ScottSevener.com

Scott’s 21st Birthday

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

The Feast!: So yeah, my Mom kind of went all out for my 21st birthday … I came home to find 21 pink plastic flamingos decorating the front lawn, and then this happened!
The Lobster: I cooked it myself – ordered his own gruesome, boiling demise – which was and still is sickly kind of amusing.
Corona: And I was sort of a beer drinker back then, although it was mostly because I felt like I was supposed to at the time. I think I picked Corona just because it seemed tropical and although I had the maps up on my walls, this was still several years before I would actually pack up and move away to Florida, so it was very much still a pipe dream at that point.
Birthday Comix: It’s kind of hard to make out, but on the keyboard towards the left you can see one of the very first comics that my sister and I did together years before Ink, Paint & Tears… actually came to be. It was a little four-part series we did for Just Laugh called Our Loser Friends – my friend Matt and I who ran the site wrote the series as Two Guys from Nowhere and Lori did the artwork under Loriginal Comix.
Jam Session: I have no idea why there is not one, but two boomboxes in this photo. I guess my Mom just throws that kind of party!

Bonus Photo…

The Original Office

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

More Monkey!: Same poster as seen before moved with me into my new office, which essentially consisted of me crudely cutting a hole in the wall and knocking out the stud in the middle so that I could get from the room where my bed was into this new office space that I had annexed for myself. By this point I had pretty much taken over the entire basement of the house, turning it into sort of my own makeshift apartment during my college years before I left.
On the Printer: The cover to my final project for college – a journal written after we took a week-long class trip down to the Everglades to study nature and ecology and all that jazz! I ended up posting the thing online and also printing out a few copies for close friends – you can find it here for the time being, in all of its 2002 Scott’s Sense of Humor glory!
Felt Figment!: I actually have that laying around here somewhere, too, because I grabbed it the last time we were up to visit – I think I got that my very first trip to Disney World, which would’ve been like 1982??? I keep saying that I want to properly frame it, but then I never do.
Sea Life, Framed: I want to say that maybe that was a gift from my Dad at some point? All it is is a big sheet of fabric wrapped around a wood frame, but it was BIG and I needed something to fill space on the wall, so there you go!

Also noteworthy:

I seriously feel cold just looking at that photo! Living in the basement meant that it was cool in the spring and summer, and absolutely freezing anytime else… 😕

My Basement Lair…

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

Everywhere: I’d like to say that the reason the room is so messy was because I was getting ready to move to Florida in this picture, but its metadata marks this photo as circa December 2001 and I didn’t move until 2003… 😯
The Tie Dye: I very much played the part of the stoner in high school and then on through college … what you can’t see behind me is an entire wall covered in trippy black light posters and a couple of tie dyed wall hangings that pretty much covered the walls completely. Hey, it was an unfinished basement – what do you want from me?!
The Bead Door: OMG, was this thing such a pain in the ass! Just ask anyone who ever caught a shoe on one coming in and brought beads crashing down all around them! There are a couple of dozen strings hanging, they were all done by hand, and the difference between mine and the ones you could buy at any head shop? The professionally made ones are tied off at each bead so you can cut them, and also to prevent said crashing to the floor whenever company comes over…
- Standard rule was that whoever broke it was the one stuck picking up all of the beads.
Christmas Lights: I was also, like, really big into decorating my Mom’s house for Christmas. It was one of the few times I didn’t mind going out in the cold, even though snow + climbing on the roof = terrifying beyond belief.
The Just Laugh Monkey: This is the same one as seen in this post, pre-signed and back when the magazine was still in active production. It was the summer before I moved down to here that I spent about $100 on postage to mail that thing around to all of our contributors for their autographs … maybe somehow I knew then that it wasn’t going last much longer.
The Expensive Music Equipment: Directly below my monkey is one of the reasons it took me so long to move … because I thought it would be a good idea to run up $4,000 worth of credit card debt for music stuff while I was still in high school! Worst part is, all of that crap now sits under a bunch of sheets in that same basement… 😐

The Old Apartment

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

After stumbling across this old photo while I was working on backup stuff, I started noticing random details in it and thought that going through it might make for a fun, little blog series, so here we are! 🙂

On the TV: HBO’s Oz … I used to watch that show a lot, despite the constant shanking and man sex that apparently comes from life in prison without parole.
On the Table: Remember CD-Rs?! We used to save all of our digital media to these cheap, optical discs that were super easy to scratch and got really bad if you left them in the front seat of your car! It was a strange time.
On the Table: In the corner is my very first, and actually the only laptop that I’ve ever owned. I don’t remember exactly when it died, but it’s definitely in a recycle pile somewhere now.
On the Shelf: Nintendo games! Also, my Aerosmith CD collection and it looks like a bunch of TV series on DVD.
On the Speaker: I own an iron?!?!?! Actually, I think I still have that exact same iron. Fun Fact: I’ve never used it to iron clothes … I think it was out to try and get melted wax out of the carpet or something.
Fishtank in the Corner: I miss the days when I was responsible enough to keep a nice fish tank, but those days are gone.

Also noteworthy:

The TV (and the metadata on the image) dates this photo November 2004, meaning I had just gotten my brand new HD TV a couple of months prior! Although we technically still have it in our living room today, it’s been acting real funky lately and my wife mentioned she smelled smoke and burning coming from it, so a decade is probably the lifespan for that reliable, old rear projection TV.

The costs of cloud storage in 2014…

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

Despite being a lifelong computer geek, I’ve never really been very good about maintaining proper backups.

It’s always been something that was just off on the horizon – something that I was going to take care of soon, but not right now.

Thankfully I think I’ve only been bitten by this lack of preparation a couple of times … usually I’ve lucked out and been able to spin a hard drive up just long enough to pull data off after a crash, and I think I lost one drive a long time ago that was a repository for video files of TV shows and movies that got toasted and never recovered, but as far as I can remember, that’s about it.

That said, I know that I should do better and as I look towards upgrading to a new laptop here shortly in addition to just updating both of our phones, I’m trying to weigh my options as far as whose cloud all of this digital crap that we’ve accumulated should get stored in!

Just at a glance, we’ve got…

My Documents – 25 GB
Photos – 90 GB
Music – 85 GB
Video – 90 GB
Miscellaneous Other Stuff – 295 GB
iPhone / iPad data – 15 GB
Online Website Stuff – 5 GB

And granted, I think part of my problem in trying to devise a strategy for this all along is that I’ve always wanted one place to reliably backup all of this stuff, and a few years later now I’m looking back at it and thinking that maybe that isn’t really the right way to go anyways. Despite in total everything clocking in at barely over half a terabyte, now it’s all on different devices, and some of it I want to remain in sync on different devices, so more of a hybrid solution may very well be in order now that there are actually quite a few cloud storage options available.

The trouble is, picking which one! 😯

I’ve had a Dropbox account now for a couple of years, but I rarely use it because I didn’t want to install their app on some of the computers that I needed it on, and plus nowadays the storage capacity for a free account isn’t anywhere near what I need.

Google Drive is fine, though I’ve never used their app to really give it a proper workout. On the other hand, I’m quickly losing my faith in Google Docs because I kind of hate their word app and it’s by far the most important to me as a writer. Their spreadsheet app is ok, but I’m pretty experienced in Excel at this point and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve hit a wall saying, “But I know that I can do that in Excel!!!”

Which brings me to Microsoft OneDrive, which I honestly hadn’t even thought about until I just realized this evening that 1 TB of storage comes with any subscription to Office 365, which I’m going to have to get for $99/year with the new MacBook Air that I’ve had my eye on.

And then there’s also iCloud, which we just recently upgraded on both of our phones (at the lowest $0.99/month/device plan) to allow them to continue backing up as we moved to bigger devices because we were both randomly getting out of space errors with the last phones that we had!

As a side note, I’ve also been looking at a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud so that I can have Photoshop and Fireworks on the new computer, which comes with a free 20 GB of storage, but looking at the numbers above I don’t think that’s even worth thinking about at this point.

I guess at the moment I’m a little torn between OneDrive and iCloud – on one hand, OneDrive is essentially free with Office, whereas iCloud will run me another $10-20/month just for the laptop alone. And I think that’s what bugs me about iCloud is that ideally I’d like my wife’s phone and my own to share, but they still need their own accounts according to Apple despite now looking at $22/month just in cloud storage fees!

I think I still need to do some more research into this because from what I can tell, everything that iCloud can do, OneDrive can do, too, and if that’s the case, OneDrive will already be free for me!

The big takeaway that I’m looking for here is really simplicity and thoroughness – even though I’ll never write from my phone for the most part, the idea of having all of my Word docs available to browse anywhere I am is kind of appealing, just like it’d be nice if the photos I took from my phone could just magically sync to my PC instead of having to copy over the ones that I want to use in a blog post or whatever. And then there’s the whole media aspect of it – I know that I can’t have a couple hundred gigs stored on my phone at all times, but if all of my music and videos were in the cloud … even the stuff that I haven’t purchased from Apple! … that I could stream anywhere, be it traveling or whatnot, that would be a nice change from the messy file folders that I have today!!!

Granted, I know that I’m not going to solve all of these problems in one day. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to solve any of them until I’ve got my new laptop and I can install both of them and play around a bit with what they can do. From a cost perspective, obviously OneDrive would be ideal, and I think it might work with syncing phone photos if I install their iOS app like the website says (now if only my camera did the same thing!). If I could get OneDrive to handle documents, photos, and a simple cloud backup for media, that would be a good start … making them easily streamable to my phone or Sara’s iPad on the fly would be even better.

On top of all of this, I feel like I still need a good, solid local backup, too, which in the short term might be as simple as picking up a 4TB external hard drive for $150 to dump everything to as well as store some of the bulkier stuff (because my laptop will only have a 500 GB drive).

Ideally I eventually want to revisit my whole home server idea because in addition to shuttling files between phones and computers, I also want to see the media portion accessible via Smart TVs in the house … though that’s a taller order because I still need to sort out multiple sources (i.e. purchased from iTunes vs DVDs and Blu-Rays bought), co-mingling these all in one interface, and making them look pretty and easy to browse on the TV itself. At one point I thought that Apple TV might be a good front end for this, but now I’m not so sure. Additionally, I need a place where I can run scripted backups pulling down from my web server just to make me feel safer with a local backup on top of the network backups that they do today. All of these combined have been what’s steered me clear of a NAS box because I’m not sure how much actual functionality I could get from one aside from here are some drives for you to use.

Oh yeah, and I have to decide whether I still want a whole-computer backup for all of this crap as well, too, or if everything else listed above would be good enough!

Last year I paid for a subscription to CrashPlan on a Black Friday sale with the intent of finally backing up our photos, and a year later they’re asking me to renew and I never even installed the client software… 😛

Lots and lots of decisions, and I have a feeling that it’s going to end up being a phased approach simply because I can’t just go out and drop $1,000 on a new file server tomorrow like I’ve wanted to now for years! I want to avoid picking up lots of recurring fees because we already pay Verizon so much money just for connectivity at home and via mobile as it is … and yet, half a terabyte now more than ever, I’m starting to realize the value of the data we’ve collected over the years and just how much it would suck for any of it to randomly disappear due to a stupid disk crash again or something.

I’m sure this won’t be the last riveting post I write about the existing world of cloud storage – I’ll let you know what I come up with! 😀

(and good grief, I really need to come up with something to solve these problems this time…)

a few more thoughts about FF: ATB

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

So despite my entirely negative review about a month ago, admittedly I’ve still been playing this sporadically here and there – I suppose you could say that morbid curiosity will do that to you.

I guess I wanted to see what other characters and monsters made appearances from the series, and ultimately how they ended it. I also really wanted to see at least one character from my favorite Final Fantasy of all-time (IV – Paladin Cecil, represent!), but apparently that just wasn’t in the cards for me.

I figure I probably pumped maybe $20 or so into the game total, spanning a couple of hourglass purchases because you get to a point where you can’t beat any of the bosses without either using them or waiting a day and a half to replenish your characters several times, and also maybe 15 or so “Premium Characters” out of the hope that eventually I would pull somebody that I actually liked!

Ended up getting Terra, Celes, and Locke from FFVI and Tifa, Aeris, and Red XIII from FFVII, but not a single solitary character from FFIV!!!

I’ve read that Cecil, Kain, and Rydia are the picks from FFIV – any of whom would’ve been cool, but no…

Anyways, I guess I’m done with it now, in that I’ve hit Level 99 and there’s no where else to go, and the end bosses still typically require a party refresh so there’s no way that I’m paying for the other worlds plus another pack of hourglasses to beat those, too. It’s too bad because the graphics and the character content deserve so much better – with six months time you could make a pretty cool, little game out of this that you could charge $9.99 for as a premium title based on everyone’s nostalgia for their favorite characters and monsters from the series.

I think it’s time to move on to something different. I even tried taking a few screenshots of the cooler monsters that we fought, but half the time the battlefield is so convoluted once attacks start flying that you can’t even pause to appreciate the individual attacks that any one character does. Oh well – I suppose sometimes that’s the way the Atma Weapon crumbles…

Several Positive Things for the Last Month and a Half!

Posted on November 16, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

I really liked this series when I started posting them back in September, but I somehow managed to fall completely off the wagon in October. Let’s try to remedy that situation now… 😉

Swim Class Survival
After watching from the sidelines as Sara did swim class with Christopher for the last however many months, I finally had to fill in because she had surgery and couldn’t go in the water one week, and it actually ended up being a lot of fun. I was a little anxious about the whole thing leading up to it, but there were only a few other kids in the class and his instructor ended up being really great about showing me all of the different things that they had been doing. And he went underwater for a few seconds all by himself!!! Seriously, where was this class when *I* was a kid?!

Christopher’s First Halloween Was Great!
He was a baby dragon, and also Mickey Mouse at one point, and both were equally adorable … although the dragon candy bowl picture just slays me… 😀

I Voted
It didn’t work, but at least I tried. Our voting system needs a lot of work here in America.

Smooth Birthday Celebrations with Baby
With last week being Sara’s birthday, we ended up going out for a nice dinner at the restaurant in the hotel where we got married, and despite me being nervous about how he was going to act in a more formal setting (he’s kind of been a little nightmare for me lately), he was actually quite behaved the entire night. Admittedly it helped that there were a few other couples with babies there, too, so at least we weren’t the only that couple, but all in all I think he did good! He did give me a bit of a run for my money in the bathroom because they didn’t have a changing table and I had to do it in the sink, and I’m still not on the same page as my wife with regards to taking him to a movie in the afternoon, but it was a nice night and good for us to get out of the house because we kind of spend a lot more time there than we used to right now.

Baby’s First Safari
Also last weekend we took Christopher over to the Animal Kingdom for his first visit to that park – had lunch at Rainforest Cafe where he got to sit by the elephants, and then pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon walking around looking at the various animals around the park. He slept on and off a lot and we didn’t really get to do rides or anything, except for Kilimanjaro Safaris, which apparently I haven’t been on for a long time because I didn’t realize that they’d pulled the whole poaching bit out of the story altogether! It was fun and it was nice to finally get over there because Animal Kingdom is a park that I just hate to do if it’s not cooler out, so the weather cooperated at least for that part of the day, and there was much rejoicing.

New iPhones!!!
And lastly, I already posted about this earlier in the week, but Sara and I finally upgraded our phones, taking the huge leap from 4 to 6 on Tuesday, and I don’t know about her but I’m loving mine so far. It feels like a new toy all over again, I’m re-exploring apps old and new like crazy, and it’s nice to have a phone that doesn’t give me crap trying to play music in the car anymore, too! Just need to remember to take our old ones in for trade-in tomorrow so that we can get those promotional credits coming that made the upgrade possible in the first place!

Lots of stuff going on right now leading up into the holidays and life is extraordinarily chaotic, but let’s meet back here in a week’s time and we’ll see if I can’t come up with three new positives to post here again! 🙂

48 Hours with my New iPhone

Posted on November 13, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

After nearly a month and a half wait because apparently I’m not the only one who ordered one of these shiny, new iPhone 6s, they finally came in the mail Tuesday morning and the upgrade from my old phone was surprisingly seamless for both me and my wife’s phones, and I’ve got to say that I’m kind of loving it in a few ways that I hadn’t really been expecting!

So before this update, we were actually both still on our original iPhone 4s that we got when the iPhone first came to Verizon back in 2011. I had been through two of them, with one replaced literally days before the 1-year warranty was to expire, and even with my replacement now a couple of years later the lock button no longer works.

Remember this?

I hadn’t really put much thought into it because $300 x2 wasn’t exactly cash that we just had lying around, and then Verizon went and did this $200 for any iPhone trade-in, and here we are! It’s funny to look back and see that only three years ago I wrote this little love letter about getting my first iPhone, but now it’s time to throw that one to the curb and frankly, so far I think I made the right choice with putting the old horse down! 😉

What I like about the new phone…

Touch ID is a DREAM!!! I thought it was going to be terrible and pointless like most consumer-grade fingerprint ID hardware is, but they did a really good job with it when you consider the application for a phone. Despite my better judgment, I never had a PIN setup on my old phone because they’re a pain in the ass to enter whenever you want to do a single thing on it, but Touch ID makes it super simple – I ended up scanning in both index fingers and thumbs so no matter how I’m holding it, it’s easy to enter and so far it works great. And granted, in reality it may not be MacGyver-proof security, but for the random cases of somebody coming across my phone and not having my finger handy, it’s good enough for me!
It’s nice to feel speed again! Facebook in particular had gotten pretty horrible to use on my old phone, but it updates and posts like new again with a processor that’s several generations newer and twice as much RAM as my iPhone 4 used to have. I’ve already found myself re-exploring apps that I’d downloaded before and never really used while I was cleaning out some of the ones that I didn’t want. Plus, the camera is significantly better, so for those excited about what I eat for dinner but who were tired of straining through the darkness to see what anything was, look out!
It FEELS like a new phone. Because to be honest, I never really got amped up about the iPhone 4S or 5 because aside from a slightly larger display and better hardware, the previous upgrades didn’t really feel like new phones to me – or at least not enough to warrant dropping another $600 to replace both of ours. And I didn’t think that I’d like the new curved form factor to this one, but it’s really kind of growing on me – the screen is a third bigger, but not too big like some of the more recent Samsung Galaxy phones and even the iPhone 6 Plus, and my biggest critique is really that the lock button moved … which I suppose that I’ll get used to considering that mine’s been broken and I’ve been using AssistiveTouch for the last six months anyways!

In a way I feel kind of spoiled right now because it looks like this might not be the only splurging that we’re doing technology-wise this year and between now and Christmas I’ll likely have a couple of other new toys to play with that I’m really looking forward to as well! Then again, I suppose if I look back over the last couple of years, tech has really been kind of quiet in my life whereas I used to be building computers and rewiring home theater equipment and fighting with my home network all of the time! So it’s also been fun to re-explore technology over the last couple of days as I get used to the latest computer that I carry around in my pocket everywhere I go, giving me instant access to information, people, games, and so much more.

Siri: Living in the future is awesome!

Accepting the Demise of The Newsroom…

Posted on November 13, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79JJOPHW_NQ

If only the first episode of season three had been as compelling as the trailer, maybe we’d still have a show worth fighting for here.

Simply put – I watched season 3, episode 1 of The Newsroom last night, and I’m sad to say that I kind of hated it. Like, A LOT.

It’s not the same show that it was when it first started – the characters are suddenly all best friends, there’s no structure left in the office, and after the last season was dominated by a plot around confidential information, season three looks like it’s starting out … the exact same way.

By the end of the episode, I regrettably had come to terms with the idea of the show ending after all. I loved season 1, but it started to fall short in season 2 and now having watched the premiere of #3, it doesn’t really surprise me as much that HBO decided to pull the plug on this one. So much of the episode just didn’t feel right…

The intern who infamously got hired at the end of season 1 is now taking jabs at Will like they’re brother and sister.
Apparently Sloan doesn’t really do much financial reporting anymore, except for showing her sparkly, new Bloomberg product placement.
Don runs a show later than News Night, but apparently he never really has anything to do with his own show so he just hangs out with Will’s crew instead.
Reese is now sort of buddy-buddy with the group, hanging out with them like he’s not the head of the entire company that everyone has hated up until now.
Jim’s girlfriend from the last season now works there because, hell, why not?!
And instead of Will being this noble, though intimidating force in the office, now he’s a bumbling idiot who seems to have traded scripts with MacKenzie the moment the two lovebirds got engaged last season.

I hate to see shows go while they’re still in their prime and I really thought that The Newsroom stood out as one of those with a decent amount of staying power, but I don’t know if the writers room changed or they just didn’t have anymore decent stories left in them. I’m morbidly curious to see what they do with the remaining couple of episodes that they still have left…

…but I swear to god, if they keep dragging out this Jim and Maggie dead horse like they eluded to when Maggie became a news woman on camera, I might not make it to the wedding that’s no doubt going to be the final episode… 🙁

Meeting an Elephant for Lunch…

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Scott / 0 Comment