Frustrated Geek - An ocomik.net 2.0 site

A little bit of game history was made today when I was able to add Portal to the small list of video games I've completed. What made the moment even more memorable is I believe this is the first time that I've completed a game without having to use the Internet to get through a portion of the game with which I was struggling.

As for Portal, it is one awesome game. Yeah, folks have been saying it for months but I'm not your typical gamer and most games just require too much time and dedication in order to complete them. So it's very rare when the general concensus on a game matches my own expectations.

Portal was able to do that and do it in spades.

The length was perfect. The gameplay innovative and challenging. The plot uniquely creative. From the opening introduction to the last song, "Still Alive", in the closing credits I was totally blown away. In a word, it rocked!

Posted by ocomik at 08:57 PM | Permalink

Marusin's NOT getting an iPhone and neither is yours truly.

From what I've seen of the device it's rather slick looking but that's the Apple way; however, it has some fairly large hurdles to contend with. The price point is too high (Yes I know it's three devices), the exclusive deal with AT&T (formerly Cingular and a poor excuse for a wireless provider), a service plan IS required to use even the iPod type features, no Windows compatability on launch, and the "dog ass" slowedness, in Marusin's words, of their data network.

If anyone knows how to do interfaces for devices, it's Apple, and that may just be the saving grace for this phone (assuming the phone acutally works like a phone), especially after a few firmware upgrades. For the past few years none of the smartphones have been able to live up the hype, let's hope Apple fairs better than the rest. If so, and that's a big IF, I may just take the plunge.

Posted by ocomik at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MSNBC article - link

A phone’s price, design and weight remain at the top of the list, with “camera capabilities ranking very high,” said Jerry Rocha, an analyst for Telephia, a research company that focuses on the mobile and telecommunications market.

Call me a Neanderthal but I'd just like for the damn thing to work like a *phone* then work on adding all of the other crap.

I am in the process of creating a script that I can take to the Cingulars and T-Mobiles of the world to test individual phones to see if they meet my needs based around the way I work before I buy another phone. As for when this script will be complete, the over/under is at twelve months with the smart money going to the over.

Posted by ocomik at 02:46 PM | Permalink

Just a little F.Y.I. that I'll be releasing a couple of my domains back to the aether. If by chance you get here via finack.net, or you point your news aggregator to that domain, you'll need to switch it over to the frustratedgeek.com domain to keep up with my insightful, witty, writing.

The other domain, which most folks don't really know about, is millecon.com. This was my first domain back when I launched Millennium Consulting pre-Y2K. About the best thing to come out of that endeavor was that I'll never forget how to spell M-I-L-L-E-N-N-I-U-M.

Posted by ocomik at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Since returning back from Poplar Bluff, where I became reacquainted with my extended family, and with some big family events on the horizon, I figured it would be a good time to give my weblog a much need facelift. One of the things I decided to add was a "moblog".

Yep! You heard it right... I was finally going to incorporate some 2003 technology into my web site. Problem is it looks like I missed the boat. All of the moblog projects I've looked at so far appear to have been abandoned around the same time frame. Other solutions like Flickr don't offer the versatility that I'm looking for.

Mind you I'm not looking for anything fancy. I just want to be able to post a single picture on my site of a certain size via a mobile device. Why does it have to be so fuck'n difficult (read: fuck'n time consuming)?

Right now I'm at the point where It looks like I'll be re-rolling someone else's code to make this thing a reality. The only real question now is whether the end result will be worth the time spent. As of this moment, the jury's still out - I'm going to bed and delve into some Gaiman. G'night.

Posted by ocomik at 08:52 PM | Permalink

[UPDATE] For some strange reason, Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News, has some old posts that are showing up as new. I didn't catch this originally, so when I caught the post of the Mother Jone's interview of John Perry Barlow, I jumped right in. In the "quick responses" section of the interview JPB is asked about the band Phish to which part of his response is "... I'm eager to hear them now that they're back together." "What!", I thought to myself - "Phish is back together."

But what did strike me was the timeliness of the interview. What JPB talked about during the interview was similar to our discussion back in August 2005 and just as relevant today. - Ed

One of the last official acts I did as the editor for TheMusicNeverStopped.net was to talk with John Perry Barlow. The tenth anniversary of Jerry Garcia's, lead guitarist for the band the Grateful Dead, passing was coming up and I wanted to get his thoughts on the subject as well as discuss a few other "music" and "digital rights" related topics.

Actually, my intention was to just schedule an interview with him at the time but when I called the phone number, I found that I was talking with him directly. This put me a little off guard but he was very accommodating and we spoke for about an hour.

I still remember when I told him the name of the web site I represented, he responded by saying, "I wrote that song." At that moment it seemed like things had come full circle.

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to broadcast the interview on the TMNS.net PodCast. I still remember much of our conversation and perhaps should relay it here as a post on this site - but that will have to wait for another time.

In the meantime, Here's an interview [via Scripting News] with John Perry Barlow done for Mother's Jones magazine in which he discusses the current state of information privacy, the apathetic nature of suburbanites as it relates to the erosion of civil liberties, both cyber and physical, file sharing, and other relevant thoughts.

Posted by ocomik at 08:08 AM | Permalink

I was going through my daily RSS feeds when I came across Marusin's post about Twitter.

What's Twitter? The folks from Twitter describe it as "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?"

The responses are of a quick and concise construction designed to convey ... Come to think of it, I don't know what it's designed to convey. The word "nothing" comes to mind.

It's social networking run amuck. Do I really give a shit that Damien Tanner just jumped "on the picadilly to the office" or that one of my web cohorts is eating dinner and watching a TV program? Not exactly!

I understand web logs. I understand social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook. I understand building data stores based on social interests in order to bring people of similar interests together.

I don't understand the social networking relevance of "Went to 7/11 and bought a slurppee."

Where's the disconnect?

Posted by ocomik at 11:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

[Ed] The backstory of this post still resides offline on my old site. It's my hope to bring over all of that content in the near future.

It's been one year since I put together the idea for my sendstuffhere domain. The idea was twofold. First, the domain name needed to be easy to remember; i.e. you could tell someone about it and they could remember it without having to write it down. Second, I was going to incorporate it into a process where receipt/management of spam was non-existant. As of this writing I've believe both objectives have been achieved.

Now when someone asks for my e-mail address, I merely just tell them what it is versus always having to spell it out as with my other domains.

Also my inbox has remained spam free, and I mean SPAM FREE, for over one year. Not one unsolicited commercial e-mail has reared it's ugly head. Now that's a good thing!

Posted by ocomik at 03:33 PM | Permalink

It's funny. Working with technology sometimes is like the old adage of teaching a pig to sing. No matter how hard you try, it's just not going to happen.

So was the case with a fairly new piece of software called MojoPac, which was supposed to take a standard USB 2.0 storage device and turn it into a 'portable' Windows desktop including housing the user's installed applications.

How'd I find out about it?

Religiously I listen to Security Now, a podcast hosted by Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (GRC.COM) on computer security, as a way to pass the time during my runs. Two weeks ago the guys featured MojoPac. Gibson unequivocally recommended that folks run out and download the application. He explained that although it had some quirks, his experience was positive and allowed him to run the applications he needed on any Windows XP workstation.

This got me to thinking how great it would be to have a handful of my most used network utilities available on any XP workstation AND in the form factor of a thumb drive. I felt my pulse quicken!

So being a good tech lemming, I ran out that evening and downloaded the software and began playing around with the base install. Nothing too impressive, a little slow, but I was able to comprehend Steve's excitement about the possibilities that existed with this application.

The next morning on the way to work I created a list in my head of the applications that I would install in my Mojo environment. PGP Desktop - check, Terminal Services - check, Solar Winds - check, and on and on. The list amounted to around ten tools that I use in the normal day of network engineering.

When I got to the office, I carved out a small portion of the day to begin installing my apps. In order to help with comparison, I calculated that the average time to install these applications on a local workstation would be no more than twenty minutes.

The first application I tried was PGP Desktop 9.x. As the installation proceeded, the install seemed to get slower and slower. It eventually completed and alerted me that a restart would be required. After I completed the restart, I attempted to launch PGP Desktop but it informed me that some files needed for initialization were not available. After stepping through the install two more times it became apparent that I was not going to be able to use PGP Desktop.

I thought to myself, No problem, I still had some other applications I could use.

Next in the queue was my Terminal Services client; however, MojoPac had other plans and reported an error right away. I noticed that it stated something regarding 16-bit so I attempted to install the Windows XP RDP 32-bit client. Once again I was stopped.

During the 32-bit install MojoPac reported that the application was already installed. After looking for it under "Start/All Programs", I was unable to find any instance of the application.

Oh well, I didn't really need to access RDP clients from foreign workstations anyway. But hey, I did need a browser and FireFox 2.0 was really proving to be an IE7 killer for me.

Oops! Doesn't like FireFox's install either. In the words of the Mojo Nazi, "No browser for you!"

Solar Winds. Yep it installed after around twenty-five minutes. It then decided to go MIA on the "All Programs" menu.

SecureCRT. Another three minute install turned into a ten minute affair. At that point I was so frustrated I didn't even bother to see if it would run. If it did, big shit! Like I was really breaking down the workstation paradigm by getting a portable desktop to run an SSH client.

Back in 2004 I took the Migo for a spin, a USB flash drive that touted a watered down version of a similar concept. During that time I never fully grokked the advantage of the portable desktop concept; however, Gibson's enthusiasm allowed me to gain a better understanding of how the portable desktop idea could be leveraged. Too bad it just couldn't be leveraged by my type of computing. And so the quest continues.

Posted by ocomik at 02:58 PM | Permalink

For some strange reason I have this strong desire to want to change my computing environment over to Windows Vista. Sure I know that it's not been officially released and that I'm running on release candidate code but the way it looks really makes me want to use the damn thing.

So over the last couple of days I've installed it, in dual boot mode of course, on my laptop and on my office PC. The only problem is, hardly any of the software that I install attempt to install will run. How frustrating!!!

I can only equate it to an ocean where only a limited number of vessels will actually sail. The rest never leave the pier or sink shortly thereafter.

Maybe many of my frustrations have been dealt with in RC2; however, since I've not been able to locate a copy, I'm going to guess that more than likely they haven't been fixed.

It's a little disappointing. Microsoft has taken many of the features that make the Mac user interface experience so cool and incorporated them into Vista. This first taste is enough to wet the appetite but at this point in the game there's really nothing much more to sustain it.

Posted by ocomik at 03:18 PM | Permalink

I wouldn't say this is my first look at Vista but maybe my first dance. Over the last few months I've installed the betas but never spent much time actually working in the OS. With RTM right around the corner, I figured I'd better get crack'n to determine how big of compatibility issues I'm going to have to face.

So far I've been using it for about four hours, installed three applications - one which doesn't want to work, looked at eight web sites, three of which are internal and only one of those rendering correctly in IE7 and connected to my wireless network.

I do know that RC2 is supposebly out in the wild; however, all of the links, at least the non-malicious looking ones, I followed kept taking me back to RC1.

If you're interested in a four hour verdict, I'd say it looks pretty.

I'm running it on my MPC TransPort U1000 ultraportable laptop.

[Ed Note: This entry was done in MovableType 3.2 running on Vista's RC1 IE7.]

Posted by ocomik at 01:35 PM | Permalink