Alin's Site

NIU Memorial Ribbon

I usually do not post “News” on this blog. This blog is almost always about me and things that directly affect me. Today is an exception, for yesterday February 14th 2008 was the day that 18 students of NIU in DeKalb were shot. DeKalb is only about an hour drive from my house. This news upsets me even though I have nothing to do with NIU, the reason I find this upsetting is because of the quantity of shootings that have been occurring in the United States schools, as NBC5 news quoted last night “It is really hard for a student to cope with tragedies like this. School is meant to be a very safe place, and when a student no longer has that feeling of security in their school it causes unrest.” I uphold that statement with huge support, for this news is making me rethink going to college physically. I am beginning to think about not going to college at all physically and doing it online if I do any college whatsoever, this leaves a flaw though, the fact that hands on labs are missed all the time.

What is the United States going to do about this? All I ask is that the United States government create a federal task force that is designed to inspect the security of schools and help fund projects to increase security. Metal detectors should be funded by the government for the schools, security cameras should be funded by the government. It is time that the government began stepping in and helping secure the schools. The TSA has done a great job of securing our airports, it is time we had a School Security Administration created.

I have created a vigil tag on the front page, which shall remain until the end of the month. This post will remain forever as a permanent memorial to all of the victims and their loved ones.

Condolences to the victims and families of the February 14th, 2008 shooting at NIU

Powerchair Airport Screen Awaiting Arrival

If I had the ability to be all over the place running around screaming ITS FINALLY COMING!!! I would, though I do not have that ability and had to settle for a blog post. Anyways the powerchair is set to be delivered next Monday!!! And it is about time, that so called “companion chair” does no justice for my horrible positioning and mobility, It is a disgrace. This powerchair is going to allow me to do so many things that I have not been able to do for a very long time. I do not take mobility for granted anymore, I want everyone to understand this, mobility is a fragile component to life, and can be broken quite easily, if powerchairs and wheelchairs did not exist mobility would be gone forever, for me and a lot of other people in this world! The powerchair was invented by George Klein in the World War II timeframe to give soldiers who were rendered quadriplegic in battle a second chance at mobility back home. I am really grateful that the wheelchair and powerchair were invented for if they weren’t I would be bedridden for the rest of my life.

Did this blog post make you cry as you were reading it?

When I was doing my final copy edit, like I always do I get the text to speech synthesis system to read it back as I scan along for errors. Surprisingly I was tearing by the end of the post.

Final word…
ITS COMING AND ITS ARRIVING ON MONDAY!!!

AWstats logo

As stated in the Google analytics system removed blog post there will be a monthly statistics report posted on the blog. I have discovered that it is not possible for me to do mid month report construction. I would have to manually create charts from the 24th of one month to the 24th of another. Hence all statistics reports will be given on the 1st of each month instead of the 24th. This change also applies to DisabledPlanet statistics.

The old plan was to have reports given on the 22nd for DisabledPlanet and on the 24th for www.alinssite.info instead of doing this both reports will be given on the 1st of each month…

There will be no January report. The first report will be the February report which will be released March 1st.

The ramp and van in the morning of the storm

Excuse the dark picture. But that is what it looked like right after the big snowstorm on February 6th, when dad woke up to leave for work. He made it to work ok, after taking an extra hour to shovel everything. The snowstorm was very bad and me and mom were surprised dad went to work that day. We had to stay home due to how temperature sensitive I am due to my respiratory difficulties.

More pictures in the gallery. Click picture above to go to gallery.

Talkshoe Logo

Hosted by: Alin S
Title: EPISODE7 – Disabilities – Central Auditory Processing DIsorder
Time: 02/08/2008 10:13 PM EST
Episode Notes: Tonight we will talk about central auditory processing disorder, a component of certain autistic spectrum disorders. It can be dealt with by using different life changing strategies and therapies. There are no medications available. last ten minutes we will be talking about our internet connections. PERMANENTLY CHANGED TO FRIDAY NIGHTS.

Preparing for Powerchair Arrival Airport Screen

We decided to call the powerchair dealer yesterday for a status update, the dealer said, “I think your powerchair arrived today; I have to go check in back. I will call you back.” Surprisingly enough she became so busy yesterday that she didn’t call back. So we decided to call her back today and low and behold the powerchair has arrived at the dealer’s office! All we need to do to the house now is move the furniture around in the house a bit to make for prime accessibility. We have to get the new van quickly and so that is going to be quite costly. If you are able to donate please donate to help us pay for the van. The powerchair will not even be ready for delivery for a few days since they need to get all the components that shipped separate from the powerchair put together, headrest, chest harness, custom seating system, and various other components. Then they need to program it. After all of that is done it can be considered ready for delivery. The only problem is we are not ready to take delivery just yet. We should hopefully be ready to take delivery in the next week or two. The van is not extremely critical to accepting the delivery.

Haloscan system overview

Another, not so little tweak has been made to the blog. We now have a comment’s system again thanks to HALOSCAN. The new comment system also allows you to rate a blog post instantly with the click of your mouse. Just like the old website, all comments will be personally read and responded to by me. Hope to hear from you guys soon!

When leaving comments make sure to use your name or nickname on your comments. Comments without names or nicknames will be deleted without notice. The same policy applies to comments without E-Mail addresses.

Me and the MacBook Air

For the last few days I have been having progressively worsening trackpad issues with my MacBook Pro. We finally decided to take it into the Apple store and get this thing checked and fixed when the trackpad started giving me constant trouble today. Hence, why some of the blog posts from today are from earlier time stamps because they never got uploaded due to my loss of control over my laptop. While we were waiting for it to be fixed we went and checked out the MacBook Air. According to the manager they just got them in late last night, so I was one of the first few hundred to touch the MacBook Air. During that time I decided I would write a review.

More photos in the gallery. Click the photo above to go to the gallery!

MacBook Air Review
By Alin S

Aesthetics

I myself must agree with everyone else. The first thing that really slaps you in the face is the thin factor of this beautiful machine. The funny thing is that it is actually light enough for me to pick up, remember that with the progressive disease I have my muscle tone is really low and I can barely lift my 5.4 pound MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air’s aluminum finish and thin-ness scream at you. “Touch me, Buy me, Touch me, Buy me.” The only problem I have in the aesthetics department is the keyboard keys, they are plain ugly. I wish Apple took a copy of the MacBook Pro keyboard and put it in the MacBook Air. Black keys on an aluminum machine just look terrible. Aside from that the aesthetics of the MacBook Air are astoundingly beautiful.

Speed

This area seems to have a lot of people worried. I have no qualms about the speed of the MacBook Pro, to me there is a lot of power packed into a very small package. The PATA hard drive based model boots in 30 seconds flat and the Solid State Drive model boots in under 15 seconds. Both much faster than when I used to use windows and had to put up with boot times hovering around three to five minutes. The MacBook Air does everything they said it would do.

Size

People were expecting a new power oriented machine, this is not that machine, that machine will probably come in the August keynote. But this machine definitely will fit for most traveling business people especially those who wish to have a laptop that is extremely light and easy to stow. Weighing in at a feather weight three pounds and measuring 0.16 inches thick at its thinnest point and 0.76 inches at it’s thickest the MacBook Air is truly a real life marvel of design and engineering. I have no qualms about the size, though I wish there were a 15″ inch or maybe even a 17″ inch MacBook Air. Lighter and thinner MacBook Pro’s would be nice.

Input

Some people really like the keyboard, I don’t I heavily prefer the feel of my MacBook Pro’s scissor style laptop keyboard. Though I must admit, the multi touch trackpad is probably the best invention since the iPhone’s multi touch screen. Apple is beginning to roam into the market of input devices now. I would like to see an Apple Cinema touch screen display soon. Aside from the qualms I have about the keyboard the MacBook Air has no problems in input.

Output

The glossy screen really stands out and extends the MacBook Air’s general point of being very sleek. It has extremely crisp colors and photos look gorgeous on the screen. The only qualm I have in the department of screens is the fact that it only comes in a one size fits all 13″ inch screen. Sound output is amazingly clear and crisp, I was expecting a tiny speaker on the mother board that could only beep, but Apple figured out a way to get nice speakers in there. The sound output like any other laptop is not very bassy but I don’t mind since I’m not much of a bass lover anyways.

Ports

This is where I only have a few small qualms, and where a lot of people have some huge qualms. The arrangement of ports is quite limited, but the cool thing is the ports are totally out of sight until you open the little ports door. The lack of more than one USB port is a bit disappointing but can very easily be mitigated with a small portable USB hub. The lack of a Firewire port is slightly disappointing but not by much since all of my devices support either both or just USB, majority being USB only. I would have liked to see a DVI or Mini-DVI port on the MacBook Air since it is a machine designed for business travelers. Business travelers are likely to use a projector at some point in their trip and it would be nice if they could directly connect to the projector with the MacBook Air like they can with the MacBook Pro. Aside from those two small qualms I have none elsewhere.

Batteries

A lot of people have qualms about the sealed battery that can only be replaced by Apple or by the 16 year old geek down the street who has three Mac’s taken apart on his desk per day. Personally I have no problem with this, I nearly never take the battery out of my MacBook Pro aside from when I need to change the RAM and the MacBook Air does not require it’s users to ever upgrade the RAM since it comes with a spacious 2GB. You must remember that the MacBook Air is mainly a business machine, so 2GB is pretty spacious for most to all business oriented applications.

Cost

This is where the MacBook Air really gets slammed. The cost of this machine is astronomical. After the sticker shock you begin to realize that Solid State Drives are quite a new technology and the price per gigabyte is still relatively high. You also must realize that a lot of things about this machine had to go through a lot of work to become small enough to keep the MacBook Air’s Airiness.

This concludes the MacBook Air Review

Talkshoe Visit my Talkcast button

It’s not very common that I really badger people about getting on Talkshoe and coming to my podcast, but lately in the last few weeks attendance numbers have plummeted. Please if you can click the link above and participate on fridays. If you wish to participate in the audio chat you must either dial on your telephone or click “Talkshoe Pro” to use the software’s built in VOIP system.

Hope to see you all there!

Over the last day I have made some tweaks to the website. The first tweak I did yesterday was fix the way the Google box looks and make it more integrated, This was completed with a few minutes of HTML code tweaking. Today I decided that I wanted episode notice blog posts to look like they did in our old iWeb based website and so I decided to tinker with some HTML code and voila, like iWeb RapidWeaver accepts HTML in the blog posts.