Today, I shall not rant about Verizon.
What, I hear you cry? But Dave, you’ve certainly let your feelings about Verizon be known before, has something changed?
As far as their offerings and their choices for what to do with the subscriber base? No, for the most part, I’m still pretty annoyed at them. But, in the department of “If you do things right, you can avoid a world of hurt for yourself”, I’m in pretty good space today.
Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
Well smack me with a trout.
I feel somewhat foolish.
I’ve been looking around for local places to go work on my laptop that are outside chez geek. My needs are pretty basic I think… Quiet comfortable space, wireless net access, a power outlet, and coffee.
I’ve found a space that covers everything but the coffee, and I feel foolish for not having come here before. It’s the Moore Institute library, better known as the Natick Public Library. It’s a huge space, several floors, well designed and laid out, and… best of all… nice little cubby spaces that are all set up for laptop use (with power outlet, hardwire connection and everything). The wireless is active as well, so you don’t need to plug in if you don’t want to.
It’s within easy bike distance of the house, and lunchstops are all around here. I think I’ll try and come down here more often.
Oh why must they taunt me so?!
This evening saw me visiting the New and Improved [tm] [reg us pat off] Natick Mall here in sunny Natick, MA. There’s been a major rebuilding going on over there, and seeing as this thing is only about a mile from me, and the fact that I had an evening free, I felt it was time to go take a look.
First, the original mall was of average size and layout. Natick Mall has always been slightly ‘upscale’ compared to others, but with the other biggies nearby like the Burlington Mall renovating and upscaling, some developer it was time to upgrade the Natick mall
And boy howdy did they.
I don’t want to get into a review of malls, but did you know that there are Wikipedia entries on malls? Weird, eh? But the entry for the Natick Mall does have pictures of the inside of the renovated space. According to the article:
This expansion project includes the renovation of approximately 100 new stores and the addition of two new anchors, (Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus), making Natick Collection the twelfth largest in the country, fourth largest on the East Coast, and the largest in New England.
Now, in this vast space, you’d think I could find something interesting.
Think again.
The newly expanded space has nothing of interest in it. It is huge, to be sure, well decorated, elegant to a fault, and simply drips of sophistication. It is, however, populated with… clothing stores, perfume stores, and luggage and pocketbook offerings. Many were outlet names, but it was simply store upon store upon store of clothing. A vast wasteland of chrome, steel, glass, and fashion manikins.
Until… in the midst of all this rampant hoity toity consumerism, I see one beacon of elegance that does not involve silk, tweed, or leather.
Apple has opened a store within this vast new space. Yes, it is similar to all the other stores, with the genius bar, young hip store attendees, and ranks of elegant hardware, but now they’ve gone and done it. They’ve put this store in my back yard.
So, naturally, I went in.
Those who have been in an Apple store need not hear the details of what the store was like. It had by far the most customers I’d seen in that entire bleak landscape for the mall, but wasn’t crowded, and it only took me a moment to find a free iPhone and start playing with it.
This was the second time I had touched an iPhone, and while there were no clear revelations from my first exposure, I was again impressed by the design, elegance, clarity of purpose, and all around “rightness” of this device. I left the store after a brief chat with one of the employees, and went in search of food, visions of well designed hardware and software systems dancing in my head.
I chanced by a Verizon store and had a chat with the folks there. My aging Treo 650 is on a Verizon plan, and I had recently heard about a possible offering for ‘tethered mode’ modem operation for $15/month. That might be handy, thought I, and went to ask them about it.
Oh no, not so fast. Sure it’s $15 a month. On top of an ‘unlimited’ data service plan ($49/mo). Oh, and it won’t work with the Treo 650, you’ll need to upgrade to a Treo 700p. “Oh, that should be fine. I’m within my upgrade window now, I should get a big discount” *flipflipflip* “Yep, you are, you’ll get a $150 discount on a new phone.” “So, if I wanted to upgrade from my 650 to a 700p, how much would it be?”
The sales person actually walked around and started referencing various displays, and said “$450, minus the $150 credit you’ll get.”. I glanced down at the display for the 700p there, and a brand new service, with the 700p, would run me $345. “But that sign says $350 if I buy a Treo 700p now, why don’t I just apply the $150 to that?” “Ah, that’s just for new subscribers.”
I’m really really really done with Verizon.
It looks like AT&T’s plans have FAR better data services, as well as a platform I’m interested in supporting. (The Verizon droid basically said I should ditch the Palm platform and use a Windows device. Not in my game plan, thanks)
There are only a few things stopping me from running pell-mell for iPhone land…
- Initial cost is high. Even with the $200 price reduction, we’re still talking $400 out of my pocket (I’d get the 8gig version. Just makes sense). I don’t have that sort of cash right now, not to mention the new service activation with AT&T. My phone number SHOULD port. Will it?
- Bluetooth limits. The iPhone is not a full bluetooth device. It supports only the Hands Free Profile (HFP) and the Headset Profile (HSP). No support for data access, OBX, A2DP, any of the cool things that Bluetooth can do. My biggest whine would be the lack of bluetooth keyboard support. I can get a mobile bluetooth keyboard that’s quite functional, and about the size of my Treo. But I couldn’t use it with the iPhone. Will Apple update this? A huge unknown.
- The jump to Apple. I’ve avoided purchasing Apple products for me personally. It’s a slippery slope, but I cannot ignore that Apple’s designs are fantastic, and their support policies are the best in the business (see a recent post by a self-avowed Windows adherant). Should I make my first real foray into Apple land an iPhone?
- Last but not least, do I really need it? In all honesty, the answer here is no. My 650 is working fine for me for now, though it’s aging, the Palm platform is most likely dying, and it’s twice the size and heft of the iPhone. I don’t need to change devices now.
So, I haven’t bought an iPhone yet. But durn Apple for putting a store right in my back yard. It’s a plot I tell ya.
So, remember that coin jar?
A month or two ago, I posted about calculating value of change by weight. The proof needed to validate this napkin-scratching figuring would be validated by dumping the change jar into a Coinstar machine, and seeing what happened.
Well, today I did just that. I hauled all 58lbs of coins to the local Stop n Shop and spent 20 minutes sending fistfuls of coins rattling into the machine’s clinking, calculating innards.
When all was said, done, clattered and kachinged, the display happily reported $673.00.
Originally I figured 52lbs of coins would be $544. I underestimated just a little bit, but it wasn’t that far off. One push of the “Pay me please!” button, and the machine happily spat out an Amazon.com gift certificate (and didn’t take anything ‘off the top’ for that, so now I’m off to go camera shopping. Woohoo!)
The Monitor Dilemma
I’m in a quandry.
Up until recently, I had 3 17″ 1280×1024 monitors on my desk. On the right, the monitor for clipper, the laptop. In the center, the nice Dell monitors, used for yawl, my primary looky-atty one. And on the left, the ‘spare’, which was used for various projects.
Well, the one on the left just went away to be part of Beth’s desktop. Which leaves a hole where there used to be a screen.
I’ve been considering upgrading my main monitor for quite a while, and tonight I sat down at my old T40 Thinkpad and marvelled at it’s 1400×1050 resolution. Pixel density was obviously an issue – a 15″ screen at that resolution will look finer than a 1280×1024 17″ monitor.
The thing that bothers me is that ‘high resolution’ monitors, (which nowadays are almost exclusively LCD), don’t seem to be catering to resolutions over 1280×1024, or more directly, 1400×900 (‘HD’ format displays). These resolutions are no improvement over what I have, and the monitors I do have are almost 2 years old.
I understand that LCD monitors are driven by the consumer and basic business market. It’s much harder to make 1000 high resolution LCD monitors (out of the million ‘normal’ monitors) than it is to crank out 1000 high resolution CRT displays, but dammit, it’s frustrating to see 19″ 1280×1024 monitors going for $170, while it’s nigh on impossible to find monitors that have a higher pixel density. Sure they have wider resolutions. Common ground is 1400 or 1600 horizontal resolution (Depending on if it’s ‘widescreen’ or not) and 1050 vertical resolution (yay another 26 pixels?), but nothing higher until you start talking $500 for a 24″ monitor.
“Nice whining, but what is it you really want?”
I want a dependable, high contrast LCD monitor that has a resolution of 1600×1200, or durned close to it, and I don’t want to fork out serious cash for something like the Apple Cinema displays. This was easy to find in the 21″ monitor CRT days, though the challenge THEN was finding a video card to drive it, a problem easy to solve with current video boards.
Any suggestions?
Update 9/9/07 Jonah, the dark and sinister influence on my life he is, points out that Dell actually has a decent 20″ monitor for $309 that has the specs I want. Hmmm.
Eve Crankiness
It’s mighty frustrating when your chief distraction / addiction starts being totally unuseable.
Grrr.
And, in the rant department, I really detest ‘debugging’ Windows problems, as I’ve had to do twice today. Windows gives you NO feedback on what’s going on. It either works, or it doesn’t, and the process for ‘fixing’ the problem involves playing whack-a-mole with driver versions, tools, and clicky-clicky interfaces. Except the mole is invisible, and the big bell is broken. You may fix the problem, but you won’t know it until you try again. And then it might work, it might not, or it might work on the next reboot, or, you may be blessed with your fix working, but may stop next time you reboot, or run an update, or move your mouse, or whatever.
I’m boggled by how people can call this platform ‘maintainable’, when the chief answer seems to consistently be “Doesn’t work? Reboot! If that doesn’t work, reinstall from scratch!”
*takes grumpy self off to bed*
Vague amusement at technology.
I find it terribly amusing, coming from a long history of data communications involvement, that my tactic, when deciding to walk away from my computer, is to turn the volume down so I don’t disturb others.
Why is this amusing? Because I don’t even bat an eye at the fact that I’m streaming 128kbps worth of music from a server in California through 4 companies’ networks and 2 dozen routers, moving something like 20k worth of data a second (that’s 10 full pages of text, to give it context) into my machine where… it is not heard, and discarded.
We’ve become so bandwidth-jaded.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Looking for a poster? Or maybe an album cover?
Back in high school I remember an image of a full size sailing vessel – a galleon or the like (we’re talking old school wooden round hull), but it was up on ice runners, and was zipping along on the ice, rather than in water.
It might have been part of the black light poster set, as so well catered to by Spencers or the like, or maybe it was an album cover? Does anyone remember this image, or better yet, have a pointer to it? <a href=”http://images.google.com/”>images.google.com</a> is not helping me.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Pats and Pans
In one of the “making community work” bits of reading I’ve done, I read about a process for group meetings called ‘Pats and Pans’. The idea is when everyone gets together for some form of communal meeting (be it “house meeting” or “gardening club” or whatever), folks go around and say one good thing (a ‘pat’), and one thing that irked them (a ‘pan’). It would balance out the interaction so there was appreciation and criticism going on in balance.
In that spirit, I give you my pats and pans for the last week or so…
Dear Starbucks…
IF you are going stand up and say to the world “I will charge $2.85 for a cup of coffee” (coffee which, realistically, costs you all of about $0.15 to make), you could at least:
- Ensure that your PAY FOR wireless service is actually functioning, or let your patrons know that it’s broken LONG before they spend 10 minutes rebooting, fiddling and tinkering trying to get connected.
- Make sure that the tables you oh so thoughtfully provide actually have 4 feet on them!. I mean, there might actually be people in your establishment that have laptops, and coffee. I would imagine making sure the tables don’t immediately dump coffee onto the laptops would not be a challenge, but apparently I was mistaken.
No lasting damage to clipper, but the entire experience left me reconsider my continuing support of this these guys.
Experiment in calculating coin value by weight
Every day when I get home I empty out my pockets of loose change and put them into a large glass waterbottle that sits behind my desk. Eventually this bottle becomes too heavy to move and I empty it out to reclaim some cash for toys.
It occurred to me that there might be a way to estimate how much money was in the bottle by averaging out weights a little bit. Since my current ‘hottest toy’ want is a new Canon digital SLR camera, my ‘go for it’ point is somewhere around $750. The Coinstar machines now support converting your cash directly into a credit at Amazon without the 9% ‘fee’ they normally extract. Yay! But do I have enough?
I started by finding out the weight of an empty glass bottle (the web knows all – 15lbs). Then I weighed the bottle with all the coins in it (67lbs), which gives me about 52lbs of coinage to work with.
Because I don’t really have a distribution chart showing how many coins of each type I have, I assumed an even distribution. There’s probably more pennies than quarters, but I’ve never sorted things out. When I run the Coinstar dump, it’ll tell me how many of each coin I have, and that will make this more accurate the next time I do it.
Given that, some more googling gave me coin weights, so I was able to work it out…
Coin Value Weight(g) Penny 0.01 2.5g Nickel 0.05 5g Dime 0.10 2.68g Quarter 0.25 5.6g Average weight: 3.945g Average value: 0.10 Approximately .10 per 3.945grams or 0.025 cents per gram
Cool. My bottle has 52lbs of coins in it, which is around 23kilograms, which works out to around $544.00 worth of coins
Not quite there yet, but if I wait much longer, I may not be able to move the bottle. Maybe Zach and I will make an excursion to the Coinstar machine and shovel coins into it for a half hour, and see how accurate my numbers are.
It’s the little things
There’s something deeply satisfying when the number of messages in my inbox drops below one screenful. The disappearing scrollbar on the right side says to me “Congratulations! You’ve accomplished something!”
True victory happens when I get down to single digits, but that event should be heralded by fanfare and balloons, it happens so rarely.
In case you were curious about how much mail flows through my account daily, here’s my catchall report. Of this, probably 80% is mailing list traffic that’s foisted into various folders by procmail. The rest is In My Box, baybee.
Breakdown by day: (3459 posts, average of 494.1 posts per day.) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Jul 26 | Jul 25 | Jul 24 | Jul 23 | Jul 22 | Jul 21 | Jul 20 672 | 669 | 649 | 547 | 216 | 207 | 499
(This report is from Mailwatch, a tool I wrote about 12 years ago to monitor mailing list traffic and generate reports.)
Vacation or Fandango, you decide!
I’m back home now after a week-long absence from home and hearth, part for business, part for pleasure. So rather than go on for pages about various things seen, eaten, or visited, here’s a Harpers-esque rundown…
GMAPS Miles covered: 1140 by gmaps Odometer miles: 1290 Hours driving: 23 Average fuel mileage: 15.8mpg Estimated gallons of gas used: 81.6 Highest price paid for gas: $3.35 (Connecticut) Lowest price paid for gas: $2.85 (NJ) Estimated money spent on fuel: $252.96 Total nights away from home: 7 Days spent camping: 4 Total time spent sitting in traffic: 200 minutes-ish Volleyball games played: 6 States visited: 5 Miles biked: 10 Weight gained: 3lb :( Number of power windmills seen: 6 ! Problems with the van or trailer: 0
All in all, it was about as good as trip as possible given the huge mileage involved. I think my limit for long distance driving by myself is around 500-600 a day. And even that I don’t know if I could keep up for several days in a row without break. The drive out was much easier due to the 3 work days in NJ.
A quick note about NJ. While I was there I googled around and found a pickup volleyball group in Princeton that plays on Tuesday evenings. I got in a good 2+ hour session of indoor playing, which helped offset the slug-like demeanor I was adopting. Indoor volleyball is weird – nothing like a popped-up ball bouncing around in basketball fixtures like a pachinko setup. Sheesh.
As to the camping, southwestern PA is absolutely beautiful – we were almost in West Virginia, and the weather really was perfect for a large (150-people ish) outside event. Temperatures during the day stayed between 70 and 85, and at night it got down to the low sixties. It only rained the first night, and we had the trailer all set up by then.
And before the purists get on my case. Yes I was camping in the sense that I was sleeping in a non-fixed environment without plumbing or heat or electricity, in a place that had only rudimentary facilities. But yes, it was a camper trailer, yes there were hot showers and plenty of water, and yes there was a fixed building nearby. I still say there was a roughing element to it because of no fixed plumbing. Any place that necessitates the use of portapotties is still ‘camping’, so there.
And now we return you to your regularly scheduled life.
Footnote – no, I was not at BC. This was a different event. 🙂
Calorie Counting
So while I’m out on the road, I try to keep myself reasonably in shape. At home, I have volleyball and the like to keep me active, but in a hotel room in Princeton, NJ? Not so good.
Fortunately, I can bring my bicycle with me, and I’ve worked out a schedule where I can spend 8-9 hours in the office, hop on the bike, ride for an hour or two, and have a nice satisfying wind-down dinner then a shower at night. Works out pretty durned well, but I was curious -how- well it was working.
At yesterday’s cohousing meeting, some helpful person had brought some ultra-tasty chocolate cake. I’ve cut back my sweets intake enormously in the last year, but the cake arrived while I was hungry. I had a slice. That’s more than I usually have (I try to have a couple bites – just to get the mmmm yummy taste – this time I downed a whole slice). Felt sort of guilty about it. “Hmm, that was probably about 400-450 calories worth of food there. I wonder if I worked that off riding today?”
The net is FULL of calorie counters. Most of them seem to be pretty much garbage, with a lot of commentary making vague comparisons about which is better for you, how much time you’re spending, etc. I finally tracked down a decent calculator that takes into account my own weight, how vigorous I was riding, and how long I was on the road. Tonight I rode about fifteen miles, and according to the calorie calculator on WebMD.com, that means I burned a little over 800 calories in my ride. That feels about right, it was a decent length ride, I could feel my heart rate up, I was sweating, and I feel a little tired, but not wiped out afterwards.
I think I offset the cake, and then some, which is what I wanted to do!
Now I’m back in my room, getting some work done, and soon I’ll snuggle into bed. I’ve found a couple possible pickup volleyball games for tomorrow night nearby, we’ll see if anything comes from it.
Occasionally, things come out all right.
While out at Canobie Lake Park yesterday with the fam, I chanced to note my Treo had shed another component of itself. I’ve been missing my stylus for quite a while (I go through about one a month), but I also noted my 2gig Sandisk SD card has ejected itself. This occasionally happens when I drop the Treo pretty hard – but it usually just ‘unclicks’ the card, and I just shove it back in. This time apparently the card had escaped completely.
There wasn’t anything particularly important on it – I usually use it to move pictures from the Treo to yawl, but I have a half dozen apps installs on it also (including GeoNiche, an outstanding bluetooth GPS client specifically designed for Geocaching). The cards cost-wise are down on a par with packing material, so I was at best a little annoyed.
This morning while packing up for a week-long business + vacation trip, I glanced down in the driveway and LO! There was the SD card! Lonely from it’s night out in the cold (in July?), but looking none the worse for wear. Clicking it back into the Treo brought up the familiar “Here’s what’s on this card!”
It’s nice when things actually go your way on occasion. Even if it only involves a little $15 memory card.