Thane of the Universe

The dark ages of animation

2011-09-20T01:29:00.001-04:00

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that the 60s, (especially the) 70s, and I'll include parts of the 80s were the Dark Ages for animation. The animation quality was just utter garbage on nearly everything, even the interesting psychedelic or nostalgic stuff. Completely uninspired manufactured trash, and especially the Saturday morning cartoons, though I certainly didn't know any better at the time; I watched just about everything that was a cartoon back then. But even then I did at least recognize the difference execution. It's really hard to miss, compare those old Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 40s and 50s to the stiff short-cut low-quality animation of the 70s, it's a world of difference. Go and compare the Tom and Jerry cartoons from the same eras and you'll see the abysmal decline in quality of which I speak. I'm not only talking about the animation, I'm also talking about the cartooning and the humour as well. Luckily there was a big bump in quality afterwards thanks to Japanime. A couple of more recent stylistic changes, starting with the new Batman cartoons in the 90s, started an acceptable trend. At least it seems they make up for the lack of animation smoothness and cartooning with mood and feel, which at least is something. Tiny Toons was also a noble effort.

Anyhow, also from the 70s I recall some movies that came out also animated. In particular a number of animated films from one Ralph Bakshi. For the longest time I asked myself what the big deal about him was. I might have been a little dazzled at the time for the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings but again it was because I was a kid and didn't know any better. I find just about everything he did, Wizards, etc. nearly unwatchable. At best something you might watch in a festival showcase if they were trimmed down to 5 minutes. And yet, he's a celebrity. It must be a zeitgeist thing, like the psychedelia of the times. Fritz the Cat stays in my head because of its shock value. Kind of like Bob Dylan being proclaimed a genius despite my lack of enthusiasm for his songs, singing skill, and elocution. However, I recently stumbled across his site and perused some of the concept art for Lord of the Rings and I at least have some respect for him as an artist, just not an animator.

It's not hard to contemplate how the decade that gave us the Star Wars Christmas Special was an all around dark age of TV in general. But to be fair I should say that one striking exception to this animation judgement were the felt-stop-motion-animated holiday shows made around that era, e.g. this and this.Those were endearing and I've never seen anything made since that were like them.

Netflix props

2011-09-19T04:42:00.000-04:00

For over a decade now I've had a subscription to Netflix, and during that entire time till now I've considered it a shining example of a good modern business with some surprising business decisions that really make it easy for the customer even at the risk of being exploited.

Highlights for me:

Good system of checking out as many DVDs as you want, a certain number at a time and they provide the return envelopes. The system could not work if you had to pay for return shipping.
Nicely working queue; you just load it up and let it go, rather than having to go to the video store and hope they have it in stock. They have an amazingly large stock, much more than you would have been able to find at the local video store.
No due dates and late fees which I think is an amazing break from standard practice. Eat crow Blockbuster. Oh, you already did.
They're very lenient on reporting lost discs without penalty even though it's something that can be abused. It's probably factored into the overall subscription cost which is the right way to do it IMO. They replace scratched or unplayable discs immediately even before you returned it.
They are remarkably speedy in turnaround for getting discs delivered. It's rarely more than a couple of days. I've tried another similar service once and it was atrocious, like a week or more turnaround.
Reasonable subscription prices that tailor from the occasional to the avid viewer and what's more trivial to change between plans immediately without extra charges to accommodate changes in free time for example. They have a very nice feature of being able to put your subscription on hold as well.
They've embraced and even pioneered in a way the online streaming model of video distribution and it works well much to my surprise. Not only that, it's included with the basic DVD subscription and is unlimited, but they even have a streaming only plan. I imagine some other companies charging you an additional premium for the privilege.
I love that the streaming was made available to more devices like disc players, game consoles, and even mobile devices. Watching from a computer was good enough but the more devices is very welcome.
I generally like this all-you-can-eat model, even when I'm not really getting my money's worth on some months where I'm busy or traveling.

One of the more recent enhancements that is a cause for celebration has to do with their streaming of TV shows. It used to be that TV shows were still clumped into seasons and worse individual discs. So when you want to exhaust a TV show you had to remember to place everything into the queue. Now with many new titles that I'd been looking at, they dump the entirety of the show into a single package so that the episodes are in order and numbered like 1 to 83 or what have you. Very nice. Makes keeping track of what you watched and where you left off very convenient and it's less polluting of your queue. Some items are still organized by seasons but at least (except for the physical DVDs) they've removed the notion of discs.

Now the potential bad news and it may be the first real blemish on them in my estimation but I'll withhold judgement until it comes about. They're re-organizing their subscription scheme so that the online viewing and physical discs are separated. The scheme is understandable and well motivated as some people don't watch streaming at all. I like having both; some movies I prefer to watch in Bluray, others are easily tolerated online. This will likely mean that my subscription fee will go up again.

Ok, I lied, there are 2 other blemishes to their credit. First, there is no Linux client for watching streaming movies. Second, they removed the ability to manage the physical DVD queue from their iPhone app. That second one boggles my mind.

UPDATE:

Horror of horrors!!!! They're going to split the DVD and streaming into two completely separate websites and accounts, on top of the fee hikes. The fee hikes I can live with because I was still getting good value and would still consider it good value even with the added delta cost. But this just completely ruins a few critical aspects of user experience.

The queue's right now are integrated. When I search for a title I see the button for adding to the DVD queue AND the streaming queue when available. The separate sites will require two searches on two sites.
On my DVD queue, sometimes an item becomes available for streaming and when it does it is obviously displayed (blue play button). When I see it, I typically add it to the streaming queue and remove it from the DVD queue. This is now impossible to do without periodically doing a search on each and every title.
When I DO do a search on a movie I can see off the bat if it is in either of my queues. I'm not ashamed to admit I keep large queues and often forget.
I just don't want to manage two lists of movie titles. Yes they are two queues now within netflix but due to the integration I can view them as two halves of the same overall queue. I have enough accounts to manage, I have no desire to having one needlessly split in two.
Quickster is a bloody idiotic choice of names for there DVD division. Netflix was originaly DVD and should have kept it. At worst, spin off the streaming to StreamFlix or something.

This latest effort to ruin the user experience of their customers is really disheartening. It's obvious to me that they're setting this up so they can sell off their DVD roots. I don't trust anyone else to operate it as well and this move may in the end backfire in addition to ruining one of my favorite services.

Update 2011-10-10:

I added my voice to the comments page from the CEOs announcement with the above summary and not surprisingly it was burried in tens of thousands of responses. I got this email this morning.

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

Well, I shall view that as good news and a near miss on their part of a great fiasco. For now I guess it's back to business as usual.

Shopping Carts

2011-08-26T20:14:00.000-04:00

The Safeway down the street from my apartment is across from the San Francisco ballpark and on the bottom of some kind of expensive condo complex. It is therefore necessarily a compact grocery story, as are many in the urban areas, with narrower aisles and the people who come here tend to shop more for the moment rather than stocking up on several months supply of groceries. And yet, the overwhelming majority of their shopping carts are the standard large full-sized shopping carts one would find in the wide suburban grocery stores. I've seen at other places smaller versions of those carts in other stores. I have no idea why this place doesn't have them.
However, this Safeway does have a VERY small set of these more befitting carts pictured on the right. Just look at it, I don't even have to go into detail as to why this is such a well designed compact and space-efficient shopping cart. Ideal in every way except that they don't stack together as well. But I go out of my way to get them when I see a free one. I prefer them to shlepping around the hand-carry baskets which I almost always seem to overfill even when going in for just a "few" things, few enough to where a large cart is not only overkill, but is also embarrassing. Actually, a "few" things usually includes a gallon of milk or a 2 liter or both, and I always hated carrying around those in a hand basket. These carts are the perfect balance between the two. It is now my opinion that every compact or semi-compact or heck every grocery store in general (since not everyone needs a full cart even there) should keep a healthy supply of these.

Correct TP orientation

2011-08-23T21:24:00.000-04:00

I am utterly perplexed at people who insist on putting toilet paper on the roll upside down. Like my wife.

Showerhead

2011-05-19T17:04:00.000-04:00

Whenever I move to a new apartment, one of the first adjustments I make (almost immediately) is to replace that fixed showerhead with a detachable one connected via hose. I can see sorta see some of the point that apartment buildings will have a fixed showerhead over a detachable one (slightly cheaper and less in need of maintenance) but I'm positively befuddled that people in their own homes don't use a detachable one (with some exception, e.g. the rain-fall variety but that's ok because the person actively changed the head to something they prefer). Advantages of a detachable showerhead.

They give you control over where the water goes.
They make cleaning the bathtub area so much easier because you can spot rinse every corner.
You can spot wash/rinse any part of your body of course, you know what I mean.
It allows you to place water elsewhere, e.g. into oddly shaped tubs containers that don't fit under the tub faucet.
There are cheap versions around $10 that are pretty good and give all the benefits.
It's quick and easy to install, requiring only a hand wrench at most.
They can have just as many or few features as the fixed showerhead.
You can still use it as a fixed shower head if you are so inclined by not detaching it; and some models let you adjust the height.

What's not to love? All of the benefits, almost none of the drawbacks. What is keeping people here from using them?

Coffee impatience

2011-05-18T15:41:00.002-04:00

There aught to be a law requiring all companies of a certain minimum size to ban certain types of coffee machines from the workplace and immediately substitute them with this one:

I'm not speaking of the espresso machines, I'm speaking of two normal kinds you almost always find: the glass pot on a hotplate kind, and the carafe where you press down on the pump at the top kind. The problem with these is efficiency with getting at your coffee. Here's why these other kinds suck:

You have to wait for the whole pot to finish filling because the coffee goes in the same opening you pour it out from.
Even when the pouring stops, you also have to wait for the dripping to stop, further frustrating the impatience.
Other coworkers may get impatient and just take the carafe out anyways and let the drips splash on the counter or hotplate, creating a mess. If they're polite, they'll maybe put a paper napkin there.
Some even more impatient coworkers will remove the carafe, put their cup under the pour, then put the carafe back, creating a mess during the transition.
I can't just wait there for a full pot to finish brewing so I go to my desk and come back to find the carafe has already been raided.
The last of the raiders didn't start a new brew so I have to go through the process again.
Or they won't start a new batch because there's some coffee left, but not enough to fill my (admittedly larger) cup.
To keep people from going crazy, you normally need multiple carafes so that you rotate them in and out but that doesn't solve the immediate problem.

Anyhow, the third vastly superior variety pictured above and solves all of these problems:

The brew enters the top and pours out the bottom.
You can get at your coffee AS IT IS brewed without interrupting the process and without waiting for it to finish.
You never need move the carafe at all and therefore don't need any extra carafes (except for e.g. big meetings). So no mess.
There's a lovely level indicator on the front so you know to start a new batch for the next guy without interrupting your current coffee claim.
It's just bloody efficient.

In my office building, each floor has a couple kitchens. The one nearest me uses those bloody carafes. The big one on the floor below has the nice one. I guess that's good enough, but they should really just replace them all.

i need to cut down on coffee

I have bad taste in TV

2011-05-17T03:23:00.001-04:00

I saw the above linked article regarding the cancellation of V, No Ordinary Family, and The Event, topped off with the fact that SGU was already cancelled with a very abrupt open-ended series finale. All of those shows are set to automatically record on my DVR. I think someone or something is telling me to not watch TV anymore or to develop new tastes.

Ok, not every show I watch is being cancelled. House is still on. Castle's still around. A few more are still on hiatus. But I have a thing for (geek) genre shows and I always keep a set on there, even when they aren't really that good. Actually I'm not surprised that the above shows were canned. I don't consider myself a true fan of any of them. Haven't seen a really good genre show that I really like since BSG ended, save for Dr. Who which I'm behind on. It's just hard to do that stuff right I suppose.

Actually it's just as well all of these cancellations happened. I've had to tone down my TV watching a lot and in truth most of those shows are stuff I leave on in the background while I work or do something else. They don't require serious attention to get the gist of the story. But thanks to the wonders of the interwebs it's also so much easier to test out or catch up on series that I missed or didn't know about. So I'm not all concerned or up in arms as I was felt with, e.g. Firefly. If I have a peeve, it's that the trend is to cancel genre shows first and foremost; I can think of other kinds that should be slated for demolition. That an the fact I get this sense they don't provide enough warning for the show to really wrap up, to resolve their arcs, to at least bring the series to a proper resolution as genre shows now (thankfully) are more in need of.

In light of this not-so-new trend for genre to get axed by the execs, the people who make these shows REALLY need to take a cue from the Brits: Make each season as if it were the only one ahead of time. It's OK to leave a little something dangling or to leave people wanting more but definitely start with the end of the season in mind, make it complete on it's own, resolve the major purpose of the season, in other words know how to end it should the axe fall even if it means compressing things down to a few episodes like Caprica did. Why? To get the story out, to aid in making the boxed set a complete thing fans would buy (I am much less interested in starting a series that just stops). In fact, while you're at it, take another cue from the Brits (or even HBO/Showtime) and make the seasons tight and short. 13 to 15 episodes is a very good length. It prevents you from putting in too much boring filler that no-one's interested in or have nothing to do with the main arcs. It's one of the things I adored about BSG season 1 over the others; it was tight and almost every episode related directly to the main plight of the series.

Addendum:
With my recent shortening of watched shows I've been watching more talk/late-night type shows. The Daily Show is my main one but I'll catch the monologues of others (e.g. Conan, Late Show, etc). I gotta say, I don't think much of Jimmy Fallon as talk show host, but he has the BEST band of them all.

In search of the perfect binder

2011-03-31T12:34:00.001-04:00

Something I've never really voiced was that I HATE 3-RING BINDERS. They are so ubiquitous and even now that I am not a student still find a need to keep at least some; loose-leaf paper is still inescapable and sometimes a file-folder is just not adequate. Over the years I have had a LOT of them. And nearly universally I've always been annoyed by them.

What I hate the most is that they don't stack cleanly. Most binders are not filled to the maximum and therefore end up in this triangle shape.
Circular rings are the most common and I don't know why. It adds to the stress around the hole, the beginning and ending pages are especially affected. How many times have you had the top and bottom papers rip out, right?
They put the circular rings on the spine most of the time. So the pages always have to slide simply by opening the binder.
Circular rings also cause the pages to not line up (observe the papers edges). The D ring is better, especially when it is not on the spine (and the cover of the binder essentially wraps around it). But why make a D when you can make an upside down U instead so that both halves of an open binder lay cleanly?
They're not that convenient to write in unless you have a big table. As a student I'd just write on loose paper and put it in later. I guess that's ok. But viewing is still a bit annoying on those tiny student desks in the lecture halls.

Anyhow, for those reasons I got rid of almost all of my 3-ring binders. For the orphaned contents that I wanted archived, I bound them using the comb binding system. Not the perfect solution either but better than 3-ring binder; they stack better if you have the right comb size.

Then many years ago I came across Unikeep and they had box-binders: 3 ring binders that

were a box, so the stacked nice and cleanly both horizontally and vertically
since they were enclosed, you could put pens and other loose things in there without falling out.
the rings were off-spine and rectangular

I bought a whole box of them and use them to store negatives, documents, pictures, etc in those 3-ring sleeves and sheet protectors. By and large, I had the perfect binder. Or so I thought.

There is one fatal flaw with the collection of binders that I bought: They were made completely of some kind of plastic, including the "rings". That in and of itself was not a big deal except when it came time to move and ship. The plastic rings was the problem, many of them snapped off or came loose. They were just not robust or sturdy. The box itself, was ok, even when closing tab didn't line up correctly anymore. Still the perfect binder in form, just not sturdy enough.

It's coming up on time to move again so I was considering this predicament and am pleased to see that i may have another solution. The company I see has added a new line of the same binder with metal rings. When I get the chance I will test some out.

UPDATE: Horror of horrors, it looks from the picture the metal rings are round.

Charging for convenience... screw that!

2011-03-30T16:25:00.001-04:00

Got a parking ticket in Berkeley. They were on the hunt, I was < 10 minutes from expiry of the meter. Those bastards. Ok, this time I'll suck it up and pay it cuz I go there often enough and maybe more in the coming year.

So there's an option to pay the ticket online. When I get there and enter the information I get this (redacted):

Pay	Citation	License Plate	Issue Date	Amount Due
	XXXXXXX	YYYYYY	03/26/11	$$.$$
Convenience Fee:	$2.00
Total of all unpaid Citations:				$45.00

Notice the "Convenience Fee" of an extra $2.00.... TO PAY ONLINE.

Un-Fucking-Believable.

Me paying online means they don't need someone to sit there and open the GOTTDAM envelope, enter the freaking information, send the check to the bank or scan it or whatever. And they want ME to pay THEM for the "convenience"? I should fucking charge THEM for the convenience of not having to deal with a couple more pieces of paper and handling it in a stinking automated way that requires no human intervention.

Screw that, deal with the check.

iTunes hate hate hate

2011-03-16T20:47:00.000-04:00

Recently I've rebooted my listening collection organization and lately I've been having discussions with Scregman on this topic. Because I succumbed to iPod and then iPhone ownership I have been forced to deal with iTunes. I NEVER liked it, but I found a way to accept it. I find it has 3 features I appreciate above all other music organizers.

A switch to let you "save your place" within a book/podcast/etc.
A disc-number field that Windows explorer refuses to acknowledge is useful and important
There is no third feature.

This guy's article perfectly captures the sentiment, with my favorite quote being:

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ".docx" Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

Apple has (slowly) made useful improvements to iTunes over the years but I still find myself continually arrested by their decisions which border on the "Do you even use this thing? How can you stand doing it this way?" sentiment.

This week's complaint session: Books/Audiobooks.

Main gripe: ALL AUDIO FILES FOR AN AUTHER ARE DUMPED INTO THE SAME DIRECTORY. They don't even have the courtesy to be consistent and store each book in a subfolder such as "author name" followed by "book name" just like every other other stinking audio file in the music iTunes library that at least gets a folder for "album name". WTF??

Ok, Should books be treated differently than music? Certainly. But lumping eBooks and audioBooks together and dumping them into the same menu item "books". eh, no? They are different media types. They should be treated as such. Or at the very least trivially separated in the listing.
There needs to be a "save your position" in a playlist. Saving position within a file is a good start, but if you have a CDrip and dozens of 5 minute tracks or at best 13 whole-CD rips, it would certainly be nice to be able to come back to the track you left off at. That information is lost once you play something somewhere else. In fact that should be just a general option. If I stop in the middle of even a music playlist, I want to be able to resume where I left off not start the bloody thing over. At the very least, treat it like a podcast and have a blue dot there indicating the listened-to status. The functionality is already there, just apply it to a broader scope.

On a computer, some of this missing feature is tolerable by exploiting the "last-played" or "number plays" field, but those items are absent from the portable device.

Yes, I'll still keep using it cuz despite iTunes those little i-gadgets are well done and nicely polished and useful. I would just like this monstrosity to be just as nice. I mean, their philosophy (read: canned response to any complaint) is that you should only organize and access your music/media through their program and unrealistically dictate that you should never need to look at it through the file system. If they believe that, they need to really make iTunes users happy and make some concessions to how people do things, or get their head examined, or both.

Coin slots

2011-03-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

While in Europe something I always noticed but never really gave much thought about was the fact that the equivalent of the dollar bill was always a coin in the foreign currency. Even $2 is a coin. It made one really have to pay attention to the coins unlike in the US where most people I know, self included, quite frequently empty our pockets of all coins into a tin or bowl or if small enough into the tip jar. We just don't like carrying coins. They weigh down our pocket or purse and fact of the matter is most wallets (at least male ones) don't even come with a coin pocket. In Europe, they are quite accustomed to it and all wallets not only accomodate the different paper-note sizes but most have a coin pocket too. How nice. I never got one, still may never for preference reasons.

I'd occasionally think, though, why is this the case? Paper bills are easier to deal with and carry and they make the strip club more entertaining. Isn't it much more expensive in materials and process to have a metallic coin than a paper note? Still, never gave it much thought. After discovering that there's a government group that's been proposing the same thing here I was compelled to understand why by way of reading the summary. In short, the crux of it is that coins are more durable and don't need to be replaced as often. This makes some sense actually figuring that the dollar bill is the most circulated bill and therefore the most worn out. These days it's practically treated as disposable isn't it? I had no idea that bills have a typical usable life-span that was so short (less than 2 years for old bills, 4 years for new ones).

I wouldn't really object to the notion of replacing these bills by coins. I'm sure the bulk of the US citizenry will be up in arms for the inconvenience or one reason or other and of course it will soon devolve into some evil conspiracy to make the US a socialist/communist nation and some other plot to embed microchips into the coins to keep tabs on you and yours by the New World Order. But as for me, I would only ask that if they do it they bring back that Silver Dollar, not these quarter-sized ones. There's something pleasing to me about a big coin, maybe that's why casino's still use them. I still have a couple saved from when I was a kid.

Peet and I

2011-03-16T13:17:00.001-04:00

I discovered Peet's coffee while at Berkeley and have been a fan ever since. I admit that I don't go to Peet's very often but only for the convenience factor; the locations are rather sparse. However, when there is a choice and I am near I will opt for Peet's over anything around.

Story:

Rewind to 10 years ago, A couple months after I moved to Cambridge Mass. One of my buddy coworkers surprised me by walking by with a cup of Peet's. I had no idea they were out there. I immediately stopped him and asked him about it. Lo and behold there was a Peet's in Harvard Square. I hadn't seen it, I was new to the area still, and it was winter so I wasn't exactly exploring, but Oh Joy!. We immediately conspired to get the company to switch their coffee order to Peet's. I don't recall what it was up until that point, I think they rotated. Others in our small company were a bit skeptical as they were unfamiliar. In a moment of enterprising thought, the receptionist/assistant/whatever-she-was-called-but-she-ordered-stuff-too decided to have a taste-test-vote with 4 brands, one of them being Starbucks and I can't recall what the other two were. Peet's won and that recurring order lasted for the next 6.5 years, ending when the company was sold.

For a good while there, I sort of took it for granted, and it wasn't until we were all ported to the new office, where they were using something else did I notice the change. Apparently I wasn't alone because at some point I noticed yet another brand of coffee sitting next to the main coffee grounds dispenser with a donation tin. The new company was big and the building was big so there were several kitchens with coffee scattered throughout. Eventually I stopped going to the one in "our" area for the most part because I found one of those espresso-cappuccino-indy-packet type machines in the other corner of the building. At the Cali office where I am now, all we have is Starbucks brand bags. I guess it could be worse but I wish I had the clout to convince them to make a switch again.

Soon though, it may not make any difference if what's pointed to in that link goes through. How sad. I may not be a true hardcore coffee aficionado, but that doesn't mean I still don't have my preferences.

comic movies

2010-11-14T05:05:00.000-05:00

Despite what critics and even myself would say about M. Knight Shyamalan on everything past his first movie, I consider "Unbreakable" probably the best cerebral comic-book related movie yet made.

1984

2010-11-14T04:15:00.001-05:00

Is it me, or does it seem like Cyrillic font is used to emphasize oppression?

Munn

2010-11-14T04:13:00.000-05:00

I don't particularly get a rise out of seeing her on TV and in action; but one sense that I do get is that she "get's it". And for that I sorta appreciate her.

I miss harmony

2010-02-08T05:45:00.002-05:00

My observation is that most music these days, when there is a singer, follows the lead-singer (possibly with backup) accompanied by a band pattern; and that when there is harmony it is only in the chorus with the back-up singers often somewhat subdued. I wish there was more music where there was harmony throughout. I like vocal harmony. I miss it. It was prevalent in the Beatles who even had harmony in the non-refrain bits. But has been used in only a few bands since then.

I've thought about this off and on for a long time but was reminded when playing Rockband.

Ice Box

2010-02-05T19:43:00.002-05:00

I'm convinced that the standard operating procedure that puts the freezer on the top in common refrigerators is a carry over from the block-of-ice ice box days. Since the advent of modern refrigeration, it should have been moved to the bottom by default.

My arguments:
1) The only good reasons I can think of for preferring a freezer-on-top are:
a) better common access to children and vertically challenged
b) need access to the freezer much more often than normal fridge
and I doubt those are the overwhelming majority use cases.
2) Because it's the standard for cheapy fridges, they are commonly found provided in the typical apartment, rented by people such as me who would rather not have to stoop the majority for the time the fridge is accessed when it is completely unnecessary.

It should stay an option, but not be the default.

Doot. Lights are on.

2010-01-20T13:13:00.005-05:00

Saw this article that I find to be a good idea... basically traffic lights that have a visible timer on so you know how long till the light turns green. The only concern that came to mind is that drivers will start gunning the gas right as the timer expires and they'll "charge" the green. This is bound to cause problems as there may still be people in the cross-traffic trying to race through before the red hits and often just running the red light. Unless they put a delay in, making both directions red simultaneously for a second or two to account for this, there's bound to be an accident.

In the US, the yellow signal light is used to warn that the red light is about to come on, but it is not used to warn when it is going to go back to green. I suspect they did this for the above reason, to introduce a reaction-time delay before getting moving. In Germany however, they use the yellow light to also warn when the light will turn green as well as red. A friend there said it allows the drivers to shift into gear and get ready to move. There are virtually no automatic transmission cars in Europe. I think fuel economy is the main reason.

I personally think a visible timer is a great idea. It would force some sense into some of those infuriationg lights on certain streets that we all know of that take an eternity to change. A visible timer would at least indicate that it's not broken.

Testing the waters

2010-01-19T15:21:00.002-05:00

I think it has been a sufficient amount of time for people to learn to stop looking here that it may very well be safe to resume posting again. ;-)

Kurt

2007-04-12T10:50:00.000-04:00

Whoa. Found out that Kurt Vonnegut, one of my old favorite authors, passed away yesterday. For a good period of my youth I really didn't like to read all that much, especially things on the order of 400 pages, especially things that I was required to read, especially things that I was required to read just for the sake of reading. Such was English class in high school. But Vonnegut's books not only made at least some of that bearable but often enjoyable. When I was required to read some American author/literature books, he was my guy. Very entertaining stuff. I only read about half of his books. Would have read more but there's just so much to read, and I already graduated high schools so nothing making me do so. Still, I may yet pick up a couple of his post-80's books someday.

I also remember the cameo he did in "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield gets him to write his class book report on his work and gets a bad grade with the admonishment that he knew squat about Vonnegut's work. It was a subtle scene but one that made me chuckle.

Flakey scales

2007-03-13T22:20:00.000-04:00

Before I start literally talking about other shit, a bit of a preamble is in order. So, lets begin. In a desperate attempt to pull myself out of my recent winter blues and to hopefully avoid going completely pitifully morbidly stark-raving nuts, I embarked upon yet another fitness kick. I figure, if I really force myself to get myself going, then perhaps eventually my heart and mind will follow. I started with a lot of voracious reading, probably a couple thousand pages total on health, fitness, and nutrition. I wanted to do it better than before. It was quite an eye-opener, I pretty much realized how wrong I was on previous attempts in certain ways. It wasn't for lack of information or that I didn't have the knowledge in the first place, it was that there's too much information out there and a lot of it is contradictory. Ok, I also fell victim a little to gimicky type systems on occasion that don't really work except temporarily.

I'd read a lot years ago and thought I had a good idea of what to do but I decided to do another literature survey, found a few ad-less sources that went back to basics and moved on: change of eating habits and consistent exercise and 2 extra philosophical points to get the system going.

Point 1: Something that probably caused my slippage from my programs before that I realise now is that they relied solely on will-power. I read an interesting article on the subject of will power. It is not a bottomless well. I does run out. It can be used to jump-start, to break the inertia, but it cannot be used to maintain. Maintaining requires something else other than raw will-power because will-power will get exhausted. Will-power is best used to jump one's-self into a new maintainable system, or to create the things that will make it maintainable on its own, but without being used itself. I think if you think about it like I did it makes perfect sense and I don't know why that didn't occur to me.
Point 2: Sometimes in order to make the odds of success as great as possible one must overwhelm it. That is, one must sometimes do all the little ancillary things that, although strictly speaking may be unnecessary, do facilitate the goal or at least improve the environment towards that goal. Or, a little tangentially speaking, a change in lifestyle often requires a change in environment.

In this particular case, what that looks like is I went a little overboard and started buying things. Workout clothes, heart-rate monitor, exercise ball, books, stopwatch, vitamins, gym membership, fancy scale, etc. Oh and I picked up something a little later that I'll write about soon... but for now I want to talk about the scale.

BATHROOM SCALES PISS ME OFF.

This is the third scale that I've purchased since moving out here. The first was just to have (cheap analog scale). The second was from my last fitness attempt and a little better (cheap, but digital to half-pound). This one is more fancy (hokey body-fat/BMI measuring, digital to 0.2 pounds) in an attempt to look serious. Every one of them, and I'm convinced ALL bathroom scales, do not measure consistently. I'm not talking about different readings when I take multiple measurements, I know weight fluctuates by up to 2 pounds during a day. I'm talking about 3 different measurements taken consecutively, and by up to a pound or more different each time. Try this with yours. Pull out your scale, measure. Now, rotate it on the floor 40 degrees or move it to another room and measure again, then rotate and measure again. I get a different reading every time. Maybe it's my linolium floor's slight surface abnormalities affecting the readings, it doesn't make sense that that should matter, it's still flat. Gaaarrrrgh. My bathroom is quite small and I have to drag my scale out of the corner to take a measurement and the placement matters, I can't just leave it there to take a calibrated reading each time in the same spot.

Those medical balance type scales are supposed to be the most accurate and consistent. Sadly, they're big and expensive and I don't have a place to put it. So my current workaround is to do multiple on-off rotate and measure readings and pick the highest number. I know you're not supposed to take weight too seriously, and I don't, but darnit seeing even a little bit of progress via a measurement is vital motivation and I don't want to get discouraged by a flaky scale. Plus, to do most things right, it's important to have a good means of measuring progress, if nothing else than as feedback and an alert to make a correction. Other forms, like inches on waist, look and feel, how the clothes fit, and such are just waaaay to subtle, difficult to measure, and take a long time to see even a little progress.

So what if it's off by a pound or so, right? Gah! When one has milestones to reach, that pound makes all the difference. It can make or break morale. It can... It can... Bleh, it's not the most imporant thing to have, has little to do with what I eat and how much I move, but I just wish it was bloody consistent.

PS: My philosophical points were best explained from this blog. I find him a borderline new-age nut, but he has some good points.

The winter of my dispair

2007-03-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

By all rights this winter was mild in terms of messiness; very little snow and relatively clear throughout sprinkled with a few "high temp" days. But gottdamm was it freaking cold the last couple of weeks. I mean negative wind-chill and all that. Last Tuesday I had to go to the hostpital. I had a swollen eye and it got bad to where it was pressing on my eyeball and causing me headaches. So I walk to the subway and by the time I got to the stop I had wished I had gone back for even more clothes. Bah, I'll tough it out, the Mass Eye & Ear infirmary is only a minute walk from the end subway stop. By the time that one minute was up my hands were swollen red and white and blotchy, I couldn't move my face, it was painfully cold and windy. Yeh I know there are worse places to be but damm that was cold. I'm gettin outa here. For the most part it's been a lonely winter. Weather sucks and people don't want to go out. I'm left alone in my humble abode left to stew in my own juices.

We have a little bit of a reprieve right now thankfully. Get some of that remaining ice off the ground. People are finally willing to get out of the house a bit more and so can I. It's time I finally say screw that and rejoin the world. Enough! It's over. Yeh I know there are some more bad weather days in store ready to hit us but at least the signs are there. Not that I've been completely idle while trapped with myself. I've been dealing with my shit. I mean, and a couple of you already know this, LITERALLY I've been dealing with my shit. And I shall describe that in the next couple posts coming soon to a computer near you.

It was the year

2007-01-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

I had this idea that like last year I would do a year in review and a year in preview every year.

Maybe I'll do that again someday.

I've found myself not feeling like it, though for some reasons I've been recounting some of the lines in a monologue in one of my favorite TV shows.

It was the year of fire,
the year of destruction,
the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth,
the year of great sadness,
the year of pain,
and the year of joy.
It was a new age.
It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.

-- Title intro to Babylon 5 Season 4 (c)(TM)(R)(etc.)

JetBlue for me

2007-01-05T14:52:00.000-05:00

I was flying back from the holidays using some point rewards I had saved up on JetBlue. As fate would have it, the DirectTV system wasn't working on that flight. It was on the longest leg so I was bummed. On the other hand it was a redeye flight and at least I had my iPod with me. Still, it would have been nice to do some channel surfing whilst trapped in my seat for 5 hours. I hardly channel surf or watch TV at home, thanks to TiVo of course. I discovered some cool programs on flights on JetBlue before. Not many days after I received an email from them, saying I have something like a $15 credit with them now because I was on a flight where the TV wasn't working. Now it's not a big deal but that little bit of customer service made a big impression. I really like JetBlue.

I mean... I REALLY like JetBlue. I think they're one of those companies that so far has done things right. If not right, then at least better than the others. I fly with them as often as I can, when convenient. Couple of things I like about them:

There's no first class seating.

But rather than making the whole plane super cramped, they've eliminated some seats and spread out the leg room amongst the remaining, making all of the cabin a bit closer to business-class than the normal economy seating you'd find on most carriers. Since I hardly ever fly first class, this is a noticeable improvement for me.

DirectTV and each seat has its own screen.

Again, one step closer to business class. On other carriers, I was never in a seat that had a good view of the cabin screens, and since I didn't like the fixed selection most of the time, I got into the practice of not watching the screens on airlines. The individual controllable screens on the other hand are pretty cool and help pass the time.

So far, very good service.

They've projected an image of an upper scale discount airline and so far it shows. They provide a good image. I've never had a problem with them. The reservation system is nice and convenient. Their planes still look new and fairly clean.

Basically, I think they should rule the airways. They're just much more comfortable than the other airlines I've been on, even the nice and pricier ones. There are only two issues I have with them, one of which is resolvable in time, and the other I fear will lead me to not fly them much anymore.

Not fully connected.

The biggest woe I had with them at first was that they weren't at enough airports. I couldn't easily fly from Boston to San Diego until maybe a year and a half ago. Before, they didn't have a means of connecting flights so I'd have to book two legs separately but I'd have to check out and in again. They didn't have a direct flight (still don't). Now they at least have some connections so I can fly on one itinerary. But their network is still not fully connected. That should change in time.

They're getting popular.

Which means 1 thing: Their prices are starting to rise. When they first came out, they were on the discount side of the airline prices. Since they've become more popular I've noticed that they're not the cheapest around anymore, sadly, but they haven't yet gone the route of absurdly ridiculous for their high demand flights. Too much for me to pay still for some time frames but I've seen much worse.

And one pet peeve: Reward points. Their points expire in a year, as most due, and are rigged so that they require just 1 to 2 more flights more than I would normally take in a year, as most do. Plus their points are isolated; can't use generic points from, say, Diners Club.

I have some mixed feelings about airmiles and that ilk in general. I can see they have their place for frequent fliers, business travelers, and people with an expense account. The purpose is to make them keep using the same airlines. But the average flier can hardly ever take advantage of them, and if they could it takes years and it being a good deal is illusory. Paper napkin calculations say that I save more just looking for the cheapest flight on different airlines than restricting myself to one airline, same with cash-back credit-cards versus ones that let you accumulate airmiles. So since it doesn't benefit me, I don't really like them and I'd rather they compete with just the price and service than incentives. My tune would probably change if I was a business traveler though.

But as far as domestic flights go, JetBlue still rules in my book compared to the others. For international flights, I think the best I've been on was Japan Air. I think Japan really has the customer service thing down in general. Couldn't tell you what their workers think of it (I could guess) but from my point of view it's a good thing.

Show me da money

2006-11-26T01:16:00.000-05:00

I'd thought about this before but this amusing story reminded me of it again. I remember some common (ignorant) comments regarding how American's often look at foreign currencies as if they are monopoly money, mostly because they are more colorful and further, often come in different sizes so doesn't seem as "real". So since it's not how it's done here, it sorta looks like play money. Um... right. There were of course some complaints when the new "counterfeit-proof" money came out but that was only because it was a change and of course, all change should be complained about in the US.

Anyhow, after my first trip abroad I had a conversation about the money and it occurred to me how kind of arbitrary the system is here. The Euro's for example were designed with consistency in mind. They go in a constant progression all the way down to the cent. 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 cents, then 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 euros. Basically everything is an order of 1, 2, and 5. I personally think the 2 is overkill but whatever. Then on top of that, the coins increase in size in a uniform way, and the bills also increase in size. The Deutschmarks were like this as well.

The US has a cent progression (1, 5, 10, 25, 50) which deviates from the dollar progression (1, (2,) 5, 10, 20, 50). e.g. we don't have a $25 bill like we have a 25 cent piece. Then then you have a 10 cent piece that is smaller and thinner than both the penny and the nickel. All of the bills are the same size and indistinguishable to the touch. This was pointed out recently in a US Supreme Court Case.

Regarding the bill size, I've come to tentative conclusion that it makes more sense to have bills of different sizes. A) It makes it less likely to confuse the bills. B) Blind people could distinguish them easily without the need for special bumps. C) Mechanical readers could distinguish the values easier. D) It seems logical to make the money worth more even in a miniscule material sense. The main downside of course is that it would cause the need for new and redesigned cash register drawers, vending machines mechanics, and wallets. Plus it wouldn't look quite as nice packed in drug dealer and other villenous attache cases in Hollywood movies. Basically ain't gonna happen. So I guess the only remaining solution is to add some bumps to the bills.

I'm not sure what to think about the $1 coins. We have at least 3 types floating around, the nice and large silver dollar size, the Suzan B, and the Sacagawea ones, all of different sizes. Oh yeh, and the ones you find in the Casinos. I suppose it's fine to use the $1 as a kind of commemorative coin. Which reminds me. There aren't 1 and 2 Euro notes, only coins IIRC. That couldn't fly here, think of how clumsy it would be for strippers.

Spit where you piss

2006-11-17T16:45:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that some men upon visiting a urinal initiate the process by first spitting into it, sometimes hocking up a collection of phlegm to make it really count. I've noticed some doing it every time we happen to visit the men's room together. I'm not in the routine of doing this and for some reason today I was pondering the possible reasons for the practice. Could it be for one of these reasons?

physiological: perhaps some class of males have excited salivary glands that overproduce when the bladder gets full.
pavlovian: perhaps something about urinals and urinating subconsciously makes some men's mouths water.
practicality: perhaps some men dislike excess saliva but are too cultured to spit just anywhere so they save it until they hit the men's room where it is a reasonable place to expel the excess.
habit: perhaps nights at the pub or restaurant where one sometimes feels the need to clear the palette, and practically so in the men's room, has created a routine that keeps going.
image: maybe it's considered cool or there's a secret society where spitting in the urinal is a call sign.

I've seen it happen mostly at bars and eating establishments but also at work and other public places. Every once in a while it occurs to me to maybe do it myself. But, like most women I observe, I don't spit very often. I wonder, do women do anything like this when they visit the restrooms?

Whining about wine

2006-11-08T14:17:00.000-05:00

The election is over and the tallies are in. The people of this good state have voted NOT to allow us citizens to be able to purchase wine (and only wine - not beer, not liquor) at grocery stores. I don't know whether I'm surprised or not surprised that what seems like such a trivial convenience was not voted through. Traditional values? Tradition yes, values I doubt. When I first moved out here to Massachusetts, one could only buy alcohol (buy for take-home, not at like a bar or restaurant) at a bone fide liquor store. You can't get beer or anything at the grocery store or the 7-11 like you can in Cali. Furthermore, when I first moved out here, they were forced to be closed on Sundays and if I recall correctly they closed rather early on Saturdays. It's one of what's known as a "blue law" and sadly, it's rather common on the east coast. Fortunately, there was a change and now they are open on Sundays and to a fair hour on other days.

So the next step was to maybe reduce the monopoly just a bit by allowing just wine to be sold at grocery stores... for the sake of convenience. Just wine mind you. You still wouldn't be able to get beer or liquor at the grocery store. Just wine. That quintessential dining drink. Makes sense to get it with your groceries for a nice well planned out dinner without having to make a separate stop. I was talking with someone who was telling me about the big campaign against letting grocery stores sell wine. Something to do with access to children, increasing the sale and consumption of alcohol, yada yada. Wine is definitely a potent drink but it doesn't have the social connotations in this country as beer and other liquors in terms of abuse by underage drinkers. Strictly an emotional appeal of course and probably funded by liquor store owners who are trying to protect their sales. I'd someday like to see a truth-in-advertising/campaigning law where the commercials were forced to find clever ways to say "don't pass this law, it cuts into our sales".

Nothing else I can do about it I guess. Business as usual. Waste a little gas and make a separate trip to the liquor store to stock up as I had been. Just a little bugged because what with the weather and roads out here, as if there wasn't enough about Massachusetts that makes life inconvenient, couldn't they have just let us be able to pick up a bottle of red along with pasta and sauce?

Back up

2006-11-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

I'm sometimes puzzled by the rationale and motivation behind people who back into parking spaces in order to make their car point outward. On the surface it is because it makes it easier and quicker to drive out. But backing into a space requires more maneuvering, concentration, and effort compared to backing out of a space because the space you are backing into is more confined and narrower than the wider berth you have when backing out to leave. So the total effort cost of parking and leaving is higher when parking face out than face in. Obviously, it must be worth it somehow for some people to do this. Is preparing your car for a quick get away at some extra time and energy that much more valuable than allowing yourself to arrive quickly by driving straight in to the space? I see it at parking lots all the time and my part-time roommate does this at home when he's in town. Our driveway is narrow and there are parked cars on either side of the entrance and our cul-de-sac is oddly shaped, so when he backs in it can take him a few minutes to slowly negotiate his car backwards at an angle along the drive path without hitting anything; whereas when I get home I simply pull right in without fuss and when I back out I don't have to be as careful since I'm backing out into a more open area instead of a tight one. I wonder what kind of mental difference it implies? Is it a reflection on pessimism versus optimism to want to leave efficiently than to arrive efficiently?

Looking for Harold and Kumar

2006-10-17T22:22:00.000-04:00

I drove down to Jersey for a wedding last weekend. I was only there one day and the drive was about what I expected. I took a slightly longer route because I've always had traffic problems driving via NYC but I'm convinced I made it there in less time that it would have. Anyhow, it wasn't until after I arrived there that it occurred to me:

Hey! White Castle's is in New Jersey!

I looked them up when I first moved out to New England and was a bit disappointed that the nearest one was in New Jersey. I had since forgotten about it. Then I remembered after I got there. Durnit, I should have looked them up prior to my drive. Luckily I had MissyShow on the phone and she overcame her fears, phobias, and anxieties enough to go to her computer and look up directions for me. She rocked and found one less than 10 miles away. Oh my, it was 8pm and BSG came on at night. I high tailed it over and made it back in time to catch my show. (I know, nerd!)

So at long last. After 20 years I finally make it back to a bona fide White Castle restaurant to enjoy some freshly cooked sliders. Mmmmmm....

Shame the onion rings sucked. Didn't run into any pot sellers nor Neil Patrick Harris either.

Teethbrush

2006-10-10T13:41:00.000-04:00

A several years ago my sister introduced me to the Sonicare(TM) toothbrush. She gave it to me for Christmas. I was a little skeptical at first but willing to give it a try. The interesting thing about it to me was not the physics and concept of its operation (cleaning your teeth with soundwaves) but the fact that once you turn it on you can't turn it off; it keeps running until the timer runs out (about 2 minutes). The nature of the thing also requires you to keep it in your mouth while it's running unless you don't mind the high vibration device splattering your bathroom area (and face and eyes) with dots of water, spit, and toothpaste. I wouldn't be surprised if some artist somewhere tried making dot-art or wannabe airbrush pieces with this thing.

I think the designers of this toothbrush must have been extreme anti-libertarian big-government types. Sonicare knows best and what's good for you. They know how long you must brush your teeth for and by Jove you WILL use it for that long and for your own good. They've removed the temptation and ability for you to do a half-ass job.

Well, good for them, it seemed to work. Last year I got off my lazy arse and used my work dental plan for the first time since leaving Berzerkely. Surprisingly, though I did have some tooth aberrations that needed patching, the dentist was reasonably impressed at the lack of decay. I'm convinced that my consistent use of this item had a lot to do with it.

Last week I went to the dentist for a yearly checkup. No new cavities or anything, just a look see and a cleaning. Despite brushing daily, it always seems like when rinsing after a cleaning there always some solid stuff to spit out; as if the dentist goes in and chips out chunks of bone and carves out bits of flesh maybe just to seem like he's doing his job. My mouth certainly feels cleaner afterwards, in that scraped raw sense, like when my mother used to scrub me down in the tub when I was a child and my skin would take on that 2nd degree burn red look just shy of bleeding out micropores. He says it's just build up and that it wasn't that bad. The mouthwash and colored toothpaste just dyed it a nice noticeable green to make it stand out and look impressive. Obviously it was worse last year. Perhaps if I go every 6 months like they say you're supposed to, it will seem less traumatic.

I actually like my dentist. He has an office just a few minutes walk away from my place, is a likable Chinese guy with a strong accent, and has surprisingly modern equipment given the location, equipment I'd never seen nor experienced previously. He even remembered my name and who I was and mentioned that he's even considering buying a house on my block that happens to be for sale. I wish I had taken the time to look, pick, and make an appointment with him closer to when I moved out. I suppose there was that internal hesitation akin to looking for a mechanic. I kind of kept waiting for a recommendation but in the end, even with mechanics, when I find a good one it's by blind luck. At least I have a dentist now, and a decent one.

Paper trail

2006-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00

Been a while and I suppose it's time to resume with the complaints. So what does all this talk about powers of two and the metric system and the stupidity of the inch lead us to? Why, praise for the most logical of paper sizes devised by man of course. I speak of the A (and B and C) standard system of paper used in many parts of the world, particularly Europe. But not here in the US of course. We have this strange system of paper sizes like letter, legal, etc, and just as notoriously, photo sizes. But before I get into that, perhaps some of you may wonder what's so wonderful about things like A4 paper?

Well the genious of this paper is that the length is square-root of 2 times the width. And what this means is that if you cut the paper exactly in half width-wise or put 2 sheets together width-wise you get a new sheet that has the exact same ratio of length to width. And of course what THIS means is that you can go to a photo copier and shrink the image to, say, 70.7% and you can fit 2 sheets side by side exactly with no extra white (or black) margin space. It also means that you represent an entire poster size (A0) down to an A4 or A5 (or even the business-card sized A7) exactly without having to scissor off strips of paper. Or vice versa. They also have a B size that falls in between the A sizes (A4 is kind of close to letter size), and a C standard for envelopes. There's just something nice and logical and pleasing and convenient and most of all sensible about this, as opposed to the sizes commonly in use here.

Take pictures developed in the US for example. We have 3x5", 4x6", 5x7", 8x10" (no 6x9 for some reason) picture sizes and then 8.5x11" letter paper. I'm sure someone thought, hey that looks right and pleasing, save for the fact it's in inches. The problem with these sizes is that, if you want to enlarge a 4x6" photo to 8x10", you are forced to fit it in 6.67x10" and keep 2 strips of white, or you enlarge to 8x12 and chop off 2 inches of your photo. Sorry folks but incrementing each side by steps of 1 inch does not yield the desired effect dispite averting ugly decimal points. These problems are averted using the other system.

I was first forced to use A-sized documents in grad school for conference papers and posters and such, and then exclusively during my stint in Munich. Like you, I was puzzled at first at the system until it clicked when I was shrinking some documents to print 4 per sheet (to save paper). It also clicked because I noticed that just about everything was based on these sizes. Wandering through the bookstores there was a pleasing uniformity of sizes to paperbacks, magazines, even the hardcover books(none of this jaggedness on the bookshelf). Shelves and boxes and folders and containers seemed to conform to this system making things fit nicely and evenly.

Slight tangent speaking of hardcover books; I saw some German versions of my school textbooks out there and they even did that right in my opinion. Take for example my old physics book (by Halliday and Resnick), nearly 1000 pages, hardbound and one of several I had to schlepp with me in my backpack daily risking scoliosis and other spinal injuries. In Germany it was issued as 2 or 3 paperback volumes. But gosh I would have loved a split-volume paperback, I could throw the volume I needed (each course only covered a portion of the book) in the bag and carry it with much more ease and convenience. Of course, they have much more of a pedestrian life (meaning "walking", not "commonplace") out there so it's definitely condusive to that lifestyle. Actually I noticed that paperback seemed more the norm out there. Why do we insist on bulky thick hardbound textbooks out here?

Getting back on topic... nothings perfect, there is indeed at least 1 flaw with the A system. I don't think the hole punch binder spacings were ever formally standardized and I don't really like how it turned out. They all use 2 ring binders rather than 3. I don't have a strong affinity to 3 versus 2 in this case except that where they chose to place the 2 rings by convention seems to be too close to the center which doesn't seem as stable. It's a worthy trade-off in my opinion.

Kim

2006-08-22T02:37:00.000-04:00

I've been living with some heaviness for many days with the news of the passing of Kim Perez. I knew her first as the kid sister of a good friend back in junior and high. It wasn't until she moved to the Boston area for graduate school several years ago that she promoted from a friend's sister to a direct friend. I remember chuckling at her gentle correction of me to call her "Kim" when I called her "Kimby", the kid name she was known as when we were much younger. She bunked at my place for a month or two while she looked for her own dwelling near Tufts. We hung out now and then, I helped her move and collect items, my having a car. During an occasional lull in the semester I'd hear from her and we'd go to a cafe, or a jazz bar, or just for a walk to chat. Towards the end of her stay, she'd angle me with her grad school anxieties, of which I was eminantly familiar and I'd say what I could to allay most concerns. Ultimately and finally she chose the path to a doctorate degree and then as suddenly as she arrived, off she was again to Michigan. I remember feeling a little let down to have lost a local friend, she was part of a batch that left in fact. We didn't get to meet as often as I'd like unfortunately, owing to semesters and the vacations in between. But I always appreciated it when we did have the time to connect and futher still when she kept in touch with her on-going adventures afterwards. I'd always been impressed by her drive and indomitable spirit; she did indeed follow her passions. I marvelled at the travelling she'd done, the places she'd seen, her stint in the Peace Corps, and her decision to apply her experience and interests towards an advanced degree. Not many do, especially from my old neighborhood. I was delighted at the email I received earlier this year noting that she had been awarded a Fulbright and would be off to do field research. I confess that I harbored some small pride thinking that perhaps I made the smallest of contributions to a budding promising career with our talks. I looked forward to following her accomplishments; I insisted that I get a copy of her dissertation when completed. And I'm saddened that it will not be so. It is a tragedy for the walk of such a promising and life-affirming individual to be stopped so young. My heart goes out to her, K, and their family.

What's wrong with an inch?

2006-08-03T22:20:00.000-04:00

I remember when I was young back in the 70s that there was this push for the US to adopt the Metric System, or at least get used to it. In schools I remember being taught phrases like "a meter is a little more than a yard" and "a liter is a little more than a quart". etc. I remember that speed limit signs had 2 numbers on them, the Imperial system saying something like 60, and a smaller number underneath with the metric number saying something like 100. I think I remember more items in the grocery store having both units as well (thankfully most still do). There was an obvious push to convert and somewhere between now and then the US at large just upped and gave up on switching to more sensible units of measurement. Why did they give up? What happened? Who were the chief opponents to the switch? I can imagine fields full of pitch-fork donning elderly in the midwest screaming "What's wrong with an inch??!!!"

I'd say what's wrong with the inch and the whole Imperial system of measurement in general but just about everyone already knows. Quick, in your head without a calculator or pencil, calculate the number of inches in a mile and see how long it takes and compare that to calculating the number of centimeters in a kilometer. It's just a damn inconvenient and inconsistent measurement system. We have to deal with units like inches, feet, yards, miles, ounces, pounds, cups, teaspoons, quarts, gallons, hectares, bushels, Fahrenheit, etc. and numbers like 12, 3, 5280, 16, 4, instead of a consistent 10. We often use 2 units to express a single measure, like our height (5 feet 8 inches) . In the metric system you have one single unit for distance, another for volume, another for mass, etc. and a set of consistent and easy prefixes to denote scale instead of 4 or more different units for each type of measurement that are related by a perplexing set of factors. I can understand how people can get comfortable with this but to actually "like" it???!!!

So of course the problem with this is legacy. There's a lot of items, buildings, and equipment that's built with these measurement and I'm sure they believe that it would be too costly to switch. Sadly, if they had actually gotten around to making the switch 30 years ago that wouldn't have been seen as a problem today. Now we're ever-more entrenched with this archaic and anachronistic system. Then there's the inertia of getting older folk who are so used to the old system to convert without screaming bloody murder for inconveniencing their lives with something "unfamiliar". That's what the whole education push was about and the dual system which arguably was meant to be temporary but to get people familiar with the kinds of numbers they'd have to deal with. Eventually if they removed the 60 from the speed limit people would still remember the 100, or still be able to look at their blasted speedometer. People would get used to it and one day learn to appreciate it and someday further still even gawk at other backwards nations that refuse to get with a sensible program. It's already happened on whole continents. Of course then there's the argument that it would take away from what makes us 'Merikun's and why should we follow them damned Youropeens anyways? As if this system was part of our slang that only the cool "in" people knew. Ugh.

Ironically, there isn't anything really technically wrong with the Imperial system. Any system, so long as it's well defined is usable, regardless of how wacky the numbers and units are. The Imperial system has served it's purpose, made in a time when things like distances were related to natural and observable objects, like ancient buildings measured in cubits which were close to arm lengths, and inches that were close to thumb length. Indeed, the only time I've heard praise for our wacky system was for such imprecise type things (A Swiss friend noted the "friendliness" of cooking with measurements like cups and teaspoons that were more guidlines and didn't need to be precise). But generally we live in an age where precision matters and yet still use such units.

Despite this, the Imperial system as been retrofitted to be well-defined, and therefore certainly usable (or rather, tolerable). I would still argue, however, that it should be abandoned with extreme prejudice because working with such units can be miserable and can lead to a great many ridiculous design decisions... like paper sized at 8.5x11 inches. Plus it's error-prone, annoying to convert, random, and basically just needs to go. It's sad that the US at large just gave up on the conversion 30 years ago because now I think we're stuck with it forever.

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This episode brought to you by the number 10

2006-07-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

So... roughly speaking the Metric System is based on water, an inaccurate measurement of the Earth's size, and the fact that we have 10 fingers. It is a great system because it is logical, consistent, and convenient. Water is a convenient material to use since it's so abundant. The Earth's circumference is I think way too ambiguous to measure down to the fractions of a meter, but the meter has been recalibrated to something more precise using lasers or something. And all measures are related by powers of 10, which is very practical since our counting system is based on 10. Sadly, this whole 10 business may be the system's only possible shortcoming and I will explain presently. We like 10 because we're so used to it and we can count to 10 on our hands. And because of that we've become very happy to count things using 10's, like decades and such. But in most other scenarios, I think 10 is an inconvenient number dispite how pretty it looks. Try dividing a pizza into 10 nearly equal slices quickly and easily. We'd cut it in half, then each half into 5 which doesn't come naturally. Much easier to cut it into 2 then 4 then 8 equal pieces because we just keep cutting things in half. Powers of 2 are nice when portioning things.

So what if we were like cartoon characters and had 8 fingers like Mickey Mouse. Actually we do have 8 fingers (plus 2 thumbs) but that's arguable. Then we'd be counting in Octal instead of Decimal. We'd count 0 through 7, days would have 030 hours, we'd count special anniversaries in Octaves instead of Decades, and it would all seem very natural to us. In fact, I think we'd hardly ever even think of the number 10 (or 12/Octal). I think a lot of our convenient fascination with 10 is largely artificial; for everything we're used to counting in groups of ten we'd equally be comfortable counting in groups of eight without missing a beat. But the added advantage is that 8 is a power of 2 and I think that would simplify our natural interaction with numbers quite a bit. I think it's much more natural and common to think of, deal with, and portion things in terms of pairs (2) and halves (1/2) than any other numbers. An Octal counting system would handle that very elegantly.

Consider, instead of [32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, ...] in decimal, we'd have [40, 20, 10, 4, 2, 1, 0.4, 0.2, 0.1, 0.04, 0.02, ...] in Octal and we'd have a nice easy pleasant-looking pattern of symbols with which to express doublings and halvings.

I was thinking about this a long time ago when looking at some stock exchange quotes which, then, counted things in half fractions, like 1/2, 1/16, 1/32, etc. and again looking at the sizes of nuts and bolts (in the US) that come in 1/4", 1/8", etc. These things get increasingly messy when trying to convert to decimal, especially the stock quotes because you have to round the cents to 100ths and tiny fractions of a cent get increasingly lost in the conversion. And in the modern age, it certainly would ease a bit the working with computer innards and code and whatnot since it operates in binary (we'd probably specify things in Octal instead of Hex though). The Metric System would be based on powers of 8 which would be just that much more applicable to things we do count and measure.

I don't wish we had 8 fingers like a cartoon character (that would make for less interesting piano music) but I do think we would have been a bit better off if people had chosen not to count the thumbs when developing our counting system.

Har!

The last time

2006-06-12T14:50:00.000-04:00

Last useless musings about time...

Dispite the biblical explanation, I find 7 an odd number (bad pun intended) of days to have in a week. It's not connected to any astronomically observable period and it doesn't divide evenly into a year or month or lunar cycle or any cycle. Some older societies had differing numbers of days per week, and thanks to Wikepedia, I was surprised to learn that even modern ones proposed different week systems (though they still had 7 days). This paper says that there is some chronobiorhythmical basis for the original apparently arbitrary 7 day social convention. I thought it was interesting. I suspect, rather, that people determined that 8 was too many and 6 was too few. I'd settle for 8 if the extra day was attached to the weekend, as I think it should be. But with the periods of the earth and moon's rotation and revolution being not nicely divisible, I think there's no way around having some "week"ly or any time period that won't be assymetric in one way or another. I guess we'll forever be stuck with what amounts to feet and inches when it comes to times and dates.

Well, there is our notion of how we count time that is partly arbitrary. So I know where 60 seconds per minute, then 60 minutes per hour come from... But 24 hours in a day? I read somewhere that it's origins come from counting system used by the ancients where they would count using their finger joints, 12 per hand, not including the thumb. I find it mildly apocryphal but it's probably true. I'm sure the number 12 has something to do with it and it divides into 360 nicely. I wonder if anyone tried to push "metric" time; a system whereby you could add and subtract different times on different days trivially without having to constantly multiply by 24, 60, and 60 and then reversing the process and counting remainders to get the result. They'd have to redefine the metric second to be something longer than the current second but it wouldn't be that drastic. Dividing a day by 10 or 100 doesn't feel quite right to me though; I feel like I should be able to divide a day into 3 parts without a repeating decimal.

Monthly musing

2006-05-31T00:27:00.000-04:00

More useless musing alert...

I'm not sure what to think of this whole month system. They each have different numbers of days, though necessarily so for cosmological reasons. But then there's this issue where February mysteriously gets short changed with respect to the rest... and not by just 1 day but 2 (or even 3). Creates an imbalance. 12 months is a bit unusual as well but it works out better than 10 I suppose, seeing as how 12 divides by 4 seasons whereas 10 does not. Now there was a time where there were 10 months in an ancestor to our western calendar system, hence the names for September through December (7 through 10). But when they added the 2 extra months couldn't they have had the decency to add them to the end AFTER December, so at least those month name prefixes would have made sense? Was that so much to ask?

I would just say abandon the whole month system and operate by weeks, or even days as Mulysa suggested... but I recognize at least some convenience for having months as a middle granularity. Still, they should re-divvy up the days and rename the months. On the other hand, perhaps we don't really need 12 months. I think that 4 months is sufficient, corresponding to the 4 seasons, and aligned so that they start on sensible days, like the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes... or something derived from them. Then each month gets 91 days except summer which arbitrarily gets 92 and winter gets a little boost on leap years. Of course some things like rent, loan payments, and paychecks should get moved to a weekly or some other sub-month schedule but that wouldn't be too different... e.g. have rent due on the first, thirty-first, and sixty-first of each month.

More on dates

2006-05-02T08:17:00.000-04:00

I haven't been able to find an answer to this.

Why is January 1 on the day it is? Meaning, what makes it correspond to the Earth's location in solar orbit a week and a half after winter solstice? Why is that position significant? Who put it there and why? It seems completely arbitrary. It would make more sense for the start of the year to correspond to some astronomically significant, or at least observable, event. It should have been moved to winter solstice, or even better, to vernal equinox... which I think they do in Japan. Or if they want these dates to midpoint the seasons, then it should be closer to the date of the Chinese new year, midway between winter solstice and spring equinox.

Bad dates

2006-04-20T01:13:00.000-04:00

I decided that I shall continue on a pet peeve series... prepare to groan.

I HATE forms that have a date field with just 2 slashes in it (__/__/__) and no template.

Somewhere and sometime someone(s) decided that dates in the US should be written as the month followed by day followed by the year.

month day, year: MM/DD/YY(YY)

This doesn't make a lot of sense. You have the rapidest changing number in between the slower ones.

In Europe someone else decided that it should be day then month then year:

day month year: DD/MM/YY(YY)

This is slightly better, increasing order significance or resolution, though it's still wrong for reasons I will explain shortly.

The difference often causes some initial confusion and sometime moments of terror when I happen to be traveling abroad or to a lesser extent, looking at pages and services online based in Europe. The ambiguity is obvious for all days numberd 12 or less of course. (does 01/02/06 mean January 2 or February 1? depends...) Many companies realizing this have taken to writing the first 3 letters of the month instead of the number of the month which is a good thing though with all the languages might confuse some people. Some have even taken to smartly giving a template like the ones above.

This needs to change and thankfully in some communities of like-minded people it has started to, especially in the computer/internet world. What does it need to change to, you ask?

YYYY - MM - DD hh : mm . ss . tt
year - month - day (and then optionally) hour : minute . second . fraction_of_second

Basically date/time stamps should be consistently decreasing orders of resolution. Furthermore, the year should ALWAYS be 4 digits (at least for the next 7994 years)... Always... I mean, first of all, we're in the 21th century and still have to sometimes write dates from the last one. Even though we can cognitively disambiguate the last 2 digits by context, that is not always the case. Also, months should never be spelled by name. The Chinese have it right here. Their word for June transliterates to "month 6".

So getting back to the true format... why decending order instead of ascending (like in Europe)? Quite simple... because then the dates sort correctly. We're firmly entrenched in the electronic, internet, and information age. We deal with gobs and gobs of electronic files, collections, and whatnot, especially with digital cameras, all manner of electronic statements and such. The dates are often encoded in the filename. E.g. when I download a statement from my bank's website I get somethingn like NFCU041806.pdf. The problem here is that I have years of these things that I have to rename because they DON'T SORT CORRECTLY. Go by the time stamps? Can't always do that especially when the date sometimes screws up when copying/moving folders of stuff. Or sometimes I get behind in the downloading and have to get several months worth of stuff.

This also happens to me at work when I get a lot of collections with dates in the folder names like jajp042806... but I routinely convince the senders to switch the date around.

But think about it. It's easier to sort dates both visually and via computer when written as:

2006-04-18
1969-06-30
2006-01-01
1987-06-18

then as
04/18/06
06/30/69
01/01/06
06/18/87

But sadly, people are still attached to that old style. Even sadder, I have some programs that do auto-naming of all my scanned images and they also use this old style so my scans get all out of order. Bleh.

Update: 2006-04-18
For those interested there is a date spec called iso-8601 that codifies this for web pages and such.

Fixing day light savings

2006-04-02T00:36:00.000-05:00

Day light savings... loose an hour for half a year. Some optimists say we gain an hour for half a year, but it doesn't feel like it. I can see some decent arguments for it. But I think there's a better solution: Split the difference. Adjust all the clocks by half an hour, and never ever have to set it forward or backward again. I mean, who cares if it's dark only half an hour earlier or later as opposed to a whole hour? At least then we won't have to deal with triffling annoyances like adjusting all of our clocks, forgetting which day the switch happens on, remembering that other countries don't switch on the same day, and some countries and even one or two US states don't even switch at all. Australia extended daylight savings a week to accomodate the possible confusion over some Commonwealth Games which only caused more confusion and prompted many to download patches for their computers to accomodate the change. Personally, it has mucked with my TV recording schedule, made me late for work, and meant that I have at least one or two time pieces (like my microwave oven or VCR) that give the wrong time for months. Ben Franklin didn't go far enough when he proposed the bloody thing. It seems to create more needless hassle.

On the MiniDisc's lost potential

2006-03-30T01:20:00.000-05:00

I think this will be my last piece on the whole portable audio thingy, at least for a while. I just needed to give a nod to probably my favorite media format, the MiniDisc... something that makes me weep at the lost potential due largely, IMO, to business decisions. A buddy who works at Sony helped me get my first one in Akihabara, one of the more amazing areas of Japan. I loved it and began recording stuff onto it while I was still there. It was smartly designed and became my preferred portable for a good long while. I even got a second one with the higher capacity some years later that was even smaller and cooler. And now I may never use them again. Accent on the may. I'm fairly confident that they'll stay in production for a good while yet and they make nice recorders.

In some ways though, I'm kind of surprised that MDs are still around and that you can buy them still. I remember when they first came out as a replacement for cassettes back in the late 1980's/early 1990s. They were kind of a technological curiosity back then but pretty slick. Sadly, the competing technology of digital cassettes came out about the same time creating consumer confusion and probably a bunch of angry customers that bought some only to see it vanish. I was kind of boggled by the DCCs introduction since DAT tapes were around too. The MD had the advantage though due to random access ability. It was also a slick package and a good counterpart to the CD which had become the standard distribution method. It was small and robust and held a reasonable amount of data, something like 100MB back then and about 1GB now.

But jeez, here we have a nice, slick, good, and robust digital medium and they loaded it with artificial restrictions. First, and most tragically, they intentionally prevented it from being used in conjunction with a computer (well, until relatively recently). So instead we were stuck with these Zip Disks which stored about as much but were a whole lot bigger. MDs would have been the perfect replacement to the 3.5" floppy which we were also stuck with for much longer than we needed. A disc that could be used both for data and in portable music players could have taken the world by storm at that time. But here we have some bigshots thinking that they could prevent piracy by not allowing it to be used with computers.

So eventually with the coming of other players that you could connect to your computer, they had to bow to pressure and finally produce players that you could upload music to via USB. Of course, they had to put in even more artificial restrictions to piss people off:

Firstly (referring to the NetMD that I got) they only allowed one way recording. You could not record something, say, live onto an MD and download it to your computer.
Then you could only transfer music in their proprietary format over, and no data. There goes any possibility of a portable drive.
As for the music, you had to use their substandard and buggy program to do the transferring and it had these limitations like only being able to transfer a song to 3 discs at a time. There were workarounds of course.

Some of these restrictions went away with the releasing of the Hi-MD, where they I guess sorta admitted that people weren't happy with the restrictions. Too little too late. I do think it could have been a huge thing if they hadn't cow-towed to the music/recording industry. Well they were in a bind since Sony, the developer, has its own media arm which gets in their technology arms way. So unfortunate. They were well positioned to have an item that just about anyone would have used: a portable drive, a portable player, a floppy replacement... all basically predating widespread use of USB flash drives and solid state portable players. It still has a strong and devoted following and with good reason. But they never got it right. What a pity.

So MDs did (and do?) thrive a bit more in Japan. I'm convinced that part of the reason is that they also used the MDs for more things. Over there you could get video cameras that recorded to it. Related Magneto-Optical storage for computers was also fairly widely used there unlike here. But now there are as-cool or cooler and more useful things available. And now, for me, I think it's just past the point of my willingness to upgrade to the latest Hi-MD. I sorely wanted one at one point but I waited just a hair too long and they stopped making the ones that took standard alkaline batteries. One AA would last me a good 24 hours or more of continuous play. The rechargeable ones didn't. Still, I was close. But I think I was abused as a consumer just once too often to trust them. Yes, the Hi-MD does have the fewest restrictions so far but there are still annoying ones there. Most pertinently, it won't let me transfer recorded music on my older MDs back to my computer digitally. Artificial restrictions. Fooey.

So... sorry Scregman. I know I was your partner in crime for these things. I'm still a fan. But I'm out. And I'm sure you can understand.

Yes, I have an iPod too

2006-03-23T23:36:00.000-05:00

So after all that text, weighing, deciding, and most significantly... waiting... I picked up a Nano later last year. I hesitate to critique something too much until I've had some experience with it. Some exceptions exist when I'm utterly convinced right away. The Nano was something I was a bit weary of from the get-go though. But now that I've had mine for nearly half a year I think I have a pretty good handle on my likes and dislikes concerning it.

The good

It's tiny. Fits in every pocket. Feels sturdy dispite the size.
Adequate space. Space for a thousand songs is good enough for my purposes.
Bookmarks. I can leave a podcast/audiobook, listen to some music, then go back to it where I left off.
Great interface. I almost can't imagine a better scroller/selector than the little touch-click-wheel and screen.
Cool design. It's a pretty slick package ruined only by its exteme popularity.
No moving parts, which is probably why I can get a good half-day's batter life out of it.

The bad but there are hacks and workarounds

Can't manage/delete items using the device interface.
Restrictions restrictions restrictions.
Stuck with iTunes (though that's changing).
Not usable as a general drive by default. I mean it's basically a flash drive with an extra processor and screen. Why not be able to use it as a USB drive out of the box?
Stupid DRM.
Only mp3 and aac support.

The annoying

Didn't come with an outlet charger, just the usb-computer cord.
Costs too much.
Scratches easy.
Add-on-itis items that are pricey too.
Everything starting with lower-case-i.
Non-changable battery.
The PIM functions only work with Outlook, bah!

Wish it had, even at the expense of some space, but can live without

Good recording capabilities.
Digital output port.
Radio tuner and ability to record off radio.

Still, it serves the basic needs and is an otherwise great little item that I'm fairly pleased with. Now to wait for the 32Gig version.

Portable audio commentary

2006-03-16T19:55:00.000-05:00

Before I left Berkeley and moved out east I bought a Creative Nomad. It was a bit bigger than a portable CD player, had about 4Gig capacity, and cost more than it should have but probably appropriately for the time. I didn't have a stereo and I knew that I was going to be living out of a suitcase for quite a spell so I got one with the intent of using it as a portable stereo complete with most of the music I listen to. Also bought a some decent Cambridge Soundworks speakers that I still have and use. It had a clumsy interface, the software interface was atrocious (though I've seen worse), and the batteries didn't last long... but it was one of the better alternatives at the time still. It worked for a good spell, and I was quite pleased with it. But to be honest, I probably only got about a year's use out of it. After I got settled in, I found that not only did I not need it much, but I didn't like to use it anymore, even/especially on trips.

I went back to using all of my other portable devices: first cassettes, then MDs, then CDs. Cassettes went out the window pretty early but I'd been using them for so long I had a large collection of mix-tapes. I'd have to carry about 5-10 of them with me when I took a trip. CDs were better, especially once I had a computer with a CD burner on it and portable job that could read MP3 CDs. I could burn about 11 CDs worth of music on a CD and just carry that around. MD's were still better. Much smaller and definitely my favorite media type. It had awesome battery life too. I got my first one in Akihabara but bought a second one with LP4 that let me put 4-5 CD's worth of music on a disc. Now they have HI-MDs (which scregman has) but as much as I love them, I haven't gotten one for reasons I may illuminate on either here or in a separate post. Actually they all had a lot of deal-breaker features that often caused me to just not listen to anything on a trip.

I swapped back and forth between them but one thing I kind of hated was carrying around a collection of separate media. I knew one day that I would return to a more mass-storage type of device at some point but despite the plethora of models that have been out since I first got my Nomad, I refused to get one until last year. I had decided to wait until I found one that met my minimum needs, which I compile here for you now.

What I determined that I was looking for in a portable player for now:

Capacity: Ability to hold/play a few days worth of audio. At minimum, enough for a few cross country round-trip flights plus a mix of stuff for while I'm away. I cannot always predict what I will be in the mood to listen to so it must grant space for a wider breadth of material.
Battery life: Must last at minimum a cross-country flight including buffer time for layovers and such... say half a day at bare minimum.
Convenience: Must be quick to assemble audio onto, must have a decent interface.
Small: Must fit reasonably into my pocket.
Continuity: I must be able to resume where I left off when playing.

Seems simple enough, right? Yes there are other features that I would like but these are the practical ones for now. Amazingly, until last year I didn't feel like anything fit the bill. Number 5 is possibly the oddest entry. It stems from the fact that ever since the days of my driving 9 hours back and forth from San Francisco to San Diego and back, I'd grown appreciative of audio books, radio plays, and other spoken word programming. Frankly, there's just so much music one can take in a long sitting and I've grown crufty and picky in age with respect to music to boot. Well, I've always felt that music is more of a mood thing, I have to be in the right mood to correspond with what I have to play. Audio books pass the time famously and in a much more engaging fashion if the content is good.

Cassettes - Old reliable but out of the question for obvious reasons. The sole advantages of tapes were battery life and continuity.
CDs - Great battery life and convenient to just throw more CDs in the bag to increase the selection. But it doesn't fit in my pocket easily, require extra CDs to carry and prepping if I'm burning a playlist, and they don't have continuity. Once a CD is popped out, I have to manually remember where I left off when listening to audio book CDs.
MDs - Great battery life, I love the media format, and they're nice and small and fit in my pocket. The new HI-MDs hold 1GB creating basically infinite carying capacity by adding more MDs. Was a serious contender but I resisted because of Sony. But practically, lack of ability to saving place after a MD is popped is the biggest hangup.
Hard-disk based players - Astounding capacity but the deal breaker for me is battery life. They may tout 8 hours of play time but I know better (*cough* iPod). It MUST have at least half a days battery life and they don't. Seriously, this is the main thing that has kept me from getting a Nomad replacement.

I made due with what I had for a long long time, but were I to buy a new one it should be better and more practical than before. So later last year the Nano's came out. Fully solid state, no moving parts, and with a 4Gig variety. It's not perfect but just about meets these needs and is a pretty durn small and slick device with a great interface. After handling my downstair's neighbors one for a bit, that's what I chose. I'll write more on it later.

I have no illusions it won't last for ever but since I've decided to shift how I handle my music collection, it almost doesn't matter.

Audio commentary

2006-03-14T23:37:00.000-05:00

Somewhere between my dad's garage and a friend's house I have a collection of vinyl records and my old record player. In a trash heap and/or somewhere south of the border is my small collection of 8-track tapes. Between my dad's garage and my room is a large collection of cassettes. Between my room and some unknown shameless thieves' possessions are some 200+ audio CDs. Also in my room are a few binders of MiniDiscs to go with my two now-retired MiniDisc recorder/players that replaced my two now-retired portable cassette players and CD-Walkman. I have purchased many many many items, as have many, in all these obsoleted formats. CDs have a lot of inertia behind them now and thankfully they are digital, but as physical media they may not last. The last batch of audio music that I bought was online directly to my PC.

That last part gave me some cause to rejoice because in a very real way I feel that my format worries are NOW FINALLY OVER. With the advent of ubiquitous PCs, the internet, (relatively) cheap hard-disk storage, and perception-based lossy compression from my very own chosen field of Digital Signal Processing, I may need never trouble myself seriously about physical media again. Thanks to CDs, nearly all available music is available digitally or will be accessible digitally in the future and at the very least convertible to digital storage. Audio buffs may whine and complain about how much better the very best of the analog devices sound, but it's all immaterial because it's good sounding enough and highly portable, highly reliable, and very malleable. When I left the west coast I didn't want to take my records and record player with me so I recorded just about everything to cassette, and later to MiniDisc. That was a verrrry long process since it had to be done real-time and I dread doing it again. Ok, I see that I will have to do it at least partly again to get some rarities from my older media and many things I REFUSE to buy again transferred onto my computer. But I'm less resistant because this *SHOULD* be my last time doing it. Once it's there it should be smooth(er) sailing and I can at least lay part of my fears to rest because so long as music is available digitally it can be almost trivially moved almost anywhere and to almost anything with a fraction of the effort.

This brings me some satisfaction and has caused me to decide to join in on something that a great many people are doing; something that I've been contemplating for a good long while since I all but stopped buying CDs (partly due to grievances with the music industry) but freshly since getting my latest in portable audio gear last year. Rather than audio CDs being the centerpiece of my music collection, it will now be a hard drive attached to a computer. CDs are no longer that convenient to me. Besides, they degrade and a friend of mine who happens to be a head honcho for the Digital Library Project asserts with high authority that CDs are NOT archival. Well, hard-discs aren't either but they can be backed up way more easily and redundantly with scant manual labor. I'm convinced that so long as I live, I will probably have a computer. And so long as I have a computer, I should need never worry about having a place to collect music that will be obsoleted by yet another recorded format. I do not want to buy the same music yet again. I think the music stores should have a deal where if you turn in a purchased item in one format you should get a replacement in the new format. Yah right.

Of course, now comes the other half of the coin. The format problem exists with a vengeance in the digital world. Ugh. A decade ago mp3's emerged on the scene as a disrupting technology that when coupled with the other major disrupting technology of the internet has reduced (or expanded depending on how you look at it) the dependence on physical audio media. Hopefully someday it will also spell the death-knell for corporate music industry too, at least in its current form. Mp3's are still pretty sweet but being one of the early popular formats, it kind of sucks too. Soon after emerged a plethora of competing formats with better compression and better sound from the major corporations and some grass-roots startups to where we now have a dozen or so popular formats, each of which is locked-to a commercial product or locked-out of the commercial market in some way. Microsoft started promoting/forcing its WMA format. Sony stuck to its proprietary ATRAC format. Apple defaults to its DRM'd AAC format. Then there are the host of mostly-computer-only formats, many of them quite impressive and wonderful. At least mp3s remain the most popular format, by inertia of course. Just about everyone has at least agreed to support it in some fashion, but it's plagued by some licensing issues and frankly it has quite a few shortcomings. I prefer it were replaced by the Ogg format but hardly anyone that makes a portable player supports it.

Still, this is a better situation than before. Being digital, the music can fairly easily be converted from one format to another, ableit with some possible loss in quality but not even close to as bad as analog dubbing. Only companies' stubbornness with proprietary formats and the introduction of digital "rights" management schemes truly interfere with the process but those seem to be overcome as quickly as they are introduced. So the choice for me now is what format I want to archive my music collection: the ever-present mp3 that refuses to die and therefore offers some security, but isn't the best? or some other format that is "better" but possibly less supported or possibly restricted. At the moment I'm strongly considering Ogg or FLAC, both of which are open-source and therefore nearly guaranteed to always be readable and decodable (unlike, say, old MS Office documents) but which require differing amounts of storage space and cost and will require the additional annoying step of trans-coding to get it onto a player that almost certainly won't support that format. But again, it's an academic annoyance compared to the physical media format problem.

Only thing that remains is to get the process started. I can't wait to chuck the boxes of cassettes I have. I have my eye on my video tapes too. It's all part of my master plan. Not sure just yet what to do with my MDs. More on that later though.

What's in a label

2006-03-01T00:29:00.000-05:00

At some point last year I decided to give the GTD system a try and one of the tools that the author recommended was a labeler. (I'll likely go on about GTD in the future, many times.) I never had one before. I didn't see what the big deal was. I'd always just written (usually in pencil for re-use) directly on the Manila folder and throw it in. Much more convenient and easier. I'd use white labels if I chose to re-use a folder written in pen. But I read his justification for such an item and went to the office supply store and purchased this:

There's nothing particularly special about this make and model other than the brand is easy to come by for replacement supplies. But, oh my, what a difference it seemed to make, both visually and therefore psychologically. It created a kind of order to my files. Using this labeler made the cabinet and a few other things clean and pleasant to look at. It made my filing system inviting. It made it look like I had my act together in this department. I now WANTED to put stuff in those files. I highly recommend acquiring one. As I mentioned before, good tools facilitate a behavior...

An unexpected use I had for this was printing a couple labels with my name on it and applying these labels to my writing implements. I haven't had a huge problem with loosing pens but I do it often enough to notice. I read an article on this very topic however ("nothing is too trivial on the internet..." to paraphrase Scregman's quotation) and decided to label my writing implements in current use. Note to the skeptical: I only labeled those pens that I actively use and carry; I don't label all my pens and such. What this does for me is three-fold.

It tells me which pens I'm actively using. I can immediately identify those pens from the others and tend to use those. I therefore now tend to have a bunch of full pens and one that gets drained to empty rather than a bunch of pens that are in various states of ink drain. I've never paid much attention to this before nor had I thought it was a big deal until I sent a supply of pens to Emilf, a portion of which were almost dry or completely dry. This way I can immediately focus on draining one pen and have full confidence when picking up a replacement. There is also something satisfying about using an item to completion. Does it seem like more trouble than it's worth? Sometimes, but just a quick labeling eliminates even this minor irritant.
My current pen likes to try and climb out of my pocket or sometimes get "borrowed" while sitting on my desk or otherwise get lost. Thrice has it actually succeeded in separating itself from me and thrice have I recovered it sometime later. Once it was sitting on my desk after probably having been dropped somewhere else in my office building. Twice I saw it left on a colleagues desk, readily identifiable and awaiting me to pick it back upon strolling back to said desk. There's something mildly comforting in that minor safety net as well.
Since this implicitly encourages me to keep track of my pens, I need keep fewer of them. I also get more picky about what pens I use and no longer pilfer them fiendishly from the office supply cabinet... at least not as much.

Yes, these are minor points and on the grand scheme of things are non-necessities, and they can indeed make me appear to have nothing better to do... but this is one of those little things that provides a surprising amount of satisfaction; moreso than I would have thought, at least, for such a trifle.

Addendum

I just realise that I did use a labeler long ago. Those were the cheesy embossing labelers kind of like the one below. I don't think I ever liked them but there was nothing else available. I remember as a kid punching out labels to attach to other stupid things and nearly always creating a little white triangle in the corner trying to peel the backing off. Biggest problem with these things is that any kink in the ribbon turns white ruining the label. The other thing I remember was that the ribbon was stiffly curved (especially towards the center of the spool) and invariably the adhesive backing was never strong enough to keep the label from eventually popping off whatever it was stuck to. At least there's been some progress in this area.

Blizzard o' 2006

2006-02-15T00:04:00.000-05:00

Two weekends ago I spent the weekend in Vermont skiing with some friends. I haven't skied in like 6 years and on top of that I'm probably 30 pounds heavier than the last time and grossly out of shape. I was beat. I come back from the weekend trip delayed thanks the recent Noreastern blizzard of 2006. Great. I'm all tired and sore and now I have to spend a few hours shoveling in the cold. It boggles my mind how when people are confronted with others who live in nicer weather they practically brag about the miserable cold and snow. I mean, I've met plenty of people that actually miss the snow (and the whole idea of seasons which I think is over-rated). I noticed that amongst other cold-weather dwellers, it is ok to complain a little about the freezing and the mess and extra work and delays and whatnot. But to anyone else, it's like a rite of passage; it makes them superior somehow. Can't complain too much or they'll think or will call you a pussy or something like that. What's up with that?

I admit the snow is very pretty and the experience is novel (for a while) but certainly is inconvenient to deal with on a day to day basis. And the cold just grates on me. It's more expensive to live in, requires more energy and attention and items to deal with, and slows down everything. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing for people who actually grew up in it, that excitement of getting to miss school due to weather conditions. For me, it should be kept in the mountains where it belongs. A nice thing and place to visit, but not live in.

An additional disadvantage is that I live on a cul-de-sac and there really isn't anywhere to put the snow. Everyone tries best they can to line the house walls with it, make little pathways, and make little castle walls of snowdrift to surround the cars and whatnot. Further, it is technically a private way and isn't plowed regularly by the city works. Occasionally they get to it and do a single plow, especially if someone on the block calls and orders it. One time, a plow shoved a rather large snowdrift into my parking spot. Thoroughly pissed me off. Wasted a Sunday afternoon shoveling it clear, though I'll admit I was quite proud of the little igloo-sans-roof I made for my car. But the street is narrow there's nowhere else to put what accumulates there so tends to ice over and stay that way for a long time.

Lucky for me, the blizzard wasn't as bad as other places on the east, only a 1.5 to 2 feet, and by and large I shouldn't really complain because this winter has been very mild (knock on wood). Actually I am quite pleased with this winter. On all accounts it's been great considering previous years. There's been very little snowfall and accumulation, especially compared to last year, and I don't think I used more than a couple cups of salt the whole of this winter so far. We've had many days where the temperature reached as high as 50 with mostly clear skies. Last year had record breaking snowfall. Here's a pic from a previous blizzard.

One of the things that sometimes gets to me is when it's too cold to snow. I mean, it goes well below freezing and with dry air to where even a minute outside and any exposed portion of my body starts to hurt, especially my hands which shrivel up painfully to where I can't make a fist and my ears just feel like they're going to snap off. I know there are other parts of the country where it's much worse. Those are the times I wonder why people live in such places.

Today I went out to watch a band called "Stars". I took the T there. I was commenting with a buddy how nice it was out (only because there was no wind-chill), but I didn't feel like I needed to wear gloves or a knit cap. It was about 35-38 degrees F. I marvel at the concept that I could call such a temperature "nice". Oh how things have changed.

That occasional consumer's joy

2006-02-04T15:22:00.000-05:00

Every so often I feel the full effect of the shoppers high. Those rare occasions where I buy something that makes me happy, that makes me feel good, something that almost makes me proud; that fully satisfied feeling that I stumbled across the exact thing that I was looking for, even moreso after getting it than I when I was looking for it. Something that just ends up feeling right. It is a rare feeling for me. Usually such a feeling occurs with an item that is ultimately useful and practical. In this instance it was a pair of boots.

I'd never seen Keen shoes before, but then again I rarely go shopping for shoes. But my insulated Timberlands have endured 5 winters and the soles are peeling so it was about time. I went shoe shopping in Harvard Square and stumbled across these boots and a bunch of similar ones. Oh joy! No laces! Just what I was looking for. And water proof. Perfect for puddle jumping and trudging through the snow.

Drat! They didn't have my size. Couple more shoe stores nearby. Curses! They didn't have my size either. I looked online and lo and behold there they are and $20 cheaper than in the store no less. And no tax either. And free shipping. I ordered a pair. The site I ordered from (Zappos) was fairly well designed, had a good return policy, and more importantly a forum section survey for each shoe noting such things as how well the sizing is and arch support and other comments. After reading some I was sold. I've always been weary of buying clothing items over the internet. I'm so skeptical of clothing sizes to begin with. But with features like

61% of Fit Survey respondents said this shoe "Felt a half size smaller than marked"
82% of Fit Survey respondents said this shoe "Felt true to width"
76% of Fit Survey respondents said this shoe had "Excellent arch support"

I felt just a tad safer. It was worth the risk. The comments led me to the smart decision of ordering a half size bigger than I normally get. I'm so glad I did. The boots arrived and they were everything the comments said they would be. They are surprisingly and remarkably comfortable and warmer than I expected them to be. I've worn them one day and it's already obvious that I won't need to break them in. And of course the beauty is I can pull them on and kick them off without mucking about with laces thanks to the stretchy Gortex. Ok so they look kind of like galoshes but that's kind of what I bought them for in the first place. I'm just immensely pleased at acquiring something I will likely use daily (at least for a few more months while it's still cold) and is almost precisely what I wanted. It felt almost as exciting as when I first encountered Moleskine notebooks. Ah the simple pleasures. I wish that match of desire to item occurred more often. Shopping has always been a pain and a chore for me.

Now to see if I can get myself to toss the still-usable slightly dressier shoes that they were meant to replace.

Air Mailed

2006-01-23T16:52:00.000-05:00

A partial order from Amazon came in today in a box capable of encasing 2 or 3 medical textbooks yet contained only one item which was slightly larger than a box of matches. The rest of the box was filled with bags of air. A month ago I received a box the size of a small footlocker. It contained more of these bags of air and a smaller yet still large box. This inside box was filled with crumpled paper and finally what amounted to be a set of headphones (gift from ifsatg). I have many other examples of items shipped in boxes 3 to 300 times the size necessary to contain said item. Not only does this violate my sensibilities regarding efficiency, waste, and ease of carrying, but I have a fear they're charging me more for shipping me air.

After a moments thought I wondered if the lunacy had rationale. Perhaps they just only stock certain box sizes and then make due. Nah, I have counterexamples. Then it dawned on me. They probably HAVE to ship items in large boxes to accommodate the bags of air. Some treehugger manager probably lobbied against the use of foam peanuts which are much more adaptable for packing things in smaller boxes. But the bags of air can't be fitted into the smaller, more appropriately sized boxes. Hence the overkill. This is all conjecture, I have no intention of researching nor inquiring about their shipping practices. Books thankfully are shipped plastic wrapped to a piece of cardboard and hence can be are sent in more fitted boxes.

Related anxiety

With all of the moving I've done (on average once every 1.5 to 2 years for the past 20 years) I have an ingrained propensity to keep and store every box that comes my way. This is bad. I really don't have room for all of these boxes. I often break down the larger ones at least to flat store them. But then there are the boxes with the enclosed foam casings for appliances, equipment, computer peripherals, etc. These I practically treat as sacrosanct. When I move again I want to pack these things properly. Yet all they do is take up space and serve no intermediate function. It's as if I need storage space to store storage space. Blimey! And I know the minute I swallow my frustration and rid myself of all this cardboard I'll need it. Murphy is always waiting just around the corner.

Look into my eye

2006-01-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

It's been at least 5 years since I've been to an optometrist. In the spirit of getting things done, I finally made an appointment to go. I had to delay a couple months until my health insurance, which switched yet again, stabilized. Luckily they had some eyecare benefits as part of the package. Ok, the real incentive for me to go was that I decided that I need to get some more contact lenses. I don't wear them often, more on that in a bit. I last wore contacts for my rafting trip back in August. When I finally dug them out I was a bit shocked. I had a bunch of unopened weeklies that had long since expired. (Yes, I wore them anyways and noted that I should go in for a renewal.) Since I have a ski trip coming up, I figured it was time to finally do it. And I did.

The Good

The doc measured the prescriptions on my old glasses and then measured my eyesight and asked me if my glasses gave me headaches. No, I wear them everyday for most of the day. He said my glasses were worse than my eyesight. Then he said my contacts (I brought a sample package in) were waaay off too. So, Either my eyes got better or my previous optometrist was incompetent. It was probably the former. A coworker speculated that eyeballs change shape a bit over time and when you're sight is good, then they can only get worse, but when your eyes are already not good, they can wiggle either way. I'd always assumed that they only get worse. I know one or two other people who've had a similar experience. But hey! Better eyesight than before! I'll take it!

The Bad

One advantage I've always had, and perhaps the reason for no headaches even with the wrong prescription, was that both my eyes were equally bad. They both had the same prescription powerwise. So I never had to pay attention to which contact lens went in which eye and I could even wear my glasses upside down and still see fine. I do have some astigmatism in one eye though. After the remeasurement, they're now slightly different so now I have to pay attention. Not terribly significant but a little "awwww" at the news. I guess there was something neatly in order in my mind knowing both eyes are the same.

The Interesting

The doc actually seemed quite proficient and professional. He told me something he noticed that no previous one had said before that seems to explain a lot about my history with my eyes and contacts. Without any prompting he mentioned to me that I probably experience constant dry eyes because the glands that line my lower lid that keep the eye moist are naturally clogged. He said it's completely genetic but there's little things I can do to deal with it. Wow! It all seemed to make sense. Dry eyes lead to discomfort and even infection in the extreme. I've always had problems with sensitive eyes. Always. Even something as simple as keeping my eyes open to snap a photo seemed to require extra effort frequently. I had more than usual difficulty inserting contacts, the bloody things wouldn't stick to my eye but rather my finger. I hardly ever wore contacts because of that and also because after so many hours they do get uncomfortable on me slightly and I end up consciously blinking a lot more; as in I'd notice them in my eyes rather than putting them in and forgetting about them. I'd always assumed that it was because I stare at a computer monitor for most of the day, every day. It also explains my tearducts seeming overactive occasionally, probably as compensation. Amazing interfacing with someone who actually knows what they're doing and talking about.

So armed with this new knowledge he gave me a set of contacts to put in and try out and sent me on my way. I've worn glasses so habitually that I think my image with them is burned into people's brains. I've gotten some amusing comments by at least 4 people upon seeing me with a naked face. One stuck two fingers in the air and asked me to count. Another asked if I could see him. A third asked me if I got Lasik. Even I unconsciously find myself reaching to straighten my glasses when I'm not wearing them. Well, I guess I'll try out those suggestions and as soon as my new set come in I guess I'll start wearing contacts more. I wonder how many people won't recognize me.

Update 2006-02:
Seems my perscription for one of my eyes was off and my new perscription has the same power in both eyes. I find that gratifying in some small way to know this. I will give the benefit of the doubt to the optometrist. The difference was only a quarter power, and there is always that possibility that I unconsciously squinted a bit when trying to read the eyechart when that eye was tested. Both my contacts and glasses had to be redone. Luckily he made me test a trial pair of contacts before placing my order. Sadly, even though both lenses have the same power I still have to pay attention as to which contact is left and right since these are more tuned, versus the ones I used to use. Makes a noticeable difference though and was worth getting fixed. Though it has taken me nearly a month to get my eye stuff in order and I still have another pair of glasses I need new lenses for. Ugh. Luckily my contacts arrived in the nick of time for my ski trip last weekend.

What not to underwear

2006-01-09T18:00:00.000-05:00

A bit of a funk started this new year at a frightfully slow pace, goal-wise. I had to do something though. And I did. I started off with a measured attack on my wardrobe, intending to cull and decimate it, thereby freeing up drawer and closet space and reducing stress by only keeping things that I can and would wear. Without realising it, it was the right place to start. I read a little post hinting that if one has trouble making or implementing proposed changes for the new year, to start off by cleaning house. Nice thing about the wardrobe is that it is volumous enough to notice the change to a significant degree and feel good about the result and feel a bit inspired. A few random observations and realisations sprang forth in the process as well.

Why wasn't this taken care of before?

When I first moved out east, I had the bulk of my stuff shipped. At some point in that first year I could have sworn I had rid myself of everything that I intended to. This was not the case. I mean, I did expect some of my clothes to be obsoleted by extra bodily poundage and through wear and tear but outside of that I still find in my collection stuff that I've had for a decade or more, yet hadn't worn. Realisation 1: I had kept things that fit, not things that I liked to wear. Realisation 2: What's worse is I actually bought stuff that I don't like to wear for one reason or another. I mean, WTF was I thinking? Well, the only thing I could come up with was "I didn't know any better." Related example:

Boxers or briefs?

For a good chunk of my life I shamefully wore the "tidy whities," the perfect example of not knowing any better. That's what was bought for me when I was a wee lad growing up and what I continued to wear into adulthood. How embarrassing. I never really liked them, even the more stylish colored ones. That whole bikini type cut would often dig into my upper thighs near the singit, cutting off circulation and such. Also made for nasty wedgies. I graduated to boxers. Ah much better. More expensive but thank the maker for Costco, when I was still a member. Still, it did have the opposite shortcoming: It didn't dig in but putting on pants now became a little dance. They were loose to the point that they would bunch up all the time, especially when donning pants. I did come up with a system eventually that worked, but thankfully I found something better: boxer-briefs. Form, function, and efficiency all in one. The holy grail of male underwear... at least for me. No edges that dug in. Crotch area loose enough but not overly so. No riding thanks to the longer legging. No bunching up since it fits snug enough where it needs to. There's no going back. For a long time I kept the older versions around for emergencies, like say, I haven't done laundry in a month. But it wasn't just that, it was this guy notion of not wanting to toss perfectly good and usable clothing. There was a time I would keep even not so good and not so usable clothing, like socks with holes in them or worn thin but still kept and worn. No more though. Especially since I have the income to buy replacements.

The XX solution

So I had replaced the entirety of my underwear drawer not once but twice. And now I needed to apply that to the rest of my clothing... again. It was my seeester who helped to alleviate my anxiety on throwing away money via the clothing I bought with it. She pointed out that women go through wardrobe replacement all the time, ridding themselves of perfectly good and usable clothing that no longer makes them happy. (Except our mom who seems to keep everything, choosing instead to store it in every closet in the house and wardrobe boxes in the garage. I think she's slowly recovering though.) Makes some sense that women by and large can do this purging for sociological reasons (stronger need for fashion) and biological reasons (the shopping gene). Emilf lent a lot of support for this and, bless her, talked me through the initial process over the weekend. The only sad thing is that Realization 3: I'm probably going to have to keep doing this clothing binge/purge thing every so often; it's not a one time thing. Hopefully I can become a little smarter about what to buy, and I should probably monitor sales. My seeester is a master at sales monitoring. I now enlist her at times to do my shopping for me. She likes it.

The other sad observations

Rummaging through ones clothes necessitates trying many or most of them on. Observation 1: It would all look better on a skinnier person. Not necessarily like the mannequins in the stores but fit people can wear almost anything and have it look ok. I have items that I do like but won't wear because of my now beyond fledgling beer gut. I've decided to keep those items this time around as a future solid target. That normally doesn't work but this time I need to make an honest effort. Observation 2: I'm cursed at being on the border of sizes. With some clothes, I wear an L, others a XL, and still others M. They just aren't consistent with sizing. Scregman alluded to this. What I also hate is when something is labeled 34-36 and I'm just at the high border or just past it, making it a tad uncomfortably tight, but the next size starts at 38 and too loose. Bleh. Observation 3: What is the deal with shirts/sweatshirts that end at the waist, such that when you lift your arms over your head the end gets pulled up well above the belly button? Works good for girls where bare midrift is a popular style. But on a men's shirt? And my last observation: I have entirely too many printed tee's. Printed tee's are the ultimate evil of events, clubs, promotions, and tourism. They serve as cheap sousvenirs, free giveaways, and a braindead means of commemorating something. But they work and are effective and here I am with a large accumulation of them. Time to rid myself of at least the ones that have faded. I guess dress shirts and Italian leather shoes aren't quite as convenient as promo fodder.

One side benefit of all this is my realizing that dispite the drawers full of clothing, and in addition to having entirely too many of a few types of things, there are few things that I just don't have enough of. I once thought that I could construct a reasonable list with 3 pairs of this, 6 of that, and a half dozen of the other and make for a solid well-rounded complete and cohesive wardrobe that required no thought whatsoever other than the occasional swapping out here and there as replacements were needed. It may mean that I need to do laundry more frequently. I don't trust myself in the selection process though. I wonder if there's a kit I could buy. You know, send in my dimensions and a color photo, and some budding fashionista assembles some unique timelessly stylish, mix and match, color coordinated complete ensemble with instructions as to what goes with what and when. That might be cool, a complete starter kit for the newly actualized male that doesn't require complete humiliation in front of millions of viewers of the TLC or Bravo channel.

The year in preview

2006-01-04T02:09:00.000-05:00

Towards the end of last year, which was a few days ago, I had a surge of inspiration and excitement. I had plans and goals. I had ideas and ambitions. I had objectives and hopes for completing them. Somehow, after returning east today, stepping off the plane, waiting a bit too long for my baggage, taking the public transportation home, ditching work because I was so tired, crashing until early-mid afternoon, eating canned soup for dinner, wasting the evening in front of the TV, and feeling more or less alone and isolated again; after all that, I have almost no sense whatsoever of what I had planned for this year. Oh I know the kinds of things I have itemized but at the moment I'm really just not feeling them. I have half a mind to just write the whole year off. I'm not feeling very optimistic.

My Star Trek Life

I've told a few people of this trend that I noticed (or imagined) some time in high school that I've been able to back-track to Jr. High and seems to continue forward to the present. The idea was that my years seem to follow the Star Trek movies in that every other movie was bad and every other was good. So I would have a relatively bad year followed by a relatively good year and so forth. Then the last "supposed to be good" Star Trek movie wasn't all that good. And my last "good" year prior to this most recent good year wasn't all that either. Well, I'm somewhere in my good year now (they don't necessary follow the calendar, but rather loosely around my age) and the seeds of despair that I felt today reminded me of a potentially approaching bad year. Now, I know all about self-fulfilling prophecies and I know that this analysis is mostly gibberish, so what I've been telling myself is to make the best of it all no matter the year. Besides, there are no more Star Trek movies... yet...

Groundhog Year

I told TheShadow the other day of my desire to make oh-six my groundhog year, in reference to one of my favorite movies which is one of a select few that I always seem to watch to completion whenever I happen to run into it playing for the millionth time on USA, TBS, TNT, etc. Predictably, he hadn't a clue what I meant by that. He said something like "what? you want to live the same year over and over?" I explained that in the movie during his repeated day, the protagonist went through phases. First he experimented with stuff, robbed banks, and otherwise exploited his condition for nefarious purposes. Then came the resignation, lack of purpose, and despair which lead to repeated suicides. Then came the climbing up from rock bottom where he took it upon himself to be kind, learn things, and take advantage of the infinite time he had. It's this last part I refer to in announcing my groundhog year. So little time and so much to do, learn, and enjoy; I need to be better at filling my time with those things I long sought but never had the gumption to pursue. I need to take better advantage of the predicament I put myself into living out here in relative isolation. I think in the end I was rather successful in some of those things when I first left family and friends to live in the Bay Area. That hasn't happened here yet and I need to make it so.

What that looks like is the traditional things involving health, fitness, organization, and focus, but also some more proactive things like resuming night classes, possibly joining a studio or club, and resisting the blahs that in the past have caused me to skip out on outings and opportunities when they were presented. I just wish vegetating wasn't so appealing to me as much as it is. Hopefully I'll find the proper balance. I do sense new ends and beginnings coming and that's often source of anxiety and fear. I think I can be zen enough to take it now. As for my recent pessimism, I can deal with that too and hopefully something will present itself to snap me out of it and get the year started as it should be. Then maybe I'll have more things to write about. Who knows, they may even be positive things.

I should also buy a copy of Groundhog Day since I do enjoy watching it.

Old year's resolutions

2005-12-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

In coming months I will likely talk more about my flirtations with productivity pr0n, or more specifically my implementations of the GTD system. One of the tenets of the system is "the weekly review" whereby, obviously, you review your action items, progress, and whatnot for the week. I believe he even advocates a monthly review and greater. It is an old and great philosophy that I only seem to take up personally in the throws of abject depression. But from an academic standpoint it makes perfect sense to review one's status on a regular basis. Some kind of regular measurement is often necessary to determine if progress is made. I haven't really made any measurements but thanks to my handy pocket Moleskine I have made notes.

It's only after having made notes for the past year that I actually see, to put it inaccurately but succinctly, whether or not the past year was any better than the year before. This is with respect to goals and accomplishments and projects as well as any sense of personal satisfaction. Without the notes I could hardly remember anything I had done (often and particularly the good things) and always had a sense that I had nothing to show for myself for the previous year or 5. I still sort of feel that way now but at least I can now open up my notebook and have literal physical objective evidence that I don't have anything of worth to show for the past year or 5.

I do this now because this may be my last post of the year seeing as how I leave for winter vacation today and because I plan to re-spark my immediate goals upon returning; also because it's the holiday season and it's crunch time, both at work and at home, and I'm running out of time to complete the drafts I have in my Blogger queue. No rush on that though.

So on with it...

PROGRESS -- things that I think I made a few forward steps with

Social life -- I lived much of the year in perpetual fear that I'd end up living my entire non-work life on my computer playing online role-playing games. Reason is that a good chunk of friends, the three that live closest to me and hence constituted the bulk of my meager social life, moved away. Another doesn't work with me anymore. This is a biennial occurrence. Every two years since moving coasts it seems half my friends move away. I always felt like I should have been one of the ones moving away. Surprisingly, I had a nice upswing in filling the void. I've latched myself onto a new group via refreshing an old connection, been going out more, been out there a bit more. In hindsight, it took me about 2 years to find my scene when I moved to the Bay Area and now not being a student I predicted that it would take twice as long. It's about that time now.
Travel -- I made a couple of trips this year. Trips that I intended to do last year but my plans got shunted for family reasons. Made it back to the Bay Area for a good friend's wedding and reconnected with a few people. Also made it up to the northwest, Seattle and Oregon, to visit some family and friends I had long promised to see but could never find the time (or vacation days). Made my (quasi-regular) trip out to Europe again. Couldn't see everyone I wanted to due to time and money constraints but I had a BLAST. Had a great travel partner this time for part of my trip; I regrettably almost always have to travel alone. I don't mind it too much though, just means I target my trips on where I have friends. I made it home for Thanksgiving for the first time I can remember in many years as well. I also went river rafting for the first time.
Organization -- I've been faithful to my Moleskine. I use it as my analog PDA. I shall post my use of it at some point. I'm kind of proud of my current system, took a lot of experimentation, but I'm mostly proud because I've stuck to it all year long.

SOME PROGRESS -- things that haven't truly progressed but have at least had fair activity so I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt and say "hey, at least I did something."

Hobbies -- I managed to scrawl out a small collection of sketches this year. I've been wanting to get back into it for a long time. It started off horrid, but I gradually fell into comfort with it... for a while. Sadly, I haven't done much in recent months. I also touched my piano a few times. I should at least try and keep fresh the pathetically small repertoire that I know.
Fitness -- At some point this year I lost about 12 pounds. I have since gained it all back. I had learned of and purchased some exercise information that I am excited about and I put it to use... during the summer that is. Now I'm back to my sloth ways, though not for long. It got started because I entered a 5k run with just about no training. It nearly killed me. I want to gear up for the next one next June. I also researched and implemented a fairly easy diet that I may write about later and was part of my successful weight loss. The diet went out the window after my Europe trip though.
Reading -- I managed to at least penetrate my large stack of books in my reading queue. I have a nasty habit of buying more books even though I'm part way through some and haven't touched the others. I just can't seem to find a set time to go through them. Then again it's all a tradeoff with other uses of my time. I'm not a fast reader. Since getting an iPod nano, I have taken up listening to audiobooks though. Much more convenient.

REGRESS -- shame on me.

Finance -- This worries me. I had foregone any financial discipline in exchange for having more of a social life and travel. I haven't updated my Quicken since last year. I haven't done any budgeting. I haven't even balanced my checkbook, trusting in the electronic statements instead. I have at least enacted a bit of siphoning away of a token amount for investing and retirement purposes, something that I should have been doing since my first job (oh the horror of what I missed).
career development-- I've mostly been a cog in a wheel here. I had planned on beefing up on my field a bit more, refreshing my memory on certain topics, and learning the basics at least of some others. I should have been monitoring the latest papers and conference proceeds as well. I at least started getting through some material but I've just been lazy and unmotivated with it. I feel like I'm getting dumber.
Home projects -- My place still hasn't been purged of much of the needless clutter. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of projects listed in my notebook. A lot of them still have none of the items checked off. The lists of things I had in mind are too innumerable to mention. Thanks to my new system, I don't feel quite as stressed about it though, because at least I have a fairly good idea of what I need to do and the steps I need to take.
Vices -- Well, I made a couple half-hearted attempts at getting one or two under control. I promise to make a full blown attempt soon. ("But Screg! I'm on vacation!")

There are few more significant items missing, both good and bad and neutral, but that's the bulk of the items I have written down on the last page of my Moleskine. I mark a +/- on the individual things depending on the progress when I finish the book and copy them in to my next one. A lot of the year has been spiced, both good and bad, with other occurrences as well. Some of my friends know that I've been calling this year "the year of the J..." but I'll not go into that.

Overall, though, I would say that this has been a truly positive year. Among the things that are important to me is the fact that I had the opportunity, sometimes unexpectedly, to reconnect with some old friends, make some new ones, and deepen my connection with some and it has left a lasting positive impression that I hope continues. (cue violin music)

But for now, off to my much needed holiday vacation. Happy holidays to you, my faithful readers, and see you on the other side. (cue last call at the pub music)

Knots and the lazy tongue mystery

2005-12-20T00:09:00.000-05:00

I discovered that for the entirety of my life I've been tying my shoelaces wrong. Or at least inefficiently. I'd been tying with the un-secure granny slip-knot. I learned a very simple and trivial adjustment to turn it into a more secure reef knot. How could I have missed this all these years? A slight study of the diagram reveals the simplicity and logicality of it. Perhaps I'm the type of person who has to understand something a bit more in depth before accepting it, at least with some things. I guess I had just found ways to cope with the un-secure way for so long I didn't have much desire to think about it.

But in a fit of frustration and a bit of luck, I have my answer. I have a pair of Timberlands with round slippery laces that tend to become undone constantly, causing me to double knot them. While on a trip, dear friend emilf tried to show me a more secure knot, but I didn't pay much attention to the difference. Well the difference was subtle and she did it quickly in my defense (plus maybe just a little I was too embarrassed to ask for a repeat demonstration). Even though in self-defensive denial I internally half-way balked, she was indeed correct. But no more! I have learned my lesson. 3 cheers for the reef knot lifehack. I have one less stress in my life. I can walk around in secure comfort that I will not be trodding on my laces (much) every again.

And on a related topic... does this happen to anyone?

With many of my laced shoes the tongue on my right foot tends to stay perfectly aligned in the toe to heel direction. But with my left shoe the tongue is always creeping towards the side. Even when I run my laces through the little sewn on fitting, ostensibly to help keep the tongue in its place, the tongue still moves to the side. But only on the left shoe.

My feet look fairly symetrical. My left foot is not oddly shaped. I wonder, does it have anything to do with this wive's tale that one of everyone's feet is a half size smaller than the other? I thought the shoe manufacturer's already took that into account. Maybe it's a universal prank by the shoe makers. (Again with the conspiracy.) This sounds like a question for Al Bundy.

I still insist my foot looks normal.

My beloved burrito

2005-11-30T19:02:00.000-05:00

For 12 years now, since leaving Sandy Eggo, the first thing I do upon visiting there and the last thing I do upon returning from there is getting myself a carne asade burrito con queso (y tres toquitos con guacamole y salsa); that is, when it's possible and convenient. It's just something that I find myself missing being away. It's also something that I'd ask SD friends visiting me in SF to pick up and bring to me. Shame I can't do that now, the flight's too long and it's harder to get people to visit cross-coast. Luckily, after close to a year of abstinence, I was able to indulge myself with several of these on my recent trip home for Thanksgiving.

Burrito?!!?? You can get that anywhere right?

No, I'm speaking of a special species of burrito available only in southern Cali. And even then only at those special dive-looking taco shops that litter the suburban landscape, typically open really late and (formerly) with a name ending in '-erto'. Roberto's was the first, then the others followed: Royberto's, Alberto's, Umberto's, Jilberto's, Ramberto's, Noelberto's... it was a joke at one point. The newer places seem to have divested themselves of the trend. Most of the original Roberto's shops no longer exist and were replaced with a suitable substitute with exactly the same menu.

Their burrito's are solid large torpedo's of meat with guacamole and salsa. Tastes good going down and sits in the stomach like a rock and often requires convenient access to a comfort room within hours of digestion; especially when one has not had it in quite some time. Ah the glory. Nearly the perfect junkfood. Healthfood be damned. And they are cheap and plentiful!!! Outside of SoCal, most burrito's I encounter are smaller and contain mostly cheap filler (rice and beans) with just a sliver of meat, cost twice as much, and often require that you pay EXTRA for guacamole. I have found places where these other varieties are good in their own right, but deep down they are not what I want and expect out of a burrito. No, the burrito's I have in mind are mostly a Northern Baja California phenom and hence can't truly be called Mexican food either.

In Berzerkely, I used to say something to the effect of:

If I had any business sense at all, I'd open a San Diego Burrito shop on Telegraph, ship up some cooks and make a killing off just the SoCal students alone... but more likely from everyone wishing a tasty break from all the wannabe-health-conscious shops that litter the streets.

I still think that to some degree out here. However, I sometimes have difficulty explaining this burrito concept to others who had not partaken in the sinful indulgence. They just don't get it. "What? No rice and beans? That's not a burrito." Or they thought of Taco Bell as Mexican food. (Yes they do exist, in droves!) Heck, some even considered burrito's more healthful food, probably in relation to burgers and such. Blows my mind sometimes. Most of my friends have had to put a limit on the number of these things one can consume for the health risk. Myself, when I'm on vacation, I'm allowed my vices.

But I've since grown understanding and tolerant. I do recognize that my notion of what constitutes a burrito is in fact the minority opinion. Most cities have their peculiar brand of late night post-drinking food. In Belgium it was fries with mayo. In Holland it was Turkish kebabs. In Oakland it was Chinese food. In Boston it's grinders. And in good ol' San Diego it was these burritos. Maybe that's where my love of these things eminate from, the association with those late nights out with friends. Nah, they just taste good.

My solution to CD piracy

2005-11-21T18:51:00.000-05:00

Make CDs $5 retail. No, not $10, not $7... $5. There. Right now, I only buy a handful of CDs a year. I have to be pretty sure I like most of the album before I fork out $15-$20. It's too prohibitive to do that upon only hearing or liking 1 song. Ok, sometimes I am caught in that adventurous mood but I usually end up regretting it. Now, if CDs were $5 I'd go out and by 5 tomorrow, probably on the order of 10 a month on average. Those recording folk would get much much more of my money than what I spend now. I'd be much more willing to experiment and that would give some support to a wider number of artists. I get frustrated knowing there's a LOT of music out there that I know I'd love but haven't heard of or heard enough of. Does $5 cut into the industry profit margins? On the surface yes but I believe they'd more than make up for it in volume. E.g. I think that if they cut the standard price by a factor of 4, they would MORE than quadruple their sales. People like me wouldn't hesitate to buy some old favorites or check out new bands or even re-purchase the stuff that we already bought on vinyl or cassette.

I'm no economist but I actually think a quadruple in sales is a conservative estimate. I think the increase would be more than that since I believe they'd recoup most of the money that gets "lost" to piracy. A $5 price-point would eliminate most of the incentive to buy a cheap $2-$3 knock-off from the street vendor with the photo-copied cover; when for a couple dollars more they could get a legit copy with the complete liner notes and possibly the special packaging. Makes sense to me. They wouldn't really need to muck about with all those dubious schemes of copy-protection/virus-infection, making incompatible CDs, CDs that degrade after X number of plays, etc. (I think all of those attempts are futile to begin with.)

When CDs first came out, they were at around $18. Now that they're dirt cheap to make they're still sitting at around that price. Yeh, I know some marketing research dweeb ran through some statistical models and decided that $15-$20 (gotta include the tax) was the most people would be willing to pay and give the companies the highest yield, especially when it's the young folk who buy most of the music and I suspect often times regardless of cost due to peer pressure or parental subsidy. I submit, that that's the wrong approach. The unreasonably high cost creates a ripe market for unscrupulous people to produce dirt cheap copies and sell them for a couple bucks. They claim to be loosing millions, nay... billions, to pirates (Psshaaw, according to their artificial price).

A former coworker of mine once countered "yeh, but no-one who really collects music pays that full price anyways" in reference to used CD stores and CD clubs where they try to unload all of the older stuff or stuff that doesn't sell well at a "discount." Used CD stores are great, but the selection can sometimes be troublesome. I find CD clubs a bit annoying, especially when they rely on sending you things if you fail to return the little slip in time. Plus you're not going to find the newest stuff in those clubs. You'd also have to join several different clubs to begin with because each club represents a different set of labels.

Ok, I will admit that this idea and topic may be all but moot. This is of course due to the relatively new phenomena of online distribution. With Napster I think everyone realized this was the wave of the future, as I certainly did (in ref. to the online distribution, not the piracy, or perhaps that too). Of course the music industry shut Napster down, clinging to their outdated business models, but eventually they found a way to capitalize on it a la iTunes and similar. For the most part I think they have made good on a good idea. I can at least buy individual songs and have it quickly and effortlessly. The price is unfortunately twice what I think it should be and predictably the RIAA is currently insisting that the price be increased for the popular songs or risk loosing their catalog. (Bleh!) Then there are the digital rights management schemes that are also inconvenient, but that's another topic. Overall, though, I'll give this avenue a little more support simply due to the increased flexibility, efficiency, and convenience.

Still, even though there may come a day I may never buy a packaged CD again or perhaps store-bought CD's will become a thing of the past, I still think so long as pirated CDs are being sold that my solution has some merit. With the internet the RIAA has no hope of eliminating unauthorized distribution and I almost think it's a wasted effort. But with knock-off street-vendors, who are actually selling discs for money (rather than making copies and throwing them out there for all to obtain for free) , I'm fairly confident that this would put a big dent in their viability. With low-priced CDs the industry may even begin to stop treating their customers like criminals as they see their legitimate sales increase.

Transformer overload

2005-11-17T16:41:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure at the moment of what the solution is to the ever increasing entropy surrounding the growing presence of rats nests of cables, wires, and power cords, but one place I'd start is with the powerstrip plugs and transformers. Every little consumer device now seems to need to be plugged in. These things invariably run on DC and hence require a transformer. Transformers are usually not placed within the device itself. Instead it's a big, sometimes weighty, box you have to plug into the wall or powerstrip socket. When you have several of these things there's just no room to plug them all in. You have to get special spacious power strips that grant room for multiple transformers or perphaps even specialty items. In most cases you end up with a bulk of cords, plugs, and transformers clumped up on the floor or on the wall.

Well, there's a large class of devices out there that are typically small, require only 12 volts of DC or less, and don't need the amperage of a vacuum cleaner. Such devices typically come with their own power transformer with a little mini-jack looking plug that cleanly slides into the device. It is the little mini-jack that is of interest to me. Wouldn't it be nice if along with the ubiquitous 2-3 pronged wall socket, there were DC power strips of these little mini-jacks. No need for 5-10 big transformers elbowing each other for space, just a simple little box with an array of mini-jacks supplying modest transformed electricity to the devices via simple non-bulky cords.

Basically, leave the pronged wall sockets to the big hungry power consuming items like TVs, vacuums, kitchen appliances, and such; but make a second standard set of more numerous socket arrays for the smaller and power modest devices like cordless phones, ethernet routers, portable music players, mobile phones, low power vanity or ambiance lights, electric razors, etc. etc. etc. Of course they'd all need to standardize on the same mini-plug jack (never understood why there are so many pitches to these things, ever see those Radio Shack adaptors with the 20 differently sized tips?) and perhaps even the same output voltage. Heck if it were truly standard, only one type of power cord would be needed, they'd be available anywhere, and you may not even need more than a few.

I just imagine a only-very-slightly more convenient world where I do not need to carry around bulky transformers for all of my portable devices on trips or I didn't have to plug my phone in the far room with the free wall socket. Yes a ubiquitous standard would be nice. But as the oxymoronical saying goes "the good thing about standards is there are so many of them."

What about Sony?

2005-11-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

I find it mildly ironic that with the introduction of the Walkman Sony had started what I consider to be the "free YOUR music" movement, or maybe the weaker "take YOUR music with you" movement. Now they're more of a "we'll tell you what you can do with OUR music" company. There's a lot of rows on their recent sinister stealth inclusion of copy protection that messes with your computer. I speculate the new philosophy started when they built up their recording and movie divisions.

For me I noticed the trend coming when I started using MiniDiscs. I love those little things (future rave alert). I bought my first portable recorder while on a visit to Japan, in Akihabara, the most incredible and insane consumer electronics area on the planet. It was more of a tape repacement but a sweet one. MP3 players started coming out though and (eventually, ugh!) they got with the program and made a computer connectable series; something that should make sense in the first place since it's a digital media. So I got one of those net-enabled ones and, alas, they intentionally crippled it. You couldn't download stuff you recorded onto it digitally. You couldn't transfer a music file to more than three discs. You had to use their proprietary music format. And you couldn't store non-music files on it, a shame for any type of digital media.

Now they've gone one step further and surreptitiously added stuff to their new CDs that would load and hide itself on your computer, in an effort to prevent you from having illegal music, and without apology. Turns out the technology makes your computer insecure as well. They also cooked up an inane scheme to bind playstation games to a specific console, making them unplayable on other consoles (even the 2nd one you bought because the first one broke), or lend or rent them out. Egads!

Sony was a cool company. This together with how they manage customer service in their online games division, however, makes me want to say phooey to them. Luckily I don't buy many CDs anymore (future rant alert) and know to steer clear of theirs.

Grrr... no backup

2005-11-14T03:32:00.000-05:00

So, I come to look at my page and it's all gibberish. I check the settings and template and all of my little tweaks and edits are gone and the template doesn't work. You'd think after decade(s) of computer using I'd learn to back up everything, especially stuff that I customize. Even in this case where I didn't expect it and perhaps didn't deem the template important enough to backup, I did have a mind to make some more tweaks which would have caused me to make a backup. Well, it's not a hard thing to recover as I didn't do too much, but I am annoyed.

Gee mail

2005-11-10T01:41:00.000-05:00

I started using Google's web-email client round-about half a year ago. The hype over it at the time wasn't really the reason for me to open an account there. It was the fact that my other email accounts were a decade old and had gotten onto way too many spam lists to where I was beyond annoyed. I made a brief reference to that in a previous post. Time to start fresh. Might as well see what this new email thing was about.

I've used it for a long enough time now to where I have to say, I'm quite pleased with it. I got comfortable with it fairly quickly. With many things there is an evaluation period. At first the interface was, it seemed, just a departure enough from the norm of email clients that it did take some getting used to, despite it's fairly intuitive interface. I remember seeing several complaints on the interface posted in the obvious places. I think I had many of the same "complaints" in my head at the time though they weren't major enough to gripe about. I adapted to the style and remain more pleased with it than not. And kudos to them for re-thinking the way I deal with email. Some of my own highlights:

Conversations: The emails are organized by conversation/replies or what should really be called threads because that's what the original name was and what most people still call them. They're all grouped together in the same line on the main list page which has the added benefit of fitting more email history on the same page. Unlike threads in other mail programs, you get to see all entries at once on a single page with the option to click them hidden. It's nice having everything relevant right there. It's fairly clean.
Labels instead of folders: Google did away with folders and instead made just 2: Inbox and not-in-inbox (or Archived). Most email clients have folders you can move messages to. Google instead uses labels (that you can name yourself). There was a little anxiety to overcome with this and some complaints still regard this. I realized however that, indeed, labels are more flexible and powerful than folders. Basic reason: One can assign more than one label to a conversation, something that you cannot do with folders without making duplicate entries (most email clients don't really give you the option). For example, I currently have all emails with picture attachments automatically assigned a "pictures" label. Should I ever want to see all emails with pictures, I can simply click on the label and voila, there they are. This will be useful when I reach the max disk quota and I want to start deleting the largest emails.
Search instead of sort: The Google philosophy appears to be "save everything, search for what you want." As with the labels it sort of violates the internal notion of aesthetics where things are properly put in there place. However, it works just fine, is a little more powerful and lower stress once you get past that notion. Google is the master of search and so far this style hasn't failed me.
Speed: Of course as far as web-based email clients are concerned none of the above would have been truly usable if they hadn't written a surprisingly fast interface. I mean, I was impressed at how fast and functional it was compared to, say, the Yahoo mail where email is organized in pages of 26 entries and I keep having to click next page over and over (and their thread features are measly).

Of course it has the other standards such as filters, contacts, POP access, spam filtering, and such. There are clever hacks to turn that 2Gig of space into a file system, that I find impressive.

Some things I find a bit less to my liking are:

It doesn't let you sort by the things I'm used to like date, sender, etc. There are still uses for this.
There doesn't seem to be a way to assign an email out of the conversation that it determines for you. Same applies to labels, it seems to apply to the whole thread.
Inability to open any of the interface items in a new window with a right-click. E.g. it would be nice to right-click-open my contacts while I'm in the middle of composing, not because it won't find email address through it's very good auto-completion but I have to remember the names I want to put. There are other uses too. I'm sure the Java code could allow that but it's not in there yet.
Merging contact information is a no-go, but then again nobody gets that right. A lot of people have multiple accounts and I wish there were a simple, quick, and effective way of merging them into the same contact entry.

There are other little things too that could easily be added to make some tasks a little more convenient. Allowing expansion of the sender's previous emails in the contacts page comes to mind; I'd really like to cut and paste contact info from emails I get. They get to escape full criticism by keeping it in perpetual beta though. (Is that a criticism?) Their system of account-by-invitee is a bit interesting too. I can see some advantages.

But all in all I'm loving it. I just wanted a fresh email address but surprisingly it keeps me using it in its web client form rather than simply downloading my email to Thunderbird and organizing it there like I do with my other email accounts. I like it that much. The unfortunate thing is that it require my internet connection be always up, and there are times when I don't or don't want to and would like to use it offline, like on my laptop. Plus it would be awesome to be able to use this technology on my other accounts, like my work one, where I see great benefits for my handling all of the email regarding the various projects and back-and-forth RFC's. So what I would really like is for my Thunderbird (which I love, especially with all the cool extensions) to behave more like the Google client... which basically means, Google should make a standalone client for personal computers and workstations (including a Linux version, thank you very much).

Hear that Google? I'm sold. Make gmail a download, and for all platforms.
(Don't say it. I know their not listening.)

Farewell, Jane

2005-11-04T13:42:00.000-05:00

I was shocked, dismayed, and saddened to learn today that a good friend in Berkeley passed away. Jane Edwards was one of the nicest and sincerest people I'd ever met. She was ever pleasant, genuinely interested in people, and walked her own path according to her own passions. She was an assistant sysadmin at my old lab as well as a researcher while supporting her own interests. She had two PhDs, was an avid hiker, and an expert pianist. But I'll just remember her as being a good friend that I enjoyed talking to and having a beer with. I hadn't had correspondence with her since July and I feel the loss knowing that we'll never communicate again or that I won't be able to peek into her office to say hi or to leave a note, as I always do when I visit Berkeley.

I was also dismayed that I learn of this a month late. I received the announcement through my old Berkeley email address, which I've had for more than a decade and sadly became a repository of spam before spam even had a name. Hence, I only check that account once a month or so to clear it out and look for anything legitimate (which is easy to miss). I had resisted closing the account due to the spam because I eventually do get academic-related items through there. I'm glad I had resisted since it would have been even longer before my finding out. I was in a kind of disbelief when I saw the announcement. I just wish I had checked the account more frequently as I feel sorry to have missed the service. A nice post is still up at the Glacier Mountaineering Society as well as a blog by one of her climbing colleagues.

Farewell, Jane.

Flat Woe #4

2005-11-02T23:58:00.000-05:00

So I figure I may as well generate my LAST post on the topic of my gripes with my flat (as if my masculinity was not already irreparably damaged). This is something that came up again when I was hanging out front with one of my first floor neighbors on Monday. She was talking about possibly having another party sometime between now and the end of the year; she and her roommate had one a couple months ago which was quite fun. Their flat is perfect for having parties. It has two common areas separated by double sliding doors that connect them into one large open space. Perfect for holding a nice amount of people as well as modest furnishings. And to boot, the connecting kitchen is right in line and also quite spacious. The second floor has virtually the same layout, wide connecting common areas with kitchen and two smallish but adequate rooms. The only difference is the location of the bathroom.

My flat SHOULD have had the same general floorplans as the bottom two floors. The only potential obstructions are some pillars that must go through due to the downstairs chimneys. However, the locations of these things would not have interfered too much since, when you think about it logically, the actual floor area should be a perfect match as we share all the walls and the flats are right on top of each other. Instead, and in addition to the absolutely ridiculous walls added to seal off the slants in the ceiling, they re-arranged the locations of the rooms in a dreadful configuration. I don't have the nice large connected common areas, they are separated into completely individual rooms, one being a bedroom, the other being a bedroom OR a living room. The kitchen, instead of being in the back is on the side, not enclosed, and away from back stairwell door. This creates an awkward L-shaped living area joined with the kitchen, with a hide-the-slant-closet at the joint. The back door is the piece de resistance: A mini corridor with a door connecting to the back stairwell juts out into the small living-room-ish space creating two awkward alcoves. Trust me, it's worse to see than what I describe. If at least the kitchen were in the back, those alcoves could have served as pantries or one of them as a kitchenette and the side of the house could have been a nice functional open area appropriate for creature comforts and guests. Right now I'm almost embarrassed about the layout (even too ashamed to post a pic). I don't have many guests, much less a party. Of course I'm more embarrassed that I'm actually bugged about this. But maybe one of the good folks from TLC will see this and take pity.

This Halloween significance

2005-10-31T20:24:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me tonight, this Halloween night, that this weekend marked a couple of things regarding this year. The significance is just a bit heightened by the bottle of Shiraz that I'm just now finishing. So please to being indulgent.

Saturday came the first day of snow in the Boston area this year. Damnation! Not even November and snow appears. Not just a few flakes, I was impressed that enough snow to accumulate came forth. It was soon vacated by the rain that came late in the night. But it serves to remind me of what I'd been hearing on the street for the past couple of weeks: It is going to be a long winter, longer than last. As if last winter wasn't bad enough, what with record breaking snowfall, all-time low temperature records, and a city-works plow that shoved a full drift of snow into my parking space. Boston, according to my Sandy Eggo sensibilities, has 3 seasons. This past year it has been 8 months of winter, ending in June; three months of summer, ending in August; and 2 months of autumn; which ended Saturday. Sort of. More on that in a bit.

There is no spring. Or, at most, it lasts about 1 week. The week where it oscillates between painfully cold and uncomfortably hot. They lied. 4 seasons my ass! But I don't really complain. Except in the winter. That's where I eat all of my words of the time I used to complain that the wonderful and sublime Bay Area had bad weather. Hey, I was from Sandy Eggo. It's all relative. I realized that for the past 4 years. I repent. Take me back there. Please. please.

Winter marks the entrance into hibernation here. Oh there is still activity, but, well, let me put it this way: I may never have gotten into MMORPG were it not for the winters here. There's a certain amount of effort required to intentionally be uncomfortable via going out when it actually hurts to be outside and it's icky and gloomy and the days are shorter and... well, I've been known to be a sunworshiper.

But to my credit I'm making the best of it. This year I all but swore that I would. A good bit of luck helps. I pulled another 3 nights of out-of-the-apartment shenanigans. I have a buddy that goes to the drum and base Thursday nights at the Phoenix Landing and despite all laziness I end up there, liquor up, and cut loose. Just a little though. (No, your opinion of me is still consistent.) Next night ChikiMiki informed me that The Love Makers were playing in Boston. He had introduced me to them and I was quite looking forward to seeing them. They play a kind of 80's style new wave, something I don't think many are doing. Sadly, due to a mis-communication in timing, we arrived as they were playing their last song. Bummer, especially knowing that we broke a couple laws in the attempt. We went to a club down the street where he knew some people would be at a private party. It was neat being in an area where everyone was dressed up in costume. We had to stop and buy some Jason masks just to not feel so guilty. Saturday, after it snowed (and believe me I was tempted already to just stay in and vegitate in front of the b00bt00b) I made my way to a Halloween party, the first one in years. I still think Halloween in San Francisco is the best, but it's great to see people out here getting together and having some fun for the event; I'd always had the impression that it just wasn't that big of a deal out here. Good ol' Deb was nice enough to post some pictures.

And tonight, as I came home tired and weary, I bump into one of my downstairs neighbors dressed in a quasi lady-bug outfit. I feel guilty that I hadn't yet fully helped her with her storm windows. But she's there with a friend carving a pumpkin on the porch. And it so happens that two neighbors from next door are doing the same. We all spend some time in front of my house, sipping wine, chatting about this and that, pulling passing-by-neighbors into conversation, inciting people to go out and scout some kids for us to give candy to, three bowls of candy. We had three customers total for the night, a disadvantage of location. Despite my complaints of the snow and the cold, tonight was exceptionally nice. Perhaps the last good-weathered night of the year. Perhaps. It dawns on me that I cannot for the life of me remember the last time that I waited candy in hand for trick-or-treaters to pass by. Especially with nice impromptu company. I appreciate that. I need to keep appreciating the little things like that. I think I do. I'm lucky this year. Compared to the last few years, I feel extremely so. I hope I'm due for a few more lucky years.

To round off the night I call a couple of friends. One is still at work on the best coast. The other is out and about with friends to watch a movie because her class was cancelled. I wish I could join them. Would be the perfect ending to a surprisingly spirited weekend, despite work kicking my ass.

Maybe someday.

But till then, a bottle of Shiraz signing off.

On car stereos and portables

2005-10-28T02:41:00.000-04:00

About 2 years ago I finally decided to replace the factory default stereo that came with my car (and broke twice). It was a cassete-deck one and I decided to upgrade to a CD player model that played MP3 CDs (11 albums on a burnt CD is nice). However, I knew then (and for a long while before that) what I really wanted was a stereo that had a convenient mini-plug auxiliary line-in. At the time I had a Nomad MP3 player that I would use on long trips. I had to use that annoying cassette adapter up until I got the replacement. I searched high and low at the various consumer electronics stores and eventually only found about 3 models that had that nice, simple, convenient feature. Two were no-named ones and at last I found a nicely inexpensive AIWA that I purchased and am quite satisfied with. I retired my Nomad and sufficed on a collection of burnt MP3 CDs for the most part. My recent acquisition of an iPod Nano (I'll defend that surprising decision some other time) has made me re-appreciate that firm requirement I had for my car stereo from back then. A simple mini-plug cable connects it to my stereo so I can listen to whatever music/podcast/audiobook continuously.

I wonder though. Was there some devious intent behind the lack of convenient auxiliary line-in jacks on the face of car stereos? Or were the makers really just clueless? When I was a wee lad the typical car stereo was a radio and tape deck. That's still largely true, they often make you get the CD-player option for extra money at the car dealerships. Anyhow, back then, very occasionally you'd see an 8-track deck but those were well past obsolete. The Walkman just came out to change the landscape of consumer electronics, but it was also just a tape player. No need for an auxiliary input since your car stereo played the same media. No problem. Then CDs came out, soon to be followed by the CD car stereo and the CD Walkman. Cassettes, however, were still a predominant listening choice though because you couldn't easily record CDs and make your own mix-tapes, what they now call playlists. So, if you had a CD stereo you couldn't play your tapes (unless you got the dual deck) and vice versa. This would have been a good time to make decks with a mini-plug line-in so you could play stuff on your Walkman in your car. Did they? No. You had to buy one of those hokey cassette adapters. Later, they came up with local FM transmitters. That was the best they could do? Both solutions degrade the quality, are failure prone, and are not as clean and efficient as a simple mini-plug cable connecting the headphone jack on your portable and the car stereo.

After the CD Walkman other forms of portable media emerged: first the MiniDisc and Digital Cassette came (and went), and later the portable MP3 players became all the rage. And you still had to loose quality of playback in your car via the transmitter or introduce a hum with the cassette adapter. I didn't like that. I remember having several copies of the same music on cassette, CD, MiniDisc, and MP3 in order to accommodate the different playing environments. I'm sure many can relate.

It took the introduction and mass popularity of the iPod to finally stir some movement, even though other MP3 players and similar had been in vogue for years. Now, finally, car stereos with a mini-plug on the front dash appeared. Not en masse, but at least there were a few. When I was looking for a stereo with just that feature 2 years ago some big-named makers required a pricey kit and an installed wire from the back of the stereo. Boggle. If they can put a laser, mechanics, and fancy displays in the stereo, then they can trivially put in an extra mini-plug input to accommodate portable players. It's not that obtrusive and it doesn't interfere with any other stereo features and people don't have to use it they don't want to. So why did it take them so long to get with the program and why is it still not a standard option? I sense a combination of maniacal consumer control conspiracy coupled with abject ignorance and ignoramousy.

Moooltipass

2005-10-26T20:29:00.000-04:00

After reading an article I was reminded that not only do I need to renew my passport, since it expires next year, but that I should plan on renewing it sooner than later. Seems our government aims to have all newly issued passports contain RFID devices containing a number of personal identification tidbits. There's a lot of brouhaha regarding these devices, mostly concerned with security, invasion of privacy, and big-brother type stuff. When it comes to the other uses for RFID that companies and such have planned, I don't care enough to comment. I can imagine some nice uses for them... inventory and whatnot. But there is one point about putting it in my passport that I find a bit disturbing: the idea that someone with the proper equipment can aim an antenna at me and read my personal information and probably without my knowing; or as a corollary, scan the vicinity (like my neighborhood) and know I'm there. I'm sure the information would be encrypted somehow (or am I that sure?) but even then it's nearly guaranteed that it will be cracked at some point or even leaked out. No. I think it's a bad idea right now.

For some reason I'm actually not completely looking forward to getting a new passport. I mean, I need to, it's practically full, I hate the picture in it, and it's a bit frayed causing some extra inspection by pass control officers at times. But, I like my collection of stamps, visa's, and work permits. I've carried this current one with me to about 13 countries. Somehow I want to keep adding to it and not have to start over with a blank one. Silly I know. Oh well, no choice in the matter. Just as well I retire it now since I don't do all that much traveling anymore; at least not anywhere new.

Of Moleskines and Men...

2005-10-25T21:27:00.000-04:00

It was a bit over a year ago that I first read reference to the Moleskine notebook online. I was going through a fit of productivity porn, doing some online research trying to refine an organizing system to replace the defunct PDA that had broken on me the previous year (that's another topic). I had basically decided that I wasn't going to replace it and was using a paper/notebook system. At the time I was using a government issue memoranda book shamelessly pilfered from a filing cabinet most likely twenty odd years ago (I'm a recovering pack-rat). Quite simply, I was using it because it was there and at the time I was quite pleased to have a use for it after all those years.

Pretty much all my life I'd used various flavors of pocket notebooks. Mostly they were just any old notebook; some pocket sketchbooks, some of those sillly spiral ones from the grocery store, the $2 weaved ones from Chinatown, or whatever happened to be in the office supply cabinet. Occasionally I'd get a fashionable one that looked pretty. One thing I noticed about all of them, however, was that they never got filled. At some point I'd loose interest, or I'd start a new one, or I just wouldn't keep it with me and I'd forget about it. Basically there was nothing about them that really grabbed me or satisfied me.

Enter the Moleskine which quite immediately hooked me. (Ok that's not quite true, the first Moleskine I bought was the accordian file one, which I was disappointed in because it didn't hold enough index cards elegantly.) At first glance it doesn't look like much but I soon marveled at some things about it that I either never noticed or never cared about:

The paper is nice. I was impressed how viscerally pleasant writing was even with a cheap ballpoint pen.
The binding allows it to open completely flat. Book bound notebooks, even the sewn ones, don't open completely flat. Spiral bound ones have the annoying gap, and the springs tend to bend in my pocket.
The elastic band is just a really nice add-on to keep it shut and compact. It has a silk bookmark too.
The envelope in the back cover is very convenient.
It's just the right size. Fits in my back pocket, and I can stuff post-its and index cards in there.
I really do like the simple non-pretentious black design, with the pages flush against the edges. The rounded corners are smart too, makes it easier to slip into my pocket. The "moleskine" oil-cloth cover has a nice feel to it.

At last! Something I think they got right. And I will confess, I was completely taken in by the incredible marketing hype with references to artists and writers of old. But more than the actual hype was the community of new amateurs, artists, and hobbyists who used these books for incredible things and posted them up on the web. It all rekindled the old creative artistic side of me that had long been buried, suppressed, and zapped by grad school. Yes, I was completely taken in. I admit it.

Even though a low quality substitute could in theory do the same job, I immediately realized that it was worth it to me to spring a bit more for these and continue to do so. Reason: With any task tools do matter; good tools facilitate or encourage a task or behaviour more than bad ones. What's more is that unlike the cheapy random notebooks of old... these things will be more than just a organizational and journaling tool; I consider them keepsakes. And because of that, I am more inclined to be faithful and diligent in my use for them. I do very much lament that these notebooks had not been available to me long ago.

Flat woe #2 and #3

2005-10-23T19:23:00.000-04:00

Many of the houses out here in NE, and in fact pretty much everywhere, have slanted roofs. I think they tend to be a bit more slanted in places that have snowfall. Makes sense. Don't want to have snow accumulating up there too much. The upshot of this is many of the top floor flats in such houses have slanted walls. I actually think this is fine and adds a little charm to a place.

... except in my case. Somewhere down the line someone decided they didn't like slanted walls and so they decided to reduce the usable space of this flat by adding walls whose sole purpose was to hide said slanted walls. This causes a strange sense of boxing within my flat as yet more walls and vertices were placed within. It seals the place in a bit and I prefer the more open area, even with the slanted walls. It at least would give more usable floor space.

Someone must have thought about that just a little too, because in addition to sealing off the slanted walls they opted to add closet doors to these walls. Well one of them didn't have doors but rather a waist-high opening. (I find this one the most puzzling and the most unsightly of all. I just don't get it.) These closets are barely usable. You cannot stack much in the way of boxes in them due to the irregular shape. You definitely can't hang clothes in there. It simply is a cosmetic thing to make it look like you have a closet when if fact you really don't. And it unnecessarily clutters the look of the space.

Which leads to my next woe which is actually the main woe of this post: lack of functional closets. Every once in a while I get way behind on my laundry and I end up doing nearly the whole of my functional wardrobe in a single day, such as yesterday. There is only one closet in this flat worthy of being called a closet, and one which is more of a coat closet that I use as a main closet due to its location. It's rather small. After doing most of my laundry I realised once again that I do not have enough closet space to hang all of my garments.

If this were mine to remodel, I'd knock down all of those shameful walls and even what closets there were. I'd much rather get a nice set of armoire's in an open room. Can't rightly do that now due to the presense of the walls and pseudo-closets since they'd subtract too much additional room space. I surprise myself a little thinking about such things as apartment aesthetics but in this case the complaints are rooted in functionality and I feel justified.

But alas, there's nothing I can do about it other than maybe make another round of clothing donations.

A warning from beyond

2005-10-21T00:13:00.000-04:00

For about 2 hours this morning, I was getting a very strange call at regular intervals, about 15 minutes apart. It was always the same message. Four of them were captured on my mobile's voicemail because I slept through them. It was very odd, and kind of creepy.

It was a robotic synthesized voice which said: "Calling from ### ### ####, Alert Condition Two!" and then the message would repeat.

I must have picked up the phone to hear this about 4 or 5 times.

My initial speculations and thoughts were:

Some kind of automated marketing thing based on the first few words, though the "Alert Condition Two" didn't jibe with that.
There was a local or state emergency, quite possibly related to the recent floods in New Hampster. That didn't make sense either, they can't call everyone... though it did make me think that perhaps I should turn on the radio just in case.
Ah, maybe DearCloseRelative who works in Homeland Security and is sometimes prone to being a mite paranoid about such things put me on an automated warning list for impending very bad things.

When recounting the events to friends and coworkers later (after having a solution to the mystery of course) a couple initial guesses were:

Oh, you're on that weather warning system... what was it, Nomad?
Ah man, what the CIA is after you?

Well the solution to the mystery came after about the ninth ring when the owner of the property I rent called asking me A) if I had been getting the calls, and B) to check the basement. Ah, it all made sense. About two years ago, a pipe burst (due to the pipe-chilling cold) in the basement, flooding it and causing a lot of water damage and inconvenience. He had installed sensors and an alert dialer. Lo and behold, he programmed my number in there in addition to his; I do stuff around the property since he lives in Texas. I don't know whether he had told me and I forgotten (or wasn't paying good enough attention) or he didn't fill me in. Either way, I wouldn't have made the connection as it had never happened and I didn't know what to expect... something like "Yo man, your basement's flooded" in a synthetic voice?

Well, for a while there it was kind of suspenseful. Should it have happened a couple weeks from now, like on Halloween, it would have taken a slightly different twist in my head I'm sure.

Oh, and to alleviate frustration for the curious: No, the basement was not flooded. A de-humidifier wasn't draining properly and it overflowed causing a small puddle of water to collect. Oddly, it was not where either of the sensors were. Some sensors, eh?

Flat woe #1

2005-10-16T22:57:00.000-04:00

I do like my flat, especially the location. Can't complain having at least 5 pubs within a 3 minute walk. But it is in a rather old house (well, old by my Californian standards). It does have it's charm but somewhere either as they originally built it or at some point when they remodeled it a bit, to divy each floor up into it's own flat, someone decided to install radiator heating. This by itself is fine but rather than the rectangular compact ribbed box-shaped radiators you sometimes see in older apartments and dorms, someone chose to use these long floor integrated ones that span the length of wall floors. They basically line the perimeter of the flat. Their presense makes it so that you cannot put anything flush up against their respective walls. It greatly eliminates the number of places that I can put bookcases, desks, and whatnot and it means the little area that doesn't have the floor heaters is artificially valuable apartment real-estate.

I just recently had to contend with this because I (finally) bought a new computer. This time I got a monster kickin desktop machine. I also had to get a new desk to accomodate it; the old one was fine for my laptop but not this thing and I wanted a hutch as well. Once I got the computer desk home, I realised that I couldn't put it where my old desk was because of these floor heaters. No way am I having my new souped up machine (as well as the power strip and cables and such) sitting on the floor next to a heater. Curses! I had depopulate, disconnect, clear, move, and restock a wall of bookcases to accomodate my new acquisitions.

The thing is, I cannot understand why they did this in the first place. I don't think it's that much more efficient heating-wise. It makes carpeting or installing flooring a pain. They're hard to maintain. They're easier to bang up and rust. It's more to clean. They're hard to clean under. More things are prone to touch them (e.g. long curtains, bedding, plugs, chords, power strips, dresser and cabinet legs) and they can get quite hot. And as an added insult, a single thermostat controls the entire flat, which means I cannot just heat one room... something you can do with the other type of radiator because they usually have knobs to control the hot water piping through them.

I'm sure someone thought these things are less unsightly than the box radiators but I don't think the tradeoff is justified one bit.

A very slight buzzing in my ear

2005-10-15T01:53:00.000-04:00

Saw my first world class DJ tonight. I believe he's ranked #3 in Europe. My wacky buddy Chiki Miki alerted me to it, threw us on the guest list, and a group of us met to watch. It was a cool experience and something I now appreciate just a bit more. The only unfortunate aspect was that I'd gotten completely and utterly hammered each of the past two nights and I felt it best to ease up on the imbibing this time around. (There were other factors too.) Thing about trance/electronica is one must be in the proper state of mind to get the full effect. That is Chiki Miki's natural state, but I require a little warmup. Ok, the other annoyance was that it was raining fairly hard the entire night which doesn't improve the warmup experience when standing outside in line waiting to get in.

Still, it was a nice change of pace for a Friday for me. I'd been going to Psyforia with Chiki Miki when it's on and I'm around. I like the more intimate and casual setting of it. They host it on the Charles River at the most unlikely place every month. Very interesting contrast between the bar and the gathering area.

Note to self: I should really consider stocking up on ear-plugs for just such occasions. I value being able to hear.

Why?

2005-10-13T22:38:00.000-04:00

Obligatory first post which I suppose is meant to justify the creation of this log.

Actually, I had thought about maintaining such a thing for the past 10 years whilst in grad school. I made a few meager attempts at it though those were more research logs. They never got maintained all that well but some of it's still around.

Truth is I didn't really see the point. I've even read articles to that end. Noone's ever going to read this so why bother? Then again, if noone's ever going to read this, then it doesn't hurt anything either. However, I do recognize that there are positive aspects to creating such things; things I won't really go into now because this time around I have peer pressure from friends jnet and gron who probably just wanted to have some friends that were doing what they were. Heh.

But the real answer to "why?" is an expression that I've heard a lot but most memorably (in the epiphany sense) at a cafe in Nuernberg by a waitperson when asking if I wanted a cappuccino: "why not?"