i have people skills

Back When Black Eyed Peas Were Good

Wow. They were so much better back then.

Black Eyed Peas - Joints And Jam

Fingerprint Scanners At The Gym

Funny thing. Over the past few months, my gym changed the way members check in. Previously, they used membership cards with a barcode on the back. You come in, you hand your card and ID to the employee behind the counter, they scan your card, verify that your membership is active, and let you pass. But now they replaced the bar code scanners with fingerprint readers. I'm a big fan of technology for the sake of convenience, but this seems kinda sketchy.

According to the little informational handout they have, they don't actually capture your fingerprint. Apparently, the system just creates a unique pattern based on your fingerprint. Uh, huh. I ain't buying that story. I don't think I can blindly take their word for it. I'm sure the system is capable of capturing your actual fingerprint. Whether or not they store it permanently or temporarily in a cache is unknown. Either way, I can see a potential for a security breach. Which can lead to identity theft and other not so fun stuff.

I really don't know what their motive was to implement such a system. Maybe to make it easier on the employees? I'm sure they get overwhelmed during peak hours, scanning people's cards one at a time. But there's a flaw to all this. It's pretty easy to just come in during peak hours, pretend to place your finger on the fingerprint reader, and then walk on in. Typically, there's one or two employees behind the counter. And during peak hours, they're usually busy ringing up people that want to buy supplements or whatever. They totally ignore the people that are checking in. Hey! Free gym membership! Just blend in with the crowd, and you'll be alright.

I do have to say that I'm glad they're not forcing everyone to use the new check-in system. At first, they kept hassling me about it. And they warned (threatened) me that they won't be accepting the barcode membership cards anymore. But I kindly told them, no thanks. Apparently, many other members said no as well. Because they stopped bugging people about it, and they now manually check in members that don't want to use the fingerprint readers. Since I'm at the gym almost everyday, a few of the employees recognize me. They don't even bother to check me in manually. They just tell me to go on in. Ha!

And I'm Back

I've been pretty busy lately. New year, new drama, new distractions, new job, new priorities. Haven't had time to post anything. But I have to admit that laziness played some part in my lack of updates. Anyways, more to come. In the mean time, here's a song.

The Ocean Blue - Drifting, Falling

Apple Mail Sucks

Another thing I've learned from the tech support frontline.. Apple Mail sucks. Please stop using it. It's buggy as hell. It's so bad, even Apple stopped updating it. Consider using Mozilla Thunderbird instead. It's free, easy to use, has lots of features, and it just works.

The Extinction Of Hard Drive MP3 Players

I've got a lot of music on my hard drive. Almost 200GB, last time I checked. But I don't like turning on my computer just to listen to music. I've also got an MP3 player. But it only holds 8GB worth of music. And I don't feel like turning on my computer, plugging my MP3 player in, and sync the songs I want to listen to.

So what's a lazy guy with an abundant amount of music to do? Get a hard drive based MP3 player, of course! However, I've found that it's not such an easy solution. After checking around, it looks like Apple is the only one still making hard drive MP3 players. Microsoft discontinued their Zune hard drive players when they launched their Zune HD. Nothing from Sony, Samsung, Sandisk, Creative, or any of the other major companies.

So get an ipod Classic and quit whining, right? Meh. The ipod Classic isn't really a consideration. For one thing, I dislike iTunes. It's such a bloated piece of crap. To be specific, it runs like shit on Windows. Not surprisingly, it runs great on a Mac. Sure the Zune also uses proprietary software to transfer music, but it seems less bloated than iTunes.

Ideally, I would love to get a UMS/MTP hard drive MP3 player that will allow me to drag-n-drop music without the use of extra software. But such a thing doesn't exist. Bummer.