Contrary to popular belief, "Going Organic/Green" doesn’t actually mean becoming a hippy. Showers and regular haircuts are still welcome! Over the past year my wife has made some what I consider to be radical changes around our household that have impacted us and our surroundings in an very positive way. At first I rejected the changes as any hippy fearing right winged man would. However now I am beginning to embrace them and come to the realization that eating organics foods or using green cleaning products around the house does not mean I am a changed person, it just means I am more informed about the potential hazards of relying on American standards to guide my well being.

I won’t get into too much detail about the specifics of the changes but if you want to hear more you can check our her blog at http://www.openeyehealth.com.

P.S. No offense to any of my hippy readers…as if they have computers psshhh Oh and this doesn’t mean you won’t find me eating at Applebees or anything in the near future…..I’m not suggesting I am a changed man….just open to change!

Since my trip to Ireland last June I keep thinking about my heritage and what exactly I am comprised of. I think this is mostly due to the fact that I saw so many faces that looked so familiar in Ireland. These aren’t the faces you tend to see when you think of the Irish but the faces of every day people. I could really see my maternal side in these complete strangers and that got me thinking. So here is the breakdown based upon my great grandparents 8 last names.

McMillan – Irish
Borelli – Italian
Burns – German
Finnerty – Irish
Rose – Dutch
Vanderzwagg – Dutch
DeYoung – English/Irish/Cuban ??????
Smallegan – Dutch

The only name I’m not very sure of is DeYoung….based on this image it could be from any number of places:

DeYoung Port of Departure from Ancestry.com

From this I can derive that I am about:
37.5% Dutch
25% Irish
12.5% Italian
12.5% German

So far I’ve been to Ireland and if it turns out DeYoung is from England I’ve been there as well. This year we plan to go to Italy and I can’t help but wonder if I am going to see more family resemblance….It is kind of crazy how so many different nationalities are classified together as caucasian but with so many varieties of facial and physical body structure. Based on my mutt status I guess I’m gonna classify myself as Durisianman What are you?

I have tried a number of different solutions for getting my iTunes library on my remote machine(s). Within my local network iTunes takes just a few seconds using Zeroconf / Bonjour technology to find my library and then a few more seconds to load the XML file containing the definitions my 60GB + of music. Until now the easiest and most reliable method I have found is to run Hamachi on my main mac as well as on my laptop(s). Hamachi if you aren’t familiar simply creates adhoc vpn networks. This works pretty well and it can be used for a number of things. One of which is allowing my iTunes clients to see each other and share libraries. However….since OSX 10.5 Leopard Hamachi had (has) been having issues. Sucking up all kinds of memory/crashing, etc…. That led me to my discovery today. I was actually working to find a way to push dns-sd commands to my .mac account using back to my mac. While doing some googling I ran into this: Reach local iTunes library over the net which basically outlines nearly exact what I was trying to do.  Now I have to execute 2 simple commands which I’ve saved and then enter my password and within 15-20 secs it loads up my big XML file and almost instantly I have all of my music at my finger tips…On my connection here where I am currently working I can switch songs and it takes less than 1 second. I was expecting some additional lag when running the data through an SSH pipe. If you have any questions or don’t understand a word of what you just read you can either ask questions in the comments or move along to the next post Also…if anyone has any ideas on how I can get that XML file to cache and then update every few days or when I manually delete it that would be cool. I have been thinking that with my 3G card in my carputer this may be a viable solution for always having the latest music on my home machine.

Carputer hardware installed and functional! I’m working on installing software and the additional peripherals now and then it is demo time!

Some smartass changed this sign around up on Five Mile Hill in Grand Haven. Can you spot the change?

View from the hill:

How do I know when it is time for bed? I open up photobooth, and if I see something like this……I know it is time.

Last night I went up to best buy and with the remainder of my HD-DVD giftcard and some cash I picked up an XBox Arcade for our bedroom so that we can watch TV in there instead of having to go downstairs to the bigscreen or into my office every time we want to watch our recorded television. I also picked up a copy of GTA4 and without even realizing it I got myself another $50 gift card back for buying a system and the game at the same time.

As sweet as the short bit of gameplay I got in last night on GTA4 I was a bit frustrated because my xbox locked up 2 times. I’ve read this has been a problem for others with GTA4 so I hope there is a resolution soon.

In other news 3 of my carputer parts are out for delivery on UPS.com today! Besides figuring out how I want the Lilliput LCD mounted this should be everything I need for the install. I may attempt to start this tonight or at least lay things out exactly where I want them in the car.

I created a page rather than a series of posts. Be sure to check back as I make updates if you are interested in this kind of thing.06 Pontiac Grand Prix Carputer 

I watch a lot of TV….I’ll just put that right out there. I pay for cable TV and with my multiple tuner Windows Media Center PC I make sure I get my money’s worth. I like being able to pick where I want to watch my recorded content on the fly. Living room, PC, iPhone, etc.. For a while converting into iPod/iPhone format was a manual task for me, when I knew I wanted to watch a show on the go, I’d go convert it. This gets old pretty quick so I devised a method of converting all of my shows nightly for transfer to my iPhone. At < 150MB for an hour episode (~75 for a half hour show) I can afford to convert and store all of my recordings without feeling like I’m wasting space. My automatic process works as follows.

• I’ve mapped a drive from my mac doing the conversion.
• I’ve set up a scheduled automator task in OSX to run at 2am which looks at the date created of each file to look for the ones created yesterday.
• Then using this automator action set for VisualHub I pump out the converted files. I like to use the wifi setting in visualhub for iPhone.
• Lastly I add them to iTunes and set my iPhone to automatically sync.

So every night if I have say 3 three things recorded from the day before this process will convert them to iPhone format and sync them over before I wake up the next morning.

 Any Questions? Feel free to comment!

So it’s been forever since I have felt like writing a blog post. Mostly because I’ve been pretty busy getting things at OWL ramped up. I took 4 months off of contracting to get things going and now I am on another long term project out at Pfizer in Kalamazoo. But enough about that…

I’ve come to tell you about my current mac lineup beacuse I’m pretty sure life doesn’t get much better than this. I’ll list them in order of oldest to newest and explain.

Powermac G5 w/ 23″ Cinema (4GB of RAM) – Still an amazing machine used mostly for storage and watching movies while working on the iMac.
Original Mac Mini- Recently migrated over to OWL so that we could have a mac on site for testing and such.
13″ Macbook (2GB of RAM) - My wife’s fulltime notebook
24″ iMac 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo (4GB of RAM) – My primary PC that does everything from VMWare fusion software development to bitorrent and watching movies. I spend alot of time on this machine.
15″ 2.2ghz Macbook Pro (4GB of RAM) - Previously my primary notebook and now I am putting Windows on it via bootcamp and making it my development workhorse. Still trying to decide if I should go 64bit so I can take advantage of the 4GB of memory.
13″ Macbook Air (2GB of RAM) - My new beauty….oh is she amazing…my favorite mac laptop yet. A title previously held by my first mac laptop the iBook G4.

That’s all for now…pictures to come later….but judging by my post frequency you may not see them for another half a year