Life has been busy with work but nothing hugely significant happening. I continue to stay up past my bedtime reading blips of the most random things available on the interweb, my taxes are done (at 5 am after staying up through the night during the big Chicago snow storm last week) and our fish party was a success.
VALENTINO!
How could I forget the most awesome fish ever? Last year for Valentines Day Anna was feeling sad about not being able to have a puppy in our apartments so I got her something even better, a velvet red beta fish. Given the circumstances under his birth into the Healey family we decided to name him Valentino. Fast forward one year, first birthday party for big V. Having a fish themed birthday party was our second best theme party we've thrown, next to the To Catch A Predator party where I dressed up as Chris Hansen, the girls as little school girls and the other men as creepy old guys.
For the big day we supplied sushi, red velvet cake, gummy worms, gummy sharks, Swedish fish and goldfish crackers. The entertainment for the night revolved around our attempts to get Valentino to jump out of his fishbowl and through a flaming hoop of death but when he wouldn't we decided to sit back and watch a few of the BBC Planet Earth series documentaries. The party fizzled and eventually Anna and I turned on SNL and went to bed.
Techy Geeky Updates
None this time. Someday I'll put together a nice comprehensive outline of my offices hardware/software schematic so anybody wondering how they might be able to configure their optometry office can see how we did it, learn from my mistakes and ask their own questions. So far ECR Vault is working fantastic at getting the patients files scanned and properly organized into OfficeMate.
Later.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Another test…
I’m doing much better at going to bed early (for the last two days at least) but I did get a small distraction tonight when I saw the Windows Live Writer in my start menu… had to try it out.
In other developments, if anybody cares to search for Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Adobe CS2) in search of installation tips for Windows 7 (x64) I was able to finagle my way into installing the programs without having to install them through the virtual machine. It must be a completely clean install, get rid of any traces of an Adobe Creative Suite product because when you insert the first of the installation cd’s it must ask which folder to install the programs to. By default Win7 will assign it to the Program Files (x86) folder but I think the Adobe program doesn’t view the parenthesis as valid characters for a destination folder, so it wont install, the next thought was to install it in the regular Program Files folder, but that either doesn’t work or it will install but when you open the program it crashes each time you try to enter a product key. Create a new folder! I suggest naming it “Adobe” and having it as a first level folder under whichever drive you decide to install the programs on. All subsequent Adobe 32 bit programs should automatically chose that as the default installation folder, 64 bit programs will go to the regular Program Files folder as they should.
The only problem I’ve run into so far is that the Acrobat 7.0 print driver (print to .pdf) doesn’t function properly (when trying to print from other applications/web browsers to .pdf) but that was easily remedied by installing the free application doPDF 7. I’ll admit, I’m an extremely light CS user so there may be a whole realm of other things that don’t work, but this is the only one I’ve run across that doesn’t want to cooperate.
Good luck, have a good night. I’m going to crawl into my new bed sheets next to my little wife.
Late.
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