Recently I have been using Skype for video conferencing A LOT. I have to say that the Mac version of Skype works pretty well. The video clarity is decent on full screen when neither person is doing anything on the internet. As expected when you are doing something on the internet the video becomes very pixelated and the audio will get choppy. With the Mac becoming more and more popular as a platform my only dissapointment is that the Mac version is lacking a lot of the features you will find in the windows version.

I hope that they will continue to develop the mac version to add new features and try to get things up to speed with the feature set that you can find in the windows version of Skype.

I have been using Citizens Bank for the last 3 years or so and I have had my fair share of problems with them. You will find in previous posts that I loved them because they were quick to stop fraud and while that is great they have some major drawbacks.

Over the last year I went into the negative (yes I know it’s wrong) and was forced to remain there because of the bank. I would go $200 into the negative and they would tack on another $300 in overdraft fee’s. They charge $38 per item that overdrafts your bank account. While this is in the terms of the agreement when the money is replaced the next day and your account is back in the positive they should wipe out some if not all of the charges. This week Unicel screwed me over because I had a $400 bill to pay, I told them I could pay $250 that day and post-date the remainder for the following Friday. They agreed to that but for some reason they pushed both payments through on the same day. This pulled me into the negative by about $150, then a few more payments did hit my account, the total amount was about $500 in the negative. After all of the bank’s fee’s I found myself $1200 in the negative.

This was on a Thursday and my direct deposit was going to hit the account on Friday. I contacted the bank to see if they would drop some of the fee’s. They told me that they were unable to do anything about the fee’s. While they are good at catching fraud before it actually hit’s your account, if you go into the negative they do everything they can to keep you there. There was one time where I was in and out of the negative for a few months last year. I ended up paying approx. $5,000 in charges last year alone. I am changing banks very soon but when you have multiple accounts and outstanding checks, payment it makes it tough.

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I was going through a course on Oreilly School last night and I wanted to poke around. I was logged into a class where I could see all of my lessons. I decided to view the source code for the frame and was astonished at what I found. They still have ALL of the SQL queries printing out into HTML comments. This is all fine and dandy while debugging but when a site goes into production these SHOULD NOT be there.

There are so many SQL statements I would not be surprised if I could have the entire database schema at my fingertips. I have written in to the instructor to have them notify the web team. They do not want to be left open to SQL injection attempts.

Today I noticed that MySpace has released a new uploader for pictures. I actually like it a lot better since you can upload muliple photo’s at one time rather than uploading them one by one. Now if only the messenger they have did not require Internet Explorer. It would be nice to be able to use that on the Mac either in Safari or FireFox. All I can do is hope that they release something soon

As you might know I have recently changed employers. I am now working for ERE Media and they are strong supporters of continuing education which I love. I just finished taking my first course over at Oreilly School and I must say that I am pleased with the course. The first course that I took was a “brush up” course in Linux administration (Linux/Unix 1: The Unix file system). I know the basics of Linux and this course actually did teach me some things.

At first I was a bit skeptical about the on-line courses that they offer. The main bonus was that it was not “led” by an instructor like most of the courses I have attended on-line. When I say that I mean you do not have to be there to attend the course at a set time during the day. You get to choose when you login and do the reading and assignments. The instructor(s) will login and grade your performance based on Objectives and Quizzes that they provide for you.

In this course there are 19 lessons which you can see in the course syllabus. I plan to take the other 3 system administration classes but first I am going to take the client side web development courses. What is cool about Oreilly School is that when you complete a set of courses such as the system administration courses you will get a certificate from the University of Illinois.

I think the best part of this entire setup that Oreilly School has is the fact that you do not have to sit down at a certain time to do the work, also there is NO time-limit on when you have to complete a course by. You could theoretically start a course and take 6 months or a year to complete it. There is one downfall to what they offer. You have to pay lab fee’s while taking the course. I think that this should be included in the cost of the course. They should not force you to tack that onto the cost of the course. The lab fee’s are pretty cheap at $9.95 per month, however if you take one of the system admin courses you have to pay another $9.95 per month because you get access to a root server. This is all automated so why should you have to pay the extra fee’s like this? The courses are cheap compared to others that you can find on the Internet but these will get you interacting with the Objectives and Quizzes.

The only thing I can think that the Oreilly School could do to improve this service is to add a 24 x 7 telephone support line so you don’t have to wait upwards of 1-8 hours from a response. If you contact them during normal business hours you tend to get a response faster, however if you email them after hours it will take some time. My guess is they only have 1-2 people working overnight to answer questions, etc.

Overall I rate this service an A and look forward to taking the other courses that are waiting for me.

You know if you wanted to travel from NYC to London you could do so in a plane and it would only take several hours. The jokers over at Google Maps have a different idea for you. Take a look at this map which is a map with directions from NYC to London. Be sure to look at #23 in the directions list. Could you imagine? This is too funny!

Here is another great joke that was passed my way.

Microsoft vs. GM

At a computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry
with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology
like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five
dollar cars that got 1000 mi/gal.”

General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement, “Yes,
but would you want your car to crash twice a day?”

And…

1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy
a new car.

2. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you
would just accept this, restart and drive on.

3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and
fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange
reason, you would accept this too.

4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you
bought “Car95″ or “CarNT”. But, then you would have to buy more seats.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,
five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five
percent of the roads.

6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to
their cars, which would make their cars run much slower.

7. The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a
single “general car default” warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would say, “Are you sure?” before going off.

Over the last week I have made some extra time for running, I have also taken the time to really dig into how the system works. It’s really simple actually. I have written a small program that will execute when I connect my Nano to my computer. The script will upload my nike+ data to my web server and then open iTunes to send the data off to nikeplus.com so that I can still take part in challenges on that site.

Having the ability to grab this data definately opens new doors. Hey I could start my own site that would track your data, show more graphs, even allow competitions on the site. I am doing this so that a small group of people and I can track our stats on my site without having to hammer on the nikeplus.com site because I am sure enough people start fetching the data from them and they will not be happy. If they wanted people to fetch the data from them they would have made the API easier to use than they have.

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If you have been keeping up with things when it comes to Apple products you might have expected this was coming. The new 8-core system takes advantage of 2 quad core Xeons which are named “Clovertown”. This is going to be a real monster of a machine. I currently have the quad-core 2.66 gHz Mac Pro with 4gb of ram and I am quite content.

As you can imagine the base price increases by about $1500 when you customize to the new 8-core system. The base price for a quad 2.66 is $2499, now if you jump that to the 2 quad core chips you are looking at a price tag of $3997 just for the base system. If you want to add more ram well the cost will increase.

I think that is still quite expensive and will wait several months to watch the price fall a little bit. It does make you wonder though if you can just throw a few Clovertown chips into a current Mac Pro which has the 2.66 dual cores. I know I have seen it done online but it brings up the question of whether or not there is different hardware in the 8-core system. Did Apple have to add or change anything to make it run 100% smooth with the quad core processors?

Over the last 8 years or so I have become very lazy. I never run anymore (used to at least periodically for leisure, or when being chased heh) but recently I have wanted to get back into shape. I do not know anyone here local that I could run with, and generally running is better with someone else so you can push each other. Running seemed like a lost hope for me as I was not motivated enough to go it alone.

Along comes Nike offering what they call Nike+ shoes and a kit that you can connect to your iPod Nano. Hmm what does this do I wondered. I started digging into Google and found that it tracks how many miles you have run, at the pace you are going how long it will take to run a mile. It has more stats and after each workout will tell you how many calories you have burned. I was a bit skeptical that the calories data would be accurate but from what I read it is quite accurate.

I received my sneakers, iPod kit, and an 8GB Nano which I got on eBay for ($122). There was minor damage to the iPod that I bought, there is a small indent in the case near the screen and 2 tiny cracks in the screen. I bought the iPod anyway thinking well I will probably just drop it while running anyway. I also checked on eBay to see what the replacement case and screen would cost. The screens are around $15 + shipping and the cases around $8. I am going to repair this nano myself as from what I have read it’s not that difficult.

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