sjamesho.v3

i love tech gadgets. if i have a potential of using up and coming technology, my eye will fixate on it until i either acquire it or another takes its place. i recently replaced my webcam which i may have used a handful of times. it actually still works on its own. but with the newer releases of current chat clients like Yahoo! Messenger and Trillian, the software no longer supports my aged webcam. so if you remember my post last month about how Some Technologies Die By Starvation, i guess some technologies die by no longer being supported by software. man, the whole computer industry is sneaky!

so here is my new Logitech QuickCam© Pro 5000 sitting on my monitor. there’s some pretty neat effects that the software does like the ability to replace your head with an avatar that mimics your facial expression or add crazy accents like mustaches and hats to your head while you video conference. but the thing i like most about the webcam is its face tracking ability. so if i move away it’ll find my face and zoom in or if i come a little close it’ll zoom out. it also compensates if i’m a little left or right of the frame and adjust accordingly.

if you want to vidchat sometime… or if you just want to see me while we IM, just give me a ping. because i can do it now. well… that is until the software no longer supports the hardware. grrr…

today i was working in Danville and after i got off work i had some time to kill before picking up Jessica at the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station. it was actually about three and a half hours to be exact. so before i left work, i found a place near the BART station that had free wireless access in case i needed to do important things like catching up on my blogging and all that good stuff. actually the place was on the other side of the freeway where there was a stores, a theater, and Best Buy. well, i didn’t intend to go to Best Buy but i know that time seems to go rather quickly when i’m in there. other stores that effect me this way are Fry’s Electronics, bookstores (Borders and Barnes and Noble), and stores with clothes (although i don’t frequent them as much as i do electronics and book stores). so an hour magically disappeared when i left Best Buy to seek out my wireless hotspot… Q-Cup! Continue reading

i love tech toys. if it weren’t for the limited supply of money, i think it would be very difficult for me to refrain from obtaining all the “cool” gadgets that are released. however limited resources definitely helps me become more sensible and critical as to how necessary an item is and how often i “upgrade” older toys for newer models. there are technologies that, even though they are old, still work and performs its function for the most part. take my 10 year old HP DeskJet 870Cxi for example. okay, it may not have the best color resolution compared with today’s color printers but for documents and printing internet directions or confirmations it does its job. the only other thing besides the color resolution that may show its age would be the paper catch. over the past couple of years its system of catching the paper and feeding it from the tray to the print head has been sketchy. most of the time it catches 2-3 sheets of paper at a time and every once and a while as it catches the paper it wouldn’t feed it properly thus jamming the paper into itself. to avoid this misfeed i would have to take out all the paper out of the tray except for the quantity that i intend to print… and even doing that it’ll do the opposite and not catch at all so i’d have to tap the papers so they’ll eventually catch. but aside from the catching-thing, the printing results were exceptable to my needs.

about two years ago Canon released a large format photo printer (i9900) that received a Kick Ass Award from Maximum PC and that definitely caught my eye. however in light of the inexpensive yet superior photo printers compared my HP 870Cxi, spending $499 to be able to print photo quality and at 13″x19″ if i so choose didn’t seem justified at the time. but knew that this would be the next printer for me, i was just waiting for the right circumstances to fully warrant the purchase.

well, a year later i was at Staples to pick up some ink cartridges for my HP 870Cxi because my backup supply and the one currently being used ran out. to my surprise Staples no longer carried the cartridges so i went to Best Buy and Office Max and learned that they too were no longer carrying the cartridge models for my printer. this forced me to search for them online which i was able to find a good deal at www.redtagtoner.com where they basically receive all the leftover stock that brick-and-mortar stores have when they decide to pull it from the shelves. as i placed my online order, i faintly heard taps being played for my HP. Continue reading

there’s nothing like something small that grows into massive, pulsating monstrosity that demonically cackles at you slamming insanity from your forehead to the back of your skull. you want it to stop but until you deconstruct what the small thing is to begin with, this incessant mockery of your deciphering skills will continue to plague your every thought and after-thoughts. of what vulgarities do i speak of? it is code. stylesheets to be exact.

i found this small “glitch” by accident. in fact i was assisting my cousin Shelley via IM to adjust her monitor to at least 1024×768 whereby she can view the larger layout i had recently implemented on this site. as i was doing so, i happened to be using a computer with that resolution setting and Internet Explorer since my favorite browser Firefox wasn’t installed. then i saw the dreaded flaw. apparently Internet Explorer processes stylesheets differently than Firefox or Safari for that matter. and its poo. yes, its poo. i’m not going to tell you what or where it is. but i can tell you is that the discrepancy is three measely pixels. THREE FREAKIN’ PIXELS! i will be the first to admit that i’m not web developer in the true sense of the title. i’m more of a web “manipulator” because i visually design the interface first and then massage the code to make it do just that.

for the past four hours in troubleshooting this absurdity, i’ve assessed what the problem is and have found some clean code as basis to refresh my existing stylesheet so that Internet Explorer can get a clue. you know if i wasn’t so particular about how my website is presented, i wouldn’t give two poos as to how IE renders stylesheets… because IE sucks and IE is lame and IE is all snooty because it thinks it doesn’t have to comply with W3C standards. what a punk!

recently i had to rebuild my computer due to an unexplained Windows XP issue. well, i would have liked to figure out what the deal was, but i just didn’t have the luxury of time to troubleshoot it. so the easiest thing was to do a clean install of the OS and begin all over again. situations like this are a reminder to me that sometimes you have to accept your limits of fixing things and start from scratch.