Digital Impulses

Relaxing on a Sunday with Mom at LGVB

Alberto — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:40:43 -0800

Sitting here in the lobby of our Bakery, relaxing after tending to the counter while the Cuban cracker production happened in the back.

We will be closing tonight at 1700 and then I am looking forward to just going home and relaxing and reading my Kindle.

Steve Jobs Dies

Alberto — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:45:24 -0700

This past Wednesday evening, 5 October 2011, I was sitting in my office at our Bakery in Inglewood, CA talking with my son and a friend of his about our plans to camp out at the Apple Store in Manhattan Beach, CA to buy the new iPhone 4S when I got an SMS text message BREAKING NEWS ALERT from KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles:

"Apple reports that Steve Jobs has died".

My reaction was immediate and visceral. I jumped in my chair as if my iPhone had become instantly white-hot and exclaimed: "Oh, shit! Steve Jobs died!". I immediately turned to my keyboard and my fingers flew across the keys, trying to confirm (yet secretly hoping not to have to) the awful news.

I asked them to give me some time to absorb the news and I turned to the Web to the absolute TORRENT of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ updates as the news spread across the globe like wildfire.

As I sit here in my office over 72 hours later, I am still puzzled and trying to sort out why I feel the way I do. Over the last 3 days, as I've read countless stories, remembrances, anecdotes, memorials, Facebook status updates and tweets, I've come to the conclusion that I am overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation.

That's the best way I can put it: DISORIENTED.

I think the the reason I am grieving as if I've lost a member of my own family is because I have a relationship with my Apple gadgets that transcends a normal person's level of interaction with their electronic devices.

I guess also that I'm so sad because Steve Jobs is gone and in death he takes with him the spark, the essence, the "id" that all Apple products are imbued with. A part of me fears that nothing will ever be the same again and that the special feeling I had of owning the greatest smartphone, tablet and personal computer on the planet has been slightly extinguished.

I didn't know Steve Jobs, but I felt like I did. In using his products constantly, every single day of my life, I felt like I owned a part of something that Steve Jobs designed and now, going forward, the very last product created while he was still alive is the new iPhone 4S coming out next Friday 12 October.

I've only been using Apple products since December 2006, a relatively short amount of time, but in that time I've grown to love what Apple products represents: The very best consumer electronics available.

Well, I'm probably rambling, so I'm going to close by saying:

Thank you Steve, for being you, for pusing industrial design forward, for relentlessly pursuing perfection until the objects you bestowed upon the world filled all of your fans with absolute delight.

Rest in peace, man. I'll see you on the other side.

Apple announces the iPhone 4S

Alberto — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:41:52 -0700

NO NEW iPhone 5. NO Facebook app for the iPad or integration into iOS 5. NO Apple TV announcements.

What did we Apple FANBOYS get?

A newly re-tooled iPhone 4 called the 'iPhone 4S'. It has:
1 GB of RAM.
The A5 CPU that's in the iPad 2.
7X faster graphics.
8 MP camera with a much better sensor, better low-light performance.
FULL HD, 1080P video recording.
iOS 5 with
The new Siri-based 'Assistant' that you can use natural language to speak to and use it to create voice sms text messages, ask for directions, make appointments, look up stocks and the weather, etc. This feature seems really cool.

PRICING (Assuming a new 2yr contract:) $199 gets you a 16GB iPhone 4S $299 gets you a 32GB iPhone 4S $399 gets you a 64GB iPhone 4S

The CURRENT iPhone 4 is now $99 and the iPhone3 GS is FREE with a new contract.

Who cares about my life?

Alberto — Sun, 22 May 2011 16:27:25 -0700

I will be 45 in August and I find myself increasingly worried about the impact I am having on the people around me. Consider this: Is it egotistical to worry about whether what you do with your life is important or not?

I mean, who cares right? Everyone has their own little life wagon that they drag along behind them, with their own set of problems, worries, concerns and issues. So if that's the case, then why not just go through life just living your life, day to day, trying not to expel negative energy in the hopes of avoiding having negative enery fall on oneself?

Or is it all random? Chance? Does the Universe, in a grand cosmic sense, not care about the individual lives of humans and only acts in a manner that affects great groups of people at one time?

I don't think so. I think the Universe IS aware of me and becuase of that I, for one, have a very healthy respect for Karma and I consider most of the decisions I make within the realm of the possible negative ramifications it might have on the people I interact with.

Like a rock falling in a perfectly calm pond, the concentric circles of water that pulse out of the place where the rock hit the water, every action we take has a reaction on someone, somewhere and if we as a species took that more seriously, the world would be a much better place.

Getting back to the question about who cares about my life, I do. I'm going to try and re-focus on living a life of Purpose and strive to do something good every day that has a positive impact on the people I come in contact with.

If I care more about what and WHY I do the thing I do with the amount of time I have left on this spiritual plane, then the odds are that I will lead a better life and I will make the lives of tghe people I care about better as a result also.

Hopefully it's not too late to start doing something worthwhile and memorable. I'd hate to think that I wasted what little precious time I had, however much longer that may be.

From Windows to Mac OS X to Windows

Alberto — Sat, 21 May 2011 17:19:23 -0700

In late 2007, as a result of the debacle of Windows Vista and how ripped off I felt as a result of paying almost $500 for a retial copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (Microsoft promised a series of add-ons specifically for people who bought Vista Ultimate and they never delivered on them), I decided that I was going to make the move full-time to Apple OS X.

I got a Mac Mini in December of 2006 (my first Mac ever) and was very happy with using it on a day to day basis for the next couple of years. In August 2007, Apple released the 1st generation of all-alumunium iMacs and I purchased one in May of 2008.

My first Apple MacBook Pro

In October of that same year, Apple released the 15" Macbook Pro featuring an aluminum "precision aluminum unibody enclosure" and I bought one the very same day it was released.

I've used that laptop over the last 2 1/2 years with out any problems, except for the fact that I find it rather heavy and as a result, I put off hauling it out of my backpack, plugging it in (the battery is only good for less than 3 hrs) and using it regularly.

Using Windows on a Macbook Pro

I tried all of the options to boot into Windows on a Macbook, including Parallels, VMware Fusion and Apple's Bootcamp, ultimately settling for Bootcamp as the best solution, as it runs Windows 7 natively and with the least performance hit.

However, having to boot the Macbook, wait for the Bong!, hold down the Option key to select what partition to boot from, then finally booting into Windows proved to be too cumbersome to be productive.

Also, the keyboard on a Macbook Pro keeps with the Jobsian minimalism and just feels lacking when you're working in a Windows enviroment. Of course, there's always the option of a USB or Bluetooth wireless keyboard, but that's just ANOTHER thing to carry around, pair, worry about batteries, etc. More productivity impact.

The Trade

So, I used the Macbook on and off for nearly theree years until just very recently when a friend wanted to get his wife a Macbook and was looking into used/refurbished units. he bought his wife a top-of-the-line Sony VAIO in May of last year, paying $840 for it a local Best Buy.

Looking into what I might be able to get for the 2008 Macbook, I checked Gazelle, eBay and a couple of other places and it semeed like $650~700 was what it was going for on average. When we realized that both units were so close to each other in relative value, we thought a simple swap might just fit both our needs well.

After a week of going back and forth and thinking about the possible tradeoffs and potential downfalls of the daily use of a Windows laptop, I went ahead and pulled the trigger, based primarily on Microsoft Office OneNote, believe it or not.

You see, we bought a Bakery in late 2009 and from the get-go, I started recording pretty much all of the business transactions (and personal also) that happen on a day-to-day basis in OneNote. Now, all I have to do to find the details of something is type the first few letters of whatever detail I can remember into the Search box in OneNote, or the integrated Search box in Windows 7 which searches inside OneNote by default.

Having quick, native access to OneNote and the familiarity of using Windows in a native hardware enviroment is something that I simply didn't have with the MacBook Pro. Now I boot the Sony Vaio and 90 secxonds later I am ready to go, working in OneNote, Excel or Google Chrome to use GMail.

As pretty and sophisticated as the Macbook Pro was, it simply wasn't meeting the PRACTICAL USE NEEDS that I have in my day to day running of a small business.

So that's it, I was a Windows user who tried to integrate a Mac laptop into the daily workflow of running a small business and in the end found that returning to the familiar environment of a Windows laptop was less stressful and more convenient.

Back

Alberto — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:26:59 -0700

I used to write in this blog almost everyday years and years ago, until one day my best friend told me that my Blog was useless, that nobody cared what was happening in my life and that it was a gigantic waste of time.

Unfortunately, I allowed that scathing criticism to pierce my psyche and just got out of the habit of writing on a daily basis and when you lose the muscle memory, well... yeah.

This is what happens. A blog that sits abandoned and collecting dust and pretty soon, it's been such a long time since you wrote anything that it's hard to shake off the lethargy and just start writing again... A colleague told me years ago that when you're facing Writer's block, a sure-fire method of breaking out of it is to write. WRITE ANYTHING, it doesn't matter what... just WRITE TO WRITE and pretty soon you're out of the rut and writing again.

Well, this is my attempt to break off the shackles of those twin agents of evil Lethargy and his brother Procrastination.

Away with you! Off with your heads!

I'm back! This blog is MY HOUSE and I can put in my house ANYTHING I WANT. As such, I am going to write here the things that I find interesting, important, funny, scary or whatever else. It's my blog and I can do whatever I want with it.

I'm looking at you, Bert.

Osama Bin Laden Killed

Alberto — Mon, 02 May 2011 08:37:18 -0700

Huge news on Sunday night 1 MAY 2011:

Barak Obama held a very late, unscheduled press conference from the East Room at the White House to announce that a team of U.S. Special Forces Navy Seals had raided a compound in northwest Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden.

Twitter immediately EXPLODED with the news and I watched Obama’s press conference on ABC News from my bedroom at home.

I will be collecting the newspapers tomorrow morning.

'02 'Vette Electrical isue # 987,645 (I think)

Alberto — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:41:56 -0800

I think I may have just resolved the latest electrical issue with my Corvette. It’s been sitting dead for more than 10 days and I can’t stand not having a car of my own to move around in.

So, this afternoon, I left the bakery for a few hours and drove home to see if I could get the car jump-started and taken over to a mechanic friend of my brother’s called Cesar who said he’d take a look at it.

I walk up to the car, open the door, get in and turn the key. “clack, clack, clack…” DEAD as a doornail. BUT. I hear a sort of repetitive CHUNKING noise coming from the back of the car. Get out, walk around, pop the trunk and the noise seems to be coming from inside the main storage compartment.

Open that compartment and sure enough, the CD Changer is just clicking away, in an electrical short sort of fashion, rather haphazardly. Thinking that this might be the source of the problem, I disconnect the power from the CD changer and the chunking noise ceases immediately.

Back to the front of both cars, pop the hoods, hook up the cables and start the engine on my wife’s Ford Explorer. Back to the Corvette and the engine turns over smoothly. I let them, both idle for like 10 minutes while I empty out the trunk.

Come back, turn it off and back on.Turns over fine.

Taking it for a spin, I drive from our house, jump on the 405, get off on El Segundo Blvd. and drive over to the car wash that’s near El Segundo and Sepulveda. Car Wash proceeds OK andf I drive home where I park, turn off the car and turn it back on. Turned over just fine.

We’ll see what it does when I get home tonight from LGVB.

Testing BlogJet

Alberto — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:29:11 -0800

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination." -- Albert Einstein

Testing BlogJet

Alberto — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:38:04 -0800

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination." -- Albert Einstein