jonathanwatmough.com

For our wedding anniversary this year, we visited San Antonio.

Some pictures from the trip are online at Shutterfly.

I also made a nice picture of The Alamo at night, which can be seen here.

Buy a Print of The Alamo.

I’ve been catching up on some dental treatment recently.

Today I got the first part of an implant procedure and now have two large titanium posts embedded in my lower jaw.

Once these get sufficiently attached to my jaw bone, essentially grafted in, they will get two crowns built up on top of them. This should stop worse things happening in the rest of my jaw.

Next week is the first appointment for a bunch more general work that will catch up on some the other problems.

You can google for dental implants to see a lot of scary pictures. I glad my teeth aren’t that bad.

Well, my crazy plan to try and slim down a bit is working Friday 25th saw 182.5 pounds on the scale, which is reasonably impressive drop in the two weeks that I have been watching my calories.

Actually, I haven’t been watching very hard at all, just trying not to blatently overeat, and trying to avoid snacking on the evenings.

I was planning to be a bit more involved with this, but work has intervened, and I’m struggling for time, even on weekends.

I’ve decided, at the ripe old weight of 190 pounds, to try and lose a few, 15 or so, pounds. So my target weight is 175 pounds for now.

As of this morning I’m at 186 pounds.

My method is basically to try and consume less calories than my body requires, so I’m going to try and cut snacks out, and try and eat a bit less at meals.

I read somewhere that a pound of fat is pretty much equivalent to 3500 calories (kCal), so if I cut my calorie intake by 500 a day, I should lose about a pound a week. Basically, eat half a burrito rather than the whole thing, etc.

I’m planning on weighing in every Thursday or Friday morning. Here’s my first two data points.

01/03/2008 189 pounds
01/10/2008 186 pounds

Wish me luck!

Well I am posting this from Firefox on Ubuntu, and just great does it look! Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) is pretty much rock solid so far, and out of the box works great.

I have my nvidia graphics, sound, SATA, file sharing, WINE all working great, and am slowly working through getting a bunch of old documents out of Access 2.0 and Word 2.0 formats and in to PDF, which sadly takes a Mac and a copy of Office 2004, though OpenOffice made a valiant attempt. In fact I ended up printing the old Word Docs into PDF from Mac Office, straight into a SAMBA share, so I can now grab the unformatted text if I really need it.

Anyway, Ubuntu 7.04 will ship on selected Dell machines as of Thursday 24th May 2007, but you can download it and try it for free from the link above. Go try it! You’ll be impressed!

There’s been a good lull of about 3 months or so since Nathan at the Woodlands of Houston Apple Store replaced the hard drive in my Power Book G4, and I’ve started getting nervous about it having an ‘accident’ again.

It was only a bad sector, in a single song, but it was enough to jack up my preferred method of backing up, which is to use the disk utility software after booting off the OS Install disc. Generally this is a pretty good way to get a complete image of your drive, every few weeks or so.

Anyway, now that my wife Meredith has her own MacBook I figured it was time to start a proper backup regime. A search on Google revealed a piece of software called SuperDuper.

SuperDuper installed in the usual drag and drop fashion and I was up and running with a backup after about an hour or so. I prefer to do full backups to an external drive, and a 60 Gig HD in the MacBook allows you to partition an external 250 Gig WD drive into four parts, allowing a nice rotation of backups.

I use the same model of WD external hard drive with my PowerBook, but partitioned into only three separate drives.

All three iTunes machines in our house have now been updated to the new iTunes 7 with somewhat mixed results.

Summary

1. No installation problems
2. Slow performance until gapless playback scanning is complete
3. Coverflow makes iTunes much more album oriented
4. You can assign almost anything as artwork
5. iTunes 7 Mac still runs just great on a PowerPC G4 (Pentium III class)
6. iTunes 7 PC is a dog on Pentium 4 2 GigHz (Slow, skips when playing)

Installation

On my G4 Powerbook iTunes installed flawlessly and initially came straight up with no problems. After starting however, I kept seeing iTunes trying to scan my library to identify songs for gapless playback. During this scanning the machine was unresponsive, and because my 2437 song 23Gig music library is stored on a slow USB linked laptop drive, the process took a long time. Eventually, I gave up trying to use the machine and just left it to do its thing. Once this process completes, it should not bother you again.

Albums and Coverflow

The next issue was with my library. Because I have so many separate single songs, sessions etc., which end up grouped into one-song ‘albums’, the coverflow feature is rendered pointless. The remedy is to very carefully, go through the library and group songs where appropriate and assign artwork.

One of the most fun things with iTunes 7 is the coverflow feature. iTunes has a new view that shows a 3d sliding image of album covers which is utterly successful in recreating that feeling of flipping through a bunch of LPs looking for something cool to put on. The side effect of this is that since starting using iTunes 7, I’ve been listening to entire albums again. Of course, you better have a bunch of good albums!

Mac Good, PC Bad (iTunes)

Now to the bad news. On my wife’s Dell Pentium 4 PC, iTunes installed just fine, as on the Macs, but unlike the Macs, it just hasn’t settled down. It looks the same, but with any activity on the PC, or even clicking within the iTunes window, the song playing will start skipping and sometimes just won’t stop.

I tried increasing the buffer size, with no real positive effect. I also quit most of the other running processes such as skype, gotomypc, vnc etc., and no improvement.

Final Words

So in summary, I say there aren’t too many issue with the Mac version of iTunes, but you should give the upgrade very serious thought if you are running on a PC. We went from having iTunes 6 run flawlessly on the PC, to having the slow skippy iTunes 7.

Note that none of these criticisms apply to the Mac version which is still great, even on a G4 laptop.

My wife Meredith just came up with a great way to prevent problems with the power cable on her new MacBook. Here’s how:

This is really neat since it uses the clip that’s already on the cable. This should prevent much of the bending that can lead to fraying inside the cable.

Some girl called me on my cell a few minutes ago and really didn’t want to believe that I am Jonathan, and not some guy called Nick.

Anyway, I just got this message:

“Nick look I know it’s you. I just want you to know that I’m extremely sorry for drunk dialling you. Thats all. I don’t care if you think this is pathetic it’s just something I have to do. I’m wrong and I’m sorry. That is all I wanted to tell you.”

This post really needs “She’s Got Issues” by The Offspring playing I think ;-)

Flew back to Houston after a long hard week in Detroit working at one of our clients. I’m working an interesting schedule right now, consisting of about 11 hours a day at the client office, starting on a Monday, then working 2 - 4 hours in the hotel at nights on email and other duties. This is fairly hard work, but a little easier than programming work, since I’m really just supporting users in using the new software implementation. One benefit is that I’m hitting about 50+ hours in 4 days of work. So much for a 9/80, this is more like a 8/105.

9/80 refers to a schedule that requires 80 total hours (two weeks of 40 hours), but in 9 working days instead of 10, allowing regular people to take every second Friday off.

This kind of ’short hours’ might be ok in a big company, but at a consulting company, 50+ hour weeks are more the norm.

On the other hand, working long hours can keep you sharper and can encourage you to keep at it in slacker times. Sometimes I wish there were another 5 hours in the day. *Sigh*.