Its all About Me

I will be soon be entering a new phase in my life (sometimes referred to as grad school), so I wanted to start making some back end preparations for when this momentous leap forward in my life occurs.

This starts tonight with the creation of my landing page, hosted on About Me.

About Me: Ross Logan

 This website will serve as my new central hub, where friends and professionals alike can visit to find out more information about me, how to contact me, and what Im up to personally and professionally.

This evening will also mark my initial shift away from personal blogging, at least for the time being. Yes, I havent blogged in quite some time, but tonight will serve as my official announcement. Its not quite a retirement from blogging, per say, but rather a temporary hold until I have started my new career in grad school. Once settled there, I shall resume blogging with much more of a Student Life approach.

Anyways, you can visit my About Me page at http://About.Me/Ross.Logan

Enjoy!

Random Thoughts

To say I have been watching a lot of Nip/Tuck lately would be an understatement. Ive ripped through 4 seasons of the damn thing in just over a week. Thats about 15 episodes per season at 46 minutes an episode, not counting the 1st season that consisted of 22 episodes and not counting that the first and last episode of each season are 20 minutes longer than normal on average. This is also not counting the time I have spent catching my Mom up on the show, who now likes to watch episodes with me.

Statistics aside, I get heavy doses every day of two individuals who have plenty of cash to throw around, and never REALLY have to worry about money.

And after I got over wishing I could be rich like them, another thought occurred to me.

What kind of life would I live if money really wasnt an issue at all?  What would I want to do with my life if I really didnt have to worry about money at all? What would really make me happy at the end of day?

These are the kinds of questions that friends and family have asked me to think about over the course of my life, but that I never really seriously gave thought to. Why should I? Money talks, and money makes a lot of things move. But perhaps something about my life-shift and heavy doses of this show have started to make think differently.

So I started thinking. And since the job market has been my priority question these last few weeks, I started with the job. What would I really be happy doing? What would really give me satisfaction? The funny thing is, I dont know if I would WANT to not be working, and just lay around all day. Ive been doing PLENTY of that for the last 3 weeks, and let me tell you, it sucks. I get to stay up all night doing whatever, sleep til 2 in the afternoon, and eat whatever I want, and do whatever I want, with no responsibility. And it feels like Im paralyzed. I cant stand it. So no, I cant just vacation forever.

I have to do something, and more importantly, I have to give back. Some of life's most fulfilling moments for me have always been when I have been giving back. I cant put my finger on what that would be yet, but I know its my calling. Whether I end up as tech support or a student affairs admin or a psychologist, Im going to be giving back.

So then I started to think about other things. What I might do with tons and tons of money. Id two things, I decided. First things first. Id buy the hottest night club in the city and pump tons of money into helping it grow. Then Id influence the setlist and make sure all the right songs were being played. Id set it up to be the most freeing club anyone had ever experienced. Im so tired of all these senseless songs that get played at clubs.

After that, Id probably buy my way into one of the top tech companies, most likely as a board member, and have access to all the latest gadgets before anyone else even heard of them. Id let them know what I want, and what consumers really want their gadgets to do.

Speaking of gadgets, the entire theme of my house would be advanced tech. Ive seen Disney's Smart House, so obviously I know what Im talking about. But the main thing that I know my house will have is a podium stand right in the middle of the front entrance hallway. So everyday when I came home from work, I would slide my iPod into this podium and the entire house would blast the music I was listening to. I hate being cut off from my music. There is nothing worse then getting kicked back to cold reality after being lost within a good song. Id also make sure LCDs lined every wall of the house. Enough of this pretending stuff. I want my house to bring the proper song visualization to life, and I want it to do it by reacting to my dictation. Cameras would capture my every movement, and the visuals on screen would react. Imagine making a ripple of light everytime you pointed at your wall. Then add in a high-BPM song, and its your own song garden.

Of course, for those rare occasions when Im not listening to a high octane song, Id settle for nature visuals, wind blowing through the trees, etc, etc. I do calm down every now and then.....

Oy. This is tiring. Im gonna cut this off here. But my point is (besides the house redesign and the club and tech purchase) that money doesnt really buy happiness. I cant buy my way into the right job for me, and I cant let money dictate what job I go for. Sean and Christian enjoy being plastic surgeons in Nip/Tuck, they didnt do it for the money outright. I dont want to be a plastic surgeon, and I dont want to be a lot of things that would make me absurdly rich. I just want to be happy, and I think the point of this whole blog post was to share that Im not afraid to find that job that makes me absurdly happy, even if money isnt a huge part of the equation. Money may buy some comfort items, such as a Smart House with mass speaker system and your own night club. But it cant buy fulfillment, and I think this year.... thats what I want to find. /Random.Thoughts.

How I Conquered the Xbox 360 Slim Hard Drive

Wow, what a wild past couple of days. Ive been cleaning like crazy, trying to get adjusted back to life in Boulder, CO.  But that meant first moving my 19-year old self old OUT of my room before my 23 year old self could move in.

... But thats a different post, with pictures.

Right now I wanna talk about how I am slowly, but surely, conquering the Xbox 360 Slim Hard Drive.

The story starts with me being impatient. My room at home doesnt have an Ethernet port for me to plug my current Xbox 360 into.  That means no Netflix Instant Streaming to my HDTV. However, I could go out and buy a wireless adapter for $100 bux that would make it work in my house, since my house has wireless.

Or I could buy the new $300 Xbox 360 Slim edition that has the wireless adapter built in.

Having money in my pocket, I promptly went out and bought the new Xbox 360 with a 250GB hard drive.

Now that I had my new Xbox, I needed to transfer all my old data from the old Xbox onto the new one.

So I went back to the store and bought a $20 transfer cable. (Remember, Im doing all this to avoid paying for the $100 adapter. Im saving money, right?)

So I came home and transferred all the data from my old Xbox to my new one.

Simple enough right?

Well, not quite. The Xboxs got to talking and decided they didnt want to transfer all my installed games from the hard drive, which is about 50GB of data. Well, that didnt sit ok with me. I was pissed.

I was super pissed. Thats dumb, I thought. There must be a way around this.

So I got to researching, and I found a program that will copy ANY data from one Xbox hard drive to a PC, and then back out to another Xbox hard drive.

So I got to work, slowly moving over all the data from the hard drive.  This first part was simple enough, as the cable I bought from the store was a simple connect one end here, and the USB end to the PC.  Done and done.

Then i went to repeat this process for the new Xbox 360 hard drive, the slim model.

Again, I was thrown a curve ball.

The new Xbox 360 slim hard drive uses a standard SATA port, instead of an eSATA port that the transfer cable uses.  Another words, I couldnt just plug in the new hard drive to the cable.

Oh no. It wouldnt be that easy, laughed my new shiny hard drive.

But a thought occurred to me. This is a STANDARD SATA port. Couldnt I just plug in the hard drive to an external hard drive shell and run it through the USB port that the drive shells come with?

So around the house I went, grabbing every custom made external hard drive I could find, and ripping them apart. After ripping apart 3 of them, I finally found one that would work.

My little... contraption... is displayed below:

Left: New Hard Drive. Right: Old Hard Drive

So as you can see, the old hard drive plugged into the cable as didnt need any mess.  The one on the left, however, the new shiny black hard drive, needed some.... tender loving care.

And this, sadly, was only half the battle. Now I am patiently waiting as each file uploads back to the new hard drive, carefully coding each folder to match the 8 hexi-decimal code so that the new Xbox can read it right.

Its been 2 hours, and Im not even done with the first set of files. There are EIGHT sets of files. Oy vey, I dont even know if this will work yet!

But Im proud of myself though. Even when the Xbox said no, I said yes, and I pushed til I got the answer I want.

Side note: My dad will kinda be pissed when he finds out ultimately it was his hard drive shell I had to take apart for my contraption to work.  Oops. Ill put it back together before I go to bed.

More posts to come soon!  Especially one Im excited to write about dealing with parents hosting drinking parties.  It will very much be a Student Affairs post, and Ill be excited for feedback!

The Future of Vending Machines

Source: Impress

See that? Yea, its a 47-inch HDTV touch screen that you use to buy soda with.  Not only that, it can scan you by age and gender, and make appropriate recommendations based on whats popular with that gender/age group at that time. And if its out of stock of an item, it wont waste your time (and subsequently piss you off) by displaying it on the screen, it will just remove it from view.

Now thats a vending machine I wanna use.

See America? Start importing stuff like that. Or at the very least, import more credit card vending machines.  I dont have quarters or cash, OK?! I have my school ID, my drivers license, and my credit cards. The only way you could still make me pay in quarters is if you had a big touch screen, like that one above. Then Id prolly bug someone for change so I could use the machine. I mean, really, would you pass up a machine like this just because you didnt have change? I didnt think so.

Well, basically: Its a cool machine.