If you just are bummed that the NBA season is over and there’s no more good NBA news, then do I have something for you. The NBA saved the best for last…a new ball! Ya, that’s right, the NBA as officially announced it’s spanking new ball and don’t worry, it’s still orange. New sleek curvy lines, though.

Ya, I know this isn’t tech but sometimes we like to let our hair hang down and just blow in the hot Central California breeze. Know what I mean?

(BTW, we didn’t want to be a spoiler and just show it here on our site, hence the logo. Go to the link and read why the NBA felt it needed to update it’s orange Tang.)

Welp, I never understand why any one would ride a motorcycle without wearing a helmet but hey, at least you look cool, right? I don’t know how cool Ben Roethlisberger looks with a broken jaw, messed teeth, and toasted knees, but hey it’s his choice, right? Probably not cutting news right now, but in case you haven’t heard, Big Ben was in a motorcycle accident today and he was by himself.

Contrary to what he was quoted as saying last fall, when he said, “I’m pretty conservative and laid back. I’ll just continue to be careful. I told him we don’t ever ride alone, we always ride in a group of people, and I think it makes it even more safe.” Maybe he was on the way to the group ride, huh?

I always crack up when people tell me how they’re safe drivers and they’re cool. Safe driver, maybe, but not smart enough to realize others aren’t safe drivers and they can and will crash into you. Ben found that out today. But hey, I’m sure he was being conservative.

No hard feelings to Ben, I just have issue with anyone that rides without a helmet. It’s plain stupid. There isn’t an argument in the world to defend your position people. And those “brain buckets” all you Harley people ride with, hey, at least you’re keeping the brain together for future research after they peel your face off the street.

I hope you get better Ben…and that this knocked some sense into you.

Hey, I got the tags to work now. I had to fudge my .htaccess file and that was about it. Now we have tags fully working here and you can click on them and find related posts that have that tag in it.

Making life easier for ya folks!

I’ve added some new stuff to the site, most notable social tags. If you’re a Digger, for example, you can now click the icon below each post and easily send it to digg.com. This will help get the word out about SvenOnTech and some articles we know others would love to see.

I’ve also added tags. While the plug-in is causing some problems on the back-end, it’s working just fine here on the front. So I’ll just deal with the back-end issue for now since I think it will add a great value to the site. With the tags, you can click on a keyword and view all other posts that have the same word in it. It’ll help create a thread for you if you would like to continue with a certain subject. Yanked due to results page not working. Hope to get this in when I upgrade the server later.

Finally, you’ll probably notice the ads within post one and three. That’s another addition that I hope will help boost my revenue a bit which will allow for me to bring more great things to this site. I have no delusions of becoming an Engadget or Gizmodo, but maybe something else that many will come to often and enjoy.

SvenOnTech would like to thank all those that gave their life, literally, for our freedom. Those in the Revolution, those in the Civil War, those in both World Wars, and those in the battles since then.

The families of these fallen soldiers also gave this country much when they selflessly gave up their rights as a mother, father, sister, brother, or wife, or husband when they let their loved ones go and fight the good fight.

No matter your feelings about current or past wars, fact is men and women have died for our country and returned home in a coffin with the flag of United States of America upon it. This flag is filled with much meaning and with great honor, I salute it and thank those who fought for it.

Happy Memorial Day.

Call it funny, but this tech guy never really sat enough to learn how to play chess before. College was too busy with studying and, well, you know, stuff. Then work came into my life and more important things like Sony PlayStations. Okay, I never got one of those, either, but that should indicate how I just didn’t have time to learn such a complex game as chess.

When my nine year-old niece asked if I’d play a game of chess with her Thursday, I was like, ‘Mmm, that could be fun.’ I explained to her that I really didn’t remember who moved how, but she said she’d help me. So I took the challenge and about ten minutes later, my niece’s father came to my resecure and put a W in my column. Without my brother in-laws help, she would have creamed me.

So now I’m practicing. Through the weekend, I’ve been playing the computer and learning the moves. While I’m not quite advanced enough to even think two moves ahead, I am at least getting the pieces allowed moves down. Of late, my biggest problem is preventing a draw yet still trying to get that check mate. Seems that the computer isn’t really up to letting that happen and after about ten minutes of “band on the run”, I just give up and force the draw.

So how am I learning all this? Did I download some game for my PC? Nope, it’s already on my Mac…for free. Chess comes with OS X and while my Windows brethren can play card games to their eyes become blood shot, I’m more into the finer things in life as is my Mac.

Like the Get a Mac ad for iLife states, you just get a lot more cool stuff with your Mac than you do with a PC. Sure Windows does come with a bit more than just the calculator and clock, but truth is, it really doesn’t come with much useful free stuff. I’m finding that the chess game that comes with the Mac is quite nice and powerful enough for my needs. I don’t need to hunt around the web for a freeware version on the PC (which I tried once a long time ago and and there really isn’t anything good out there.) In the end, it’s just good that I have a Mac and can sharpen my chess skills so I don’t get a whoppin’ from a nine year old.

Looks like after some changes to our server and CSS modification, all games but Keep Uppy were messed up or not even showing (poor Spank the Monkey.) Welp, we’ve got it all fixed and working again, so your gaming fun can once again be enjoyed right here at SvenOnTech!

Now the screen shot does show only 308 MPH and that is not our best here at SOT, but see how high you can spank that monkey. If memory serves us right, we have hit the 500+ MPH barrier…or was that another reader? Mmm, can’t say for sure. Maybe we’ll go back to playing the old school favorite, Pac Man.

One common complaint I hear from many iPod users is that the Artists section has too many redundancies in it. The most prevalent occurrence is an Artist featuring Some One. Rappers are famous for bringing on a huge posse and thus you get LL Cool J featuring Janet Jackson or Fat Joe featuring Ja Rule & Ashanti. Of course if you get enough of these featuring people going, Fat Joe will fatten up your Artist list and truth is, he’s only one artist. If you’re like me, having over 85 GB of music can make going through your artist list a bit tedious.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature that would show “Similar Artists” much like it’s wonderful “Show Duplicate Songs” feature. But you can get around this by simply searching for “featuring” in the Song field. For me, it brought up a large amount of songs that I then edited and moved the featuring mark to the song title which is common practice in liner notes. Within a few minutes, I reduced my Artist count down to 1741.

The next phase of reduction is going through all your classical music (if you have that.) Most classic works put the symphony or conductor down as the artist and then you, once again, get this bloated list. At this point a personal decision on how you’d like to handle this has to be made. If you’re more in tune to the conductor than the composer, then keep it as is. If you would rather keep everything together by composer, like I do, then go and find all your classical by sorting Genre by Classical and then make the changes. To keep the conductor in the meta file (so you can still do searches,) move their name to the Comments field.

These two changes will greatly reduce your scrolling the next time you look for LL Cool J’s song he did with Janet.

I told my wife this weekend that as an IT professional, I knew that I should dust my Windows XP install every six months and start over due to something termed “bit rot“. But as an IT professional, I was also lazy to do it on my own system because even with my back ups, it would still take me hours to bring my system back to it’s original (but clean) state. Well, Saturday the Lord gave me the final push I needed with some funky domain network problem (I couldn’t browse the domain because I didn’t have permission…yet I’m the domain admin!), so I did the evil deed and formated my hard drive and re-installed Windows XP Professional with SP2 and the 50 other critical updates.

As an IT professional, I know to keep my data files on a separate hard drive and that alone saved me hours when I started re-installing software such as Office. Within about 20 minutes, my bare essentials was back up and running, but six hours later, I still look at my laundry list and see it’s got some way to go. Ugh. Now, if this had happened to one of my Macs, I wouldn’t be having this issue. In fact, this has happened to one of my Macs and my PowerBook was up and running again (minus the hiccups) in two hours. That’s it!

Since OS X is *NIX operating system, just running Disk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions will fix most peoples issues, but when my Mac still had issues, it was time to do the deed…but unlike the Windows way. As any good IT professional would do (do I keep using that title? ), I first backed up my entire hard drive. I then renamed the System folder to System Bad and then re-installed OS X. Basically it just put a new System and Library folder in and that was pretty much it. No need to re-install my many applications and all, they were all there already. I had also dusted my /User_Name/Library/Preferences folder, too, since those settings could be another reason of issue. Due note, by removing this folder, all your personal settings for every program will be lost. You’ll have to reset them upon first use of each application. A small price to pay for a regained healthy system.

In either situation, I did lose my preferences (to a point, on both Windows and OS X, I did back those up and the applications that I knew would be fine to restore preferences, I did by hand) but re-installing all the applications in Windows is what is so time consuming. Since Microsoft thinks having vendors put files in the Windows directory and the System directory and the Common Files directory and a bunch of other directories is a necessary thing, it makes system restores timely. Apple on the other hand designed its OS, all the way back to the Macintosh 128k, to self-contain all the files in one package. When you double click that iTunes icon in OS X, it’s got everything it needs right there. In Windows, it’s just a single icon that needs tons of other icons (files) to make it work. Joy.

I tell you, even as I sit here typing on my stupid Windows box this very post, I keep thinking, “Thank God I have my Mac.” It’s my hope that in just a few more months, my remaining four applications that I can only use on my PC will be Mac usable and then Windows restores won’t matter any more.

I did some minor noticeable updates and not so noticeable updates to the site.

First, to finally rid myself of the Svenrox.com domain, I hacked the server to send all non-svenontech.com requests to svenontech.com. This now means any old lingering links will automatically forward to svenontech.com. It also means some old sub-domains will simply forward to this top level. I also have to fix my moblog section, too. No biggy.

Second, I fixed the stupid roll-over for the table of contents. For some reason, the CSS was ignoring my calls on the visited attribute, so I just redid the entire class. While I was at it, I redid the coloring which I think is much better now. You might have to refresh your browser to grab the updated CSS file.

With the first change, I think I can now officially yank all old references to Svenrox now such as graphics and includes. I’ll do that later, though. Right now I have other stuff that needs my attention.