I was greeted this morning by a guy here at work that I really enjoy talking to. His personality reminds me of my brother minus some of the antics.

We started chatting about how my application testing was going and I mentioned that I was getting ready to turn it over to a co-worker as I prepare to leave and he said “Maybe it could be a source of income while at school”… I do not know exactly what that means but if he’s wanting me to do this while I’m at school and pay me for it then I am fine with that.

I am going to try and talk to him some more before the day is over and see what he really meant. I would be willing to work on more of this application testing stuff. I have learned a lot about how the software works and how to apply it in certain situations and I now have intricate knowledge in how the application I am testing works so I know when some things are supposed to break (controlled) and when they just flat out fail.

It is an interesting proposition and if given the chance I’d probably continue to do it.

Americans may just be the most volatile people on Earth. The littlest things set us off. After a few weeks of driving in severe traffic I have learned to deal with it. Sadly, there are a lot of Houstonians who feel that their commute to work should be instantaneous and without incident.

This morning driving to work there was an accident on the outbound side of U.S. 59 that had that entire side of the freeway shutdown and traffic slowed on the inbound side. The wreck was one of the worst I have seen in a long time and two LifeFlight helicopters were on the scene. Yet people were honking at each other, trying to change lanes, and get going as fast as they could. They would then get angry, throwing up middle fingers, when the lane they moved to did not go as fast as they wanted it to.

I really wish people would just slow down and realize how small something like traffic is compared to other problems that life presents, like being in a possibly fatal accident. Everything is a race. The world does not move fast enough for people and it is obvious when you are in store and people get mad at a checkout girl because the price will not scan correctly. Someone speaks up and says something rude and sarcastic and the girls shrugs it off.

Maybe it is an issue of respect or lack thereof. My mom was in Starbuck’s and a woman brought a dog in. This was not a seeing eye dog, it was a little mutt that this woman just couldn’t leave outside for 2 minutes while she got her coffee. My mother made a comment to a Starbuck’s employee stating that she was allergic to dogs (she’s not but it was better than saying “The dog needs to leave”) and another woman spoke up stating that she was allergic as well. The employee asked the woman with the dog to take the dog outside, saying that customers were allergic. This woman looked over to my mom and had the nerve to respond with (and I quote) “Well, she’s just a b*tch!”. Excuse me? I told my mom that had I been there things probably would have gone down a little differently as I have no problem getting up and telling that woman to her face that she has no right to speak that way to my mother or any other customer. It is a respect issue. Take your dog outside, how hard is that? It is a health code issue, end of story. We just have a lack of respect for the people around us and it effects our everyday lives.

Just try and show some love or respect and see what kind of difference it makes. Let someone into your lane on the freeway, let someone cross infront of your car in a parking lot, or just say “good morning” to someone.

Does anyone else have problems with their iPod’s clickwheel sometimes not doing what it is supposed to do? Mine seems to work intermittently, sometimes not scrolling through the menus and sometimes not clicking. I have reset my iPod about four times since I bought it and I am probably going to take it in to the Apple store and get it looked at. I will probably buy the AppleCare Protection Plan as well, just as a safety measure for the coming years.

Another small problem I have been having is the iPod not updating the album art. I will rip a new CD, select all of the songs, right-click, choose “Info”, and add the album art. I plugin the iPod after doing this and it tells me the iPod is updating, then it gives me an error about the artwork. I have been unable to find the error on Apple’s website and I have not found any answers on third party sites. It is pretty frustrating but not super important, I just like seeing the artwork when playing a song or album.

AppleInsider had a write up on the possibility of the Playstation 3 supporting OS X. It is also reported that it may support other operating systems such as Linux.

I wasn’t planning on buying one but this ups the ante.

Today I talked to a few people who run the RTOC here in Houston and they mentioned some of their history. The RTOC monitors offshore oil rigs and their drilling operations in real time. This has been done for the past 10 years and apparently Shell was one of the first providers of broadband internet to people on the Gulf Coast.

The amount of data that is streamed a day is in terabytes so large “pipes” were needed to get the info from the rigs and to the monitoring stations in New Orleans and Houston. These pipes were so large that their excess bandwidth was actually sold to different telecommunications companies. If you have the available throughput then why not give it up and make a little money?

I had asked about the data they received because I was interested in whether they used a commercial data provider but was surprised to hear them tell me that they put down their own fiber and started up their own telecomm company.

After all of my searching I found a house that I liked and that fit inside of my price range. The roommate seemed nice and the house was completely renovated so I went ahead and signed the lease.

The house is older, about 50 yrs. but with all of the renovations looks like something you would find in The Heights. The whole house has hardwood floors though they are going to put carpet in the bedrooms, which is perfect. The entire kitchen has been redone and looks awesome.

My roommate Brad is a nice guy. He owns the house with a co-signature from his parents and seems to take real pride in keeping it up. All in all I think it is a really good situation and I feel very lucky to have found the house when I did (thanks Courtney!).

You can see more of the trip and the house by clicking on the picture.

That really is not the right word… More like roommate shopping is what I’ve been doing here in Lubbock. I can live in a house that’s decent and fix it up but if the roommates stink my life will be miserable.

I’ve found a few places that I like and today I plan on going and meeting the potential roommates since that will be the selling factor for me. All of the homes are close to campus which is a big plus for me as I do not really want to pay for a parking pass (or gas). They all have hardwood floors with carpeted bedrooms which is great, less cleanup and less to worry about. My only catch is that the one landlord said no indoor pets, even though Jackson is small and is house trained. Now I have to figure out what I am going to do with him.

I also finally filled my schedule up with a blow off elective. I need 2 hrs. of electives and this will fill that requirement up and since I only have to go to class 2-3 times a semester I’m even more happy. My dilemma now is grad school. I only have 70 hrs. left to get a Master’s but I can’t decide if it’s what I really want to do. Do I continue with the Bachelor’s and get out in the workforce (or military) or take my time and get the Master’s degree and then make my life decisions? It is a lot to think about while I’m here, but it has to be decided some time…

I will be traveling tomorrow to Lubbock to find a place to live for next semester. You can reach me through e-mail or my cell phone. Your best bet is e-mail though because my phone will probably be turned off most of tomorrow.

I have no problems with getting in front of people and talking. I can explain things well and if I stumble I usually recover. However, I hate with a passion giving PowerPoint presentations. It is not just the giving of the presentation but the creation of it that frustrates me as well.

First off, unless PowerPoints are done correctly they are useless. What is correct? Giving me some text and walking me through what you have written is definitely not. I would rather just listen to you speak instead of having to try and pay attention to two things. Give me graphs (interesting ones only), cool pictures, and a little humor and I’ll be your most attentive listener. If you bombard me with data and text I will more than likely fall asleep or completely tune you out.

When you are presenting do not look at your slides. I am your audience, not the screen. If the screen needed to hear you it would have sat in my chair. Take some notecards with the basic facts about each slide and use those to make your presentation. I can get the basic info from what you are saying and look at the slides for the rest. The more you talk towards the screen the less I and others pay attention, so stop it.

Lastly, I do not need “cool” sounds or “killer” animation to keep interested in the presentation. Do not try to make up for your presentation’s lack of information with some snazzy slide-in sounds, it just doesn’t work. The noises are annoying but the animations are good when they are done right. If you have animation on every letter in your presentation you should be dragged out of the office and fired on the grounds of wasting everyone’s time. Just animate the things you are trying to draw attention to. That means you should not be drawing attention to everything.

That is my brief overview of bad “PowerPointing”. I have a presentation to finish before August 2nd, so it’s back to work for me.

According to Apple Insider we may see hardware upgrades from Apple as early as Tuesday, July 26.

The article does not say anything about new PowerBooks but maybe we’ll see some upgrades to them before the end of the year.