Thursday, January 20, 2011

Just a quick word

It's late again.  Earlier today Microsoft decided to make a OneNote iPhone app!  I've never been much for all the different note taking apps reviewed on Gizmodo or Lifehacker, mostly because I don't take notes, but OneNote has a bit of a special place in my heart from back in the day I bought my first laptop for school and religiously used the Office '03 flavor for everything I could.  My new found interest in this one has perked curiosity in all the other note taking apps people have been squealing over (Evernote and Simplenote specifically).  I'll have to give them all a shot and jot down my thoughts another time.  As for now, I'm still enjoying my new Moleskine notebook Anna gave me for Christmas... so soft, smooth and classy!

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

More Addiction

The time is 1:33 a.m. and I’m considering googling “tech’s anonymous” to see if there’s some kind of group I can go to in order to overcome my addictions to reading about all these fun gadgets that are coming out.  Each morning I wake up and the first thing I do is check my phone for the 3 am daily email I receive from Newegg.com about their Shell Shocker deals.  At work today I spent the bulk of my working hours watching the tech support remotely install ECR Vault on the server and workstations and the rest of the day playing with the scanner (which is amazingly fast) and receiving the official training from the technician.  A quick word about the process, with our officejet all-in-one it would take about 2 minutes to scan and assign each sheet of paper in a patients file, with a touch of training my coworker ripped through about 200 insurance claims and attached them to the corresponding patient files in about an hour and a half.  It took her longer to go through the stack of papers taking out the staples than it did scanning and archiving them.

Another little ditty about my adventures through silicon-land… last night I spent almost 5 hours on the phone with my dad giving tech support to him.  After a little bit I logged in to his computer and tested out the fantastic LogMeIn program.  Remote assistance at its finest!  Many failed attempts with the default Windows Remote Assistance tool through Windows Messenger had me a little flustered so I finally caved in and signed up for this service I’ve seen mentioned here and there in all my tech pr0n I’ve been reading.  Highly recommended.  The LogMeIn Free edition in conjunction with Dropbox gives amazing functionality to anybody trying to help somebody out (and please, if you’re reading this and thinking about doing the Dropbox thing, use my link and we’ll both get an extra bit of free online space in our accounts).

It’s late, I’m tired.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

The next weekly post.

Anna hasn't been feeling well.  She's been on her ped's rotation and probably picked some little bug up from one of the kids which has left her with headaches and a sore throat.  Today was suppose to be spent in the peds ER but she decided to call in sick so it isn't spread to the rest of the world.  I feel bad for my little wifey, she's a sniffley mess.

Sushi has come and gone three times this month so far.  Once at our neighborhood favorite place Ichiban, once at a higher class place for one of our friends birthday parties called Hachi's Kitchen, and lastly we used a Restaurant.com coupon at a place called Blue Fin Sushi. Hachi's gets the award for the tastiest and classiest place, Blue Fin would be the most cost effective place if you're buying a couple rolls individually but Ichiban still remains my all time favorite with their awesome taste and the all you can eat option.  Lucky for me it's just a block from where we live!

Work has been chugging along.  Last week I spent a few 12 hour days getting the office computers updated with the latest software so we can begin going paperless.  We will be one of the first established Chicago optometry offices to change from a paper files system to paperless EMR (electronic medical records).  Last week Officemate was installed on our newly built server.  One of the challenges with converting an office like ours (established over 15 years ago) is scanning all the paper files into the server.  All should be set up this coming week using ECR Vault which I'll be teaching co-workers about so they can do all the gruntwork of getting things scanned.

The rest of the family videos came this week as well.  There was a bit of a scare when the box was opened because one of the videos got crunched during shipping (thanks UPS), however, the video that broke was the Safety First video from my dad around the 2002 Olympics and there's plenty of backups.  None of the other videos have backups (which is why I'm doing this).  I've only started on one of the videos but I've found a few jems I've posted to Facebook and one to Youtube.

Friday, January 7, 2011

New Years Resolution

Anna gave me a small Moleskin notebook to write things down in, I think I'll use it to jot notes about what I want to blog while I'm out and about... then I'll write at least once a week about it.  Well, that's the plan

Just a small post

Geeking ahead

I'm in the middle of playing with my computer... overclocking my Intel Core i5 750, trying to get the voltage right so I can get a stable OC (at 4.0 GHz), so I'm going to keep the post small.

Recently I built a server and tonight I finally got the software and everything working properly.  It's going to take a while to get use to the new setup.  It's a huge step towards getting our office to go completely paperless!  Bring on the Electronic Medical Records!  We'll be the first optometrists office that I know of to get rid of the paper charts!

In other news, I've also been having fun overclocking.  If anybody is googling the problem with 3DMark 11 having problems when it gets to the physics test, the solution is to close 3DMark and when you reopen it, right click and "run as administrator" and that should fix the problem.  I believe the problem is coming when the program doesn't have access to view the hardware specifications of the computer but it never brings up that windows UAC popup that asks for administrative controls to make changes/view the computers files.  That solution worked for me (it's also the reason why the program works when you uncheck the box to scan for computer hardware in the settings tab).  I still get some pretty sad readings from 3DMark 11, I'm only running it on a Radeon 5750, one of the lower end DX11 cards.  3DMark Vantage gives me fair results, but it just isn't built for any kind of real performance with tessellation or any of the other DX11 eye candy.

The lovin'

The biggest news recently is that Anna and I have finally gone on our (much deserved) honeymoon!  We're only 2.5 years late, and we did have to travel in 2 separate vehicles again (different flights down, same flight back home) which doesn't even compare to the previous honeymoon we had (moving ourselves, driving across the country at 45 mph in two separate cars).

Aside from the hiccup in flight plans, everything else went off without a hitch!  We both arrived at the Miami airport on the Tuesday before Christmas and cabbed it down to South Beach where our hotel was.  We stayed at the Astor Hotel which I highly recommend (if you like great music playing right outside your window each evening and birds chirping in the courtyard each morning).  We ended up spending huge amounts of our time laying out on South Beach (two short blocks away) or bumming around the streets looking for little shops to wander around.  Fatburger was just across the street which was a great help to attaining my goal of hardened arteries at a young age, but my favorite little shop was the small French bakery right across the street from the hotel.

I do want to keep writing, however, I am very distractable and Anna is calling for me... I must go!



Edit: Also, I really need to tell y'all about that video project I was working on throughout 2010 for my parents.  I put all our home videos to DVD, it only took about 200 man hours, some sweat and a few tears (usually tears of laughter when I saw myself or other siblings doing something ridiculously awesome).  December was an intense month getting that put together.  I also used Lightscribe DVDs to burn titles and screenshots as labels for each one.