Holy Crud!
It’s June and been a crazy busy month at that. Now that summer is here every weekend has been planned and full of events. I purchased a new MacBook Pro the ones they announced last Monday. It’s a screaming 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and all kinds of awesomeness. iPhone OS 3.0 comes out on Wednesday which will be all kinds of awesome because I will finally be able to Copy and Paste.
I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD. You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.
http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087
But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.
But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.
Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.
Tristan Chimes In! With Ringtones! And Geekness!
So I got an e-mail yesterday from my stalker. Aka StalkerDave asking what ringtone I had on my phone. Well it’s the ringtone from the best TV show of all time. Arrested Development it’s the theme Gob uses in his magic show. I still need to grab the DVD and get his chicken sound for when I get a text message but all in good time.
I must say Arrested Development was introduced to me by my girlfriend when she got the DVD’s from the library. I got to watch 4 episodes or so before it ended up having to go back. I wanted to see more so I could have waited for her to get the DVD’s again but I didn’t have time for rational solutions. So I did some research and found that I could get each season for $20. I didn’t like this idea it just wasn’t geeky enough. So I found that you could hack an AppleTV with Boxee and watch Arrested Development via Hulu. I had been wanting an AppleTV for a while now so I decided to go that route since it was geeky and seemed cooler at the time.
Instead of spending $60 and getting DVD’s and being happy I decided to spend $300 on an AppleTV. Got a USB thumbdrive I had around the apartment and loaded the AppleTV Patchstick on there and installed Boxee and I could have Hulu on my TV. It has been shown that the AppleTV has been a great investment since it plays all my media now. I used to have this task delegated to the Playstation 3. But it wouldn’t play my DRM stuff from iTunes now the AppleTV does it all and I am happy. Plus the HD rentals on AppleTV make it worth my while.
But the moral of the story was I got to watch Arrested Development and every other TV show or internet video I wanted on the magic AppleTV box.
Which inspired my ringtone.
Link is in iPhone format so you will need iTunes to play it.
iPhone
Just got the wordpress app for my iPhone thought I would try to write a blog post. This seems better for short form but it works. Hope life is treating everyone well miss hearing from everyone. Trying to update twitted more and keep contact by emailing people now that I am a proper mobile device. Keep in touch.
1st Annual TristanPipo.com Contest
I figured since I love all my readers so much I would give away a brand new 8GB iPod Touch!
To win the contest you must visit the link below and complete the following.
All you need to do is get to the end of the roll and if it says you are winner it will give you a promo code. Leave a comment with the promo code and if you are a winner it will say you are a winner. If not well better luck next time.
Good Luck to you all!
Hacking the Code
Well they released a security update to the application that runs this blog. So I tried it out on my test server and now it’s running on this one. So pages seem to be a bit snappier or maybe that’s because I fixed the caching module.
So we are running v2.2.1 at the moment if you come across any issues. Especially Internet Explorer 6 or 7 let me know. I spend more time fixing those problems then anything else. Usually it goes like this.
I use some newer or different tag that does the same thing. Internet Explorer doesn’t like it and messes up the entire page and then I need to go figure out how I can use a workaround to get that issue solved and make sure it works with everything else. You pick your battles I trying to go with Firefox but I forget the rest of the world isn’t so enlightened.
They did release a Beta of Safari on Windows. Which is nice for testing stuff while I am at work. If you want to try a different browsing experience.
The Weekend – Movies, Beer, Introducing the Girlfriend to the Friends.
As I sit down at the keyboard and link my fingers crack a few of them and lets see what comes out.
Friday I went to go see Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard. This movie lived up to all the Die Hard fame. One thing that was a bit of a bummer since they had the PG-13 rating you couldn’t really get in a Yipee Ky Yay Mother Fucker. With get Yippe Ky Yay Mother *Gunshot*. So the premise of the movie is hackers take out the world by crippling transportation. Then taking out money and so forth. So it was Die Hard in every aspect of Die Hard. I give the movie a very positive rating with a few dings for no “Welcome to the Party Pal!” But if you go your entire life only see Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 4. 2 and 3 are not really worth your time.
Saturday!
So I went to the Seattle International Beerfest at Seattle Center. I made a few drunk dials. So this place is pretty sweet for $20 you get a 5oz Beer Glass and 10 beer tickets and you have music and all kinds of beer to try. I tried so many kinds of beer I can’t even recall. Some were amazing others not so much. After my first 10 beer tickets ran out I was rather golly and sloshly. The guest list was Jered, Nick, Justin, Greg and the reason you are reading this to begin with. The place was packed and it was a rather nice day. I was shocked there were a great deal of females at this thing. Most girls you talk about beer and they hit you back with Coors Light or Bud Light. But when I saw a girl drink a 20% ABV Stout I was like there is a girl who has it together. They had $3 pints as well. While waiting in line for the pints I met this guy named Steve and I was rather drunk and friendly and he busted out the iPhone.
The Apple Geek in me was like holy shit. Steve being a cool dude lets me play with the thing. I want one of these things rather badly. $600 seems totally worth it.
So we hit Beerfest around 2pm and we left around 6pm after I was rather drunk and we then went to Red Mill Burger. I am sorry to say you can’t get a better burger in Seattle then Red Mill. Then we went to the ferry and passed out. Got home and then went out for the night. I was feeling rather tired and Sunday was going to be a big day so I retired the evening early.
Sunday!!!
Sunday the Girlfriend came over. This was also the day that Me, Nick and Justin have Brunch. So she came over and we hung out for a bit chatted. Then I said we must get going so we hit up the grocery store since I was told to pickup some fruit and juice. I get stuck carrying the heavy things. So cliche but I enjoyed having a purpose. 
When you are taking your girlfriend to meet your friends there are one of three outcomes. Meh, Eh or Sweet or translated Ok, Bad , Good. (Speaking of translations. The new saying that evolved from Beerfest is Delta! Such forms would be “Because I’m so Delta! or Say what! You better recognize the Delta! or That translation from Meh to Ok was Delta! Dude I know)
So I figured well I like to be prepared in such situations so I gave her the names and a slight background of everyone she would be meeting. Her and Audrey seemed to hit it off amazingly. Audrey told me I needed to bring her back. So I think that would classify everything as “Sweet” or “Schweet” the one thing I forgot to mention about this bunch is they take forever to get anything to go anywhere. We arrived around 12:30 to go play MiniGolf but all things said after Brunch and so forth we didn’t leave until 3:45 or so.
But we had a fun day hanging out and I feel like I have met a real keeper. Junniper seems to approve of her just by knowing her name. =)
The parents found out about the girlfriend they want to meet her. They invited me out to have a BBQ at my mom’s work want me to bring her along down at the 3rd of July Fireworks. I am still on the fence about that one. Parents are a totally different realm. They say I should be a bit more concerned about the stories my sister could tell. I was thinking going up on the grassy hill and just having a picnic. Who knows at this point.
Tonight is Guys Night. I have a day to make a decision. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.
Flash Player Has Failed for the Last Time Emperor
So I have had this problem that has been bugging the crap out of me. For some reason I went to a website that wanted a newer version of flash player so I installed it and ever since then anything flash has not worked on the powerbook. So I have tried the Uninstaller and the Installer from Adobe’s website to solve this issue since that is all that their help had to offer. But the plugin would never show up in the list of plugins in Safari or Firefox. It didn’t work in Opera either but my experience with that software is rather limited.
So I searched Google and Forums and nobody was really offering any feedback that was anything that I hadn’t already tried. So last night I thought I would power through this problem because I had some free time and there were some e-mails with youtube video links. For a temporary fix I was taking the youtube links and pasting them into vixy.net and creating a quicktime file to download. Which was rather time consuming but hey sometimes you just need a laugh.
So I wanted to see where the plugins were installed on the Mac. So I found out they had a filename that went like this.
<name>.plugin
So I used spotlight to run a search for that plugin file name and found they were located under the following directory tree
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins
And I found a few flash player files so I deleted those. Since it is in a rather scary directory I had to type in the admin password for the device. That is one thing I love about Mac’s it won’t let you fuck it up unless you are really trying to on purpose.
So I deleted those and then tried to install flash player again. It was throwing me an error that I don’t have enough permission to do so. So I tried to run the installer from the command line using sudo which wasn’t really getting me anywhere.
So I figured that I needed some more permission so I loaded up Quicksilver and used it to launch NetInfo Utility. Went looking for users and found my username. I was assigned a UID and GID (User and Group ID) of 501. So I changed it with this utility to 0 which is the root user UID.
Doing a little research I found out a simple command in terminal could have fixed my issue for changing UID as well
sudo niutil -createprop . /users/userName uid XXX
This does create one issue with changing file owners but I didn’t think about that at the time. So after the change was made I logged out and then logged back in. Installed flash. Launching the NetInfo Utility and changed my UID and GID to 501 again and then logged out and back in again.
After I log back in I find that all of my desktop settings have changed so that took a little brain time to figure out how to change how everything was displayed but that was quickly resolved and youtube is working again. Which prompted a twitter update.
I know this is rather technical and most people will just blow this off but I thought I would share my experience in case a future google search user runs into the same problem I had where flash player just stops working.
So nice being able to see that Kitty Kat Finally Dance
Geeky Post #2 Today
Looks like I got a quote up for a review of this software I use for Podcasting called Ubercaster
http://maczot.com/discuss/?p=411
“It’s like a mac podcasters wet dream.”
(http://www.tristanpipo.com)
My contribution to the history of the internet. It’s cool to be featured on such things. =)
iTunes Issued Me a Refund
I was minding my own business today. Then my Motorola Q starts going off that I have an e-mail. So I go check it out and find this in my Inbox.
Dear Tristan,
A few months ago, you downloaded the single “You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell. Unfortunately, you were charged $1.49 rather than $0.99 for the song.
Please accept my sincere apologies for this mistake. You are a valued customer and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused you.
As a gesture of apology, I have issued three free song credits to your account. The next time you buy individual songs, your song credits will be used as payment until they all have been used.
To see the credits, refresh your account information by signing out and back in to the iTunes Store. The sign in/sign out features are located under the Store menu of the iTunes application.
Your song credits should appear next to your account name. If you have any further questions or require additional assistance, please contact our customer service team by replying to this email.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Fretheim
Customer Experience Analyst
I hadn’t noticed this charge that was higher on my account so I went and searched through my iTunes Recipts and saw that it was an issue. So my props to Apple and iTunes for actually I have never heard of iTunes giving you a refund on anything. Just thought I would share that iTunes yet again proves they are awesome.
Now Here Is My Dream Woman
For some unknown reason to me the Internet Explorer users of the world have been sending me a great deal of e-mail about this. I never use Internet Explorer since you can no longer get it for Mac since Microsoft admitted defeat in that realm with Firefox, Safari, Camino and Opera being the key players on the Mac. But if you desire here is the link. My Dream Woman – Mac in the meantime I suggest you uninstall IE and grab Firefox.
Has a 12” Powerbook and falls in Love with a Mac Pro. Makes my 15” 1.5ghz G4 feel sad as well. But I keep holding off until Leopard comes out to buy a new Mac Book Pro.
I was in love for about 2:45 seconds there. Back to Reality.