First, the 1TB hard drive I use with my hacked AppleTV went up in smoke.

500 GB of movies down the shitter.  That drive also housed my iPhoto backup. That really sucked.

Not 30 minutes later I went to get something from the car and stumbled. I didn’t fall, but somehow my iPhone came loose from the pocket I keep it in and went crashing down to the pavement.

Bye, bye glass screen.  Shattered.

Yay.

The phone still works, but I risk slicing my finger open if I dare try and use it.

At least I still have a 500Gb external drive to use, but I needed to clean it up and reformat it.  That meant transffering what I wanted to save onto my laptop, which meant me freeing up 60GB of space on my laptop to fit the stuff from the hard drive.

Needless to say 60GB wasn’t easy to free up, and I deleted some stuff I wish I didn’t have to. At least I have a temporary drive to use with the AppleTV, and to backup my photos.

That leaves the phone.  I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.  I can’t afford a new one, and the prices to get them fixed are insane considering what I paid for the phone, and the fact that our contract is up in November and I’ll be moving to Verizon. I also can’t see finding a cheap phone to put my SIM card in, because I’ll still be paying for iPhone service.

What’s Buzz?  That’s a hard question to answer.

What does it feel like?

It feels like a more streamlined version of Google Wave and Twitter.  You have a timeline, followers, and people you follow, like in any Twitter like site.  You also have the ability to post all sorts of neat shit into your Buzz, and with no character limit.  Conversations are threaded, and you can pull information in from other sites, like Flickr, Twitter, Picasa, and more.

Do I like it?

Yes, I do, but there’s a problem.

I’m already on SO many social sites that I don’t think enough people from each of those will be moving to Buzz.  Right now I use Twitter, Plurk, and Facebook as my 3 big social sites.  I have a unique set of contacts on each one, with very little overlap.  Will they move to using Buzz? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Where does this leave Buzz?

Who knows.  It’s really cool, and I’d love to use it, but after the fiasco that was Wave…I’m not sure what the adoption will be.

What would be crazier than trying to get ahold of Apple Customer Service during the morning on Black Friday? Probably a lot, but that’s what I’m doing right now.

You see on Nov 19th I ordered a refrub 40GB Apple TV. I got the shipment notification shortly after, but ever since FedEx has not updated the tracking. The thing is supposed to come tomorrow, so I called FedEx and they said they received a notice that there was a package to ship, but never got the package to ship it.

They told me to call Apple. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure they’ll throw this all back on FedEx’s shoulders, but I have no clue what to do to get this package found.

For all I know it’ll show up tomorrow as planned.

The truth of it is, I’m having a hard time keeping up with this blog. I seem to update it in waves. I am very good with updating Twitter, Plurk, etc… Tumblr has a feel similar to those sites (at least for updating), and is very easy for me to update from my iPhone.

We’ll see how long as lasts, but for now I think it’s going to work out.

A) My kids are notoriously rough with DVDs, and

B) It’s nice to travel without a LOAD of the kids DVDs.

Unfortunately Disney has to make creating a digital copy of a movie you OWN a pain in the ass. I had to play around to find just the right title that wasn’t in the wrong order. It turned out to be title 16.

Now I understand this is to thwart movie pirates, etc…, but this speaks to a larger issue. If I buy a DVD, I should also get a digital copy in this day and age. If you’re not going to let me create a digital copy, give me one, especially when you charge as much for a DVD as Disney does.

Now I just gotta find a spare DVD drive around the house. I’m sure there’s a few, just gotta find where they’re buried.

Down for everyone or just me? does just what it looks like. You enter in a site and it lets you know if the site is down or not.  I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve been working on a site that stopped working internally for some reason.  After running around like a chicken without a head for five minutes, I eventually find out it’s just me.

Yeah.

I’ll be keeping this tool VERY handy.

Well, the company I work for is.  I had been working off my own Macbook Pro ever since I started, and it was about time to move to a company machine.  Thankfully I was able to convince them to buy me the Open(3).  At only $700 total ($600 – base, $50 – 4GB RAM, $50 shipping) the machine was a steal.

Some specs:

• Mac OS X Leopard v10.5
• 2.5 GHz Dual Core E5200
• 2.5 GHz Dual Core E5200
• 2.5 GHz Dual Core E5200
• GeForce 9400GT 512MB (DVI + VGA)
• 20x DVD±RW DL

After using the machine throughout the day, I can say that it’s no different than using any other Mac. The only one problem I had was installing Parallels. For some reason it thought my machine couldn’t handle the hardware virtualization. A quick install of VMWare Fusion solved that problem.

Would I recommend an Open(3)?

Yes, though I would prefer an actual Apple Mac (you can’t beat the style). For the price, though, you can’t get a better Mac cheaper. The base model is the same price as a Mac Mini, and packs WAY more punch.

This one intrigued me a bit, and I actually click through to their URL.

The site is http://0seven0eight0nine.com/ and it counts down to 04:05:06 07/08/09.  That’s pretty damn geeky right there, and pretty damn awesome.  Figured I’d just pass that along.

Great video. Better follow-up by Wil Wheton.

http://geekadvancement.com