My First Week

Well, I’ve worked four days for Rockwood now, and I love it.  It’s been so great!  Everybody is nice there, and I’ve already learned so much, with the promise of learning more.

I’ve never used many of the programs I’m using now, which is really fun because I love learning new programs.  Also, the networking aspect of it is really fun.  There was a call that I took on Friday, for instance, where I had to drop a shortcut onto someone’s desktop from a server location, I just opened up the host computer’s file structure and dropped it on the destkop from my computer.  It was pretty neat.

Tuesday was just OSHA and HIPAA training, and on Wednesday I started learning the programs and Thursday I started listening to calls.  Friday I started taking calls and took them from mid-morning to the end of the day.  It was fun!  I’m starting to get more comfortable taking the calls too, which is nice because I don’t constantly feel so nervous.

CBS Typo

I ran across this typo today and thought it was a little funny.  Mostly because it was on CBS’ site.  It amuses me when a big company lets an error made by some code monkey out in the wild. 

Ooops!

Starting my New Job

Well, I start my new job tomorrow.  My last day at Rosauers was Friday, and today is my last day before I start at Rockwood.  I’m excited, but I’m also nervous.  I’ve never worked an office job like this before.

I know I’ll do fine, but I’ve never been fond of not knowing what to expect.  I suppose that is a fairly universal human quality though.

Tonight I’ll set out my clothes for tomorrow, and get everything ready so that I don’t freak out in the morning.  I tend to freak out when leaving for something for the first time, or if I won’t be back for a while. This is why my wife hates to fly with me.  I love the flight, I just hate the packing.  It’s stressful.

But, back to the topic. I’ve got to be there tomorrow morning at nine to fill out the forms and start training and all that.  I’ll let you know how it went.

New Job

Yesterday I received an unexpected phone call.  

About a month ago I had a couple of interviews at Rockwood Clinic for a Help Desk Coordinator position that they had open up.  I thought the interviews went well, but they decided to give the job to one of the other candidates.  I was bummed, but it happens.

The phone call yesterday was to inform me that the person they had offered the job to had been unable to take it and therefore the job was mine!

I’m really excited about it.  It’s basically a tech support job.  I’ll be the guy that the doctors will call when their machines act up.  I’ll have to try to quickly diagnose the problem; fix it if I can, or escalate it to one of the technicians. 

I’m super excited, especially because the job pays more than twice what my current one does.

Want a Keyboard for $1,589.99?

The Optimus Maximus Keyboard is out now and it can almost justify it’s pricetag. Each key is an individual OLED screen that can be individually addressed and controlled.

For instance, if you press the shift key all of the keys change to display what they will output if you press that key in conjunction with the shift. It’s crazy!

Check it out at ThinkGeek. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/9836/

—Brian

Fluid: review

Fluid is a really cool application found at http://fluidapp.com. If you are anything like me you have several web applications that you use regularly and maybe would like a way to use them as standalone applications.

Let’s say that you have several web apps that you commonly use that you would like to be able to address as their own entities, being able to quit one while keeping another open, or command-tab between them to quickly switch applications. Or, for example, there are some web apps that seem more suited to a desktop application like webmail or Google Docs.

Enter Fluid. Fluid is a site specific browser generator. What this means is that Fluid allows you to create a specialized web browser that hides the typical web browser interface elements (like forward and back buttons) and limits browsing to a single domain. So, if you create an app for your webmail and click on a link in a message that link will open in your default browser window, not Fluid.

Fluid’s setup screen is a very simple screen. It allows you to enter the URL for the website you want to use and then a name for the Application, it typically makes sense to use the sites name as the app name. You can choose a directory in whish to store the new app (I would recommend the default of Applications so that all users can access the app). Lastly, it allows you to choose an application icon, here it defaults to the site’s favicon (the icon that appears left of the URL in the location field). If you can find a higher resolution version of the favicon or any image you want as the icon you can use that instead.

There are some problems with it, and they seem to be because of the domain limiting. Bart Buschotts over at bartbuschotts.ie points out that some sites, like Flickr link you through another domain for login, in Flickr’s case it’s parent company, Yahoo!. These web apps won’t work, unfortunately, but many will.

Overall, it is a very useful program, and I love it! I use it for this blog as well as for Google Docs and Jessie uses it for Facebook. It’s a wonderful piece of freeware and I highly recommend it.

—Brian

Musings Continued

Well, I think that what I’m going to do is post twice a week, in one post I’ll review software or give a cool hint or trick that I discovered, and in another post I’ll talk about something that happened to me or something that I’ve been thinking about.

I think I’ll try to post my computer topic on Wednesday and I’ll aim to get my personal post out on Friday.

—Brian

Musings

Well, it’s been a few days since I posted. I would like to post more than just software stuff, but I’m not narcissistic enough to talk about myself at length. I’m gonna be thinking about what I can do to post more often and post more interesting things. I’ll get back to you all soon.

—Brian

Music Video

My brother and I made a music video for fun and finished it today.  I uploaded it to YouTube.

Bento, hulu, and Evernote: reviews

I decided I wanted to do a couple of reviews for you on some products that I think are really great.  Two are free, one is an internet service, the other is an internet based application in beta, and the last is a Mac only database application; they are hulu (the internet service), Evernote (the private beta), and Bento (the database you have to buy, or use the free trial).  I thought I would take a few minutes and go over why I think each one is great.

 

hulu

First, hulu (http://www.hulu.com).  A while ago NBC pulled all of their video content from the iTunes Music Store, shortly thereafter they announced that they would start hulu.  They finally got it out of private beta and it is now open to the public and fully active.  What’s great about it is that not only does it have NBC’s television content but it has content from over 50 other networks, plus movies from Universal, MGM, and 20th Century Fox.  There are full length movies, TV shows and clips from movies or shows, like individual SNL skits. The best part is that it’s all free because it’s ad supported. Normally ad supported internet content is annoying because the ads are dumb and long.  Hulu’s ads work a little bit harder at being clever and never get longer than 30 seconds, plus they put fewer of them in and try, with TV shows, to put them in the commercial break spots. In order to try to protect younger viewers from the R rated content of some of the movies hulu has a login system.  You must have a free hulu account if you want to view much more than TV shows.  Also, they have been pretty good about getting TV shows up fast.  By Friday morning Thursday’s episode of The Office was already up. Overall, it’s a very good system, and I like it a lot.

 

Evernote

Evernote is a note taking application.  It is both a web application and a desktop/phone application.  At it’s heart is a web service that can be used from anywhere which stores your notes, but the Evernote team has gone beyond this and released desktop clients for Mac OS and Windows as well as a client for a smartphone.  Evernote allows you to take clippings and notes of anything you want, screenshots, photographs, sound clippings, text notes, etc.  Evernote will store all of this for you on their servers which you can have the desktop client sync to.  You can then access your notes from any computer or online smartphone. The notes feature is even cooler with images since it allows you to search for text in the image.  For instance, in the screenshot above If I were to type in “Windows” a little box would appear around the word windows in the title of my previous post.  It’s all done by some seriously cool software, but there are limitations, certain fonts or text without enough contrast will not be indexed. As of right now it is free but also a private beta, by invite only.  If you go to the site and ask to be let in to the private beta they will most likely let you in within a week and a half or so, I’ve heard different results.  Once it goes golden master it is supposed to have two versions, a free version and a paid version with more storage, etc. I’ll probably stick with the free version since I don’t take too many notes.  But it is an amazing program that I highly recommend after less than 24 hrs of use.

 

Bento

Bento is probably my favorite of the three, even though they all do very different things.  Bento is my favorite because, as is common knowledge to anyone who knows me, I love databases.  And that is what Bento is, a very powerful, easy to use personal database.  I allows you to store all sorts of data that you might find useful to you, contacts, calendars, customers, inventories, subscriptions, etc.  There are many built in templates for you and you can build your own very easily.

My only complaint about it is that there is no ability to use queries or create reports.  The table view does a fairly good job of creating rudimentary queries by allowing you  to pick and choose what data you want to view and allows you to perform simple operations like sums and differences.  Reporting is lacking entirely, but for what the average home user needs Bento is more than perfect.

My complaints are based on the fact that I’ve done systems design and analysis and so I can’t customize and tweak this as much as I can other solutions.  But this is a great product that I think is well worth the $49 that FileMaker charges.