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We recently decided to replace the television in our bedroom and add VCR and DVD capability in the process. Last week we finally bought the equipment and today I finally set things up with Steve's help.
Buying a new television always seems weird, perhaps because we do it less often than we buy cars. In this particular case, the television was one we'd bought right after moving to California in December, 1987. A few years ago we replaced it as the primary TV and moved it to our bedroom. The picture has been going downhill for the last five years and it's relatively difficult to watch on a sunny day as the maximum brightness level has been way too low for some time. I honestly think Jon uses it more than either of us and occasionally Jon wants to watch DVDs or older VHS tapes, which hasn't been possible. Whenever we want to watch a movie I bring up the Powerbook, which is more than a little clumsy.
We ended up buying a flat screen television (not a flat panel, that would have seriously broken the spending limit) and a DVD/VCR combo. The whole deal cost only slightly more than buying a DVD all by itself in 1999. The installation went well except for one stage after putting in the DVD player where I had the video chain backwards and it still worked somehow (thanks for noticing Steve).
Somewhere in the middle of all this I needed to change the television controlled by our cable remote which we use for most purposes. I knew there was a way to change the TV (I've done it before) but I couldn't find the documentation and it's not at an intuitive process. Off to Adelphia where I found nothing of use which still bugs me. Do they want us to call them about stupid stuff like using a remote control when they must have hundreds of questions per week on the same subject?
The remote used with the General Instruments (now Motorola) settop box used here was made by a company called US Electronics (now a part of ICX Global?). After poking around in most of the manuals available on the support page, we have a UG3-DIGI remote and the process of reseting the TV or VCR is straight forward.
Press TV, Setup, three code digits and Setup again.
That's it.
And right after going through the whole discovery process Sarah walked in and handed me the little pamphlet that matches the documentation I found online. Naturally.
With some help from Tom, I've migrated dijas.com over to VPOP. The DNS change is propagating and is now available on some systems. I should have dealt with this last month when I had problems, but I let it go. Oh well.
Sarah actually got some backed up email tonight and by late tomorrow the transition should be over. And then there will be several days worth of email to go through.
It's been two days now and no progress on my hosted domain provider coming back on the air. Of course, with them being off the air, my domain is AWOL (no secondary DNS... wouldn't help anyway since mail is on the same set of systems) and so is this frivolous exercise.
You can get here by static IP, but that's pretty useless.
That's it, no more dallying. I'm out of there.
I have to mention a great bowling product which doesn't seem to have a name (but ought to). It's basically a roll of tan tape with a sticky side that has a backing layer like a band-aid would. The tape itself is a lot like a band-aid, but more porous and not as slickly plastic (it has a textured feel to it -- this particular tape is a lot like a rough cotton -- and comes in several textures, each a different color).
If you have a banged up thumb, or just want to avoid putting tape in the ball, this is worth trying.
A few weeks ago I had seriously dinged my thumb a couple times during the week before our weekly bowling date and figured things were going to be bad. On the second ball in practice, I ripped open the fresh scab which was going to be a problem. I tried using Robbys Sure Release but that's works much better for cuts and the like and this was right on the back of my thumb so it immediately tore itself apart. I went to Jeff Massey who runs the local shop and he asked if I'd like to try some tape. He showed me what it looked and felt like and cut off a piece for me to try. It ran from the tip of the thumb (needs to be cut a little pointed) to just above the top joint. I used it and things worked out quite well. It stayed in place and I felt comfortable, mangled thumb and all, I bowled pretty well. It hurt a bit to rip it off, but a whole lot less than what might have occurred otherwise.
Fast forward to this week. Once again, I'd put a ding in my thumb (not a big one this time) but I went in and asked Jeff for some more tape. I pulled the tape from my balls and damned if it didn't feel a whole lot more comfortable than having tape in the thumb hole of the ball. The tan variety of tape works well with a plastic thumb insert and just slides inside the ball. No hangups outside of operator error.
I went back after finishing this evening to buy a roll of the tape with no name and plan to use it on my thumb when I need to fit a bit more snugly in the ball and stop using tape inserts all together. Actually, that's as subject worthy of an entire discussion; pulling two month old, gooey tape inserts from a ball is quite a mess.
The word for the day is kerfuffle (courtesy of Bill de hÓra in Objects v Services).
Adelphia is apparently changing their local (Conejo Valley) set top boxes from channel 4 to channel 3. In order to get the message out to everyone, the boxes are rebooted in the middle of the night (every night? I've seen it twice) and set up so the first time they turn on they go to channel 101.
After spending more than twenty minutes poking around on the Adelphia Cable site, I still couldn't find any notice about this.
This isn't an ideal way to communicate. Sarah doesn't remember anything in the last bill and the best place for a customer to turn (for self help) has zero useful information. If rebooting the customer is a bad thing (I believe it is), then doing it over and over again is beyond bad.
In theory, the boxes will stop wandering over to channel 101 after the changes take place on the 25th of this month but everyone on vacation right now is going to have serious picture problems when they get back and call support. In the meantime, an always on service is doing all kinds of weird things in the middle of the night.
a good weblog is a conversation among friends that you can't tear yourself away from, even after the check has been paid and the waiter stops refilling your coffee so you'll take a hint and free up the table
In the best cases on my own little place over here in the corner, I've found that to be true. Things which generate conversation are worthy of revisiting. Feedback is fun as Michael pointed out. However, it also leads to a publish or perish type of mentality, especially if you start paying attention to site behavior based on this criteria. There are people out there who are amazing a pumping content, day in, day out regardless of what else is happening around them. I honestly don't know how the hell they do it. And even I did I'm not sure I could emulate it.
Which is part of why this site is destined to be a little backwater watering hole, and not part of the primo real estate of the web. You've got an occasionally absent owner who even when he's present may be feeling churlish and not too interested in dealing with the customers so he hides in the kitchen all day.
I've been thinking about these things a bit since reading David's feelings about publishing (and lack of progress) since leaving the ETech conference last week. I've been feeling just about the same way. Of course, I have been publishing, just not here. And a lot things from ETech are still kicking around in my head (I've been writing about some of them, but nothing that seems well formed has yet appeared).
Mostly I've been wrestling with next generation RADIUS/EAP support for wireless and how that affects our infrastructure and identity management on a much larger scale. Toss in all the new stuff from ETech (and the implications for identities) plus keeping track of a whole batch of projects we've got running (some of which have jumped into the final stages which is always interesting).
Thankfully, this isn't my job or I'd be hitting the pavement.
I ran out of coffee and Sarah (who doesn't drink it) decided to help out and pick something up.
After several years in the Navy, I can and will drink anything (we used to call coffee after 3 AM 'coffee on a stick' for a reason). At work I have to live with decent through awful (and worse) coffee unless I brew my own (it's on my mind fairly often when I am getting coffee). At home, I usually have interesting coffee and this time around I'm stuck with a basic French Roast.
I like to make strong coffee by putting in less water and a lot more beans. After a trip to a friends a while back, I wondered if a French Press might not be the better brewing method, but it's far too labor intensive. Being lazy as usual, I want an ePress.
I don't really have a recipe, which is good; every time out is different. I find it more interesting to try different varieties of beans and usually wind up with a collection of four or more varieties. Every once in a while, I buy a combination so bad that I throw it away; slightly more often I create one that drives me back the next day for an alternative. Eventually, I need to start over (I'm there now).
There is an exception (of course!) Every chocolate and coffee combination I've ever tried is too good. I think it awakens a taste for the coffee, milk and sugar combination that I liked as a youngster, so I stay away as much as possible. Perhaps that makes it even better.
A few weeks ago I ran into some DSL problems caused by poor filtering on our phone lines. I finally got around to checking everything over the weekend and realized we only had one good filter in place. I also removed all of the old RF modulation gear (we had an old powerline phone extension that was never removed).
We're currently using a 2wire single line filter and they seem to be pretty well thought of. I've ordered a couple new 2wire filters and I need to make a run to a local electronics shop to replace all the crufty phone connections in my office (old connectors, old phone lines, too many phone lines).
The end result should be a lot less messy and I won't need to worry about our phone connections again for a while (not that I was paying any attention before).
I discovered something interesting (and annoying) about OmniOutliner this week while spending a great deal of time working there taking notes.
Normally, when you paste, the whole thing ends up in one blob and you have to manually fix the mess and turn the 'item' into individual outline entries. I've long hoped for a MORE like paste mode that would divide the data up into entries and save me the hassle. I've asked a couple times about it without ever being told anything. After accidently stumbling into how to do it, I think they decided that I was so stupid that it wasn't worth explaining (how could you not know this sort of thing).
So here's the deal...
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You are sitting in the editor, with an insertion point blinking somewhere and you have data that needs to be pasted and is already broken up into item sized chunks separated by linefeeds (or your local equivalent).
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| Step 2 |
Press enter (not return) in OmniOutliner which will select the entire item in the outline. Paste. That's it. Your data will automatically be broken up into multiple outline items. Now I wish that they'd see two linefeeds and figure I want an extra linefeed attached to the inside of the item, but this is a big step forward in usability for me.
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| Step 3 |
Notice that the data I pasted was added as an outline item. The outliner does recognize tabs during this paste process and will automatically deal with data which has already organized.
The reason I am annoyed (and have missed this until now) is because it is a modal behavior. When I accidently managed it earlier this week I ended up missing five minutes of notes as I failed to discover what I'd done accidently. When it happened again today I already knew everything I'd done previously to find the feature so it had to be related to something else... I repeated the previous behavior (deleting multiple lines of text which leaves you in a 'selection' mode). Voila!
Modality may not be a bug but it certainly is not a feature.
One last thing, pressing the left or right arrow will put you back in edit 'mode'.
I'm down at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this week learning some new things and provoking some new thoughts in other areas. I've got months of writing material.
I was talking to Doc Searls this afternoon about identity related stuff, trying to get a read on his thoughts when the conversation wound around to Atom. He asked me why I thought Atom was important. My reply, as I remember it:
Atom is to weblogs (and potentially to many other web applications) what pipes are to unix applications. It is both an output and an input mechanism which makes it very powerful in my mind and gives a whole new meaning to the concept of information flow.
That's my high level view (and one less thing on my to do list).
Such is the staggering pace of technology...
Here's what happens when a maturing industry hits a sufficiently motivated small group (Guy Bothamand and Steve Stephani). They've created an email mapping gateway for many (all?) of the major telco's, all of whom refused to get together and do so for customers. Send some mail to somenumber@teleflip.com and its likely to get there.
As usual, there is a caveat (even though the service is currently free)...
"Even if you knew your friend had, say, Cingular, you'd never be able to figure out that the e-mail domain is mobile.mycingular.net without looking it up," Mr. Botham said. Neither he nor his business partner, Steve Stephani, who worked with him to write the programming behind Teleflip, would discuss the method by which each e-mail is steered to the proper phone, and they said they had applied for a patent on the algorithm.
A patent on what amounts to a number translation and lookup service? It's been done before (in many ways) and worse, plays right into the hands of the companies who want ownership and control. Things are going to get ugly here.
Many thanks to Susan's Cell phone heaven article (and Jarvis' BuzzMachine).
In Now Hear This Cringely discusses Powerpoint, its lack of suitability as a stand alone documentation format and his general approach to doing speeches.
There's a lot of that (Powerpoint bashing) going around and he covers the basic problems including a relatively recent concept that Powerpoint is a perfectly reasonable way to pass around documentation. It's starting to take hold in technical circles as well and I'm not sure why there isn't a bigger backlash against this.
Powerpoint is a tool, it should not be the only tool. Perhaps the idea that vendors tend to throw every capability possible into these tools is what makes some decide that everything should be done there. There is also the concept that for the folks who never previously used anything more than a spreadsheet as a presentation method, Powerpoint (and tools like it) makes a significant step up.
On the other hand, I've had people ask where the rest of a presentation was when I handed them my slides and had to explain that the content is in the paper which goes along with the talk or in my head. The slides are the high points and main areas for discussion... I tend to wander off and take quite some time to get back to anything on the screen. I'm no great shakes as a public speaker and certainly don't have the kind of practice that Cringely has but I've found that engaging my small audiences and and asking questions that keep them in the loop is particularly effective.
This is the entertainment age, the era of bland corporate presentations should be over but it's not. There is nothing more boring than sitting through a presentation and getting nothing out of the other end that couldn't be sucked out of the Powerpoint document an hour ahead of time. It's even worse if the presentation hammers home the same point over and over (and over).
If you get tagged with the responsibility to effectively make use of a large groups time, it certainly makes sense to want to have them leave feeling like they've spend their time wisely.
Excel really ticked me off today. What is it about handling multiple monitors under MacOS X that is so darned difficult? My arrangement isn't exactly bizarre, at least I don't think so.
Of course, it does seem to cause all sorts of problems. More so because I wander around going to sleep and waking up in different 'modes' (work, work wandering around, doing presentations, home connected to an extra monitor, home wandering around, etc.) Given the weirdness that abounds, it must be a lot harder than under the classic MacOS where you iterated over the graphic devices on the system, getting some global rectangle coordinate information from each and built a view of the world.
When you opened up windows based on saved preference data or new windows based on some sort of staggering heuristic, you made certain the window was visible and that some portion of the drag bar was accessible before showing it to the user. You can't assume the world is square (which made regions particularly well suited to this task), you can't assume where the menu bar is and so forth... assume nothing basically.
Terminal is a good example of a weird app. What the hell is it doing? When I operate on single monitor, it pins its first window to the upper left area of the main device. When I operate as I normally do, it thinks it should stick the window about 300 pixels south of where I think it ought to be.
Safari 1.0 actually has similar problems (I'll be testing 1.2 shortly). I recently tried out the Safari resizing code from Safari Bookmarks which has some strange behavior if placed on my left monitor (the TiBook itself) at home. The javascript value for screen.availHeight is about 300 pixels short of reality (are we sensing a pattern here?) Still, it makes for much easier browser window sizing than what I had been using with external scripts.
All of which brings me to Excel.
Within the last couple days, I'd been looking at something, decided that the whole sheet needed the main monitor and moved my normal tool bars off to the left. Before leaving for work today, I killed off Excel because it wasn't really needed anymore.
This afternoon I needed to open a sheet with some infrequently used data and Excel went into the spinning beach ball of death syndrome. I ended up logging out and back in with the same result. After a bunch of fiddling I gave up and moved on to other things. Later, I realized the probable reason and decided to verify when I got home. Sure enough, up it popped. I should have just killed off the preferences (see below) but I forgot.
Still, it should have worked... the behavior was completely wrong. In the worst case, the floating pallets should have showed up randomly or just turned themselves off. Freaking out at startup is the kind of sloppy silliness that used to crash systems and cause scorn. Acting bewildered and stupid (while continuing to run) seems to be the alternative today (with occasional severe unfriendliness). If applications would just admit defeat, log something useful via syslog and die, we might be a lot better off.
I'm trying to get moved to Panther and can't find a way to enable the Jaguar hot key for the Favorites folders (cmd-shift-F). The whole menu item has been replaced with the Utilities folder and I'm trying to not to fuddle in a system plist. There has to be a straight forward, dynamic way to deal with this nonsense.
For me, popping up the dynamic and constantly shifting top level hierarchy I tinker with works as a jumping off point. The side benefit of using the Favorites as a Finder navigation jump off point is that the same jump off point shows up in dialogs. Losing it leaves me back at my home directory, and I accumulate quite enough messes there.
Well that wasn't really much fun.
I managed to get the IOGEAR USB device talking to the serial ports on two Sparc systems today (one with an old fashioned D-9 connector, the other with the newer RJ-45 connector using a D-9 to RJ-45 converter).
I tried but failed to get a connection to the Xserve. I found an interesting article about the subject on MacOS X Hints called Use an old serial VT100 terminal with OS X but it didn't really help with this particular problem. I still can't figure out what's wrong the setup on the Xserve, but it isn't essential right this minute. We're going to leave a monitor on the system via a KVM, so it can wait while I seek better mojo.
The settings for ZTerm are straight forward, although more difficult to arrive at if you choose unknown devices, cables, adapters, drivers and software as I did. The settings you want are 9600 baud, 8-n-1 (data, parity and stop), no echo (it's a full duplex connection) and no handshaking.
Finally, more in the device department...
Jeff sent me some email over the weekend pointing to ByteRunner Technologies which sells a wide range of USB to RS-232 devices based on FTDI chipsets. He uses a 4 port device on a linux box. FTDI also makes available MacOS X drivers.
Sitting in a living room full of people pulling for Carolina, it was a little hard when the game ended. Adam and his friend stalked off to play video games.
It's too bad about the result, but after goofing up on one kick and having another blocked, it was pretty unlikely that Adam Vinatieri would screw up another one.
Will Kasay be the goat? Hard to say but his kickoff surely didn't help matters. And how about Rod "He Hate Me" Smart getting the first and last touch of the game. It's too bad that he never really had a chance to do something right at the end.
All in all, it was a good game. Late in second quarter, I was beginning to wonder if anyone would score. With 3:05 left in the second quarter the Pats finally managed it, the game shifted gears and we wound up with a 14 &mdash 10 halftime score.
The half time show wasn't exactly what I was looking for, so I wandered off and noticed that Tom and Kerri have a new baby boy, safely delivered this morning.
Congratulations to both!
Lots of news stories today about the shuttle because of the Columbia anniversary.
Michael Browning wrote one such story for the Palm Beach Post in Shuttle a bird of extinction. I did notice that Mr. Browning got the Challenger date wrong. It was actually January 28, 1986. I was sitting in a hospital room with my wife waiting for the labor inducing drugs to kick in and got to watch a shuttle launch for the first time in quite a while; our first child was born the next day. That sort of thing tends to stick with you.
I missed the connection last year that Columbia was so close to the Challenger anniversary date (this past Wednesday, January 28th) or just forgot about it in the flurry of other things to worry about.
Update: Space.com has NASA's Shuttle Program Faces its Future and Jim Lovell commentary It's Time to Soar Again. [via /.]
I decided to make some predictions for todays Super commercial Bowl.
First, the new commercials won't be as compelling as they were during the nadir of such things four years ago. Face it, advertisements for real companies are never going to be as funny as the ads were for companies that made no sense.
Second, Carolina is going to win, 31 - 24. I don't know why, but I just feel like Carolina has the right pieces in place to beat New England.
