Feature

Wild Wild West

Miles Driven: 1,100+
States Visited: 3
Seeing tons of cool sites: Priceless

Earlier this month, Cressie and I took a trip out West. On the trip, we went through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, visiting Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, Valley of Fire State Park, Brianhead Ski Resort, Zion National Park, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, and Red Rocks Canyon. If you want a nice overview of our trip on a map, check this out! If you want to see the pictures, they are all here and the highlights will slowly be added to Flickr. For a more in-depth description of the trip, read on!

Read more

Rock Boat IX

trb_logoEvery year for the past several years, I have gone on a cruise known as The Rock Boat. This is a week-long cruise where approximately 30 bands are on board, and there are concerts every day from about 12 noon until 3am.

This year I had not been planning on going – I chose instead to use the money for the my 10 day trip out West to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, and skiing at Brianhead (we are leaving for this trip in less than 2 weeks!). The past few weeks leading up to the cruise I had a lot of people trying to talk me into going.

Read more

Comcast Customer Service

Update – see end for update

Recently, while looking at my Comcast Bill, I decided to look at their current offerings. To my surprise, I ran across the “Digital Double Play” package. For only $66 they offer their Digital Cable package with Channel 1 on Demand, plus High Speed Internet. My current package is Limited Basic Cable ($18.95) with Performance Plus Internet ($52.95) for a total of ~$70. (As an aside, it is a total rip off that they tack on a $15 fee for not doing cable. When I signed up, I just wanted internet, only to find that there was a $15 charge per month for having “only” internet. My choices were to pay $15 for nothing, or $18 for limited basic)

Read more

Gallery 2 and Eye-Fi Memory Card

For the uninitiated, the Eye-Fi memory card is a SD memory card with wireless capabilities built in, allowing automated uploading of your images as you take them without requiring a connection to a computer. You simply walk to a hotspot or a wireless access point you have registered with and your images are uploaded to the web for you.

With that being said, here is the problem:

Read more

‘Downgrading’ from 7200 RPM HD to 5400 RPM HD sees speed increase?

My Macbook Pro was purchased in spring of 2006. At the time, I decided to choose the one hard drive Apple offered that was 7200 RPM – specifically, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB drive (ST910021AS). Over the past year or so, I found myself constantly running out of disc space, and decided it was time to do something about it. I decided upon the Western Digital Scorpio drive – a 320GB drive that is 5400RPM (WD3200BEVT).

Upon first look at the new drive specifications I was a little worried, as I wasn’t sure the effect dropping down from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive would have on my systems performance.

Read more