Mr Papa's World » Technology

Feeling Like An Idiot

Mr Papa — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 04:44:52 +0000

As a pretty technical savvy guy, I am feeling like quite an idiot tonight. For the last year or two since we replaced our last HDTV with our current model, we have struggled with an issue on the TV that I have been unable to resolve. But, that’s not where the problem really lies.

This Samsung DLP TV has been a really good TV. I have set up a movie mode that is a series of settings optimized for TV viewing at night. However, whenever I would select this movie mode I had created and calibrated, the setting would revert back to default or dynamic mode after about 30 minutes.

It was really aggravating while watching a movie to have to change the settings back every 30 minutes during the movie. It definitely interrupted the flow of the movie.

I had scoured the manual and settings on the ... READ MORE

PowerPoint Info Overload

Suzanne — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:59:42 +0000

Yesterday was the deadline for the kids to complete their summer reports on Barcelona, Malaga, Madeira, the Canary Islands, St. Maarten and San Juan. Those are all the destinations we’ll be visiting on our upcoming Trans-Atlantic Cruise. Since the kids will be missing two weeks of school for the trip, I required them to complete an extensive research project on the history, culture, and attractions of each destination. They put together the reports in the PowerPoint application, which also required them to learn specialized functions in that program like animation schemes and slide transitions.

Last night, Mr. Papa held a contest to see who put together the best presentation. The kids were judged on quality of research, knowledge of material, presentation skills, and utilization of the effects in the PowerPoint application. Both of the kids clearly demonstrated that ... READ MORE

When We Left The Earth

Mr Papa — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:47:55 +0000

For those of you that haven’t been watching the recent Discovery series “When We Left The Earth”, you don’t know what you have been missing. The series has been quite excellent and the high definition images quite stunning.

The series is a cooperative effort between the Discovery Channel and NASA. It chronicles the history of the NASA space program from its inception until current times. The show is very well done and includes tons of footage and interviews that I haven’t seen before.

There was a docu-drama a while back, “From the the Earth to the Moon”, that was also well done, but that series featured actors and interpretation. The “When We Left The Earth” series is all real people and fact based. It includes many interviews and viewpoints of astronauts, NASA personnel, media, family and others. The footage is all genuine and quite riveting.

Its been a ... READ MORE

Coming Soon – New Gallery Look

Mr Papa — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:53:34 +0000

Well not all that soon to be quite honest. Its going to take a lot of work to convert over all my albums and photos to a new appearance, but work will start soon. If you have been wondering about the lack of activity here at Mr Papa’s World its because of all the work on developing the new gallery appearance. That, plus the work on do on Simple:Press Forum plugin that I am part of the development team.

I used my other sites as test beds for development of the new gallery appearance. I started with some existing WordPress stuff out there and the customized the hell out of it. I have also fed back most of my customizations back to the original authors for their consideration for incorporation into the baseline.

Previously, I had been using Gallery2. To be honest, Gallery2 is a ... READ MORE

Cruise Talk Central Getting Noticed Again

Mr Papa — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:00:08 +0000

I know I have said this before, but our Cruise Talk Central site continues to grow in popularity. You have probably heard in the new recently about the lady that went overboard on the NCL Dream Ship. Well, yesterday Suzanne wrote a blog article about the incident.

It has been a popular post in terms of number of people viewing it. In addition, if you searched on the CNN.com site for information about this tragic incident, our site/post comes back as the number one page. CNN has sent us quite a few visitors over the last couple of days. Thanks!

Every week and every month, the amount of traffic on Cruise Talk continues to grow. To combat the increased demand, I plan to move all of my domains, including Mr Papa’s World, to a more capable, powerful box. I am ... READ MORE

Sleep Number Beds

Mr Papa — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:31:31 +0000

A while back I mentioned that we were going to be purchasing a new Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed. Our previous mattress had served us well, but was 14 years old. Suzanne and I believed that we also preferred different style mattresses. The Sleep Number Bed seemed like a perfect fit.

About four weeks ago, we went out and purchased our Sleep Number Bed. Suzanne also tricked me and we ended up walking out of the store with three new beds as each of the kids also ended up with a Sleep Number Bed. For us, we got the top of the line Model 9000. I had decided before hand that I wanted a bed with the new “space age” temperature control materials. We have drastically different body temperatures when we sleep. Suzanne sleeps in sweats, sweatshirt and socks and has about ... READ MORE

Rosetta Stone

Mr Papa — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:42:43 +0000

Now that the next cruise is booked, its time to start getting ready for it. The trip originates in Barcelona, Spain and ends in San Juan, Puerto Rico – both are Spanish speaking areas.

This past Christmas, as a gift, I got Rosetta Stone German. I occasionally go to Germany on business and have worked a little bit on trying to pick up the language. Lately, trips have gotten down to maybe one a year, so its been hard. I got the Rosetta Stone to help me along. I haven’t been working on it as much as I had hoped, but the software seems to be a pretty good tool for learning a language.

Now with the cruise, the whole family wants to learn Spanish so they can communicate better on the cruise. So, we have now purchased the Spanish edition of Rosetta Stone. ... READ MORE

Move To New Server Complete

Mr Papa — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:54:53 +0000

Whew, I think the move to the new server is finally complete! I had some issues moving this time. My sites continue to gobble up bandwidth and I just keep running into issues with shared hosting, so I made the plunge on over to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). It took a bit more work and hand wringing to the get the configuration right than on the shared hosts.

Anyways, I think we are back live with Mr Papa’s World. If you run into any issues, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Now, I just have to move the rest of my domains. Hopefully, it will be easier now that I think I know the recipe.

Skype

Mr Papa — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:09:36 +0000

I seem to be taking more and more plunges technology speaking. Or is that web based speaking? With my new found, reliable, high speed internet service, I am finding more and more things I can do on the net.

You can now get a hold of me on Skype. I have long been a user of Teamspeak for voice chat, but I have to admit, this Skype works pretty darn well. And it has video. Guess I may have to get a web cam soon. You can even call real phones from Skype though that feature costs money and I haven’t felt the urge to try it.

Skype has proven useful for chatting with friends online and especially for coordinating some activities with the Simple:Press Forum development team that I am a member of.

Give Skype a try and look me up. My Skype username ... READ MORE

Qwest DSL

Mr Papa — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:07:52 +0000

Qwest finally decided to turn on DSL out here in my neck of the woods. They had run fiber out for a central office several years ago but had resisted actually activating any kind of service. I guess they think Sonoita is backwoods and wouldn’t support turning on the service.

Anyways, I have used a wireless provider out here for the last year with mixed results. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t, its very frustrating. The last couple of months haven’t been very good. I think the wireless is getting interference from somewhere. It just cuts out at different times and becomes very latent. The provider has been very good about talking with me about the problem and working to solve it, but unfortunately has not been able to fix it.

I decided to give the Qwest system a run. ... READ MORE

Back To Netflix

Mr Papa — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:09:38 +0000

Well, looks like its time for us to switch back to Netflix for our video rentals. We were one of the early/original subscribers to Netflix when they first began their novel approach to video rentals. Getting our movies by mail was a time saver and it was really convenient to be able to keep them as long as we wanted. The selection was great and turnaround time was only a day or two.

However, as Netflix became more and more popular, they started to experience some growing pains and they significantly raised their prices. And then Blockbuster entered the market with lower prices. With the might of their store division and experience, we decided to switch over to them. That was maybe a year ago. We have been pretty happy with them.

Or at least we were until we acquired Blu Ray and HD DVD ... READ MORE

Help Choosing A Hosting Plan

Mr Papa — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:51:54 +0000

One of the toughest decision for bloggers has always been where to host their blogs. Choosing a hosting company for your blogs has been one of trial and error or relying on the experiences of your friends. Well, we now have another tool in our arsenal for choosing a hosting company.

There is a new online service, http://www.webhostingchoice.com, that allows bloggers to review prospective hosting companies. The site has a host of tools that you can use to help you make a good choice in your search for a hosting company.

Web Hosting Choice has a nifty search feature where you enter in data for how much you want to pay each month, how much you want to pay for a setup fee and how much disk space and bandwidth that you want each month. The search feature will then return a list of hosting companies that ... READ MORE

I’ve Joined Payperpost

Mr Papa — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:14:41 +0000

I have been blogging here at Mr Papa’s world for over three years now (the last two years in its current WordPress format). Most of my posts have been related to what’s been happening in our family. A few posts have ventured out into politics or our favorite pastime cruise travel or other unrelated areas. One of the things that I have wanted to do for a while is review things and post my opinions on them.

Well, today, after several days of research, that time has come. I have now joined payperpost. Payperpost is a blogging community where folks that are accepted in get to write posts or reviews about a wide range of products and services. The sweet part is that I get paid for writing the posts or reviews.

My research convinced me that Payperpost was a reputable organization. I was ... READ MORE

Connection Issues and Call of Duty 4

Mr Papa — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:22:59 +0000

For the last two or three weeks, we have been struggling with connection issues. Its one of those issues that you occasionally deal with living in rural America and having to use a wireless setup for your broadband connection.

The connection from my provider has been occasionally dropping for a minute or two, which isnt that big a deal. However, the connection has had a pretty large amount of latency, sometimes as high as 500 ms. Again, not that big a deal for normal web browsing and website work. However, it is a big deal for the internet gaming of Sean and I.

That amount of latency just makes any kind of twitch game almost unplayable. Sean, in particular, has been extremely frustrated when trying to play our favorite game, Call of Duty 4. I can’t say the lag has me too please either.

I have ... READ MORE

Vacation Update

Mr Papa — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:09:42 +0000

Vacation continues to go nicely. I really needed some time off. The last part of the year at work was rough. I still haven’t decided if I am going to go back to work on the 2nd of January or delay until the 7th. I had been thinking the 2nd, but the kids are trying to get me to make it the 7th since they have that whole week off from school.

On Saturday, Suzanne and the kids had their annual Christmas dance recital with the Alma Dolores International Dance Centre. This tends to be the biggest production of the year. Unfortunately, its also the performance with the most little kids. One can only take so many 4 and 5 year olds up on stage trying to dance. Don’t get me wrong, we were there with our kids too, so I fully understand ... READ MORE

Merry Christmas From DirecTV

Mr Papa — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:36:36 +0000

We got a nice little Christmas present from DirecTV last night. They have begun to broadcast our local TV stations in High Definition. This is a big deal for us because we don’t watch very many TV shows if they are in standard definition any more. It’s just not as enjoyable.

Living in the country, we actually get our local stations from Tucson, AZ, the largest city in our vicinity. Tucson is considered a small market for television. It took a long time for them just to get DirecTV to carry their local stations. When DirecTV recently launched a bunch of satellites in preparation for many, many more HD channels, they also planned to start converting the non-local HD channels to HD. Again, Tucson would not be on the early list.

When the satellites went operational a month or two ago, we were hopeful that ... READ MORE

New Laptop

Mr Papa — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:09:14 +0000

Well, I finally broke down and bought a laptop computer. I have been wanting one for personal use for some time now, but could never justify the expenditure. I am not really sure that I did this time either, but never the less, I now have a laptop.

I envision using it on family trips and for easy computer access from various points around the house. Since we take a fair number of family trips, it will allow me to keep an eye on all of my websites when away from the house. For those long dance weekends, where countless hours are spent watching other parents’ kids dance, I can slip out and do some compute work until my kids are ready to dance.

Set up and installation of the laptop was a piece of cake and went off without a hitch. I must say I am pretty ... READ MORE

Spam and More Spam

Mr Papa — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:05:07 +0000

Wow, the spammers never let up. After cleaning out my spam this evening, I was presented with the following message

Caught Spam

Akismet has caught 38,644 spam for you since you first installed it.

You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day.

That’s almost 40,000 spam attacks stopped here at Mr Papa’s World. I have had the software running for a year or so now. These spammers try to leave stupid comments on my posts. Luckily, Akismet is hard at working catching most of the spam. You may notice an odd one or two slipping through now and then, but I usually catch them pretty fast. The ones Akismet catches, you never see.

DirecTV Finally Adds Many HD Channels

Mr Papa — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:30:02 +0000

Finally, DirecTV has come through with their promise of many HD channels. They recently brought on line many additional HD channels since launching a couple of new satellites. We are now able to get around 75 HD channels on our satellite. TV viewing life is quite sweet now.

Ever since getting an HDTV about four years ago, I have struggled to watch standard definition television. The difference is like night and day. Those who haven’t yet enjoyed HDTV just can’t imagine the difference. There is no going back and as I said, you tend to shy away from standard definition TV.

Almost every channel that we watch is now in HD on DirecTV. Combine that with our HD DVR and we now always have something in HD to watch if we so desire. I spent a bunch of time last night setting up recordings ... READ MORE

Server Move Complete

Mr Papa — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:50:51 +0000

The move to the new server is complete. It was relatively painless for me – hope the same can be said for you.

If you are seeing this post, then your ISP’s DNS has propagated and is correctly pointing to the new server.