A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Vacuum cleaners have a surprising number of parts

2012-05-24T03:00:59Z

This is something you learn when dog crap is accidentally sucked into yours, and you have to take it apart and thoroughly clean every part.

More Father’s Day ideas…

2012-05-21T16:01:27Z

in case nothing tickled your fancy off my prior list

Clothes Climbing Robot. Ah how much fun this could be at parties.
A nice Hasselblad medium format camera — hey they’ve cut prices!
More realistically, something to challenge the mind from this list of book recos
Love puzzles, and really love these puzzles

Again I am running way ahead of the number of progeny I have.

Recent books — Mosley, Adler-Olsen, You Lost Me There, Banks, Amis

2012-05-17T19:30:17Z

All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley. Great characters, but story felt a little slapdash.
The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen. Part of the now flood of Scandinavian author mysteries. A good disturbing tale and a character with promise. But something is off in the book, dialog seems particularly colorless and flat — few idioms, simple structure. I doubt Danes as a society are colorless and flat. It is possible the author chose this style for the protagonist who is somewhat repressed. But I am wondering if it might just be a poor translation. Knowing no Danish, there is no way for me to verify.
You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin. An introverted scientist finally comes to terms with his wife’s passing and his inability to really connect. Very compelling.
Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. Another of his books set in his Culture universe, this time concerned with virtual environments and their abuse. I find the Culture series to be always entertaining.
The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. First of his I’ve read, a boy deals with his fate in an alternative world where the Reformation and Renaissance never really happened. An ugly world in many ways. “Alteration” is at play on many levels here.

Dan Barry — incredibly inspirational

2012-05-15T19:37:55Z

Heard Dan Barry speak at USC grad this past week. What an amazing story. Was rejected by NASA for like 15 years running and refused to give up. Finally made it as an astronaut at age 37. An amazing tale of perseverance. If you ever have a chance to hear his story, it is worth it.

Nokia Lumia 900 and LTE networks — good and bad

2012-05-15T16:02:52Z

Ok so I’ve had a chance to use the Lumia on an LTE network for most of a week here in LA.

The obvious good — data services are fast, it is hard to tell you are not on WiFi. This kind of speed is addictive, it is going to suck going back to slower nets in Seattle.

The downside — the battery drains fast. I was also using the phone a lot for nav so I’m not sure how much of my battery drain was due to LTE and how much for nav but the phone couldn’t last a day without recharge.

I also had to reboot the phone twice. Once, MSFT services quit working — bing search, Msft map app. Google worked fine, Nokia maps worked fine, but everything MSFT would just hang. Reboot fixed. (btw, the Nokia Maps app is much better than the MSFT maps app).

Secondly, at a location with so-so LTE service, where the phone kept dropping back to lesser data services and rates, the texting app hung. I could open it but could never type in text and the phone generally was unresponsive. Reboot fixed maybe but it may recur, the phone is feeling a little wonky again right now.

So how am I generally feeling about the device after a month+ of use?

solid physical hardware, feels good and looks nice
generally solid OS with some nice design touches
some real problems with back button behavior. Most times the back button causes you to leave an app. Sometimes it causes you to go back in an app. And if you leave an app and then click on its home screen tile, the app restarts and forgets your place. So you have to learn to hold down the back button and use the task switch interface to get back in your app. This is all a pain in the ass. The back button shouldn’t sometimes quit and other times go back in an app. And reentering an app from the home tile shouldn’t forget where you are. Super annoying.
solid 3rd party apps when they exist
pathetic marketplace of apps — marketplace design and marketplace contents both are very poor

How can Fry’s have so much of nothing I need?

2012-05-06T00:04:47Z

Today’s experience at Fry’s — I’m trying to set up a MythTV box and I need a cable splitter so that I can continue to use my normal TiVO box. And since this is all digital cable, HD quality, I need the large bandwidth splitter, not the crappy old splitters you find anywhere.

So of course, Fry’s has a huge selection of <900Mhz coax splitters and RG59 cable, and right in the prime display area for their TV component section. All of which is useless. And a teeny number of 2G splitters hidden up the aisle. “We specialize in parts that don’t work with most cable/satellite installs and will just frustrate the hell out of you!”

They could cut their floorspace and staff in half if they’d just stock products that might actually work. Who exactly is served by all these crappy parts? I bet 90% of the customers who buy the old splitters return them when they realize they won’t work. Or maybe it is all a scheme to get people to pay for professional install.

Watching TV on the iPad

2012-05-04T17:12:52Z

I pay a large amount to Comcast/Xfinity each month to view nearly their entire lineup (ex non-English channels) at our home. And because we pay for a Time-Warner Cable sub as a gift for a family member, I also have access to a TWC account. A lot of dollars per month.

I’d like to watch all this content on my iPad when I am in a room with no tv or when I am out of the house, and I don’t feel like that is an unreasonable expectation given the dollars I spend.

So how do I watch on the iPad? Well as a start I downloaded as many of the branded apps for various channels and distributors as I could find.

Xfinity TV app. Sounds great but is not useful. Basically a super duper remote control if I am in a room with a Xfinity branded settop box. Doesn’t let me see video, doesn’t do anything if I am out of the room. And since I am mostly a TiVo house, basically not much utility here. I had hoped/expected that Xfinity would give me an iPad app that basically acted as a dvr+tv, and would let me see all my streaming xfinity content. I was wrong.
TiVo iPad app. Looks nice and for some things — remotely managing my scheduled recordings — it is fine. But for watching video? It blows. Apparently I need to have my TiVo and iPad on the same wifi network, and none of my tivos are on wifi, so I can’t watch video.
Showtime app. Performs a distributor validation, only works on AT&T Uverse and Verizon networks. Seriously? I am paying a ton for Showtime access and you guys are going to squabble with Comcast and deny me this service?
HBO Go. A reasonable app. Works on Comcast and works anywhere as near as I can tell, I can watch shows anywhere. So this is great but if the world we end up in is 57 separate apps, one per channel, each with their own UI and login, that will kind of suck. Imagine if your tv had no single guide but per-channel guides which each worked differently, and then different remotes for each channel. Barf.
NBC. A decent experience. Seems to have all their recent shows, no crazy access control. Yes you have to watch ads but that is ok with me, I have to watch ads on TV too.
WatchESPN — nice when it works, but only on TWC, Verizon, Brighthouse. Another case of distributors squabbling and screwing users.
btn2go. no comcast. More distributor squabbling
CBS sports. Claims to have live seasonal NCAAFB and NCAABB content. We will see.

So — I get very little of my content; I am prevented from getting a lot of choices due to squabbling between various members of the distribution chain; when I do get content, it is spewed across many different apps with all kinds of different UIs, guides, control interfaces, etc.

The whole set of players is really underdelivering to me. Is it any wonder people just seek out torrents?

Books — Goon Squad, Woiwode, Lively

2012-04-29T19:45:52Z

A kind of melancholy grouping of books this week, all exploring time and mortality in different ways. I need to switch it up after these.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. A half dozen characters and their interplay over their lifetimes. Time wears us all down, changes us, transforms us. The structure seemed a little gimmicky but maybe ok.
A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode. A brutally honest meander thru the author’s life as he contemplates fatherhood and faces death. The narrative bounces paragraph by paragraph across decades, and in the hands of a lesser writer, it would be chaos. But it is excellent. And tough.
How It All Began by Penelope Lively. A chance mugging sets off changes through a set of interconnected lives. Along the way the characters mull over the choices in their lives, the randomness of events, and the passage of time.

Michigan still sucks, but sometimes a UM alum can stumble on the truth

2012-04-25T21:44:57Z

MGoBlog rips apart the rationalization from BCS leaders about hosting of college football playoff games.

The proposal to host these games at schools was awesome and would have created some terrific games with terrific atmospheres, college football is all about atmosphere. Moving to neutral sites blows. The BCS really thinks that a school like UM in a smaller city can’t handle the logistics of a playoff game? Have they been to a Michigan football weekend with a major opponent like OSU or ND?

The BCS may have valid reasons to favor neutral sites (bowl sponsors plyIng them with $), but these are not those reasons.

Like prismatic, don’t get wavii

2012-04-25T18:04:12Z

In the last two weeks I’ve tried to use some recent news aggregation services. A billion people have been sending me connection notices from Wavii, and I just don’t get it. My feed is stuffed full of friend notices and really random news items and stuff that is duplicative of my twitter stream. Nothing worth looking at.

Prismatic, on the other hand, has been a pleasant surprise, I get much meatier links, with a lot more relevance, and doesn’t duplicate my twitter stream. Is it better than techmeme or other aggregators, I don’t know, but I am getting value out of it.