I have decided to sell my Mac Pro Quad Core System (also listed here on craigslist), Below are the specs and the link to craigslist.  I am looking for someone local because I no longer have the boxes and shipping alone would cost you a fortune.  I am asking $3000 or best reasonable offer.

• 23" Apple Cinema Wide Screen Display
• Intel Xeon 2.66 Quad Core
• 256MB Nvidia 7300 GT
• 4GB memory (2gb chips)
• 8x Dual Layer Super Drive (CD/DVD +/- RW)
• Drive Bay 1: 250 GB SATA 2 Drive
• Drive Bay 2: 500 GB SATA 2 Western Digital Drive
• Drive Bay 3: 500 GB SATA 2 Western Digital Drive
• Drive Bay 4: EMPTY
• Bluetooth
• Airport (Wi-Fi)
• Apple Wireless Keyboard (bluetooth)
• Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse (bluetooth)
• Mac OS X 10.5 Retail (Leopard)
• AppleCare Extended Warranty on both display and Mac Pro System
• iSight External Camera (magnetic mount to display)

This system has been used for about 7-8 months. This system runs really fast and is just more than I really need. I WILL NOT ship this product as I do not have the boxes for the items anymore and the weight alone would kill you on shipping costs.

The ONLY Issue with the system is with the keyboard, it was knocked off my desk by my son and the battery cover on the back has 1 of the screw fasteners broken. The total cost for everything from Apple is 4800 (I did not include the keyboard, mouse or iSight in the Apple cost).

The base price for the quad core Mac Pro is $2499 (this is without all the extras) and the price of the display is $899

I do not mean to disrespect anyone’s religion here but when you buy a book from someone would you expect to flip open the cover to find reading material about something you did not pay for? I bought the book “Step Into Xcode” from a seller on Half.com and when I opened it I found a card which contained a $2 bill and went on about sins and using the lords name in vain. The way I am looking at it is that is is just another $2 off my book because I am not religious in any way shape or form.

The main question in my mind is how unethical it is to do something like this? I could see if I won it in a contest that was held by a church but on Half.com? Is it a big deal that this was included? I paid less for my book so I don’t care. Even if there was no money in the item I would have tossed it aside and went on to reading. Since when do they try to pay you to read about the lord and “try” to convert you.

I wonder if this guy is doing it for all of their customers. The person I bought it from is the-book-guy they do however have 100% feedback at Half.com.

Last week we were in the hospital in Syracuse and Kaytryn decided that she wanted to have pizza for dinner. One of the nurses had suggested a few places but it was Sunday and they were not open. Another one of the nurses said that Dorian’s Pizza was pretty good. When we called they were courteous taking out order. About an hour later we got a call that our food was there so I went down to the lobby and paid.

When I returned to the room and opened the pizza’s they looked really good. However after the first bite all we could taste was burned pizza. We looked at the bottom to find that both pizza’s were in-fact burned. Charmaine called the restaurant to complain about the food,. When she told them that the pizza’s were burned he got defensive and said that he himself just cooked the pizza’s and that they were not burned. They were just done… He was being really sarcastic with her on the phone and when she finally asked if there was anyone else there that she could speak with he said “would you like to talk to the driver?”. With all the sarcasm given to her on this conversation she hung up on the guy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I finally got my new pug. It has been 9 weeks of waiting and I am so happy. The only problem I have is coming up with a good name for her. This is so bad lol usually you have the name picked out before you receive the puppy. She is going to be so spoiled. We were at PetSmart yesterday and just had to buy her some cute clothes to take pictures with. I had no idea that they had so much for dogs, I actually saw boots for them to keep their feet clean and warm while they are out in the mud or snow.

I was actually really satisfied with the color she has and with how healthy she seems to be. She is getting along great with the other animals here. She just loves playing with our cocker spaniel babies. It’s funny the pups get together and tag-team the Persian kitties that the girls have. If you can think of any really good names please let me know through comments. I am going to come up with a really clever and cute name.

If you are in the market for a Pug in the near future, I highly suggest you contact Angela over at Trinity Kennels, she was really great to deal with and the quality of her pups is impressive.

So I have had some time to actually fiddle with my AppleTV. I have actually opened mine up and modified it so that I can play all sorts of media formats, it is no longer restricted to just iTunes content.

When I modified my AppleTV I did not know there was a way to do so without having to open the unit. If you are not upgrading the drive and just want to make it so that you can install plug-ins your best bet is to read up on the patch-stick method. The one thing I feel I NEED to say and cannot STRESS enough is that before you do anything you make recovery images of the EFI and Recovery partitions. If you fail to make backups and something goes wrong your only option to fix your drive will be to borrow a friends AppleTV and get the partition images. I can tell you how much of a pain that is. The reason I suggest you use the patch-stick method is because you will not have to open your unit. The patch-stick is a one time operation once the system is patched you will not need the usb drive anymore.

When I was modifying mine I moved SSHD to the wrong directory then went to delete it and did ‘rm -rf /usr/bin/’. Can you say Woops! I attempted to recover the files from the 1.1 update that Apple released but was unable to do that. Somehow during the process the EFI partition of my drive became corrupt. I was left with a perfectly fine AppleTV unit without a hard drive that would boot the system. I had to borrow a friends AppleTV and make the images necessary to fix mine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone. It has been quite a while since my last post and I wanted to let everyone know that things would be back to normal very soon. I have been in the midst of relocating to NY. I have also been very busy with work @ ERE. We have been doing a lot of pretty cool things with CodeIgniter and JQuery on the new ERE website that we are creating.

I have also been having to work with an attorney to fight for my fair share of time with my kids.  I am hoping that once things are squared away with the kids things will start to seem normal again.  I miss the kids so much and cannot wait to take them on the weekends.

Anyway I promise that things will be back to normal and there will be content posted on here on a regular basis.

Hey everyone, I am sorry it has been a while since my last post before today.  I have been going through a lot of stuff in life that I have needed to make a priority.  I am recently separated and have my own apartment.  On top of trying to get things squared away there I have also been trying to work with the Attorney and the Office of Child Support to nail down what my monthly support will be.  I am also working on getting a visitation schedule down on paper so that I can see the kids on a regular basis.

Things are slowly getting back on track and I will be posting on here more frequently than I have been.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few days I have been sick as a dog.  I have been congested, short of breath and even sick to my stomach.  I went to the doctors yesterday and they said that I have a sinus infection and a double ear infection.  I hope I get better soon it just sucks being sick.

Although I have been sick I have been pushing through it trying to get as much work done as I can.  I have been making some good progress with the Google Maps API and hope to start that article at some point so keep your eyes open.

I have been using this blog for everything from Mac to PHP to my everyday jokes etc. I am going to be starting up another blog that will be dedicated ONLY to PHP. This is where you will find all of my related PHP articles and code examples. I am also going to customize the site to have a question & answer section. Please do note that I am employed full time and run more than one site in my spare time along with having kids. Responses may not be very quick at first but I hope to get more PHP savvy people involved in the PHP site as well.

I am not looking to become the next large hit with the PHP site but I would like to be able to help more people learn and learn the right way.