The LaValley’s Blog

Angie is now using the video camera tape her students speeches. She then comes home and uses my computer to “download” them to the PC and either “upload” to her class youtube account or convert to a WMV and give back on a USB card.

Personally, not my first choice sticking 15-20 different USB drives into my brand new PC every 3-4 days, But… it’s a true test to see how “robust” Norton Anti-Virus truly is in the long run.

Time will tell.

On a side note, my Blackberry storm is holding out pretty darn well. I’ve got google maps that acts like tom-tom (with directions). I’ve got an app that shows me the closest “insert yellowbook” query here. I’ve got an app (like the iPhone) that allows me to take a click with my camera and send to amazon and look for similar products…. that was really a cool feature my brother in law had with his phone.

AND I have an app that shows me known speed traps (that links with google maps) and buzzes whenever I get near them. I can either confirm or deny that there was a cop sitting in the “known” speed trap. It’s a real time “flashing your headlights” to other users of the app. So far been pretty accurate. It’s called Trapster (of trapster.com), take a look and see if they have the app for your blackberry or iphone.

That’s all for this week. Till next week…

Another summer comes and another “can’t wait to see movie” arrives and honestly… makes me wonder what the heck happened to make a director go “yep this is good idea” and then an editor to go “yeah, let’s leave that in there” and then a studio suit to go…. “no that’s not at all offensive or anything”….

I present to you:

The Transformer Ghetto bots

These two characters are like the Jar Jar binks of Transformers. Added after a great first movie to help “boost” audience attendence in other market areas.

FAIL in my opinion.

So on Friday… my trusty super duper PDA phone that I’ve had for about 18 months… decided it had had enough and died. Well actually, the screen had decided it had enough and decided the best way to demonstrate that was to crack in half.

Have a looksy: Samsung Bites the Dust

The good news is that I don’t need a phone for my job as no one is ever trying to reach me and thus I’ll never to reach anyone… *holds finger to ear* Wait a minute… I’m being told that a phone is a requirement of my job… and that I’m secondary on call in the coming week. Why am I always the last to get the memo. Or in this case, why was my phone the last to get the memo.

So I went over to the local verizon store and had a chat with the technical team. They said since the phone was over a year old, that it would cost me $53 dollars and that I’d have to wait until the new phone gets shipped to me from… I guess the moon cuz it would take 3-4 weeks. I basically just looked at the guy and asked “OR?” To my disbelief he asked…. “Or what?” So I basically go into a long diatribe about how it’s required that I have a means to contact any user at the hospital if I get paged and that I needed a cell phone. He said, well, that there wasn’t much he could do… then looked at our account (note to tech staff in sales… do this first) and noticed that my wife’s phone qualified for an upgrade and that I could get my phone to be replaced by using the upgrade to knock off the price of one of the phones they had on the floor.

Perfect, let’s go over there (1 hour later as the 3 people in front of me had all 3 sales staff telling them every possible detail about every phone in the store and then deciding, that the first phone they looked at was the best because “they really just wanted a simple phone to make phone calls.”) What, It was a small store and I overheard their conversation. So when it got to be my turn, the sales person had no chance. I knew exactly what phone I wanted, and that it would be better for him if he made the time with me short as humanly possible. I don’t know if this made him happy or if he was just in shock that I didn’t ask him to repeat his seminar on cell phones that he had just gone over like every other customer before me in the previous 5 hours of his shift. Needless to say 30 minutes later and a few dollars poorer…. I walked out with this:

This is not the actual phone.... but seriously... they all look the same.

All I can say is that I’m very happy. I’ve not got it completely broken in but in the past 24 hours I’ve been able to:
a) Get my Geisinger Mail synced through their BB server (which ironically made the mobile admin’s day that I didn’t have to bug him with 10k questions)
b) Get a Sirius radio app to stream to my phone
c) Use google maps
d) Install my facebook application
and finally
e) Be able to watch youtube videos… (seriously this is one thing that REALLY irked me about my last phone)

Just think what the next 24 hours will bring.

Ok… seriously that was alot of words to say … My phone broke… and I got a new one.

So this spring my daily activities have been….

1) Go to work,
2) Come home, check email on the PC… delete spam.
3) Play Xbox 360 and Play Halo 3.
4) Rinse / Repeat.

Mainly because, I had access to the TV and I like to play Halo 3. However, Angie completed her degree recently and I now found continuing the routine meant… wife being bored. So I have given up the TV (except 2 nights outta the week and exceptions) in an effort to make sure she can watch some of the stuff she likes too. (Yeah.. this is reality TV most of the time).

So I can’t really go back to my old gaming habit, Eve-Online because I swore never to play it again once I stopped. Well it’s been a year and I’ve not even thought about it, which is a good thing but I still need something to play to unwind after the day is done.

There are several options on the horizon, but for now I picked up a game called X3: Terran Conflict. And it’s pretty good. It’s space based and completely single player. No more creepy 13 year old kids and no more subscription fees.

It’s actually a 2 year old game, but it came out with a new 2.0 version box which is the one I picked up.  It’s pretty fun and worth checking out.  I do warn anyone looking at getting the game that the manual is absolute rubbish. It doesn’t explain anything in any detail. The video tutorials from the website… also rubbish. They are about as equally useless. It’s got a very high learning curve, but once you do the universe is ridiculously huge and worth every penny spent on it. I could play this well into this fall and just be finished with most of the content by then. Halo 3: ODST and Modern Warfare 2 will be out on the Xbox and I can continue to garner the TV when Angela should be doing grading. *hehe*

Game Link: http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3tc/info_en.php

So I added the top 3 news stories coming from the RSS feeds over at CNN.com. There are so many options. More to come…

Ok… so I’ve been struggling for about an hour getting the gallery to work. I’ll be continually trying to tinker, but dang that was harder than I thought. It’s not going to be an easy “drag and drop” it seems. I’ll be needing to reformat some pictures so they aren’t so immense on the server. hopefully i can get a shadow box to work. I’ve got a few more tweaks, but if you notice, lulu now adorns our gallery. If you don’t see Lulu… it means I’ve added more than my first image. I do like the “pop out” feature the site gives for pictures. It’s nice.

I added my xbox live gamer tag on the side bar. I’m not sure how long it will stay, but I feel that since I’m a gamer… it’s important I’ll be updating the site through out the day.

On the “to do” list is either get a working photogallery or a link to photobucket / flicker. I’m really impressed with the amount of stuff wordpress has going right now. It’s nice.