Youseph Tanha Dot Com

I truly hate cable television. There are so many shows that are on T.V. that do little more then act as a tool to keep the masses parked at home on their asses. Cable T.V. is such a waist of time and a mental mind suck. This newly found hatred for the shows that I have no interest in seeing has been brewing for a while now and I’m slowly learning how to deal all the wasted time that goes with turning on the television. (see my post on Cognitive Surplus)

Yes, there is the occasional show that is worth watching. Shows like Heroes, How I Met Your Mother, The Dean Martin Show, Family Guy, and South Park, are all great shows. But are they worth planning your week around just to see them with commercials for products you really don’t care about jammed in-between the show every 15 minutes?

I think not.

To avoid this, I just wait till these shows come out on DVD. I am a big fan of buying shows on DVD. You can then watch them anywhere you want as time allows without having to interrupt your life or planning your day around when it airs. You also don’t have to deal with commercials when you by the DVD which to me is a HUGE plus to me.

Since my hatred for television program has been gowning, so too has my liking for podcasts. Podcasts consist of audio or video programs that you can download onto your computer or iPod and be played back whenever you like. There are programs on just about every thing imaginable and in my experience not just mind numbing tripe that seems to occupy 90% television today. It makes me wish I had an Apple TV to watch them on.

I am a big fan of tech news podcasts like This Week In Tech, Webb Alert, Tehzilla, and g4tv’s ‘The Feed’. I also enjoy a podcast on cigars call “The cigar Nation” and X-play’s gaming podcast. I want to encourage everyone to check out some of these podcasts. Especially those you who have a long commute to work. Podcasts; even audio books are a great thing to listen to.

Occasionally I get ask to do some website work. It does not happen all that often, but I am happy to do it when it comes in. Recently I finished the redesign for North Sound Safety’s offical website.

North Sound Safety is a motorcycle training company located in Washington state. They are professional at teaching riders young and old, beginner or seasoned, the importance of Motorcycle safety.

Their old website was very consistent with it’s navigation. However, the pages (the homepage particularly) had a lot of stuff going on and could make it hard for the user to focus on what he or she was looking for.

My first redesign design attempt was to just clean things up and tighten the over all look and feel of the website. I do most of my design work exclusively in PhotoShop.

My client really liked the new look and feel of North Sound Safety’s new design. He had a few changes he wanted made before I could go forward with writing out the HTML for the site. The finished product looks like this image below.

The final product incorperates Google Maps, as well as Flash. The whole top banner graphic is a Flash animation. I need to thank Jason for givng me some lessions in flash so i could create that rotating banner. The completed website can be viewed at www.NorthSoundSafety.com. Take a look around. Let me know what you think.

Back from my vacation and working in the new company office. Things are really starting to fall into place and my work space is starting to feel like my own.  One of my friends and co-workers Henrik, configured my office phone to know me as Optimus Prime the leader of the Autobots, a faction of sentient robots from the planet Cybertron.

This is a great Friday.

In 2005 our investment club manager e-mailed us asking for our opinions on how to invest the money the group had been collecting. I wrote what I felt was the best suggestion I could have made at the time. Below is a copy of the e-mail I wrote our investment club along with Chris’s wrong and inaccurate response.

Now, Back in November 2005 when this e-mail was written Apple’s stock price reach a high of $69.34. Today, Apple’s stock price is valued over $180. Now for thoughts keeping score, this means that Apple’s market value of $158 billion is now four times that of rival PC Macker Dell’s $38 billion.

Whats that Chris? I can’t here you. Cat got your tongue?

 

Yup, thats right. I don’t own a printer. It cost so much to own a printer in my opinion.

Actually, a printer itself is not that expensive. You can get a really nice printers these days for cheep. It’s just the outrageous cost of printer ink that keeps me from owning one.

I don’t have things I need printed everyday. From time to time I do have documents I need to printed. Sometimes I even want to print photos off for myself or friends and family. It’s not all that often. Maybe once, maybe twice a month I have something I want to print.

When I have something I need printed I will take it to a local print shop. I can print documents and photos for pennies compared tot he cost of buying a printer and ink, and hopping I use it often enough that the ink does not dry up before it’s empty. It’s just not worth the hassle or cost.

The other day at work, I was preparing to meet with a new client here in Juneau. The client is located in downtown Juneau, but I did not know exactly where they where. So I loaded up Google Maps to help me figure out where their office was.

Now, Google Maps does a really great job of helping you find where your going and giving you directions to where you need to go. After I put in the companies address, Google Maps showed me where they where located. I still was not 100% sure of their location or how to get their.

Now normally when this happens I just have Google Maps generate directions for me from my office. But this time was different because I noticed for the first time a new button at the top of Google Maps,”Street View”.

With Street View, you are able to see a 360 degree view of any street in Juneau. I was so blown away by this. I mean, I knew Google has a small fleet of cars setup to take photos of cities like this but i did not think Juneau was going to be on the list anytime soon. With street view I was able to see the actual office of where my meeting was to take place and as a result of seeing the street view picture I realized that I knew where the office was located and I knew out to get there with out any directions.

After my meeting was over and I was done with work for the day I got back on Google Maps to see if I could find my house. I did!

That’s my truck in the drive way!

You can also see the Glacier

Our Little AirPort.

Governors Mansion

In using Street View and looking all around Juneau I can tell that all these pictures where taken just over a year a go. This is a pretty cool new feature they have added and I know I will be using it quite a bit. Not every city in the world has street view just yet, but I am sure they are working on it.

Recently Google’s development team released a web widget for their Google Talk Chat Network called “Chatback“. This widget allows anyone visiting my website to be able to chat with me without having to sign up for any kind of account. I think think it’s pretty cool and I am giving it a test drive. I have currently placed it on my side bar. So feel free to chat with me!

Henrik: be in in about 20
me: ok, lazy ass
Henrik: while you’re spooning Hannah i’m writing code…so shush [smile]
me: ColdFusion is not code. It’s creative writing for people who don’t know how to code.
Henrik: okay..reading PHP code and translating it into creative writing..how’s that?
me: A fucking Travesty

When I upgraded my operating system to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I did not think I would like the new backup software, “Time Machine” at all. Truth be told, I was expecting to hate it and continue using my trusty old Silver Keeper application to do my backups. But, like a true geek with new software I just had to test it out.

Let me start off by saying I can not express to you how important it is to back up your data. I myself learned this lesson the very hard way several years ago on my G3 Powerbook. Having the need to reinstall my operating system at the time I rushed and failed to do any backups at all. The end result was years of lost digital photos I can never get back. I might have cried a little bit after that incident (reports waver from person to person) but I learned from it. I went out the very next day and picked up an external hard drive that was bigger then the internal hard drive of my Powerbook and setup a nightly backup system.

So here I am, several years later trying out a new piece of backup software by Apple called “Time Machine”. Now before I can try and launch Time Machine I thought I should plug in my external hard drive that I want to backups to. Moments after I plugged in my External backup hard drive my computer prompted me with a message saying “Do you want it to be your backup drive?”. I said yes and to my amazement that was all I had to do.

Time Machine proceeded to make a full back up of my computers hard drive to the external backup drive in the background. I could not help but think there had to me more to Time Machine that just this. Every piece of backup software I have never used always needed to be configured and setup. So I went searching through the system preferences for Time Machine settings. Upon viewing the Time Machine settings I found a very simple preferences window with a comically large On/Off Switch much like you would see on an iPhone. The only other options on the screen allow you change the backups destination (So if you go out and buy a bigger hard drive and you want your backups to use the newer hard drive you can.) and pick files or folders you don’t want to have backed up at all.

This was so brain dead simple I found myself wishing I had more options to choose from. But honestly, I have never needed more then this. I would Imagen for the majority of computer users out their this is all they really need.

After several hours my initial back up of my hard drive was completed. So what happens next? Well, Apple’s website states:

Every hour, every day, an incremental backup of your Mac is made automatically as long as your backup drive is attached to your Mac. Time Machine saves the hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.

So what happens when you remove your external backup hard drive? To find out what happens I disconnected my laptop from my external backup hard drive and did some work. I worked on files for my website and I worked on some random Photoshop work I have laying around. After about two hours I plugged back in my External backup hard drive. Right away I can see that the external hard drive is being written to. I opened up the Time Machine preferences to see it was doing a backup. A few other tests confirm that as soon as you plug in your backup external hard drive to you computer the first thing that takes place in the background is a backup of any changes made since it was last plugged in. That is just awesome!

It also looks like restoring from a crash or a reformat is also easy.

To make setting up a new Mac even simpler, Time Machine shares its data with other Mac utilities. Use Migration Assistant to copy portions of any Time Machine backup to a new Mac, or select “Restore System from Time Machine” in the Leopard DVD Utilities menu. Choose any date recorded in Time Machine to set up your new Mac exactly as your previous Mac was on that date.

So their you have it. You should always back up your computer. Any backup system is better then none but in my opinion Time Machine is pretty damn good.

Hannah and I left Juneau Alaska last Saturday to start off our well over due vacation together. We have had this trip planned for so long that Hannah had started counting down to the second from when it was time for use to leave.

So we left Juneau bright and early. Our flight made two stops on our way to Chicago. The first was in Sitka Alaska. It was a very short stop. They unloaded the people who wanted to get off at Sitka and loaded all the people who wanted to go to Seattle very quickly. The second stop was in Seattle Washington. Our layover in Seattle was only 2 hours long. But the time flew by because in Seattle we met up with my mom who flew with us from Seattle to Chicago.

So for the first leg of our vacation Hannah and I are currently in Illinois and having a blast with our family. Both my brothers, sister, nephew, and mom are here. We are all staying at my bother Reza’s new house in Aurora. (Party on Wayne! Party on Garth!)

The first day here we took it pretty easy. The house got some Christmas decorations put up and we played a little Ping Pong in the basement.

Today (well now Yesterday, but I have not been to bed yet so it feels like today) Abe, Tracy, Hannah and myself got up and took the commuter train from Aurora to the heart of Chicago to see the sights. With Abe as our tour guide we did some shopping and checked out the official Chicago Apple store. We also had dinner at the Hard Rock Café which was a lot of fun. They where playing great music videos the whole time we were there. Here is a picture of our Waiter.

We took the commuter train back to Aurora and drove from the train station back to my brothers house. We all shared our stories back at the house. Most everyone is in bed now. I should go too.