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HP will be selling off more touchpads Dec. 11 and why I don’t care

Thursday, December 8th, 2011 | Uncategorized | No Comments

HP, not too long ago, decided they were done making hardware, than they weren’t done, than they were, and frankly I don’t know where they stand now.

To clear out their inventory, they sold all their new touchpads with webos for $99 bucks for the 16gig model and $150 for the 32. The touchpad was the first tablet (in the new race of tablets) to not run an operating system designed for a phone like any android tablet or iPad does. Not a super bold move, but still a bright idea. This tablet was said to be the iPad killer (sort of like every android phone that comes out it seems). it rocks a 9.7″ screen and has a decent resolution at 768 x 1024. It is a wifi only tablet (not a deal breaker for everyone) and has a 1.2ghz dual core chip. Where this thing really shines is that is has a dedicated gpu, so it’s supposed to be a better experience video wise.

On Sunday, Dec 11, 2011 at midnight, HP will be selling off the rest of their stock of refurbed units at this same price. it seems a good deal considering the closest price for a tablet would be the kindle fire at $199. So why am I not excited about this? I have a lot of reasons.

We’ll get one thing out of the way, even though this isn’t really a road block for me to get one, I’ll say it anyway. I am an IOS guy. I love my iphone. I’ve invested hundreds of dollars into my multiple iPhones and apps. It wouldn’t make sense for me to start buying apps for android or webOS.

ok, so the first reason, those that own the hp touchpad, those “lucky” few to snach one up before they were sold off the first round, when I come accross them on forums for this new release, are offering theirs for sale as well. One guy sold it for $25 and even told the buyer, it wasn’t even worth that. so what’s the problem? first off, there seems to be a firmware issues with the GPU. review after review brings up frame dropping as a serious issue. Other problems, webOS is dead. aside form indie programers, you won’t be getting very many new apps or support. HP has said there will still be updates, but if they’re not making a successor to the Touchpad, it’ll turn out like most android devices and stay NOT updatable.

Web browsing on it is said to be very fast, that’s a plus. It also supports flash, which opens up a large portion of the web closed off to us mobile safari users.

Because webOS is dead a lot of people have been putting android on it. I’ve read a few accounts where they’ve bricked their device, and those that were successful say it’s very skitish, crashing regularly, missing support of some of the interface, and one guy said it heated up a lot, to the point that he thought it would melt the plastic casing. I read one forum where a guy loaded linux on it, but he didn’t say anymore, just that it successfully loaded.

so the reason I don’t care. I don’t like android devices because you have to reprogram the thing to play nice with other devices. sure it’ll work, but I want a tablet I can just pick up and run with. I want a tablet that movie watching will be an enjoyable experience, the touchpad hasn’t offered that with it’s dropped frames. It seems like those who are excited about the touchpad, don’t own one. and those that own one are excited to get rid of it.

although, one review I read said it made a great picture frame!

I used to love IR

Sunday, May 15th, 2011 | Uncategorized | No Comments

recently I purchased some new flashes. Which flashes you ask? well, some Travelite 750’s. by some I mean 2. All this thanks to my older brother Mark who told me is father in law was getting rid of his for a ridiculously low price! well, they are awesome slave flashes, one little issue I have is, I have 2 sb-600 flashes which don’t slave, they only trigger from hot shoe or IR (infrared). So the 4 of them couldn’t play fair with each other. than, I started looking into rf trigger. I first looked at pocket wizard, the current leader here in the US, but at $150+ a unit I had no way of justifying that cost. I found one by Alien Bee, which is a company that I had considered buying slaves flashes from in the past. but again, the price was just too high. so I looked into the chinese brands, which have been lovingly nick named the poverty wizards. I was basically sold on one called the cactus 5. it had all the features of the pocket wizard, but lacked in the review. sure people were saying it did ok, just a few mis-fires here and there, but at $50 a unit, I could almost justify it. And than I accidentally came across one on youtube. The Yongnuo Rf-602. it seemed like a decent unit, great review, so I went to price it out. The price wan’t bad, but it also pulled up one called the RF-603. so I did a google search. Not a single bad review. in fact, the forums boasted that it was more reliable than the current pocket wizard (I don’t know which model that would be.) at a price tag of 2 for $40, it was worth a shot. 3 weeks later, they arrived and I have to say. I’m very impressed. I have yet to have a mis-fire, they sync up all my flashes’ very nicely, and I would never have tried my sb-600 in manual mode if it wasn’t for these little beauties (PS. i love manual mode on my sb-600). In conclusion, IR is great for indoors, close range photos. I’m far from done with it. but RF (radio frequency) has become my favorite way to flash those I’m shooting!

I wish I were there

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

I love fire, this is an understatement, I know. I also love science. anything that can teach a man how to burn stuff, erode away at stuff, blow stuff up, etc is good in my book. here is a great combination of the two.

Nasa\’s new rocket shakes Utah

English Final

Sunday, August 15th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

I recently finished up my summer semester at SLCC. In my English class we were required to write a persuasive report, meaning we had to find a topic that we felt needed to be made public and write a paper on why we felt it should change. I did mine on Gun’s in Schools.

The emphasis was mainly about allowing those who are of age to carry a gun on school grounds. that would mean K-12 teachers could, and in my opinion, should carry daily. I’ve seen the Vlogers who say that guns = violence, but those vlogers haven’t seen the stats about guns.

Colombine - 12 dead and 23 injured (in 1990 no guns on school grounds policy took place restricting guns in the hands of teachers)

Virginia tech - 33 killed, more injured (V.Tech does not allow guns on their campus. Their policy states “… Students may not poses, use, or store firearms or weapons on university property…”)

Fort hood tx - 12 killed 31 injured (Fort hood does not allow guns to be carried on base by anyone with the exception of training excursuses.)

Look at how the crime rate sky rocketed for Washington DC when they restricted hand gun use. Look at the states that don’t follow common CCW laws and the high violente rate.

Now look at Kennesaw GA. in 1982 they required ever head of the household, with the exception of mentally incompetent, those with criminal history, or violent behavior, to own and maintain a firearm. since than they have had 3 murders. 2 with knives and 1 with a gun. the gun murder was from someone outside the state.

It was interesting to read some of these statistics. According to the yearly FBI violent crimes report, cities with fewer guns have higher murder rates, however cities with fewer guns and higher concentrations of registered democrats have higher rape and murder rates than even just those with lower gun ownership, in some cases double that of a prominently republican city.

In England in 2004 gun laws became even more strict. their crime and murder rates have risen 77% from 04-09 making them the leader in violent crimes in europe. When filling out a crime report in England they have a check list; Murder, rape, theft, etc. Due to the high rate of bizarre crimes, they have had to add, “Bitting” to the check list in 2008.

U of U allows their students to carry guns to class. U of U also has one of the lowest bomb threats, rape rates, and mis-conduct reports of any college in the US. The state of Utah has allowed Collages to permit their students to carry. As predicted by those in favor of this ruling, crime and violence in the schools has dropped.

While doing this report I ran into a few issues that I found rather funny. I’d run fact checks on articles I used and on more occasions that not I had to throw out articles due to incorrect information.

NEW YORK TIMES - out of 16 articles, only 7 were useable. the other 9 contained wrong names, numbers, and in one article it had the name of the school and it’s location in the US wrong.

CNN - out of 8 articles, 6 were useable.

Fox News - out of 12 articles, all 12 were usable.

In short, Fox News wins. I had a few local papers that I had used 1 article from (Cincinnati, Tennessee, kennesaw) but saying 0 out of 1 is too limited a number to sugest a stat.

In the end I found I had 1 more piece of inaccurate information from NYT, in one article about fort hood the had stated that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan committed suicide after the shooting. Fortunately I was able to show my sources to my teacher and she excused the error in my paper.

In short, Teachers should be allowed to have a gun on them, or locked in their rooms somewhere. The teachers first line of defense would be to close the door and lock it. if that get’s breached, the teacher should be allowed the right to protect them self and their students, that’s when the gun get’s drawn.

When people know they are one of the few with a gun, it gives them more power of the others. By having more guns in the hands of good people, we level the playing field.

update

Friday, July 23rd, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

My boss told me I need to update my blog. so Nate, here you go. a post

Sweet Concert

Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the concert for a Gentleman and and Scholar. Rory Jones Rocked on Guitar and Vocals, Lance filled the room on the bass, and Ryan Wasted any other drummer there with his sweet rhythm. For those of you who have missed their past 2 shows you are missing out greatly! Theres nothing like good music, family, friends, and enough rock to power a steam roller!

Waiting for a hero?! Buy a sandwich, it’ll be quicker

Friday, January 8th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

My tale is a common one. I’m sure I’m not the first to have see this.

My Ipod, yes my Ipod which contained 80 gig’s of my life kicked the bucket the other day. lucky for me I had means of extracting my music from the HD. However there is a slightly happy side to this story and that is, about 1.5 years ago I paid a little extra for my ipod and got a 3 year warranty with a replacement option incase of failure!

So off to best buy where I got it, and of course who do they have me talk to?

well I wait in line for about 30 seconds while the lady finishes her text. She greets me with a smile and tells me I’m in the wrong line. so I take one step to my left where a guy is waiting and he prints off a receipt for me and sends me over to the Emo girl filing her nails/claws on the other side of their rounded counter.
I hand her the receipt and I explain my ipod broke but I payed for an extended warrantee so I’d like to use that at this time.

This is the look she gave me, than she asked, “would you like to know about our return policy cause I don’t think you can do that any more, it’s been like, too long!” I than explain how this works, I paid more when I got it so that you could take my broken one and offer to either send it in to get repaired or order a refurbed one from apple to replace mine.

again the look of confidence strikes her young depressed emo face. “Let me talk to someone.” she says and walks away for about 2 min. than she returns kind of laughing and says, “let me talk to someone else.” at this point I’m imagining the geek squad in the back looking at the CCTV of the security cameras and laughing.

finally she returns and tells me I’m right and that she’ll take care of it. she hands me a paper that’s filled out by hand and says her printers broken. This is Geek Squad in Best Buy, couldn’t they grab a new one? Couldn’t they fix the one they have? Their name implies some knowledge of electronics doesn’t it?

Well, that happened on monday. I was told that it’d be there around thursday friday and that I should call them if they don’t call me. so yesterday I call, i’m on hold for 14 min and 32 seconds only to have them tell me the case is still open, nothing new to report. I thank them for their time and sleep on the results.

well today I give them a call and a man pics up, i’m on hold for 7 min 3 seconds till he tells me it was in yesterday, and they had decided to ship it to my house. now, I’m holding the paper right now that is a copy of the paper I filled out that asks if I’d like it shipped to my house or pick it up and it clearly says pick up and under reason it says, “because I work 3 min from this store and it’d be more convenient due to the fact that we’re rarely home.”

Now I’d like to point out that I’m very grateful that I wasn’t charged an extra dime for this, but I feel as if I burned millions of brains cells every time the geek squad spoke to me.

So if you find you know more about your electronics or the return policy than a seasoned employee, go somewhere else.

Something to Change

Friday, February 27th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

well I was evaluating my life the other day and decided that I want to make a drastic change. so i thought of some of my down falls.

the list was many, and so I’ve decided to start playing guitar in public more often.

yes that is my big change!

Returning from the silence

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

First off, You guys really should subscribe to Nott Block on Itunes!

well Rachel is right, I need to post more. so here I am.

this last weekend Adam, Rachel and I decided we’d had our fill of the average weekend of adventures, so we decided to take our adventurous spirits and head south toward Cedar City.

we all had our own reasons.
Rachel - an EFY friend that she hadn’t seen in 2 years
Adam - see Kami’s play
Matt - a date with Ash’s roommate Megan.

Adam & Matt - to see our awesomest friend ever Hye Soo!

well we got there and we all went our seperate ways. My Date was fun. we hiked up Kolob and took pictures. it was really fun. than we went out to eat, than we killed zombies, following said Zombie Killing, we visited Kelly a friend of both Megan and I. The next day we made scones and went bowling.

well on our way back, we stopped and said Hi to the Hunts. It’s always so much fun to see that family again.

from there we hit up some hot springs. we were so luck to be able to share it with two gay guys! yeah Rachel and I were kind of disgusted with it.

we’re home now but I wish I was still on the road. it’s so much fun. no worries, no responsibilities, and adventure after adventure!

Pictures and Friends

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Recently I’ve made not one but two trips to Temple Square. Also I got a custom Apature kit for my lensebaby. oh yeah, it was totally worth the $9.95 + shipping and Handeling.

as you can see in some of my pictures, what it does; it take smaller light sources (or distant light sorces) and changes them to a shape when they’re out of focus. This usually works best against a black or darker back ground, so like night time.

Was I awed and amazed by it? Flip yes I was! this thing is awesome!

but yeah, it turned out freakn’ awesome!