January 2004 Archives

All of Saint Francis lost its power today (except for us in CERMUSA of course, we have generators). It's funny that the those without power didn't complain first about not having electricity, but instead complained about not be connected to the Internet. Times have changed.

I very rarely go on political rants, but after last night's results in New Hampshire, I feel that I must. The whole Howard Dean campaign really amazes me. This is a guy who is passionate about what he believes in and (seems anyway) to think he can really make a positive change in Washington. His rant after the New Hampshire caucus was negative to several people, but to see a guy get that excited after just losing a state was amazing.

The fact that he is losing to this Kerry guy baffles me. I'm sure that Kerry is a million times better than our current war-mongering, oil-addicted president, but he just doesn't seem to have the personality and ability to get things done as does Dean.

Take some time to check out Dean's webpage and blog.

I don't know if he will still be around by the time the primaries hit PA, but unfortunately, I won't be able to vote for him. As much as I hate to do it, I've decided to change my registration to Republican for this year's primary so that I can vote for Michael DelGrosso. I've never been a big fan of the current Shuster administration, and have decided to support this young and energetic candidate.

Looks like another 7 inches of snow on top of the 7+ we got yesterday. Time to head out and dare the elements!!

The ESP Game. Addictive yet helpful.

Make sure you read the "Did You Know?" section to see what the whole point of it is.

I thought that I had put Christmas photos of Ethan on the site, but apparently I didn't. Here are 3 of the best!

To prevent some whining here at work, I have to send a shout-out to Phil. I went skiing with him, Dave, and Jared this weekend.

Apparently, Phil was disappointed that I didn't mention his name in my previous entry.

As you can see, I just added a new "Shanafelt Sector" logo to the web page. Thanks to Fontifier, that is actually my handwriting.

I don't know why that purple box is around it. But I'm just going to pretend its not there for the moment, as I have other more pressing issues.

Yesterday. I made it out to the slopes of Blue Knob for the first time this year. A good time was had by all. I did some of the more challenging slopes that I normally don't do, since the guys that I went with are pretty good. It was good though, a lot more challenging than my past trips.

I still haven't decided what I'm going to do with the excessive amounts of free time that have suddenly emerged since I found out that the class I was supposed to teach was cancelled due to lack of enrollment. I'm thinking of taking on some side programming jobs at ITMoonlighters to make some extra dough. Or I may focus on updating myself with some programming languages. I haven't gotten to check out much of .NET yet at my job.

I'm heading to Philly on Thursday to meet up with our good friends at MAGPI. There is a lecture on Internet2 infrastructure that may (or may not) be interesting.

Here we go again....

The first class of my second to last semester to finish my MBA. Fortunately, I'm only in one class this semester. Time to learn the wonders of Strategic Management...

Looks like Apple just released a new iPod. The iPod "Mini" has 8 GBs and comes in some pretty funky colors. Looks pretty nice, but it still locks you into the iTunes service and the amount of storage is half of what the Dell DJ is at the same price ($250).

I've had the Dell DJ for about a week now, and I think that is enough time to give a fairly accurate review of the device. Overall, I'm happy with most features. Sound quality is great, battery life is awesome (I had it going for about 8 hours and it never dropped down to the 2nd battery life indicator), and the amount of storage (15 GB) is twice what I need to put my entire collection of about 100 CDs on it.

However, there are several features that were left off of the Dell DJ that make the interface annoying:

1, The playlist management is horrible. There is no way of simply deleting a song off of a playlist, you have to delete it out of the library all together to remove something from the playlist. There is no simple way to create new playlists using the device. Once a playlist is created, you can't simply add a song to it. You have to load the playlist, go back to the library, find the song you want to add, add it to the current list of songs playing, and then go back and save the playlist again by re-keying in the whole name of the playlist. Come on, has the concept of "Save" and "Save as..." totally eluded the folks at Dell???

2, There is no easy way to play your entire collection, you have to create a playlist that has all of your songs and play that. Everytime you add a song, you have to recreate the playlist and reload it.

3, I'm not impressed with MusicMatch, the software that comes with the DJ to manage your library and transfer songs to the DJ. Compared with iTunes and Napster, MusicMatch is probably the least preferred in my book. However, the "Super-Tagging" feature is great for automatically updating song tags.

4, The random/shuffle mode has one little quirk. When you are in this mode and select an artist, playlist, or genre to play, it will always play the first song on the list regardless instead of randomly selecting it. Once the first song is complete, or the next button is pressed, then it will start to pick songs randomly.

5, Not really something related directly to the DJ, but it took about 5 hours to transfer my entire collection (7 GBs) to the DJ using my old USB 1.1 connection. Make a splurge and buy a USB 2.0 connection for about $10 at Pricewatch.com if you don't already have one.

Overall, I'm happy with the performance of the DJ, but having the inclusion of the above items would go a long way for improving the user experience.

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2004!