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I’ve gotten a new Gmail account and I’m considering switching to it as my main email account. I’ve been using my current permanent email account for almost 9 years. I’m afraid to switch away from it because I’ve subscribed to so much stuff over the years, I might not be able to login to something that I need like a job hunting site or a forgotten password reminder.

I’d also like to switch because after 9 years I get a ton of junk email since my address has been floating around for years. My service has been getting better about blocking spam but I wish I could make it so where it blocks anything in Russian.

I’d probably get less spam with Gmal since it’s a new address. I haven’t really looked at Gmail’s spam blocking features. I assume they are at least as good as my current provider’s.

I also like the 2 GB of space Gmail offers. I don’t think I’ve sent 2GB of email in my entire emailing history. There’s also an ability to share files with your friends that sounds intriguing. I’ve also found a lot of interesting hacks in Make magazine that I’d like to try out as well.

I wish that it had IMAP capability and better usability with my Treo but I’ll probably switch soon.

What do you think?

Last week I was doing some training in St. Paul. One of the things we did was go on a few store walks to see how the stores have set up their displays. On one of these trips, the trainer pointed out a disturbing characteristic in almost every store we went to.

In most grocery stores, there are freezers in the ailes called “coffin cases” typically located in front of the meat, cheeses, and milk sections. When you look down into them they are usually stocked with frozen meats, vegetables, fruits, and other items that need to be kept very cold. When you’re in the store next time, look at back side of one of these cases, inside the refrigerated part, right below the metal lip. You’ll see the words “Load Limit” which has two arrows pointing out from it horizontally. The stores are not supposed to load anything above this line or else the item will start to defrost. In most of the stores there was quite a bit above this line, frozen turkeys were the worst culprit, that was in various states of defrosting.

Recently, I’ve been working on converting my old desktop into a MythTV PVR. I’m using the KnoppMyth version of Knoppix Linux that has MythTV bundled with one installation CD so you can install both of them in one action. Or at least that’s the idea in theory.

In practice I have been tinkering with the darn thing for a month and only recently have gotten it to mostly work. The biggest problem I ran into was making my Hauppauge PRV-350 show anything on the TV screen. I’ve been able to make the web interface, photo gallery, and music library to work. I think that the web interface is one of the coolest features of MythTV. You can access your multimedia files (videos, images, mp3s), schedule recordings, and download recorded files all using a browser. I can even access it with my Treo.

However, I’m still having problems with console game emulators (I can list all the games but I can’t play any of them, the joystick won’t work, and it says my MAME roms are corrupt), and my video library won’t play any of my .avi files even though I can see them. I’m still searching through the the MythTV forums trying to figure out how to overcome the last problems. I have seen almost all of these problems addressed in the forums so I think that the end is in sight. I hope it will be worth it once its done.

I was only able to get this far by finding a script that someone wrote to set up the hardware correctly. Once I found that script, it set everything up automatically. I wish I had found it sooner, it would have saved me a month of frustration.

The next step, after fixing the current problems, is getting some new hardware. I’ve got an 80 GB hard drive in it which is supposedly 35 or so hours not bad but you can never have enough disk space. I’d also like to put a DVD burner in it so I can share interesting stuff via sneakernet.

So I’m doing some training in St. Paul, MN and I’m getting ready to turn to get to my hotel and what do I see on the lawn in front of it? A FREAKIN’ BEAR! (free registration or go to bugmenot.com to get a shared login).

(I know I said I wouldn’t do any personal stuff, but you don’t see a FREAKIN’ BEAR wandering through the city every day.)

As you can see, the blog has been down for a while. I’m sorry I’ve been gone. I’ve been extremely busy with a new job and I’m also a slow, easily distracted writer.

The next question that I had when decided to restart my blog is what should I write about? I have several friends out there that who blog as well. They each have their own sphere of expertise and they also include what’s happening in their lives. It seems like all of the blogs are a little on the McLaughlin Group side in the passion of their comments. That is something that I didn’t neccessarily want on my site.

I also don’t really want to add a lot of personal life stuff on my blog as well. My life is pretty boring and since I’m a slow writer I want to focus on good content.

So, what to write about? I belive that the blog that I wrote in Japan was the most successful bit of blogging I have done. In my opinion, the content was interesting and I had something to write about everyday. I also got some good responses back from its readers. So, travel should be one of the main topics.

Now that my new job is in retail, I’d like to keep up with what’s happening in my old career of IT. I still like to tinker with computers and I’ll post whatever bits of information that I come across that I think would be interested to people ranging from experienced users to technotards.

So as my first tech entry, let me share some news from the IT community which I think is really great, The Return of the Screen Savers. These are the original guys who were on TechTV’s show of the same name before G4 or whoever they are now changed the format. Its great to hear these guys together again. They really know their stuff and have great on-air chemistry. The current incarnation is called “this WEEK in TECH” or TWIT for short. I think it’s kind of a lame name. I hope they come up with something better soon.