One more thing

   I finally decided on a calendar for the postal workers I know from around the country. You all can find it at http://freecal.brownbearsw.com/SpecialBob .   If you’re going to be in Norman any time soon, add yourself to the calendar. Thanks! 

( I haven’t added it to the main webpage yet, but look for something on the main page soon. 🙂 )

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So much going on, so little time.

    I have no idea where all the time goes, except maybe driving in the car back and forth to work maybe, but it seems every day that 24 hours is less and less like 24 hours and more and more like 16 hours. In any case, I have been busy, just unable to update the blog.

       One thing I have been doing is loading up the laptop, especially the xp virtual machine I have loaded on it. I updated my kubuntu partition with the latest, and that seems to work ok, although at first my wireless card didn’t seem to work, when i sat down with enough time to troubleshoot it and get it working, it was working on boot. Go figure.

    On the XP partition I have loaded a ton of stuff, limiting my need to load stuff into Vista. I noticed with Juice, my podcast catching client, some of the folders that the podcasts are saved to are different than what they used to be. Not sure why, and thats something I need to fix, well, sorta. My batch file I wrote to move all the podcasts from their downloaded directories to a temporary directory for copying onto my toshiba gigabeat, has been screwed up by the change in directory names. Most of the directories are the same, but a few are different, and the changed ones contain a character like >> in them, which I’ll have to figure outhow to duplicate in Dos I guess…. we shall see.

      Weight Watchers was happy this week. At least I was happy going. Since last week I missed the meeting due to the season finale of a modified football season ( they won YAY! ), I was happy going back to see that according to their scale I lost 4 and 1/2 pounds. Pretty good because I’ve been on a plateau for about 5 weeks and this takes me down to where I haven’t been since I started losing. So at present I have lost 38.5 lbs.

      Saturday the idiot and I go to RIT to check out their campus… I’m sure I’ll definitely have something to blog about there…  I guess thats about it for now, nothing too exciting, which may explain my lack of blogging, but check back in the future as I plan on updating the website over the next few days. Adios Amigos

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I’m Back!

 It went ok and once again I refreshed my memory as to why it’s so important to backup backup backup.  In restoring my computer’s C drive to factory new condition I caused some of my programs, mainly my virtual machines, to be broken. So now after a few days of reloading stuff, I have my laptop back to almost optimum usability. I still have a few things to add, but my XP virtual machine is now big enough to do some serious heavy duty playing around in. Excellent!! 

    Since I’ve been working so much I haven’t had time to do much but reinstall necessary programs, so I haven’t much new to throw up here. The VirtualBox software I am running from innotek has been updated since I last used it, and it has a nice shutdown feature thats new, otherwise I haven’t noticed much. Anyways, I need to shower and get to bed but look soon for more neat and new stuff soon. Niters!

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Scary!!!!

  Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road? Because he had no guts.

    So it’s Halloween and the scariest thing I can think of doing is formatting my hard drive. So since I backed up most everything I can think of, I am about to insert the system restore disks for my beloved laptop and (hopefully) restore it to what it was the day I bought it. Here Goes —- Happy Halloween!

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What’s the deal with Blogs?

   Ok, first let me say that I am only a beginner in the world of blogging. Since I am learning, what I say here will be very basic. But since I am certain not everyone understands the power of blogs, and other RSS feeds, I wanted to share what little I know, at least as it pertains to my blog.

   Most every blog I have come across is available as an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. This just means that with the right program, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, and if the content on the website has been updated, the new content wil be automatically downloaded to your RSS reader program.  I believe all major browsers have RSS support built in. Before I started this posting, I went to the little button on the bottom left of my site labeled “Entries (RSS)” and clicked it. A pop up showed up that I needed to click a button to add the site as an RSS feed. Now I haven’t seen what happens now when this site gets updated, but somehow, Internet Explorer (7) is supposed to let me know it’s been updated and deliver the new content to me. Simple.

    Another way is to have a separate program for your RSS feeds. I have added to the portable apps page of the techy section a news reader called “Great News” and that can be downloaded from http://www.curiostudio.com/ .  I ran the install program and then, to add a feed I clicked on the “Add a News Feed link in the main window. You can also click “Feed” on the menu bar and click “Add”. It looks for feeds on whatever site your on and fills in what is needed. If it doesn’t, you can also copy the url the feed is on and put that in where it says “Feed URL(*)”. Then just click next and follow the directions. Feeds will be downloaded automatically. Works beautifully. If you need any help setting this up, just email me at bob@specialbob.com.

   In addition to Great News, I also downloaded and installed Notepad++ Portable, which is a great little portable text editor. The thing I like about it, is that when I use it for editing html web pages, text shows up black, html tags are red and links and other stuff is blue. It’s a great little text editor for HTML.

  As for the diet, I’m at a Plateau. Yuck. As for colleges, I’m still stressed. Yuck.  Since things have gotten “Yucky” in this entry, I guess I’ll call it a night. Niters!!

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RPI vs. SUNY Geneseo

   So we visited RPI on Friday and SUNY Geneseo on Saturday.  A Definite Night and Day Scenario, although not quite as drastic as MIT vs. SUNYIT.  Without a doubt, RPI is a definite ” I want to go to that school ” kind of school. The enthusiasm of the Dean of admissions as well as our tour guide, of whom I don’t know his exact title, was tremendous. And why not? The school can’t help but brag about it’s soon to be opened amphitheatre which when completed will be the 3rd most acoustically perfect building in the world.  And of course one of their latest research breakthroughs dealing with an ” invisible paint” that absorbs soooooo much light, as to make things appear “invisible?” And then there’s the sticky nano substance they have for gloves that brings up visions of students climbing their buildings like spider-man, if only in our minds right now, lets you believe that the reality is somewhere in the near future.  How about the worlds fastest supercomputer ona campus? Yes the list goes on, one reason after another, why this college stands out high above many. As for Geneseo? Well it has promise of a great education, and prestige among colleges across the country, which is pretty good for a State School. But after visiting MIT and RPI, makes you want to put it on the list of schools you will be willing to go to, if the best ones don’t take you. Or, for the money minded, an excellent school on a budget. But for my future, I would want to spare no expense. Many times I have heard wise men say that the best investment you can ever make is in yourself, and in the long run, I think the best bang for your buck is going to be a large private University, without a doubt. There is hope, because, unlike MIT, RPI accepts alot of transfers, and therefore, if not accepted as a freshman, I’d shoot to get in there my Sophomore and Junior years too.

    Now that I’ve got that out of me, I can say this. I think I’m more stressed out about the whole college acceptance thing than my son. This is probably a good thing. But only since I have gone to visit these colleges do I really really now understand the difference between going to the 2 year community college, the State College and the Private University.  Years ago I would have wanted the first couple years to be done in a community college, sparing the large expense of the more expensive schools. Not anymore. There’s too much to gain as a freshman in the big school, and so much to lose, if you take the cheap way out. I guess in the long run, once again, as in most aspects of life, you get what you pay for.  You can have the burger, I want the Lobster Tail!!!

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Where’s the Beef??

      Here’s the beef! Although at the time I am posting this blog, the items mentioned will not ( I repeat, NOT) be on my website, I assure you I am updating the HTML of my webpages as I write this entry. I will be unable to upload the new pages to the website because I am currently in a secret, high security, undisclosed location.  That being the case, I will upload undisclosed pages to undisclosed website at my earliest undisclosed convenience.  So now that I’m totally sick of that word, lets get to the meat of the additions.

     The first thing I did to the pages, was fix 2 major errors I left on them when I edited them a couple of nights ago. There’s probably more, however, I’ve only found the 2 as of right now. One on the techy tools page, and one on the new Semi-geek page.  It’s what I get for not doublechecking my work.

     The First addition I added was http://www.threatexpert.com/  which is a website that will scan a file you upload for various types of security threats ( virus, worms, malware, spyware, etc ) and report back to you on what it found. Good stuff if you have a suspicious file.

    Next I added http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,1-page,1/description.html to the portable apps page.  It has a great little utility there from HP for formatting a USB device, and directions how to add a few files to make it bootable. Thanks to HP and PCWorld.com for that.

   Next I added http://camtech2000.net/index.htm to the left side of the techy tools page, under “collections of tools”, and if you visit this page, you’ll see why. They have a ton of utilities and such for windows. I originally was going to add just “hidden utilities xp” program, but this site has Soooooo much more to offer. Check them out!

     OK, so now I have added a new page to the site, one I’ve been meaning to add for a while, which is a “How To” page. It may be  a while before you see it on the page, as I need to add some more content before it goes up, but if theres a how to item you are interested in related to computers, drop me a line and let me know.

       To the “Tech help online” section of “Online apps” I added  http://www.retrevo.com/ which seems to be just a fancy search engine, but it was recommended by a PC Magazine for getting all sorts of info about various consumer electronics goods.

      To the Techy Tools page I added a section for Rescue CD’s, and added http://ebcd.pcministry.com/ which is an Emergency Boot CD useful for all sorts of neat things.

     On the Shopping Page :  http://www.shop4tech.com/ . Need I describe it??

    Techy tools Hard drive utilities : http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287 . This website lists links to different diagnostic software and utilities from different manufacturer’s of hard drives. Good Stuff.

    On the Online Apps Page : http://www.openlibrary.org/  which has a few books you can read, right online. Also I added http://www.spock.com/ which is a People Search site.

    Last but not least, on the nottoogeek Page, I added http://www.maxthon.com which seems to be a small full-featured web browser that not too many people are using. I expect to be using it on my laptop soon.

       Well thats it for now.  I probably will be adding more stuff to the site before you know it, but I don’t expect to be listing everything I add all the time, so browse around the site. There’s some great stuff there, at www.specialbob.com .

                                                               Gnite!

           

    

   

  

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Neat Stuff

   Today I have been playing around with some programs and websites. I won’t bother going into the ones that didn’t work out, but lets just say that a program designed for Vista doesn’t necessarily work on my Vista machine… but the one I played with uninstalled in about 3 seconds. Ahhh life is good.

    First website link I added to my website tonight is www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm . A huge number of tweaks. Check out line 55 right side for being able to download 10 files at once instead of XP’s default of 3.

 Next I added a couple of sites for tech help. In Beta, and free while in beta, is http://www.supportspace.com/home/home.s2 which is Supportspace.com. I didn’t check it out much but it seems like it has potential. The Next one I added was http://www.techguy.org/ which is another tech support site, and comes highly recommended by the Computer America Show. 

  Another thing I added was http://wiki.djlizard.net/Dial-a-fix  which is a link to Dial-A-Fix, a little program that fixes a bunch of known windows problems. Good thing to try first thing on a pc giving you problems.

Just a note on something that didn’t work out for me. Tiddlywiki is a one page wiki that is merely an html file that you can easily edit. It uses javascript I guess and was recommended by a podcast I listen too, however I found it not very pleasing to the eye.  But give it a try and let me know what you think. You can find it at  http://www.tiddlywiki.com/  .  

     Now I must say good night for another day. Good night all.  

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Busted!!!

Ok, so I’ve been caught. Some how some way some one….found my blog. Yesterday I blogged about Crossloop and today, as I was about to blog a couple things, I find a comment to my blog. As it is merely a Thank You from the “Crossloop Team”, I probably shouldn’t make a big deal of it. But 3 things are important here.

  1:) I have currently been on Crossloop with another computer in the house for 2 hours and 20 minutes, running antivirus, antispyware, and registry cleaners.

  2:) The Crossloop team have the honor of having the very first comment to this blog.

  3:) I positively love this crossloop and I should be thanking them, not them thanking me.

  I do wonder how they found this blog too…hmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

  Last night I added Crossloop to the website under techy tools, as well as a few other remote access options. I also added a few other things, one of which I now use, and it worked great while cutting and pasting links and stuff for the webpage.  It’s called Clipboard Buddy, and it’s great for saving several items you’ve copied to the clipboard, and copying it into whatever you’re working on later. Check it out, so far I like it alot.

   I also added a new page to the Techy section of the webpage. It’s merely a “Semi-Geek” page, which I created as I realized some things just didn’t fit into the sections I already had. CoolMon is what I added to that page, and altho I haven’t tried it myself ( It’s for XP or 2000 ) I’ve heard great things about it. I plan on adding it to an xp machine I have in the near future.

  That’s about it for now. Tonight after dinner we had 5 deer come up near the house in the backyard and I got a few pictures, so I thought I would add my first pic to the blog ever. Yeah, it’s extremely blurry,  but I’m no photographer. Not much of a blogger either, but hey, I try.  Anyway, it’s time for bed for me. Goodnight and Have a Great Weekend.

 

Deer

 

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Night and Day

    OK, so based on everything I knew about MIT, I had no doubt comparing it to SUNYIT was going to be night and day. But I’m here to tell you, it was like Night and being on the surface of the sun. What a difference.

       SUNY IT’s quiet rural setting with like 600 students was like a long lost memory as we toured the huge urban campus of over 10,000 students on the mile long Cambridge side of the Charles River. In one word I have to say MIT was “Impressive”. Walking long corridors through historic buildings and seeing the immensity and uniqueness of all there was to see was almost overwhelming. In fact, it was overwhelming. I would describe it if I could, but I can’t so I’ll say it was like a 5 year old being in disneyland. Impressive. Yep. I would be proud if “the idiot” went there. But beyond that I’d be honored, astonished, dumbfounded and incredibly envious. The place is awesome and it’s prestige is icing on the cake. It’s also a long shot at any chance of getting in, but dreams do come true, and I’m rooting for this one to come true for “the idiot”. I’m not sure if he really understands the endless opportunities this institution has to offer, or the extremely special rank it has among tech schools, but I do know that after seeing SUNYIT and MIT one after the other, he wants to go to MIT much much more than he did before.  He’s no dummy, just ” the idiot “, and I wish I had had the brains he has, when I was his age. He’s already making much better choices than I did at his age, and I have no doubt he is going to be successful no matter what college he ends up at. But IF he happens to be among the very few selected to go to MIT… Impressive!

       I tried a new service tonight and it’s worth mentioning. If you have a friend or relative that needs computer help and try to help them over the phone, you know how tough it can be.  With this service provided free at www.crossloop.com , you just have them download the small program on the main page and run it, and you connect to them from your computer, easy as pie. Their desktop becomes your desktop and you can do whatever you want on their computer. Check it out. I see this being a big help in the future for me.

       Didn’t visit Weight Watchers this week, as I was on my way back from MIT when my weekly meeting was going on, however the scale at work said I ate too much. Enuff said.

            Haven’t updated the website lately, but I’m hoping to do a bit after I’m done posting this blog. Ya’all come back now, ya here?

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