear as an Apple TV, it’s not horrible looking, fits nicely in the rack and has a good feature set. It has HDMI out as you would expect. It also has digital audio, which comes in handy for the audio channels available (like SOMAFM, Pandora and others).
While I would love to have an AppleTV, the cost of media through the iTunes store makes it less than attractive. To be able to use it as iTunes for the entertainment system isn’t that attractive either since we have a Roku Soundbridge that will play damned near anything we want.
Ideally, I would like to add a new Mac Mini to this system with a Thunderbolt drive attached. That would give access to the web as normal like YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and everything else we use, plus iTunes and Hulu for those shows that are still web only. With Boxee or Plex installed, a Mini would be pretty rad. It’s a pretty low priority item, so the spend can’t be justified at this time, but hopefully one day soon.
Step 1 will be adding an external antenna to see what kind of over-the-air performance we actually get. Luckily they are cheap no matter where you go. Stay tuned as I will be documenting the entire process.
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