Casey Sousa dot com

I love that we have the opportunity to vote in this country. We all get to put our heads together and decide who gets to be in charge for the next 4 years.

I also love that we have the ability to vote by mail. Here we are, a little over 2 weeks away from election day, and I’ve already voted. It’s one more task I can check off my list. That feels nice.

The part that I don’t like about it, though, is that I still have to drive around and see all the signs that say “Yes on Prop x” or “So-and-so 2008.” I’m not gonna talk about who I voted for, but I can’t help but notice that I feel a little bad about voting the opposite of what the particular sign says. It’s like a little reminder to me that there are a lot of people out there that support different views than I do, some of whom can’t hold back a tongue lashing when they hear that I voted opposite of them.

How annoying do you find it when someone starts making fun of you for who you voted for? Well, my annoyance starts before that. I get annoyed when someone just asks who I voted for. That tells me that I’m about to receive an earfull. There’s nothing that I can say that will avoid hearing this person spout off about how they have it all figured out, how one of the candidates is better than the other, and for me to not see it would be proof that I’m stupid.

Since fighting over politics isn’t something I enjoy doing, I have field-tested some tactics to prevent this uncomfortable situation. My hypothesis is that anyone who asks you “Who are you voting for?” is actually telling you “I’m about to get all riled up and tell you why Candidate B is a scum bag.” Here’s what I’ve tried as responses when someone asks, “Who are you voting for?”

1. “I’m voting for Candidate A.” A direct response to their question showing you have a firm position and are not really open to hearing opinions. Their response will always be to smear the candidate they are against. If you said you were voting for Candidate A, and that’s who they’re voting for, they’ll say, “Good. Candidate B is a dirty scum bag because…” If you said you were voting for Candidate B, they’ll say, “What?! Candidate B is a dirty scum bag because…” FAIL.
2. “I haven’t decided yet.” Trying to communicate that I am apathetic about it, and not open to opinions. Depending on how enthusiastic the person is about their choice (Candidate A), they’ll range from calmly telling you Candidate B is a scum bag to condescendingly reprimanding you for not picking the one they are going to pick. FAIL.
3. “I don’t like to talk about politics.” This is an attempt at complete avoidance. Response is usually a challenge in some way sounding like, “Why not? It’s probably because Candidate B is a scum bag.” Sometimes you’ll get a crafty booger who will lure you into response 1 or 2 by saying something like, “Oh, I don’t like arguing about it either. But I’m just curious about your opinion.” If you fall for this, see response 1 or 2. FAIL.
4. “I already voted, but I’m not telling you who.” This response has two goals: a) frustrate the inquirer for our own entertainment, and b) communicate that I don’t want to engage in conversation about it. The frustration levels vary depending on the person and my delivery, but it eventually turns into a guessing game that sounds something like, “Oh no, you didn’t vote for Candidate B, did you? I hope not because he’s a real scum bag.” FAIL.
5. “I’ll tell you if you tell me first.” This is total surrender to the question in hopes that appeasing the inquirer will shorten the length of the conversation. When they respond, “I’m voting for Candidate A” you just start emphatically agreeing with their choice and beat them to the punch with something like, “Oh, me too, because that Candidate B is a scum bag.” However, even if I preempt all the bashing, they still seem to want to agree with me by repeating it all over again! FAIL!

After all that I still haven’t found a way to avoid these types of one-sided conversations with this type of person. Usually if I know the person well enough, I’ll use humor and sarcasm to downplay the topic and then divert it to something else, but I don’t always get asked by someone I know.

If you’ve done any research of your own, let me know your findings in the comments.

Good night, and good luck.

I have been experiencing some weird occurances with my iPhone lately. This is an image of the latest oddity.

What’s wrong with this picture? I guess I should check my voicemail more often, eh? I actually didn’t have 68 voicemails, but it stayed like that until I rebooted my iPhone. Scared me for a second, though. Interesting little glitch.

If you live in the area, stop by and get some great deals. Tell your friends, too!

Sometimes I get phone calls, emails, or IMs from people needing computer help. Most of the time I try to help, but sometimes I refer them to the know-it-all that I learned from: Google. This is an open letter to everyone who gets bitter at me when I don’t help them with their computer problems.

Dear Helpless & Bitter,

If I was right there with you it would be easy to fix your problem because I could just take over the mouse and keyboard and make it work in like 5 minutes. However, it sucks having to type it all out and if someone isn’t familiar with the terms and applications I’m talking about, then it takes even longer to type out the description of what I’m talking about, or try to take a screen capture to send to you so you see what I mean. Not to mention that I usually get at least 3 requests EVERY DAY at work or from friends to help them with their computer problems. At the end of the day when I get home, I just don’t feel like being your on-call “tech support” anymore. Sometimes I want people to call me or IM me when they DON’T have a problem with their printer, or iTunes, or getting a program for free, or setting up their email or wireless network, etc.

No offense, but what I usually do for you for free is what the Geek Squad charges between $100 and $450 for. I do it because I enjoy computers and I enjoy helping people. But sometimes I don’t feel like it because I get it all the time. And when I don’t feel like troubleshooting something for you, I refer you to Google because most likely you can spend 10 minutes searching and find your answer. Searching is how I learned most of what I know. You can get bitter at me for referring you to Google, but just realize that you’re bitter at me because you’re lazy, not because I wouldn’t help you.

Next time you ask for my help, I’ll probably tell you I don’t know how to fix it just to get you off my back because you gave me attitude the last time I didn’t help you. If I’m gonna have to put up with your demands and bitterness, then you better start paying me!

With much 1’s and 0’s,

Your local computer geek

I went to the Dave Matthews Band concert a week ago on Friday. He played at the Coors Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, CA. It was one of his best performances I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying quite a bit considering that I’ve seen him live about 7 times. I was really bummed after last year’s performance at the same venue when he played relatively obscure songs and lacked the typical zest that Dave usually displays. However, this year he played every song I wanted to hear except for Bartender, but I can’t complain about that. Here’s the set list from the concert:

01: Intro [01:09]
02: Sugar Will (tease) [01:57]
03: Granny * [05:59]
04: Don’t Drink the Water * [07:34]
05: Corn Bread * [06:00]
06: Grey Street * [05:53]
07: You Never Know * [08:22]
08: Crush * [14:40]
09: #27 * [05:57]
10: Dream Girl * [06:12]
11: Shotgun * [08:04]
12: Eh Hee * [05:18]
13: You Might Die Trying * [08:10]
14: Dancing Nancies * > [10:47]
15: Warehouse * [15:35]
16: Stand Up [For It] *+ [06:18]
17: (Typical Situation) * > [12:37]
18: Everyday * > [08:06]
19: Ants Marching * [07:45]
20: Encore break/intro [09:12]
21: Gravedigger ~ [03:52]
22: Tripping Billies * [08:26]
* Rashawn Ross
+ Joe Lawlor
~ Dave Solo
(song name) indicates a partial song

A short clip of Everyday:
DMB - Everyday

I was looking around for some wallpaper for my iPhone, and I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. The screen is so clear that it really deserves to have a cool high resolution image on it. So I found out that the wallpaper is just a .png that is 320×480 and goes into the /Library/Wallpaper directory on my phone. I decided to head into Photoshop and whip up my own. I’m not saying it’s “all that and a bag of potato chips,” but I like it. It may not look like much here, but once you get it on your iPhone you’ll see how nicely it goes with the smoked glass interface. Feel free to use it on yours if you want.

I love this song by David Crowder Band. It’s short, sweet, and best sung early in the morning when the sun first hits your face.

Glorious Day

The reunion was great. I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone as much as I would have liked to, but it was very good to at least see everyone again and hear a little about what’s going on now. I pretty much flaked on the slideshow that I was supposed to have going during the reunion, so I made it afterwards, and decided to share it here. Enjoy.

I’ve had the same car for almost 9 years now. It’s a green, 1994 Honda Accord. It has been a great car for its 140,000 miles, and I’m going to be sad when it finally dies. I don’t know if any of you have learned anything about life from your car, but I sure have received more than a few valuable lessons from mine. I’d like to share two of them with you now.

As you can see, it’s not in the greatest shape. The main eye-sore is the paint on the roof and trunk which is oxidizing from being parked outside for the last 9 years. It’s a little dirty in this picture, but when it’s clean, it doesn’t look a whole lot different.

I went to a wedding a while back and I had heard that there would be valet service. Being that I had worked for a while as a valet before college, I decided to wash my car so that the valet guy wouldn’t be too disgusted. I got all the bird crap and dust off of it, and it looked ok. Not anywhere near a new car, but better than it had been. I valeted at the ceremony, and after it was over, the friendly valet retrieved my car. I got in and drove about two blocks from the church when I noticed that the little bus that was taking the wedding party to the reception was parked on the side of the road and all the occupants were mingling around outside of it. As I got closer, I was halted and told that the bus had broken down and would it be alright if I drove some people to the reception. I was more than happy to help out, so I told them I would. The brides mother and grandparents were elected as the first ones to get a “lifeboat” and leave the “sinking ship.” As the mother got into my car, she said, “Don’t you wish you would have washed your car for the wedding!?” I chuckled a little and nodded, but inside I was dying of laughter because I knew that I HAD washed my car, she just couldn’t tell cause it was so beat-up!

About 6 months ago, I went to dinner with some friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time. One of them was bragging a little bit about the new BMW that she had just bought. She explained about the cool features of the interior and how fast and cool it was. The conversation moved on and we eventually finished dinner and left separately. About 5 minutes after I left the parking lot, I got a call from her asking if I had jumper cables in my car. I said, “Yes, is everything ok?” She told me that they couldn’t get the car started and asked if I could come back and give them a jump. I turned around and headed back laughing a little to myself that my piece of junk car was going to save the day.

My point in these stories is not that I got to laugh at others who had a bad day or hard time. Sure, I chuckled at the irony of the situations, but I certainly did not take pleasure in their misfortune. My point is that even though my car isn’t that great looking, fast, or comfortable, it was still able to be used to help others.

Many times in our daily lives we are forced to recognize our shortcomings or the many reasons we don’t fit in with society. We might be unattractive, poor, unfunny, or not athletic. We may feel we have nothing to offer someone else or society in general. This is not the case! We can be of great value to others. All we need to do is allow ourselves to be used when the opportunity arises. Better yet, we can actively look for opportunities to serve others with what we have. We may not have a lot of money, but we can give a lot of encouragement to those who have had a bad day. We may not have nice possessions to loan others, but we can joyfully lend a hand to someone who needs help. We may not be funny or the life of the party, but we can listen to someone vent about their tough week at work.

It reminds me of the story found in John 6:5-13. Jesus was able to use the boy’s seemingly small gifts of five loaves of bread and two fish to feed over 5000 people. If the gifts were not given by the boy, then many would have gone hungry. But the boy offered what he had, and many others benefited from it.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who is attractive, rich, funny, and athletic. The same applies to you in that whatever your gifts and talents are, they can be used to benefit others. This life would be so boring and meaningless if all we ever cared or worried about was ourselves. It’s a privilege to be able to help others, and I hope that we all can strive to look for the chances to do so every day.

I wish I could count how many of these posts there have been over the years of blogging, but I can’t. A recent read from a friend of mine’s blog has convinced me that I need to make a list, also. These are the apps that I either love, find very practical, use most often, or all of the above.

Quicksilver - The website describes this free app as “A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” Although that is true, it really doesn’t give a clear picture to the average Mac user about how useful this app is. The interface is activated with a keystroke (mine is command-space) and then you start typing. The power of Quicksilver is that you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard to use it, so it’s always at your fingertips no matter what app you’re using at the time. The difficulty in explaining this app is that it can do so much, that it’s hard to describe what it is. So, with that in mind, here are a few examples of what I use it for.

1. It’s an application launcher. I can be typing away, and then activate it, and start typing the name of the app I want to open. It finds it as I type, and then I hit return and it opens it.
2. I reboot my Mac. If I need to restart my Mac for some reason, I just activate it, start typing “restart” and then hit return, and it reboots my Mac.
3. Control iTunes. I can be typing an email or using another app that takes up the screen and realize that I want to skip the currently playing track in iTunes, so instead of taking my hands off my keyboard and moving around windows or apps to see my iTunes controller, I just activate Quicksilver, type “next” and hit return and it skips the track.
4. FTP uploads. I really find this one useful. I frequently upload images to my server for posting on my friends’ myspace pages or other places. I activate Quicksilver, type the name of the image, then tab over to the action field, start typing “upload,” tab over to the selection of servers, start typing the server name I want, arrow over to the directory on the server I want it to go, then hit return. I know it sounds like a lot, but this action seriously saves about 2 minutes each time I upload an image.
5. Bookmarks. It keeps a list of my bookmarks from del.icio.us as well as my browser, so I can activate it from anywhere and start typing the name of the bookmark, hit return, and off it goes in my default browser.

I know that still might not impress you, but the reality is that the more you use it, the more you’ll find how powerful it is and how much time it’ll save you. One caution: if you don’t know how to type by touch, you’ll probably hate this app.

Camino - This is my favorite web browser hands down. It’s a free and open source project by the same people who make Firefox. The difference is that Camino is made to fit in better with the Mac interface so you get the look and feel of a native Mac app. The part that I really like about it is how fast it is. The startup time of Camino is much faster than both Safari and Firefox. The rendering of pages is also much faster. I’ve noticed that the nightly builds are even faster than the latest stable release. It doesn’t have the addons that Firefox has, but it does come with the ability to block pop-ups and web advertising. Once you learn to live without some of the excesses of Firefox, you’ll find that it’s a lightweight browser that gets out of your way and lets you surf the web faster.

VLC - This is a video player that plays just about anything. It’s free and open source, so there’s no reason for it to be missing from your Applications folder.

ImageWell - This is a free (for basic version), lightweight image editor. It’s great for when you want to email a photo to someone. You don’t want to send the full-size image, but you don’t want to open iPhoto or worse, Photoshop, and resize it in there. This app opens quickly, lets you resize or edit your image with some great basic features, and then use the image wherever you want. It also has a great built-in FTP client that lets you hit a button and upload the image to a preset server on the Internet.

Handbrake - I don’t know how many of you watch movies on your computer or iPod, but if you do, then you’ll want this app. It’s a free and open source conversion tool that will convert a DVD or VIDEO_TS folder into an iPod-friendly MPEG-4 video file (.mp4). I use it to archive my DVDs to my iMac, which has Front Row, which is connected to my TV. Now I can browse my movie library on my TV with the remote. Nice, huh?

Adium - Some might say I’m getting too old for instant messaging, but I don’t care! I still enjoy chatting with my friends all around the world through the various services: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, and ICQ. Adium is a free and open source app that connects you to all of these networks (and more) and combines all your buddies into one easy-to-customize list. It has a tabbed IM window so that you don’t have to clutter up your screen, but rather can have all your conversations in one window. There are easy shortcuts to jump from tab-to-tab so that you don’t ever have to take your hands off the keyboard. It’s still ironing out some difficulties with file transfers, but it’s come a long way in that area. Other than that, it’s the best IM app ever created.

Those are about the most frequently used apps on my Mac, aside from the standards like iTunes, Quicktime, Photoshop, and iPhoto. If you haven’t tried some of these, then I encourage you to give it a shot because you have nothing to lose. I strongly recommend that everyone download and start using Quicksilver weather you like it or not. Eventually, you’ll learn how to use it and be thankful that you took the time to get used to it.