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!
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.
As you probable already figured out from the last post, I’m now 100% Mac. Also, for those not playing the home game, there was this from the weekend.
Since I didn’t have WiFi and I wasn’t able to get any work done, I did some writing.
It all started back in 2007 when I acquired my very first Macbook. It was the first generation with the Intel processor and I liked it. Alot. It’s been one of the most reliable PCs I’ve had and is still in active use today.
Jump ahead to 2009 when I got my iMac. 20″ to be exact. It’s been my workhorse, being used to generate countless websites, blog posts, photos and hours of video. As it stands, it’s about the 3rd most reliable PC I’ve ever owned and if it lasts another 2 years I will jump to the number 2 spot.
For the record, the PC I have ever owned was one I built myself. A PII700 running all Intel internals with Samsung drives and Windows 2000. Got about 5 solid years of use out of that before I upgraded to something a little speedier.
I title this post 100% Mac Shop because I have always had a copy of Windows running somewhere. Either in VM on the iMac or Macbook, or in the shape of a laptop or netbook. Friends, I am here today to let you know that is no longer the case.
Instead of getting a mobile device running Windows (and saving a bunch of money) I decided to go mobile on the Mac. And not a Macbook Pro either. A 13″ Macbook Air. Thin, light and limited on storage. A machine that I know will take advantage of dropbox and iCloud. A machine that I will use primarily for editing text (or coding WordPress themes). A machine that has enough space to offload photos and videos from week long events. And if I run out of space, there is always FTP or dropbox. A true portable machine.
I will be using this for light photo editing. I might even attempt video editing on it as well. For video, I’m going to almost bet that it will not be the greatest for encoding, so I will save that for the iMac.
Toss in my iPhone and there you have it! I’m all Mac. Only took me 5 years to get here too!
Oh boy is the internet pissed at Godaddy this week! Turns out they supported SOPA (which they later changed their mind about). That was reason enough for quite a few folks to start pulling their domains and move them to different registrars. I know I did, but not because they supported SOPA. More like, that’s the straw that broke the camels back.
I’m transferring domains away from GoDaddy as fast as my checkbook will allow. I only have 8 or so left with them, and I hope to have them transferred to Hover by the end of January. This is a process I started earlier this year after Bob Parsons came home from Africa after spending some quality time shooting elephants. But that’s only part of why I’m moving my domains.
Another part is their famously awful user interface. Or the fact that they are the worst WordPress host. Or the fact that when trying to check out when purchasing anything you have to click through 10 different pages offering upgrades, magazine subscriptions and ginsu knives. But, like the other reasons, this is just a part of why I’m transferring away.
If we take a second to look at the graphic at the top of this post. That is a screen shot from my Gmail account. Please note the date stamps on each line. If you want to know why I’m transferring away from GoDaddy, it’s because they are practicing email spammers and there is no way to make it stop that I can find.
Buy a domain? 2 emails. plus the weekly “buy more domains” email. Have a domain? 9 months before it expires they start sending reminder emails to renew. As the date draws closer, the frequency of the emails increases until you are getting 2 per day (per domain). Once the expiration date has passed, they continue to send emails at the rate of not less than 1 per day per domain. And there is no way to make them stop.
Worse part is when you don’t want a domain name any more. I let about 10 go this year that I will never do anything with (or my customers won’t be using). And the damn emails never stop. It’s truly rediculous.
So, if the emails won’t stop, if the UI won’t change and if the check-out process won’t stop pushing ultra high security email and faxing from my rotary phone, then I’m out.
And now you know The rest of the story.
Last weekend, the inaugural Arizona Balloon Classic took place at Wild Horse Pass in Chandler. Not really Wild Horse Pass, but a place called Rawhide. From their site:
>Witness more than 50 hot air balloons take flight both morning and night on November 18, 19 and 20 at Rawhide in Chandler, Arizona.* Don’t miss this unique visual spectacle during the perfect time of year.
50 is more than a bit of a stretch. The actual count on Sunday was closer to 12, and not a single one of them was there at sunrise. A fact I am supremely confident with since we were there at sunrise.
Once the balloons did show up, it was pretty amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, at least not up close and personal. Standing right next to each balloon as it was filled with hot air from propane torches that resembled rocket engines was awesome.
The main reason for us going was to snap some photos and video of the balloons, which I did using pretty much all of my gear.
That was shot with my Canon, which couldn’t be in the shot because it was busy taking the shot. Shots that can be seen in my Flickr stream.
And there is video. This video is comprised of video from my the The Flip Mino and Canon HF100. I was going to do some iPhone video in there, but decided against using a 3rd video camera because that’s just silly.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.
