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Never thought I would say this about something from Microsoft, but……Microsoft Office OneNote RULES!

I started using it about a week ago after promising myself that I need to start taking notes instead of keeping everything in my head. The thing is, I hate notepads and pens, my handwriting sucks, and if I have it on paper instead of on the PC, I’ll never actually “act” on it. I tried to find some software that was better then “Notepad” for taking notes for work, and Office OneNote came to the rescue.

The UI for it is fairly good, in that I can setup a Work notebook, monthly Tabs, and then daily pages. On the pages, I can take freeform notes in sections. You aren’t tied to a specific line, like in Notepad or Word. Once I’m done with a note, if I have a to do or follow up from that note, I can go ahead and create either an Outlook task, or a meeting request, straight from OneNote with that note’s content. Sweet! I usually create Meeting requests, as then I can assign a time and block off my calendar for that particular task, so I make sure it actually gets done.

The integration with Outlook gets even better. If I’m in a meeting somewhere w/o my computer, I can then use my iPhone’s built in Notes app to take a note down. Its very easy to email that note to yourself from your iphone. 2 clicks. Once I get back to my desk and am sorting emails, there is a 1 button “make into note” feature, so I can instantly turn that email into a new note. It would be awesome if there was some sort of App to integrate with OneNote, but there are no services or APIs to do that. Would sure be nice if that would sync over wireless straight to my OneNote DB. For now, I can deal with 3 clicks per note/meeting. Especially for free.

On a separate “note” har har, I’ve been using Toodledo to keep track of my personal to-dos. As with work, I always keep everything in my head and just start to forget to do stuff, like get my damn car registered, or sign up for the next semester for classes. Toodledo is pretty much free ($3 for the iPhone app) and allows me to always have my to-dos in front of me. I have the iPhone app, where I can view, enter, sort, assign dates, etc to all my tasks. I have the website, where I can do the same from any computer ever, and I have an iGoogle widget that sits on my homepage reminding me to get my damn car finally registered on Thursday. Now I just need to start actually doing the things I don’t want to do, and I’ll be set

So I’ve been on Facebook for a while, but I don’t seem to post on there often, even though I “mean” to. I do update my blog fairly frequently though, and crosspost all my photos to Picasa as it automatically pics those up from my home pc.

Since I moved to Wordpress, there seems to be a cool app/plugin “Wordbook” that will take my blog posts and throw them up right on my Facebook wall. Also, I was able to integrate my Picasa account with Facebook as well. Super Nerd. Activate!

So after telling a couple of coworkers that I had my blog on an old blogger.com template, I got this weird look and “you don’t use wordpress.org?” comment. Checking it out for a bit got me interested, and as I played with it, I realized what they were talking about. Wordpress rules!

The longest part of the conversion process was setting up all the 301 redirects for my old URLs to the new ones. The import of my blog feed, the setup of the template and blog was cake, and the admin interface is awesome. Even better, I control all the code through the php templates, so my blog is now proper XHTML where with Blogger service, there was so much invalid blogger code scattered, it wasn’t even funny.

Also, the more I use php, the more I like it. I was always an ASP guy, and with the vBulletin work I do running the RoadRaceAutoX forums, and now setting up Wordpress, I’m finding that php rules.

So I went to Brandsmart tonight and pulled the trigger on an LG 47″ LCD HDTV. When compared to the Sharp Aquos 52″ we were thinking about, it just had better “pop” on the blacks, no matter what the settings. Also figured that sitting 8-10′ from the TV, the 47″ would actually look better.

Took this thing home and plopped it right next to the 3 year old LCD Projection 50″ Hitachi that I currently have. I was thinking that I’d get a big upgrade in black levels, sharpness, picture quality etc etc by going to a “new” LCD TV versus the LCD projection that I’ve had for a while now.

After hooking both of them up to the cable box and tinkering with some settings on both TV’s (got the LG looking great with the recommended CNET settings and then set up the Hitachi to look like the LG), we realized that its the same damn picture. While there is a slight difference in the black levels, its definitely only slight and can be noticed when viewing dark scenes. Watching normal TV, or discovery HD as we were, its hardly damn noticable. Maybe with a Blu-Ray player we could see it, but on normal HDTV and then upscaled regular DVD, there is just no way to justify the purchase.

I guess in the end I saved myself some $$ as it looks like we’re just going to keep this 50″ Hitachi till it goes away, or until OLED’s come down in price, cause it ain’t worth it going to a 1080P LG LCD right now. Color me surprised.

So its been about 2 weeks since I started Project Fatass. I’ve been good and been following the diet. Its actually pretty easy to follow and I like it. I like the lunches a lot better then the usual microwave frozen lunch, and its actually more economical as I don’t spend $8 a day on lunch every day. I’m a fan. I’ve lost 5 lbs so far. If I lose another 5 over the next two weeks, I’ll be happy.

So my parents just “got” me the NutriSystem package after calling me fat for the last year or two. Guess I’ll turn this into Project Fatass and see what I can do. I weighed in this morning at 224.0 and started the diet. I also have my plan to get back to “fighting shape”. I’ve been playing soccer and tennis and just realizing that I’m way out of shape compared to where I’ve been in the past. Few years of sitting at a desk and playing with cars I guess

The nutrisystem is pretty cool so far. Good amount of food, but spread throughout the day, so you are not hungry. I think the main goal is showing you how much to each, and by liming the amount, making sure you don’t overeat. Also, splitting up your food categories, so you get enough of everything. One of the first things I’ve noticed, is I don’t eat much dairy and veggies at all. This plan has me do 3-4 servings of dairy/protein a day.

I’m also going to take the next season off of soccer and tennis and hit the gym and mountain bike to get some strength and endurance. I’ll be back with a vengeance for the spring season

Since I’ve had the MacBook Pro I’ve been wanting it to “hibernate” instead of “sleep” when I close the lid. There are times when I’ve shut the lid, stuck it into my backpack, just to not look at it again for 3 days over a long weekend. During that time, even in regular sleep mode, the battery dies as the laptop is not all the way off. My Thinkpad on the other hand can fully hibernate, in which it turns itself all the way off and stores its current state to the hdd.

Turns out that the MacBooks have the same mode, but its not an option in the menu. After a little digging, I’ve found a site that tells you what to do. I’ve outlined the steps below for “mac noobs” such as myself.

• Go to Finder, Utilities, Terminal
• type pmset -g | grep hibernate
• You should see that your hibernate is set for mode 3. This means when it sleeps, your items are saved to the RAM and power stays on. What you want is to set that to mode 5 which will function just like windows hibernate, and actually turn your laptop all the way off while saving where your state to the hdd.
• Create two aliases, one to enable mode 5, and another to set back to 3 if you want.
• Type alias hibernateon=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5″
• Type alias hibernateoff=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3″
• Now when you type hibernateon, it will set that mode to 5. Once you do that, type pmset -g | grep hibernate again to confirm that you are on mode 5
• Your laptop is now set to hibernate like windows when you close the lid. If you ever want to revert back, run terminal again and type hibernateoff

This is easy as pie. With the below steps, you can take any MP3 and make it into a ringtone for your iPhone.

• Grab the MP3 you want to turn into a ringtone and using Audacity turn it into an MP3 that is less then 30 seconds in length.
• Drag the newly shortened file into iTunes
• Find it in iTunes, right click on it and choose “Convert to AAC”. It will make another version of the song.
• Find that song in your iTunes folder library (probably c:/…./My Documents/My Music/iTunes) and rename if from .m4a to m4r. In iTunes, delete the m4a that you made.
• In iTunes, go to “file” then “add file to library” and select the newly renamed m4r that you made in the step above
• Now you can sync with your iPhone and you will have a new ringtone to select.