KaiSchaller.com

When the headphone jack on my iPhone stopped allowing plugs to click into place I figured there was some tiny piece of metal that had either broken off or gotten stuck somewhere down inside the hole. After putting off a visit to one of the Apple Retail stores in the area I finally made an appointment for Monday evening so that I could swing by on my way home from work. Imagine how silly I felt when the employee (or “Genius”, if you prefer) shone his tiny LED keychain flashlight down into the opening only to declare, “there’s a big piece of lint in there!”

It all began to make sense. The first time I noticed there was a problem was in the pitch black of the bedroom after not being able to fall asleep. Thinking I’d listen to a podcast or two while laying in bed, I grabbed the phone from the headboard and pushed the headphones into place. Or at least I made the attempt. There must have been a piece of pocket lint just inside the headphone jack which was promptly shoved further in and compacted by my fumbling nocturnal efforts.

After removing the lint we had to test that everything was working properly. Since I didn’t have any headphones with me the Genius pulled out his own personal pair to test with and double-tapped the home button to play the most recent audio file. He gave a very abrupt “Uh… it’s working.” and stopped playing the file. It was only later that I found out that the file that had started playing was an old episode of The Dawn and Drew Show podcast, the intro to which sounds like this. I can only imagine what that poor guy was thinking.

Lesson learned: always shine a light into a problematic hole and assess the situation.

In other news, I can’t wait for this kind of weather to return:

Taken while driving back to St. Louis on I-70 E.

I think it may be time to transition this site from a personal blog to more of a professional representation. The blog served as a convenient way to communicate with friends and family over the years, but there are many other services that have since taken up the task (Twitter, Facebook). I can’t make any promises about when I’ll get around to it, but I plan on getting the ball rolling before too long.

Jill and I need to decide by the end of the month whether we want to stay in our current apartment for another year or move someplace else. Two things we’d really like to change about our current living situation is having another bedroom (so we can each have our own space) and having a washer and dryer in the unit. We’ll be looking around in the next couple of weeks to see if we can find anything matching that criteria within our price range.

On a related note, I find myself turning down apartment choices based on what kind of Internet service they are able to get. I’d really like to stick with AT&T’s U-verse, so the hunt continues.

With the exception of XP I’ve never been one to stick with a single operating system for long. Sometimes I dual- or even triple-boot to mix things up, other times I experiment with a Linux distro or a beta version of Windows (as I am currently).

I’m feeling the itch again, this time because the various little beta bugs and incompatibilities of Windows 7 are starting to get to me; while most software seems to function well under this operating system, a small amount of them that I use on a regular basis (ex: TightVNC) don’t seem to run as well as they did on XP. As a result I’m seriously considering switching things up again (and the fact that Windows 7 isn’t due until late 2009 doesn’t help), but for some reason find myself being drawn to a Linux install once more.

I like the nerd-factor of running Linux, and I’m definitely more comfortable with it now than I ever was in the past. Most likely the fascination will last all of a week at which point I will probably drag myself back to XP once more… We’ll see how things develop.

Wow, hi. It’s been a while. I almost forgot I had a blog! I blame Twitter, which also explains why this post is so short.

I felt like drawing on the whiteboard late on evening. Jill had been reading the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, so I grabbed the copy from her desk and sketched the stylized title in dry erase marker. Behold:

I haven’t read the books, but I think Matt wants me to.

Can you remember a time when the built-in Windows OS help has ever been useful? Me either. Imagine my surprise when the following window popped up after the Java installer crashed in Windows 7 Beta:

Needless to say I was amazed when following these instructions actually solved my problem. There is a lot of potential for this, but I really, really hope it doesn’t turn into worthless “Did this solution work for you?” troubleshooter. It’s nice to see the built-in help show some hint of intelligence.

It just occurred to me that I should probably add some content from my other frequent web destinations (i.e. Twitter, Flickr). Look for that within the next few days!

Ha, this time I’m going to be clever and upload any images from my blog to a separate Flickr account! Losing images from prior posts kind of strips their “oomph.”

Microsoft recently released the public beta of Windows 7 and given my inability to resist trying new (free) software, I bit the bullet and gave it a shot. Here are my thoughts thus far:

Fresh Install is faster
By this point I consider myself a veteran XP installer, mostly because of voluntary formats. Operating system installations (not just Windows) usually take a while, but this one was relatively fast — right around the 10 minute mark, as opposed to the usual 20 or 30.

Windows Update is just as slow
I’m not sure if this is something Microsoft is trying to improve in this iteration, but Windows Update is as slow as ever. Installing optional drivers took almost as long as the OS install. On a more positive note Update was very good about finding drivers for my monitor, network card, and sound card.

Anti-virus and Windows Defender
The first thing I was asked to do after installing and updating Windows was to find an anti-virus program. A link was provided to a Microsoft page with a list of supported programs. While the lists for each Windows OS is incomplete (my current favorite, avast!, is missing) there were several options listed. I opted for Kaspersky, and the installation and subsequent scan was painless; Windows was very quick to recognize that I had installed an anti-virus program and also when the program had been updated.

The suggested Windows Defender scan was surprisingly quick — even though it’s a fresh install and there aren’t many files on the system yet, it still seemed faster than a scan on Vista.

Desktop Personalization
The dreaded gadget bar seems to be hidden by default. Windows 7 includes some pre-packaged “Windows Themes” that apply quickly and are fun to use — some include multiple backgrounds, so if you get sick of looking at one of the backgrounds in the “Landscape” theme you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Next Desktop Background Picture” from the context menu.

Windows 7 - Next Desktop Background Picture

Paint
Paint has been greatly improved, now offering things like cropping and even free-form selections. Equally impressive is that the default format when saving was PNG. All of the screenshots in this post were edited with Paint.

Taskbar
I thought it would take longer to get used to the new taskbar, but the transition has been less painful than expected. It does seem to take a little longer to identify programs due to the lack of a text description, but at the same time this provides more room. I thought I might not like the extra space the new taskbar occupies, but it’s really not that much larger and still smaller than your average OS X dock.

System Tray
The system tray (or “Notification Area” as it’s called in the Control Panel) sports a very sharp redesign with simple and attractive system icons:

Windows 7 - System Tray

There are also some nice customization features available, including the ability to hide an an icon’s notifications and being able to turn off system icons.

“Snap To”
A really nice feature is the ability to “snap” an open window to either the left or right side of the screen. This makes it easy to compare two documents or websites by having each of them take up half of the screen. In a related feature you can drag a window to the very top of the screen to maximize it. Each of these actions comes with a nice window-outline animation that shows what will happen when you release the mouse button, and the window will return to its original size when it is dragged away from the screen edge.

Conclusion
I honestly didn’t expect my first impression to be so positive (or to be using the words “quick” and “fast” so often!), but I must say that Microsoft has pleasantly surprised me. I came in expecting to see a lot of ideas stolen from Apple, but there are a lot of original concepts that are actually intuitive and fun. Assuming Microsoft can continue to make improvements and stop itself from making any major bad code and design decisions this might actually be a decent operating system. I’d be happy to finally ween my PC off of the now very dated Windows XP and move to something more modern — let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into another Vista.