Be The Pigeon

It's been a while. Yeah yeah. From the annals of " Parallel Parking for Dummies " I caught this gem while in in Galveston, TX. This week. This gal might qualify as the world's worst VW-Beetle driver. The picture doesn't really do it justice. The rear of her (short) vehicle was a good 2-3 feet from the curb; it was evident that using REVERSE is not part of her parallel-parking technique. That's my rental behind her.

I've been traveling tons for work lately; so much so that I'm gone much more than I'm around. Last night I got home from a full-week trip to find the following on the doorstep. It was from my six-year old. If you don't read 6yr-old very well, it says: Dad follw the cards and you may find a clue for the mystery you well do -->. That put a smile on my face right away. When I got inside, I wasn't greeted by the usual D-A-D-D-Y onslaught that comes after a week of being gone. Instead, there was another sign reading: Go up you well find the clue! I went up stairs and followed another arrow to my own bedroom, where the door was closed. When I opened the door, Kristen popped up from under a blanket where she was hiding. It was pretty cute. Then she gave me one last card (wrapped in the proper 6ft of tape, of course): The card came with lots of hugs and kisses, for sure. I was touched. I'm not normally the hallmark-card type guy who gets all gushy at ever...

If you have multiple computers and would like to control them all with a single keyboard-mouse combo, it's easy to do. Use "Synergy." This doesn't require a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch as it did in former days. In fact, the cool thing about Synergy is that you're not screen sharing. Each machine has its own separate display, and it can even have its own mouse and keyboard. But your main mouse and keyboard, when you move the mouse over to the new display, now controls the other machine. What's cool about this is that it works across platforms. For example, I have a Mac for my main machine, and a Windows 7 laptop sitting on the left-hand side. With Synergy running on both machines, I just move my mouse to the left until it comes onto the Win 7 laptop screen and then I can type and use it as though I were really connected there locally. It makes controlling multiple machines a snap. Synergy is available here for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc . It's ...

For years, I've had an ugly music library. Very little cover art, inconsistent album titles, artists, etc. I ripped all my old CD's years ago, and the formats seem to have varied quite a bit. A couple months ago I finally found a solution to clean the whole mess up. Now that I've switched to iTunes, the cover art is a nice thing to have, as it's shown on AppleTV and on the iPod when you listen. The cleanup process is very simple using a tool (which I purchased for about $20) called TuneUpMedia . TuneUp will listen to clips of your songs for you and then search them in an online database to come up with the right info and then retag your whole library. It will also add missing cover art and even detect duplicate tracks. Very nice. It loads up along side iTunes or Windows Media Player. I don't normally shell out bucks for this type of stuff (figuring that there's always a freebie if I look long enough), but this one was worth it. There's a free version...

I've updated my post from last year about how to convert DVD movies for your iPod or AppleTV.

Been a while. This is another techno-dump, so skip it if you could care about this stuff. We got an AppleTV unit for Christmas. Jolayne was interested in playing her music through the family-room stereo, and after doing some research (and a few worthless purchases) I finally decided on the Apple products, as they have been so easy for our family to use. We started by looking for something to just play music, and Apple has something called an Airport Express that does just that. But for the same price, AppleTV does the same thing, but also plays movies (both from your own library and from iTunes downloads). It's remarkably simple and yet easy to use, which we like. What drew me to this device, though, was the remote control. All iPods, iPads, and iPhones can have a free app called "REMOTE," which allows you to use the touch-screen abilities of the unit to control the AppleTV (or your iTunes on your computer). Makes it super simple to control the music, and since i...