It’s been one hell of a year.

2009 in a recap for me:

  • First year of marriage to my beautiful wife
  • Moved in with my inlaws
  • Had the worst tax year ever
  • My Grandmother passed away
  • Started shopping for a home
  • Decided to re-define my business and take a huge risk
  • Dad had open heart surgery
  • Bought a home
  • Rebuilt a home
  • Father-in-law diagnosed with cancer
  • My Father diagnosed with cancer
  • Moved into our home
  • Incorporated my business
  • Hired 4 employees
  • Father passed away
  • Wife’s grandmother passes away
  • Father-in-law made it through chemo, now in remission
  • Grandfather (88 years old) falls and breaks hip
  • Grandfather makes it through surgery against all odds
  • I’m still working 18 hour days, but getting better each day.
I’m going to keep this short and to the point.  If you think you’ve had a rough year, I challenge you to top the hell my family has been through in 12 months time.  I stopped posting here because I simply needed to focus on other things, but I miss blogging dearley, moreover I miss having this one extra outlet to enjoy talking about the things that keep me going. If I could manage to stay on top of my game with all the above happening in my life, you can as well.
2010 will be a wonderful year.  On a personal level, I dont see how it can get much worse, so I’m only looking towards the best that can be brought.  And I somehow know I have the will-power to stay strong and make it happen, because there’s no room for handouts.
To a swift return, and a wonderful year to come.
Jim

Web Site Story

College Humor did such an awesome job with this original, check it out. And yea I know I haven’t posted in a while, I’m working on it.

MMS & Tethering Enabled, Today.

I was pretty bummed to hear that it was going to take till the end of summer to get two of the hottest features coming with iPhone OS3, Tethering and MMS.  However after some digging I found out that it’s a simple case of upgrading your Carrier settings. All OS3 3G phones already have the features integrated and after this quick 5 second process and a reboot on the phone, everything magically appears.

The working process can be found here:
How to Enable MMS & 3G Tethering on iPhone OS 3.0 GM Build 7A341

The above blog mentions this is for Windows machines, however I’m running the following version of iTunes and it worked just fine with the GM Developer Release.

I have not yet tried the process on windows, however on mac, I simply downloaded this file, renamed the file to remove the .zip extension, and did an Option + Restore click to select and apply the new carrier file.  After a quick reboot, teathering works flawlessly and MMS is still spotty, but all the features are there.  Note I also tried this on a 2G phone and it did not work, the phone still works fine but the features are missing.  I plan on doing this with my new 3GS when it comes in the mail tomorrow as well.  Here are some screenshots below.

Tethering Active over 3G

Tethering Active over 3G

Notice under carrier: AT&T 5.0 (vs the normal 4.0)

Notice under carrier: AT&T 5.0 (vs the normal 4.0)

Error sending, but all the features are in place.

Error sending, but all the features are in place.

Enjoy this at your own risk, I’m not responsible if you create an Apple Paperweight or rack up 5 grand in fees, but as far as I can tell, this seems like a harmless tweak.

CAPTCHA, Seriously?

I can’t be the only one that is getting sick of these.. Now Facebook & Google are the worst.  My favorite is when FB asks me to go through 2-3 of these before it accepts my link, and then half the time ends up having an AJAX error and not posting it anyhow.

I miss the days of webcrawler when the whole internet was spam, but at least we didn’t have to be challenged before clicking submit.

Tiananmen Square, Last Year

Amidst the hundreds of things I keep on my to-do list, one thing I still wish I could find time for is finishing getting all my photos together from my China Trip last year.  It was by far one of the most inspirational and eye-opening vacation’s I’ve ever taken.  We stopped by Tiananmen Square one of our first days there and here are a few of the photos I took that show how I best took in this amazing place.  Enjoy.

Twitter Spam, Annoying.

One thing I miss about twitter POE (or as I call it – Pre Oprah Era) was the absense of people who just use it to spam their links.  There’s nothing worse than trying to be nice and offer the simple act of following someone back to see what they have to say and getting crap like this shortly after:

Twitter DM Spam

As a rule, I follow everyone back who follows me, I’m not an Internets rockstar and feel like I have to be an idiot to the world like, most, everyone, else, does. That is, of course, excluding Colbert.  However in my book, the minute i get these, that constitutes a swift reply mentioning how annoyed I am with people who abuse twitter for that, followed by a block. It’s not much but, hey, why not make a point.

With great popularity, comes great abuse online.