Technology – No Small Talk

When projects control your mind

I’ve been wanting to redesign my blog, and work on a number of web projects for a while… so I decided that this evening would be at least the start of some of those projects. I should’ve known it would take me past midnight… these kinds of things always do.

At least I’m happy with the new blog design, although I want to customize the header image, and make a few minor tweaks – overall I’m quite happy. Next on my list is a major project to centralize all of our photos both in the cloud and on our computers, that’ll be fun… not. I might actually start blogging some more once I feel like all of these projects are caught up on.

Major changes coming….

Okay so with our new Poland focused website pretty much up… I’ve fallen in love with using Word Press, and have decided to re-launch, re-brand, and re-focus food for fish… I’m kinda sad to see the name change… I might incorporate it somehow.. But I will converting this blog into my own personal blog, called “Living as a foreigner” for now, while I import, design, and tweak, you can see a test version here (right now, it’s absolutely nothing but the default install of Word Press).

And sometime in the not to distant future you’ll magically be transported to there when visiting this site… and hopefully the feed subscriptions as well.

Stay tuned….

Things are moving forward

So, we’ve gone ahead and purchased our own domain name now: reachpolska.info

You’ll notice (if you visit my blog) it now redirects to travis.reachpolska.info. I’ll be slowly updating everything to reflect this change, for now everything should be pretty transparent. Eventually we’ll have information on our missions on the main page of http://www.reachpolska.info/.

Stay tuned!

Windows Vista

I am a daily user of Windows Vista, both at home and at work. Yes it’s true, and I’m not ashamed. I have had very few problems, except for our home Media Center (due to me being a bit over zealous with some things and breaking the program guide and Media Center’s ability to download information for some reason, requiring a re-install, but I’m better off anyway because I did a clean install this time).

You see, I love using the newest stuff, even in beta. I’m a power user, and I just like new stuff. I’m also a purist, I use essentially just Microsoft Software (office 2007, IE7, etc) and google for all online stuff, of course theres a random program made by random, inc. I essentially remove anything I don’t use. I don’t download random things I don’t need simply because they may be “cool”. I have free virus protection that runs a scan each night, and that’s it, I hate virus scans that are “on” all the time. Most of all I practice safe internet browsing.

Guess what? Everything works, all my hardware and software. Granted it’s all new, but both of these computers had XP originally, and they both run perfectly well. Just a little blurb on Vista, because I think it deserves a good look by the “MS haters”.

I love it, of course I see past the visual elements, but at the same time, things under the hood make it quite cool. For example when I did a fresh install on my Media Center computer, at first my dual HD tuner didn’t quite work right (it detected only one tuner), after about five minutes a little pop-up said “Windows has found a solution to a problem” I clicked on it, and amazingly it realized that there was a new driver, it installed, and all is well. Anyway, I know this won’t convert anyone, but I just wanted to be on a soap box for a moment because I like it.

Now on facebook

Hello everyone,

I am now on facebook.com, so much better than MySpace, I never enjoyed being subjected to random pictures of human anatomy. I’m not abandoning this thing at all, in fact, I’m just enhancing this blogs presence by joining facebook. It is here, and here alone where I will write my thoughts, share our stories about Poland and missions, and continue to encourage others.

Our online presence is growing, we’re now on blogger, MySpace, Facebook, and You Tube… Our you tube profile doesn’t have much in it yet, but soon it will have our wedding video, a tour of our place here in Gresham, and when we return, tid bits from our upcoming trip.

So stand by….

It’s Friday!

I am so glad it’s Friday. Tonight I get to go to a Men’s conference, essentially my first, can’t wait. I just want to be out of here (work) and get my brain off of troubleshooting and diagnosing… nothing ever seems to get accomplished in this line of work. A few projects, but those are few and far between, it’s almost always “maintenance“.

Wish I had a secretary.

I know I can do the things that need to be done, but I just don’t want to do them, but I want them done. Things like writing support letters, printing them, stamping them, sending them, buying everything that needs to be done for them. Scheduling time with people to talk about missions. The list could go on and on, I had plenty of time to do it yesterday after work, but since it was after work I was fried and simply wanted to rest, and that I did, sort of, if you call investigating ATSC and QAM HDTV signals resting… Tonight is booked, date time with Alexis, but I feel under preasure to get this done!

Now this is exciting.

If this turns out to be as stable and feasible as they think it is, I would buy a car driven by this technology in a heart beat… assuming I could afford it. I’ve been eyeing the Toyota Prius for quite a while, however, it’s a bit out of our price range, so most likely we’ll end up with a traditional gasoline powered vehicle as our second car. The implications of this kind of technology is extraordinary.