Glitch: Where Webkinz Meets Dr. Seuss in The Shire!

The GeekMoms drew me into this new world of video gaming: the MMORPG.

"The WHAT?"

I know, many of my readers (hi Mom and Dad!) may not have heard that term, so allow me to educate you.  MMORPG = Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.

A couple fellow GeekMoms got to be alpha- and beta-testers for this new game called Glitch.  It went public on September 27th, and is amazingly addictive!  If you know a player, you can get in pretty quickly, but if not, it's about a 48-hour wait for the official invitation once you give them your e-mail address.

Once you're in, you choose your avatar, undergo a little keyboard/mouse-ology on how to navigate the Glitch-world, and then you're set out into the wild.

Like Webkinz, you're responsible for the care and feeding of your avatar (grow/buy food, earn money, make a living, get educated, get a house, etc.), and the visuals are similar to an elaborate Dr. Seuss novel!

I set up two accounts, one is my own avatar, and the other is one that the boys can use (I control the login and password, of course!)

Here's my Glitch window from this morning.  Impressive that this is all web-based, so I can play from anywhere (dangerous!).  I'm standing in the center of the space, with my dusty-rose colored hair and all.  My name is "Scruffette" (Jacob's idea), and you can see here that I'm chatting with fellow GeekMom "ChaosMandy" in a window on the right.  she was giving me some help with how to earn enough money to buy a house.

Check out GeekMom Lissa's review of the game, she was a beta-tester and is now on level 10,000 or something like that now....

Pay No Attention, Nothing to See Here....

This is just a filler post to run a fun little experiment.  I am going to compare RSS Graffiti with Networked Blogs and see which syndication posts to my Facebook page faster.

I'm leaning towards keeping RSS Graffiti because it didn't require the widget on my site, nor did it require me to pick 5 blogs to follow like Networked Blogs does (note -- I proceeded with the registration after only selecting two blogs to follow: Fotomom and Sergeant Major Mom).  If I keep Networked Blogs I will add more to follow.

My First-Ever Blog Post, Revisited!

...which wasn't on this blog.

It was on MySpace in July 2006.

that's just the link to one blog.  To see everything I wrote between July 2006 and August 2007 -- I stood up this Blogger.com blog in December 2007 -- use this link and select the "More" button at the bottom of the page until you get to July 2007 posts.

I'm guessing most of you won't care, and that's okay.  I barely care myself.  I hadn't been to MySpace in quite some time and it's way different  now.  In fact, it's not even really "MySpace", but "My_".  Really???  I connected my Facebook and Twitter accounts to it -- so it isn't sitting absolutely dormant, but really I don't pay that site much mind anymore.

Enjoy!

R.I.P. Webcam (for now...)

The webcam on my HBTS Rexford St. Weather Underground setup is dead.

I don't think it's the webcam itself, it's most likely the laptop that was hosting the webcam.  That dastardly "kitchen laptop" that I've kept alive all. these. years.

Anyhoo, since the screen on the laptop isn't working, I have to plug it into our TV with a VGA cable to see what it's up to.  For all I know, it's probably some update to the software that I need to download or something like that.

I'll check it out later this week -- I've a bunch of odds and ends to tend to.  New license plate for the Prius (switching from Nebraska back to Florida), squaring away our Family Care Plan, and finally squaring away our claims from our move.

In the meantime, I've removed the blankness on the tag to the right so conserve a little space.

CrashPlan Status: UNSUCCESSFUL

Not a complete fail, but a "mostly" fail.

Today I officially gave up on the CrashPlan 30 Day free trial to send files to "the cloud": the CrashPlan Central offsite servers.  I had a 30 day free trial to try this out, and after 27 days, I had only uploaded 60% of the files.

I didn't get enough time to test restoring the files after a full upload, therefore I cut my losses and will do backup another way.

Besides, with the recent news about Mozy, I wonder how much longer "all you can eat" offsite data storage will remain affordable.

By the way, until the end of February, CrashPlan is offering a 15% discount to Mozy customers who are bailing because of Mozy's recent price schedule changes.

Paul and I attempted some file transfers to each other, but that wasn't very stable either.  Our network settings had to be very precise to maintain a connection.  Paul's fiber broadband pushed about 2/3 of his files to me, but my slower connection only allowed us to give him about 1/3 of the files.  I have dynamic IP addressing -- so a system reboot would change up our settings and kill the connection.  We pushed our respective computers into our firewall's DMZs, which made me incredibly nervous, and if that's how we had to keep things permanently, that was also a no-go.

I will caveat things to say that it wasn't a complete wash.  Without paying, you can still use the CrashPlan GUI to manage in-house backups free of charge, as well as backups to friends.  I'm probably going to stick with that.  It's the only GUI that allows "cross-flow" between PCs and Macs.  It also allows you to attach external HDs and network-attached-storage into the setup.  Other programs, such as Mozy and Carbonite, have restrictions on that.

While I'd read dozens of testimonies to how great CrashPlan worked for their individual needs, I feel that our family's network setup simply wasn't going to support things.  We have an AT&T DSL connection coming into the house that typically allows for about 7 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speeds.  When CrashPlan was running, those speeds dwindled down to about 20-40%.  Especially when CrashPlan was running on our PC and was uploading data to CrashPlan Central.

We couldn't watch videos anywhere else on our network (i.e. via Netflix streaming, Wii or on YouTube on our computers), so I removed Crashplan from the PC and suddenly things sped up.

This morning I re-installed CrashPlan on the PC but cut it off from external network connections.  I am hopeful that will be okay.  I will keep it to back up our 3 computers' files to each other, and we at least have that.  Better than nothing, right?

In the meantime, I'm pricing 2 TB external HDs and will be replacing our two smaller external HDs for day-to-day backups.

Like Watching Paint Dry

Paul and I have gone nearly a week uploading to each others' computers with CrashPlan.  It's been quite successful, in that we are successfully connecting to each others' computers consistently.  That's the good news.

The bad news is that I'm seeing just how slow my AT&T DSL network is.  I purposefully selected a data plan that matches what we'd need it for the most -- which did not include extreme gaming or running a small business.  Something middle-of-the-road.

With his FiOS network on the East Coast, Paul has already uploaded all his data (nearly 100 GB) to "the cloud", while I'm less than 10% through.  No fiber availability in my area, unfortunately.

Paul's upload rate to my own machine is more than twice as fast as my upload to him.

At my house, we're also challenged with trying to do other things on our network while CrashPlan is active, like uploading pictures and videos.  I have to shut down the data transfer if we're doing particularly important work.

Ever the optimist, I really want to see this through - I wholeheartedly believe that once the initial transfers occur, you can leave Crashplan on and it does periodic updates only...requiring much less bandwidth.

Fingers crossed!

CrashPlan Update

Isn't Schoolhouse Rock the BEST????  I Googled images for "Hooray" and this scene from the episode on "Interjections" appeared.

Yesterday we had success! Paul and I did a couple more tweaks with our respective firewalls, and after dinnertime, the grey lights turned green on our CrashPlan GUIs!

This point-to-point uploading is going much much faster than uploading to CrashPlan Central (i.e., "The Cloud"). Paul's machine to mine = 4.1 GB in about 12 hours, my machine to his = 1.7 GB in about 12 hours.

All of this is faster than my uploading to CrashPlan Central.

If this is successful, then perhaps I'll pick up a 2 TB external HD at Best Buy and use this as my official backup plan. What we're doing right now is experimental, lots of band-aids in place to make this work, but I need a long term plan still.

Free, Easy, Automatic Backup???

I called it. On Saturday I enrolled in CrashPlan for the 30-day free trial and so far I'm not that impressed. Their website claims "Free, Easy, Automatic Backup". So far, no.

Paul kindly offered to sign up also -- we can always backup to each others' machines with the CrashPlan GUI without charge -- and we've spent the past 48 hours attempting to connect to each others' computers without success. Too many firewalls, port settings and over-my-head troubleshooting going on here. Paul and I exchanged no less than 30 e-mails last night bouncing different ideas to make this work. Most of the ideas were his...since he's the one who does IT stuff for a living and understands it more than I do.

I guess using iChat or IM might have been easier to discuss this, but for some reason we didn't.

Until we get the point-to-point backup working, I have a batch of files uploading to "CrashPlan Central" which is their offsite server system. This is what I'd have to pay a monthly fee for if I choose to go beyond the 30-day trial.

Unfortunately, the backup to "the cloud" has been taking FOREVER. I have a 77 GB package I'm trying to upload (pictures, music, videos) and after 4 1/2 days, 7.9 GB has been uploaded.

Go ahead, do the math. About 10.5% uploaded in 4.5 days = 47.25 days to upload this batch of data. And this is only from the MacBook! This doesn't include the PC's data (another 125 GB).

One of the things I did to try to speed things up was direct-connect the Mac to the DSL modem, taking the computer off the WiFi altogether. I also closed everything this Mac was using that involved the Internet. Things like the webcam, weather station and my iPhone on the Wireless were still taking down the bandwidth periodically.

CrashPlan offers to send you an external hard drive to directly upload to, which caught my attention at first, but for $125 for that service, I figured the time would be cheaper.

I understand that once this initial upload completes, the worst of it will be over and we'll have our data in place. I'll see how this does through the weekend. If I see better progress, this might be worth keeping...but so far, I'm not quite impressed.

Our Weather Station is BACK!

We re-assembled our weather station in our backyard over the weekend. We have plenty of fenceline to choose from, and you can't see the equipment from the street (always a bonus in a deed-restricted neighborhood).

You can see current conditions on the right-hand column of the blog now, or you can click on the "sticker" and save that page to your favorites.

We also have several other local weather stations with which we can compare our data. I'm not quite sure our wind vane/anemometer set is high enough off the ground, we have some wind direction inconsistencies that we'll monitor for the next several days.

It's nice to have this back, especially for rainfall information...we can use that data to assess whether I have to water plants.

RIP Kitchen Laptop, June 2000 - February 2010

Okay, maybe I'm jumping the gun a little by considering it dead already since technically it's still serving its purpose.

For those who had been following the adventures of my poor dilapidated Dell Inspiron 4100 "Kitchen Laptop" (yeah, I'm sure I'm so popular that you guys are following my laptop), yesterday was another step in the eventual death of a computer that I REFUSE TO LET DIE! After getting my Macbook in April 2009, the "Kitchen Laptop" (as it was fondly named when we got to NC in 2005), actually became the "Living Room Laptop" as it hosts our weather webcam pointing out our front living room window.

The screen stopped working. I had made a point to nix all screen savers/sleep/hibernate modes on this laptop a couple of rebuilds ago because of its inability to come out of sleep. Like it went into a coma, and the only way out was a cold restart. So when I walked past our laptop in the living room yesterday, I should have seen the webcam image fully across the screen. It's the only non-critical software on the laptop now, in fact. A copy of "TinCam" runs in full screen with the image in real-time. Every minute, the current image is FTPed to Weather Underground for posting to our weather station's website.

If you're reading this via my Blogger page, that image is to your right. If you're on Facebook, you can see the image here.

So I know the Kitchen Laptop is working. It's sending out the webcam images. In fact, I'm sure if I hauled our desktop's monitor over to the laptop, I could plug it in, hit "Function + F5" and see the screen just fine. I know what the problem is.

But I don't feel like taking the time to continue to troubleshoot. I feel like a caretaker for a very old pet, or a very old human even. Once the computer, pet, person gets too old, is surgery going to really help the individual get better? Does the risk of surgery outweigh the benefits of the surgery?

Instead, I'm goin' SHOPPING!

I've been interested in the new Dell Inspiron Zino for it's stylish appearance and ability to customize to exactly what we want. I think this is what we'll end up getting, thanks to Dell's Military Employee Purchase Program. Free shipping and decent discounts on the Zino.

As for hosting our webcam, Dave's 4.5-year-old Gateway laptop can do that. The hinge supporting the screen is broken, so one has to prop open the lid to do work on it, but it's otherwise a good computer.

NOTE: I took some time the other night and was reading through my first blog posts from January 2008. Boy was I funny! And boy was the posting profuse! I need to do better than I have been. Perhaps I need more going on in my life than all this snow. Now that some of my blog posts are contributing to another website, I'll definitely be keeping my eyes out for more weather items to post about. Another snowstorm coming up this weekend???

iPhoto -- For a Good Laugh

So I'm having a grand old time working on organizing my photos on my Macbook.  There's software called "iPhoto" that seems quite intelligent.

I've already imported all my pictures from our desktop (32,000+ photos, about 30GB).

So one of the features I'm having fun with is iPhoto's Face Recognition program.  Called "Faces", based on a few initial tags in your photo albums, "Faces" will run through all your other photos and attempt to find other pictures that also have that particular face.

If done right, you can tag the faces on your photo, then upload them to something like Facebook, where the tags will also upload.

iPhoto also then categorizes all the photos by face, so if you click on "Howie", ideally you'd see all photos where our dog, Howie, has been tagged.

As you can see in the first picture here, at the beginning of the "Faces" listing, iPhoto does a pretty good job matching my faces. But then, as you scroll down, you see some other faces appear: Jacob and even Maryann the Fotomom.


This was GREAT when I was tagging pictures of Dave.  Every white person with glasses showed up: Joe (Dave's college roommate), Wendy Warlick, both Andy AND Suzy McNabb, our friend Bill from grad school, even a number of officers I worked with in the desert recently, especially if he had glasses!

Dave was wearing his military hat with Captain's bars in several of his pictures, so one of the "Faces" that appeared was of a four-month-old Jacob wearing Daddy's Captain's hat.  Ha ha!

It's certainly a good laugh...fortunately, as you go through each pass of tagging photos, you can run "Faces" again and each attempt will be improved.

A Revolution in the Vollmer House!

The kitchen laptop has officially been REPLACED!

Finally!

I haven't been this excited about computer stuff in a really long time -- I've been looking forward to getting a new laptop for many months, and for once I was going to save up and get something I REALLY wanted.

After those months in the desert, getting kicked off the WiFi just because someone with a Macbook sits next to me got quite old.

So today I marched down to the Apple Store in West Omaha, took advantage of their "Personal Shopper" service and walked out of there with a Macbook of my very own!  It's AMAZING!  It immediately hopped onto my WiFi (yes, after I gave it the security code) and I was surfing SO FAST!

A couple weeks ago Dave's laptop ran into some troubles with the hinge that keeps the computer open, so he's contemplating getting a Macbook of his own.  They're offering a military discount, which made it even more appealing!  He's taking a trip in a couple weeks so it'd be nice if he had a new computer to take along.

The Macbook I got was the most basic of the aluminum models (there's a white model that costs less, but the aluminum seemed more durable), which has a special multi-function touch pad, it doesn't work like a typical PC-laptop touch pad, you have to learn some new moves for scrolling and zooming in and out...much like what you can do with an iPhone.  It has a built-in webcam, which is nice, and when I plugged in my iPhone to it, it automatically synced with iCalendar, iPhotos, iTunes and my Address Book.  I didn't have to do a thing!

Surfing the web has been like lightning, and even task-intensive sites like Facebook have been a breeze to navigate.  I haven't had this easy a time with our PCs since we moved to Omaha.

So it case you hadn't noticed, I'm pretty excited about this.

I'll leave you with this silly picture of me, taken from the built-in webcam. You can see how happy I am:

Weather Webcam Fun

Now that I'm home, I'm slowly getting back to normal. One of the things that was on my mind while I was away was setting up one of our webcams (that we used to keep in touch during my deployment) as a weather webcam, that connects to our home weather station.

So here you go. Have some fun and scroll down on the webcam page to the calendar and select "View Video" to see a daily 24-hour loop. This will look better in 2-3 days when we have some steady-state views. I've been adjusting the timestamp, viewing angle and resolution so it isn't perfect at the moment.

You can also look to the right and see the new, improved weather sticker for our weather station. The weather observation is from our backyard, while the webcam is pointing out our front window, aimed towards the north-northwest. It's supposed to auto-update about once a minute.

If you want a quick look at the past 24-hours' weather, play the video below. Pardon the quality if you view this before mid-day Thursday:

Check My New Widget on the Right!

Now you can see my Twitter statuses, which are also my Facebook statuses!

One Status to Rule Them All!

Happy Place

Greetings from a happy place! Today has been a good day. I got some 9 hours of sleep yesterday and the weather I help to forecast has finally calmed down from the ridculousness I experienced my first week here. After this blog post I plan to hit the gym for a nice long run on the treadmill (it's dusty here so I'm not sure I want to be outside much longer).

Let me start with a little history. From my very first blog post, I've told stories of my "kitchen laptop". This is the computer I have with me in the Middle East...it's circa 2000, so I've no qualms if something bad happens to it, except for all the pictures I have saved to the hard drive. When I'm at home, I don't even save things to this hard drive. It's a "dummy" machine, merely for websurfing and until recently, it played host to our home weather station. It doesn't even host the weather station anymore, since the computer here now here instead of at home.

Click Here for more adventures of the Kitchen Laptop.

I'm writing you this post from a table in the Bra NOWHERE NEAR AN OUTLET! These batteries are great! I've had the laptop unplugged for 55 minutes so far and only used 13% of the battery life.

I'd been running into keyboard problems lately and I figured out it was related to the keyboard being cold. So every time I power down the laptop, then turn it back on, it'd be about 10 minutes before the space bar, "v", "b", and "n" keys would respond to typing.

Over the weekend I was sitting outside early one morning with the computer -- the temperatures were probably in the 40s -- and for the entire time I had the computer powered up, I couldn't get those four keys to work. The keyboard never warmed up.

At home, I'd keep this computer on all the time...and the keyboard usually would be there for me whenever I needed it.

So...now that I have working laptop batteries, I can keep the computer on all the time...all I have to do is unplug it and walk over to the Bra area for WiFi access. And my keyboard is here for me when I need it.

This is great! I love that I can blog freely whenever I'm off duty...and not wander around with my power cord for 5-10 minutes looking for someone to leave -- like a car driving around a crowded mall parking lot waiting for someone to pull out of a parking space.

The signs with the red stop signs are warning not to plug in multi-outlet surge protector strips. This is at the BX WiFi hotspot, at the Bra WiFi hotspot (next to my dorm), people do that all the time. It's discouraged, but not forbidden.

So I don't have to be one of THESE people anymore!

From 2009 01 10 Southwest Asia

Coming soon: the combat omelette and other changes to my eating habits!

No more iPhone transmissions from Southwest Asia!

I used my iPhone a few times since I’ve been here.  I used it quite a bit en route, uploading pictures and chatting on Facebook from Italy.  My phone will officially stay in “airplane mode” for the rest of my time here! 

So it’s essentially an iPod touch, still quite useful to me.  I can still access my tunes, my one movie (Star Wars the Clone Wars), and my notes, contact lists and games.  

I just checked my AT&T bill and did the math:  I’ve done 5.07MB (5070KB) of data transmission via the iPhone on this trip, at $0.0195 per KB = $98.87!!!!

I knew this was coming…I received a text message in Germany, Italy and my location here, each from the respective cell phone companies (Vodaphone, Voda-It, the one here) telling me the data transmission charges.  My phone can hop on wireless here when it can find it, but as soon as the wireless drops, the cell phone network picks up the slack and suddenly the charges accrue.

Can’t wait for that first paycheck from this trip to cover those charges!

-Patricia

Wow, What a Smart Computer I Have...

This is what greeted me when I tried to use Google.com for the first time this morning.

I did a screen capture before immediately clicking that "Google.com in English" link in the lower left.

Several of my web pages are doing this, my ads on Facebook are for goods and services near my location. Some in English, some in Arabic.

Smile!

A Bright Spot in a Gray Day

Today has been gray and rainy all day. Ugh.

Dave is in Michigan for a Google Earth conference. I'm jealous. I love Google Earth and would LOVE to learn how to write code for overlaying data!

So it's just the boys and me tonight, so we had a laid-back afternoon/evening. We built Legos, ate macaroni and cheese for dinner, popped some popcorn, watched some Return of the Jedi, and had a video teleconference with FotoMom and her son Joey!

I have to share the popcorn experience with you. I picked up an ear of popcorn at the Arbor Day Farm.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

So this is it. About $2 from the souvenir shop.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

I like these instructions! So you can't sue the company if your microwave explodes?

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

So here's the popping bag.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

And here's the popping bag with the ear of corn it in, per the instructions.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

The instructions say to fold down the bag THREE TIMES, which is what I do here.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

The shots of the corn in the microwave popping didn't come out, but this is the product when it's done. For starters, I popped this about a minute longer than your standard Pop Secret or Orville Redenbacher's and it DIDN'T BURN! The first kernels popping sends the cob bouncing in the bag in the oven, which the boys thought was really funny.

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

A closeup of the cob -- several kernels popped and remained on the cob. Cool!

From 2008 10 21 BigRedPopcorn

The finished product. The one cob gave us about 1 1/2 commercial bags worth of popped corn. Since this is about as pure as it gets, we had to season it ourselves. All I did in this case was drizzle 2 Tbsp. of melted salted butter on top. Perfection!

So the boys and I sat down and devoured this popcorn while watching the first part of Return of the Jedi. Then Maryann chimed in on AIM and we chatted for a few minutes. After all this time, I never got around to installing our web cam on our desktop computer...it's a laptop webcam and Dave took the laptop with the software with him to Michigan. So we discussed letting our boys see each other and talk on the AIM webcam:

From 2008 10 21 VideoTeleconWithMaryannJoey

Joey and Timmy are showing each other their toy lightsabers. Joey's is green (on the main screen) and Timmy's is blue (on the inset screen). The laptop camera is on the left side of the picture, clipped to the left hand of my running trophy, which you can read about me winning here.

The boys had a blast with this -- I put the camera far enough away on the desk that both boys could easily be in Joey's field of view and they had the best time exchanging stories and telling each other how much they miss each other (awwwww....).

In a rare moment, I was able to get the webcam working in about 10 minutes...that's the time it took to install the software and configure the video/audio on the webcam. Usually something goes awry when I'm installing new hardware, but tonight we were lucky -- I figured I'd be jinxed for sure with 3 little boys' happiness riding on whether the software installed correctly!

Another New Look!

Feedback please! I finally took the plunge into a 3-column blog, which I'd been wanting for some time, so I can put the "standard" widgets on one side and the "fun" widgets on the other.

Unfortunately, all of my widget code was lost in the transition, so I'm in the midst of reconstructing those.

I did this all Monday evening when I should have been viewing training videos for work...sigh...

So What's Up With This New Look?

"Why the new look, Major Mom?"

Many of you have known of my quest to find a blog layout that took advantage of the space on the left AND right sides. As much as I enjoyed the color schemes in the previous layout, enough was enough.

When Dave started putting together his new train blog, he was exploring the Blogspot layouts and came across several layouts that included a "stretch" variation.

So I reached out and grabbed one of those. There's a little bit that I still need to get used to, and once I have my desktop computer back in a couple weeks (our goal is a 1-2 August delivery in Nebraska), I can pretty things up a little more.

I like the ability to make my pictures appear a little bigger, and hopefully you don't have to scroll as much to read my pontifications... :-D