Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • I thought I was done… The Baroque Cycle

    I am a huge SciFi fan, been reading it since I was in high school. I have lately become a fan of Neal Stephenson (ok, not so recently, I read Snow Crash shortly after it was published), but it has taken me forever to read the the books in the Baroque Cycle. Today, I finished the second novel, The Confusion, thinking that I was finished with the set.

    WRONG.

    It seemed like a funny place to leave off, and alas, it was. There is a third book, another 900 pages. The System of the World.  Groan.  I guess I will have to work my way through this tome as well.

    One of the reasons it has taken me so long to get through the first two tomes is that it became clear that my lack of knowledge of European history of the 1600 – 1800 was pretty weak, so I have been bolstering that as well (and it greatly enhances the enjoyment of the novels).

    It is back to see what Jack Shaftoe has in store.

  • Wild Sighting: Microsoft Surface

    I spied it gingerly. It was a couple seat away from me in the waiting area at the Southwest gate in the SanJose Airport. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I finally figured it out.

    It was the first Microsoft “Surface” tablet that I had ever seen that wasn’t part of a store display. Someone was actually using it.  Not sure if it was the RT version, or the PRO version, but that seems of little import. He was using it for what almost all ipad or android tabled owners use it for, watching videos, and browsing the web.

    Rumors had it that Microsoft had almost $1B in unsold inventory. Not surprising since they were late to the market, and they priced it closer to the iPad price point than the Android price point. Now they have announced the Surface 2. I wonder how long after launch of that it will be before I see on in the wild…

    It is somewhat of a shame, as I played with one at a store, and I liked the metro interface. But it is most assuredly doomed.

  • Some instinctual items – motorized version

    The other day, walking my dogs in the morning, someone was taking their early 1970’s Monte Carlo out for a drive. Ah, the sound, the rumble, the rough idle of a carbureted 454CID engine in a sedan was enough to make me wax poetically.

    The Chevy Monte CarloThere is something about late 60’s and early 70’s heavy metal (American muscle cars) that just goes to the core of my being. The mechanical advance and points/condenser ignitions that were hard to time and tune, requiring frequent adjustment. Having to jet the carburetor to run clean (if you made it right at cursing speed, it would be rich off idle). Putting it an aggressive cam to improve the horsepower at the upper range made it a struggle to get it to idle right. It just brings a tear to my eye to remember those days.

    I spent a reasonable part of my youth working on cars and motorcycles. I still have (most) of my tools. I have rebuilt engines (my Honda Civic CVCC 1975 vintage, and several motorcycles), repaired transmissions, converted to electronic ignition, and at every step was a great deal of satisfaction knowing that I accomplished something.

    Cars today are much less open to the home mechanic, and the speedshops of yesteryear (Speed Merchants in Santa Clara is where I used to hang out) have much less to offer the current cars. It takes a lot more effort to “tune” todays high reving 4 and 6 cylinder engines (there isn’t much more performance you can wring out of the 2.2l engine in my Honda S2000 without going to forced induction.)

    But every time I see, and more importantly hear a muscle car of yesteryear, I must pause to look on with reverence. Some day they will all be gone, hidden in collections or not driven at all. A sad passing of an era.

    (For the record, the Monte Carlo barely qualifies as a muscle car. It was far more refined than the firebird, camaro, or even the malibu of that era. But it did have a great big motor, and all that goes with it.)

  • Travel bullshit

    (well, poopies.  This is post # 300)

    I travel a lot for work. (well, usually, when we don’t have restrictions).

    This morning, I was taking the early flight, PHX to SJC, easy 1:40 hop, but I had a day chocked full of meetings, so I took the 6:25 flight. Ugh.

    That means I needed to wake up about 3:30 and get my butt out the door.  Ok.

    I get my pastry and starbucks coffee, and sit in the gate for SW flight 277. About 6:05 they announce that the flight is canceled. “Mechanical” is the proffered reason.

    The real reason was that there were only about 20 people on the flight, and they decided to not send the plane to save money, so I had to rebook, and hoof it to a different terminal, catch a flight to San Diego (that connected to SJC) and get in an hour later. My first meeting of the day was canceled.

    Airlines: I understand that you are all trying to remain profitable. That means that sometimes you have to cancel flights that cost too much to run for too few people. Just don’t fucking tell us “mechanical” issues. Like Michael Corleone said to his brother in law Rizzo at the end of Godfather one, “Don’t insult my intelligence”. Man up and tell the truth.

    As someone who often got caught in PHX after UAL canceled their last flights to Tucson, I am well aware of the process. It still sucks.

  • Long term, low level injury

    One of the joys of getting older is that I no longer bounce back from even minor injuries. Case in point:

    About a month or a month and a half ago, I jammed my left thumb. I don’t remember what I did, just that it hurt like hell and was tender for a few days. Usually, these things pass, and in a week or so, you forget that you ever did it.

    However this time, it didn’t quite go that way. It still hurts when I grip with my left hand. Like holding a beer bottle is a struggle (oh noes!!!!!). I can’t use my left thumb to dispense soft soap at the washbasin. I can’t open jars (can’t grib the jar with my left hand).

    Cycling is hard, as you need to grip to be somewhat safe and efficient.

    So, off to the doctor. Probably a referral to a orthopedist, and X-Rays to ensure that I didn’t break anything.

    But really, I just want my left hand to work right again.

  • IT upgrade or is it really a downgrade…

    Last friday night we had one of those upgrade events. Supposedly to improve our broadband connection, and improve the experience of using both the internet and the internal network.

    I have to say it is a resounding failure. Sending 750 MB of data to a server in Colorado Springs (intranetwork), has taken 45 minutes, and is still only 75% complete. It used to be faster.

    Guess I will have to submit a helpdesk ticket. (FWIW, it would be faster to drive home, VPN in, and transfer this data from my home network connection).

  • Some weird shit – Microsoft Office to HTML

    So, I run a website for a great group of people. It is a non-profit that rescues greyhounds.

    Sometimes, they need to post something, so I get a file in Microsoft Word, and I need to get it HTML formatted.

    Their website is based around Joomla, and I use the JCE rich text editor. In general, it works pretty good, but sometimes it is thrown for a loop by what Microsoft outputs as HTML.

    An example:

    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>1. &nbsp; Identify caring and responsible homes.</p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>2. &nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>Re</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>scu</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>e</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”> </span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>s</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>i</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>ck</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>,</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”> </span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>i</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>n</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>j</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>u</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>r</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>e</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>d</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”> </span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>an</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>d</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”> </span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>abandone</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>d </span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>g</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>r</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>eyhound</span><span style=”line-height: 1.3em;”>s.</span></p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>3. &nbsp; Seek to return lost greyhounds to their owners.</p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>4. &nbsp; Teach the principles of kindness and humane dog care.</p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>5. &nbsp; Promote birth control by neutering/spaying all intake animals.</p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>6. &nbsp; Provide pre-adoption health services.</p>
    <p style=”margin-left: 60px;”>7. &nbsp; Provide residential foster care to assist greyhounds in becoming acclimated to a home environment.</p>

    Note the second line item, it is supposed to be :

    1.  Rescue sick, injured, and abandoned greyhounds.

    It has become some gawdawful bunch of span’s that make no sense whatsoever.

    Sigh, I get to clean this mess up…

  • Music: iRadio FTW(?)

    In the past I have pitted Spotify against Google All Access, and while the Google offering was slightly cheaper, it had enough warts to drop it into second place. At that time, I mentioned that I looked forward to Apple’s offering, and would revisit when it was officially launched.

    iTunes has long supported internet radio stations, but they were all third party, and of quite varied quality and availability. At first, I thought this was the offering of Apple, and I was disappointed (until I found the Live365 feeds at least).

    With the launch of iTunes 11.1, and iOS 7, Apple has put out its own radio service. I have been using it pretty extensively since last Thursday (before I even updated my iPhone), and I am quite impressed.

    There is no doubt that Apple has an amazing selection of music in their grasp. But could they do a good job defining stations and genres to tailor the music. I should add that I am not a demographic for top 40, or much of the pop/country/hip hop music. I am a guitar player, so my tastes tend to classic rock, blues based rock, some folk, and generous helpings of heavy metal.

    One of the first “predefined” station is a “Beatles” station. ITMS has the Beatles, and Spotify doesn’t. I fired it up and enjoyed several hours of mid – late 60’s pop-ish, and deep cuts/covers and related tunes. Awesome.

    I dove into creating my own stations. They have genres that make sense. In the “Metal” category, they have british, classic metal, progressive, and the harder stuff. All these sub genre’s are great.

    In the blues, I have electric blues (Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy, Gary Moore), and Delta Blues (Robert Johnson, and his ilk). Great stuff.

    The selection, and the mixes have been awesome. I don’t think I have heard the same song twice in probably 20 hours of listening. (One area where Spotify could improve, is that you seem to get in a cycle and the same song can come up 2 times a day.)

    A long time back, I was a Pandora user. I never subscribed to them, because if I wanted to listen to Gary Moore, I didn’t want a radio station based on Gary Moore. So I went to Spotify when it came to the US. But I always liked the Pandora stations. They seemed to have awesome algorithms to select music, and a deep playlist that went on forever. I believe, from what I have heard over the last 5 days, that Apple has come really close to this algorithms.

    The best point? Since I am a iTunes Match customer, the radio is ad free. And free is better than $10 a month.

    Yes, I see my monthly spend to Spotify going poof.

  • Some Evernote Love

    I have been a premium subscriber of Evernote for a few years. At first, I paid to get the larger amount of storage, and to toss them a bone.

    It is the premier cross platform notebook. I have written in the past that Microsoft’s OneNote is a better app, but being Windows only means that I am not going to adopt it.

    At first, the disparity in features between OneNote and Evernote were pretty wide. But with the last few updates, the gap has narrowed greatly, and in some ways, Evernote has surpassed. The ability to toss PDF’s, Gmail messages, and pretty much all documents at it is impressive to say the least. Its apps for the smartphones are also excellent.

    And, as a premium subscriber, it will OCR documents for me in the background, so they become searchable.  Adobe Acrobat does that as well, but it is nice to just send them to Evernote and let it chew on them.

    Lately,  I have been using Evernote for collaboration. I have invited some people to share my “Marketing” notebook, and it has fostered some great idea sharing.

    I am beginning to use it more and more for my daily workflow, and it is improving my productivity. I have no doubt that trent will continue.

    If you are a “free” Evernote user, consider taking the plunge and go premium. You will find a lot more uses for the product and service.

  • Why so much Apple Hate? iOS7 edition

    Being a “geek” I frequent a lot of geek-y websites. One topic that comes up over and over is a raw hatred for all things Apple. Macs, phones, ipods, ipads, you name it, and you would think that Apple, instead of being one of the most loved companies on the planet, is staffed by the Antichrist.

    The thing that really bugs me, is that much of this hate, and virulence is completely offbase and misdirected. Last week, someone said that if you bought a Mac Book Pro with the SSD, you couldn’t change it, as it was soldered to the motherboard. Clearly this basher had no idea what he was talking about. Apple laptops use the mini PCI form factor SSD’s. There are lots of them used in netbooks, and now ultrabooks, but they are standard, they are available, and you can upgrade change them. Fortunately about 10 other people piled on to call him an asshat.

    The same thing about the iPhone. It’s a walled garden ecosystem, and Apple does control the content. They have standards that you must meet to submit and publish, but by and large, it is filled with useful, high quality applications. But the fact that without “jailbreaking” your iphone/ipad you can’t side load (install miscellaneous binaries circumventing the on board controls) applications, and that pisses them off. Of course, the geeks all view this as the antichrist rising. But, if that is your preference, you can jailbreak, and you can load whatever the hell you want.

    About a year ago, I bought an Android device. I wanted to like it, to see if it was as good of an experience to use as my Apple gear. I even bought a Google branded Nexus tablet, so I wouldn’t have a system encrusted with carrier installed crapware. I used it exclusively for several months, I bought many applications, I tried to live with it. In the end, I went back. Yes, I am biased, and I am used to the Apple way, but there were enough annoyances that even having an unencumbered open system couldn’t make me forgive the Android experience.

    Now Apple has retreated from the Skeuomorphic experience, offering a plainer, less lifelike experience, that I associate with Win 8. I did upgrade my iphone, a 4S that is getting long in the tooth, and I was surprised. It took no time to get used to the new stuff, and I think I got lucky by having a dark wallpaper, but it just works.  Of course, I am sure Steve Jobs is spinning wildly in his grave.

    The real surprise, is that it is quite snappy on my 2 year old phone. I was hesitating to update, as the last time at the end of life for a phone, the 3GS, I upgraded to iOS 5 and that made the phone almost unusable.

    And, at the same time, Apple launched their radio service as part of iTunes. You know what? It is AWESOME.  Great selection of genres and sub-genres, great music, and a hugely better quality experience (listening, navigation, and selection of included tracks) than the Google Play all-access service. Heck, it might be too soon to tell, but this might replace my Spotify account.

    Love, love, love the radio.

    As I said, I am biased, I have tried to venture from the vine, but I keep coming back.