Eric Arseneau's Weblog

eric<.>arseneau<@>sun<.>com

I've been reading in various places about how the battery in my laptop and my cell phone should be maintained to maximize battery life.  Here is an extract from an Apple site (http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html)

Standard Maintenance
For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time. An ideal use would be a commuter who uses her MacBook Pro on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing. If on the other hand, you use a desktop computer at work, and save a notebook for infrequent travel, Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month. Need a reminder? Add an event to your desktop’s iCal.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to use my computer's at their full capacity.  This means that when I am at home, I leave my laptop plugged in 90% of the time.  This gives me a couple of things

• I get full CPU and IO power to have the computer service my every whim as quickly as it can.
• When I need to go mobile with my laptop, my battery is fully charged

If this goes against the recommended way to work with a laptop, WHY don't laptops come with utilities and ability to discharge the battery while they are plugged in?

If I had such a utility, and I knew I was going to be at my machine for the better part of the day, I could just start the utility and let it do its magic.  As it stands, I am stuck unplugging and using the machine in its less than optimal settings until the battery dies.  I don't like it, so someone please fix it.

Note, with the new 17" Apple Mac Book Pro, the battery lasts a long time.  Meaning I get to spend more time in this less than optimal state.  I understand that I can maximize my power savings settings to decrease the lifetime of the battery.  But then, what to do when I am on the road and want my power savings to maximize the lifetime of the battery. 

Being a Canadian, I have to say I LOVE Tim Hortons, Tim Bits anyone?

BUT, with a Starbucks on every corner and a supposed recession going on, this blew my mind

Tim Horton's a Canadian doughnut place that, ... [Tim Hortons]

Here is an extract from an entry I did on my personal blog, which I forgot to share with you all

I think that blogging is an excellent way for future employers to see what I've been up to in the past, and to get a more lively version of a resume.  Would you rather see a watered down 2 page resume that tells you nothing, or would you like to see what makes a person tick ?

It seems that a blog can give a pretty broad overview of what a person is like.  Provided of course that this person takes the time to write up opinions, status, pet-peeves and such.

Now, if you go with the premise that a blog is a valuable tool to communicate who you are and what you are about.  Then using your blog to tie all of your activities together seems to make a lot of sense.

One of those activities will be work, we all need to earn money and most of us are stuck doing it by working.  Some of us have made the decision to stay with one or two employers, some of us have been at multiple employers throughout our careers.  For some of us, our employers strongly suggest that we blog.  Of course this is done to help communicate information to your customers, but it also helps make the employer's site THE place to come to for information.

If having more than one blog is unavoidable, then should you not make sure that there is a thread that ties all of your blogs together?  This is what this blog is for to me.

Lets not forget also, that I can gain quite a bit from blogging on my employer's blog.  Take for example my current employer, Sun Microsystems.  Sun's web site is so high in rankings with Google, that anything coming off of it ends up being ranked pretty highly as well.  This means that Google searches will show my stuff pretty highly in the results list.  Try Googling for Eric Arseneau, almost all hits come to me.

The plan is to cross link between here and whatever blog I use with my current employer.  Therefore providing a path throughout my employment life :)

The original blog entry is at Blog continuity plan, what's that you say ?

The root of my personal blog is at System Child's Ramblings

Its pretty amazing the things that can get you jumping out of your seat sometimes, but today I just got this really cool e-mail:

2009 JavaOne Conference Speaker Award
Dear Eric,

Congratulations! Your session titled "FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science and Technology): FRC-FIRST Robotic Competition" was a Top Session at the 2009 JavaOne Conference. Survey results from the people in attendance at your session rated you as an exceptional speaker. With this honor, you are now considered one of the JavaOne Conference Rock Stars and we would like to send you a commemorative award as recognition.

Please provide us the following information so we can send your award:
- Shipping address you would like the award sent to. (we will send via FedEx so please provide a street address)
- Is this address a residence or business address?
- Daytime telephone number

In addition, we will highlight your session on the JavaOne conference home page with a link to your presentation(s).

Thank you again for your efforts in making the 2009 JavaOne Conference a success.

If you have any questions, send an email to j1papers@sun.com

The JavaOne Conference Content Team

Now to figure out how to explain this to my family as they beat me at Rock Band :)

PS: This presentation was 100% the work of Derek White and Brad Miller, all I had to do was get up on stage and blab, so thank you guys. 

Book recommended on leadership.

Starting a new thing on my blog, books I want to read.  Lets see how the format should be over time.  I wish I could to the same type of thing as Facebook does, where you attach a link and it provides a nice synopsis and picture :(

Here is a rant, why doesn't every OS provide a software update service?

I may be the only one, but I doubt it, but the idea of having MANY small little services that are running to check for recent updates.  Even worse are the ones that check as I launch the app.  Has anyone told these people that when I want my document/App, I want it NOW.  If you go off and check stuff every time you launch, it seems absurd to me.

I have and am using various ones now, App Fresh and Version Tracker. These are cute and do mostly work, however I need to regularly run these apps to get my updates AND not all applications update the same way, so I have to manually have to do the upgrade anyway.

Now, provide a registration service on every OS. Each application must provide a URL to get access to information about latest releases.

Why is this not being done already? If it is, then why is it not on my OS of choice yet :(

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