1st Post of the New Year

I think the first post of the year should be about gadgets. In the last couple of weeks, I have aquired the following…

1. Apple Watch – Custom made and delivered from China. Sweet. Most sweet. I love it when Apple goes the extra mile for developers and adds something to our hardware order. It has happened a couple of times to me. I ordered an iPod and received an engraved and enhanced version far and above what I originally ordered. The watch was much the same. I ordered a relatively simple model and what I got was immensely better.

2. XBox One S – This one is kind of funny because the only reason I wanted an XBox was for a game called Battlefront. It is a very detailed and intense Star Wars game with add ons for the latest movie…etc. At first, I wasn’t sure what the S stood for and quite frankly, I still don’t. As it turns out after Googling it, the S stands for “supports 4k video.” I only have a 1080P television to play this on. Hmmm….

3. That leads into aquisition#3. A 55″ 4k television which I had to purchase to support the XBox. What is the point of having an XBox that supports 4k if your television doesn’t? Right. The answer couldn’t have been more obvious. A new television was in order.

4. This one was a bit unexpected at least right now. I had planned on purchasing an Apple laptop to backup my main work machine at home. Up until now, the Mac Mini was fulfilling that role but a laptop would give me more freedom if I needed to work from someplace else. You never know. I could find myself in the middle of a beach on St. Thomas and be called upon to process orders. You just never know about these things. A colleauge just so happened to have an extra Apple MacBook Pro and offered to swap out my Mac Mini for the laptop. Gee, let me think. Ok, then!

I wasn’t expecting to get so many gadgets this year but life is short and we don’t know how many more tomorrows we’ll have. I hope everyone has a great gadget year.

…and NO FIRES! I am looking at you Samsung….

Final Thoughts About 2016

For me, 2016 was a mostly good year until the beginning of October. That is when my world fell apart. It wasn’t just my world that fell apart. My significant other’s world fell apart as well. It wasn’t something we needed and it completely ruined more than just a year. I wouldn’t say it ruined anyone’s life because we pick ourselves up and continue on as best we can. However, it affected people we both love and us more tragically. I love her with all of my heart and always will.

My life will never be the same and I’ll always be a half a person going forward. If you throw in all of the celebrity deaths this year, face it…2016 sucked ass.

I’m hoping that 2017 will bring a better year than the one we leave behind.

Happy New Year everyone!

 

Let The Vacation Begin…

Well, the busy holiday madness is over for me. Time to catch my breath and decide what I’m going to do going forward.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the big holes in posting that have occured for the last several years. As I’ve said on the podcast that I’ve started back up again…we’ve been busy and stuff.

I’m looking forward to the next year and hope that the dream that I have in my heart comes true and that real love and happiness are mine once again. Time will tell.

This blog has always been about me and what I like and will continue to be so.

I’m half the person I used to be and as I’ve said just a couple paragraphs earlier, I am hoping for the best.

I hope we all find the happiness we so richly deserve.

MacOS Sierra – Initial Impressions

I look forward to every June when Apple releases the next version of their various operating systems for developers to go through and test. It is a treat for geeks like me. I usually grab a new hard drive and make a backup copy of my current system. I install the new OS and my expectations are that something will break.

This year I'm happy to report that, for the most part, that did not happen. It is extremely unusual for a new OS to NOT break things. A whole lot of things. For me, my work access almost always fails. It usually has something to do with VPN, Java, etc.

That is not to say that bugs don't exist. I've spotted a few. I think Siri is buggy. Logging on to the forums will show you that beta testing causes it's fair share of grief across various configurations, however, my iMac 27″ 2011 is doing just fine. I am using an external cradle to run MacOS Sierra on an external 4TB hard drive. The cradle is connected using Thunderbolt 1.

I have encountered a weird window issue where pressing the minimize button doesn't really minimize. The window acts like it's getting ready to get smaller but it snaps right back in place and then cannot be closed until you quit the application. I'm not sure what is causing this particular issue. I've changed the preference from “scale” to “genie effect” for minimizing windows and so far, I haven't had a problem. It could be just the scale effect itself. Not sure.

So far, I think this beta version is more solid than those I've tested in the past.

Good job, Apple!