Jtosh.com | the T is silent.

So I’ve been talking for some time about two projects that I’ve had in the pipes, really there are like 5 but 3 are way out there ideas right now.  Anyways, the most recently completed one is a new website for Robyn’s dad.  Greg Pierceall, check it out http://www.gregpierceall.com/, its my first foray into e-commerce time design, and I feel like it went pretty well.  I did some custom mods to the wp-ecommerce plugin, which is a pretty nifty plugin to begin with.  It will be becoming a personal website for Greg in the near future but for now its a site describing his pre-moving sale.  Check it out if your in the central Indiana area.  Atleast 100 items on sale.  Lots of really nice antiques and some beautiful furniture pieces.

Next up.  Coopertition.

So here is my sad story of event over the last few days.  But fear not friend, it has a happy ending.

Flashback several years,  I’m a computer geek, a nerd by many measure, I am OS agnostic, I am just a lover of tech, gadgets, bits and bytes.  One limiting factor, I have never had much money, and what I do have I’m bad at saving.  Long story short, the best computer I own is a broken laptop that has no hinges on the screen so you have to prop it up.  Its probably a 800mhz or so.  After that is my desktop  that weighs in at 600mhz, and it just gets worse and worse from there.  Now dont get my wrong, I have plenty of nice gadgets and tech (Read: Cellphone, Wii, Tivo, etc) but my computers have always been a pathetic fact for me.  However Robyn has had an ibook G4 for about 4 years now, and it over time became the defacto computer of the house because the others were just somewhat painful to use.  Being a 4 year old laptop, it was getting a little long in the tooth and low in the battery.

This is were our story begins.  I arrived home from my moms house on Sunday, happy with the new domain name I’ve registered.  I was ready to start plunking away on the keys to set some stuff up for it, went to turn the screen saver off on the keyboard, and I realized there was a clicking sound coming form inside the case.  Utoh!  I rebooted, fingers crossed hoping for the best.  Natah, just a blinking logo of the mac system folder not being found.  It was sad it was like the little laptop was crying out to me trying to get me to rescue it.  Nothing I can really do, I may buy a external firewire case for the HDD and see what I can recover.  The bad news is, the only external backups I had were about 2 months old from when I upgraded to osx 10.1.  Even worse.  These are backups on CD’s because the ibook didn’t have anything but a CD burner.  EEK!  And worse, All I backed up was iPhoto and the documents folder, because lets face it, backing stuff up on CD’s sucks.

So now is where the happy ending starts.  Robyn being the girl of perpetual impatience and instant gratification, already planning on upgrading to a new computer in the next year, went out and bought a new mac mini and a nice 19″ samsung LCD to replace our retired iBook.  SAWEET!  I was actually quiet proud of her, as she usually recruits me to help her with purchases like this.

So now how do I recover as much of that HDD as I can without physical access to it and no backups?  It struck me on the way home from work yesterday,  we both have iPods, mine being a small 4gb 3rd gen nano, but robyns is a 30gb ipod video!  Eureka!  There was all the music trapped in that brick.  All our videos, but unfortunately none of the photos.  So now I started the task of recovering all my music off of her iPod.  First stop was iPod Disk which crashed and didn’t want to cooperate with this computer of the ipod.  Next up was expod, a down and dirty little app that allows you to export stuff off your ipod in disk mode.  It works but its not the easiest app to use.  It freaks out when you have duplicate files, which makes transferring all 5,000 or so songs over at once a nightmare because it hangs up every few songs and you have to start over wherever it left off.  So I managed to make it most of the way through the library with that.  Imported it back into Itunes.  And 4 hours later I had my music back, well almost.  Some was still on the Ipod, not cooperating coming off.  Thats when I found Senuti, through the simple but great site Open Source Mac, which by the way is usually my first stop when I get my hands on a shiny new mac and need to get it all stuffed up with apps.  Anyways, Senuti is great, I used it to pull off all the videos, tv shows, podcasts, and other random stuff left on the big iPod and this afternoon I’m going to try and recover what I can off the nano.

So the next project isn’t bad, just tedious.  I have 8 cd’s of photos to restore onto this hard drive.  And Iphoto isn’t the best at this.  It has to first load thumbnails of all the pictures, then import them.  Lame.    Its taking forever.

So yet another project for the air conditioned months.  Restore what I can off the old ibook hard drive, and install my own replacement hard drive and maybe upgrade the battery.  Hell if nothing else, I’ll turn it into a photo frame!

Ah, Its Wednesday, The Indiana Primary is over, I thought I would take a minute to post my thoughts about the whole shindig.

I’ve lived in Indiana (or Michiana) my entire life.  In my twenty three and a half years I’ve never seen the state as abuzz about a primary or even a national election as it was yesterday and for the last few weeks.  Constant TV commercials, people knocking on my door every other day, unsolicited mailings, even old fashion loud speaker vans driving around neighborhoods on
the eve of the election, blaring political messages.  Its really quiet a site to see.  This sleepy little state, often forgotten except during basketball and race season on national news.  News trucks set up camp around downtown Indianapolis yesterday and Hillary set up a HQ at the Murat Theater just North of downtown.

On a side note, I think the last time I was in the Murat was about 6 or 7 years ago to see System Of A Down.  Then to watch Hillary take the same stage were SOAD sang about “Fucking The System” and “Beyond the staples center you can see America - with it’s tired poor avenging disgrace - peaceful loving youth against the brutality - of plastic existence” was a bit strange.

Back to the subject at hand.  Indiana has not had a race like this one since 1978 or 1962 depending on which party you are talking about.  We haven’t seen activism like this in this state in years.  We haven’t seen Democratic voter turn out in traditional Republican counties like this in years.  We haven’t seen attention like this in years.  Will it continue?  I already know the campaign offices are closing down or packed up yesterday.  The satellite trucks are all packed up and moving onto the next state.  The  local news has switched off their 24 hour election coverage feeds.  But will any of this excitement carry on past last night?  Will people still feel this passionately when their vote might not be quiet as loud on a national level?  Will they still feel their civic duty to stand up and try and change something or do something for the betterment of mankind?  Will they still fight for their convictions?  Or will we go back to our sleepy state.  Mow our grass, watch some little league baseball, complain about the smell of cow manure as we drive through the country, and go back to being a shoe in Republican state year after year.  I hope not.  I hope people realize even though we don’t always get as much attention, our vote counts just as much, or rather should count just as much, but I dont want to get on the issue of the electoral college today.  Stand up, do something you believe in, vote, empower yourself.  Apathy will be the death of our society.

So this weekend I picked up a laptop from Robyn’s Dad, which is in exchange for a website I am building him. Its an older Sony Vaio PCG 505fx. I got the laptop which is really quiet a nice little machine, although a pretty outdated piece of hardware its just so awesomely tiny and lightweight. Its probably under 2lbs and is compact although its still functional. Its kind of like the MacBook Air in the fact they took out the floppy and disk drives, and all the extra ports to save space and weight, although even this old dog has a firewire port!

The specs are pretty minimal: 32mb of PC100 RAM, Intel Pentium 266mhz with MMX, ~4gb HDD, PCMIA PC card slot, 1 usb port, one I.link port, IR port, port replicator add-on with VGA, Serial, LPT, and serial/mouse PS/2 ports, removable speakers, external CD-ROM and FDD.

Its currently running Windows98 (not even SE!) with plus installed OEM. This laptop hasn’t really ever been used for much so there isn’t anything else on the HD. So I decided to try and turn it into a more functional piece of equipment then a win98 paperweight and see if I couldn’t install linux on it. I began the process of selecting a distro, which to me is one of the most complicated parts of linux that really holds it back. All the different flavors and branches that just confuse newbies. In the past I’ve just picked one and ran with it, because honestly I dont know the difference and everyone has their own opinion. I found some good articles with google and checked out distrowatch, and came up with three leading canidates. Deli Linux, SaxenOS, and PClinuxOS, mostly for their advertised ability to work with older slower hardware and smaller distro size. I’m also going to give Vector Linux a try, as I’ve gotten that running on older desktop hardware in the past, although I dont know if the lapto is going to have enough ram to handle Vector.

In the past I’ve only dabbled my fingers in the world of open source software. I know enough commands to get around and make myself a little dangerous, but I figure I will give it another try, if nothing else I’ll make a super small lightweight laptop that I can surf the web with or use at a coffee shop.

Next tasks include:

• Installing all 4 distro’s, trying them out, picking a winner and getting it going
• Dealing with the weirdness of any proprietary Sony hardware I may encounter once I get going
• Finding/Configuring a Wifi and ethernet adapter for the laptop
• Making it look good
• posting more info about this project as I come up with it.

So the idea is I am going to post all of my findings, headaches, and triumphs on here as a multi-part series so that maybe someone else can maybe learn from my mistakes and experiences.

And now its off to bed. As of late with the new job and my increased amount of exercise I find myself actually able to stay up later. I haven’t felt like I could stay up past 11 on a normal night at home in a long time, however I actually feel more metally sharp lately, even if my body has been more physically exhausted. However at a point the physical will triumph the mental and your pass out. ergo, where I am headed now.

Ohh, I’m also trying to stay up and see if Andrew ever puts his account back up on Ebay, I’m very excited to watch people get their panties in a bunch again. If nothing else it raises alot of questions about the value of your friends and online contacts, electronic identity, ownership of social data and online connections, and trust.

I had a personal first on twitter last night.  The following is a series of tweets back and forth between @andrewbaron and myself last night

andrewbaron What are the top 2 most difficult things about having a kid?

jtoshua realizing your mortal but having to be there for someone else no matter what and realizing how much an impact you can have on another person

andrewbaron That 2nd one freaks me out. I think I would be good, but it just seems so dangerous! Im worried I would question the purpose of life 2 much.

jtoshua In a lot of ways it has been easier then I expected. I’ve learned so much from him, its cliche but he’s taught me so much aobut myself.

jtoshua wow, cramming that into 140 words was quiet an experience.

That last line sums up the whole conversation, although chronologically it came early in the exchange. The internet is a powerful tool, allowing communication between people who would most likely not have met or even have the opportunity to meet without it.  Twitter is a unique form of communication, limiting us to 140 characters per message, yet even with that limit it is still possible to have meaningful conversation beyond telling people about what your having for dinner, or that someone just cut you off in traffic.  I’m sold, I believe in twitter now, and beyond that my love of the internet has been reinvigorated. Last night I felt something close to the excitement I can remember the first time I logged onto Compuserve or when I got my first email message, or when I set up my first website and realized someone else was looking at it, and I didn’t even know them.  I could go on and on about community, and humanity, and all that jazz, but I feel like its not even necessary.  Read into this what you will, but I felt the need to share the connection Andrew and I had with everyone else, somehow it seems important to me, and maybe it will to someone else as well.