technorthodox

New Music

2008-06-16T21:48:00.000-04:00

I’ve been sitting on several pieces of new music for a while, trying to find the time to edit, review, and post them. I finally made some time to finish a few of them. The first is a four part setting of “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord”.

It is free to download and use, and you can find it, along with all of my sheet music, here.

Shame on you, Verizon

2008-03-31T11:58:00.000-04:00

Our neighbor, like most everyone who lives in our area, has Verizon for his local phone service. Almost a week and a half ago, all of the phones in his house stopped working—no dial tone at any phone jack, completely dead. So, he called Verizon (using his mobile phone) to schedule a service call. Verizon said the earliest they could send a technician was 3 days ago (Friday, March 28).

So, right off the bat, Verizon left a customer without service for a week.

On Friday, Verizon called our neighbor on his mobile saying that they had to reschedule the service appointment for the next day, Saturday, March 29—a week and a day without any phone service.

On Saturday, they called again and told him they would not be able to send a technician until this Friday, April 4.

That will be two full weeks without service for a family with small children. Two full weeks without 911 service. What if they need to call an ambulance? What if they have a fire? What if someone else on the street has a fire and is unable to call 911?

But wait, they have a mobile phone, right? Sure, but does that really make it ok? Should everyone have to have a mobile phone to compensate for Verizon? What about folks who don’t have a mobile? I would bet that demographic includes many seniors, and other people for whom their landline is the only option in an emergency.

Aunt Mae has a monitoring services that relies on her phone line. She wears a button around her neck that she can press in case of an emergency, and it will automatically call the service so they can take action, such as call the police or an ambulance. What if her phone service is out for two weeks and she falls? What about her, Verizon?

FreeMarker TextMate Bundle

2008-03-21T11:21:00.001-04:00

I had been using this for a while, and it only recently occurred to me that it might be useful to someone else. So, I finally motivated myself to create a Google Code project for my admittedly still very minimal Freemarker Bundle. I posted about it a few days ago on the mSpoke blog, but I figured I might as well give it a shameless plug here, too.

Here’s the first version. If you find it useful, drop me a comment here or there, and suggestions are most certainly welcome.

The list

2008-03-17T22:36:00.000-04:00

Since we usually do our big weekly grocery shopping trip on Saturdays, it has been easy for us just to buy Aunt Mae’s groceries at the same time. She usually calls on Saturday morning to give us the list.

As you may have guessed from other things I’ve written, Aunt Mae is not only an incredible cook, but also downright hillarious. So, getting the list is, like most things we do with her, usually quite entertaining.

The list usually starts out small, with about five items (of course, as you’ll see, an “item” might be something like “twenty boxes of pudding”). After that, she’ll say “that should do it, honey … oh, except for…”, and then she’ll add a few more items. Then, “I think that’s it, except for…”, and add a few more. After shopping, we usually find that our grocery cart is two-thirds Aunt Mae.

Not only do we get the list of items she needs, but also a small story about each. For example, last weekend, she needed four packages of cream cheese. Three of them were for the cheesecake that she was going to make when so-and-so came over this week. And by the way, did you know that so-and-so’s daughter and her family are doing well? They live in this-place-or-that now, and she hasn’t really seen them since they were in visiting so-and-so. The other box is for bagels, of which she still has plenty. She didn’t eat many last week, because she wasn’t in the mood for bagels. She did eat quite a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, though, you know.

Oh, and did you know that so-and-so is other-so-and-so’s cousin?

“That should do it, honey … oh, except for…”

Do people even read the grocery store fliers anymore? You know, the ones that list all the stuff the store has on sale for which you don’t even need a coupon? Aunt Mae does.

When there are big specials, like twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding for $10, she gets twenty. Do people these days even know what to do with twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding? Or twenty boxes of anything, for that matter? Aunt Mae does.

Last week, she noticed that hams were on sale. Not ham, like coldcuts, or slices of ham, but hams. She wanted a fourteen pound ham. The smallest I could find was a fifteen pounder, which was fine with her. Do people these days even know what to do with a fifteen pound ham? Aunt Mae does.

God bless you, Aunt Mae.

Rain X stuff

2008-03-10T12:03:00.000-04:00

Recently, I got an offer from Rain X to try their new Latitude wipers. I don’t know if I actually needed new wiper blades, but I hadn’t changed them since I got my car in 2004, so I convinced my frugal side to give the Latitudes a try. They came as part of a kit along with Rain X glass cleaner, glass treatment (their claim-to-fame product), and a microfiber cleaning cloth.

The glass cleaner came in an aerosol can, rather than a typical blue stuff spray bottle. When you spay it on, it foams. I used the cleaner and microfiber cleaning cloth to clean all the windows of my car. Beforehand, they were dirty. Afterward, they were clean. I’m not sure that it worked any better than the blue stuff. I’d probably only buy it again if it’s cheaper, or is more environmentally friendly. I have no idea about either yet.

The microfiber cloth is actually quite nice. It has little pockets in the corners for your fingers so you can easily get the cloth into the nearly unreachable inside corners of your windshield.

The Latitude wipers are the newer “beam” style assembly, with a single curved, springy beam that is supposed to evenly distribute the wiper pressure across the windshield, as opposed to standard wipers which have several “pressure” points, according to the Rain X marketing department. The wipers have some weight to them, and feel like a quality product. They were fairly easy to install, although I had some trouble when trying the different adapters.

When I placed my order, their web site guided me to the correct driver and passenger wipers sizes for your year, make, and model, which was great. After I installed the Latitudes, I sprayed water on the windshield to test them. They completely missed a four inch wide, six inch long swath right in my field of vision. My first instinct was that I installed them incorrectly. A quick look at the instructions revealed that it was reversed, left to right. I couldn’t imagine how this would make a difference, based on the design, and sure enough after I fixed it, the wiper still missed the same large swath.

I decided to try the other adapter in hopes that it was a bit larger and would cause more pressure on the blade. It was a pain to change, and involved using a screwdriver to pry things. I can understand that, since you don’t want your wiper assembly flying off at high speed, but still overly tough. Unfortunately, neither adapter allowed the blade to contact the windshield fully in this one area. Since that pretty much defeated the purpose, I gave up and put my old wipers back on.

The Rain X glass treatment works pretty well. I had used it, or something similar (I think it was Rain X brand, but can’t remember for sure), about 8 years ago, and remember it working well.

At low speeds (under 30 mph) with light rain, water beads instantly, but you still need to use your wipers intermittently to clear the water. Heavy rain runs down and off the windshield at low speed, and amazingly enough, you can still see clearly and only use your wipers as needed. At higher speeds (over 40 mph), light and heavy rain are blown up and off the windshield. This higher speed effect is quite nifty to see, and works surprisingly well at keeping the windshield clear even in fairly hard rain. Of course, you should still use your wipers as needed.

There is a gray area between “low” and “high” speeds where the airflow over the windshield holds even larger water beads in place. I’ve had to use my wipers more in that gray area than at either low or high speed.

So far, the only downside I’ve found is that under very light rain, the glass treatment can leave a light haze on the windshield after clearing it with the wipers. It doesn’t hamper visibility, but it is definitely noticeable. I don’t know how long a single application of the glass treatment will last. I’ve heard 2-3 months. It only takes a few minutes to apply, so that’s probably long enough not to be annoying.

I’ve read in several places that PPG Aquapel is at least as good, and may last a good bit longer. If the Rain X doesn’t last 2-3 months, I may give the Aquapel a try later in the spring.

Perforation

2008-03-07T10:04:00.001-05:00

Is it just me, or does perforated cardboard never seem to do what it’s supposed to? I always end up either mostly shredding the parts that aren’t perforated as the tear shoots off in some random direction, or tearing the perforation so slowly and carefully that it may as well not even be there in the first place.

At work, we have a Keurig single cup coffee maker. We get our coffee singles from Green Mountain Coffee (Keurig seems to be heavily marketed through Green Mountain, are they subsidiaries?). I’ll admit that although I like drip-brewed coffee better, the coffee singles are actually pretty good.

Anyway, the coffee singles come in boxes that are perforated on one corner, kind of like the 12 packs of soda that are meant for your fridge. They also have this nice cutout for your thumb or finger on one edge of the perforation. Apparently its purpose is to lure you into thinking that you can just insert your thumb or finger, pull, grab a single and brew. It never fails that I partially destroy these boxes while trying to use the obvious approach.

The perforations on those damn 12 packs never seem to work out either.

I don’t get it. Perforations really seem like they should work. If I had more free time, I’d invent a better way, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll just complain-blog about it.

YATTMBU

2008-03-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

Yet another Trac TextMate Bundle update. This one adds a hot key for formatting text as ~~strikethrough~~, which was a pretty obvious oversight in my last update! It works just like the bold and italic hotkeys.

You can check out the (mostly uninteresting) Change Log, or just go grab version 1.1.3.

Small Trac TextMate Bundle update

2008-03-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

I’ve been using Trac across two jobs for about the past 5 years, and until a coworker pointed it out to me yesterday, I never knew that it had wiki syntax for strikethrough by surrounding text with double tilde. For example, ~~Text to be struck~~ will appear as ~~Text to be struck~~.

I ended up using it quite a few times over the past two days, so I decided to add a scope to the TextMate bundle. Now, anything that is struckthrough using the double tilde syntax will be scoped in TextMate as markup.deleted.tracwiki. I chose that over markup.strike or markup.strikethrough because many of the themes I have do not have formatting for the latter two, but do for the former.

Check out the Change Log and grab version 1.1.2.

Electrons

2008-02-28T21:42:00.001-05:00

Tonight, Aunt Mae called and asked why she was seeing two of everything. After my initial panic of some potentially serious health condition passed, we determined that she had somehow accidentally activated the Picture In Picture feature of her television.

I asked her to try finding the “PIP” button on her remote, but she couldn’t find it. So, I asked her to try turning off the TV and then turning it back on to see if the PIP would just “go away”. In my fairly-electronics-aware geek brain, the TV might revert to PIP-off on reboot.

“Oh honey, I tried that, but I’m still seeing two of Hillary,” she said. I chuckled, and sympathized.

“Maybe I didn’t leave it off long enough.”

That’s when I was reminded that her understanding of the universe is vastly different from mine. In her mind, the length of time that the TV was off could somehow cause a different outcome when she turned it back on.

It’s not that the electrons might disperse a few microns more, and thus never re-collect to activate the PIP function. In Aunt Mae’s universe, there are no electrons.

To finish the story, it turned out that a few minutes after we hung up, we simultaneously realized that, like most households, Aunt Mae has thirty-some remotes. The phone rang as I was starting to dial her number. We found the PIP button on the correct remote, and she was back to one Hillary. Whew.

Thanks, JD

2008-02-01T10:53:00.001-05:00

Last January, when I was unemployed for a while, doing the job search thing and driving to interviews almost every day, I got used to quickly backing my car out from the garage onto the carport, a space off to the side of our driveway where Lor parks her truck, and then taking off down the driveway. I got a little too accustomed to it, apparently, as I did the same routine while Lor was home, and the (old) truck was parked there. Imagine my surprise when the car came to a sudden, and fairly loud, halt as I backed square into the truck. It left a nice hole in my rear bumper, a nice bow in the left side of my trunk line at the seam, and several spots of chipped paint.

Better yet, Lor was in the car when it happened. Fortunately, it didn't really hurt the truck at all.

A few minutes later after the humiliation died down, it all became very funny, as those things usually do. We decided that since the car was still perfectly drivable, we would wait a while to get it fixed, at least until I had found a job, and we had finished the bathroom remodel.

So here we are one year later, and we finally got it fixed. This was our second dealing with JD Auto Body in Verona. The first was with my 2000 Jetta, which we guess was the victim of a toppled 4x4 post in the Home Depot parking lot. JD did an excellent job then, and so we went back.

They did an excellent job once again. The estimate was reasonable (they did estimates for both repairing and replacing the bumper), were able to get me on their schedule within a week, let me drop off and pick up when it was convenient for me, and were friendly the whole time.

To my admittedly untrained eye, they did a great job with the repairs. I had them fix some scratches and nicks on the front bumper in addition to repairing the rear. Both turned out looking brand new. The seam that they repaired between the trunk and the rear left panel is tighter and more aligned than the factory seam on the other side.

While I'm sure they had to wash the car to work with clean bumpers and to match the paint, they really washed it. Honestly, it is the cleanest it has been since we drove it off the lot back in 2004. It looks like a new car.

So, if your car needs body work, I highly recommend JD.

The scoop on poop

2008-01-27T20:19:00.001-05:00

I was on my usual drive home from the park'n'ride after work the other day, when I heard something very unusual on the radio, the word "poop". That's not usually a word one hears on NPR. So, I tuned my ears in a bit more and learned that, oddly enough, there is an exhibit on poop at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, The Scoop on Poop.

I'm sure it's all in the name of science, but when I got home, Lor and I couldn't help but laugh about it. A bit later, she said "You should tell Mike." The thought of Mike Rowe doing a bit on poo at the Carnegie Museum was just too funny of a thought to resist. So, I waded through the astounding amount of Flash on Discovery Channel's website and posted a message to the Dirty Jobs suggestion board. Who knows, maybe Mike will stop by.

Pee-freezin' weather

2008-01-20T20:34:00.001-05:00

Last year we had booger freezin' weather and light switch freezin' weather. Today, we had pee-freezin' weather. Sera is somewhere around twelve years old (we rescued her, and so we aren't exactly sure how old she is), and her bladder can't quite make it through the night anymore. So, today, Lor got up at 5am to take her out. A bit later, around 7:30, I got up to let the other two out, and found a frozen puddle just outside the back door. Now that's cold.

Christ is Born! Give Glory! in 25 words or less

2007-12-20T21:40:00.001-05:00

Album: Christ is Born! Give Glory!
Composer: Kastalsky, Glagolev, Finley, plus many traditional melodies with contemporary arrangments. See liner notes at archangelvoices.com
Artist: Archangel Voices
Conductor: Dr. Vladimir Morosan

Rating: ★★★★☆

Excellent, refined followup by this talented small ensemble has beautiful blend and dynamics, clear diction, and excellent musical selections, the best of their albums.

Find it at archangelvoices.com

In my review of Archangel Voices first album, I mentioned their obvious talent, but also the problems I heard. They have clearly fixed those problems. Their sound is no longer nervous and unsure, but comfortable, refined, and precise. The voices blend beautifully, but also stand out when the time is right.

Archangel Voices are on a path to becoming a world class small ensemble.

Praise the Lord in 25 words or less

2007-12-18T13:29:00.000-05:00

Find it at Amazon.com | iTunes

This is an amazing collection of many Russian Orthodox "standards", and the choral performance itself certainly deserves 5 stars. There are also some less frequently heard selections, which is a very welcome bonus.

I waffled a bit on giving the CD 5 stars overall, though, so I figured I should mention the reasons briefly. First, I believe that some of the selections, while impeccably performed, seem slightly out of place sonically when listening to the overall sound of the album. Track 3, Rachmaninov's "To Thee We Sing", is an example. It doesn't seem to fit in the otherwise well-chosen flow of tracks 1 through 5. If you listen on random, you may never notice this kind of thing.

Second, there are some direction choices that do not make sense to my ears. As one example, on the final track, Tchaikovsky's "Praise the Lord from the Heavens", the second half of the Alleluia section is sung in double tempo (or at least significantly higher tempo). To my ears, it does not work, and is especially noticeable as the closing sound of the entire album.

I am, of course, picking nits. This album is the finest performance of Russian Orthodox master works in my collection.

Nativity Season Concert

2007-12-11T15:15:00.001-05:00

The St. George Orthodox Church Choir will be joining six other choirs for a Christmas Concert on Friday, December 14 at 7:30pm at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral in the South Hills. It will be a truly Pan-Orthodox event with choirs from the Greek, Carpatho Russian, Ukranian, OCA, ROCOR, Serbian, and Antiochian Archdiocese singing Liturgical and seasonal music from their traditions, and then joining together as one choir for the final piece.

Thanks to Holy Trinity Orthodox Church for organizing and sponsoring the event and to Holy Cross for hosting.

Christ is Born!

Trac TextMate Bundle

2007-11-19T20:18:00.000-05:00

I've updated the Trac TextMate Bundle with a major bug fix, and some updates to wiki CamelCase link recognition, including the ability not to link a CamelCase word by prefixing it with !. Thanks to sdevore for reporting the bug, and to Adam for suggesting the addition of preventing CamelCase links.

See the Changelog here, or download the update.

New truck

2007-09-30T20:33:00.001-04:00

We finally said good-bye to Lor’s ‘96 4Runner last week. It was a great truck, and was still going strong after almost 160k miles. We decided we needed something bigger for Home Depot runs, and antiquing. So, Lor found a used 2006 Toyota Tundra Limited double cab with only 14k miles on Autotrader—quite a find, so we’ve been told. We got it from Land Rover of North Hills, and they gave us a great deal, and were very nice to deal with. The previous owner apparently trades in his current vehicle once a year (or more) for whatever happens to suit his mood. Good deal for us.

He also loaded the truck up with some nice extras that we basically got for no cost. It has what looks like a fairly expensive set of off-road lights (I’m no off-road light connoisseur), on a huge bumper/grille protector. It has running boards, a bed liner, a hydraulic hard cover for the bed, and a bed extender! He also installed a satellite radio, which still seems to have an active subscription.

We probably won’t get much use from the lights, as nice as they are, so we may try to eBay them. They do look pretty cool (if slightly intimidating), though, so maybe we should keep them for effect.

That’s two vehicle ironies in the past month. My small-but-mighty wife drives a big intimidating truck, and my dad, the most humble and understated person I know, drives a 263 horsepower rocket with a wing on the back.

Feedhub.com goes live!

2007-09-24T09:05:00.001-04:00

It’s been a lot of hard work by the very dedicated and talented folks with whom I work, and we’re all very excited to get it out there for everyone to try. So, if you use or know about RSS, go check out feedhub.com. We hope you like it!

Prepay more

2007-09-22T11:52:00.001-04:00

Recently, a friend asked me to look into mobile prepaid plans because she only uses her mobile for emergencies and wanted to try to reduce her monthly bill. She had heard from another friend that prepaid plans might be a good way to save money. Her current service is through Verizon, so we decided to check their prepaid plans first. So I did a little homework.

Verizon has 2 prepaid plans, EasyPay and INpulse.

The EasyPay plan doesn’t sound like it would save any money, as there are two versions of it and the lesser expensive one costs $50 per month. So unless she is already spending more that $50 per month, that’s probably not a good option. It also includes things that I know she will never use, like text and picture messaging.

The INpulse plan sounds good at first, but when you look at the details, it starts to sound less attractive. First off, there is a $.99 per day fee, regardless of whether you use your phone or not. That means there is a minimum of approximately $30 per month without ever making or receiving a call. Then, each minute costs $.10.

This is where it gets tricky.

The minutes expire, and how soon they expire depends on how many you buy at a time. The more you buy in one chunk, the longer they last. It appears that you have to buy a minimum of $15 worth of minutes at a time (approx 150 minutes), and at that amount, the minutes expire after only 30 days!

That means she would have to spend approx $45-$50 (with fees and taxes) per month to have 150 minutes per month. Hmmm, sounding like less of a good deal.

I decided to compare these prepaid plans with the regular monthly plans. They have a basic plan for $40 per month that includes 450 minutes. I’m pretty sure this is the plan my friend has currently, and I’m also sure she would never use 450 minutes in a month (probably not even in a year). After fees and taxes, this would probably be around $45-$50 per month.

It appears that the minimum you can spend per month to have service from Verizon is realistically around $45-$50. If you go prepaid, then you only get 150 minutes in that month, and if you go regular, you get 450 minutes.

The only benefit I can see to the prepaid plans is that they might be slightly cheaper if you are willing to buy minutes in large chunks so that they don’t expire so quickly, and you don’t want to be locked into a contract. Otherwise, I can’t really see any benefit. Am I missing something?

If you know of a carrier that provides a relatively inexpensive prepaid plan that would be good as an emergency plan, please let me know.

0 to 18

2007-08-27T21:52:00.001-04:00

Last Monday evening, we went from no kids to an eighteen year-old, when our nephew moved in to go to start his college career at the nearby Penn State branch campus. We had been planning on it for a few months, but he called on Monday at 2:45pm to tell us he was leaving in fifteen minutes to bring his stuff and move in. He lives an hour away, and we thought he was coming on Thursday. Ah, teenagers.

His major is Computer Science. Coincidentally, someone asked me recently if I would encourage my kids to be interested in computers. While I probably haven’t had much influence on my nephew’s interests, I have to say that I’m looking forward to talking to him about his classes, and helping out if he needs.

Tonight he cooked dinner for us: Princess Chicken, from his favorite “Everything Chinese” cookbook. It was a little weird to sit back and let someone who is not me or Lor cook dinner, but we managed, and the chicken turned out to be quite delicious. Maybe we can convince him to cook more often …

Like most things, I’m sure it will have its ups and downs, and I’m sure it will be an adventure for all of us. He’s a great kid, though, so Lor and I agree that the ups are going to be much more frequent than the downs.

Mac Salad

2007-08-15T08:52:00.000-04:00

Lori left this note for herself last night. When I noticed it in the morning today, my nerd brain immediately tried to make an Apple-related news headline out of it.

Of course, it had nothing to do with Apple, Macintosh computers, or anything remotely geeky at all. This past weekend we hosted two pool parties and ended up with a refrigerator-full of leftovers. Lori decided to bring the rest of the macaroni salad to her work luncheon on Thursday.

I suppose that makes me a nerdy fan-boy. So be it.

Moving back to .Mac

2007-08-09T13:16:00.001-04:00

With Apple’s latest space bump to 10 gigs for .Mac accounts, I decided to move my sheet music from my box.net account to my .Mac iDisk. With the larger space, and OS integration, there’s just no good reason not to use it now.

You can find the files on my iDisk now. The files are still available at box.net, but won’t be for long.

Stop here

2007-07-20T09:28:00.001-04:00

In the morning today, I noticed that one of the signs at a fairly busy red light on the drive to the park’n’ride had been changed from “Stop here on red” to “Stop here on red to activate sensor.” I’m sure most people have seen both versions of this sign, but today I was running late, and I noticed that my reaction to the revised wording was different than to the original.

My initial reaction to “Stop here on red” is that it is a forceful command, with no indication of either what the consequences to me will be if I do not (although crashing into another vehicle is certainly one fairly obvious consequence), or the benefit to me if I do stop there. I think my tendency is to ignore, or even question the authority of the sign.

On the other hand, my reaction to “Stop here on red to activate sensor” was that I wanted to stop right here because I perceived that doing so may cause the light to turn green a little more quickly, and so I might not miss the bus.

It may seem like a fairly trivial moment in the day, but I’ve found that drawing on all the little day-to-day experiences like this one helps me to think about, design, and implement a better user experience.

Masses et Motets de la Renaissance in 25 words or less

2007-07-19T21:29:00.000-04:00

Album: Masses et Motets de la Renaissance - Musique Sacrée de la Renaissance - Century 8
Composer: Byrd, Monteverde, Palestrina, Tallis, and others
Artist: Various
Conductor: Various

Rating: ★★★★☆

Light, beautiful countertenor and soprano voices shine, and are the reason for listening to this pleasing, if somewhat typical, tour of the genre.

Find it at Amazon.com | Liturgica.com

More pets than people

2007-07-17T08:47:00.001-04:00

I heard an interesting statistic on the Today Show. There are more pets than people in the US. It’s certainly true in our household, with three dogs and two people. Here are some other statistics, as well.

The special

2007-07-11T21:33:00.001-04:00

Because Aunt Mae is such an incredible cook, we almost always have dinner at her house when visiting, but last night, due to some unfortunate circumstances, we ended up at a local Eat & Park for dinner. Fortunately, Aunt Mae is the kind of person around whom you just can’t help but smile and laugh, no matter what the circumstances.

When we were being seated, on the table next to ours was this sign. That brought on a few laughs, and lightened the mood.

When the time came to order, Lor had decided on the cheese-steak. “The regular or the special?” asked the waitress. Lor asked what the difference is, and the waitress answered that the regular comes with american cheese, and the special comes with Cheez Whiz.

In my mind, it’s debatable that american cheese qualifies as cheese, but I’ve always thought of it as at least being a closer approximation to real cheese than Cheez Whiz. I almost laughed out loud at the thought of Cheez Whiz as an upgrade to american cheese.

After the waitress walked away, we all laughed out loud for a bit. When the waitress came back, Lor ordered the special.

Subtitles

2007-06-19T12:30:00.001-04:00

I know the morning news anchors and crew work as hard as anyone else, but even so, they have become a source of humorous morning entertainment for Lor and me.

In the morning today, they ran a short bit on Tiger Woods and his wife having had a baby less than 24 hours after the end of the U.S. Open. During the bit they showed a clip from an interview with him from just after the Open. At the bottom of the screen, they put a typical caption of his name, “Tiger Woods”, and a subtitle, “PGA Golfer”.

While sufficiently accurate, I would think that being the most dominant and recognizable golfer of one’s generation would earn a slightly more distinguished subtitle, or maybe even obviate the need for a subtitle at all.

Maybe soon they’ll have pieces on “George W. Bush”, “Politician”, or “Steve Jobs”, “Guy in black turtleneck”.

Why people hate computers

2007-06-12T10:11:00.001-04:00

The other night we stopped at Lowe’s on our way home to return the one unused box of tile from our bathroom remodel. That’s one box containing twelve tiles. One box, twelve tiles. The new employee working the returns counter started entering information into the returns software on the computer (Having new employees work the return counter because no one else wants to is a bad idea, imho, but that’s another post altogether).

She asked us the standard questions, “Why are you returning the tiles?”, “Phone number?”, etc. She scanned the barcode on the box, and then looked thoroughly confused as the software asked her a question she didn’t understand. “How many units??”, she mumbled. She asked several other employees about it, and after several who didn’t know whether she should enter one or twelve (one box, twelve tiles), they settled on twelve.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be the wrong answer. I learned later that because their inventory system stores the tiles as units by box, the correct answer was one.

Thinking she had entered the right answer, the employee continued through the software to a point where it informed her that she was about to accept a return of twelve boxes of tile.

Oops, but no big deal. She would just need to change the return quantity, or in the worst case, cancel the return and start over, right? Wrong. When she tried changing the quantity to one, the software created a new return item of one box of tile while also keeping the existing twelve boxes. Now the system thought we were returning thirteen boxes of tile.

After several employees came by and stared at the screen, and several calls to managers, who also tried changing the quantity to one (after a while, the system thought we were returning more boxes that we originally bought!), the conclusion was that someone needed to MIS. M … I … S, cue ”Theme from Mission Impossible” (with apologies to Lalo Schifrin).

At this point I thought, ok, she’ll make a quick call on the store phone, and an MIS geek (I can say “geek” because I am one), will swoop in, hit the magic keystroke, and all will be well again.

“What’s the number for MIS?”

“1-800-…”

Uh oh.

It turned out that “calling MIS” meant calling some central Lowes MIS division, probably located inside a concrete bunker, deep inside a mountain somewhere (there’s that theme song again).

She picked up the phone and called. After explaining the problem several times, and being transferred to the “right” person each time, she reached someone who was able to help. Apparently the tech support person on the other end had to use some administrative interface to the massive returns system to delete the return record.

About an hour, and several tons of frustration (ours, and the employees’) later, we had successfully returned our box of tile.

In my experience, the biggest reason people hate computers is because of poor alignment of the computer and software with the natural flow of their jobs and lives. Instead of being designed to function in a way that flows with and augments their lives, most software forces people to change the way they already do things. Worse yet, when the software doesn’t behave intuitively and the user makes a “mistake”, there is no easy or obvious way to correct the mistake or get help, either from the system itself or from a human deep inside a mountain somewhere..

“Just so you know”

2007-06-08T14:56:00.001-04:00

The phrase “just so you know” has started to drive me crazy. When someone prefaces, or ends a statement with “just so you know”, I usually don’t get the impression that he or she actually means “there is benefit to you solely in the act of hearing what I am telling you”. Unfortunately, the impression I usually get is that the person is telling me something in order to influence me to take an action that he/she wants me to take. If the statement is purely informational, and the benefit to me lies solely in hearing it, then there is no need to add “just so you know.”

The real problem, though, seems to be when the statement itself is purely informational, and in no way conveys what action the speaker intends for me to take, but the expectation of action is still there. Then I feel like I should say something like “what do you want me to do with that information?”, which seems quite socially inept and rude, but that’s sure what I’m thinking. Of course, the answer would probably be something like “nothing, it’s just so you know.” Argh.

I really hope that “just so you know” is just another fad phrase, like “you know”, and “so” and that it goes out of vogue soon. Just so you know. Sorry couldn’t resist

On a useless side note, I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post with that many double quotes in it.

LOL: Technorthodox

2007-06-01T21:15:00.001-04:00

I just noticed this post over at Profitable Signals, and I couldn’t resist making my own. Now my useless drivel will be at least slightly more amusing: LOL: Technorthodox

Sticky barcode tea, now with paper bits

2007-06-01T15:31:00.001-04:00

I like loose tea, and a while back, I bought a Bodum stainless, single-cup tea infuser to keep at my desk at work (I don’t quite qualify as a tea snob, though). When I decided to make my first cup of tea with it, I opened the crinkly plastic packaging and removed the strainer and lid to find that stuck onto the bottom of the strainer, covering nearly all of the holes, was a product barcode tag.

Surely, I thought, given Bodum’s emphasis on functional design, this would be one of those vinyl tags with the nice post-it-note-like adhesive that just peels right off. I might have to run it under some warm water to get rid of the last little bit of residue, but then I’d be ready for a nice cup of tea.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be the paper variety with the unnecessarily strong adhesive. The ones that come off in bits the size of grains of rice and leave their sticky backing firmly attached to the product.

I prefer milk and honey in my tea, rather than ink, paper, and glue, so hopefully soaking the thing for a while will get rid of the tag remnants.

In general, I like Bodum products. My experience has been that they typically do what they say they will, and have nice design aesthetics. While I don’t know for sure that the tag was put there by Bodum (I bought it on Amazon), it seems like it was since it had a bright red Bodum logo on it. I do know, however, that the tag turned a potentially nice product into a very frustrating initial experience.

23

2007-05-30T13:34:00.001-04:00

Until a few years ago, my definition of a “good bike ride” was going more than 50 miles and breaking 50 mph at least once. I didn’t think twice about the little bits of gravel lying in wait around that next downhill hairpin turn.

Over the past few years, though, my definition has evolved. These days a “good bike ride” is any ride that involves fresh air and doesn’t involve sudden deceleration.

For as long as I’ve been riding in Pittsburgh (which, in the grand scheme of things is not all that long), I’ve ridden with an “11-21” cassette in the back. For non-bike-nerds, that means the cogs on the back wheel range from the smallest cog with eleven teeth to the largest cog with twenty-one teeth. In very simple terms, smaller cogs with fewer teeth are for going fast, and larger cogs with more teeth are for climbing hills. Twenty-one tooth cogs happen to be the smallest large cog you will find on a typical road bike.

Some people would probably consider a 21 to be somewhat insane inappropriate for the terrain around Pittsburgh, but it has always felt right to me. That is, until this year. My lungs and legs are complaining.

I think it may be time for another evolution. I haven’t hit 50 miles or 50 mph in a single ride in a good while, and I think it’s time to buy a 23.

Awake?

2007-05-29T12:29:00.001-04:00

While standing at the bus stop today, I was looking up the hill, the opposite way from which the bus approaches, at the line of cars (now a regular morning thing due to construction on Rt. 28) turning into the school. I must have zoned out because suddenly the bus was there, door open, and the driver was looking at me over his glasses.

Speaking of the driver, I had never seen him before. He was not one of our three regulars. The bus was empty when I got on, which, if memory serves, has never been the case before. I walked to my regular seat wondering if my alarm would go off any second now, and I would wake up in bed.

The bus went several stops before anyone else got on. Another regular walked back to her seat. I managed a “Good morning”, but she didn’t respond, which only added to the feeling that I was actually still asleep.

Must have been the long weekend.

Design flaw?

2007-05-29T07:14:00.001-04:00

As I’ve hinted at before, I’m not a big fan of the Pittsburgh Mills. The other night, we went there to see Shrek the Third. Before the movie, we stopped for a quick bite in the food court.

One might think, with the sheer number of malls being built these days, that there would be some sort of template or at least a laundry list of things to include in a mall food court. One might also be tempted think that said template would include a bathroom.

As far as we could tell after several minutes of searching, there is no bathroom in the food court. You either have to go into the movie theatre, whose bathrooms require a movie ticket to use, or walk out of the food court into the shopping area of the mall. Check the map, and you’ll see that it’s a pretty good distance to the nearest public restroom.

Strategic decision to get people out of the food court and into the shopping area, or silly design flaw?

New favorite screensaver

2007-05-28T20:32:00.001-04:00

My colleague, and fellow Mac advocate, Evan always seems to find the coolest screensavers. I’ve been running several of his finds over the past couple of months, until I stumbled onto EuclideanGarden a few weeks ago. So, here’s a bit of payback, Evan. It is definitely my new favorite. Static screenshots just can’t do it justice. Trees grow, leave, bloom, turn, and even sway in the wind. Beautiful.

Well done, Phillip Nguyen.

I’ve always had a fascination with fractals and L-Systems, and I have to imagine that is what EuclideanGarden is based on.

S. Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in 25 words or less

2007-05-18T21:21:00.001-04:00

Album: S. Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
Composer: Sergei Rachmaninov
Artist: Moscow Chamber Choir
Conductor: Vladimir Minin

Rating: ★★★★★

A world-class performance. The dynamics, the blend, the balance! I was nearly brought to tears by “The Lord’s Prayer” the first time I listened.

Find it at Amazon.com

Trac TextMate Bundle update

2007-05-06T20:48:00.001-04:00

Had to write a few more Trac wiki pages recently, and in the process I took a little time to update my Trac TextMate bundle. See the Change Log for details, and snag version 1.1 here.

Bathroom, it works!

2007-05-06T20:01:00.001-04:00

We have a working bathroom! The vanity, tub, and toilet are all plumbed and usable now. We are also incredibly pleased with how everything came together. The tub fixtures are even nicer than we had hoped (I suppose they darn well better be given what we paid for them!), and the fact that they came with matching drain, waste, and supply sections is nice. Not only does it complete the look, but it also meant we didn’t have to go try to find ones to match.

Despite being fully functional, we still have a good bit left to do. Most notably, there is no door! We have the door, and we’re in the process of staining it, so hopefully we can hang it this week. We still need to hang the mirror as well.

There are other things like finding a nice shower curtain, drapes for the window, playing with the lighting a bit, etc. but hopefully we’re in the home stretch now.

Check out the latest photos.

Storm casualties, perspective

2007-05-02T09:36:00.001-04:00

IMG_2565 by bcavalier.

We were out during most of the storm last night. when we got home, we found that the wind had pulled the flagpole mount, flagpole, flag, and masonry anchors still attached, out of the brick wall to which it was mounted.

When we pulled into the driveway and saw the flagpole hanging down by the last anchor, we were certainly impressed and also bummed that we’d have to remount the thing this weekend.

Now I can’t help but feel a bit silly, since some people lost much than a few screws and masonry anchors.

Wind generator

2007-04-26T20:51:00.000-04:00

It’s really amazing how much wind there is downtown. Before I started commuting, I thought the street level would be shielded from the wind, but it seems to be nearly the opposite. The wind is actually funneled into the streets. Since that restricts the available air space, the wind is more intense. Remember that old gradeschool question about in which pipe the water flows faster, the one with the larger or smaller diameter?

There’s something else going on, though. As I walk from one of my various morning bus stops, the wind gets more intense. Standing 20 feet from USX, you get blasted by wind that somehow seems to come directly from the building. Sometimes, even while standing in the revolving door opening, the wind can be impossibly intense, hitting you right in the face.

I think there’s some sort of top secret wind generating machine somewhere in the basement. Maybe the Smoking Man knows …

Elevator

2007-04-25T18:52:00.000-04:00

For several minutes yesterday, I thought I would be spending the evening in a USX elevator. Several minutes may not sound like a long time, but when you're locked inside a 4x4x8 metal box, the minutes certainly feel longer.

I and another person from my floor got on the elevator after work, and, as usual, the elevator started its quitting-time-stop-on-every-floor descent. At the next floor down, it slowed, but didn’t quite stop. It continued to move down at an almost imperceptibly slow pace for about 20 seconds, until it finally stopped, and the doors opened. Whew, that was weird … dodged a bullet there, I thought.

A few more people got on, and we started again for the next floor down, where it happened again. Slow … 20 seconds later, stop. At this point I was just waiting for the lights to go off or for sirens to sound—some signal of the impending elevator break down, or the thing somehow locking in place for a few hours.

My guess is that things like this happen more often than you might think, as I’ve seen some other bizarre elevator quirks at USX. I’ve gotten on elevators whose doors would never close, and thus would never go anywhere. There are regularly elevators in the lobby that beep incessantly, doors open, “ooh, ooh, pick me! pick me!” The Venus Flytrap of elevators?

Anyway, it happened at two more floors, but thankfully each time the elevator did its thing, albeit very slowly, and we all eventually made it to the ground floor.

Bathroom remodel progress

2007-04-20T16:58:00.001-04:00

IMG_2528.JPG by bcavalier.

I took some rather uninteresting photos of the latest progress. Now that the drywall is up and the cement board is down, it's starting to look like a room. The overall appearance probably won't change much over the next few days, until the radiant flooring and tile arrive next week.

Taste the Fountain of Immortality in 25 words or less

2007-04-16T06:51:00.001-04:00

Album: Taste the Fountain of Immortality
Composer: Traditional Valaam, Znamenny, and other Chants
Artist: Valaam Brotherhood Choir
Conductor: Unknown?

Rating: ★★★★★

Excellent musical settings, both simple and sophisticated, and extraordinarily pure, precise male voices create harmony that must be heard to be believed.

Find it at Liturgica.com

Wearing bamboo

2007-04-13T09:45:00.001-04:00

I bought this shirt from Sahalie because I liked the colors and the style. It also happens to be made from 70% bamboo (the other 30% is cotton). I never considered the possibility of bamboo fibers being woven into cloth. Fairly stylish, kinda stretchy, mostly renewable, and size medium actually fits.

Bathroom remodel, day 1

2007-04-12T20:25:00.001-04:00

Our contractor started the demolition today, and judging from the pile of rubbish in the dumpster, and the shell of a room that I came home to, it was a good day. We would have loved to do this ourselves, but right now we just don’t have the time to take on a project of this magnitude, especially when it usually takes us four times longer than people who know what they are doing.

Check out the latest pics.

Planet Earth again

2007-04-09T19:16:00.001-04:00

Did you watch it last night? It was amazing once again. IMHO, it’s the most beautiful and informative show on TV right now. If you didn’t catch it, here’s what you missed:

Birds catching fish 130 feet underwater.
A sparring match between a penguin and a seal.
Incredible time-lapse footage of starfish. They move so slowly that this would have been impossible (and ridiculous) to show, but in time-lapse it was quite nifty.
Probably the most amazing super slo-mo footage ever captured of a great white shark leaping several feet out of the water to catch a seal (it’s about 1:20 into the clip, and shown again from a different angle at 2:09).

If you did watch, and you have HD, please invite me over so I can watch it in HD next week! I'll bring chips and salsa.

Pineapple lopsidedown cake

2007-04-07T16:18:00.001-04:00

Aunt Mae is one of the best cooks I know. She’s the kind of good cook that results from fifty-some years of cooking for a family of 4 kids, and armies of relatives on every holiday. She uses real butter because lard is tough to find these days. She keeps a full side of lamb in her basement freezer. She uses the forty year old cheesecake recipe that doesn’t list Splenda as an ingredient. Her mistakes are more delicious that my well-planned meals.

The other day, she made pineapple upside-down cake. Somehow she had managed to put the rack into the over with one side higher than the other. The batter slid to the lower side, and consequently, the cake turned out thick on one side and pancake-thin on the other. We dubbed it “pineapple lopsidedown cake”. It was, of course, delicious.

Live bait

2007-04-02T21:40:00.001-04:00

The other night, we went to see our niece and nephew in the opening night of their high school musical, Seussical. It was wonderful. That’s not what this post is about, though. The high school is in a very rural area, so we passed through some podunk towns, some of which probably don’t even have names, to get there. In one of them, we saw a Live Bait vending machine. It was a vending machine just like any other, but instead of dispensing canned or bottled beverages, this one dispensed live fishing bait. It even had fishing-related logos and graphics on the front and sides, and buttons to select from the various types of bait it could dispense.

It’s all about location and demand.

Having grown up in a tiny town in WV, population 1100, I feel ok about using the word "podunk".

I'm shrinking

2007-03-30T09:56:00.001-04:00

On a related note to shirts not fitting, clothing sizes in general seem to be quite ridiculous these days. I’m about 5 ft. 11 in., and usually somewhere between 150 - 160 lbs., and have been for about 10-15 years. The shirt I ordered was a men’s medium, and you could have put two of me into it.

Last year, I tried to buy a new pair of swimming trunks, and eventually gave up, because every pair I found that I actually liked came in nothing smaller than size medium, which was too big. I have a 30 inch waist … is that really not medium anymore?

Lor and I have noticed over the past 5-6 years that women’s clothing sizes have, shall we say, adjusted. About 6 years ago, Lor was a size 4, then a size 2, now she has to look for size 2 clothes that run small, or even size zero. Size zero. Pretty soon, she’ll have to look for size negative 2 in some weird specialty shop.

Thinking past it

2007-03-29T07:23:00.001-04:00

The other day I received the shirt that I had ordered from The Territory Ahead. It was too big, so I started packaging it back up to return. It came in one of those indestructible plastic shipping bags that many clothing companies are using these days instead of cardboard boxes. I would have had to destroy the bag to get the original shipping labels off. Lori saw me puzzling over what to do, walked over, grabbed the bag and turned it inside out. Presto.

In general, I consider myself to be a very good problem solver, but sometimes I just think myself right past the simplest solution. Lor is really good at those when I overshoot.

Age perception

2007-03-28T09:19:00.001-04:00

On the morning bus today I saw a middle-aged woman, probably in her 50s, watching a movie on her smartphone. On my walk from the bus stop to USX I saw a young man, probably in his early 20s, walking with a cane.

Avoid bus burn

2007-03-26T18:28:00.000-04:00

Here is my little contribution to daily bus commute survival. Don’t sit in the seats all the way in the back on the right (the bus’s right, i.e. “passenger side” of the vehicle). These seats must be directly over the engine or the exhaust because they are extremely hot. That’s hot as in burning through my jeans right now, hot. While I can imagine this might feel toasty for about 5 minutes on a cold day, it is making for an exceptionally unpleasant ride home today.

Planet Earth

2007-03-26T09:20:00.001-04:00

If you’ve watched the Discovery Channel or any of its affiliates at all during the past few months, you’ve probably seen the hype for their “planet earth” miniseries. We watched the first episode last night, and I have to say that it was pretty incredible.

Many of the things they showed had never been filmed before, like a mother and baby giant panda in their den in the wild, and a snow leopard chasing down prey. I won’t give away any more about the content, because I’m sure they’ll repeat the whole series, and the Science Channel is rerunning the latest episode on the following Monday night.

Besides the excellent content and narration, I thought the cinematography was impressive. The quality of the film alone seemed to be well above your normal documentary—bright, crisp colors, and incredible definition. We don’t even have HD, and I was amazed.

Some of the shots left me wondering how in the heck they got them, like perfectly steady shots of a huge flock of cranes flying up near the peak of Everest. There was another of a grizzly scavenging for food on a rocky hillside. The shot started with the bear taking up nearly all of the screen, and zoomed waaayyyy back until the bear was smaller than the pixels on my TV, and the mountain was framed in the screen. I thought lens technology like that was limited to spy satellites and space telescopes.

They showed a lot of time lapse scenes of landscapes, clouds, starry skies, etc., but there was one that seemed just darn near impossible. It was a time-lapse-and-pan that showed a landscape through all four seasons. The camera panned across as the time-lapse whizzed the seasons by. I was blown away by how smooth it all was. That had to be a seriously slow and smooth rotational motor … and how the heck did they keep that camera in place and so steady for 12 months???

I definitely recommend getting your Battlestar Galactica fix some other way next Sunday, and tuning in to planet earth.

Tree

2007-03-21T09:27:00.001-04:00

Maybe it was the intake of a sizable helping of carbon monoxide in the morning nudging my subconscious, but last night Lor and I planted our 2006 Christmas tree in the back yard. On second thought, it was probably just the fact that the weather was nice, and the ground was soft from the rain.

CO geyser

2007-03-20T20:30:00.001-04:00

As I walked to the bus stop, which is the parking lot of a local mechanic, I saw this. I couldn’t figure out what it was until I got fairly close and realized that it was a geyser of carbon monoxide. It was coming from a fairly ingenious setup that allows the mechanics to keep a vehicle running inside while they work on it without them suffocating from the exhaust.

Unfortunately, the fumes are directed out of the garage bay and right into the area of the parking lot where people wait for the bus. So, we were at the mercy of the wind as we waited for the bus today. My life span is probably shorter by a few milliseconds a few seconds …

With the Voice of the Archangel in 25 words or less

2007-03-19T07:50:00.001-04:00

Album: With the Voice of the Archangel
Composer: Bortniansky, Glagolev, Morosan, et. al.
Artist: Archangel Voices
Conductor: Vladimir Morosan

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Angelic female vocal blend, well-performed dynamics and expression, and prayerful mood coupled with excellent musical selections and settings show immense potential, despite some technique lapses.

Find it at Amazon | Liturgica.com | ArchangelVoices.com

From the moment I first heard this CD, I knew Archangel Voices were special. The spirituality was immediately apparent, and the talent is there. That raises the question of why only 3 stars?

On the technical side, there are some pitch and diction problems. These sound to me like they are mostly due to nervousness, lack of rehearsal time, or simply that, at the time the recording was made, the singers had not been together long enough to reach the necessary comfort level with one another. Still, I highly recommend this CD.

I also need to leave room (hint, hint) for rating their subsequent recordings, “Christ is Born!” and “Resurrection!”, both of which I’m planning to review sometime soon.

USB flash drive usefulness?

2007-03-16T09:21:00.000-04:00

I own a 2 GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro. The sheer fact that it is so ridiculously small, and has more storage than many of the computers that I’ve owned (and probably more processing power) gives it a pretty high geek factor. But what the heck can you do with these things that’s really useful?

Using it as just storage seems silly. There is so much free online storage now, and networks are so ubiquitous that using a flash drive solely as storage seems silly. You can get 5 gigs of free online storage at box.net. There are many other similar free storage services, as well as for-pay services that offer huge storage capacities, and there’s even Amazon S3 if you want to take it to extremes.

About the most useful thing I’ve done with mine lately is to use it as a backup disk with Apple Backup. Even that will seem a little silly very shortly, since I just ordered a new Airport Extreme, and I have an external 250 GB USB 2.0 drive sitting at home waiting to be used as network storage. I won’t even have to plug anything into my laptop to have it backed up, it will just happen automagically every night.

My collegue Jim, an IT ninja, says that he would use it to boot TinyLinux for some IT support tasks. He’s the first person I’ve actually known that actually would do this, and it’s probably one of the most viable uses I can think of.

Yeah, there are portable apps for OS X, Linux, and Windows, but how many people really use them beyond the initial geek coolness factor of saying you have FireFox on your keychain?

Vista lets you use a flash drive to “improve system performance”, presumably by using it as cache, swap, or hibernate storage (or all of the above). But soon, that’ll just be integrated into everyone’s laptop. Now, If I could have a complete operating system and my currently saved workspace all on a flash drive that gave me instant-on-and-resume-my-workspace on any machine, that might be useful.

But, unfortunately, that doesn’t exists, and I can’t come up with anything really useful to do with mine. I think the days of the USB flash drive are numbered.

It was bound to happen

2007-03-13T22:11:00.000-04:00

I missed the morning bus today. The 1B passes my street and gets to my stop, which is about a 1 minute walk from the end of my street, around 8:10am. Some mornings it gets there at 8:11, others at 8:15, or 8:09, or even 8:08 once or twice. Today it passed my street at 8:05, when I was about halfway there. The way our road slopes, the bus driver couldn’t see me, and all I could see was the top of the bus as it cruised by. So, I turned around and hopped in the car, my wallet already feeling $14 lighter. Oh well, I guess Id rather just get that out of the way now, so I don’t have to worry about missing it for a while.

Ironically, today turned out to be a great day. Downtown was bright and sunny, rather than cold and shadowy, had some good chinese food for lunch, and I plowed through some serious code.

MBP Waterfield sleevecase

2007-03-12T12:53:00.001-04:00

Here’s what I ordered:

Horizontal Sleevecase, size 15-2
flap (see below for the bonus)
d-rings and suspension strap
horizontal piggyback

The short version is that this thing is bullet-proof, carries just enough beyond the MBP itself to be useful as my sole commuting bag 90% of the time, and the attention to detail is impressive.

The first thing I can say that I liked about my new Waterfield sleevecase is that I ordered it on Monday and it arrived on Wednesday, and I didn’t have to pay for extravagant shipping. That was just USPS Priority, which was one of the lesser expensive shipping options (USPS Priority is underrated, IMHO, but that’s another blog post).

The overall design, and as far as I can tell, the materials, have not changed, and that is a good thing, as it should be as bullet-proof as my tibook sleevecase. The case fits my MBP like an Assos jersey. That’d probably be “like an Armani suit”, but since I’ve never actually worn one, I figured I’d go with the cycling reference. Once again, the interior neoprene suspension design is genius.

D-Rings

The d-rings, shoulder strap clips, and piggyback clips are all metal. The ones on the shoulder strap and sleevecase are quite beefy. The piggyback clips are less so. I’d bet money that they sturdier than equivalently sized plastic clips, though. They also have nice release levers to help you open them since they are so small—very nice attention to detail.

Shoulder Strap

The suspension strap is a very interesting design. I couldn’t find many pictures or a detailed description of it on the site before buying, but I decided to give it a go anyway, betting that if I wasn’t happy with it, I could try to exchange it for a regular strap.

The strap has 3 sections that are sewn together. The two ends where the clips are attached are standard heavy duty shoulder strap stuff. The key is the center section. The underside is made of a very soft and grippy rubber that really does keep it from sliding around. Second, the pad is stretchy, but has another strap sewn onto it that acts like a damper. That’s probably impossible to visualize, so think of the springs and shocks on your car. The first is for absorbing impact, the second for keeping the springs under control. It’s a clever design. I can’t really say how much it changes the dynamic of carrying the bag, but I can say that overall the shoulder strap is very comfortable.

It is also adjustable in two places, instead of just one, which allows you to position the pad correctly no matter how long or short you make the strap. Attention to detail.

Piggyback

The piggyback is my favorite part of the package. It lets me carry the extra bits that I need, which makes the sleevecase usable as my daily commuter. It clips to the same d-rings as the shoulder strap, and it holds more than I thought it would. I’ve carried the following without having to cram: MBP power brick, ipod and headphones, small moleskine and pen, cell phone charger, and a Balance Bar. The inside is lined with some super-soft alien material, and has one large main compartment and two smaller pockets. The zipper is metal (a good thing, imho) and has a zipper pull tab that I can easily grab while wearing gloves. The piggyback also has a small rain flap (details, I say!). It’s a lot of usefulness wrapped up into a svelte little package.

The shoulder strap can be attached to the piggyback, so you can carry just the piggyback by itself if you’re so inclined.

In my experience so far, the case and piggyback work together very well. I was afraid that the piggyback would bounce around while carrying the bag, but it doesn’t. The on problem I’ve found with using them together is that the piggyback actually covers the flap on the sleevecase in a way that makes it difficult to open the flap. This hasn’t been a big annoyance so far, and it might be possible to work around it by attaching the piggyback on the back side of the sleevecase and carrying the case with the flap facing toward your body. I may give that a try if the interference becomes annoying.

My only other gripe so far is that I wish the sleevecase had some sort of small carry handle (also one of my complaints about my Timbuk2 messenger), but I knew that before I bought it, so I can’t complain too much.

Bonus

One bonus that my previous sleevecase did not have is the slash pocket on the back. I’m guessing that you get this when you order the flap. Regardless, I’ve found it to be extremely useful so far. It is the perfect size for my aluminum clipboard, or any of several music books.

Conclusion

All in all, I am very happy with my purchase, and I think it’s gonna just right for my daily commute. It’s more streamlined than my Timbuk2, and still holds the few extra things I need.

Accidental bus wardriving

2007-03-09T12:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday on the bus ride home, I popped open the MBP to watch the latest BSG (sorry, couldn’t resist the acronym alliteration). As I typically do, I started to crank down the screen brightness and to turn off Airport in order to conserve power.

When I pulled down the Airport menu, I was surprised at the the huge list of wireless networks. Some are obvious, like “Brueggers_Free_Wifi”, “WifiPittsburgh”. Others are interesting because they are obviously wireless routers being used in their default configuration, probably without WEP or WPA. I don't approve of stealing wireless, but it would be interesting to see which ones are open. I didn’t try, though, since the bus was moving and I’d probably be out of range in a few seconds.

A good morning

2007-03-09T09:34:00.001-05:00

I was listening to my new copy of The Archangel Voices’ Resurrection! for the first time on the bus ride in today. My iPod was set to random, and “Angels in Heaven” started to play. About halfway through the song, Russian bell ringing faded in behind the singing just as I approached St. Nicholas Church. It’s going to be a good day.

Fireplace 2.0

2007-03-08T13:35:00.001-05:00

fireplace by bcavalier.

We finally finished up the fireplace and mantle. I did this quick before and after composite using, of all things, ComicLife (pre-installed on my MacBook Pro). Anyway, I'll spare the long winded details and just point to the photos.

Commuter karma

2007-03-08T13:18:00.001-05:00

I must have a decent supply of good commuter karma built up now. I'm sure it's due in part to the fact that the 3:40 1B never showed up yesterday, so I had to wait for the 4:40 instead. Today, though, I the karma has been in full effect.

Normally, I walk to the end of our street, turn right onto the main road and walk about 200 yards to the bus stop. Today, no sooner did I reach the end of the street, than the bus pulled up, stopped, and opened its door so that I almost didn't even have to break stride to board. There were only two other people on the bus, so I had my choice of seats.

The bus arrived downtown about 5 minutes earlier than usual. I got off the bus and started on my usual route to USX, and my good karma field remained in full swing. The stoplights and crossing signals at every intersection along the way switched at exactly the right time. There was even an elevator waiting for me, and at USX, that is a minor miracle at 5 to 9 in the morning.

Just a while ago, I decided to head out for a veggie burrito at Qdoba. On the way to and from, the crossing signals synchronized along the route I walked. No breaks in stride yet again. I hope it lasts for the commute home.

Of course, now that I've used up so much good commuter karma and blogged about it, I've probably doomed myself to at least a week of bad commutes ...

Timbuk2 messenger bag

2007-03-07T10:50:00.000-05:00

Since I mentioned them when I blogged about Waterfield, I figured it’s only right to give props to Timbuk2. I’ve had my Timbuk2 messenger for at least 10 years now, and aside from having a few spots of ground-in dirt and grime, the thing is still in great condition. I’ve biked with it in torrential downpours, snow, and hail. I’ve crashed with it. It’s been beaten up in many airport checkpoints and smashed into airplane overhead bins and car trunks. It’s even survived an alien attack. Ok, maybe not that last one, but I’ve beaten the thing up in nearly every other way you can imagine, and not a single stitch has come loose.

Amazingly, the velcro still works after 10 years, too.

Like just about everything, there are a few minor things about the bag that could be improved. In fact, Timbuk2 has made several improvements over the past 10 years that solve my main gripes. My biggest ones are the lack of a carry handle, which you can now get in a custom build, and the layout of the interior pockets, which has also been revised.

If I ever need to retire mine, a custom Timbuk2 messenger will certainly be at the top of my list of replacement candidates.

Waterfield

2007-03-06T20:17:00.001-05:00

I've had a Waterfield sleevecase for my aging tibook for nearly six years now. The case still looks like it did the day I received it, even though it's been all over the US, and in and out of my Timbukt2 messenger (another product that I'll probably buy again when the time comes) more times that I can count. The thing is darn near indestructible. I have no doubt that my tibook is still in working order without major dents and gauges because of that sleevecase. The outside “shell” is ballistic nylon, and the inside is a magically suspended neoprene pouch that holds the laptop and acts like a shock absorber. Subtle, but ingenious and effective.

Now that I have a brand new MacBook Pro for work, I needed to get a case for it. The tibook sized sleevecase doesn't quite fit. After looking around at a few others and comparing features and prices, I decided to go with another Waterfield sleevecase. I wanted to be able to carry it as my sole commuting bag this time, so I went with the full deal: flap, strap, and piggyback.

After I ordered it, I was reminded of another reason that I like Waterfield so much: customer service. I got a personal email from Gary. In the email he asked how I found out about Waterfield, so I responded telling him about my experience with the tibook sleeve, and he responded with another personal email. It's pretty clear that not only do they make great stuff, they actually care about it. I feel very confident that if I have a problem with the new case, they'll make it right. That goes a long way to making me want to be a repeat customer in the future.

The case should be here this week, so I'll probably post a bit more about the it then.

Today's interesting commute

2007-03-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

I probably jinxed myself in the morning today by changing my routine around, but whatever the reason, today’s commute was a bit more interesting than usual. I usually shower right when I get out of bed, but today, I decided that I would wait and shower just before leaving the house. The only reason that’s relevant is that my hair was still wet when I got to the bus stop, and it was so cold today that part of it froze. It was actually crunchy when I got on the bus. Luckily it all still seems to be attached to my head.

There were some very interesting characters to watch on the bus. There was the girl who twirled her hair from the time I got on the bus until she got off about 30 minutes later. There was the woman putting on various kinds and layers of makeup while the bus bounced around … it was like watching someone play some strange video game. There was the grandfather letting his granddaughter brush his hair in various crazy directions, none of which came close to his intended hairstyle, I’m sure. That’s what grandfathers do, and it was very sweet to watch. There was lady dressed in fur from head to toe: hat, coat, gloves, pants (not technically fur, but leopard print), and fur tufts on the tops of her boots. Finally, there was the fellow who was very animated at the bus stop, waving vigorously for the bus as if it would pass him by for sure.

After I got off the bus, I walked my usual route across Liberty, in front of the Culinary Institute, where I can usually see the chefs-in-training either preparing breakfast for one another, or all sitting together to eat whatever breakfast one of them had made. When I turned onto Strawberry Way, there was a huge crane in the alley, and I had to walk under the enormous counterweight that keeps the crane from tipping when it’s boom is extended. If walking under a ladder is bad luck, I’m surely in for it.

I never know what manner of interesting smell will be coming from Wiener World. Today, as I approached, it was immediately apparent that the aroma-du-jour was ammonia.

I decided on the way up the USX entry escalator to treat myself to a scone from Starbucks (say all the bad things you want about their coffee, but I do like the scones). The line was quite long, so I got to people watch for a while, which is one of the things I enjoy about being downtown (couldn’t you tell?). Ironically, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary, just the usual bluetooth headset people having their conversations into thin air (slightly hypocritical, as I do this at the grocery store on occasion), and the suits flirting with the female Starbucks baristas. I guess I used up my interestingness karma on the bus ride.

The Essential Tallis Scholars in 25 words or less

2007-03-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

Album: The Essential Tallis Scholars (2 Disc Set)
Composer: Gregorio Allegri, Antoine Brumel, William Byrd, Clemens non Papa (Jacob Clement), William Cornysh, et al.
Artist: Tallis Scholars
Conductor: Peter Phillips

Rating: ★★★★★

Phenomenal compilation that is near perfect technically, yet still warm and enjoyable. A must-listen for all choir singers and conductors.

Find it at Amazon

The music on this CD is not Orthodox. Most of it is Christian in origin, however, from the Renaissance period, and is performed in Latin. Please do not let that dissuade you. While it does lack that certain spirituality many find unique to Orthodox music, this is certainly one of the most amazing compilations in my collection. The selection of pieces is excellent, the performances are near-perfect, and the recording and CD production quality are top-notch.

The Akáthistos Hymn in 25 words or less

2007-03-01T15:33:00.001-05:00

Album: The Akáthistos Hymn (2 Disc Set)
Composer: Ivan Moody
Artist: Cappella Romana
Conductor: Alexander Lingas

Rating: ★★★★☆

Moody's epic composition combines powerful, creative, yet authentic Byzantine melodies with beautiful harmonies. Cappella Romana is bright and balanced, but diction suffers slightly at times.

Find it at Amazon

PL Premium Polyurethane Construction Adhesive

2007-03-01T13:03:00.001-05:00

PL Premium Polyurethane Construction Adhesive is really good stuff. PL’s website claims it is “3 times stronger than ordinary adhesives.” I don’t really know what they consider to be “ordinary”, but this stuff has been plenty strong for anything we’ve used it for, even in high heat areas (like our fireplace). Our carpenter friend swears by the stuff, and has given up Liquid Nails altogether.

A single tube seems to go a long way, and is fairly easy to re-open by just pulling or cutting off the dried adhesive at the tip of the spout. It has pretty balanced open time and curing time. It has stayed malleable long enough for us to do what we need to do, but then seems to cure to rock hard within 24 hours. It’s also reasonably priced, and readily available at a Home Depot near you.

One tip on using the stuff, though. It can be darn near impossible to squeeze out, especially when it is cold, or even cool. Don’t kill yourself. Set the tube near (not on, for goodness sake!) a heating duct, heater, radiator, etc. to warm it slightly. Even so, it can still take some work to get the stuff out, so be prepared.

My life on timers

2007-02-28T08:18:00.001-05:00

Another big adjustment in my transition from working at home to commuting to an office has been that my schedule is now largely dictated by outside forces. My morning and evening commute schedule is tied completely to the bus schedule, for example. Over the past week, though, I’ve discovered a couple more slightly amusing ways in which outside schedules affect my day.

The office lights in USX are on timers. There are no light switches. Want to go into the kitchen and find a fork with which to eat your breakfast at 7am? You’ll be fumbling in the dark … luckily you’ll have the Joust machine to provide a bit of light (but not much, since it’s screen is 90% black most of the time anyway!).

Luckily, the bathroom lights seem to be on by 7am, so I don’t have to aim in the dark. The automatic flush systems, however, are not. No flushing before 7:30am, and presumably no flushing after a certain time in the evening. I’m not sure whether I find this funny, or just plain freaky. A bit of each, I suppose.

The smoking man

2007-02-27T18:34:00.001-05:00

The smoking man rides my bus. I first encountered him late last week, waiting at the bus stop downtown. He was, of course, smoking, and got on the D. Not paying much attention, I sat down in the same end of the bus. As the cigarette smell began to make me ill, I looked up and realized it was the smoking man.

Yesterday, he was at the bus stop again, smoking. In the course of the eight minutes I waited for the bus, he smoked two cigarettes (as a non-smoker that seems impressive). I looked around, but no Mulder anywhere. Rats.

Even if he wasn’t on his way to a date with extraterrestrial espionage, I made sure to keep my distance this time so as not to tempt my cigarette smoke gag reflex again.

I don’t have anything against smokers, per se, except that they smoke, and I do not like smoking. It kills people, and smoking residuals inevitably make their way into non-smoking areas … like the bus.

Russian Orthodox Music in 25 words or less

2007-02-27T14:35:00.001-05:00

Album: Russian Orthodox Music
Composer:Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Bortniansky, Tavener, various others
Artist: Tallis Scholars
Conductor: Peter Phillips

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Some styles may not please. Stunning performances of Stravinsky’s “Otce Nash”, Rachmaninov’s “Lord’s Prayer”, Tavener’s “Great Canon”, and Bortniansky’s “Mnogaya Lieta” will.

This had been an incredibly hard to find album, for whatever reason. Recently, it has appeared on Amazon.com and also appears to be available at CD Universe.

Tube 2.0

2007-02-25T19:58:00.001-05:00

I just ran across this post about a guy using Twitter to broadcast real-time London Tube delays. Now that’s a very useful thing to do with Twitter, and is definitely headed in the direction I had in mind for using Twitter as a message delivery API.

I’d sure love to have this for the 1B and D buses that I now take to and from work every day. PAT are you listening? No? I thought not.

Lay Aside all Earthly Cares in 25 words or less

2007-02-22T09:53:00.001-05:00

Album: Lay Aside All Earthly Cares
Composer: Father Sergei Glagolev
Artist: Cappella Romana
Conductor: Alexander Lingas

Rating: ★★★★☆

A heavenly album of inspired compositions, excellently performed. New, yet ancient. Dynamic, yet practically singable. Exciting, yet absolutely prayerful.

A quick note about this review. The “25 words or less” part was inspired by my friend Jeff who posts 25 word or less movie reviews. I've been wanting to write Orthodox music reviews for a while, but always found myself being too wordy. I'm hoping that limiting myself will allow me to actually get some reviews done. Thanks, Jeff!

This review is also formatted as an hReview. I really like microformats, and was inspired by this review and this subsequent post by John Hicks to format my music reviews as hReviews. Thanks to those examples, it was easy to get an hReview up in Blogger.

TextMate Trac bundle

2007-02-21T12:38:00.001-05:00

I’ve been an avid TextMate user and fan for the past couple of years, and I’ve also used Trac at several jobs now. I never like editing anything substantial, like Trac wiki, pages in a web browser text widget, so I use TextMate’s “Edit in TextMate” plugin exhaustively. Over the past couple of years, those things led to my creating and evolving a Trac bundle for TextMate.

It’s still pretty simple, which I think is a good thing. I haven’t had a need for it to do anything very complex. So far, it has a fairly decent language grammar for Trac wiki syntax that defines some reasonable scopes, following the conventions of markup scopes defined in other bundles. It has several useful wiki formatting snippets and commands, from simple stuff like bold and italic, to a rudimentary snippet for creating tables. It also parses wiki headings (e.g. == My Heading == ), and wiki links as TextMate symbols, so you can jump around in wiki pages easily using the symbol pop-up.

If you’re interested, head on over to the Google Code project page and try it out. Please let me know if you find it useful. Suggestions are always welcome, too.

Adjusting to downtown

2007-02-20T09:42:00.001-05:00

While I don’t like commuting to and from downtown, I actually do like being downtown. However, a few things that I didn’t expect have bothered me a bit over the past week as I’ve walked around downtown.

First, it’s incredibly noisy. We live out in the sticks, and it’s very quiet in our back yard. I’m pretty shocked at the ambient noise level while just walking around downtown. All the cars, buses, people talking, huge HVAC systems, etc. generate a lot of noise. Add to that all the hard surfaces that are reflecting the sound and creating echos, and you’ve got one loud environment. My ears have adjusted, but I still notice it on occasion, especially when trying to make a phone call. I notice myself practically yelling into my phone, and saying “what?” a lot. Of course, by doing so, I’m adding to the ambient noise level.

Second, it’s dark. Ok, not dark like night, but darker than at our house. It bothered me a lot yesterday, because it was a very bright and sunny day. At least, it was at our house. The buildings are so huge and so close together that no sunlight seems to penetrate the city. We don’t have that out in the sticks. Our closest neighbors are a good fifty feet away, and certainly aren’t fifty stories tall. Sunlight was streaming in our windows at home yesterday shortly after 7am, and I’m sure it stayed that way for most of the day. It always looks like dawn or dusk to me downtown, and never like the daytime I've grown accustomed to at home.

Third, it’s cold. It’s been really cold in Pittsburgh lately, but I’d swear there is a 10 degree temperature difference between our front yard and the streets of downtown. The fact that there’s no sunlight makes a big difference, and I can practically feel the cold concrete and steel buildings sucking the heat out of me.

That sounded a bit like a rant, and I suppose it is, but I really do like downtown. I just have to adjust.

A fireplace-tilin' weekend

2007-02-19T10:18:00.001-05:00

On Saturday, we actually laid the tile. Like most things in life, it’s all in the prep work and planning. We managed to come up with a plan to cover the entire facade and hearth without cutting a single tile. The fact that it actually worked is equally amazing. The fact that it only took us four hours is utterly mind-blowing, since this is the first time either of us has tiled anything. We’re usually off by at least a factor of two in estimating how much time our projects will take.

Sunday evening, after the adhesive had set, we started on the grout. It turns out that mixing grout by hand is a bad idea. Join a gym instead, and then go buy a grout mixing attachment for you drill. Seriously, spend the money, and thank me later.

Applying the grout was an on-the-job-learning process for sure, but once we got the hang of it, it wasn’t too bad. When you’re laying 1 inch tiles, though, the grout to tile ratio is very high, so we learned two things. First, you need more grout. Repeat after me: “high grout to tile ratio”. Read the package. Luckily we had enough. Second, it takes a lot longer, but not where you might think.

After this project, I can say that I had two big misconceptions about tile.

1: Tiling is hard.

In fact, laying the tile was very simple. Of course, it really was all in the planning.

2: Wiping excess grout off the tile after you’re done grouting is quick and easy.

(This is the part you never see on Home Depot commercials or HGTV.)

Lies! I am here to tell you that it is neither quick nor easy. I’ll bet, to most people, the word “wipe” implies a nice, relaxed process. However, I’d say that “scrub violently” is more appropriate in this instance. It took 2 hours, lots of trips to the sink to wring sponges, and buckets of elbow grease to get that dang grout off. I’m sure that if you have nice, smooth 12 x 12 tiles it’s a piece of cake. Leave it to us to pick 1 x 1 tiles (that darn grout to tile ratio again), and 6 and 12 inch slate tiles with peaks and valleys like the Rockies. Elbow grease.

In the end, we’re very happy with how it turned out. Hop on over and check out the pics.

Words in my T9 dictionary

2007-02-16T13:03:00.001-05:00

Today, while posting a lunchtime Twitter “waiting for a burrito in the long ass line at qdoba” from my phone, I learned that both “burrito” (2877486), and “ass” (277) are in my Nokia 6682’s T9 dictionary by default (unfortunately, “qdoba” is not).

I don’t know if that’s useful to anyone who isn’t standing in a long ass line waiting for a burrito, but I was both surprised and pleased. It’s the little things, you know.

The next morning bus commute

2007-02-16T10:06:00.001-05:00

In the back of my mind, I just knew I’d shouldn’t have blogged about how smoothly that first morning bus ride was.

I needed to get into work a bit earlier today, so I took a different bus, the D Flyer, from a nearby park and ride. On the bus, I popped open my laptop to do some reading, and shortly after, I heard:

“D Flyer, mechanical emergency”

It took a sec to register, but then I realized that there was no sound coming from the bus—no engine noise, no whiny electrical noises. Uh oh. So much for getting into work early. The bus driver called in to the mother ship, and then quickly herded us out to a nearby bus stop. After only a few minutes, another bus stopped to pick us up, and we were on our way again. The first driver got us back on another bus within minutes on one of the coldest days of the year. I’m sure the he’ll never read this, but …

Thank you, Mr. D Flyer driver from Feb. 16.

This new bus, the 1D, only got within about 6-8 blocks of where I needed to go, so I figured I’d just have a brisk morning walk through the city … if I could figure out which way to walk. It’s probably good that I looked a little confused, because a woman that had boarded the D Flyer with me earlier asked if I knew where I was going. “Uh, well, I know I need to get to the USX building.” She told me to walk to the nearby T stop and take the T to USX. So I did. It’s free to ride in town, and it was about a thirty second ride right into the base of USX. I consider myself a fairly savvy city traveler, although not so much in Pittsburgh, as I’ve never really had to, but I’d have never thought to take the T five blocks. I’m sure she’ll never read this, but …

Thank you, Ms. D Flyer rider who recommended the T.

In the end, I only lost about 10-15 minutes, met some nice people, and learned a few things along the way, so I’ll consider it a good morning, especially when it had the potential to be a very bad one.

The long bus ride home

2007-02-15T16:18:00.001-05:00

After having such great success with Google Transit to find a bus to work, I hit it again to find my route home. Here is one of the routes it came up with.

Seems like it’s probably a routing bug or a problem with the transit data Google is using. Other than this one goof, Transit has been a big help. In any case, I don’t think I’ll be taking that route!

The first morning bus commute

2007-02-15T13:09:00.001-05:00

Ironically, after my first day at mSpoke, the weather got bad enough that I (and most everyone else) worked from home on Tuesday and Wednesday. Since I drove to work on Monday, today was my first day taking the bus to work in the morning.

Before I get to that, though, I just have to say yet again how amazing dogs are. Lubov somehow knew that I was leaving for work today, well before I had done anything that I thought might give it away. He moped around all morning and kept giving me that “I know something different is about to happen and I know I won’t like it” look. Argue all you want, but you’ll never convince me they don’t know.

Anyway, thanks to Google Transit (and no thanks to the dreadful Port Authority website) I found a bus that stops at a reasonable time just a 5 minute walk from the house. So, armed with a book, laptop, and several podcasts (NPR’s daily 5 minute news segment, Fresh Air, and Ancient Faith Radio’s The Path by Fr. Tom Soroka), I comforted the pups and headed out.

It was so cold out again, that when I decided to use my phone (which had been in my pocket and reasonably warm, so I thought) to check Gmail at the bus stop, it wouldn’t even acknowledge that my sim card existed, and rebooted itself repeatedly. It probably needed more coffee, like me. It also took 15 minutes on the bus for my iPod to warm up enough to work at all, and my toes never quite warmed up until lunch time.

I’m all thawed out now, so I can say that I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the bus got me downtown. I had a few minutes to spare, so I even made a detour over to the Port Authority store (or whatever you call it, it’s not a terminal) and bought weekly bus passes for the remainder of February. I still managed to make it into the office by 9.

So far so good with the bus. Hopefully the journey home will be equally painless. Thank you PAT bus 1B, and thanks Google Transit.

Adium is great, but ...

2007-02-14T08:24:00.001-05:00

... why does it eat so much of my laptop?

Over the past few years, I’ve bounced back and forth from iChat to Adium more times than I can count. Until recently, I had been using iChat for quite a while, mainly due to only needing AIM, and the fact that Adium eats my laptop. Many of the folks at mSpoke use Yahoo! Messenger, so I switched back to Adium for integrated AIM/Yahoo messaging. Here’s a snap from Activity Monitor:

That’s with Adium as the frontmost app (snapped with the wonderful Capture widget). I’m using some very simple themes, and when I snapped that, I had no chat windows open, and my buddy list was hidden. Adium consistently hovered around 11 - 13% of CPU time.

Adium developers, what’s going on?

For the record, the CPU usage is similar when my buddy list is visible. The memory usage seems reasonable, but it tends to shoot up when I have message windows open.

Here’s another snap with Adium not as the frontmost app.

Interestingly, in the background (with the same theme settings, no chat windows, buddy list hidden) it eats much less CPU, from about .8 - 1.2%, even though the number of threads is the same. That’s much more tolerable, but it does make me wonder what the heck is going on inside the app when it is in front.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Adium, I just wish it was a bit less resource hungry, especially when I choose to use (what I perceive to be) very simple settings.

Square dancing

2007-02-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

I was out clearing the drive and front steps for the second time today, and one of our neighbors’ kids came walking up the driveway with his snow saucer. He asked if he could sled down the hill in our front yard—the kids are very polite, and they always ask, even though we’ve told them they don’t have to. Here’s a little excerpt from the conversation that made me chuckle.

…

me: “Pretty nice sledding snow, huh?”

him: “Yeah, and it’s even nicer since school was canceled and I don’t have to go to gym class.”

me: “Oh, you don’t like gym class?”

him: “We’re doing square dancing, yuck!”

…

I don’t have anything against square dancing or square dancers, but I’d rather sled, too.

Thoughts from the first day

2007-02-13T08:44:00.001-05:00

A few random thoughts from my first day in four years working in a real office:

Is that a real Joust arcade machine? Cool.
Interaction design actually being scheduled into the development cycle?? That makes me happy.
I miss my coffee maker at home.
I miss my dogs more.
The commute wasn’t that bad. Wait, where’d my evening go?
I have a lot to learn.

Hello mSpoke

2007-02-09T08:16:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I accepted a position as Senior Software Architect at mSpoke. “Another startup??” you ask. Yep. Nearly all of my professional career has been with startups, or small companies/groups that have those aspects of the kind of work environment that I enjoy. The folks at mSpoke definitely have that kind of environment. However, although I can’t give much detail right now, I can say that mSpoke is in a rather unique situation for a startup company, and that is certainly something that helped in my decision making process.

They are an all around great group of folks located in downtown Pittsburgh, and you can check out their site to get more of an idea of what they do. One of the reasons I am so excited about this job is that the problems mSpoke solves are problems that I see and experience on an almost daily basis as an internet user. I understand the huge potential benefits they can provide to me as a user, and to other users who aren’t computer geeks. Another reason is that I can tell the job will make me stretch technically, just as working at Tomo and Adhoc Mobile did.

Of course, because I have been working from home for the past four years, Lor and I have to figure out all the logistics of how to deal with my not being home during most of the work week. It also means it’s time for a wardrobe check. I’m guessing that even though mSpoke is a very laid back place, pajamas aren’t appropriate.

Design and Engineering

2007-02-08T07:38:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, a colleague pointed me to this article, which led to several other sites, including this one. This colleague and I have discussed the issue of the role of graphic and interaction design in software before, and we tend to agree that there’s a lot of embarassingly unusable software out there. However, I feel very strongly that putting the blame solely on programmers misses many of the more important aspects of the problem. It’s an easy cop out to point at the people who wrote the code and say it’s their fault.

To understand where I’m coming from, consider this question: Who created the specification for the visual and interaction aspects of the software to which those developers wrote the code?

One possible answer is that there was no specification for visuals or interactions—not even a napkin drawing. If there was no specification, then it's extremely likely that no one has really thought about it, and by no one I am including the domain experts, customer liaisons and reps, managers (both technical and non-technical), and developers. If no one has thought about it, it seems a bit ridiculous to expect a beautiful, elegant, and highly usable interface to emerge out of sheer hacking or luck. Unfortunately, in my experience, that seems to be an acceptable expectation in industry.

Yet another possible (and typical, in my experience) answer is that the developers themselves created a specification, either in some document or set of drawings (paper or electronic), or in an ad-hoc way, possibly even on the fly as code was being written. One big problem with this is that developers are not trained in design. They are trained in algorithms, data structures, network protocols, etc. In advanced programs, that training can extend to object modeling, software architectures, and even software project management and the business skills necessary for running a software company. Their training may even include the dreaded GUI programming course(s). In my experience, however, it is extremely rare for any areas of the typical computer science or software engineering curriculum to include interaction design concepts such as mental models, metaphors, and affordances, or visual design concepts such as layout, typography, color theory, etc.

The fact is that, most developers simply are not trained in these areas. However, in my opinion, that is the not the problem. The problem, I believe, is that the general expectation of most executives, managers, and developers themselves, is that all developers can do these design activities effectively. To put it simply, developers are expected to do something they were never trained to do.

Developers are very good at solving problems that involve logic and complex algorithms to process and transform data, but they are typically not good at creating, for example, a color palette that evokes a certain emotional response, or a text and widget layout that leads the user effortlessly through filling out an online form, yet we consistently expect that developers take on the role of design experts. Would it be reasonable to expect a graphic designer to write a program that solves the Towers of Hanoi? Or to create an XML parser? Or better yet, to create efficient and elegant implementations of those things? Or how about a well-defined system architecture for an inventory system to track millions of items across multiple geographically distributed warehouses and distribution centers in near real time? These are not reasonable expectations because designers are not trained to do these things, and typically do not have industry experience doing them.

I think the revival of design in Web 2.0, along with several higher profile companies who have focused on design has started to change the expectations a bit and to educate people on the benefits of good design. Unfortunately, I think it will be a while before the benefits of good design percolate up to the point that expectations really start to change on a large scale.

Fireplace prep work

2007-02-07T20:29:00.001-05:00

We’re starting to dive into the next phase of the fireplace project. With a little help from our friend, we managed to mount cement board to the facade. By “a little help”, I mean that he did most everything while I tried to assist and learn all the ways I would have screwed it up.

It actually turned out to be a good bit more challenging that I had ever thought it would be. Measuring and cutting the boards to fit the firebox opening and the corbels was tedious, but simple enough. After that the fun began, though. The stones in the facade were mostly even, but there were occasional protrusions that really made it tough to get the boards to line up with one another and to be plumb. We planned to use screw anchors and adhesive to attach the cement board, but after playing with them for a while and figuring out how to position the boards, we decided to mount them once without adhesive to make sure it was going to come out right after screwing things down. Luckily it did, so we took them down, and then re-mounted them with the adhesive.

Since the latest photo, we’ve also taped and sealed the center seam with joint compound to smooth it out. We still have to figure out what we are going to do with the sides of the facade, the corbels, and the rim of the firebox, but we have some options in mind. We also have to figure out what we want to do with the hearth.

Hopefully more updates and pics to come soon!

IMified and that Twitter idea

2007-02-07T15:04:00.002-05:00

A short while back, I posted about the possibility of Twitter becoming an input modality and a information delivery service. I just found IMified (via LifeHacker), and it sounds like it does a lot of the things I was envisioning, but uses IM directly as the transport, rather that Twitter. They seem to have several interesting points of integration (look at the icons in the main graphic) already.

One thing that will be interesting to see is whether they strive to provide an additional integration across the multiple services that they talk to.

I still think Twitter would provide a more useful layer of integration since it allows various input (including IM) and output methods. I’ll probably sign up for a free IMified account to evaluate it and post some thoughts later.

Frozen light switches, and science

2007-02-06T11:22:00.001-05:00

With scary visions of house fires raging in my head, I decided it was best just to go for it and crack open (not literally) the frozen light switch. What I found on the inside was both relieving and puzzling. There was absolutely no ice, or even moisture whatsoever inside the wiring box. My first thought was “Yay!”, followed closely by my second, which was “How can that be?”. How could there be moisture and ice on the cover, but not inside the box?

Our carpenter friend is at the house helping us prep the fireplace, so I presented the puzzle to him. He immediately, and nonchalantly provided the answer. First, there is cold air coming into the house through the box (a project for another day) and cover. The air in the house, along with the surface of the cover, are much warmer, so when the cold air meets the warm air, they interact on the outside of the cover to form condensation (or more correctly, “dew”). The dew eventually freezes because the outside air coming in cools it to below freezing (keep in mind the air outside as I am writing this is around 0°F).

The air and the metal surfaces inside the wiring box, however, are much closer to the outside air temperature. The temperature differential of the outside air and the air and metal inside the box is not great enough to initiate condensation inside the box. No condensation means no dew, and no dew means no ice.

Tada.

Lightswitch-freezin' weather

2007-02-06T07:35:00.001-05:00

Here is a test caption to see if it wraps

Yep, it's certainly cold enough to freeze boogers, but I honestly didn't think it was cold enough to freeze a lightswitch inside our house. This switch is on an exterior wall in the sunroom. We noticed the frost in the early morning today, so I think I need to make some time today to open this thing up and see what's going on!

Bathroom prep work

2007-02-05T09:45:00.001-05:00

We made some time over the weekend to do a bit more prep work for the bathroom. Last weekend, our contractor came over to review all the details and brought up a few more things that we needed to decide about the tile. So, on Friday, we returned to ProSource(see below) and picked out a bullnose tile to go with the wall, floor, and border tiles we had already picked out. Once we laid it all out, the grout color we had previously picked just didn’t look right. We ended up spending more time finding a new grout color than on anything else! It was worth it, though, as the wrong grout color can really destroy the look of the best tile.

On Saturday, I performed minor surgery on the vanity. To get the back to sit flush against a wall, I needed to trim the lip with circular saw, and then add two boards to hide gaps. Taking a circular saw to an antique vanity was a little nerve wracking, but I think it worked out nicely.

While I was hacking the vanity, Lor managed to remove the fixtures and drain from the tub. That involved the use of our favorite tool, and was probably just as scary as circular saw surgery on the vanity. Then, she sanded and stripped the paint from the edges of the porcelain and from the outside of the tub (the paint is directly on the cast iron). We’re planning to paint the outside of the tub with a faux dark copper/oil rubbed bronze look to match the sink and fixtures.

Check out the progress on Flickr.

On a side note, ProSource is a flooring wholesaler. They have a great selection and very competitive prices. The catch is that you can’t just walk in and buy stuff. You have to be, or be working with, a contractor, and you/he/she has to be a ProSource member. So, if you’re working with a contractor, or have a friend who is a contractor, and you’re in need of some flooring, it might be worth checking if he/she is already a member.

Blonde joke2

2007-02-04T16:50:00.001-05:00

Lor brings home at least one funny story from work every day. Every now and then, though, there’s one that is just over the top. I laughed for a good couple of minutes at this one.

A doc tells a joke to a nurse (who, coincidentally, is blonde) in the operating room before surgery:

A guy walks into an elevator and presses the button for his floor. As the door is closing, a perky blonde dashes in.

Blonde: ‘T-G-I-F!’

Man: ‘What?’

Blonde: ‘T-G-I-F! Thank God It’s Friday!’

Man: ‘S-H-I-T’

Blonde: ‘How rude! You shouldn’t say things like that’

Man: ‘S-H-I-T, Sorry Honey It’s Thursday.’

A few chuckles cascade around the room. The nurse, not laughing, and looking a bit confused, says “Well?” “Well what?” “Well, what day was it?”

True story.

Job interview observations, part 2

2007-02-02T12:38:00.001-05:00

I realized after my last post on job interviews that I gave some examples of technical questions that I think are useless, but didn’t really say why I think they are useless, and didn’t give any examples of questions I think are useful.

One of the questions I mentioned was “What is the difference between public, private, protected, and default access permissions in Java?”. If the purpose of this question is to immediately disqualify someone who doesn’t know anything about Java, then maybe this question has value. However, if a candidate answers it correctly, what have you learned? Not much at all, in my opinion. Maybe the candidate read it in a book the night before. Maybe you’re doing a phone interview and he/she did a quick google search. Maybe he/she knows the difference, but always makes all member variables public because it’s just less typing than writing getter and setter methods. Maybe he/she is the greatest software engineering wizard the world has ever known. How would a correct answer help you discern? I contend that it won’t help you.

Ok, so maybe that question is just one among a whole series of similar questions that test reference book type knowledge. Again, what will you learn if the candidate answers them all correctly? If your minimum requirement for a developer is someone who can write code that compiles, then you’re probably (but not certainly) safe. Programming languages are simply tools, like hammers and saws. I know how to swing a hammer, I know how to operate a circular saw, and I know what nails and screws are, but you do not want me to build a deck on your house (trust me, you don’t).

A better approach, for example, might be to ask the candidate to design a few classes to model a problem domain (like a poker game, or address book, or whatever you want) and see how he/she uses those access permissions, possibly asking questions about the class relationships and permissions. Another approach might be to ask him/her about certain design patterns that can make use of those permissions, such as the Template pattern. I think youll learn a lot more about the person on many levels from this type of question, especially at the technical level, since it’s highly likely that this is closer to the kinds of things you are actually hiring him/her to do on a daily basis.

Obviously, language syntax is important, just as knowing how to swing a hammer is important. However, truly effective interviews go beyond that. What is really important on the technical side, in my experience, is how logically and/or creatively the person thinks, and how quickly he/she can understand the important aspects of a problem, begin to formulate solutions, and how they weigh those potential solutions to pick the best one for the situation.

Job interview observations

2007-01-31T12:48:00.001-05:00

I’ve had quite a few phone and face-to-face interviews this past month in my job search. A few of them have been refreshingly interesting, and also effective. A few have been truly dreadful. Most fall somewhere in between, of course. However good or bad, though, I think I’ve learned at least something from each one—either something about myself or something about the job interview process.

A few things stand out in my mind from what I consider to be the most effective interviews:

They were balanced. I felt that I learned as much about them as individuals and as a company as they learned about me on a personal, professional and technical level. How do you know you will be happy working somewhere if they don’t let you learn about them, too?
They were comfortable. I didn’t feel pressure to dress or act a certain way, or like I was a suspect being interrogated. The interviewers and I had real, two-way conversations, not just question and answer exchanges. I always came away from these feeling like I had just met some very nice, and very talented professionals.
Their evaluation of my technical skills went beyond the common (and in my opinion, useless) reference book questions. An example of the worst is the classic “What is the difference between public, private, protected, and default access permissions in Java?”. “Why are manhole covers round?” is just as useless, imho. The best ones required that I devise a solution to a small, but interesting computer science-y or real-world problem. Some involved writing code, others involved drawing architecture diagrams or object models. All of them involved explaining my thought process and my solution.

One more reason Pegasus Lighting rocks

2007-01-29T13:44:00.001-05:00

Last year I blogged about how much I liked the Pegasus xenon task lights we bought for our kitchen renovation. In the morning today when I checked my email, I found a message in my inbox from the President of Pegasus Associates, who had “stumbled upon” my post. Here’s a bit:

Thank you very much for your very kind words about Pegasus Associates Lighting in your blog dated March 13, 2006, “Stuff that rocks: Pegasus Lighting”. I have shared your remarks with everyone here and all of us really appreciate your very positive comments. I would have commented before this but I just happened to “stumble upon” your comments this morning. What a great and wonderful surprise. I just love the smell of positive customer comments early in the morning.

I thought this was very cool—a personal email from the President of the company just because he happened to “stumble upon” a blog post from some random diy’er like me. He even asked if they could use a few of my flickr photos on their site, and I was happy to oblige.

Let’s recap the score: number of nice people I’ve interacted with at Pegasus: 3, number of belligerent customer service reps: 0, number of confusing, dead-end laden, automated phone trees: 0.

Hats off once again to the folks at Pegasus Associates.

Filing for unemployment

2007-01-29T10:07:00.001-05:00

I just officially filed for my first two weeks of unemployment benefits. It’s one of those things I had never really thought about before, even though I was on the brink of being unemployed once already last year. It was always one of those things that other people do. Now it’s something I do.

CallWave Dashboard widget

2007-01-25T20:18:00.000-05:00

I’m liking CallWave more and more, and now they have a Dashboard Widget. It’s a little clunky, especially when you first activate the widget if you already have a CallWave account (check the bottom red bar of the widget for an “Already Registered?” link), but once you log in it works very well. I’d say it’s easier to use than getting the messages in Gmail. I don’t know if it has Growl support yet, but here’s hoping!

Keep up the great work.

Twitter as a message router?

2007-01-25T11:49:00.001-05:00

Twitter is fun, no doubt about it, but I think the novelty of it is starting to give way to some interest in finding ways to make it more useful. I had been thinking about it for a while (almost ever since I started using Twitter), but this post on their blog, pointing to Eric Meyer’s post got my wheels turning again. If Twitter had the notion of public and private posts (as Eric points out), it would be fairly trivial to do some interesting stuff with it.

It could be used as an input layer abstraction for various other web services I already use. For example, I could post something like “cal: lunch with Bob tomorrow 9am” from my mobile, and use a service like rssfwd to have posts routed to Gmail, where I could set up a filter that would forward it to 30boxes. If I happen to want to start using Backpack calendar instead of 30boxes, I probably rig up something similar. The key is that I would still create events using Twitter—only they would go to Backpack instead of 30boxes.

I could do something similar with notes that I want to send to my Backpack page or to Stikkit from my mobile. In essence, it could be used to add an SMS interface to apps that don’t already have one.

Similarly, it could be used as an delivery system for more useful things. For example, it might be interesting to setup a Twitter stream for team meeting reminders, that way the meeting could be scheduled on a single calendar, but a reminder could be broadcast via Twitter to all the team members who have added that private team meeting Twitter feed as a “friend”. Granted, that could be done by setting up an email group or alias, and using SMS gateways, but I think Twitter could present a much more elegant solution by abstracting away the particular calendar service being used. I think that’s just scratching the surface, too.

At it’s core, RSS is a message delivery mechanism, and Twitter puts a useful, near real time face on it. Who knows what the Twitter developers have in mind, but for an app that is about nothing, it sure seems like it has big possibilities.

twittereeze

2007-01-23T15:26:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I started working on an Applescript that would set my Twitter status and my iChat status if iChat was running. I’m sure this kind of thing has been obvious to most people who have started using Twitter, but I hadn’t found any app that had done it yet. Today, along comes twittereeze, and totally blows away what I was doing in Applescript because it uses SIMBL to integrate seamlessly with IconFactory’s wonderful Twitterrific.

Well done. No more applescript for me.

Two useful cameraphone things

2007-01-23T07:32:00.001-05:00

Over the past few months, I’ve been using my cameraphone to capture our weekly grocery lists. We have a small whiteboard on the side of the fridge, and as we think of things over the course of the week, we just write them on the whiteboard. Then, when it’s time to go to the store, I just snap a pic of the whiteboard and head to the store, where I can view it with one of the builting image viewer apps (more recently Nokia Album, which is much nicer). That basically lets us write down stuff whenever we think of it, without my having to recopy the list into Backpack, or heaven forbid, paper.

Since we’ve started a few new projects, we’ve been making quite a few runs to Lowes, Home Depot, and various other specialty stores to look at everything from fixtures to tile. Sometimes it’s convenient for me to do that during the day, so I’ve been snapping pics of various styles of tile and borders, shelving systems, etc. Then I either bluetooth them to the laptop or send them to flickr directly with ZoneTag and we look at them full size to pick out things or to narrow the field so that we can make fewer trips or make decisions more quickly when we are able to return to the store together. For example, I took pics of all the shelving system components so we could start designing some shelves for our soon-to-be-remodeled closets.

technorthodox

New Music

Shame on you, Verizon

FreeMarker TextMate Bundle

The list

Rain X stuff

Perforation

YATTMBU

Small Trac TextMate Bundle update

Electrons

Thanks, JD

The scoop on poop

Pee-freezin' weather

Christ is Born! Give Glory! in 25 words or less

Christ is Born! Give Glory!

Praise the Lord in 25 words or less

Nativity Season Concert

Trac TextMate Bundle

New truck

Feedhub.com goes live!

Prepay more

0 to 18

Mac Salad

Moving back to .Mac

Stop here

Masses et Motets de la Renaissance in 25 words or less

Masses et Motets de la Renaissance - Musique Sacrée de la Renaissance - Century 8

More pets than people

The special

Subtitles

Why people hate computers

“Just so you know”

LOL: Technorthodox

Sticky barcode tea, now with paper bits

23

Awake?

Design flaw?

New favorite screensaver

S. Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in 25 words or less

Moscow Chamber Choir - S. Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

Trac TextMate Bundle update

Bathroom, it works!

Storm casualties, perspective

Wind generator

Elevator

Bathroom remodel progress

Taste the Fountain of Immortality in 25 words or less

Valaam Brotherhood Choir - Taste the Fountain of Immorality

Wearing bamboo

Bathroom remodel, day 1

Planet Earth again

Pineapple lopsidedown cake

Live bait

I'm shrinking

Thinking past it

Age perception

Avoid bus burn

Planet Earth

Tree

CO geyser

With the Voice of the Archangel in 25 words or less

Archangel Voices - With the Voice of the Archangel

USB flash drive usefulness?

It was bound to happen

MBP Waterfield sleevecase

Accidental bus wardriving

A good morning

Fireplace 2.0

Commuter karma

Timbuk2 messenger bag

Waterfield

Today's interesting commute

The Essential Tallis Scholars in 25 words or less

Tallis Scholars - The Essential Tallis Scholars

The Akáthistos Hymn in 25 words or less

Cappella Romana - The Akáthistos Hymn

PL Premium Polyurethane Construction Adhesive

My life on timers

The smoking man

Russian Orthodox Music in 25 words or less