I have steadily been becoming a coffee snob.

I own two french presses and never make coffee anyway. I always grind my own coffee fresh everyday.

Until recently starbucks was my goto coffee supplier, however for the past couple months my work has brought me to Portsmouth NH. If you live in the Northeast and have never been it is highly recommended. Portsmouth is a well kept, friendly city with great restaurants and bars, and of course great Coffee.

There are two starbucks here and two independent roasters: Port City Roasters (http://www.portcitycoffee.com/) and Breaking New Grounds (http://www.yelp.com/biz/breaking-new-grounds-portsmouth).

Both of these roasters have great coffee. They both buy their beans direct from the coffee farmers, and they both roast these beans themselves in house. The availability of these great coffee shops is taking my coffee snobbery to unprecedented heights.

They both have slightly different roasters and roasting processes so if you got the same type of coffee at both places it would be different.

I have bought coffee in spurts from both places but I think that Breaking New Grounds is my favorite. Their coffees all have a very clean roasting taste that leaves a lot of the taste of the beans still intact. However Breaking New Grounds is also quite expensive.

Port City Roasters has a slightly smaller selection, but they always seem to have 1 or 2 types of beans that are unique and new to me. Currently I am drinking the Bali Blue Moon coffee from Port City and my favorite is probably their Organic Tanzanian coffee. Port City Roasters has great coffee and is moderately cheap considering the quality. They are a great value and frequently bring in new beans to change up their selection.

While I do miss not being able to be home as much because I am always up here, I certainly will miss the great coffee when my time here is up.

After having a blackberry tour for 2 years and growing increasingly frustrated with it, I finally was able to ditch it and upgrade to an Android device.  Being an moderately well informed technologist, and therefore very picky with technology, I was hell-bent on getting the ‘perfect’ phone.  After lots of research I decided that the Droid Bionic was the phone for me, but that its release date wasn’t announced because Motorola was making some design modifications.

My contract with the blackberry was already over… how long would I have to wait to get the Bionic?

Well folks, it was well worth the wait.  While it is running Gingerbread which many Android devices have had for a while, and it came out right on the cusp of the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, the hardware for this phone is fantastic.  The screen is very good, and it is fast fast fast.  Not to mention that because I live in the Boston area and it is a 4G device that now I get to use it on Verizon’s 4G network, which is the real deal.

Yesterday on the outskirts of Boston I did a speed test and got 20MB down, 10MB up.  Unfortunately where I live its only 12 down and 2 up.  But I won’t complain, that’s still great considering it is rare to download large files to a mobile device.

My one gripe with the Bionic is that Motorola has baked in functionality, which I am vehemently against.  They have however committed to releasing Ice Cream Sandwich.

I don’t know exactly what these hardware manufacturers are modifying, but I wish Google could come up with a way to make those components modular like most of the phone so you could press a button and switch to Vanilla Android if/when your manufacturer has ended their support.

I must say all in all that I am very pleased with this device, and now that I have joined the Google eco-system with my phone, I am not sure I can ever leave…

Still looking for the tablet to end all tablets though, I expect to see one next year.  But now the question becomes Android or Windows 8 with Metro?

-Steve

I know I am pretty late to join the party about the developer preview. But I must say I am enjoying this.

Browsing on IE10 with the Metro UI is very nice, however switching between tabs (are there even tabs???) and other common browser tasks seem clumsy. Though it could just be that it is new? But the actual web browsing experience is very good.

I am still not sure how this will fair in the real test ( trying to do work), but I do think that this is a step in the right direction and am looking forward to many more steps to come.

Well typically I am opposed to sharing jam sessions and things, mostly because I am a perfectionist and only want my best to be out there.  Though I don’t think I will have the chance to refine the good parts in this to the extent that they deserve, so I will share it exactly how it came out of my fingers.

Jam session record at 10:30 PM March 21st 2011: synthness

To anyone that listens to it, its pretty loud, and bare in mind it was a jam.  Some parts are pretty good, some parts are plain crap.

-Steve

So after years of typing considerable amounts everyday and over a year working at a job doing programming, I decided it was time to get a terrific keyboard.  If you enjoy good keyboards or type a lot you probably has heard of it: daskeyboard.

The daskeyboard has no multimedia button, no programmable keys, and no lights (except for num, caps, and scroll lock).  Just all the keys in their clickety clackity glory.  For those of you that haven’t heard of the daskeyboard, the first thing you will be told about these is they are LOUD, like really loud.  Well how loud can a keyboard be right?

Well when I was looking into getting one I saw they had a silent edition. “Hmm I like quiter things…”.  Not to mention I would prefer the people in the cubicle next door not taking a sledgehammer to my nice new clickety clackety keyboard.  So I did a little research and read that there was a difference in noise but not as much a difference in the keyboards themselves.  The long and the short of it is that I got the silent edition.

AND I LOVE IT!  First day back to work I emailed the IT supervisor and said I wanted one for the office because I didn’t want to take it back and forth with me everyday (all other keyboards feel like typing quicksand in comparison).  Of course my counterpart at the company (there are two of us performing similar tasks) also wanted one.

Well we were told he would give it his best shot if we sent him the information to order them.  I decided to get the silent edition again and my counterpart got the standard daskeyboard.

After having compared them…. there is quite a difference, not surprisingly the standard model is more responsive.  Now before you laugh at me because I am the fool who ended up with two lesser quality keyboards (which are 5 bucks more too), I actually DON’T LIKE IT AS MUCH, though I recognize it is more responsive.  They don’t feel good.

For the past 6 years I have used one of the saitek eclipse model keyboards, which in my opinion are among the best typing keyboards in their class (that is the gaming / multimedia class of keyboards littered with fodder from logitech and razor ).  Saitek keyboards have keys with very smooth strokes.  That is what I have always liked about them, and I was pleased that the silent daskeyboard was even smoother and also incredibly responsive.

Well the problem I have with the standard daskeyboard is it does not feel very smooth when you type.  It feels as though the plastic part of the key travels a few millimeters before it hits the plunger and travels further.  This feel very odd and cumbersome to me, not to mention the plunger requires more pressure than originally felt.

Fortunately I made out with the keyboard I liked better, even if I do admit it is the ever so slightly inferior keyboard.

So to those of you (or I should say ‘if any of you are’) reading this that might want a daskeyboard keep in mind that while the standard, original keyboard is ‘better’, it is different enough that you actually may not like it.  Since the keyboards are sold online you are allowed to return them within 30 days of purchase, however I am still pleased with my choice and will continue to type with pride on my slightly quiter, slightly less responsive, daskeyboard silent edition.

This neat little application was recently reccommended to me by a friend at work and at first I was skeptical and hesitant but I now feel it is indispensible.  For those of you that haven’t heard of f.lux ( http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/ ), it is an application that dynamically changes the color of your screen based on the amount of natural light available in your area.  The purpose of this is that your screen will adjust as the outdoor light adjusts, and your eyes, which will subsequently put less strain on your eyes.

Recently I have been doing some late night coding and my eyes feel more refreshed and less strained when I look away from the monitor than without it.  The strange thing about it is that at night it has a pinkish / orangish tinge, which takes some getting used to.  But once you get used to it f.lux is glorious.  Highly reccommended.

-Steve

I am going to ignore the fact that it has been almost a year since I last posted and continue on…

For the past few days I have been learning the WPF platform.  Since its release I have dabbled but I have yet to pick up a book and actually learn how to do things properly.  In fact I had stopped trying to use some of the advanced features in WPF because most of them are implemented using a methodology so drastically different than windows forms that I simply couldn’t figure it out and got frustrated.  Today however I saw success and am pleased with both the platform and my progress learning it.

However what I am most pleased with is how easy Click Once Deployment is to set up, there was however one gotcha I noticed which is what made me want to make this post because while I did find the answer ( here: http://marlongrech.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/clickonce-installer-when-the-server-does-not-have-frontpage-server-extensions/ ), I felt it was unresolved because there was no context or reason to why this work around infact work ( the book I am reading was even vague on this technique or else I would have used it first).

Using the publishing wizard from Visual Studio 2010 made this a piece of cake.  To launch the wizard go to Build -> Publish Solution Name.  The basic idea of this dialog is that you give the location you want to publish the application, then you declare where the users will connect to install the location from.  Usually the installation location will be a website, and often these two addresses are the same.

I put the website I wanted users to install the application from as the ‘publish’ location, when you hit next it skips the installation location prompt if you entered a web site to publish to.  Then you are asked if users are allowed to run the application without access to the host server.  Selecting yes makes the most sense, you can’t even launch the application without going back to the address if it is totally dependant on the web server.

Then after that prompt, you are done.  Review the settings and press finish.

Watching with excitement I watched the status bar update with information: Publishing, Building, Build Failed!

At this point I began googling around for the error displayed in my error list window ( “The Web server does not appear to have FrontPage Server Extensions installed”).  This was when I found the link above which ended up being the solution.  But why?  Why do it this way (I actually published to a local drive not a local IIS instance)?

It is my belief that the reason is as simple as your web server needing the Front Page Server Extension installed and configured properly to be able to PUBLISH the files to it.  Since I just wanted to get the thing up and running at this point I decided to cut the corners and publish to a local drive then copy and paste to the install directory I entered in the publishing wizard.  Supposedly this address gets entered somewhere into the files that get published so it won’t work if they are not in the correct location.

Now that I’ve finished this seems like a fairly insignificant post… oh well hope it helps at least one person.

Regards,

Steve

Well thats a lie i have recorded several, but this is the first one i think is “good enough”.  I still need to get better at using the recording equipment (though I really have come a long way), and sadly I made a few mistakes, but overall I think it sounds pretty good.

If anyone actually listens to it I would appreciate any feedback good or bad.  Hope you like it!

LittleBee

Well the past couple of months have been super busy, and obviously I am not very good at keeping on top of this.  However I recently got an Alesis Multimix 8 usb mix station, and it is awesome.  I am currently working on figuring out how the heck it works, because I have never recorded before, then I hope to have some original songs up here!

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera; which of these browers is best, which should I use?

A few years ago after having been a devoted Firefox user for several years, they released 2.0, which began the downward spiral of performance issues, and endless memory leaks, I made the difficult choice of switching back to Internet Explorer which recently recieved its update as well, to 7.0.  This lasted for about a year, when Firefox released a new update to 3.0, which I downloaded in anticipation of promises of improvements and fixes.

Initially pleased with the improvements, and plethora of new features, the same problems began to rear their ugly heads.  Over the next couple of years I began jumping around between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the at the time very new Google Chrome.  They each had their advantages, and they each had their faults; though Firefox always seemed to be in the back of my head due to its plethora of features, and endless number of add-ons: many of which are nearly good enough to cause me to overlook the browsers flaws performance wise. Enter Flock. Then a friend of mine and I discovered this new (to us) web browser called Flock.

Flock is a web browser based on the Firefox engine, that integrates a toolbar for a better user experience with social networking site, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  Continuing my search for a new browser that I would be truely satisfied with (and be able to use firefox add-ons again!) I decided to give it a try.  Not only is Flock great for having integration to social networking sites, it has the best performance of any browser I have used.  I know what you are thinking, with such a bold claim I must have evidence to back it up, or atleast a solid reason to stake this claim.

As a computer nerd (and proud of it) I always test new technology products to their breaking point (and somtimes past it), just to see what they are truely capable of; this is no different with Flock.  Like its competition in its heavy browser class, Firefox and Internet Explorer, Flock uses just under 100MBs of ram to run, usually ~85MB; so why is it so special?  Flock has an innate ability for taking resources as needed, and totally releasing them 100% (or seemingly close to it) back to its initial state.

For example.  I opened Flock with only one tab to 85MB.  Then opened 5 youtube videos (running), 3 pandora tabs (running), gmail, windows live, 3 hulu tabs (running), and 3 vimeo tabs (running), with windows task manager opened.  As expected, 450MBs of ram was used, and nearly 60% of my cpu (core 2 duo T7600), but the browser was as responsive as if it had only one tab open; that is remarkable.  The true test lay in closing all of these resources.

I closed every media tab as fast as I could watching Flock release its memory until I was back at my google homepage, and Flock was like was back at its 85MBs of ram starting point with ~1% cpu.  Absolutely incredible.

On top of it’s impressive performance, Flock boasts all of Firefox’s and more, with its addition of the social networking integration.

I have been a proud Flock user for 2 months, and am also pleased to report I have not once had a memory leak.

-Steve