Jon Kunze’s Blog

A Little Over a Week Since We Made the Switch

Well, the Kunze family is finally an Apple Family.

Last Thursday we received our 24″ iMac from the UPS man. Tera waited at home all day, looking out the window every time she heard a vehicle, but he finally came while she was heading out to school to pick the kids up. For some reason, the UPS guy decided to leave a ~$2,500 computer on beside the front door with no one home. Luckily, I was on my way home, and only missed him by 4-5 minutes. I quickly got it inside, cleaned off the desk (removing my old shitty computer as well) and got the box up on the desk to surprise Tera.

When she called I told her that I had missed the UPS man, and that he had left a note saying he would try to deliver it again the next day (haha, I’m such a funny guy). She was so pissed about missing him, and I seriously thought she was going to go looking for the UPS man and beat the living crap out of him. Luckily, she just decided to come home

When she got home, she was so surprised, as the photo below shows:

This thing is a power house of the computer. Some of the features are listed:

• 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 2×512
• 250GB Serial ATA Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 128MB SDRAM
• SuperDrive 8X (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse + Mac OS X (US English)
• 24-inch widescreen LCD
• AirPort Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

I’m going to be doubling the amount of memory to 2GB and probably adding an external 750GB hard drive in the near future. For now, it’s doing everything I’ve expected. One of the beauties of running a new Intel Mac is being able to run Windows inside of OS X natively. Using a program called Parallels, I can load up Windows in a window, and run any program that I absolutely must in Windows.

I can also make the window full screen, so that you can’t even tell OS X is running. It’s quite nice. That’s one of the biggest reasons I want to upgrade the RAM, because it can really help that process, although I haven’t run into any problems with it yet (but I’m sure Vista will want more RAM than I’m throwing at XP).

Well, like I said, we’re a week into the switch, and I’m so glad I made the switch. You definitely pay a small premium to have Apple hardware, but the extra capabilities definitely cover the premium!

Rod’s Birthday Surprise

I meant to write about this sooner, but it kept slipping my mind.

My best buddy Rod‘s birthday was on January 12th, last Friday. As many of you know, he’s living down in Alabama working for Honda down there, and is just miserable. When he came up over Christmas break, he was talking about how miserable his birthday was going to be since he is all alone down there (did I mention his wife moved back up here to take a job?). After he left our house that night, I told Tera how much fun it would be if we drove down to Alabama and surprised him for his birthday. We pretty much left it at a cool idea, but we never really gave it much thought after that.

Well, about a week before his birthday, his wife said something to use about going down to surprise him as well. That’s when we really got excited. Before, it was just kind of a cool idea, but now it was getting some traction. When I got to work the next day, I checked into renting a Van for the weekend, and sure enough they had one available. I plunked down the reservation and decided that we were going head down and surprise him for his birthday!

I called him quite a bit last week, asking him if he had any big plans for his birthday, and he just continued to sound deeply depressed about his lack of plans. I also let him know about all the fun (factious) plans that Tera and I had for the weekend. Little did he know that plans had already been set in motion for use to arrive early Saturday morning to surprise him!

So, on Friday at 9:00p, Tera, Erica, Aiden and I all packed up into our rented van and hit the road. It was a very long drive, but we rolled into the apartment parking lot at about 6:30a CST (Alabama is an hour behind Ohio). When we got out of the van, I quickly put my suprise plan into action. I called Rod from my cell phone and woke him up (he had only been asleep for about 2 hours, so he was extremely asleep when I woke him up). I informed him that I had sent him a package, and received notification from UPS that it had been delivered. After a little coaxing, I got him to go check and see if the package had been left outside of his door. By this point, I was standing outside of his door, and just waiting for the door to swing open. I hung up the phone, and heard him on the other side of the door. He started to open the door, but decided to check through the peep hole to make sure no one was around (since he was wearing nothing but his underwear). I heard an “No Shit?” from the other side of the door, and it swung open. The reaction on his face was priceless. He couldn’t believe that we made the trip to Alabama to see him, let alone that we had kept it such a good secret for the entire week. He was so tired, that he told us he was probably going to wake up in a few hours and realize it was all a dream. It was so funny!

We quickly got our stuff out of the van and into their apartment, and crashed for a few hours since we had pretty much been up all night. When we finally got up, Rod took me around Pell City (that’s where he lives), and he took me up to Lincoln to show me the Honda plant that is down there. It was really good to just get to hang with him and drive around the city. The weather was great too (it hit 80 while we were there). It also definitely made me miss having him around even more, as we’ve had some
really good times over the years.

Saturday night, Erica made a very nice Japanese style meal, and Rod and I enjoyed some quality Sushi, and watched the movie Clerks (I’d never seen it, but I highly recommend it!). Then, I decided to turn in, as we had to leave the next day.

We got up early Sunday, said our goodbyes, and hit the road. I’m pretty sure I saw him shed a tear as we pulled out. It was a long trip home, but definitely worth making the trip. Just seeing the look on his face when he realized we were there, that was worth any amount of driving! I really think it meant a lot to him!

How Useful is RSS?

For those who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows you to monitor web sites for new postings. It’s very useful for watching multiple web sites for updates, and then viewing those new postings. I use it for monitoring blogs, news sites, and tech sites.

A great way to view RSS feeds is with Google’s Reader. I use it all the time. Recently, they added the ability to view your “trends” while using Google Reader. Seeing this information made me realize I really do view a lot of news stories during the day, especially at work

It looks like Friday is the day when I get the least amount of work done.

And, as a side note, tomorrow is the Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld in San Francisco. It’s always a lot of fun to keep up with the live coverage and see what new products are coming from Apple. This years conference will be special for me though, because I’m pretty sure I’ll be ordering a good product from them very very soon Details to come later!

Summing Up Christmas Shutdown

One of the best things about working for Honda is the amount of holidays that we get each year. We typically get 13 paid holidays a year, and that includes 6 business days off over the Christmas Holiday. That, on top of the amount of vacation and personal time they give, makes for a very nice benefit for associates.

I definitely tried to make the most of my time this year, and I think I was very successful. We ended up not traveling at all over break, so that allowed us to relax around the house and allowed me to spend a substantial amount of time with my wife and newborn son. It was a wonderful time!

As I had posted up before, Christmas was very good to us, so I was able to spend a good amount of time playing around with my new Playstation 3, as well as some new XBox 360 games that I got. I was also able to spend a good amount of time with my good friend Rod while he was visiting Ohio, including having him and his wife over for New Years Eve. It was a great time! I can’t wait until he relocates back to Ohio.

Tera and I took some time yesterday to watch Superman Returns, which I had downloaded onto my Xbox 360 in Hi-Definition through the XBox Live Marketplace. It was utterly fabulous! The movie was great, and the fact that it was in 720p made the experience even better. I’m glad I gave it a shot, but I also plan on renting some movies on Blu-Ray and testing out the Playstation 3 as a Hi-Definition movie player as well. Speaking of Blu-Ray, I picked up 50 First Dates for Tera on Blu-Ray, and it was definitely a good choice. We’ve seen the movie many times and enjoyed it, but I figured the vast array of bright colors in Hawaii would look fabulous in Hi-Def, and I was proven correct!

On Christmas day, the girls joined us late in the morning, and opened the many presents that Santa Claus had left for them, and that was exciting as always. We then went out to Danny’s mom’s house for an eagerly awaited 20 minute phone call from him. It was really good to hear from him, although it definitely made me miss having him around a little more. After leaving Judy’s house, we went to dad’s, where we all exchanged presents and had a good time as well. All in all, Christmas day went very well.

We also managed to get quite a bit done around the house over break, including getting the Christmas lights taken down, as well as the rest of the decorations while the weather was decent. There are still a handful of projects that I would have liked to have gotten done, but o well. The time spent with my family was more than worth not getting all of my projects done.