There are no words to describe how wrong this is....

I hope that this is a April fools leftover.... The part about the nanites is particularly amusing....

http://www.google.com/tisp/

I miss my headphones...

So many people on the bus have no concept that they are surrounded by people... They talk at the top of their lungs on their cell phones, one guy was face timing on his iphone. Yes we all know you are cool, no we don't care what your sisters kid daid this morning...

I used to use my headphones to block out the stupid people, really more for ear plugs than anything else, but I miss them. Nice lady sitting next to me still has the default beeping on her phone, so everything she is doing beeps... Just awesome.

Another day in NJ transit, thank god I am driving the rest of the week.

I'm going to call it ipaditist...

I bought the last two robert jordan books and have been enjoying them on my ipad, reading on the bus kills time more cost effectively than watching a movie when you get right down to it, but I noticed that my shoulder was hurting...

I finally put two and two together and confirmed it today while watching a video, if I sit holding my ipad in my hand while watching or reading, I end up with a very sore shoulder within 30 minutes that can last for days... Wonder if anyone else has this ailment, kindle, ipad, whatever..

Stefan

The other blog is finally live!

I know I know, but I couldn't resist actually doing some work in the new place now that we have it... so the blog kinda fell by the wayside. We took before and after pictures, but no video as of yet. The video of me getting hit in the face with a sheet of drywall probably would have got a lot of laughs, but oh well...

Check it out here:

http://ohcrapicantbelieveilistenedtoher.blogspot.com/

iPad: Did you know...

So I have been fighting, FIGHTING with my collegues at work to try and use my iPad as the productivity tool it should be.

First, they kicked me off the mobile sync server. This after a high level executive, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, gave me the information on how to find the server. So no more can I have my outlook calendar and emails on the iPad, arguably a serious benefit. Fine...

Second, they found my illegal (I didn't know it at the time, though to be honest I suspected it highly) wireless router in my office and remotely killed my network port, that was an interesting hour...

Third, They decided they would strip machines of logmein, so that I can no longer remote control my desktop from my bed and work on the weekends...

Forth, they found my wifi sharing function and somehow stopped that, it just doesn't want to work anymore, not sure why or how...

So I've almost given up using the iPad at work, except for taska and evernote, its really not all that useful anymore. I can't get documents onto it, or off of it, and since we don't have public WIFI except in starbucks downstairs, its really just a cool decoration on my desk...

Until I figure out another trick to get content onto it. If you load itunes on your workstation (which thus far has not been blocked, but clearly someone is reading my blog and will probably figure out how to block it) you can actually sync documents to the ipad without syncing the ipad its self. Huh? You say. Right well I have music, movies, apps etc etc on this thing that I don't have (or frankly want) on my work machine. So I don't actually want to sync the apps, I just want to be able to add a document to it. Now with this method I can easily just add a PDF to iAnnotate and go to my meeting.

Still a FAR cry from just opening up your email and clicking on the file you already had, but also a far cry from forwarding it to myself, or using google docs, then running downstairs to SB or piggy backing on our neighbors Wifi to get the information I need. If you don't want me to be productive at work, just tell me, I can play solitaire with the best of them....

Note, I actually can't, bores me to tears...

We finally got the deed to our house

OMG, so relieved to actually have this little piece of paper that says the house that i have been fighting to get for the last 6 months, is actually mine. I haven't been this happy to see a single piece of paper since my first paycheck from Phoenix International...

Now, the hard part starts. I have already had a glimpse of how much fun this will be with trying to get permits and play the he said she said game with my contractor about who should get the permits...:) Will actually publish the blog tomorrow (its over here at She Made me do it), while I have been writting my soul out on the blog, we didn't want to publish anything without it being official. Now I have to go back in time and get some of our initial images up and make the blog look halfway decent before I release the articles.

The new blog is going to be MUCH more interactive than my iPad one, with video, photo's and some give aways so get ready to enjoy...:)

iPad: Stanza app, alternate to iBooks

There is a large amount of free literature out there, some legal, some questionable, but most of it can't be read on the iPad without being converted, and even then... I had a large selection of books that I had converted to read on my iPad, and then an update made the iPad decide it didn't want to read epub format anymore.

Needless to say, since I was done reading most of the files, I didn't bother re-converting and trying to read in PDF in iBook... Then I found the stanza app. Other than just NOT being able to figure out how to change books, its pretty cool. You can zoom in and out by pinching, if you save the zoom level it applies it to the entire book so you can go grandma and read with 30 pt font, or exercise your eyes and read it at 6pt... the illumination level is cute, you swipe up or down to increase or decrease the backlight. It also has a questionable bookmark feature, which I haven't figured out a use for... maybe it was for when the app wouldn't continue running in the background? Bascially you "fold" the top right corner to remember your place, again cute.

Over all, the app is good with the exception of not knowing how to close the book and go to another. I had to settle for learning how to crash the app at will, you zoom, cancel, and change the luminosity while the system is resetting the page and it crashes...>.> don't fix it, I can't close the book without that bug!

Update: The latest release removed the bug that crashed the app! Luckily before that I figured out that if you single tap in the middle third of the screen a plethora of options open to you, allowing you to close the book, jump between chapters etc etc. It has all the features and functions of iBook without any of the annoying limitations.

iPad: Infinity Blade Reviewed

First of all, yes, this is the orgasmic eye candy it looks like in all the screen shots. The graphics are video quality, the fight scenes are at first intense and the game play is interesting.

Then it kind of falls apart. I won't add any spoilers here, but it gets repetitive quickly, the choose your own adventure style of play is limiting in that you are moving from fight scene to fight scene, and while you can make those fights as fast or as slow as you want, really that is all the content in the game.

Relax, you say, its only 6$. True, and for the 6$ its a tremendous start, it truly shows what the iPad COULD achieve if someone spent the R&D budget and came out with a 30$ game to provide content where I could, oh I don't know, MOVE my toon around this amazing world, where I had more than a single castle to investigate. Admittedly, I have only played the game for a couple of hours, and so haven't finished it yet. If it holds my attention long enough for me to get past the first boss I'll let you know if there is more coming, but if the entire game centers around killing this first boss then its not worth buying, except of course to show off your iPad's amazing graphic capabilities to your friends who are on the fence...:)

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm... say no more.

I've been a little pre-occupied with work, and with the game to really be doing much of anything else. Oh and there was jenn throwing out her back to add a little spice to life... But I was thinking over the last couple of days about my iPad and what I should write in the blog, and realized that I no longer think about the pad.. other than my fun of upgrading to 4.2 (bricked twice, long story) it's just a fact of life now, no longer a novelty.

I have seen a sharp increase in the number of iPads showing up at meetings, if only our company had WiFi in our office I think that it would take off even faster... I was thinking over a survey on one of the sites I frequent (www.tuaw.com) where they said what would make you buy an iPad 2.0. To be honest, I'll probably buy one with 3G... lame I know, but I'll use the 2.0 as an excuse to buy a 3G version next time around, even though I am using it almost exclusively for work, its hampered by the fact that we don't have WiFi and therefore its very hard to get documents on to it, and show up to meetings with the presentation in e-hand instead of printed out...

Still loving it, and theres a rumour going around that I am getting that Zagg case that I wrote about before for Christmas, can't wait...:)

What is it about a car that makes people feel so alone?

On the bus on the way home being amazed at how very many people are texting and driving.... When I see something I wish I hadn't..

Don't people realize that in a car, you are surrounded by 360 degrees of glass, and people? If you wouldn't do it in an elevator (don't get me started on things people do in elevators that they shouldn't) then you shouldn't do it in your car...

Zaggmate iPad Keyboard case, best of both worlds?

There have been a lot of clamshell cases that have come out over the lst couple of months that made me wonder, why buy an iPad if you are going to carry it around with a keyboard all the time... Since then however Jenn's been bed ridden, and I've been increasingly frustrated with trying to use my iPad as a complete computing solution. Logmein is good, but annoying without a keyboard, the constant scrolling etc, is irritating so this case actually looks appealing to me.



To be honest, I am still not sure if I want to make fun of it, or buy it... what do you all think? Given that I bought the iPad, and don't have an option to buy the new Mac Book Air (which is thinner than the iPad btw) this might be a good direction to go in...

This comes from my favorite blog out there for all things iPad: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/11/09/zaggmate-ipad-keyboard-case-joins-the-fray/

Experimenting with blackberry and attachments

Not sure what will happen if I do this, so consider this a test post. Emailing in a picture from my bb

----- Original Message -----
From: Stefan Desrosiers
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2010 10:29 PM
To: Stefan Desrosiers
Subject: IMG00008-20101023-2229.jpg

Where in the world is Desrosiers?!

I know I know, I have been sorely lacking in updates these days, but between work and trying to buy a foreclosed house I have not had much spare time. Did I mention Jenn blew out her back with 4 bulging disks?

So yeah been a little busy, tend to fall asleep on the bus despite best intentions otherwise. If this house deal goes through will also be starting a blog dedicated to that, unfortunate "she made me do it" and "I can't believe I agreed to this" are taken on blogspot...

Why does CW's web site suck

OK, forgetting for a moment that CW has mostly chick tv shows... it has the occasional Gem like Nikita and Hellcats (Whats not to love about a bunch of nubile young women bouncing around for 45 minutes? But serious, when it takes 1.5 hours to watch 45 minutes, even 20 nubile bouncy women aren't enough to make anyone but the truly desperate hang around... why does their site suck so much? Did they buy all their hardware from the google garage sale? Yeash, anyone else have a bad experience with CW?

More miss adventures in nj transit...

Walking to the bus stop this morning, ok fine I drive to the bottom of my street then walk 20 feet to the bus stop, I managed to miss 2 busses... Then the next one was full and the bus driver declines to even slow down and give us the option of standing...

All this for a low low 230$ a month, a real bargain.

Rain + nj transit = long trip home...

Seems like for every 1/2 inch of rain that falls in ny I add a 1/2 to my commute, anyone else having a long commute tonight?

iPad: hulu plus problems on iPad

Not sure about the rest of you but I am having a lot of trouble with hulu plus on the iPad these days. I have been trying to connect for the last couple of days and it just sits on hulu plus splash screen and I get no further.

I tried using my bb to tether to iPad on the way home one day, and the quality was weak at best. This is probably because I wasn't in 3G coverage area, and I was impressed that hulu would step down the quality of video to keep you moving along, but over the 1 hour bus ride I only managed to watch30 minutes of video, extremely frustrating.

Over al, I am not impressed with hulu plus at all, however I have tried to use netflix to complete my review of heroes back seasons, and netflix on the iPad sucks pretty bad too... Starting to wonder if my iPad is borked...

iPad: Hulu Plus a week in review

OK so I've been playing with Hulu plus a little more and there are some additions to my first post that I need to make.

1. Yes you can add things to your Queue as well as subscribe to a show... its kind of nice how they were seperated, but you have to visit the shows page in order to add episodes to your queue. I now have 150+ back episodes waiting for me to watch.
2. I haven't been watching it on my iPad as much, I got an iMac and have been using that ever since I put my Lazy boy in front of it... hard to beat such a large screen though I will be trying to tether watch a show tonight to see how that goes... ran out of pre-loaded content.
3. There are still commercials, and they are still really annoying... There are less commercials than if you had watched it live, but I was having internet problems the other night and Hulu was having trouble getting commercials to me, so they put up this message for 30 seconds that tells you how you need to allow them to show you videos to support the free content... but wait, I'm paying you for this...

Over all, I'd say that Hulu plus would be a good summer investment, when there is little to nothing on tv and you want to back fill your tv with old content you may have missed, but I am not sure I will stick with it for too long.. there are still shows that you can't see anymore than 5 episodes of because of Hulus contracts with the various networks, so its not an open all you can see buffet as its hyped to be, its still limited and a little lame. Still for 10$ a month, its not a terrible deal.

iMac: Manual of Shortcuts for a PC owner

OK so its been about a week since I got my iMac and I'm still impressed... I tried out iPhoto (which i will review later) as well as surfing, Starcraft 2, and watching hulu. On the 27 inch screen its hard to find fault with anything. Remote controlling another computer does usually require that you zoom in to be able to see the entire screen from 4 ft away.

This brings us to the first of the short cuts. Holding down control and rolling your fingers forward on your magic mouse will zoom in on the mouse cursor. Repeat by pulling back and you zoom out again. This isn't some lame make the font bigger bs, it really is zooming in on your screen. Clarity remains the same and it is handy for those wtf moments when you can't read something on a web site, or when trying to find Waldo. If you don't get that last reference, go ask your mom.

Other things that are annoying as a hard core PC geek, there is no Home, End, Page up or Page down on the mini wireless keyboard that I have. Control to the rescue again...

Page up: Control key and arrow up
Page down: Shocker here, control key and arrow down.
Home: Control __ and back arrow
End: Control __ and end arrow.

The universal use of the delete key for backspace or delete is annoyingish too, for example when trying to get to a new web site in safari you have to clear the contents you can't just click inside and start typing, so you have to backspace through the contents. At least that is until your wife (who did I mention has had a mac for 5 years and is Tickled pink to be MY IT department for once?) says just click three times to select everything.

Now for text editing and other uses:

%A: Select all
%C: Copy
%X: Cut
%Z: Undo
%V: Paste

There are some really wild short cuts in the mac, with keyboard symbols I have never seen before and can't find for the life of me.. once I figure out how to represent them, and how to use them I'll update this post, and hopefully you'll see what I mean....:)

iMac: Wall Mounting your iMac 27"

So the smaller version of the iMac does not support wall mounting, but this bad boy does.. Have I mentioned how large this thing is? Man, anyways, getting it up on the wall and getting yourself about 4 ft away seems to be in order, of course then the fonts too small, so you need to increase your perscription lenses...

Mounting it on the wall is simple enough, you need a Vesa compliant wall mount. There are any number of those out there from 15$ to 100$. Not sure about the rest of you, but mounting my over priced iMac on the wall hanging off of a 15$ vesa mount makes me a little nervous...

Getting the mount on is no problem, there is a little "access key" in the kit that you buy from Apple or Best Buy. This is basically a blank credit card... You slide it up the base under the screen until it hits something, then give a small push and the screen flops forward. Don't worry, it doesn't fall off, it just leans all the way forward.

Now lay the screen down on a protected surface and remove the stand with the tool provided. 8 screws later, and you are ready to attach the hinge portion of the vesa assembly. 8 more screws and the hinge is on. Ok for those of you looking at the kit atm, its not really a hinge, but you'll agree that's the best way to describe the small piece of metal that sits in the middle of the kit.

Once the Hinge is on the computer, you attach the vesa adaptor to it with the 2 screws provided. For those of you doing what I did, and swearing that the holes don't line up, in the back middle of the plate there is another screw you have to screw in, this basically pulls the holes into alignment, its not for decoration..So, 8 screws to hold this little piece of metal onto the back of my computer, then 2 screws to hold that to the plate.. the plate will be attached to the vesa mount by 4 screws... anyone see a weak link here?

Wall side prep is easy, locate a stud or two and attach the mounting bracket to the wall. Make sure its level, make sure that you measure so that you don't hit that bookshelf above your old monitor etc.. Now make sure that you use whatever washers etc are required to ensure that the thing doesn't pull out of the wall, and don't use a dry wall plug to secure this, it weighs 20+ lbs, not something you want dangling off of drywall imo...

Once all thats done you just have to "drop" it into place, plug it back in and enjoy. If you didn't buy the apple remote you'll be kicking yourself, this thing really is bad ass.