If you want to check out some magazine covers with Steve Jobs on them, you will like this selection of 89 magazine covers with his Steveness gracing every cover complements of Kuo Design . I enjoyed looking at it because it’s like looking back in time at a person and a company that started off small with a great idea then failed miserably for a while then rose again despite all the cynics. It also makes me think about all the insanely great products that came out of Apple/Steve’s “magic kingdom” and what if there were no iPods, no iPhones, no iTunes Store, etc. Have a look it!  It was nice looking back at some of those covers as they reminded me of the first time I used a Mac back in undergrad, writing my undergrad thesis on an LC III in living color in my advisers living room, my reaction to the first time I played with my friend’s  iMac Blueberry with the round mouse and the 1st generation iPod I received for my birthday compliments of a few of my friends pitching in…

Wow 2010! Another year is upon us. It was a very low key New year celebration for me. Actually a friend of mine called and woke me up as I was snoozing away with delight. Man its really cold and I was exhausted after the drive up and down the hills. Due to the nice little winter storm in these parts its been snowing for the past few days with promise of much more to come tomorrow. Its below 30 out there now with 12 mph wind feels like 10 degrees actually. Buurh! What a cold New Year this has been. Glad to be inside.  Thankful that I can spend some time catching up on sleep I’m going to need the rest for next week for sure.

I finally had a chance to see the movie Avatar this weekend. I didn’t really know what to expect because I did not pay any attention to the reviews beforehand. I wanted to see it on the big screen though and they had two versions, the 3D and the regular version. I saw the regular version because I had woof down my dinner and did not want to get sick on the 3D version. Anyway, my friend and I arrived at the theatre a bit early so we saw all the previews beforehand and was more than happy when the film finally started. I won’t give anything away there is enough of that going around all I have to say is that I was immersed in another world for over two hours. The colors and scenes before me were grand and imaginative, the story was complex but simple and the underlying messages were clear. From a techie standpoint there was plenty to gawk at. I especially liked those thin flat screens in the lab and other places, the networking concept on Pandora was also cool. I thought that the acting was really good everyone seem to really be into it and the whole Avatar idea was well executed. When it was over we got up and clapped… I can’t wait for this one to come out on video and is hoping for an Avatar 2.  All in all it was a fine way to spend $10 and 2+ hours on a rainy, foggy night in an otherwise stuffy theatre.

 We finally migrated to ArcGIS Server 9.3.X end of last week, so when one of my colleagues wanted to update a previous  ArcIMS based application, I thought I would get my hot sticky hands all over it and port it to ArcGIS Server myself. Not a bad idea but the ArcGIS Server out-of-the-box tools are sparse to say the least. For example, BUFFER… I’m all kinds of wishing that I had Geocortex Essentials to port this app. Could seriously use some of those extra tools.

I spent the last couple of days of my work life trying to get a sample buffer tasks to work. Man the WebADF is a beast. I followed install instruction for the task to the letter and at first I got an error saying that I did not set the “max buffer distance.” Several searches and downloads later I opened up Visual Web Developer Express, found the offending value in the default.aspx file and took care of the problem. I’m no programmer so this took me a few hours to find, download, and fix. Next time I ran the buffer task again, error number 2… “The Geometry Server is not pointing to the right place…” Crud took care of that real quick. I was playing with ArcGIS Server Manager all day so I remembered where this was. Finally, I ran the buffer task again! This time to my utter annoyance I received the same error I did yesterday late evening… something about Identity needing the proper permission, object variable not set, blah blah! I rolled my eyes something awful and went back to my DBA work… I think at this point I will wait for my programming buddies to take a shot at that one. They all did the sensible thing and left the office for the holidays. There I was being all inspired… at least now I have a greater empathy and appreciation for my programming friends who have to deal with the WebADF all day long. To the programming elves at Fountain Spatial (you know who you are) thanks alot!

Since I was stuck at home today with some sort of stomach bug that’s been going around, I did what I normally do when I’m stuck at home… take the opportunity to clean. My first order of business was to vacuum so I got out the vacuum cleaner and went to work. I noticed that my carpets had a medicinal smell that I did not like and no I don’t smoke so don’t even go there. I felt strongly that some sort of deodorizer was needed and I was not about to go out to get any. Other than my stomach issue other deodorizers tend to make me stuffy, and I have issues with particular strong scents, so I was looking for something a bit more natural than carpet fresh. I fired up the ole computer and did a search on natural deodorizers and the next thing I knew I was in the kitchen mixing up a batch. My particular mix consisted of :

• 1/2 cup of baking soda (I used the aluminum free kind)
• 1/2 cup of borax (yes the same stuff you use to clean your laundry)
• 5 or 6 drops of Now 100 % Natural Tea Tree Oil (happen to have some of this in my medicine cabinet)
• Couple drops of vanilla extract (I was looking for almond but thought the vanilla would be interesting)
• A few shakes of cinnamon (before I remembered the cinnamon sticks on the lower shelf- use the sticks next time)
• A few pieces (3 or 4) of cinnamon sticks
• A few shakes of dried rosemary leaves (straight off my spice rack)
• A few shakes of dried mint leaves (also off my spice rack)

Combine ingredients above and make sure that the liquid stuff (oil, extracts) don’t get your mix all beady, the idea is to keep the consistent powder form… The oils and other goodies made the otherwise bland baking soda and borax smell really nice. Ooooh the fragrant offering of natural goodness… I found a container for mine (a rounded tin can that once held tea), threw a thick piece of printing paper on top of it, wrapped a make shift rubber band of sorts around said piece of paper to hold it to the container, and poked some holes in it with a fork real quick. Obviously when I make it out of the house next few days I’ll try to find a more appropriate container for my fragrant concoction.  Anyway, I sprinkled my fragrant offerings on the carpets and left it for an hour (you can leave it for 20 minutes or so) then vacuumed with delight. The whole house is smelling really nice and fresh! I can’t wait to mix up another batch using some other essential oils that I like (yes I enjoyed doing this).  If you are not into mixing up concoctions in your kitchen and prefer to purchase a natural deodorizer, I found two in my brief search: Citrus Magic- Carpet and Room Freshener (particularly for those with pets) and Matt Carpet Deodorizer by Eco-Me. Can’t speak for any of those but I noticed that Matt had baking soda, cornstarch, and essential oils (Roman Chamomile, Grapefruit, Clary Sage) as its ingredients.

 A few days ago I took the plunge and decided to upgrade the OS on my PC to Windows 7. I did not shell out a dime but is testing out the Enterprise version. Not sure what got into me but I had some time on my hands and I was curious to see how my machine would perform with the update and wanted to test some special software compatibility issues. I always found Vista a bit buggy and unfinished. The upgrade was painless except that I had to reconfigure my network settings and forgot my super secret password. Other than that, point and click… Since the switch my machine seems to be performing better. Perhaps its because I took some time to clean off some of the junk that was loading it down but I noticed that my disk icon does not go as crazy as it used to and the machine seems to start-up and shut down faster than before. I like the new Taskbar in Windows 7 big time. It reminds me of Rocket Dock which I used to run on Vista in that you can pin shortcuts to your to your programs on their.  I also like the way you can preview Windows without opening them right from the taskbar and navigate to the one you want. In addition, the program icons on the taskbar glows when you hover over them during the preview, its pure eye-candy goodness but I’m a sucker for eye-candy. This is handy especially while using IE. The shake feature is just plain ridiculously cool! The themes are also quite nice and the Aero interface seems to have gotten some refinements. There are so many other little nuggets that I’m discovering everyday. Although I like the Mac OS in all its assets and facets I have to admit that Windows 7 has caught my attention. Good job to the folks in Redmond for this one. I wish they were rolling this out at work tomorrow but I was told that the server requirements were going to slow down the adoption a bit. Perhaps by the time IT rolls out the next version of Windows we will be on Windows 10 or whatever they call it then. They’ve been testing one copy of Windows Vista for well neigh three years now… I’m not bitter!

This was an interesting Thanksgiving Day for me. Since I had the whole day off I spent 3 hours raking and collecting leaves in my yard. Three hours and all I made was piles and collected a few bags of leaves plus planted some bulbs that had been sitting around for a while since my friend gave them to me back in October. Its been so warm around here these things started sprouting. At least I got some exercised before the Thanksgiving feast. Now I’m home almost off to bed and I am sore. I haven’t raked leaves like that since I was a kid. Wheee! It was quite fun and I discovered a groundhog hole which I was trying to cover up with a large rock. This did not work as I said the rock was large and after fiddling with it a bit I just left it sitting there. I felt like I fought with nature today and it won. Now its raining fantastic! Tomorrow there will be several piles of wet leaves in the yard. I have a lot to be thankful for this year. A beautiful home, family, old friends and new friends, and a job that I enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you no matter how hard you worked for your Turkey or Tofurky today.