iPad 2 – The purchase

Just a short post to tell you something you may have expexted…

After much anticipation, the iPad2 was released into the Australian wild minutes ago, as I do not have an apple store near me, I chose to online ordering method, reserving my iPod 16 hours ahead of those who are as we speak, lining up out front of apple stores all over the continent… the only catch… and it is a sizable one… I now discover the shipping time estimate is 2-3 weeks… oh well, all I can do is hope they overestimated their lead time.

For those interested in what flavour I secured, I ordered the;

Apple Releases the iPad 2

Well it happened at 4am our time this auspicious morning, Apple released it’s hotly anticipated iPad2. In a succinct way, I just wanted to recap the highlights for those interested.

The questions that have been on the mind of every gadget guru have been “What will the iPad 2 do to secure its place?” “Will it fail?” “Will it rise to the challenge of new competitors like the Motorola Xoom?” The tablet market is hostile but Apple did what they do best, they create and sell their products at the intersection of Technology and Liberal arts with an added module called lifestyle, you see, they do not sell the product so much as they do the experience.

So, without further waffling… what will it sport?

NodePony

I know this is not in line with the theme of my blog… but I thought I would share it anyway.

Some time ago I was linked to an internode blog article, for those of you who are not familiar with internode, they are an ISP (internet service provider) and they happen to by my provider of choice, I have recommended many people go to them for good service, reasonable prices etc… but I digress… The article I speak of is regarding nodepony… it is a rather tongue in cheek piece of editorial prowess by Simon Hackett (commander in chief over there at Internode) containing comments like this…

Geeky Nostalgia

The over-arching tone of my blog is indeed a Spiritual one, and that is not changing, however, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was once well and truly ensconced in geekdom, that mysterious culture, where building computers and tinkering with cutting edge software is the norm and you look with disdain upon the masses who simply “use” computers, however, something happened, REAL LIFE arrived, my time was absorbed more and more by my business, spiritual pursuits/church etc and then one day it happened, I unscrewed my hard drive which was in my custom built box, and robbed it for business use in my Mac, along with it’s monitor.

Since that time, I have been a “user”, never tinkering too much, foregoing the excitement of the Linux world I used to enjoy, taking the proprietary and slick OS X  as my daily work-horse, I traversed the slopes of life, until yesterday…

Video Camera

For a while now I have had the Sony DCRSR47S video camcorder, unfortunately like most other cameras in it’s price-range it records in mpeg2 meaning there is no real nice way or pulling it into an NLE like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier, so I have somewhat used it half-heartedly, never really having the time or inclination to figure it out, so this week I

Social Experiment:Conclusion (and Part2)

Well, we are at the end of my social experiment. i have learned much.

1: I have been sleeping better as screen time immediately before going to bed ruins your best sleep. (i have replaced this with reading)

2: Work life has been more productive, i am acquiring more clients and completing their jobs in more streamlined and focused ways.

3: I Have been having more time with my family which is reward in and of itself.

4: I have had more time to develop my guitar playing abilities (this has been a real blessing)

5: Last but not least i have had a more real awareness and quality time with God.

I have now decided to institute Phase:2, removing my previous rule of 1 browse per week on Saturday nights. I will now leave it up to my own discretion for 1 week, and see if the old habits return, if they do, I will again apply some rules to my browsing habits.

Assuming all go’s well, I won’t be on here often, but rest assured I will be around 🙂

I strongly encourage you all to look at your life, find the time wasters… and deal with them.

Blessings to you all.

Luke,

Tech History – Chronicles of Glitch

Well it all started on that fateful day… the 29th of April 1996 when I awoke on the morning of my 8th birthday, to find a shiny, very cool, AMD 486DX based, Windows 3.1 rig, (the CPU of which can still be found on my shelf for posterity) this was a true shock to me, a computer was the pinnacle of ‘awesome’ as far as I was concerned, and I had one at my command, granted, all I used it for was Dangerous Dave Warcraft1 and Llamaxtron, but it was the first taste, the gateway, if you will, to the Tech Odyssey my life soon became…

A few short years later, there was the purchase of a family computer, an IBM Aptiva no less, with it’s snazzy Heart, bearing the inscription “AMD K6 200Mhz” this Machine of legend was the conduit of my first internet experience, my first CD burning exercise, not to mention my first foray into the worlds of SimCity and Age of EmpiresII… I was never the same…

All of a sudden, information was at my fingertips it was like the Raw data was coursing through my veins, and coolness was oozing from my every pore… I had an email address, and not just any email address… a Hotmail address, I signed up for this under the tuition of a certain Friend by the name of Megan (AKA:Megie, Spot, Venus, and many more) and if i have any luck at all, she will not be able to recall and post what the address was…

My next problem was a familiar one to most of us… an economic problem… I lacked the ‘economy’ to purchase a Laptop which was truly the desire of my heart, so i dreamed about it and talked about it, until it was an all-consuming hunger for portable computing, at which time I began washing cars to earn enough of the folding stuff to accomplish my goal.

I became a master of suds for about 2 years at which point I became the master (and commander) of my Duron Powered Compaq Presario 735, my first Windows XP based rig, it was more than excellent until it failed, failed and … yep… you guesed it… failed again, at this point HP conceded that there was a major problem and gave me a newer Athlon Based Compaq which served me well through my highschooling.

By another twist of fate, after years of faithful service it broke down although, this time, it was lost by the repair agent and to make a long story a medium length one, i was awarded an Intel Centrino based Presario V4004 for my trouble, and this was the machine upon which i discovered the Performance enhancing Drug they call ‘Broadband’ and what an addictive substance it was, as a matter of fact, 4 years on and i STILL have not been able to get off it…

Presario V4004

With the advent of this ‘Broadband’ i found the wonderful online world of Forums, my first brush with these Knowledge infested playgrounds, was over at Atomic (the forum attached to a niche Tech Magazine i was fond of at the time) thankfully this was in the golden days of atomic when it was actually a cool place to be, back in the days of legend when Ashton Mills was still the editor, there was no such thing as advertorials and they were still owned by AJB Publishing. It was there in those dank caverns i learned the dark arts of IT, and in time Built my own Rig which became affectionately known as Beast Box 1.0, it had the power of an AMD 3800+ X2 coursing through its circuits and 2 Gig of RAM feeding the fire it was here, on this Rig that i truly developed a love of Linux i traversed many different distros until i arrived at Debian… and thus i lived in the Raw, beautiful, frustrating and dangerous lands of Linux for the next 2 years, all the while shunning the evil rolling fields of Windows.

Beast Box 1.0

It was During the Tenant of Beastbox 1.0 that i discovered my next forum, a better, smarter, more potent forum, there were fewer people,but the attitude and knowledge displayed by the denizens of this Utopian forum was unlike any online culture i have seen before or since, this Valhalla of the internet was speedlabs.org.

It was there, in that backwater corner of the internet, I discovered my love for Graphic Design, at the beginning i was using the Free linux graphics application, called ‘GIMP’ little did i know, this was merely a stepping stone on my journey…

At this time i was working for Leading Edge Electronics , my Manager, a devoted macolyte, Taught me how to sell the range of Mac computers… over the coming months I would sell many of these peculiar white computers, and eventually after convincing so many customers of their benefits, indeed, i convinced myself…

Today my Workstation is adorned with the lofty, regal figure of a Dual CPU, Dual Core Xeon powered, Mac Pro, 2 LCD screens for the Graphic Design work i now do, thanks to the skills Speedlabs inspired me to find, no longer do i use GIMP but the Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash etc.

My Current Workstation

However, not being ready to Let go of my Linux Heritage, I now also possess a 7″ Asus eeepc, their ulltra-portable laptop, which runs linux, right out of the box, this is what i use for most of my blogging and chatting.

Thus you now have the whole story, my Tech life is forever recorded in the blogosphere of history.

feel free to make comments

I Serve a Great God

Ok, I know not all you out there are of a Christian mind and i respect that but for those of you who are…

Here is something awesome that happened today… today was the regional day at Church where (in our case) the 3 churches in our “Region” all come to one church and the conference president for SE QLD comes and says “Hi” (basically they take the church service/sermon and in the arvo, show a presentation of what happened over the last year in our division plus statistics/numbers et al.)

Our musical team includes an organ, a piano and a guitar (with an occasional sax) while the worship leader leads with a keyboard but today just before worship began, the KB amp went dark, died, karked it, croaked, whatever you want to call it is fine with me, the end-game was we have no KB and that is NOT GOOD, being a church there are many wise people about, from the upstairs sound room, I saw 2 people go and kneel over the amp and begin to pray, I couldn’t think of anything so I joined them with a silent prayer from where I was seated at the sound desk…

I then went about my business, basically ignoring that part of the situation, suddenly I felt impressed to go down and see if there was anything I missed… I ran down the stairs, had a look, and it was still obvious that something in there was toasted, so the next logical link in the chain of thought is to hook the keyboard straight upto the church soundsystem, however, the plugs I had access to were not the same type as what was required for the Keyboard

I then had an impression so strong it was almost as if someone had literally told me, “The Conference guy has one” now I know it sounds odd, but much earlier he had mentioned this handy adaptor he had for his laptop should we need it, (we didn’t) so i ran through the pews to this guy and asked him for that adapter he was reffering to earlier, he looked more than a little confused as he gave it to me and as you have likely guessed it was the exact adapter I needed, 2 clicks and the worship service was better than ever.

Later I Discovered that those two wonderful ladies who prayed, did not pray for it to be fixed, They prayed for God to Send someone to fix it, it was a simple fix but i take no credit for thinking of it, that was the Greatest Technician of all.

Hope that bought you some light.

|G|Luke|