As much as this post is going to sound like an ad, I felt I needed to take a moment to endorse a great site, FreeHeadset.org. First, a brief intro of their site, taken from them:

“Since December of 2003 we’ve been running a worldwide wireless phone safety program that distributes free cell phone headsets in an effort to promote safe driving. So far we’ve given away over 260,000 headsets and we’d like to give one to you too!”

I believe I first stumbled across this site 2-3 years ago. I found it hard to believe that someone was willing to send out free headsets for cell phones for the cost of shipping. As skeptical as I was I gave it a try and shortly after received it in the mail, it was great. Time went by and I didn’t think much about it for awhile until recently when I wanted to look into a Bluetooth headset for my cell phone. I found the site again and seen that they were still around and did have a Bluetooth headset available. Now as expected, it wasn’t quite free like the normal headsets, they do charge $27 for them. By their claims this is a $45 savings off the retail price - try to find a decent one for that price elsewhere. With the cost of shipping it comes to around $30, not bad. In fact, I just ordered a second one, they have no limits.

With more places banning hand-held cell phone use while driving, I’m sure this site is likely to see an increase in use, or at least deserves more publicity.

Well, it’s hard to believe but summer is almost over. Come next Thursday it will be back to the books for me. I had a nice start to the summer back in May with our trip to the Dominican, which was quite awesome. The weather here this summer hardly compared to how nice it was there. I told myself the reason for going away this year was because I didn’t know when I would have the chance to again. Now that I’ve gone once it is hard to think that I couldn’t find the time and money to do it again next year.

Ever since the week after I got back from the Dominican I’ve been working at my co-op position. It’s been incredibly nice having a job where I don’t have to work in the evenings or on the weekends. Being downtown by the waterfront also made it so much better. The best part is that it isn’t coming to an end quite yet. While my co-op now officially ends next Wednesday that have agreed to let me work there part time during the school year. I am pretty happy about it all.

In other news, I recently attempted a dual boot with Windows Vista and FreeBSD. The dual booting part worked fine for the most part. I ended up deciding to try to use KDE for the desktop environment which for most peoples standards worked fine as well. However, the trick with my setup is that I am attempting to have dual monitors working, in the same fashion as I have it working under Windows. Try as I might I just couldn’t figure it out. The biggest problem seemed to be that I am working with a 20″ widescreen LCD and a 17″ LCD. From my understanding there is a certain combined maximum resolution that will work and that I am exceeding it. I have not giving up yet though, I just need to perform some more research first.

I finally have the new design up now. I know it’s nothing spectacular but I am pretty pleased with it myself. It is a big improvement over the simple design I originally had for my portfolio that I did at the end of last year in my web development class. I also actually like it a little better then the WordPress theme I was using on the blog before. Anyways, I now have the consistent look that I wanted across my entire site. I think there might be some other pages or sections I want to dig up that are laying around.

The two new things right now are my portfolio and photo gallery. I’ve had the photo gallery around for a long time but always kept it hidden. I have my pictures from the Dominican on there now as well as pictures from my other trips to California and New York.

Let me know what you think of the updated site.

The last month has been pretty good all around. The trip was excellent, had a great time. It really makes me sad that it will probably be awhile before I get the chance to go away again. I have also started my summer co-op with the government which I am enjoying, the people are great.

As for the site change I discussed last post, I have actually made progress. I came up with a design that is a mix of this design and my portfolio design, I’m happy with it. I still have some tweaking to do before I’m ready to put it up though. So, my current goal is to finish that off and get it up then go back to an old project. I had previously created a Facebook app called PhotoGrab to make downloading of pictures from albums very simple. I ended up neglected it so it isn’t online anymore but I want to get it back online and improve it.

I’m really enjoying the lack of homework and having a set work schedule Monday to Friday. It should make for a great summer.

Seems like every time I get around to making a post on here I end up changing something. Well, this time there are two notable changes so far. The first being that I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I’ve been using WordPress for awhile now and have seen it evolved, and I must say it keeps on getting better. Unfortunately I end up neglecting it by not posting, then always have to update it when I do post.

The second change is that I have moved the blog to its own directory. For now I don’t have anything in the root directory of the site but that will change. During my first term at school we created an online portfolio, something that I think is incredibly important to have, especially as I try to market myself and get that dream job. For the portfolio I created the design myself and I’m not totally pleased with it, mainly because I am in no way creative. I don’t do design. My current plan is to incorporate the portfolio into the design of this blog or to play around and come up with something on my own that I do like. Ideally I want the whole site to have the same look though.

When will this all be done? That’s a great question I say. With school done until September now I have one less excuse, however I will have a full time job (co-op) this summer - starting around the first of May. Oh, and then next week I am gone to the Dominican for a week so it won’t be happening then. I have some free time in between packing and going to a birthday celebration this weekend so I think the plan is to start on it now. Until then though the site root will redirect to /blog.

I feel like I am just talking to myself right now, I don’t think anyone really reads this thing. My own fault though for not keeping it active.

Last weekend I finally bit the bullet and decided to install Vista. There were a couple of things that were bugging me about my system so I wanted to either reinstall XP or give Vista a shot. It’s been on my mind for awhile now that since I am in IT now I need to get much more familiar with it than the occasional tinkering.

Out of curiosity I kept a log of the Vista install process which took about 45 minutes from the time I inserted the DVD until I saw the desktop for the first time. There are just a few comments I have about the install process, the first being that when the setup launched for about three minutes all I had was the Vista background with a cursor, nothing else. This was a little confusing because I didn’t know what, if anything, was going on. Needless to say the install was quite different from XP, but I liked it. There seemed to be a few instances where nothing appeared to be going on for a few minutes. One good example is when setup started expanding files. For a good 5-10 minutes it was showing 0% until after 10 minutes it was showing 75%. Another thing that stood out is that I was able to see an option to upgrade from XP to Vista but I was not able to select it, and believe was told it was not available. Mind you, I wasn’t interested in doing an upgrade, but I can pass this off on the version I am using.

After the install completed the only real issue I noticed immediately was lack of sound. I have built-in sound on my motherboard as well as a sound card that I use. There seems to be a number of people that have had issues with Creative sound cards after installing Vista, although it usually just requires installing a new driver. While trying to resolve the issue I encountered my first BSOD in Vista, but I did manage to get it working. I am hoping that will be the only blue screen I have to see. One other issue that appeared and that I am not 100% sure is gone is that after rebooting the boot process would seem to halt and I would be left with a blank screen. Usually after another reboot or two it was fine. My current thoughts on this are it was a result of the driver issue for the sound card, or it is somehow seeing the old XP install (in a Windows.old folder) and getting confused. I tend to keep my computer on so I will have to watch out for this the next time I reboot.

So, my thoughts on Vista. I have been just as guilty as most at making fun of Vista for as long as I can remember now, but I have to say that so far I am happy with it. I have to admit I am a bit of a sucker for the eye candy though. The primary purpose should be functionality but pretty is always nice too. I do have Aero enabled and my system is working just as good, if not better, then before the switch. For those of you familiar with it my computer scored a base score of 2.8 on the Windows Experience Index, obviously room for improvement but I’m not going to rush out and purchase another video card for a higher score. Overall I don’t have any complaints so far but it hasn’t even been a week yet.

(Note: For those curious, I am running Vista Business with SP1)

A rather interesting email was sent to me today which I have copied below for your enjoyment. Mind you, after doing a quick Google search on it I found it less amusing but still a little freaky. I’ve cleaned up the formatting from the original email some. Also, this isn’t anything new, it’s been going around for a little while now.
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Was a little bored tonight so I put together a little epoch time converter that’s pretty basic. When working with some databases the times are stored as epoch values in which I need to convert. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but I figured since I was bored I would make a little script to do it for the enjoyment of all. I plan on adding a date to epoch feature to it later on when I’m bored again. Feel free to make suggestions for other scripts.
Epoch Time Converter

No big surprise but I have again continued to neglect this blog. I would like to do something cool and useful with this site but I am not sure what that is yet, maybe someday in five years it will come to me.

December 14th marked the end of my first term back in school. For those who don’t know and are curious I am taking Information Technology at NSCC. I am rather pleased with the results, I finished the term with a 96.6% average. The first year is simply a wide range of courses to cover various areas of IT. For the second and final year I have to select the concentration that I want. Right now it is either programming or database, somehow I need to make a decision in the next couple months.

One new addition to the site is the portfolio that I made for our web development class. By no means is it complete, and it never will be considering it’s a portfolio. During the rest of my education I will continue to update it as my skills and experiences grow.

I hope everyone had a good holiday season. Let’s see how long the next update will take…

I finally came up with one project idea to work on and the initial version is completed. Based on a conversation with friends a little while back I realized that while it was easy to upload pictures to Facebook to share with others, it is a pain for your friends to download all of them if they want to have a copy on their computer. After reviewing the Facebook API I determined a way to make a simple application that allows users to login and download complete photo albums in a few easy steps. PhotoGrab is what I came up with. It is extremely simple but also very basic right now. If there seems to be demand for it I will probably built it out more and possibly add in other sites if requested.

PhotoGrab - The easy way to download your friends’ albums!