The World of Scott Mindeaux

Did the Disappearing Act Again…

Well it seems that I have fallen off the edge of the earth again… I have not posted on my blog in quite some time and I am REALLY, REALLY sorry. As many of you know I also have a food blog – FoodieInDisguise.com. I have been concentrating on posts there and neglecting my life outside of food.

Let’s see, the last thing I wrote about was about Downton Abbey and Torchwood. Who would have thought how much attention Downton Abbey has been getting over the last couple of months. American fascinated about the life of aristocrats and their servants. They even won a couple of Emmys! I am anxiously awaiting season 3.

Since my layoff, I have spent all of December, January and February looking for work. It is rough out there!! There ARE jobs. Lots of jobs actually. But you’re competing with hundreds of applicants. If you don’t get your resume in right away, it could get lost in a stack on a recruiters desk or stay unread in the HR managers email. You have to play this game of not being too early for fear of being buried, but not too late that they have already selected their first run candidates.

I went out on a few interviews. Some good, some bad. I applied for a position as a Jr. Mac Administrator position for a well known geographically based iPhone app that helps you located “people and friends” that a nearby. You know, the app wiht the black and yellow skull logo. Well I went into that interview and I wasn’t prepared. I totally fucked that interview up and the sad part is that I did know all the answers. I had been so out of practice, I literally forgot the answers. Out of practice you ask? Well, I haven’t actually been doing IT support work since November 2010, just before I took responsibility for moving Ignite to their new 30,000 square foot building. After successfully moving the company, I took more of an operations/facility role. So in essence, I haven’t been practicing Mac Admin for over a year. When I got there they also asked me a slew of OS X Lion questions. We were still Snow Leopard at the agency and I didn’t have any game with Lion in a corporate environment. Sure, I used it at home, but not like I would if it was deployed at the office. So, obviously I didn’t get a call-back. I knew I messed that one up. In hindsight it probably was a good thing. I struggled for a bit about how to explain where I worked. My duties and actual job would probably always be overshadowed by the fact that I worked for “you know who”. Let’s all be real here, that app is not as innocent as the iTunes store describes the app. [smile]

A couple more opportunities came across, some out of state and some in-state but in places like San Diego, San Francisco and the East Bay. I even thought about leaving IT again and pursuing something in culinary. Unfortunately, those opportunities were far and hard to find.

Being on unemployment sucks. Things have been very difficult lately. Rent and Cobra alone is more than what I take home in unemployment. I had already struggled thru some of my savings when I was out on medical leave last summer. I even had to sell things on Craigslist just to make ends meet. So where are things?

Well, let’s just say an awesome opportunity will be making itself known on March 1. It’s exciting and I can’t wait to see what that will turn into. Details after I hear back!

So what else has been going on? Ugh. I have gained 15 pounds back. I went from 275 to 227 and back up to 243. I think I went into a tailspin after the layoff and went back into bad habits. I started slacking off from going to the gym and eating all the wrong foods. I have started to get back on the diet (modified Paleo) and started going back to the gym again. It will be nice to have a routine again when the March 1 thing comes through. So let’s see how fast i can get myself back to 227 and then keep steady for a loss below 200!  Can I do it???

I am so behind on some of my cable shows. I had to stop paying for cable since I didn’t have the money for it. So I have missed a good chunk of shows from Bravo, Cooking Channel and The Food Network. It has been 3 months since I have watch a cooking show. I’m having withdrawals. Yes I have found some content online, but nothing is more relaxing for me than waking up on a Saturday morning and watching The Barefoot Contessa or an episode of Eat Street. I heard there wasn’t much to miss on LOGO, but I have missed out on the Housewives in Beverly Hills, Atlanta and The OC as well as a Season of Tabitha taking over something!

So stay with me whoever you are. I hope I still have at least one reader on my site. I have been blogging since 2000 and it has been a fun ride so far. Let’s fill the rest of 2012 with some positive news and a leaner me!

Continuing Website Woes with WEB.com

So over the last month I have been having this love/hate relationship with my ISP web-hosting company. To recap let’s talk about the following:

1. The have a planned email server move, I got a notice, but after the transfer, I had a lot of email access issues. Then I started get 2, 3, 4 copies of the same email over and over in my mailbox.

2. They moved my website to a new server without notification. As a result, they moved the site, but since they never told me, I never knew I had to update the IP address to access my MYSQL database that runs my site. It took almost 2 weeks to figure this part out.

3. Since the transition to the new site, people have been complaining that they haven’t been able to get to the site. People will access it, but it will take a long time to load or they get a timeout.

4. Access to my WordPress Admin page has been also painfully slow. My ISP web-hosting company has been bought out like 5x now. I don’t even think that anyone from the original company even works for the company.

The company you ask? Web.com. All their technical support is overseas. You can’t talk to ANY systems engineer or admin in the United States. The overseas technical support can’t do a thing. It has been very frustrating.

Have you had problems getting into my site? Please let me know by commenting. Be anonymous if you want, but let me know if you are having problems and what State you are from. Thanks in advance!

They keep closing my tickets and I keep re-opening them and no one still won’t pick up the phone to help me. They try to access my site once and they get thru and they declare it fixed! So it may work for that try, but if they try to go somewhere else, I bet they will get a spinning beachball or an hourglass for the Window’s folks.

So….anyone have any suggestions for a new web-hositng company or will WEB.com redeem themselves? I have been with them for almost 7 years.

My iPhone 2.1 Upgrade

Well Apple released the 2.1 firmware upgrade for the iPhone today. I started my download of the firmware to be greeted by a backup status bar that wouldn’t go away for almost an hour. iTunes 8 wanted to backup my iPhone before installing the update. Once the backup was complete, the actual upgrade went fairly smooth.

So far, responsiveness seems good, I haven’t had a crash yet and typing seems to match up to my speed.

One thing I noticed right away is that Apple got rid of the bounding box around the 3G in the upper left hand corner. I never really had signal issues at work, so I’ll have to see if my 3 bars at home becomes a 5.

On a somewhat related note, I’m really liking the Genius feature of iTunes 8.

UPDATE: NetShare still works! 

Another UPDATE: Backup took 25 minutes as a test after the 2.1 update.

So The Problem With The Ball and Chain

So when you’re on vacation (Staycation) and you’re in IT, you are so tempted to read all the emails that come into your iPhone. I have a connection to our Exchange server at work.

So all day today I have been getting emails and have been so tempted on many occasions today to respond – but at the same time I want to pretend like I’m on a real vacation and pretend that I didn’t bring my technology with me. My iPhone has been chiming off all day.

I’m really scared that if I really take a real vacation, that I wouldn’t be able to leave the phone behind. I didn’t realize how much energy I have spent today trying to “ignore” my work emails. It’s hard!

I took last Friday off, but the emails were low cuz lots of people left early or took Friday off too. Today is a different case.

Ugh.

Un-Jailbreaking My iPhone

Well after a few stomach aches, my iPhone is back to normal. I started the process to un-jailbreak my iPhone this morning in between hitting the return key while I was doing software installs for three machines I’m setting up.

So I plugged in my iPhone and clicked on the RESTORE button in iTunes, this is supposed to bring the iPhone back to factory specs. I clicked it and my iPhone rebooted, the Pwnage pineapple showed up on screen, then for a quick flash, it was some kind of Steve Jobs cartoon, then the Silver Apple logo appeared on screen. WTF?!? What was that Steve Jobs cartoon?? Did the jailbreak do something to my phone that I will join some countless others that now have an iBrick?

The restore process continued. Phase 1 would take almost an hour. It said it was restoring. After the first hour, the iPhone rebooted and there was the familiar Apple logo. The iPhone was still connected to iTunes and then nothing. I slid the slider on the front of my iPhone and the home screen came up. It was the default icons. Then the iPhone rebooted again and it wanted to restore from backup yet again. Phase 2 took an hour. When that was done, it then had to re-sync (re-syncing took another 40 minutes).

There was alot of nervousness, but my iPhone is back to full working order. Whew!!!

Well I Did It…I’m Jailbroken

Well something got in my gut at 3am this morning and I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. I still haven’t quite figured out WHY I decided to do it. I think it was more curiosity than anything else. I wanted to see what apps out there were available to someone who wasn’t chained down to the iTunes Apps store. I’ll call it research.

So far, my experience has been a little rocky. I actually had to go thru the process 2x. The first time, I missed the text saying to hold down the option key when you click on the RESTORE button in iTunes. So it basically restored the phone back to factory specs and that process took almost 45 minutes. Sleep deprived, I tried it again, this time clicking option-RESTORE and that Pineapple showed up on my screen. I did a full backup of my phone prior to installing the new IPSW file. The Restore would put all back on my iPhone with a few new items like Cydia, the alternative Apps installer.

I’d say close to 5:30 am I got the phone back up and runnning. Only casualty so far, all my home icons are outta wack. No big deal right? So next up was to load Qik. A video recorder app for the iPhone. It streams a live video feed to qik.com. You can see my “tests” at http://qik.com/scottintheoc. Kewl right? I even put a LIVE video window at the bottom left of this page for whenever I am LIVE.

So I finally got to bed around 6:30am. I got up at noon and decided I wanted to play some tunes. I clicked on the iPod button and nothing. Nothing is there. None of my playlists, none of my videos, nothing. WTF? In addition to the iPod stuff, all photo’s from the “cloud” (MobileMe) were also gone.

So about 45+ minutes ago, I started another restore. It’s still chugging away. Wish me luck.