serving time at the DMV isn't as bad as it used to be

Someone stole the plate off our minivan yesterday, and the first thing I did after consoling Left Coast Mom for the bad luck of finding was to go to the California DMV site and try to set up an appointment so as to avoid spending tons of time in the lobby.

Yes, we could have driven around a while sans plate (we had a police report to back up our claim of the plate being stolen), but LCMom wasn't too thrilled at the thought of driving around without everything being legit. I don't blame her.

However, the earliest appointment available at the DMV was on June 14... over a week away.

I screwed up my courage and decided to go in as soon as the local DMV office opened this morning at 8am and wait it out.

One thing conspired with another, and I didn't actually make it to the DMV until 10 past 8. 

Imagine my surprise when I not only walked straight up to the DMV air-traffic-control person (the multilingual one who says, "why are you here? here's your form... here's your number.. wait over there" all day long). 

I got my form, sat down, and if I hadn't hurried to complete it, I would've had to do so standing in front of the clerk waiting to serve me.

I was walked out of the DMV at 8:20a with brand new plates.

For years, I've given the DMV a bad rap as "the great equalizer that makes everyone wait a long time no matter your stature in life." 

I stand corrected. Color me impressed.

sculpture garden under the sea off Grenada

In catching up on my boingboing feeds, I'm just now finding out about Jason Taylor's Underwater Sculpture garden off the coast of Grenada.

The sculptures are life-sized human forms that he's carefully placed in 4 to 9 meters of water off the west coast of Grenada. It's a simple concept, yet he's executed it brilliantly.

While the still photo gallery gives a great overview of the pieces, I'm a sucker for video, and the piano etude playing in the background is the perfect choice for this 2 minute video tour. And if you're like me and wonder just how Jason did it all, he's even shared pix of his process.

My favorite pieces are the Vicissitudes (a circle of standing human forms in 4.5m of water) and the hauntingly beautiful La Diablesse at 7.5m. Yet another reason to head back to the West Indies.

new home for the chooks

new home for the chooks,
originally uploaded by thomas pix.

The Eglu has arrived, and after a little more than an hour, I was able to put it together and move the girls in.

I was really impressed with the way the packaging was handled... the Omlet folks have done a splendid job with the product design. The only nits to pick are with the instructions on how to set things up, and the expectation for how long it'll take.

The instructions start with the sentence "Assembling the eglu and run - this shouldn't take much more than 20 minutes and is very simple."

Very simple? Yes.

20 minutes? No. Not even. Maybe if you've been putting these things together for years and are racing a fellow employee for bragging rights you can do it in 20 minutes, but for the average Joe (or Thomas as the case may be)... plan on an hour.
The handy "The Omlet Guide" included with the eglu was surprisingly informative and entertaining in addition to instructional regarding how to set up the 'glu.

In all, I'm very pleased with our purchase. But I already miss hearing the girls' cheep cheep as I type my blog. Hope they're sleeping safe and sound in their new eglu.

Note: this is a duplicate post of what's appearing over on my Urban Chickens blog. I inadvertently published it here straight from my Flickr account, but it's worth keeping here if for nothing but the cool technology that the eglu represents.

ten years of cathedrals and bazaars

Wow. I just was reminded that this month marks the ten year anniversary of
publication of the seminal essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (links to First Monday version).

As I was first starting to explore the whole open source/mass collaboration
phenomena, this essay had an enormous impact on my understanding what was
to come. It's worth reading again (which I will do to mark the occasion).

how to reproduce 36k ft thinking at sea level?

Today is not the first time I've had some holy-smokes! strategic insight blind-side me mid-flight.

I'm just about to pass over my 50,000th mile flying in the last three months, and besides the toll of the cramped seating arrangement and the challenge of liquids (both to consume and to expend), the cocoon of air travel actually presents me a very fertile space for big-picture thinking.

I divided up this flight into three segments (all segments soundtracked with noise-canceling Shure e4c headphones and a random playlists on my iPod).

• In the first segment, I caught up on all the short articles I'd been printing out and stashing in my "flight folder" (Tom Friedman opinions, CIO mag leadership articles, conference prep materials)
• [break for food and drink]
• in the second segment, I dove into the book I'm plowing through right now (The Difference by Scott E. Page)
• [break for short nap]
• in the final segment, I read all my RSS feeds offline to get inspired by a whole plethora of different perspectives, and that's when the insights hit.

The ideas flow like water, and I madly dash the notes down in an email to myself. And here I sit wondering what is it about hurtling through space that enables this kind of thinking.

Much as I don't want to admit it, I think the catalyst is the one-two-three punch:

• my cocoon of iPod-laced sound
• the lack of distractions from others around me asking questions
  
• and, gulp, the complete lack of internet connectivity.
  

Without connectivity, there's no way for me to satisfy my curiosities by following the links in my RSS reader, so I gobble up the static ideas and perspectives quickly... and that leads the neurons to fire in ways they otherwise don't.

Next time I'm inclined to spend sleepless hours in the middle of the night surfing the web (yes, undisturbed, but no music playing), I'll instead try to reproduce the airplane experience: pop on the iPod, sign off the web and then see if I can get into an uncomfortable seating position.

Bonus points if I can endure the awkward tug of both a full bladder and a dry tongue for full replication of the high-level thinking environment that seems abundant at 36,000 feet.

too many netflix dvds unplayable

Over the weekend, Left Coast Mom and I finally got a chance to sit down and watch The Pursuit of Happyness, courteous our Netflix subscription.

Well, we got to watch the first hour and fifteen minutes of it. Then the damn thing froze and we couldn't get the rest of it to play. I tried cleaning the DVD (per Netflix suggestion) but no dice. We were stuck at the beginning of the Taxes Due chapter (21) and unable to skip ahead. Lots of forced quits of the Mac Mini's DVD player before we finally gave up.

If this were the first time this'd happened, I might be more understanding, but we seem to have run into a slew of unplayable DVDs from Netflix.

Yes, Netflix is more than happy to quickly replace the unplayable DVD, but that's at least a three-day-long solution, and the nights are few and far in between when both LCM and I hit the parenting trifecta of 1) kids in bed and asleep on time, 2) caught up on DVR shows and 3) have at least two hours before we fall dead asleep.

We're on the 2 at-a-time (4 a month) program specifically because we hit the trifecta so seldomly. Now that we're running into unplayable DVDs, to boot, we may just have to reapportion our $12 a month movie habit over to HBO instead of Netflix.

We just got billed, so I'll give Netflix until end of June before making the decision. If we get yet another unplayable DVD, we'll switch.

the feature creep conundrum

James Surowiecki (of Wisdom of the Crowds fame) has a great article about Feature Creep in this coming Monday's May 28 issue of the New Yorker. In the article, he adroitly addresses the painful situation that technology producers have found themselves in now that design cycles are relatively short, innovation is relatively cheap and the consumer feedback loop is so short:

This spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,” costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them.

Surowiecki points out that a lot of Feature Creep problems stem from the internal-audience problem where the developers themselves don't use the very products they're developing and therefore have no idea how crappy the end product turns out.

I learned at AOL to combat the internal-audience problem by making the producers use the actual goods they're making (aka "eating your own dog food"). Back in 1998, when my team created the 1-2-3 Publish and Easy Designer home page publishing tools, you bet I used them to make and maintain my own AOL Hometown page (still there after all these years. Ah, good times).

The number of features we didn't include in the basic publishing tool was huge, and not all of them fell off the list because of scarce development resources... we had constant battles to strip down the 1-2-3 Publish tool to be as lean as possible so newbie web publishers wouldn't get distracted by gizmos on their way to creating their first web page.

Of course, as a product manager, I cheated by throwing all the gee-whiz features intended for 1-2-3 Publish instead into the specs for Easy Designer, the WYSIWYG publishing tool. The price we paid for including all these things was comically bloated html code in the resulting published pages. As long as you don't view source, the products not all that bad.

I still make sure to use the tools I produce, but my primary interaction with feature creep now is as a consumer. I fancy myself to be a geek and take pride in making as much use of features on my gizmos as possible, only if I have time to study and learn and ham-fist my way through menus of options.

I've come to expect that part of the purchase equation I've internalized is that I'm willing to pay for high-end stuff and yet use only a tenth of the features available on that stuff. Case in point, my Harman Kardon AVR245. Of the 70 buttons on the remote, I use only 5 of them (power, volume up, volume down, FM, HDMI) when I'm not just manually pushing buttons on the receiver itself. That fact in itself tells you just how much of the capacity of the AVR245 I'm using. However, I love the sound quality of the AVR a lot, and even that's an understatement.

I'd like to say I bought the AVR245 specifically because of its sound quality and not because of all the cool kick-ass features I'll some day use, but that's not true. I bought it for the feature set (and the sound quality!), and that's exactly the conundrum Surowiecki talks about in his article:

as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we’ll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works.

Maybe I'll spend Memorial Day learning how to use another button on the remote.

yet another bug with the HR20 HD DVR

More bizarre behavior from our DirecTV HR20 DVR has recently cropped up:

When we press the 30-second skip ahead button, the DVR actually rewinds about 15 seconds before starting to skip ahead 30 seconds. It doesn't happen every time we press the skip button. And it seems more likely to happen when the show we're playing back is within the first five minutes of the recording.

No, I'm not fat-fingering the skip button and accidentally hitting the replay button (my fingers aren't that big, thanks), and I can't understand why this bug has appeared now.

Our latest upgrade (to software version 0x145) happened on Friday 3/30/07 at 1:47am. Nothing has changed recently in our setup, so I'm stumped about this one.

I'd resisted posting about the HR20 for a long time because I didn't want to jinx our good luck with the latest software build. However, this rewind-before-skipping-ahead "feature" is getting a little annoying.

Oh, and another beef that I've got with the way the HR20 sets up series to record: if there are multiple broadcasts of a show (like the Daily Show or Deadline or Art Mann Presents), the DVR records the earlier broadcast, even if you choose the later broadcast to avoid overlaps with other recordings. Annoying.

But hey, at least I'm not losing programs anymore. (fingers-crossed)

turning old CDs into something valuable

Thanks to a BB post, I see that a couple of those old CD-ROMs I've been lugging around since I moved from San Francisco to DC back in 1995 might actually be worth something, at least from a patent-busting point of view.

Overly quoting the EFF story here (but for good cause):

A company called Acacia has claimed a patent on an “information distribution system” that amounts to the idea of shipping a CD-ROM that contains hyperlinks to online resources. (EFF is currently working on busting another Acacia patent that covers streaming audio and video over the Internet.)

To help bust this overly broad patent, we are looking for prior art that shows the use of this technology before 1994. Specifically, we are seeking the following items:

1. NetNews CD-ROMs, sold by Sterling Software, preferably volumes #1 through #35. These CDs may have been also available through CD Publishing Corporation.

or

2. Other CD-ROMs that were distributed in 1993 or earlier that contained
hypertext content or were installation disks for applications that linked to Internet content.

Information about these or similar items is greatly appreciated. Submit tips to Philip H. Albert with Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP.

Can't wait to dig through my file boxes to see if I've got a golden ticket!

my favorite Treo 650 map app

I'm still oozing with gushy feelings over having found the Google Mobile Map application yesterday (thanks to the folks blogging at WWD).

This lightweight little app (480KB download) brings all the power of web-based Google Maps to your handheld (mine's a Treo 650) with surprisingly quick speed and decent resolution:

• real-time traffic data
• detailed directions (written and illustrated)
• search results displayed on screen
• satellite images

I couldn't be more pleased to have this little app. What's more, it's not browser-bound, so I don't have to go through the slow launch process of pulling up the web every time I want to use the maps.

w00t!

The only other Treo app that I've found even close to this clever and useful is the Caltrain Schedule for Palm OS, but now that I'm a mile from work, no need to slavishly consult the "next train" info for me.

i remember her when...

Over a bowl of Grape Nuts at breakfast, I was glancing over the list of attendees at the white-tie dinner for the Queen at the White House last night, and what caught my eye were the names of two different pro football players in attendance: Peyton Manning and Timothy Hasselbeck.

Perhaps Dubya thought it proper to have some footballers in attendance for the Queen? (shhh, don't tell him).

What stood out all the more was the fact that Elisabeth Hasselbeck was in attendance with her husband (or was he with her?). Yes, she's a co-host of "The View" now and all that.

But this is also the same Elisabeth (Filarski) that we watched sweat through a season of Survivor Australia to finish in fourth place.

Who could have thought she'd go from getting eaten alive by flies in the Outback to an audience with the Queen?

Just goes to show that life is funny sometimes... and there's no way to know what's coming next.

when the party's over...

My beloved Sharks managed to lose in the second round of the playoffs (again). This, after being up two games to one in the series against the Red Wings.

I was at the game last night, and it seemed like after the initial 15 minutes of trying to score, the Sharks, as a team, shrugged their collective shoulders and gave in. It didn't help that we were sitting in front of a couple obnoxious some-time fans of the game (see Left Coast Mom's description of the experience), but it was still great to get in one more game at the Shark Tank this year.

So, the 2007 Stanley Cup will be won by the better of the Ducks/Red Wings or the Sabers/Senators. Don't even know whom to root for in those matchups.

And, after a day or two of beating up the Sharks in the local papers, hockey will be relegated to its usual 4 column inches per week in the Mercury News.

On the bright side: only four more (hot) months until preseason starts!

name change or revised history?

Courtesy a kottke.org link, I discovered this Air & Space article on the First Photo from Outer Space.

Turns out that shortly after WWII, scientists launched a V-2 missile into outer space from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The rocket had on board a 35mm motion picture camera, and it reached an altitude of 65 miles at its apex. The missile crashed to earth, and the camera broke (as you'd expect) but the film survived in its steel case.

Several of the film stills were stitched together to form a panorama that showed over a million square miles of the Southwestern United States. More specifically, of New Mexico, a state I grew up in.

And beyond the golly-gee-willikers nature of the shot, I'm amazed to see that the Jemez Mountains, the mountains I grew up at the foot of for ten years, are called out in the panorama as the "Valle Grande Mts."

Huh. I'd always known that the caldera that makes up the vast interior of the Jemez Mountains was the "Valle Grande" (and more specifically, "Baca Land" after the family that owned the vast expanse).

Granted, the photo was taken when the city of Los Alamos was freshly emerging from its secret-squirrel status as home of the Manhattan Project. But when did the name change? Or was the person in charge of labeling points of interest on the photo a little loosey-goosey with names?

Looking over at Wikipedia's entry on Jemez Mountains, I see that what I knew as "Valle Grande" is referred to by others as the "Valles Caldera." Wikipedia contribution, here I come!

use wordpress or blogger? blogger wins

Those following along know I'd started a new blog a week ago to track our progress as urban chicken farmers. I've used Blogger for over a year to publish this string of posts, and having blogged on the WordPress platform a few times as a guest blogger, decided to try something new.

After just five posts on WP, I've now moved the nascent Urban Chickens blog back to this platform. While you can still find the blog at http://urbanchickens.net, the domain now forwards here to myurbanchickens.blogspot.com. I'll be deleting the old WP blog this weekend.

Why did I pick Blogger over WordPress? for several reasons:

1. Knowing as much html and CSS as I do, it's easy to customize the Blogger template. To do the same on WP, I'd have to pay (literally) for the privilege. When I start creating artwork for the design, it'll be easy to add here on Blogger.
   
2. WP disallows all advertising and anything more than a few, relatively low-key affiliate links. I've got designs on building up enough niche traffic to Urban Chickens to warrant at least token advertising and affiliate income (enough to pay for chicken feed). Here on HVY TK, I've earned upwards of $10 in the last five months without really trying.
3. I'm comfortable with the Blogger interface. I know where to click to find things. I lived through the starting this blog pre-Beta and then moving to the now no-longer-Beta interface. Starting a new blog here on Blogger is incredibly easy.
   
4. I use Statcounter to track traffic, and WP didn't allow me to add it to my blog there. Here, I've just added the Urban Chickens blog as a new project. Piece of cake!
5. Finally, what I thought would be the deal clincher on WP is no longer a value-add: I can add guest bloggers (like left coast mom) to the Urban Chicken blog in a snap.

Glad to be back here. Be sure to change your feed readers!

WWO: walking to work everyday

(I'm participating in World Without Oil, and as of today, gas is up to $4.12 a gallon in this alternate reality game.)

I filled up my car for what I hope is the one and only time this month. Gas hit $4.12 a gallon, and that's up from $3.69 last week. I can't believe that it only took $0.50 a gallon to push me over the threshold, but driving a mile to work now feels like such a luxury, and one I can now do without.

No more weekend fun rides on the motorcycle -- it will stay in the garage unless I absolutely must travel to attend meetings outside the office, then I'll ride it (@ 45mpg) instead of driving the car (@ 22mpg). And if I can get away with Skype video conferences instead of face-to-face meetings, I will.

Glad I booked my June trip to Boston last week, as it looks as though airfares are shooting through the roof. And I'll take the T from the airport this time instead of a taxi. Who knows what the fuel surcharge will be at the end of the month?

cheep, cheep, meet the peep(s)

meet the chick!
Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

After much hemming and hawing and fence-sitting, we've finally got our chicks. Two Barred Rock pullets joined our family yesterday afternoon.

To spare regular readers all the bloggy details of raising chickens, I've started a new blog about them chicks here in my new blog Urban Chickens.

Only rarely will the chicken stuff bleed into this blog, and that'll only be when there's a technology or food angle to the post.

TED video: why are we happy? why aren't we happy?

Had the pleasure to see Dan Gilbert talk at South by Southwest Interactive in 2006 on the same subject: what makes us happy?

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness "synthetic happiness," and he says it's "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for."

Great 20 min video from the TED conference here. Well worth the watch!

If you're more into reading ink on dead trees, get his book: Stumbling on Happiness

earth day: living greener in 2007

As a way of celebrating Earth Day today, I've taken inventory of how much "greener" we, as a family, are this year compared to last.

The biggest greening has come from our moving into a new home that's only a mile from my office. Not only has my daily commute shrunk from 59 miles to 2 miles, with all the carbon emission reductions that come from not having to lug my butt those 285 miles to work each week, but the house we live in now is greener, too.

Our old house was in a nice sunny neighborhood in Campbell (outside San Jose), but there was no topography to speak of. We were in a flatlands surrounded by other houses/condos/businesses, and the micro-climate of our area meant we consistently ran temperatures 10 degrees warmer than other towns around us (love those Bay Area microclimates!). Lots of trees in our neighborhood, including two huge camphor trees in our front yard, but that didn't mean it was any less hot in the summers. To help cope with the heat in our old place, we had air conditioning installed when we replaced the ancient furnace with a new energy-efficient one. While we lived more comfortably, we paid for it in our energy bills. The Springs and Autumns were the cheapest since we didn't have to pay to heat or cool the place, but we got used to shelling out over $200 a month in energy costs.

Flash forward to this year in our new home. We now live on the slope of a hill overlooking downtown Redwood City which means we get gentle breezes every afternoon and can leave the windows open most of the spring and summer to enjoy the natural cooling. Not only is the location of our home more conducive to natural climate control, but we have solar panels on the roof and an electric meter that spins both ways: when the panels generate more energy than we use, we feed back into the grid. At night and on cloudy days, we pull from the grid since the panels aren't generating anything. These solar panels have had an amazing impact on our electricity bill. Since we moved in last August, we've consumed less than $200 TOTAL electricity (compared with $200 a month in the old place). Wow.

The house we're in now is about 1,100 square feet bigger than our old home, to boot, but thanks to a dual zone furnace, we only heat the upstairs floor (where we spend 95% of our time living) and leave the well-insulated downstairs floor to its own devices.

There are other things we can do to get greener by next Earth Day, like cutting water consumption, growing our own veggies and my walking/biking to work several days a week (oh, and raising chickens!), but we've made huge strides in the last year. Here's hoping more and more of us can have similar impacts in lessening our footprint on the earth.

Happy Earth Day!

toshiba 42hp66 HD plasma snowy picture

toshiba 42hp66 HD plasma picture snafu
Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

Disconcertingly, I'm seeing the snowy/fuzzy picture problem pictured to the right more and more frequently when I first turn on our Toshiba 42HP66 plasma HD TV.

So far, I'm able to get around it by turning the TV unit on and off a couple times seems to solve the problem and eventually the picture comes in clear as a bell.

I'm not sure where the problem might be, but I've noticed that it has the same signal processing problem whether I'm trying to watch TV (the signal from the DirecTV HR20 DVR) or access my Mac's desktop (the signal from the Mac Mini).

Since I'm getting the problem while trying to "see" both TV and Mac, I don't think the problem is due to the Harman Kardon AVR 245 I use as a switch between the devices. Rather, I think it's something to do with the connection between the AVR 245 and the TV itself. I've tested the physical connection of the HDMI cable to both the back of the AVR 245 and the TV, and those both seem fine.

I'm really hoping it's not the actual HDMI cable that's going bad. Not only because I paid the installer the unholy sum of $85 for the cable, but because the cable has been installed inside the wall so there are not unsightly wires hanging from our wall-mounted HDTV.

san jose sharks move on

Was quite satisfying to see our hometown Sharks defeat the Predators in Nashville last night.

While I really wanted them to win the series in five games (which they did), there was just a small part of me hoping the series would go to six games (WHAT?!).

Blasphemous? not really... I'm just greedy, I guess.

See, I split my season tickets with two other parties, so we're rotating attendance at playoff games, using a pbwiki to track rotations and tabs. Since there weren't three home games in Round One, there's a remote chance I won't be able to attend a Round Two game should the Sharks sweep or win in five again.

Now I don't really mind watching the games on TV (it's cheaper, for sure), but the camera crew assigned to televise the games from Nashville couldn't follow the puck to save their lives. It looks like the rest of the markets still in the playoffs (Anaheim, Detroit or Calgary, Dallas or Vancouver) have many more years of experience under their belts than the Nashville crew ever would.

Go Sharks!

busy or bursty?

Interesting article over on Web Worker Daily describing the differences between what they call the busyness-oriented workers and the bursty-oriented workers. Some examples:

Busy: Show your face during all standard working hours.
Burst: If you produce what you need to, we don’t care when you do it or how long it takes.

Busy: Immediate response to email required.
Burst: Use better ways to communicate when available including blogs, wikis, IM, chat rooms, SMS, and RSS.

See the full busy/burst article over on WWD (and don't miss the discussion in the comments).

urban chickens... here we come

After several months of research and precarious fence-sitting, last night I navigated to the Omlet web site, and filled my digital shopping cart with a blue Eglu and two Gingernut Ranger chickens.

The checkout process was relatively straight-forward, until it came time to enter credit card info. A notice on the site said Omlet isn't yet accepting credit card payments, so they'll be giving me a call to get the info instead.

It's a good thing I'm getting the call back, too. Turns out my color choice isn't as popular as I thought it would be. Breakfast negotiations will ensue shortly.

I'll be creating an entirely new blog about our adventures in urban chicken farming. Will post a link to it when it's up.

UPDATE: Claire, at Omlet, called me back, and the next delivery date for chickens isn't until mid-June... given the delay, am I now back on the fence? oh, and the Eglu color negotiations settled on "green."

united flies better than usairways

I had to be in Canton, Ohio this morning no later than 8:30am. Seeing how I live in the Bay Area, a plane ride was called for.

To minimize the time away from family, I opted to take a red-eye from SFO to Pittsburgh on a United codeshare flight operated by USAirways and then drive a rental car to Canton (80 miles away).

It's been a long time since I've flown any airline domestically other than United. I've got almost 500,000 FF miles on United, so you know my loyalties.

It only occurred to me last night as I was arriving to SFO: I've never flown any airline BUT United out of SFO (except my international trip on KLM last month). So I've never experienced Terminal One at SFO before. I may never stray from Terminal Three again.

I was a little underwhelmed by the entire Terminal One and US Airways flight experience. Granted, SFO is a hub for United, so things are generally better all around for flying United in and out of SFO, but I didn't expect the drop off to be so steep:

• The check-in process for USAirways consisted of eight electronic kiosks (three of them were open for folks not checking bags), period. No way to approach a ticketing agent directly. You have to interact with the kiosk first.
• The TSA pre-screening tables are configured oddly in Terminal One so that the amount of table space available to stack your stuff in the bins is quite short, and the unload area is quite cramped. Lots of elbowing and hip checking once through the metal detector to get your shoes on and laptop stowed before taking the lo-o-o-ong walk down the terminal to the gate.
• No gate attendants! Wow. If you've got a seating request, I guess you're SOL. Maybe this was due to the late departure of the flight (10:30p), but I was very surprised not to see any USAirways staff until mere moments before the gate opened to usher us in.
• This was my first trip on an Airbus A319 in a long time. Small plane (but not an empty seat to be found). The flight attendants were a little on the bossy side for my tastes, but for the most part, my eyes were shut and ears were plugged to sleep as much of the 4.5 hour flight time as possible.

Oh, and am I the only one who's noticed that Pittsburgh has added terminals to its shopping mall where the airport used to be? Do folks really go to the airport to buy all that stuff? I felt like I was walking through a miniature (only 40 stores) version of the local Valley Fair mall once I got to the main hub of the airport. Reminded me a little of my last trip thru BWI (another mall-turned-airport outside Baltimore).

Oh, and in case anyone in California cares: it's definitely not spring yet along the Western PA, Northern WV, Eastern OH corridor. The buds on the trees haven't yet opened, and it was flurrying as I drove to Canton this morning.

Glad I'm flying United back to SFO tomorrow. How'd I get so comfortable in my flying rut? Oh yeah, by flying 28,000 miles on United so far this year. eesh

shrook wi-fi access at boston logan airport

At Boston's Logan airport, there's the logan wifi network which allows minimal web-based content on the free side of the pay-to-web-surf wall.

An unintended benefit to the crippled access: using my standalone copy of Shrook (my RSS reader), most of the pictures associated with feeds download at least partially. I didn't scientifically measure anything, but it looks to be about a 12Kb limit before the wifi pay-me sphincter squeezes shut. Definitely not enough of a glimpse to see whole photos, but surprisingly enough to get logos, illustrations, etc accompanying the blog posts.

Of course, no email or web pages are allowed thru, but for some reason Shrook can rain down supplemental content for the feeds already sitting on my macbook pro. No new feeds without paying.

When I'm traveling, it's usually the feeds I'm catching up on anyway. w00t!

Oh and I see that Continental airlines is trying to offer free wifi access at Logan in their Frequent Flyer lounge. I'm sure we can look forward to seeing a lot of "your free wifi is interfering with critical airport communications" (while the pay-to-surf wifi has no such effect?!) Follow along on Google.

my favorite time of year (hockey!)

If you listen closely at this exact moment, you can hear Oh, Canada! and the Star Spangled Banner being sung in Ottawa's arena, Scotiabank Place.

The puck will drop in mere moments to start the 2007 Stanley Cup Playoffs. w00t!

You can find me watching hockey scores here for the next two months.

Go Sharks!

Sharks hockey playoff tickets!

Sharks hockey playoff tickets!
Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

It's like Christmas all over again!

Our playoff tickets were delivered to the doorstep this morning. Interesting to see the breakout of prices the deeper we go in the playoffs:

• regular season: $38/seat
• 1st round: $48/seat
• 2nd round: $61/seat
• 3rd round: $86/seat
• 4th round: $116/seat

I can't wait to pay $116 to watch the Sharks win the Cup this year!

drm-free is like unleaded gas

With word that EMI will now be selling DRM-free songs on iTunes for a premium ($1.29 per DRM-free song v $0.99 per crippled song), I should be rejoicing, yes?

I mean, who doesn't want to be able to buy a song online and do with it whatever you want? right?

But still, something's sticking in my craw. Apple's the one who takes the original file and then alters it with their DRM code. Kinda like the oil refineries add lead to the gasoline they make.

And then I, the consumer, pay extra for them to take it right back out again so I can fuel up with "unleaded" gas. Blech.

need help getting daily del.icio.us posts on blogger

So, I've been using del.icio.us a lot recently, and it's come at a cost to my posting here on the blog. Via Shrook, my feedreader, I've seen others like Ross Mayfield include their del.icio.us links in their feeds, and I want to do the same.

Much easier said than done.

The del.icio.us folks have provided a handy widget to generate daily blog postings, but in creating the widget, you must know full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog. I have yet to find said URL for my Blogger blog. I've checked the Blogger Help Groups and the closest I can get to an answer (LucyG asked the same question) is the unhelpful helpful tip to look here in the Blogger Data API Overview.

A helpful answer would have been "here's the URL just swap out NNNNN for your blogname." But it appears no one's yet cracked the code.

Has anyone seen a successful automatic post from del.icio.us to a Blogger hosted blog? As soon as I find the answer, I'll post it here. Talk about search keyword gold...

planet earth as an hd showcase

I love it when all the technology in our living room functions as it should...

Our HR20 DVR has been faithfully recording all the episodes of Discovery Channel's new Planet Earth series, and it's been delightful to watch these high-def tours de force on our plasma TV with the sound streaming through the Harman Kardon AVR245.

Not only are the sights and sounds stunning, but the editing is top notch, too. You can hear the surrounding low rumble of volcanoes and the twitter tweet of all kinds of insects and birds as if they were in the room with you. The flyovers of mountains are as if you're looking out the window of the plain yourself.

And to the editing: as a father of two young ones, I really like how the chase scenes (wolf chasing caribou or leopard chasing goat) are shown up to the moment of the catch but not through to the disemboweling and consuming.

My daughters are mesmerized by these shows and I think they'll be leaving a lasting impression on them for years to come. Way to go, Discovery Channel.

Planet Earth should be the marketing campaign for all things High Def.

lessons on surviving winter travel to boston - redux

A week ago, I was in Essex, MA (just outside Boston) looking out at six inches of fresh snow topped off by a little ice and sleet feeling grateful I hadn't paid attention to Lesson Number One from my nine lessons.

Instead of being booked on the first flight out, as Lesson Number One had taught me, I was on the penultimate flight out. And if not for that, I'd have been desperately trying to live lessons Three through Nine all over again, just two weeks after I'd learned them the first time.

Thanks to the winter storm that hit the Eastern Seaboard on March 16 and 17, United canceled its evening flights on the 16th and many of the morning flights on the 17th.

My St. Pat's flight was untouched, and thanks to my Mileage Plus Premier Exec status, my upgrade request was honored well before the cancellations threw bookings into a tizz and filled the flight to overflowing. Sitting in First Class never felt so good.

Perhaps my upcoming trip to Boston (third trip in six weeks) will yield more travel lessons. I just hope there's no snow involved this time. I'm in the mood for spring having sprung.

flickr photos under creative commons license

After I uploaded my Stockholm pictures to Flickr, a good friend pointed out that (until today) I have not been practicing what I preach regarding content being available for others to build on in the Creative Commons. My own pix were under regular old copyright until just now. At last, I've put my own Flickr photostream out there under a Creative Commons license for others to use as they see fit (with attribution to me, of course).

Now, I chose the Attribution license for my own photos, as it allows for others the most creativity possible, as long as they attribute the original photo to me. But there are six different Creative Commons licenses available for employment on Flickr, and the Creative Commons web site has a very useful CC license FAQ that details the difference between each license.

Want to add your own photos to the Creative Commons? Here's how in six easy steps:

• From any Flickr page, click on your account name to get to your account settings page
• Scroll down to the Defaults for new uploads section and click "EDIT" next to "What license will your photos have?"
• Choose your license from the dropdown and click the "Set Default License" button
• IMPORTANT: once the license is set, you need to click "EDIT" on the "What license will your photos have?" again to change the license on all your existing Flickr photos.
• Once you're on the license page, choose the "batch" link in the grey box above the dropdown.
• On the new "set a license default for your photos" page, choose your license and click SAVE.

Voila! Your Flickr stream is now part of the Creative Commons set on Flickr for all the world to get jiggy with!

timely verizon wireless notice

So, we've just experienced our first "early" Daylight Savings Time switch, beginning March 11 and ending November 3.

What should I find delivered in the mail on Monday, March 12? The following IMPORTANT NOTICE from the good folks at Verizon Wireless [with my italicized comments]:

Please note that Daylight Savings time is going to take place 3 weeks earlier and end 1 week later this year as a result of the Energy Policy Act that Congress has passed. [read: don't grouse at us about this change]

Daylight Savings Time will begin on Sunday, March 11, 2007 and end on November 3, 2007. [what, this is a one-time gig? no change in 2008? cool!]

Although Verizon Wireless network is ready to seamlessly support the change, you may be required to update your device if you use a Blackberry®, PDA or Smarphone running Palm® OS or Windows Mobile®. [seamless, save remembering to send this reminder out on time]

Updating your device helps ensure that your calendar and time stamp calculations remain synced up with the United States and Canada. [Wait, Congress passed an Act that affects Canada, too? do they know about this? ]

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and appreciate your continued support. [and kindly overlook the blatant inconvenience of sending this to you late]

To get the required updates, please visit verizonwireless.com/dst and follow the directions. [and here's hoping you can still access the web after the fact!]

Yer palz at verizonWireless

Funny how they never send out a bill late, huh?

refreshing change of perspective

It's been over two years since I traveled outside the United States, and this trip to Sweden has served as a powerful reminder how refreshing it is to immerse yourself in a different culture.

Even though traveling to Scandinavia is far from the culture shock of a trip to say, South America or Southeast Asia or anywhere in Africa, the culture here is different enough from my daily American experience that I'm reminded just how insular my life is in California.

Among the biggest differences I've noticed:

• I've yet to see any trash anywhere on any street in Stockholm (I'll keep looking)
• The Swedes are very style-conscious, but in a sense of personal pride way, not in a "look at me" kind of way
• The food is portioned perfectly on the plate... no heaping American-style servings spilling over the sides of the table here
• Tax is included in the price you see on the shelf... no complicated additions at the cash register
• There's a very strong push to mind how big a footprint one makes on the environment... I can't believe how green the adverts and marketing messages are here in Stockholm. It'll be interesting to see if the Dutch are as green as the Swedes seem to be.
• Kaffe is king: If only I could fit the industrial-strength coffee-making machine at the GWP offices, there'd be a vacant spot where the machine now stands come tomorrow evening :-)
• Politeness and courtesy overwhelms me everywhere I go: not in a sickly-sweet manner, but in a "I respect you and expect you to do the same of me" manner.

I've got to figure out how to bring this home with me.

madmundo: what rights for women?

In today's Global Action Network meeting, we were treated to content created by Patrice Barrat of the Bridge Initiative.

In celebration of International Women's Day, here's a snippet of video seen on his Madmundo site about Chahinaz, a young woman in Algeria, exploring why women don't have the same rights as men in her own country and how her experience is (or is not) shared by others elsewhere in the world:



Patrice also had a great idea, that's not as "out there" as it might seem: in conjunction with the upcoming Olympics in China, have an Olympiad for Change, where the competition would be about how to effect change in the world... we'll see how this unfolds.

flying (to the) dutch, man

After a harried morning at work, I arrived at SFO with time to spare to take KLM flight 606 to Amsterdam. It's a code share flight with Northwest Airlines, and I had signed up for flight status notification at the Northwest web site. Having used United's EasyUpdate service for many years, I thought NWA's service would be similar.

Wrong.

Two hours before the flight was due to leave (and I was already in queue to go through security), I got the following email in my box from nwa@nwa.com:

Flight information is not available for NW flight 8606 scheduled to depart at 3:20 pm on March 6 and arrive in AMS at 10:55 am.

Luckily, the flight information notice, or lack thereof, was the low point of my experience flying KLM to Amsterdam. Flight 606 is a ten-hour nonstop flight aboard a McDonell Douglas MD-11. Depending on which flyer forum you visit, the MD-11 is either the last of a graceful line of three-engine long range aircraft, or it's a dying breed that should be parked in the deserts of Arizona without further delay.

Aside from lacking power ports at any seat on the aircraft, I found the aircraft to be rather comfortably appointed and unless I was looking really really close, I couldn't tell the aircraft hadn't been delivered in just the last couple years (in reality, the last MD-11 was delivered to KLM in 1997).

I'd been assigned seat 6G, an aisle seat, in the World Business Class section, and this sums up the experience:

• the seat has 150 degree tilt, so is much more comfortable than coach, but in no way a comfortable position for sleeping
  
• it has its own video monitor, so you're able to choose among 7 movies and 7 television program packages that run on a 2 hour loop
  
• you can learn a surprising amount of useful Dutch by reading the captions to a spoken-english movie
  
• shortly after boarding, you're given a convenience bag (with eye blocker, cabin socks, etc), noise-canceling headphones and breakfast menu to make your selections for the next "morning"
  
• within the first two hours of flight, dinner is served, cleared and the shades are down and lights lowered to facilitate sleeping (or learning Dutch-by-caption for those of us who are restless)
  
• the food was decent fare and the coffee and wine were actually quite good
  
• the attending crew are polite and efficient at their tasks
  
• the parting "gift" for the business class folks is a miniature model of Old Dutch Houses filled with "the famous Dutch young jenever, distilled by Bols Distilleries." Nice gift for me (at the hotel) and the girls (emptied for home)
  

In all, quite the pleasant transatlantic experience and I wouldn't hesitate to fly them again (after I return home Sunday, natch)

My Schiphol airport experience can be summed up in one word so far: smoky. What a difference from the clean-air US airports.

directv hr20 dvr needs customer support

The latest software upgrade for my DirecTV HR20 DVR was downloaded on Feb 28.

I'm now running version 0x134, which has finally fixed the dreaded IKD bug, according to the Level 2 Tech Support supervisor I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with.

Was it a coincidence that on March 1, the day after the software upgrade, my HR20 failed to record either American Idol or Survivor like it was supposed to? Instead of finding them waiting in the playlist for me, I had to go to my History list and see that they've been registered as "deleted" with the following error message:

This episode was canceled because of an unexpected error. (2003)

Evidently I've discovered yet another bug that has now been reported to the tech team awaiting others to share their same pain. If you've had a series fail to record on your HR20 because of the (2003) error, please call customer support to report it so they can fix it quick by having more data points.

Even though DirecTV has claimed it's fixed the IKD bug, they have yet to "fix" their orientation toward how the problems are affecting their users. I spent 35 minutes on the phone this sunny afternoon trying to get to someone at DirecTV who would acknowledge that their product is failing to deliver what it's promised to do (record the shows I ask it to record).

The orientation of the first- and second-tier customer support reps seems to be to do what they can to get you to reset your DVR and assume all will be solved. I finally had to ask for a supervisor after spending 10 minutes with "Loretta" telling me that my problem was "fixed" with the reset and there was no problem whatsoever with the fact the HR20 had failed to record shows for me last week. She tried several times to ship a new unit to me to "fix" the problem which shows just how ignorant she is as to why folks use a DVR:

I have a DVR to reliably record shows for later playback at my leisure.

I don't have a DVR to help someone develop their technology. I didn't pay several hundred dollars to lease this HR20 so I could spend at least an hour a month on the phone with tech support to help squash bugs.

Here's an idea for the execs at DirecTV: look at your user account database and identify the people like me who call in for tech support only after already diagnosing and capturing in explicit detail what the bugs are. Give us free DirecTV service in exchange for us agreeing to be your beta testers with regular bug reporting and feedback looping. When you've got a true GM candidate after testing with us (and all the others who don't know how to beta test well but are along for the ride), you can begin charging us for the product.

As a longtime subscriber, I remember as recently as one year ago when I was a huge DirecTV fan and sang the company's praises. The HR20 ownership experience has done nothing but erode my goodwill toward them. And I'm sick of the phone-tree hell they force me to go through each time I want to help them debug their software.

BTW... the "fast access PIN" thru tech support is 1537 for the next five days. Call 1-800-695-9251 to get straight to the level-two support folks. If Loretta answers, hang up and queue up with someone else.

nine lessons on surviving winter travel to boston

This weekend was a real lesson for me regarding air travel in the wintertime and how I might do better in my next booking. At least, as long as I'm flying United Airlines, my carrier of choice.

I was supposed to arrive back to San Francisco on Sunday at 2:30pm on a direct flight from Boston. Instead, I arrived a few hours ago, at 2:30pm Monday on a delayed connecting flight from Boston by way of LAX. Yes, I was 24 hours late, but I'm a lot wiser for it. Here's what I learned:

Lesson One: Book the earliest nonstop flight you can
Instead of taking flight 171 (6:25a) or even flight 173 (8:00a) nonstop flight from Boston to SFO, I chose flight 177, the 11:04a departure which left ample room for "weather-relatd equipment problems" to delay my getting out of Boston's Logan airport even though the sky was clear and sunny in Boston.

Lesson Two: Subscribe to United's EasyUpdate flight notification system
I've signed up to receive text messages to my phone with any/all updates on delays and gate changes and upgrades! :-) and United seems to get these text messages out even before updating the web-based Flight Status tool. Starting at 6:09a on Sunday, I started getting updates that my flight departure was delayed which allowed me to hang out at the hotel longer instead of getting the bad news upon arrival at the airport.

Lesson Three: When the electronic check-in kiosk asks if you'd like to change flights, think long and hard before saying no.
When I arrived at Logan airport and used the kiosk to check in, knowing I was still two hours early for my flight that'd been delayed three hours already, I thought it a little odd when the machine asked if I wanted to change flights. Silly me, I put faith in "the system" that flight 177 would make it out of Boston some time that day. Those who chose to reschedule likely made it out on a later "regularly scheduled flight" while I got bumped to the next day.

Lesson Four: When the gate agent starts sharing how he's horse-trading to get equipment assigned to your flight, it's time to rebook.
Once the agent informed us the original equipment never made it out of Chicago (snow) and the replacement plane was stuck in Dulles (snow and sleet) so a third plane due in from LA was to be ours, resulting in a now 5:45pm departure, I should have taken it as a sign to rebook. Our agent was Mr. Merry Sunshine at 5pm as his shift ended and he strolled through the terminal at the end of a long day. The new crew coming in waited until 5:30pm, as we passengers were queued up to start boarding to cancel the flight because the crew was now "illegal" (had worked too many hours to staff our flight cross-country).

Lesson Five: The moment you see the flight is canceled, RUN, don't walk, to the ticket counter by the curb.
Sure, there's a customer service desk or two inside the terminal (once you've passed through security), but your odds of getting to an agent are much better if you just go back out to the agents by the curb and queue up. I got funny looks from all the folks queued up to deal with the inside-the-terminal-yet-very-haggard-looking agent. When they joined me out by the curb, I got a bunch of "lucky bastard" head nods as they went to the waaay back of the queue having been booted out to where I was.

Lesson Six: If you're in line at the ticket counter, don't bother to call the airline hoping to jump the line.
Every single person around me that was able (after multiple tries) to get a customer service agent on the phone was told the exact same thing: stay in line, the agent in the same physical space as you will be able to help you better. Makes sense if you think about it: with a big weather event, you've got lots of people in lots of airports flooding the phone-based customer service resources.

Lesson Seven: Chill.
Adopt a Zen attitude about the whole situation, no matter how nasty it's been to your plans, and do not jump aboard the "you don't know the day I've had" bitch bus. I do know how your day has been. I've been watching you complain to everyone sitting around you and a series of someones on your cell phone all day long. Take it quietly and respectfully like a man (or woman). No matter how much you want to believe the airline had it in for you from the start, I'll bet they were doing everything they could to get you home and only gave up when the last reasonable possibility was exhausted.

Lesson Eight: Be nice to the airline agents.
You know everyone else has been extracting pounds of flesh from them all day long as we've been stuck in the terminal with each other. Be the compassionate one.

The exact words of a purple-faced guy at the ticket counter next to me. "I've been stuck in this airport all day and I want to get home NOW! You better get ME home now! I want on the next flight out of here or so help me..." My agent and I exchanged a shocked look, and this is what I said to her "I can only begin to imagine the day you've had. Can you help me get to San Francisco?" As suspected, there was nothing available leaving that night, but she put me on the next flight not routing through a snowy section of the country (thru LAX) and on which she could confirm seats and she even tossed in a complimentary upgrade. Which leads me to the final lesson:

Lesson Nine: A seat in hand is better than two standbys.
No matter how tempting it is to try to get on a flight that'll arrive 30 minutes earlier than the one you've got a confirmed seat on, don't do it. I almost let a fellow traveler convince me to wait for the 8am nonstop flight out of Boston that was scheduled to land two hours before my two-leg trip through LAX. Thankfully I did not. I kept my aisle seats in Economy Plus as I watched all the snow coming down in Boston and covering up everything. Given how much time it took as my on-time departure plane was deiced on the tarmac, I wasn't too surprised when the several-hour-delayed Boston folks arrived at SFO the same time I made it from LAX.

Fingers crossed there are no weather impacts when I get back on a plane next Tuesday to Stockholm.

marriott ibahn(tm) billing trickery

If you're thinking of using Marriott Hotel's iBAHN High-Speed Internet Access, make sure you read the fine print when signing up for the service.

When you first log in, you're informed that you'll be charged for access for each day of your stay. If you'd like to get access for anything less than the duration of your stay, you have to contact the front desk to get the billing work-around.

While I needed access for my whole stay this time, I wasn't bothered by the "convenience." However, I think they could make the notice a whole lot more conspicuous than they do for those who don't bother to read the fine print.

I wonder how many folks call for a bill adjustment at the end of their stay due to this?

a vision of the new democracy?

At Beyond Broadcast 2007, Henry Jenkins shared this funny Ask a Ninja clip wherein the ninja explains the difficult concepts behind net neutrality using pop culture references and makes the concept quite accessible.

Keeping in mind the ideals of a progressive popular culture (participatory, active, open-ended, transparent and transformative), this quick hit, peer-distributed messaging is quite compelling as fodder for a new participatory democracy.

Is this how campaigning and issues will be discussed in a new participatory democracy? It wouldn't be so bad. Perhaps we should ask a ninja.

UPDATE: And here, courtesy boingboing is yet another cool Net Neutrality video.

compromise culture? notes from beyond broadcast 2007

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, opened up the Beyond Broadcast conference here at MIT with a quick spin through the implications and possibilities of participatory culture and democracy.

One of Jenkins's slides including this compelling quote from Robert Fritz:

"If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect from what you truly want, and all that is left is to compromise."

As John Maloney has helped remind me recently: we've got to keep the values of the group, the "what the group truly wants," in mind first and use that value to find the technology or let the group itself find the right tools only after that'll support those values.

This values-first thinking is counter to the way I see most groups attacking the communication challenge to grow bigger than the geography they're bound by.

Typically, the communications tools and platforms that are widely available are those that have scaled up enough (and therefore have generally been watered down enough) to pander to a critical mass. The platform/tool creators, in their quest to build a platform that'll be as useful as possible to as many people as possible, necessarily bake in compromises during the development process.

It seems then that the users are forced to compromise at the get-go and the barrier is way high to keep the users as a group from really achieving what they truly want.

Does a group even realize the kind of trade-off they're making when they pick a tool to digitize their work under the auspices of "greater reach" than the people in the room at the time? I think they don't, and that's got to change.

more directv hr20 dvr bugs

Overnight on February 10, my DirecTV HR20 HD DVR got yet another software upgrade. This marks the tenth upgrade since I purchased the unit last Fall, and this latest upgrade, to version 0x12a, seems to have fixed some bugs while introducing still others.

What's been fixed?

• It's been a couple weeks since I've dealt with the "Instant Keep or Delete" (IKD) bug
  
• I haven't had any black screens of death necessitating a hard resets to free the system up
• the remote has been working without fail

What's still buggy?

• The disk space bar in My Playlist still doesn't reflect anywhere close to reality, and I think shows are getting deleted earlier than they otherwise should. Comparing unwatched to watched shows in My Playlist, the proportion is nowhere near what the indicator shows. While I can't prove it to DirecTV's tech folks, I think there's still hard drive space taken up by all those IKD shows I could never watch. Not a big deal? When these inaccessible shows are reducing the amount of space I have for shows I can access, that's a big deal. It's like telling me the DVR has a 200 hours of capacity but only letting me use 120 hours of it. Yes, this is a bug.
  

What's new?

• Any show I've set to record as a series (each episode each week is recorded automatically) shows up as expected in My Playlist, BUT, when I go to watch an episode, it starts playing at the one minute mark of the show. It records the whole show, mind you, but I have to rewind to get to the beginning.
  

I'm coming up on six months owning the HR20, and I still have the feeling the development team released this thing too early. Kudos to them for continuing to squash bugs, but I'm still less than satisfied with my overall experience as an owner.

I had a standard definition TiVo DVR for five years and never once had a technical issue with it. An unfair comparison between the two? No. It's my real-world comparison of what it's like to time-shift television programming across two different DVRs. As a consumer, I don't care how much more difficult it is to manage HD signals than SD signals. As a consumer, I want to be able to select the shows I want recorded, find them in the playlist after they've recorded and play them when I want, starting at the beginning of the show.

Hopefully the tech team has this same expectation in mind as they continue their two-steps-forward-one-step-back lurching toward a solid product. Keep the IKD bug at bay, and I'll be patient.

fresh eggs everyday? yum

This morning's Mercury News had a column about urban chicken farming, and when Mel first mentioned it (she got to that section of the paper first), I quickly dismissed the idea and then back to reading about why my beloved Sharks have been unable to score a goal for over two games in a row now.

When I finally got to the Business section myself, suddenly the idea of raising a couple chickens in our backyard was really appealing. Thanks to our participating in a CSA back in Virginia, we'd had the pleasure of tasting fresh eggs, and believe me, once you have fresh eggs, you can only tolerate the styrofoam-packaged things they sell at the supermarket by the dozen (or gross by the gross, if you're shopping at Costco).

Besides the tempting oddity of having a couple cute cluckers inhabiting the back 40, raising our own egg-makers would be yet another green thing we, as a family, can do. As a bonus, the local zoning laws allow us to keep as many as three chickens here at the house.

A couple hours research on the web has led me to the following decent resources (a lot of not-so-useful stuff is out there):

• Backyard Chickens
• The Country Chicken
• The City Chicken

But, I think I struck gold when I discovered Omlet's eglu chicken coop.

High tech meets high design meets urban living. It's all I can do not to order one today.

Instead, I've ordered Barbara Kilarski's Keep Chickens to study up a bit more before diving in with living, eating, scratching, pooping egg-makers in the backyard.

I've got preliminary buy in from Melanie (with certain agreements to do other outside chores as a condition). I'll keep you posted on my progress.

fan control on a macbook pro running hot

Like many folks who use a MacBook Pro, the tops of my thighs have been scorched several times due to how frickin' hot the thing gets.

I used to have a 12" PowerBook (RIP) before this, and it got hot, too, but I swear I could fry eggs on the MBP. I'm rather careful to keep the airflow as robust as possible around the MBP, but it doesn't really seem to help to have it on a glass tabletop versus on my denim-clad lap. Either way, it's a furnace.

In search of something, anything, that might help cool down the MacBookPro, I came across the smcFanControl app that allows you to manually program the MBP's two fans to run at a higher active speed than they normally would.

As a bonus, it's got a built in thermometer to show you how hot the core is running. (should I be worried that my core readings have been as warm as 185 degrees F? if not, why not?)

So as not to void the warranty, you can't set the fans to run any slower than the factory default setting, but you can set them to run as high as 6000 rpm.

I've got my minimum fan speed currently set to 3500 rpm, and that seems to be doing the trick of keeping the core reading at right around 120 degrees F (room temp is 73 as I type).

I've installed smcFanControl on my Mac Mini as well, given the fact it's stored in the entertainment cabinet alongside those two furnaces otherwise known as the DirecTV HR20 HD DVR and the Harman Kardon AVR245.

In all, I'm very pleased with this handy little fan control app for the Mac.

how to enable 5.1 sound output from a Mac Mini

As blogged ten days ago, I've been having troubles getting my new Harman Kardon AVR245 seamlessly integrated into my entertainment system.

My challenges included not being able to get a true digital output from my Mac Mini due to the optical cable (S/PDIF) plug incompatibility, not getting the Mac Mini to actually stream 6 channels of sound through the digital output nor being able to use the AVR 245's integrated HDMI switcher.

After a couple hours trouble-shooting today, I've got the system up and running with 5.1 outputs and integrated switching between the Mac Mini's HDMI out and the DirecTV HR20 HDMI out.

Here's what it took:

• Mac Mini digital output: the jack for Headphones/Audio out/Optical out on the back of the Mini is designed to accommodate a mini-headphone plug. If you think you can buy a standard S/PDIF optical cable to hook your Mini to your receiver, think again. You have to buy a separate adapter that'll convert the TOS plug to a minijack-compatible plug. Of course, Apple has a Belkin optical cable kit that has the adapter and will set you back $30 (and takes 5-7 weeks to ship as of this writing), but if you've already got an optical cable, why buy a whole new optical kit? You can hop over to Amazon and spend $1.65 (plus shipping) to buy a perfectly good TOSlink to optical mini adapter. Takes a couple days to get to you, but good luck finding the adapters stocked in a local electronics store (like Fry's). I checked several places and found I'd need to buy a whole "kit" just like the Apple online store is pushing. Adapter in hand, the Mac Mini now has an optical connection to the AVR 245.
• Mac Mini streaming 5.1 sound: I thought once I'd bridged the Mac Mini to the AVR 245 with an optical cable, I'd automagically get 5.1 sound from the DVDs I play on the Mac. Nope. It took a little digging but I found out how to coax 5.1 sound out of the Mini's DVD player (thanks to Dave's recent post on This Much I Know and related Apple Help docs). The default stream is a two channel stream from the Mini. To turn on 5.1 audio in Apple's DVD player, Choose DVD Player > Preferences, and then click Disc Setup. At the bottom of that window, change the Audio output setting to "digital out" and (very important) check the box next to "Disable Dolby dynamic range compression." Voila! Your DVD's 5.1 sound is now streaming out of your Mac Mini. This change to preferences applies to the MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac, as well if you're using any of them as your DVD player for your TV.
• Integrated HDMI switching via the AVR 245: I'd previously thought that the AVR 245 was hard-wired to match an optical coax and an optical TOSlink to each of the two HDMI inputs. After digging a little deeper into the hundred page User Guide for the receiver, I discovered that I could override these default settings and match each of the HDMI video inputs to one the two optical sound inputs. Why does this make me happy? I can now get rid of the analog push-button HDMI switcher I'd been using to toggle video feeds to our HD TV from the HR20 DVR to the Mac Mini. I can now sit comfortably on the couch and use the Harman Kardon's remote to switch back and forth at the push of a button.
  

Next stop: 7.1 sound, but that'll mean adding more components to my A/V stack, and I've grown fond of the clean four-piece look we've got going now (HD TV, Mac Mini, AVR and HR20 HD DVR).

harman kardon avr245 review

So, I've had my Harman Kardon AVR 245 7.1 Channel Audio/Video Receiver hooked up for just shy of two weeks now, and my ears haven't stopped smiling since they heard the first sounds it pushed through my speakers.

Last year, I picked up the Harman Kardon HKTS 14 6-Piece Loudspeaker System and have been quite pleased with the sound they produce. Oh, what a difference a receiver makes.

Now, this isn't to say the Yamaha HTR-5140 it replaced was bad. However, it is to say that the HK AVR245 is very, very good.

The last time I remember being so conscious of a sound upgrade was when I replaced the standard-issue head unit in my Honda Accord with an Alpine head unit. After picking up my car from the install shop, I sat in the parking lot a good 20 minutes with my mouth agape marveling at the quality of sound.

Flash forward a decade, and the Harman Kardon is having a similar effect on me. I know it doesn't make much sense, but the quiet pieces of songs are actually quieter, and that's what makes the difference in the listening experience. I didn't notice, until hooking up the AVR245, how much noise had been coming through the system to pollute the music I was listening to.

I can get into the technical mumbo-jumbo in a future post, but for now, here are the highlights:

• This is one hefty piece of equipment: all 30 pounds of it. And it's worth every ounce.
• The front of the receiver is beautifully designed with a simple interface: one big wheel to control the volume and a slim line of buttons in a row. Functional simplicity, and the lights are all cool blue.
• There's not an inch of the back of the receiver that's not set up for an input or an output of some kind. I'm almost embarassed at how few cords I have running through the system (for now). I'm confident that'll change over time.
• The included EZset calibration tool is too cool. It's a mic that you put where you plan to do the majority of your listening from, and the receiver calibrates the output level of all speakers to deliver perfect sound to exactly that point of the room (whether you live in a cavern or a padded cell). Sweet.
• Lots of room for upgrades to the system, including the Bridge for my iPod and adding an additional two speakers to upgrade to 7.1 sound.
• The receiver does a great job of outputting Dolby II sound from an analog input.
• Amazon has it for a great price (compared to Best Buy or Fry's), and you can get it for the same price at the link above.
• All the speaker knobs on the back of the receiver are color-coded to match the wires included with the HKTS 14 system. No more crossed wires.
  

The minor complaints that I've uncovered so far:

• There's built-in HDMI switcher for video only, and the AVR245 processes the sound through hard-wired default inputs, one a digital optical, the other a digital co-axial. This is fine if your two pieces of HDMI equipment output via the same media. Unfortunately for me, my HR20 HD DVR and my Mac Mini both have digital optical outs only, so I can't use the built-in HDMI switcher (no sound) and am stuck using the manual HDMI switcher. see Feb 10 post (above) for the good news update!
• The remote for the AVR245 has over 70 buttons, and some of them are multi-function buttons. I use a grand total of 7 buttons. 90% too many buttons for my tastes.
• There's still so much to learn about the receiver, I feel like I've only scratched the surface of possible uses.

Until I do learn more, I'll just keep enjoying these sounds that are comparable to the high-def images coming out of the TV. nice.

studying swedish for my trip

I'm excited to be going to Stockholm for a meeting at the beginning of March. I'm nervous that I won't know the language (other than what I've picked up at IKEA).

Finding resources on the web that provide "useful phrases" is very hit or miss. So glad to see franksyard uploaded lots of video so I can study the Swedish Chef in action!

is 9C really the best seat on your flight?

When booking a flight I'm not one to leave airplane seat selection to chance. Maybe it's the long legs. Or the overwhelming urge to actually be able to see my laptop's screen while working in that sleek cubicle in the sky.

I've found a cool little site where you can find the best seats on an upcoming flight by using the Seat Scorecard.

The site promises that "[their] airplane comfort guides consider factors such as seat width, seat pitch, seat plan, seat configuration, and legroom to determine overall seating comfort. [They] have reviewed the seat maps / seating charts of all featured plans and also consider feedback of frequent travelers on major American and International airlines."

After poking around looking at airplanes I spent most of my 50k miles flying on last year, it seems their reviews are pretty darn accurate.

collaboration and user information recommendations

This past week has been a whirl of serendipitous and convergent reading recommendations.

Could be I'm more receptive to suggestions for reading material because I'm looking at a transatlantic flight in March that'll outlast my MacBook Pro battery life by a multiple of five.

So, I've just placed my Amazon order for the following, and I don't know if I'll be able to wait until the plane ride before cracking the spines:

• The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Brafman and Beckstrom. The metaphor in the title conveys the core concept of the book. Although a starfish and a spider have similar shapes (somewhat), their internal structure is dramatically different - a cut off the head of a spider and it eventually dies, while a starfish can regenerate an entirely new self from a single amputated leg. Lots to learn about leaderless and decentralized organizations.
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Tapscott. It's been recommended to me as a must read for anyone with a career arc toward mass collaboration on a global scale.
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition) by Krug. Seeing this second edition added a chapter titled "Usability as Common Courtesy" and collapsed three chapters around user testing into a single one was more than enough to get me to add it to the Amazon shopping cart.
  

Can't wait to tuck into these. If you follow the links above, you may find that Amazon bundles the first two on the list together for additional savings.

Dimming those HR20 blues (lights, that is)

I was studying the DirecTV HR20 DVR user manual over the weekend to try to find out how to get the best quality sound out of it and into my new Harman Kardon AVR245 (this is the subject of a forthcoming post, and a preview is: WOOHOO! It's here!).

Tucked in amongst all the not-so-friendly troubleshooting tips was this little gem:

To dim those blindingly bright blue lights on the "light wheel" on the front of the HR20, simply press both the left AND right arrows on either side of the wheel at the same time. The light intensity of the wheel will cycle through varying levels of dimness, eventually turning off completely. I count four cycles of brightness.

Needless to say, after causing our living room carpet to fade from the intensity of the status lights (I'm only partly kidding), they're now as dim as they can be without not lighting up at all.

they should call it american DENIAL

Now that I'm fast-forwarding through my DVR's collection of shows from the sixth season of American Idol, I've finally come to understand why I'm so fascinated by these lead-off cattle-call shows yet so very uninterested in the subsequent "you made it to Hollywood!" shows that eventually winnow the pool down to the winner. My fascination comes from realizing I sit watching, mouth agape, at how deep in denial the lionshare of these contestants manage to live.

This season's opening cattle-calls in Minneapolis and Seattle have illustrated like no others just how powerfully (painfully?) an individual's denial can separate them from reality. It seems like the worse the auditioning singer, the more adamant they are that everyone else just can't appreciate how superbly talented they are. Now, I'm no expert in spotting singing talent, but even I know when I hear folks that, to put it plainly, sing real bad. Equipped with this knowledge, I can also spot when a given "talent" (methinks) doth protest too much at being told they're awful.

And that's what makes the cattle call shows that open each season of American Idol so very much fun for me. It's an illustration over and over and over just how delusional these kids are that they possess some kind of singing talent. If only they'd expend a similar amount of energy opening their minds to feedback and redirection, they might become something. Alas and alack they don't: they're in heavy denial, and seemingly happily so.

And like every other season but the first, I'll quit watching AI once they convene the contestants in Hollywood (dawg!). It's at this stage that the talent consistently acts in diva-like ways to sabotage their own futures, and I think that's even worse than fate befallen those in denial who never made it out of the first round.

(thank goodness the HR20 seems to be recording the shows as intended... fingers crossed)

parallels install on mac mini

Six and a half months after blogging about Parallels software being released for the Mac (to rave reviews), I finally installed it yesterday on our Mac Mini.

The process was rather painless: it took all of 20 minutes to do the actual install (from opening the shrink wrap on the software box to hitting the "done" button). The Mac Mini itself acts as our AV center (holds approx 40GB of iTunes songs and acts as our primary DVD player) using the Toshiba 42HP66 as a 42" HD monitor. The Mini has access to the internet via wireless connection through an Apple AirPort Express.

So, Parallels, in "easy install" mode, claimed an 8GB partition (half the remaining free space on the hard drive) for itself, and I successfully installed WinXP in that partition. I'd used the WinXP install CD that came with our dearly departed Gateway PC, and I have 30 days to get a new authorization code to get full functionality. I'd forgotten just how confusing the Windows install could be and am glad I don't have to do that again anytime soon. Given my past difficulties getting Windows to properly install on a PC (or three), I was pleasantly surprised at the error-free install on the Mac!

Why do I bother to run Windows on our Mac? So that we could install Microsoft Money 2006 and manage our finances. I've done some research and it seems true that the available mac osx personal finance software available leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you've been spoiled enough to use either Quicken or Money on a PC. Having Money installed on our Mac Mini will allow both Mel and I to manage our finances (instead of having the files on one of our laptops). Of course, "access to" doesn't mean "regularly uses." But we'll see how well it goes.

Money was a breeze to install, and after 20 minutes of setup, all our accounts had been configured and the last 90 days of transactions had been successfully imported. No hiccups with the Parallels WinXP accessing the internet (which was a worry pre-install). All in all, very pleased with the experience.

Get your copy of Parallels software on Amazon.