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Woohoo! I ran into a great opportunity to become a fulltime Ruby on Rails developer, so I’m leaving my current contract to go work for a new client. This new client will also be in San Francisco but I’ll be working from home for most of the time, which is nice because that will also make it easier to put some extra hours into my personal (Rails) project. Oh – I haven’t written about that yet here, but I will soon. In any case, it’s an exciting time to be getting involved with Ruby on Rails, ajax and all this web 2.0 stuff. I think I might as well go all out and buy a Macbook Pro laptop as well to start developing on… then I’ll be really hip and up with the times. Well, hip in a geeky kind of way I suppose.

If you would have asked me a month ago about ThinkGeek.com, I probably would have told you that it’s one of the coolest sites out there for geek toys. But right now I’m no sure sure I’d give them a recommendation. Almost 4 weeks ago I ordered a couple of those Flickr enabled wifi photo frames called eStarling. Very nice, but ThinkGeek has been advertising these in their online catalog since early this year but never actually had them in stock. Finally, they announced that they would get a batch of them in early december so I ordered 3 of them for myself as well as for mine and Rachel’s parents. But over three weeks and 3 emails to ThinkGeek later, I’m still waiting and I have no idea when, or even if I’ll ever receive these frames. My first 2 emails to ThinkGeek were never answered, but I finally received an answer to my third email. Check it out, this is what I wrote them:

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So I had a computer meltdown last week and spent all weekend fixing my computer. After messing around for a long time with my pc I finally discovered that something was going on with my motherboard or power supply. After running a while, one of the ATX voltages would start dropping, eventually resulting in spontaneous restarts (or not being able to start up at all anymore). What to do? I didn’t know either. I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade pretty much the whole system… motherboard, power supply, memory, CPU, and a new harddrive as well while I was at it. Unfortunately, as I was putting it together I discovered that AGP is apparently also an outdated technology, making my old $300 ATI graphics card useless, so a trip to Best Buy and a couple of hours of assembly work later I was ready to install the operating system on a virgin harddisk.

I’ve been reading a lot about Vista lately and Vista RC1 has recently been released… People are claiming it’s stable and nice looking so I figured why not give it a try. So far so good… well, almost good. I do like the new look a lot, as well as the gadgets on the desktop. But my favorite new feature is the search option from the start menu. Finally an easy (and quick) way to search for an application or document. Two major annoyances: Quickbooks won’t install on Vista, and all the security popups (‘do you really want to run this as administrator?’) are driving me nuts… .. I hope there’s a way to disable those.
And still, my system is freezing up at random sometimes… I could blame vista for this, but I really think it might be some kind of memory or timing issue with my new motherboard. Probably need to play around with the bios settings a little more. I think I remember now why most other people buy complete PCs instead of a dozen separate components…