Tralfaz

Category: blog

  • Some good things about being “smart”

    Today, I got to flex some intellectual muscles.  We had our monthly engineering meeting, where we bring our founder in (from the local university) and we discuss technical projects.  I am a mere marketing flunky.

    Before the meeting started, we were discussing swimming pools, and how here in Phoenix, with our uber hard water, and high evaporation rate, that your pool accumulates a lot of “metals” as part of the cycle, and needs to be changed.

    Someone was talking about the metals build up over time in the pool water. I piped up with that you typically use EDTA to eliminate them from the water(usually part of a “clarifier”). Our director of engineering (a pretty damned smart dude) didn’t know what EDTA was. I got to pipe up with ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetate, and explain that it is a chelating agent used to isolate metals and let them be processed.  (Thank you time spent as an analytical chemistry technician)

    Now everybody thinks I am smart.

    (Until the next time I open my mouth)

  • Death of a once mighty brand – HP

    From this awful laptop that is a hopeless pile of crap, to the core strength that was once HP, their printers, it is apparent how the mighty have fallen.

    I have posted before on the travails of my lousy laptop. Suffice it to say that it works, but the power management bits are pretty messed up (not sure if it is windows, or the hardware, and frankly at this point, I don’t care.)

    This post is on the HP multifunction printer we have.  In theory, they are great machines. Color, black and white, scan to email, fax, they just work. But there are some glitches that will drive you bonkers.

    By default, they print in duplex. Not too much of a problem, but sometimes you really want to print one-sided. So you end up fixing the settings and printing a second time.

    Where they fail miserably is in the collation. For some reason that I haven’t been able to determine, if you print 8 or more pages, the first two are properly sent to the bottom tray, in the proper orientation. Then all the rest will be sent to the top tray, in backwards order.

    Is it the shitty HP universal print driver? Is it the shitty onboard software/firmware? Or is it gremlins? Our support organization seems to have given up the search for a solution (as I am sure the only real solution will be to push these units off a ship’s deck into the ocean and replacing them with a better device, canon, brother etc)

    So, I am manually collating a 36 page document that has no page numbers, and is backwards in its order.

  • House trivia, part X

    A little over a year ago, we moved to Chandler as I took a job there. We bought a good house in a great neighborhood. However, I knew there were some things to fix.

    I already had the plumbing nightmare where every step of the way in replacing a bad bathroom fixture, and replacing a hot water heater valve, and ultimately replacing the main water shutoff valve.

    The concrete in the side yards looks like a third grader put it in. The lot isn’t graded to drain, so in heavy rain, our yard floods. They went ultra cheap on the insulation.

    But the worst, without doubt, is the exterior paint. I knew it was a bit rough, but hey, it was 15 years old. We got the nasty gram from HOA that we needed to paint. So, we got a painter. He point out that the exterior paint was just a colored primer. Not even a finish coat.  Sigh.

    I wonder what will be next…

  • Part II – The Quest to Lower my Monthly Wireless Bill

    Yesterday I was toying with the idea to give up the iphone and possibly go phone-less. Hard to imagine, as i have been a cell user since 1998 or so, but frankly, I rarely use the phone at all anymore.

    Of course going cell free is a crazy idea. 15 years ago you could walk a block and find 4 – 5 pay phones. But the ubiquity of cell phones has pretty much made the old staple payphones obsolete. (and does anybody still use calling cards?  I think 2002 was the last time I had one for work).

    So, I decided to go prowl around the AT&T Wireless site. Perhaps I can go to fewer minutes, since I am using less than 100 minutes a month. Or go to a flip phone and dump the data plan. Alas, there are few options. I could go to a flip phone (and they are surprisingly expensive, and the selections are skimpy) and cut the data plan.  That will save $40 a month.

    But 450 minutes is the smallest plan offered. There is a 200 minute “Senior” plan, but since I am not 65 yet, I can’t go there. Crud. So with feels, I would go from $1200 a year to $600 a year. Not that big of a savings, worth giving up my music player (I would need to buy an iPod again, gasp).

    I could go to a Virgin Mobile PAYGO plan, but I am pretty sure I would lose my current cell number (does anybody know if I can port my number to one of the MVNO’s?)

    Sigh.

  • That existential question – do I need a cell phone?

    Well, my contract is up with AT&T Mobile, and not surprisingly it coincides with an Apple product launch. New iPhones are in the air, and I am due for an upgrade from my 4s.

    But instead of diving in and getting the new 5s, I have been thinking a different way. Do I really need a cell phone?

    Since I haven’t been traveling much I haven’t really used many minutes on my plan.  I currently have over 5000 rollover minutes (which I think is the most that AT&T will let you accrue), so I certainly could trim back my plan to fewer minutes per month. (I think in the last two months I have used about 180 minutes total out of 1800 allocated (900 per month)) I do not get a phone through work, so I can conceivably just not be “available” when I am on the road – an attractive thought indeed.

    Yes, I like having my email, facebook and other apps at my fingertips throughout the day, but do I really need it?

    About 6 months ago, I was looking to reduce monthly outlays, and decided to not make any changes in my wireless communications. Mainly because I rely on the text messaging for my Google gmail two factor authentication. If I go back to standard security, then I no longer “need” a cell phone. (that was the determining factor at the time).

    Or, I could just give up the smartphone, and go with a feature phone. But AT&T has a whopping selection of only 7 models, and 3 are refurbs.

    I even thought of going to an Android phone a while back, and looked at the AT&T store. There is a wide range of quality and “goodness” of those devices. None of them really rocked my world.

    So, now that I can cancel my phone without penalty, I am considering going cell phone free. It might be liberating.

    $1,200 a year extra cash is appealing. But will I regret coughing up my digital leash?

  • Must be Monday – 2 bluescreens by 8:00 AM

    Sigh. This is getting tiresome. I have not had such issues with computer crashes since I first went to Windows Vista in 2007. 

    I come in this morning and pop my computer on the docking station. It was sleeping happily, then I pressed the power button to “wake it up”. I get the familiar password screen, then BAM – blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Wait for it to finish the memory dump. Hmmm, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_0, and a search of the internet tells me not much.

    Power it off and on again. It gets about 1/3 the way through booting, and BAM, another blue screen.

    Fuck.

    Third time is a charm. It is up, and I only took an hour to get to a ready state of working.

    Last week, the service people replaced my screen, several cables, and the logic board. Now I am getting lots of bluescreens. And my left side USB ports are dead. While they supply power, they do not recognize any devices attached.

    I hate this PC.

    Now to recover all the in progress documents.

  • Grocery Shopping Theatre – The beer selection

    The local Fry’s Foods is a smorgasbord of people watching. A few days ago, I was in the mood for beer, so I maundered in the alcohol aisle. In front of the cooler with the microbrews and imports was a gentleman (and that is a loose interpretation) who was idling in front of the good US micros.  I watched him hem and haw for a few minutes.

    One of my favorites, not as good now that it is owned by a major though
    One of my favorites, not as good now that it is owned by a major though

    I could almost see him thinking out loud: “I have $12, I can get a six pack of really good micro brew.  Or, I could get a 12 pack of a reasonable import.  What shall I buy?”

    Of course after wavering and standing in front of where I wanted to look for a few minutes, he walked over and bought a 30 pack of Miller Lite.  Obviously quantity won out over quality.

    I hope I am never that person.

  • Web Content Management Systems

    I have used several CMS’s over the years, from my time at Cisco with their internally developed system, and again starting in 2009 or so when I started working with WordPress and later Joomla! They are wonderful tools, but they do have some drawbacks.

    First the positives. Someone who is technically minded can setup a WordPress site, add a custom template, and have a pretty decent site in an afternoon. WordPress has grown a lot since I first started using it, and it is a pretty good environment to setup a public website, not just a blog. Joomla! is a bit more complex, but it is infinitely more customizable, and flexible. You can run a pretty complex site with options like project management, multiple vehicles of managing content and contributions, and even a pretty robust e-commerce site.

    Both platforms make it easy to create and modify content with either built in WYSIWYG editors, or extended editors as a plugin. That means that your contributors can easily create and maintain pretty complex content like the were creating a document in Microsoft Word.

    But that is also a problem as content is updated, modified, and changed. These WYSIWYG editors do all the html stuff on the back end, hiding the complexity from the user. They also do not create optimal html. Little glitches add up over time, and soon, if you have content that you update frequently you will need to either blow it away and restart, or drop into raw HTML mode to clean it up. Fortunately both platforms make this easy, as long as you know how to edit HTML.

    The second positive is the amount of customization possible. Both platforms have a great ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and packages. Joomla has a slight lead here, as the quality and support of these third party bits is quite good. WordPress has a lot more, but some of the components are buggy, or are security holes. Again, the community will help guide you to the best pieces.

    But there is a downside. I have been using Joomla for a couple years now, running one of my personal sites, as well as a non-profit site (Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption). I have done lots of experimenting, and sometimes it is a bit of a struggle to undo some changes.  At first, for the SA Greys site I had a testbed, but soon the two sites structurally diverged enough, that I really just keep the main site up now. Of course, with the coming of Joomla! 3.5 stable, I will be making a new version of the website (the hassle of finding and updating plugins and components to 3.0 compatible is a task that I don’t have the patience for, or the time to do. Time for a fresh start with all that I have learned in the past two years)

    This weekend, I am beginning the process of configuring a Joomla 3 site as a testbed, and that means replication and processing a lot of data. A fun activity for a cloudy, rainy Sunday.

    (This post is a little diversion from the tedious documenting of the current site.)

  • Glad and Sad

    While I am not a religious watcher of The Daily Show, I do take in 2 or 3 episodes a week captured on the Tivo, and I have long enjoyed it. Jon Stewart does a phenomenal job of entertaining, while actually achieving some semblance of journalistic integrity (mixed in with a healthy dollop of humor, there are many insightful perspectives).

    Jon had been out on a sabbatical to direct a film in Egypt and Jordan for most of the summer. Now, he’s back, so yay! Of course the first episode back was epic, and of all the major media outlets, Jon Stewart’s take on the Syria crisis makes the most sense.

    But I am sad in a way. While Jon was on hiatus, John Oliver stepped in and did a brilliant job hosting the show. I always thought he was a good asset to the show, but his performance at the helm almost made me forget that Jon Stewart was ever there. Yes, he was that good. He deserves a show (beyond his stand up gig), but it is hard to see where he can fit with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central.

    Hopefully, he finds a happy home and we can then have three outstanding comedian shows to watch.

  • Woo hoo! I am a security Risk!

    A post I entered earlier got flagged by a friend’s work internet filter.

    I have been blocked! How awesome is that.

    He gets this when he tries to surf to this site:

    Clicked the link to read your post… while here at KT. Here’s what I got:

    Your requested URL has been blocked by the Global Threat Intelligence Reputation System. The URL is listed with a reputation that is not allowed by your administrator at this time.

    I guess you’re a security threat, Geoff.

     

    How awesome is that!