Storming

My crackberry showed up today. I just activated it a few minutes ago, and I'm still trying to get used to it. I'm typing this on my Storm though, so at least I can browse the web effectively. Initial reactions are positive, but i'll have more to say later.

A Storm this way blows...

So it's time for a new phone. Not only is my old one not holding a charge and acting strange from time to time, but I've hit my upgrade time for my "New Every 2" plan. Thanks to this discount and my expenses being reduced lately, I can finally step into the 21st century of communication, I can finally get a smartphone!

Specifically, a Blackberry Storm.

It should be here on Friday. I'm totally stoked. I'll report back after I get it and start playing with it.

Really... I wanted an Iphone, but AT&T's network SUCKS in Mount Pleasant, so getting an Iphone would be about the stupidest thing I could do!

Google Maps needs a little help with their math...

I had to make a trip to Ionia from Mount Pleasant this morning. I had to be in Ionia at about 9:45am. So I jumped on to Google Maps and punched in my address and got directions to Ionia. The first route it suggested was south on 127 to M-21 and West into Ionia from there. I didn't feel like taking the highway so I moved the route to take M-20 West out of Mount Pleasant to M-66 South out of Remus. Google Maps then told me this:





Wow, 2 hours and 12 minutes... well I wasn't thinking too clearly about this last night so I set my alarm for 7am and planned to get on the road about 7:30.

While I'm on the road, I see a sign saying "Ionia 45 miles"... at 8:10 in the morning. At that rate, I was bound to hit Ionia at about 9am! Whoops... Sure enough, I'm in a coffee shop in Ionia right now, got into town at least 45 minutes early, it really only took me about an hour and 15 minutes to get here. I looked up the directions again and now I've realized Google's error, it's figuring an average speed of about 30 miles per hour! They must expect me to get stuck behind every tractor in Montcalm county...

Oh well, better early then late I suppose!

The WORST job in the world!

MINE.

I HATE IT.

IT SUCKS.

THE COMPANY SUCKS.

oh my god I need to get out of here...

The BEST job in the world!

After four solid days of brewing... I'm still 100% convinced that brewing is THE best job in the world. I'll try to write up my thoughts on the whole experience here in the next day or so, along with some pictures... but in the meantime just know this: I WILL BE A BREWER!

NO MORE THUMB DRIVES!!

Thumb Drives are great. I can't even begin to explain how useful it is for me to have 16GB of storage in such a small form factor. I keep 8+ GB of music on my thumb drive so I've got plenty of fresh tunes to listen to at work, on the road... wherever! I keep a couple hundred meg or so of various documents... beer recipes, food recipes, resumes, handy how-tos, diagrams... lots of random stuff on there. I use it to hold avi files to watch on my laptop on the couch. I use it to hold data while I work on "clients" computers. I use it to share all sorts of media with my non-bittorrent savvy friends, or those with slow internet connections. I can't even fully sum up just how handy it is to have so much space available anywhere I've got a USB port... which is just about anywhere nowadays.

But I should back up... Thumb drives "were" great, I "did" use my thumb drive for all of these uses... until it DIED. My current (dead) drive is an OCZ ATV 16GB flash drive. It worked wonderfully for 9 months... fast, lots of room, water resistant... I had nothing to complain about! When I bought it from Newegg last June, the ratings were pretty good, at least they were good enough for me to buy it and Newegg ratings are a HUGE part of any buying decision I make when I purchase tech equipment of almost any kind. Well when I look at them now... they've taken a serious hit. It seems that my situation with this drive failing after a short to medium length period of time is not at all unique. In fact... if I were considering this thumb drive right now... I would not buy it. It's got an overall three "egg" (star) rating, with only 48% of ratings at 5 stars, including a 2-star rating from me. I try to find products that have an overall 4 or 5 star rating, with preferably 75%+ ratings at 5 star, and that normally provides me with a high quality, highly functional equipment.

Well that provides me with a bit of a problem... OCZ IS going to replace my ATV 16GB drive for me (but I'm responsible for paying for shipment to OCZ, hmmm... that doesn't make me very happy even though it's light and will be cheap.). But that still leaves me with an unreliable thumb drive, one that I don't want to use for anything anywhere NEAR important. I can't even count on this drive to last a few weeks according to all of the reviews on Newegg.

So I've been looking at other thumb drives, preferably at 16GB, to use as my "primary" drive and keep my OCZ as just a music storage device. Well... I'm not exactly liking what I see. When I search for 16GB thumb drives and sort by rating, I find a few drives with 5 star ratings but not enough ratings to count, and then a few drives with 4 star ratings... Taking a look a the Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB we've got an overall rating of 4-stars, ok so far. But when you look at the breakdown only 53% of ratings are at 5-star... not quite as good as I would like, but hey, it does come with a 10-year warranty! The next drive in the list is by OCZ... well that's a no-go, I will not buy another OCZ flash drive! Even though the ratings on this drive are a fair bit better (4-star overall, 61% 5-star)... I just don't trust them, and I don't want to have to pay to ship another drive back if it fails! Next in the list is the Pariot Xporter XT 16GB... I don't have any experience with Patriot RAM or flash devices, but the ratings are getting better, 4-star overall and 67% 5-star, but with less total ratings. Next is another OCZ... And further, not only are the exact numbers not up to my (apparently) high standards... when I get to reading the reviews of any of the thumb drives I've been looking at... I'm not comforted. It seems to be pretty common for thumb drives to die young, to have random incompatibilities with random hardware rendering them anywhere from slow to completely inoperable. It's not at all comforting... Can I not rely on a thumb drive for storage of important data? I had hopes of tinkering with installing a small Linux distro on a drive so I always had a familiar desktop with me no matter where I go...

So what in the hell is one supposed to do for long-term, portable, bootable, important data storage? Print it off? Seriously... this can't be too difficult. I used to have a Lexar 1GB thumb drive that has now lasted for close to 5 years, I know it's still working because one of my friends has it and still uses it. External Hard Drives are not a good solution because platter-based magnetic data storage is physically fragile, I need something I can throw in my backpack and take with me without having to worry about keeping from breaking. I can't afford... much less do I know if I can trust a SSD drive... they're based on Flash RAM too! And I don't know if I can trust Flash RAM anymore... For example, SSDs with USB connectivity start at $96 for a 32GB drive with an average of less than 1 review.

Fwiw... if I relax my limitations a bit on the size of the thumb drive I want, I can find some thumb drives that DO meet my exacting standards. But one of my requirements for a good thumb drive was that I be able to fit an ISO of a complete dual-layer DVD on that drive, with room to spare. That basically means 16GB is the minimum, and it seems that 16GB thumb drives are CRAP.

A week off... at a Brewery!

So I've neglected this blog *JUST* a bit... to say the least. For various reasons that I choose not to go in to at this point, I've had to put homebrewing aside, temporarily. But that's not to say that advancing my brewing career is off the table or not moving forward!

Last time I updated here I was excited that I was going to be moving to Mt Pleasant soon to start an apprenticeship at the Mt Pleasant Brewing Company and Mountain Town Station Brewpub & Steakhouse. Well, due the same reasons that have prevented me from homebrewing recently, and compounded by normal financial limitations... that's had to be put on hold. But definitely not on hold indefinitely! In fact... plans are in the works for me to begin my apprenticeship this fall, even as soon as August or September!

I've still been spending time in Mt Pleasant, at the brewery. My goal at this point is to spend a minimum of one day a month there, helping out and learning as much as I can. But next week... I have a bit of a golden opportunity! I'm going to spend 3-5 days there in a row! Woohoo!!

I've been saving up my vacation time, and so has the assistant brewer up at MPBC. Brad, the assistant, is taking most of next week off, at least Monday through Thursday. That leaves Kim, the Head Brewer, all alone, and up to his eyeballs in work. Now I'm not *quite* as useful as Brad yet... they can't just let me loose and trust that I can clean/sanitize a fermenter, hook up the pump, and transfer a brew off a yeast cake and into the fermenter... yet. But I'm at least a second set of hands, and a set of hands who has a bit of brewing experience rather than Joe Schmoe off the street. So I'll be helping Kim out starting Monday or Tuesday, and ending either Thursday or Friday. I can't wait! This is the perfect use of a spring break if you ask me! And the perfect way to wedge my foot further into the door of a brewing career.

And to top it off, Tuesday night there will be a Wine & Beer Tasting at the pub! Wine & Beer samples, brewery tours, good times... I can't wait! I think the coolest thing is that people will probably assume that I work for the brewery ;-)