PhillipBlanton.com

I am spending about a month in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, and Avis gave me a 2013 Chrysler 200 for my stay here. Normally I drive a late model Infiniti FX-35. In all of my many travels I have not yet had a chance to encounter a car as nice as mine. It should come as no surprise then that the Chrysler 200 also fails the test. However, plasticy as it may bethe Chrysler 200 comes closest so far. The 200 has many of the luxury accoutrements that the Infiniti does (though not all) and is an overall comfortable, and performant vehicle. If I had to live the rest of my life with a Chrysler 200, It wouldn't be too bad. My biggest complaints are that the wheels are cheap (already being scratched up and dinged by the Canadian winter before I got it), and... [More]

I use Discus on my website in order to provide comments and control comment spam. Today, when posting I noticed this message... So I gather that Discus is no longer supporting Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. That's a strange development.

My new software security job with HP/Fortify requires me to travel quite a bit. I used to carry my laptop in a backpack, but I worked in jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. Now I have to dress a bit nicer, and wear sportcoats, slacks and sometimes even ... SUITS! A backpack over a suit is tres' gauche, and a bit uncomfortable. I searched a while for a good solution and liked the McKlein line of rolling laptop cases because the wheels could be easily removed, leaving the leather bits to be carried like a fat briefcase. The McKlein Chicago also came with an extra, smaller briefcase that fits my 17" Macbook Pro and all of its accessories perfectly, The McKlein will easily carry two laptops, so I bought it. Unfortunately it didn't arrive in time... [More]

Right at the end of the year, I got a new laptop from my employer. It's an HP Elitebook 8570W that is configured pretty much to the max. The one thing they didn't max out is my memory. The lappy came with only 8GB of DDR3 RAM, but I wanted more in order to effectively run Virtual machines via VMWare Workstation. I discovered that it was easy and cheap to order a 16GB upgrade kit for this computer from Crucial... http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=7B13F803A5CA7304 Which was at the time I ordered it, $81. It was cheap enough and easy enough to order that I just paid for it myself, and didn't bother to create an IT ticket in order to get an upgrade kit for the memory on a NEW laptop. The memory came in a few days ago. I expec... [More]

I got a new laptop at the end of the year. While configuring it (I'm a bit of a power-user and like my laptops configured in a specific way) I tried to remove the onerous "require password when the computer awakens". Unfortunately the domain of my company had enforced the policy. Drag. I use a severely complex password in order to provide real security. It's not a sentence, or an array of sentence letters, or anything in any way related to me. It in fact is a generated password that looks something like this...  "g4JGmU{Y2xX". That one is NOT my password. It's just another generated one based on the same algorithm as the one that I generated before. Anyway, as you can see, entering that password over and over again, is pure hell. ... [More]

For those of you who don't know, October is THE month for pumpkin pie pumpkins. If you like Pumpkin pies, then you most likely have been raised on pies made from canned pumpkin. While it's sad, it's also instructive. Pumpkin pie pumpkins are only a small sliver of the pumpkin growing industry. Most of the pumpkin growing industry is dedicated to the growing of the big pumpkins used for throwaway Jack-O-Lanterns. Pumpkin pie pumpkins are very small and very sweet pumpkins that are only available for a very short period of time from early October until mid to late October. BUY THEM WHEN YOU SEE THEM! The pie pumpkins should cost about $2 each and they will keep for about two months. The best thing to do is buy them when they are ripe, gut and... [More]

The cigar gift to friends of newborns is well cemented into our cultural conciousness. Recently a friend had a newborn baby girl, and "presented" me with an "It's a Girl!!!" cigar from Arturo Fuente. Hoping that since it had the "Arturo Fuente" name on it, it wasn't totally trash, I placed it in my humidor. This evening, I lit it up and ... OMG! Was I smoking a cow patty?!?!? Why is it that this one cigar-based cultural achievement is so sullied by crappy tobacco? Why can't Punch, or Cohiba, or Gurkha, or Davidoff, or Rocky Patel make nice cigar packages for the proud new father? Seriously!? If you are my friend and have a new baby, Go spend some money on some good sticks and have Kinko's print up custom bands for you. Don't present me with... [More]

Like those of you who are hitting this post, I received an Acer Aspire 1420P at the 2009 PDC in Los Angeles, California. I have searched and have not found any other posts about the Acer Aspire 1420P so I assume that the lappy wasn't ever released outside of the 2009 PDC in LA. Suffice it to say, the Acer 1420P was a seriously nice touchscreen lappy/tablet with a; "meh" microsoft operating system running on a crappy touchy version of Win 7. In fact I gave this lappy to my daughter as a 2009 Christmas present. She used it for a year, then handed it back to me when I gave her a 15" Macbook Pro for the next Christmas. It sat in my (crappy computer) pile for a while until I recently realized that it is in fact quite a capable computer. This is ... [More]

About three years ago I switched my whole family from Windows computers to Apple Macs. In fact, my eldest daughter got our first mac (a 15" Macbook Pro) as a gift for her sixteenth birthday. She is now nineteen and works behind the "Genuis Bar" at the local Apple store. From time to time though, I get this notice on my iMac or Macbook Pro... The solution (on OSX Mountain Lion) is as follows... 1. Close out of any applications that are connected to the Web. 2. Click on the Apple menu and choose System Preferences. 3. Select your active network interface from the pane on the left. 4. Click "Advanced" in the lower-right corner of the main pane. 5. Click the TCP/IP tab, and click the "Renew DHCP Lease" button. The system will toss yo... [More]

Hand-made cribbage boards.http://www.woodenimages.com/popup_image.php?pID=475This guy in Montana has super-nice hand-made cribbage boards. The big plus is that they have a slide out pocket for the pegs and a deck of cards. I saw them at the art fair in Manitou Springs, Colorado this last Monday and was super impressed. I want to buy the maple one (the one pictured above) but couldn't justify the $95 expense.I have been playing cribbage since my stint in Navy back in the mid eighties. Mary Ann and I play it regularly on a cheapie wal-mart board. I seriously want that maple board and will eventually buy it.If any of you like to play cribbage, then this is the ONLY guy to buy a custom cribbage board from. I have handled them and can say withou... [More]