Listen To The Show!

Nothing in my podcast hardware setup has been working right since the move. It’s one of the reasons there has been only one podcast since moving to Portland. Most of my equipment is pretty old now and is starting to get long in the tooth. After much thought, what I am doing is replacing my Yamaha mixer with a new Mackie mixer. I am taking the ART Tube preamp out of the equation all together. My DBX compressor/limiter might be bad as well as it’s doing very bad things when connected. I’m going to connect it differently with the new nmixer, so we’ll see if that helps. If not, I may add a new Presonus compressor. The computer interface and Heil pr40 microphone will remain the same.

For video,  have a great opportunity to use a green screen down in the basement. It’s just a matter of how I construct it. I am thinking of options now including purchasing one. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

And there you have it. So much new happening, including the new carpet going in for the basement and master bedroom. It will be much more cozy in the lab. Are labs supposed to be cozy? Well, mine is.

For a long time now, the desktop computer has been playing second fiddle to the laptop. Laptop machines have become more powerful and innexpensive. You can get very near the power of a desktop and the mobility too. But things are changing, primarily due to the smart phone and portable tablets.

Smart phones like the iPhone and Droid phone are packing a great deal of power and functionality into our palms. Smart phones are so good now, they can take on many of the rudimentary tasks of a notebook. Add to that the new iPad and things get even more interesting. I’ve tried using an iPad as a notebook replacement and I will tell you it’s not there yet, but I do believe the platform will get there soon.

The other big realization I made is that I rarely use the power that my notebook has when I am mobile. When mobile, I mostly like to consume content and blog. I don’t generally produce a lot of audio or video. I would prefer to do that on a larger screen at home. The power of a big laptop, than, is wasted. What I really wanted was something at home that was big and powerful and that could be hooked up to large screens; a desktop machine. For mobile, I wanted something very light and with tons of battery life.

What I did was get a 21″ iMac for home, connected to a second 21″ monitor. For mobile, I went for an Asus Eee PC. Now you may asking me why Iwent for a netbook instead of an iPad. It’s a good question and I’ll tell you why. The iPad is an elegant, beautiful piece of technology, but it has several drawbacks. I do think it’s a little heavy, especially after you have been holding it for awhile. Also, the sides don’t provide enough space to grip it and my fingers always slip into the touch area, resulting in unwanted actions. They keyboard is surprisingly good for a touch device, but still not quite as good as a physical keyboard. In addition, I have not found a good way to lay it in your lap while typing. The angle never seems to work. With a netbook, you have a hinged screen, so I can adjust the angle at will. Like many Apple products, the second and third generations of the iPad are the ones to wait for. There is also the fact That I was able to get my netbook for around $250 whereas an iPad would have cost me at least twice as much.

Is the netbook perfect? Hardly. The keyboard is good but small and so harder to get used to. The screen does seem tiny, smaller than the iPad even though both are 10 inches. But for now the netbook works for me. I assume that I will indeed transition to a tablet, but not until some good Android tablets come out or possibly a second generation iPad. My new computing architecture now lines up as follows: Droid Incredible – small, Asus netbook – medium, iMac – big. At every level, I’ve got it covered, and notice that it also happens that I end up with three different operating systems, Mac, Android and Windows. The best tool for each need and I overcome the OS by living as much as I can in the cloud. I don’t think much about OS anymore, I think more about apps and function.

I’d love to Hear what you all are thinking and doing with your environments. Let me know in the comments.

I proudly announce my new project, New Guy In Town.

Moving to and adjusting to Portland is going to entail lots of new discoveries and adventures and I want to invite you all along for the ride. This will be both a blog and a podcast following my first year in Portland. All the new places I discover; places to eat, play and see. I’ll share it all. It’s my take on Portland from a newcomers and ex-California perspective.

Come along as I introduce you in text, sound and pictures to my new home town, Portland OR.

On the web at http://www.newguypdx.com

Other than that, it’s been an adventure a minute. Our furniture, which was bought when we had a very large house, doesn’t fit the same in this smaller house. I knew we were going to face this kind of a problem but it’s another thing to see it first hand. The headboard for our bed still isn’t in our room because it’s too large to get up the stairs. Now we are having to literally saw it apart and then put it back together once it’s in the room. We love that bed and we’re not going to spend more money buying a new one, so whatever it takes, that bed is going in.

After the first week we all got killer colds. Maybe part stress and all the effort of unpacking, but Lisa, Virginia and I were all laid out. Only Capella came through without a scratch. Now we are finally healthy again and are making decent progress bringing the house together. It’s feels a lot less like a disaster area and more like an actual comfortable home.

In the middle of all this, through in a heat wave of 93 degree plus temperatures. I expected many things in Portland but never heat like this. The house has no air conditioning and has been brutal, especially at night when trying to get to sleep. Of course, the worst room is the kids room.

In general, I love being here though. Portland is just great. Our neighbors have been very nice and welcoming. Plenty of great, fun places to eat and a nice mellow vibe. Lots and lots of bikes, per the legend. One of the things I like most about this house, every window I look out of I see green.

As you know if you’ve been following along, our family has been basically vagabonds since selling our old house and waiting for our new Portland house to be available to move into. We’ve spend time in various places and Memorial Day weekend we were at an Embassy Suites in Irvine, CA. We love Embassy Suites and we stay there whenever we can. We are Hilton Hhoners members at the Silver level. Don’t get too excited, it doesn’t get us squat but it sounds nice.

On this fair weekend, there was a massive youth baseball tournament going on in Orange County and hundreds of these baseball kids were staying at the E.S. The hotel was pretty much overrun with 10-12yr old boys and girls. It might have been ok if not for the fact that these were some of the most misbehaved kids I have ever seen and their parents, completely out to lunch. Kids were running around the hotel, going up and down elevators constantly and generally making far too much noise. I would have expected their parents to reign them in a little, enforce at least a modicum of reasonable public behavior. But some of the parents were as loud and obnoxious as their kids.

At one point there were around 10 girls sitting directly outside our room door having a loud and boisterous conversation. Just sitting outside our door. That’s when I finally picked up the phone and called downstairs. I’m trying t0 have a nice relaxing weekend and these kids are driving me nuts. Add to that all the elevator hijinks, and getting downstairs at times involved waiting up to 10min for an elevator. There are many other little things I could gripe about but these were the big ones. I was never so happy to leave a hotel in my life. I’ll still go to Embassy Suites as they still have by far the most bang for the buck of any hotel chain I know but boy did they drop the ball this past weekend.

Residents of a center-city neighborhood in Guatemala City, Guatemala, are still in shock after a massive sinkhole opened last weekend, gobbling several buildings and nearly an entire intersection, according to local officials.

You look at the photos and it almost doesn’t look real. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie. But it’s real and it’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Looking down that giant hole and all the things around it, I’m reminded while we’ve built on top of the surface of the earth with our concrete and steel; our malls, buildings and houses, it’s still a big dense ball we’re floating around on.

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We’ve been bouncing around, spending a few weeks at my mom’s house in Newport Beach and now at a timeshare we got access to in San Clemente. It looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel though as we do have a date the second week in June when we will be able to get our new house. Until then, we live out of a few suitcases of clothes and the very basics of out stuff.

All this and Connected World Media goes on, getting Virginia to and from school goes on and a large personal event that I won’t specify is added to the mix.

Again, I won’t complain too much though as we go to sleep to the sound of the ocean and enjoy the cool fresh air. If there is anything about California that I will miss, it’s this; the beaches are magnificent here.

That’s not to say I haven’t been reading at all. The second reason for my shortcoming is that I have become obsessed with comics and graphic novels. I have been reading alot actually, just about every day, but not traditional books. I have been absorbing comics as fast as I can get them. It all started for me with The Walking Dead, a fantastic black and white zombie/end of the world comic that is now going to be a series on AMC television. It’s a super compelling and addictive book and it drew me in to the whole larger world of comics where I have found several series I am loving. Here are a few of the things I am reading thus far.

The Walking Dead: Much better than your traditional zombie comic. Plenty of violence and gore, but a real human element to the story is the main driver.

The Unwritten: A interesting comic that’s hard to explain. A writer of children’s books much like the Harry Potter series has gone missing. His son is often mistaken for the lead character in the books and the words themselves seem to have a power to them. His son is basically trying to figure out who is after him and why and what is the mystery surrounding his father.

Transmetropolitan: Spider Jeruselem is a disaffected journalist who rails against the system with his column. Partially psychotic and often out of control, this is an adventure into urban decay, politics and other social commentary.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Who knew! Joss Whedon himself continues the story from right where the tv series ended. This is the actual continuing story of Buffy but in comic form. I actually like it better as a comic.

This is only a short list. There are many others and several one off graphic novels I have read as well. I don’t know how to classify these as they are not traditional books and they are so short in their single issue forms. What I will do it call it even. For the past few months I have not technically posted a book a week, I will consider all my comics as time served. And we will start again from this week (yesterday).

I hope you are doing well with your own book a week project. Don’t give up, the year is young!