Tralfaz

Category: blog

  • Music Streaming – conclusion

    TL;DR version: Spotify wins

    To round out the saga, I needed to make a decision on whether to keep Google  All-Access or Spotify for my online streaming pleasure. If you recall, I signed up for a trial of the Google all access, and was comparing it to Spotify.  While I am an Apple fan, I am not sure their entry this fall into an ad sponsored offering is going to be worth my time. (Perhaps if it was free with my iTunes match subscription …) Primarily, it is because I need to use it on my windows machines as well as my Mac, my iPhone and my Android tablet. iTunes sucks donkey balls on the PC, so unless Apple does something amazing, I am discounting it without trying it.

    Early on, Google All Access was plagued by the glitches that I experienced with my tunes in their database. Skips, pauses, and long halts in playing. Spotify pulled into the lead, because their dedicated application was really solid, and whatever magic they do buffering, it has almost no issues (except when my crappy work network connection flakes out).  But about 2 weeks ago, Google got their streaming act together, and it became solid. Almost as reliable as Spotify.

    However, I am going to stick to my Spotify premium account, and turn off the all access.  While it is $2 cheaper, and it is better integrated with my Android tablet, the Spotify apps make the difference. A quality user experience across platforms, coupled with great streaming, and a good catalog. Spotify FTW.

    Aside: One thing that I never did much of was use the radio option of spotify. I compared the radio option of Google All Access versus spotify, and I like the selections of the Spotify radio stations a wee bit better than on All Access.  Both services have holes in their catalog (due to licensing issues, I would believe), but points in All Access’s favor is that since I have all the Led Zeppelin and Paul Gilbert tracks (legally) they get in to the mix. But that isn’t enough to save its bacon.

    Winner: Spotify

  • Touching a nerve

    So, I have a regular blog where I talk about product management and other career-like things.  I get 20 or so visits a day, and I have some followers in the product management / product marketing world. I try to be a little bit of a balance against all the happy-feel-good self promoting blogs from the Product Management conslutants.

    Some things I have noticed:

    • The greater the “snark” factor, the more visits. When I write something that is non-controversial, or informative on the role, I get far less of a response than I do when I go on a rant.
    • The oddest topics seem to resonate.
    • Some people just need to take a chill pill and relax.

    Case in point. The second most viewed post was when I was ranting about LinkedIn. They are doing a lot of scummy things to try to bolster their database, and to make money. Can’t blame them, but it does get tiring (I should do a follow up, because it seems like every week, I get an entreaty from them to try the “Premium” service.) If you want to check it out, it is at this link.

     

  • The curse of being a “Techie” – Making things too complicated

    I have always been adept at technology. I am sure that some of it is natural aptitude, and some is single bloody-minded-ness that I learned from working with many different computers and other “smart” devices for years (decades now). I am the person that all my family calls when they have problems with tech.

    But sometimes, it is a curse.  Case in point:

    My bluray disc player
    My bluray disc player

    In 2007 or 2008, we took the plunge and went BluRay. We bought a good mid range player at the time, the Panasonic DMP BD30. It has been a faithful player, working great.  Every disk we tossed into it, regardless of the warning that a firmware upgrade may be required played without trouble.  Until May 10 2013 (My birthday).  I got a BD copy of Skyfall, and while the damn trailers on it played, it just wouldn’t play the main movie.  F*ck. I didn’t get a copy of Skyfall on Bluray to watch the damn, tossed in DVD copy.

    So, I investigated the firmware upgrade. I have to say that the Panasonic website for support completely blows.  Yes, I was able to find it, but it took too damn long. Of course, it comes as a self extracting archive that is a Windows program.  Poopies.  I am a Mac person. But it was a self extracting RAR archive, so I was able to get the firmware file out.

    But the instructions were complicated. It said to burn the image to a CD-R (not a CD-RW) and that it had to be ISO9660 format.  Easiest to do on windows, so I tried it with my work laptop.  No joy.

    For some reason, I thought the PANA_DVD.FRM file was a disk image, so I tried all my tools and utilities to burn that image to a CD-R. I now have 4 coasters.

    Finally, I thought to myself, perhaps it isn’t an image file (like an iso) but just the firmware file. I opened a toast session, selected “data CD” and ISO format, and burned that file to a disk. Joy, it took about 10 minutes, but the firmware is now updated to 3.1 (from 1.3) and I am watching the end of Skyfall on BD now.

    My error was in my natural inclination to try to treat it as a disk image, and to burn it as such. That is because I am accustomed to that workflow. But in this case, the simple solution was to just burn the firmware file on a disk. Of course, the instructions say nothing like this, but are filled with warnings about Windows Vista or Windows 7. Being the geek that I am, I avoided the easy solution, and spent a few weeks messing around creating coasters.

    For the record, the player works beautifully, and I am astounded that I was able to go 5 or 6 years before I was forced to do a firmware upgrade. I have friends who are constantly updating their player to handle new discs.

  • More nostalgia – Technology – the PC Clone

    After my Atari 8 bit and 16 bit days, I tacked hard into PC clone land.  My first build was a Mylex motherboard, with 640K ram, and a 286 CPU.  I remember buying the components from a variety of sources, but since this was pre-internet (probably 1986 or so) I didn’t mail order anything.  Probably got much of it at Fry’s Electronics.

    My first foray into the PC world
    My first foray into the PC world

    Added to this was an PC AT case and power supply, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive, an ISA RLL disk controller card, and a simple CGA display card.  A 40 (or was it 60) megabyte HD that was the most expensive part of the build was added to the mix. (It was a 5 & 1/4″ full height disk that was frightfully loud). I remember it having a turbo button (almost always in fast mode) that slowed it down to standard PC XT speed for compatibility – mostly games.

    My good friend Mike Davis helped me assemble it, and got me started with a selection of software for use on it.  I did use the heck out of that system, and subsequently upgraded a few times over the years.  I remember going to a 386 board, with a 16MHz cpu, and a whopping 4 megs of ram. I learned a lot about things that we no longer worry about. IRQ lines and conflicts, UART’s for serial communication (which ones could support the faster 19.2K baud modems).  In those days, there weren’t robust BIOS systems to let you interrupt the boot process and change the settings, you had to open the case and set jumpers on the motherboard or expansion cards. Really annoying to hunt down an odd conflict.

    The main driver for upgrading was to play games better.  CGA was replaced with EGA, and finally with VGA.  Using more than 640K of RAM required the use of fiddly memory manager applications. I was fond of DesqVIEW and QEMM386.  They both worked together to give you some true multitasking on the 386 chip.

    Of course, I used these machines to run a bulletin board system, but it lost much of the Atari charm.  I did discover the online systems, and was a member of Delphi. The one thing that I remember from this time was that the PC world, while it had better, and more powerful hardware, lacked some of the soul of the Atari’s I cut my teeth on. But it was a good stepping stone in my technology education and evolution.

    Sometime in 1989, I got the itch to try something new.  Still in university, I was able to get student pricing on a Mac, and I jumped at a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte HD.  This was the all in one system, with the small monochrome monitor built in. But that is for another tale.

  • The good ol’ days – Technology edition

    Like everyone who makes it to middle age, I have a rich tapestry of memories. Today, while bicycling, I reminisced about my first computer, an Atari 800.

    My first personal computer
    My first personal computer

    The year was 1979, my freshman year of high school, and I got exposed to the new computer lab at school. It had (I think) 4 Apple ][+’s each with two disk drives, and small color composite monitors.  I was in love.  Of course, I couldn’t afford one of these, but Atari had just released their line of computers. Not as slick and sexy as the Apple ][‘s but it was in a price range that I could afford on my paper route money.

    After saving my nickels, I went out and splurged on an 800, and an 810 disk drive.  I added a Basic cartridge, and I bought a game.  Star Raiders if I recall correctly. I had am amazing amount of fun exploring that system.  I found some local users, and we started swapping disks of software, and I was happy.

    I learned Atari basic, some very simple 6502 machine language, and some of the cool capabilities of these systems. Then sometime in 1981 or 1982, I learned about electronic BBS’s.  At the time, the IBM PC hadn’t been launched, and if you wanted a personal computer, it was Apple, Atari, or Commodore (This was before the VIC20 and the C64 – so it was the older PET computers). I had heard of this thing called BBS’s, and I once again saved my dimes to buy a modem. I also had to buy an interface box (called the 850 I think, or was it 815?) to connect it to (the box had 4 RS232 ports), and I got online for the first time.  There were a ton of great Atari BBS’s, probably 40 – 50 in the San Jose area (no toll area for me), and I logged in to most of them. There were message boards, file exchanges, and even chatting with the operators of the BBS’s (called “Sysops”).

    I was hooked. I had a growing collection of software, and was enjoying the interchange, but the bug to run a BBS bit me.  I found a copy of the most used program, FoReM (Friends of Ricke E Moose), and off I went.

    The name was “The Hotel California” (I was going through an Eagles phase), and I made the entire board a music theme. I probably had 20 calls a day on the average. In those days kids, you had to use a phone line to call another computer. I also did a fair amount of customization to the software (It was written in Basic XL) which was a struggle because it barely fit in memory to run.  Often you had to rewrite a subroutine to save a few bytes before you could add somewhere else.  I added a lot of hardware to the system as time went on, more disk drives, a special adaptor that let me use 8″ disks (3X the storage per disk) and from a 300 baud Hayes modem up to a 1200 baud modem (don’t recall the brand). I also remember writing some assembly code that was executed from a string to be able to transmit data at 1200 bits per second.  Heady stuff indeed. Eventually it ended up on an Atari 800XL that I had hacked 128K of memory into (used the extra memory as a ramdisk to speed the message board IIRC).

    I ran the BBS for a bunch of years, and had a blast, but eventually I moved on to a 16 bit Atari, and to a PC clone. I made some friends that I still have today (Mike Davis, and Vern Anderson who ran the “Rat’s Nest” bbs, and was my guitar teacher).

    I have a 130XE, the last of the 8 bit line for Atari that I break out to play games on once in a while.  I have a ton of old software that I can run in an emulator, or on the real hardware. It is “fun” to return to the archaic past, and relive some experiences, but it reminds me of how well we have it now.

    Next installment – my migration to the world of PC clones.

  • Hypermiling – Pisses me off

    Today on the drive home, I was behind a Prius who was hypermiling. In case you are unaware, there is a phenomenon in the hybrid car world of people who work to minimize their fuel consumption. The cars’ onboard computer very accurately tracks fuel consumption, and they challenge themselves to keep the MPG as high as possible.

    To do this, they very slowly accelerate from a stop light, and brake far from a red light to use the regenerative braking (converts kinetic energy into electricity and stores it in the batteries). It is really annoying to be behind one of these buttholes when they are doing this.  We have ~ 1 mile between stop lights and these a-holes don’t even get to the 45mph speed limit before they slow for the next light (they seem to always have to stop). How boring.

    I drive a sports car. I like to accelerate hard through the gears, and to brake hard when I have to stop at a light. I like to go fast around corners, to start wide, kiss the apex, and drift back out. I know that I burn more gas than a hybrid, and I just don’t give a crap.

    I don’t ever see myself buying a hybrid, and trying to minimize gas consumption. I understand people who do that.  But I would rather sell my car and take public transit than have the mindset of a typical hybrid driver.

  • A good problem

    Life is a series of challenges, but some are more welcome than others. Today I bicycled into the office, showered and changed into street clothes.  I brought in a pair of jeans, a polo shirt and the usual accoutrements. After showering, and dressing I made a stark observation:

    My jeans are almost too big to wear.

    Woo hoo, what a good problem to have.  I don’t yet need to shop for more clothes, because I have sets of clothes that will follow me down to below 190#’s, but it is a good feeling.

  • Fun with Dentistry

    I had a cleaning and “new patient” visit a couple weeks ago.  My first visit since I moved to Chandler from Tucson.  All was good, but they did tell me that my amalgam fillings were beginning to age, and probably should be replaced. I was not surprised by this, as I had some major work done after my orthodontic work was removed. Some big cavities were filled, and this was 30-ish years ago (before I graduated high scho0l for sure). Since two upper right molars have crumpled, and been crowned, I am not surprised that it was recommended to replace the amalgam fillings with some new composite fillings.  It also turns out that silver-mercury amalgams are becoming rare, as the modern composite materials are in many ways vastly superior.

    Fast forward to today.  I had half the at risk amalgams replaced (the left side). Ugh, I forgot how much I hate dental work. Of course, on the lowers, there was a place where they had to drill deep to remove the amalgam, and it is likely to be cold sensitive for a  while. I got a view of the “holes” and yikeys, it was a lot removed.  I guess I never realized how much repair I had in the way back time. Of course they did a brilliant job of numbing me up, I had 4 shots of Novocaine, and am drooling like an invalid.  I guess my plans to go to dinner with my visiting sales engineer are off.

    The good news is that the new fillings are going to last longer and hopefully will not need any more crowns.

    In 2 weeks, I do the 4 on the right side of my mouth.  Oh joy.

     

  • Colour did in The Avengers

    A joy from my childhood was watching reruns of the The Avengers.  Much later in life I bought the DVD’s on a whim, and I will admit to enjoying watching the old episodes.

    I have two years form the “pre Diana Rigg” Avengers.  Honor Blackman (who was a Bond girl, Pussy Galore) did a fine job. It was clear that the production quality was a bit thin, and that showed through, but still they were enjoyable romps.  Starting in 1965, Diana Rigg took the place of Ms. Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) in John Steed’s new partner, Miss Emma Peel, and the series was in full cult mode.  There were 2 years of Diana Rigg episodes filmed in black and white.  and they were awesome.

    Then in 1967, they went to color.  While the production values improved year after year, and the writing, one thing was lost in the transition to color. Miss Peel began wearing colorful pant suits and similar attire. Gone forever was all the black leather that graced the show in the B&W era.

    Pity, that was definitely one of the charms.

    (For the record, like most cult classics, the plot lines were contrived, the action cheesy, and almost all episodes had Miss Peel in a catfight. Hence, I will continue to watch the episodes.)

  • Gift shopping tips for men

    As last week was my better half’s birthday, and next week is our anniversary, I thought I would share what I have learned over the years in gift giving for the feminine half of the human race. I am sure this is out there somewhere, but I figure that it can’t hurt to repeat it ad nauseum.

    First, buy big durable goods. Cars work if you can afford it (and in fact Lexus does some brilliant messaging around this) but I am not quite that rich.

    Second, buy tech goodies.  iPads, smartphone, computer, or if your other half is a video geek, AV gear works well.

    Next up (and many might move this to the top) jewelry.  I am fortunate that my spouse isn’t a fan of expensive flashy jewelry, so I get to rate this down the list.

    Many other good ideas, spa days, fancy meals out, weekends at resorts etc are all great ideas (and some of them you might enjoy too.)

    What you should never ever under any circumstances buy your woman any clothes. There are several reasons for this, and tripping on any of them is cause for time spent in the doghouse.

    1. If you buy a size too big – Hoo boy, this is good for some fireworks. You become an instant insensitive slob who thinks your woman it too fat.
    2. If you buy a size too small – Almost worse than going too big. Now you are expecting them to be something that they aren’t, and crying jags, followed by whole pints of hagen daz ice cream being consumed.
    3. If you actually buy the right size, you might think that you are golden, but a fact I have learned in life is that a woman does not want you to know that she is a size 12.  That is supposed to be a state secret, and not divulged.

    If you must, note where their clothes come from (the label) and buy a generous gift certificate for that store. Or, better yet, go along and let them shop while you watch them model the clothes. (naturally, you bring the credit card)