KickIdle.com Blog

Apple is known for they’re aesetics and marketing for their products, so I’m always disappointed with they go with something that looks good, but sucks. In this case, I mean the earbuds which come with iPods. My girlfriend and I were watching a movie on my iPod Touch during our flight out of Montgomery. She was using her Apple supplied earbuds (retail $40) and I was using a pair of Phillips foam earbuds (retail $10).
She was getting frustrated by how low I was keeping the volume, until she finally took one of my earbuds. Then she suddenly realized that the reason I was keeping the volume so low was that I could hear everything just fine. Her earbuds were so bad at blocking the ambient noise in the plane that she was basically stuck reading the subtitles to follow the plot.
The iPod got a lot of press a year or so ago for the poor quality of their earbuds, and they deserved every bit of it. Considering the premium that is paid for Apple products, it’s disappointing that they have to include one of the poorest quality accessories I’ve ever seen with a high-quality product.

Re: Summer
Well, I think Cindy already knows this, but I’m super proud of her for finishing up her degree this spring. As some already know, it took me an easy going eight years to finish my degree, so she’s kicking my butt already.
She’s also been travelling with me for the last month. It’s been a huge amount of fun for me to take her to new places and see everything with an extra pair of eyes around. We had a blast at Disney World! I’m sure she can’t wait to go back, and I’ll admit I had a good time too. I guess Disney’s just not for kids after all! haha
Plus Cindy’s turning out to be a regular ole’ southern country girl, despite her born-in-Boston certification. If she can survive a few more days of 100 degree Alabama heat, I think she’ll have earned her full-bore Southerner certification. Now we just have to work on getting her a southern accent!
Plus, who could forget – CELTICS in the NBA FINALS! So of course, we’re looking forward to game 4 tomorrow!
I’m not looking forward to being apart again – this time together has really been great. So I plan on making the most of the next week and a half before we have to separate again!

Going home, originally uploaded by aremac.

I love the iconic style and vibrant colors in this shot.

Welcome to the new Boston theme for the blog. As part of the web hosting move/blogging upgrade, I’ve rebuilt all the site templates and installed a new theme.

Renting cars is part of the job when you travel full-time, and this time I ended up with my first hybrid – a 2008 Toyota Prius. My friend Kostaki got a Prius right before I left my old job, and I was suprised at how roomy it was. So I was looking forward to driving one for a month to get a real feel for the car.

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Cindy and I drove down to Dauphin Island last weekend. It was about a three hour drive each way down to the island, which is south of Mobile, about 2-3 miles into the Golf of Mexico. There’s a nice bird sancuary and public beach on the East side of the island.
Since we were doing it as a day trip and we had to fit 6 hours of driving in, we limited our exploration to the pond trail and a little time on the beach. We had some excellent viewing of several Great Blue Heron, as well as Least Bittern, around the pond area. Out towards the beach, there was no end to the Brown Pelicans and Laughing Gulls. Watching the pelicans soar along and then fold up and dive into the ocean was really entrancing. They would kick up a plume of spray three to six feet high when they dove down into the water.
The other neat view of the pelicans was afforded by the lenghy drive across the bridge connecting the island to the mainland. The sea breeze creates a updraft along the entire length of the bridge and the pelicans take full advantage of the updraft to cruise along between the island and the mainland. There were at least a dozen times we would cruise past a pelican about 10 feet away from our car. If you’re interested in pelicans, I doubt you can find a closer view of them in the wild.

I’ve been hosting with Beachcomber Creations (BCC) for the last seven years. It started out as a cheap solution to my desire to post various things online hosting my domain. Over the last couple of years though, BCC has slowly accumulated strikes in my experiences with them. Then in the last year they’ve finally driven me away.
First, they made a change to my mail server configuration without prior notice, resulting in all of my email bouncing for a weekend before I found the error and fixed the configuration. Then, for a second time, they moved my account to a new server and lost 6 days worth of my email. When I contacted them to get the mail moved to the new server, they took the stance that it wasn’t their responsibility, and sent me some info on how to access the old server and move the data myself.
Quite frankly, this isn’t the level of service that I’m willing to put with. As someone who works in IT infrastructure, I would never tell a paying client that it was their responsibility to deal with the data loss from an unannounced server migration. So, I’ve restructured my hosting solutions.
First, I’ve migrated all of my email domains to Google Apps. Probably a long time coming, this lets me continue to use IMAP for Outlook, but also integrate chat and calendaring with my friends who already use Google.
I’ve also migrated this blog and my other web content to GoDaddy hosting. I’m looking forward to an improved hosting experience with a provider that is a large-scale and well-managed environment.
While the vast majority of the site content should now be migrated and looking more-or-less the same, you may encounter some broken links. I’ll try to get things cleaned up and maybe migrate to a newer site design if I get time.