The rants and ravings of a Mac developer

I Love programming, Macs, the iPhone, iPad, Apps & iOS! In my spare time I like Programming in ExtJS, PHP, MySQL / SQLite3 and Apache - in other words a Real Geek's geek. I've tinkered around with programing for iOS in the not so distant past . During the day I work for Motorola Solutions in IT as BSA for our Export Compliance system JPMorgan's TradeSphere. At night I freelance program on the Mac & Web. I'm also a techie who likes Sci-Fi and Horror. Some of my favorite authors include Stephen King, William Gibson and Frank Herbert as well as his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

But my real passion is for Comic Book Collecting. My current freelance project is writing a web based application using ExtJS for collecting comics books. After I get the web application completed, I will be integrating some portion of the web application into a desktop client for the Mac through the use of web services for all data exchange & transaction. Eventually, the web site & Mac client would also include a social networking component as well as an iOS component.

I started collecting comic books as a kid when my grandfather passed away and we found my father's comic book collection when we were cleaning out my grandfather's basement. There were a number of early issues in that stash, such as Fantastic Four number one, The Amazing Spider-Man number one, number 22 of the Uncanny X-Men... and others. So needless to say, I was hooked.

After high school I stopped collecting - college, drinking and woman took priority (not necessarily in that order) over visiting the local comic book shop. Now that I have 2 kids of my own, I've gotten back into collecting.

AT&T U-Verse is here

Over the weekend friends of mine had AT&T’s U-Verse TV/Phone/Internet package installed at their house. Needless to say it kicks some serious butt.

AT&T U-Verse delivers digital television over your ethernet network to each of your TVs. Each TV gets a little AT&T cable box and has a ethernet connection on the back. There is 1 central DVR for the whole house - you can record on it and then watch the recorded program on any TV in the house. There’s lots of programming to choose from, including On-Demand. Picture quality is great too - even without HD. While I didn’t get to play around with it too much the online channel guide looks fairly good too.

Phone service is standard VOIP - not much to say there.

Internet speeds leave a little bit to be desired and are a tad bit pricey for the high end, 18 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up for $95 a month.

Just to compare ComCast has a their Performance package for $43 which is 15 Mbps down (with PowerBoost) & 3 Mbps up or their Blast 20 Mbps down & 4 Mbps up for $53 or their Ultra 30 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up for $66.

But remember too, this is DSL your own dedicated connection versus Cable a shared connection.