iJFP.com

San Francisco Apartments

Joe — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:23:14 +0000

I spent the last week in San Francisco looking at apartments flying in and out of Chicago from Christmas day to New Years Eve. My parents also came along since my Mom just put the finishing touches on her book and neither of them had taken vacation this year yet. So we turned the apartment hunt in to a family vacation as well. It was pretty exhausting since we stayed near the top of Nob Hill and looked at a bunch of apartments each day we were out there. I also worked the 2 weekdays we were open at Symantec down in Mountain View so I got to try the mass commute again. After all the searching I did find a place and it’s in SOMA instead of Nob Hill which will be closer to the train and save me from having to go up a massive hill every day. It’s a newer building built in 2006 and only a few blocks from Whole Foods so it should be a less abrupt transition than going from my condo to a 100-year old apartment on top of Nob Hill. It has a gym inside so I don’t have to go out for that and I even negotiated parking in so I’ll still be able to keep my car. I’ve also heard Nob Hill referred to as “snob hill” so at least I don’t have to deal with that reputation. I get enough crap being from Brookfield when I run in to someone from Wisconsin. I’m back in Minneapolis now just tieing up loose ends. Need to get the condo sold or rented, pack, and finish the last few lectures in the MBA program. The move is definitely pending so much over me that I’m thinking about it constantly but in a good way. I can’t wait to be out there and the going away party is shaping up to be a blast.

Megabus Sucks

Joe — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:47:15 +0000

I’ve rode the Megabus twice from Minneapolis to Milwaukee and both times were awful. The bus was over an hour late the first time (while waiting in below 0 temp) and the second time they left 30 people on the side of the road since it was already full. They did send an overflow bus after we all put our bags in front of the bus to prevent it from leaving without us. The bus driver told us it was already in Milwaukee and would be there in 5 minutes so we let the bus go. After calling dispatch though we learned the bus would take 3 hours and would be coming from Chicago. BE WARY. It’s not bad if you can actually get on but you pay for what you get.

My Place is up for Sale

Joe — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:44:00 +0000

I’ve decided to put my place up for sale after getting it appraised a few weeks ago. If you or anyone you know is interested let me know. It’s sad to see it go since it’s been a dream place to have but I’m moving on to San Francisco at the end of January. Check it out here (it will also be up on Craigslist, in the paper and a few other places).

Description
This 860 square foot unit was bought 3-years ago when the building was being renovated from apartments to condos. RiverWest is an all condo building with 75% of owners occupying their units making it a nice friendly community where you can get to know you’re neighbors. The entire building was renovated 3-years ago and the lobby now has a fountain, gourmet kitchen and living room equipped with a Plasma TV that can be used for hosting your large gatherings. Additionally a 2nd social room on the 1st floor was added with a pool table and plasma TV as well. The fitness center has a full weight room, ellipticals and tread mills with personal LCD TV’s on each of the aerobic units. Outside on the 1st floor is a pool with a skyline view of the city as well as a gas fire place and grills for hosting barbecues. Just inside by the pool you would have access to a sauna and jacuzzi along with locker rooms. The actual unit overlooks the Mississippi river with a view of both the 3rd avenue bridge and Stone Arch bridge. To see a picture of the view from the balcony check out the panoramic photo which was shot from standing on the units balcony. The unit was planned and decorated by Dwelling Designs, a local interior design firm that decorated the common areas as well. The space has dark hard wood floors in the kitchen and living room with carpet in the bedroom. Large breakfast island in the center of the kitchen, slate tile in the bathroom, black granite counter tops throughout, stainless steel GE appliances, and a in-unit washer and dryer.

Features

Central Air
Hardwood
Spa/Hot Tub
Swimming Pool
Living Room
Modern
Central Heating
Stylish
Renovated
Exercise/Yoga Room
Balcony
Smoke Alarms
Elevator
Granite Countertops
Stainless Steel Appliances
Stove
Microwave
Dishwasher
Refrigerator
Washer
Dryer
Clubhouse/Rec. Room
Exercise Area
Security Features
Community Spa/Hot Tub
Community Swimming Pool
Walking Distance to Town/Shopping
Walking/Jogging/Bike/Hiking Trail
Community Park
Community Fitness Center
Within 5 Miles from Park
Within 5 Miles from Fitness Center
Within 5 Miles from Roller/Ice Rink
Within 5 Miles from Town/City/Shopping
Storage Room
Dogs Allowed
Cats Allowed
Parking Garage

Amazon MP3 Store

Joe — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:48:16 +0000

I’ve bought music online before plenty of times. Pearl Jam live albums, rarities, digital only compilations, things like that. But today for the first time I bought a legit normal full length album from Amazon instead of going to Best Buy to get the physical CD. I have a slightly embarassing obsession with the Killers for awhile and their new album is full of ridiculous 80’s synth pop goodness. I was pleasantly surprised at how well Amazon worked. The album cost $3.99 (for 10 songs), the MP3’s are variable bit rate 256k with no DRM and the little program thingie automatically added them to iTunes and started playing after 1 click on the website. I’m still hesitant to buy through iTunes with all the DRM garbage and I feel like Apple already owns enough of my soul but for $4 I can definitely get use to this. I especially enjoy that you can stream pieces of all the songs right before clicking on buy which has gave me second thoughts about buying the new Kanye - what is with all the singing? Lame.

Mac Apps

Joe — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:35:45 +0000

It seems like a lot more people are getting Mac’s theses days (Pat just got one and Paul from work just got a new one…even my Mom has a temporary one for editing her book). So for fun I thought I’d list a bunch of applications I’ve come to love. I used a Mac for web design all through college but I didn’t switch my primary computer at home to one until a year and a half ago and now I have one at work as well. Most of the applications are free so a quick search should bring them up if you want to download. Anything killer I’m missing?

In the dock:

Cyberduck (free FTP client)
Firefox (browser, duh)
Mail.app (use it occisionally just to download Gmail for offline use/backup)
Entourage (work email)
Adium (by far the best chat client)
iCal (i mainly keep that there so I know the date since i use entourage for a calendar)
iTunes
ProTools (for the nowlikephotograph podcast)
Adobe Lightroom (best RAW editor I’ve used)
Adobe Photoshop (for nowlikephotos and random web stuff, it’s expensive but worth it)
Textmate (the best text editor I’ve ever used, it’s like a graphical version of VI. best part is blogging with it or auto uploading things like the podcast xml file)
Office (word, excel, powerpoint)
iShowU (screen recording for demo’s at work)
iMovie (use it with the screen recording and editing other video)
Terminal
Remote Desktop (nice to use for connecting to the media center and running iTunes over the home stereo)
VMware (awesome that you can run bootcamp Windows partition and work demo’s using Windows Server)
Cisco VPN client (for work)
iPass (service provider for work travel)

And at the top in the system tray:

Office calendar button
Gmail checker
Google Calendar checker
Google Reader checker
Caffeine (one click to enable and it turns off screensaver making sure the laptop doesn’t dim or go to sleep)
Growl (universal pop-up notifier for Growl, gmail, itunes and everything else - nice since it keeps all the pop up status windows the same format)
Spaces (i keep trying to use this but never really got in to it, i live by expose instead)
Monitors (mainly for presentations)
Time Machine (works great with a 320GB western digital passport drive for backup)
Rest is standard stuff….

Other things not listed that you can’t see:

Flip4Mac - allows quicktime to play Windows media files
Desktop 2 Login - allows the default desktop at the login screen to match the custom one after you login (nice so you can get rid of that stupid space background that always shows up at login)
Handbrake - best free 1-click DVD ripper
Norton Antivirus - come on i work for them and secuity is important…
SuperDuper! - full image backup. Time Machine is nice but with SuperDuper I can take a full system image and boot off of the backup. So if a hard drive crashes I can just run the Mac OS on the backup until things are fixed.
Twitteriffic - I’ve been switching over to using a dashboard widget instead (twitterlex) but Twitteriffic is pretty nice too
Quicksilver - this is hard to explain but you it’s a text launcher so you can do search or type commands without using a mouse. I use it to setup hot keys for controlling iTunes without bringing up the window or updating IM status without bringing up chat windows etc…

Downloaed Dashboard Widgets (besides the standard ones):

Package tracker by Mike Piontek (tracks UPS numbers and notifies you through Growl when they get scanned at different locations)
Remember the Milk - todo lists synced with the web and Gmail widget
Twitterlex - for twitter feeds/posting

New Blog

Joe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:27:06 +0000

Inspired by last week’s poll I have started a business speak blog and wanted to use Tumblr so I could learn a new platform.

http://bizspeak.tumblr.com/

I’ll be updating it pretty frequently since I realize how many ridiculous things I hear in a day on the phone…

More in Dubai

Joe — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:36:44 +0000

Training went well on Wednesday. I ran in to some guys I knew from the other product teams after the session I gave so we went out for dinner with some of the locals that night. Dubai has this thing where almost all restaurants are in hotels like India so we didn’t have to leave where we were staying, just went to the top of the building. It stays pretty hot at night and it’s so humid that the windows fog up after the sun goes down so being high up didn’t offer us a view because of that. Thursday morning I had a breakfast meeting with some of the locals since they are taking me to visit a Saudi customer in Bahrain on Saturday morning. After all the work stuff I took the afternoon to do some site seeing finally. I hit up the Mall of the Emirates first which is kind of like the Mall of America in size but instead of Camp Snoppie in the center they have a indoor ski slope. I suppose when it’s ridiculously hot outside it’s a fun thing to do. The mall had a hop-on hop-off tour bus that went around the city so I got on that for a few hours. It went by the Burj Dubai (tallest building in the world), the palm islands, marina and business districts. There is so much money in Dubai it’s kind of mind blowing between all the shopping and houses. And you can’t legally own land unless you are an Emirattee so all of it is being rented. The motivation is that there is little to no tax on everything including cars which is why almost everyone has really nice cars. There is a larger disparatiy in the classes though since the people that don’t have cars are usually the consturction workers who they pack in buses to bring to the sites. There is so much construction that I imagine they make up a decent amount of the population. Most of them are expatriates as well. At night I went out with a bunch of locals again and one of the girls from Lebanon taught me how to belly dance. I definitely looked like an idiot doing it since a guy should probably not be belly dancing in the first place. The whole sales team in the middle east is pretty young so we all related well and I was glad I could see the cities night life. Almost all of them are expat’s (Egypt and Lebanon make up the most). I still don’t get the music they play, it was like in Europe - Wham, Men at Work, Village People. Basically anything that was in the top 40’s prior to 1990. Tonight I’m staying in Bahrain to meet with a Saudi oil company tomorrow. Friday is a holy day so the UAE weekend is Friday/Saturday (they work Sunday) and in Saudi/Bahrain the weekend is Thursday/Friday so hence me working on Saturday morning. Everyone has been awesome over here and I’m really impressed at how nice things are (people and environment). If it wasn’t so fricken hot all the time I could definitely see myself living here.

First Day in Dubai

Joe — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:59:36 +0000

I was pretty much in a daze after leaving Minneapolis at 7pm on Sunday and getting in to Dubai at 10pm Monday night. Flying in to the city was cool at night since you could see the Burj Dubai (tallest building in the world) and the man made islands as we came in. I took a taxi to the hotel and crashed until 6am this morning at which time I was woken up by a new skyscraper being built next door. The city is crazy - as if they were trying to build every skyscraper in Manhatten all at once. They are all about 2/3 done but you can’t get arund by foot very well since many of the roads don’t have sidewalks and cranes out number buildings anywhere you try and go. Despite what’s being built there is a ton of stuff to do still. I made the mistake of going out for lunch and sight seeing in the afternoon which resulted in almost passing out from the +100 temp. People apparently also sleep during the lunch hour since I walked in to several shops where the employees were laying on the floor. If I get some time later this week I’ll be going out later at night, the working hours run longer from what I saw on the doors due to the afternoon break (kind of like Spain). In fact Dubai seems to be a mix of all the neat things from other cultures - the relaxed but always going Spaniards, the hospitality and attentiveness of India, and even the German efficiency in the hotel for check in. I even was in a coffee shop where they served a small glass of water with the espresso (only seen that in Vienna). I didn’t do a ton today other than catching up with email and putting some last minute updates on presensentation for both this week and next. I’m presenting the next two days and then flying to Bahrain to meet with some customers before heading back home on Saturday night. Will be sure to post some pictures later when I get a chance.

Boiler Club Arguement

Joe — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:42:03 +0000

Two of my favorite movies mashed up…enjoy.

Boiler Club Arguement from Josef Pfeiffer on Vimeo.

Computer Things for Free

Joe — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:42:23 +0000

I am once again on a quest to reduce the amount of junk I have. Here is a list of computer parts from the bin I have been keeping for far too long. If you want any of it let me know, it’s free, just pay postage if you’re outside of Minneapolis or wait until I come visit sometime. Anything not claimed I’m going to give to Goodwill at the end of next week.

Wireless keyboard (some generic brand, it’s black and the receiver is a PS2 plug)
5.25″ removable hard drive cages for swapping drives (2 of them)
IBM Deskstar 30.7GB hard drive (IDE)
Western Digital 40.0GB hard drive (IDE)
3.5″ beige floppy drive
ATI Radeon 9200SE 64MB DDR AGP w/ TV Out
ATI Radeon 7000 32MB DDR AGP w/ TV Out
Promise Fasttrak TX2 IDE RAID Card
Philips 5.1 PCI Sound Card
Firewire PCI card (3-ports), some generic brand
Netgear FA310TX network card
D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit network card
Logitech QuickCam USB camera
Intel USB camera
Microsoft PS2 scroll mouse
Microsoft PS2 natural ergonomic keyboard (white - the first one that came out)
Logitech MX510 USB Mouse
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 USB Mouse
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer (Wireless)
MIDI to 15-pin joystick/sound card cable
Monster cigarette to firewire adapter (for charging an old school iPod)
Belkin 2-port KVM switch (USB, no PS2 ports)