Mike's Lab

SF Giants - Finally!

2010-11-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

After waiting 8 years since their last World Series, I can finally say the SF Giants are champions. Top of the baseball heap, #1. The Best is in the West.

Seven years ago I taught my wife about baseball. This turned her into a baseball monster, vocal & highly opinionated when it comes to the sport. I am not in her league when it comes to the game. Especially after this crazy season.

It is not an understatement to say that she has been dancing all Oct. and this first day of November. A season of torture, but the playoffs were like cheesecake topped with pineapple.

The Giants return to the Bay Area heroes. Amazing year. Stunning strategy that paid off time and again. I have survived a nail biting season next to my baseball monster. Now she will go into hibernation until spring training. And I get the living room back, for as everyone knows, it is really her TV.

Giants!

-Mike M.

Some return to focus

2010-08-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

The summer seems to be running by quickly. The last couple of months have seen a lot of change for me, diverting my attention to more pressing matters. I do want to keep writing about the things I come across. That way the handful of people who pay attention will have more bits of what's in my head.

I changed jobs last month. Moved from my contracting gigs to a full time role. Still testing software, now data storage systems instead of routers. It's a good change for me. I did 14 years in networking, this is an opportunity to devote many years learning a different part of the core. Think of where all of your "cloud" information is stored, that is where I am.

Companies are hiring. I know I am. Doesn't mean I will accept just anyone off of the street. The teams are quite strict in their requirements & stick to them through one candidate after another. There are jobs, but you need to be confident in what you know & your skills as an engineer. The jobs are local to Santa Clara County too. We interact with teams from around the world, but this isn't something that will be off-shored just because the bean counters like it. There is more than enough work here and abroad to keep us busy for a long time.

I haven't had this much fun in the work place in many a year. I feel at home & plan to stay a long time. That kind of calm stability is making a difference in my health. I'll write about my more recent improvements soon.

-Mike M.

When "No Soliciting" means bang on my door...

2010-08-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

I have a sign on my front door to let those coming up my driveway to leave me alone. No Soliciting. Pretty straight forward. Big letters. It turns away many, but from time to time someone feels they can out whit me.

Like yesterday. Saturday afternoon, sitting down to start a movie. Bang on the door. I thought it was my neighbor, as I was watching their dog for the day while they have a party. Nope, its some short dude with a vague company name on his shirt. He says he’s there to offer me something for free. eh?

I tell him I don’t need anything. Oh, he’s got a quick response that I must need something. Everyone does. I point to my sign, which has him switch to the next item on his pitch, “Do you know the definition of soliciting?” Amazing, the guy wants to joust with terms so he can justify the interruption to my afternoon. I am of the opinion that if you are on my doorstep & I don’t know you, 99% of the time my money is the object.

To get this guy to leave me alone, I tell him I don’t care what he has to say, he’s on my property & to please leave. He wants to get the last word in, but I get pretty sharp when it comes to this point in any conversation.

Annoying, oh yeah. Maybe I should set up a wireless video camera above the door so I can check who’s there. A friend of mine did this - it pumps the video stream out onto the home network. Extreme, maybe. Extreme would be facial recognition announcing if it someone I know.

After my movie, (the superb Red Cliff parts 1 & 2), my mind wanders to touch on where’s the return on door to door sales. I mean, what is your time worth? How many deals do you need to close per day to make it worthwhile? But as its physical & the dude has to go to the customers, a huge inefficiency. Wouldn’t a weekend be better used to hang with family & use the internet to drive business to you? In this day and age of virtual store fronts & Second Life, why not use it to your advantage?

I just want to be left alone when home. Neighbors knocking to say hi or ask a favor, no big deal. Called being a neighbor. But some sales dude that claims he is offering something for free, read the sign & learn about the Internet.

-Mike M.

What is your place in the community worth?

2010-05-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Here’s a question for you: What is the value you put on your standing within your immediate community? For me, this was posed by a kid on my doorstep Friday evening.

At 7pm Friday, some fresh faced kid is knocking on my door. This is annoying to me for two reasons. First, I’m waiting for a guest. Second, I have a large sign on my door that says to go away if you are soliciting. For those that do knock, I simply point to the sign and say, “Can’t you read?”

The pitch started with him being a marketing student & is walking the neighborhood. He’s got a shirt with a symbol on it, a clip board with a folder, and says he’s representing GE Capital (though on the third point I may be wrong & I didn’t get a card). He likes my house & wants to use it for advertising. eh? He wants to put a sign on my front yard & pay me for it.

How much is this kid offering? $5000/month. That number isn’t in dispute for he kept repeating it over and over, like a mantra. “$5000/month for a simple sign.” “It won’t be very big.” “Do you realize I’m offering to pay you $5000/month?”

I pointed to my sign & told him to leave. He stammers how can I turn away such an offer. I tell him he doesn’t own a house nor cares about the neighborhood. I live in San Jose, in a small house on a street built over 50 years ago. “Why would I want to deface my property & lower the value of my neighbors’ property by doing so?” No answer, other than I could do a lot with the $5000 monthly income. I tell him to leave my property, he won’t go. So I close the door on him while he is still pushing the dollar amount. Amazing.

I asked a couple neighbors at a garage sale yesterday if they were approached by this same person. Nope, no one else had such an incredible offer made to them.

Darlene came up with the idea that it could be a scam to get my bank account information. As I didn’t get past the “Go away & leave me alone” part, I couldn’t confirm if he was going to ask about where to deposit the checks. I should have gotten something from him so I could post it for all to see.

I took it as what is my community standing worth? I’m not sure what San Jose’s sign ordinance states, but still, anything that reduces the splendor of my neighborhood isn’t worth it. I don’t have a problem with a home owner putting a sign in their window that proclaims they are a Sharks fan (I have one for the SF Giants myself). But commercial advertising on private residential property? What does some corporate marketing nut take me to be? A sellout to my neighborhood?

What raises my blood pressure is that there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how low corporate advertising will go. For me, this is about where rattlesnakes live - as low in the grass as the dirt. I don’t want to walk the streets around my house & run into even more oppressive messaging. I want to be able to smell the roses & meet the people with dogs. Turn off the media. Be a person.

So here I make my stand. I can’t be bought to deface my own property & hope that my message will encourage others to do the same.

-Mike M.

Pondering the perception of time

2010-05-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

I haven't been feeling too good the last few days. Head in a bucket feeling of allergies turning my brain into mush. Hard to do some serious thinking, so I usually pass the time performing mundane tasks, like making the bed. It also gives me the excuse to put on the big head cans & chill out to some music. Where does my mind drift off towards? Things of time and place. What would the world be like if we walk on Mars? Then the topic of this post, the perception of time changing as we age.

One thing I always hear is how the days are passing by faster and faster. That the past was slower & the present is quick. I look at my own take on the passage of time, how as a 5 year old the day felt long and my birthday was always slow to arrive. But now many more years older, the days pass by at an ever increasing rate. Perception is the day is shorter, but the clock says it is the same as it ever was.

The theory is that each day you live becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total days of your existence. The brain perceives in ratios, a day for a 5 year old a much larger part than a day of someone 95. This may point to why kids are impatient & elderly much more patient. At least in broad strokes.

My great grand mother lived to around 95 (she wouldn't tell us her exact age). Listening to her discuss her day & what she did (a very active lady), she would say that the days are short, but that means they come back around that much quicker. She would wait for letters in the mail, patient that they would eventually come. Maybe what I'm rambling about is gaining calm through age.

Look at a kid waiting for something in the mail. As my sister would say, like a ferret on crystal meth. Each day drags, each night feels long, even if the monsters under the bed stay quiet. I remember my days playing after school, younger than the age of 10. Watch the clock for 3pm & then off to home. The time from home to dinner seemed long enough to conduct numerous adventures. Mom would limit play time to an hour outside. Such a length of time, though. Sixty minutes didn't seem short at all.

Contrast that to today, an hour doesn't feel all that long. I may move a bit slower than I did at 5, but I'm calmer. Waiting in line doesn't seem as frustrating. Maturity? Nah, the perception of time as I experience it.

The brain is a wondrous device. It filters all of our senses to create a sense of reality. But it isn't a true reality. We see within our mind - the eyes give a lot more information than is used, tossing away details or merging diverse images to make a composite. Being severely near-sighted, I can tell this every day. Even with my contacts out, I can still perceive faces, motion, and the objects in my house pretty well. But it is a construction as the brain adjusts for the fact the eyes now need more correction.

Being that our reality is a complex melding of sensory data to build a perception of the world, it seems that time should fit in there too. Our brains need a reference for time, usually using the position of the sun as a guide. Which gets back to ratios - measurement of absolute time into quanta is a relatively recent technology for humans. The brain "feels" time, giving the child the perception the day is long & the adult the day is short.

At the end of this stumbling prose, what of it then? The point is that each day you wake to sunshine is another great day to create new experiences. To better appreciate the frustration of the child who thinks their parents are slow. To better appreciate the wisdom of the elders for patients. Somewhere in the middle is happiness.

Or so my fuzzy brain perceives. :)

-Mike M.

Should have asked Uncle Steve for a new Mac

2010-05-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

As a reader of the Apple rumor sites, all kinds of things get said, some true, some not. Lots of leaks, supposed leaks, and deception. Apple's secrecy rivals the NSA or the NRO. A "it may or may not exist" approach. So when I read the story about the Apple engineer leaving behind a prototype iPhone & it being found, sold, then lots of legal shells being lobbed, I thought two things.

First, poor engineer. His name is forever tied to beer & the iPhone. Second, the guy who found it? Instead of going through this whole deception of hiding evidence & selling it to Gizmodo, he simply could have called Uncle Steve and asked for a reward. No hassles, just a handshake & a fill in the blank reward.

I would think that Mr. Jobs would have been very accommodating if the finder asked for a whole stack of Apple stuff. $5k in cash or a fully loaded Mac Pro? How about add a couple 24" monitors, a MacBook Pro, a couple iPad's & iPod's? Don't like any of them, they are easy to convert to cash in a legal, honorable way. But no, had to go the more glory hound route. Oh well. Guess he didn't want the Vietnamese to get the first photos of the 4th Gen iPhone out to the world.

Though in Vietnam, Uncle's Steve's reach isn't as great.

-Mike M.

A Tale of Two Phones

2010-05-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

I seem to be finding ways to reference classic English novels recently. I'm finding my mojo again to write. To keep pouring it out, good or bad.

So tonight is a quick tale of two phones.

Until recently my friends knew that I rarely had my cell phone on. That would be the Nokia on the left. It was free a bit more than five years ago, replacing another Nokia that I had picked up in 1997. So I'm on my third phone in 13 years. The Nokia did its job, mainly as a way to make outgoing calls when I needed. I did not feel a need to be constantly connected or reachable. Still don't. My plan was 45 minutes a month for $20. Not bad, eh? Helps that my wife doesn't need to text or talk to me every minute of every day.

The phone on the right is my Motorola Droid. Bought that back in November. I wasn't interested in an iPhone. I had already suffered on the ATT network with my Nokia's & I had the iOS experience with my iPod Touch. I like what Verizon does with their network & I like what Android is about. With a growing business need to have a better phone & greater connectivity, I succumbed to the smart phone wave.

The Droid is pretty slick. When in Portland for Alex's wedding, it did superb turn-by-turn navigation. I have Google Voice on my line, as I push most calls to voice mail. The transcription helps at times & it gives me visual voice mail without paying for it. I like the keyboard, though it would have been better to have it centered & do away with the little cursor square.

The Droid has become my terminal to the world. It can access anything on the web & push quite a bit of data back up if I want. Neat, but most of you iPhone or Blackberry huggers already know that.

What I want to put a spot light on is the time between the two phones. Five years. That isn't very long. The pace of technology change in anything portable is just phenomenal. To move from a device & network that barely supports sending short text messages to one that surfs the net quickly for a reasonable price hadn't been seen in the century before. Consumer technology moved forward, but not at the pace currently seen.

My two phones point to the trend of anything wireless will continue to advance in great leaps every year. Wireless makes it easy to change out client devices. Makes it easy to upgrade protocols or use different spectrum. The air doesn't need to change, just the devices, especially if we are talking about consumer / enterprise wireless deployments. With the continued drive to LTE on the licensed spectrum & 4x4 MIMO 11n plus 60GHz standards on the unlicensed side, we are only seeing the end of the first book in the series.

Here's to my Droid lasting at least as long as my previous phones.

-Mike M.

Pictures from Bricks By The Bay

2010-05-02T16:20:00.000-07:00

A month back I had the opportunity to steep myself in the world of Adult Fans Of Lego (AFOL) at the Bricks By The Bay convention in Fremont. I only attended part of the show on Saturday & had a wonderful time walking around. There were talks & workshops, plus the numerous creations on display. My pictures can be found here. (I still need to work on my technique of indoor without a flash...)

The best part was listening to Mads Nipper, a Lego executive who had come to answer questions in an informal town hall type meeting. That really is his name. Nearly 20 years with the Lego Group & super passionate about the Lego building system. This guy lives Lego everyday. He firmly believes that Lego bricks help make the world a better place. I think so too.

I went to gain inspiration to build something, anything. I got that & more. The community is very supportive & filled with creative people who are always trying new ideas. Some build trains, other castles, still others ships. I'm interested in ships, something a single mini-fig can sit in to start with. I learned about landscaping & posing mini-figs to illustrate action to tell a story.

Time to sort through some parts & put some bricks together. I see this as a way to calm my head, as I can't play xbox games any more & TV isn't interesting. My wife is supportive, as she knows it helps keep me out of trouble & is something I can do when grumpy. As long as there isn't a big truck set, she'll leave my bricks alone. In the living room it is mainly her trucks & crane that are on display. How cool is that?

BayLUG is here.

-Mike M.

The Banana - Big or Little Endian?

2010-05-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

As two people who grew up on either side of a big ocean, my wife & I have a number of differences. Which is a good thing, as long as I acknowledge the difference & defer to her. (I know she reads these, so I have to be extra nice).

It dawned on me this year, though not sure why, that my wife opens a banana from the opposite end that I do. Strange, at least to me. Why would anyone crack open a banana from the bottom? I, as most people I believe do, crack open a banana from the stem. Simple & direct. But she insists that I have it backwards. A banana -must- be opened from the bottom, as far away from the stem as possible. Why? Not sure, other than that is what she learned as a girl in the tropics. I may be inclined to believe her, but…

She is a serious banana connoisseur. Actually, serious isn't strong enough. Banana obsessive. Banana crazy. She picks each bunch by hand & examines them for any flaws. By hand, I mean that each is touched & great care given to assessing its worth. I am not allowed any longer to buy bananas. I'm more mechanical - 5 in one bunch? Great, in the basket they go with nary a further thought. For her, they are prized possessions that require to be gingerly bagged & brought home.

The Gulliver's Travels reference is lost on my wife. Where she is from, such classics are not read by students (so as not to pollute the minds of the children). But we do have our own big endian / little endian debate ongoing in the house. It would be funny, but for the fact that each of us is serious in proving to the other the proper banana opening technique. As there is an average four bananas consumed daily by us, there is ample opportunities to dig in our heals & mock the other.

But what to do? Slice it in half? You are still left with the stem & not-stem ends. Which half first? One would think that such issues can be resolved without mocking of the other party. But it seems only natural to denounce the other side as backwards (or reverse end-wards).

So its stem first!

-Mike M.

A Return To Writing

2010-03-02T21:53:00.000-08:00

Somehow it is March. My great grandmother warned me this would happen. Time slips by faster as you get older. According to the record here, I haven't written anything for public consumption for about four months. Winter has come and almost gone.

I know Spring is arriving. Our trees are beginning to bloom & my wife is gearing up for baseball. At dinner she let me know that spring training starts tomorrow. This is a bad sign. Means the TV is mine for only a month longer. Then into a long season of nearly daily baseball games. Maybe it is a good thing time zooms by faster.

What have I been up to? The end of 2009 was a lot of traveling, at least for me. 2010 so far has been a lot of working the jobs. I have really two, with a side project thrown in from time to time. A lot of learning & building relationships with new people. Mostly fun.

I still play. But not video games any longer. At least not 1st or 3rd person shooters. Hands & head hurt too much. Though I think a turn based tactical warfare game on the iPad would be very cool. Harpoon would be a killer app for me.

LEGO sets are still a good form of therapy. Calms & focuses the mind. I'm planning on attending a Lego convention in Fremont in April - Bricks By The Bay. What an opportunity for me to hang out with other adult Lego nuts.

Music is still very central to my existence (outside of the wife & dog). On the continual hunt for more of it. I buy a lot of used CD's at $2 each out of the bargain bins at the local stores. Amazing what can be had for very little.

I want to write more. Some of the things above I'll expand on a bit later. A list of topics has begun & it is growing, even though I've only started. And I'm supposed to be in charge!

Our white furball is a lot of fun. I'll pull more pictures out of the camera soon. Maybe the squirrels will make a return, wanting their picture posted to the web for the world to see. Ah, the rambling is starting, so it must mean I'm about at my end for the day.

More soon.

-Mike M.

Synthetic Turf

2009-10-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

...Or my assault on the tyranny of lawn care.

My story begins thus: I don’t like lawns. I don’t care if the grass is greener over yonder. Let them have it. Tending grass to me seems like a life sucking endeavor, created to keep the common man eternally striving for, well, nothing. What do people do with their grass lawns? Usually not much, if anything. Except make it grow to which you then cut. What a vicious cycle. A lot of water & fuel to produce very little.

Me, I like trees. Shade in the summer, fruit too. Plus cleans the air.

But with a new puppy, I needed a solution. Being a puppy & low to the ground, she is interested in just about anything. Especially if she can get her mouth around it. Especially rocks & weeds. I only have a small grass patch in the front yard, a compromise at the time. The back yard is scrub between all of our trees. Not good for puppies to walk around in.

We got the idea of synthetic turf from a couple of local ads. Neat concept. Dig down 4“ & put down rock, compacting it down. Then stake in the turf. Lots of variety in turf types too. I didn’t know that people will build a whole putting green in their front or backyards with the stuff. I just wanted a place for my dog to pee & poop.

My wife measured our side yard - 6’x41’. Nearly 250 square feet of my property that I wasn’t using. Nothing is on that side of the house. We don’t use that side to move yard clippings to the front. So a bunch of dirt I pay property tax on.

The first turf place gave us a quote of $5k. Ouch. My wife is a marvel at finding outstanding value. We settled on a little local company called Eternal Greens in Santa Clara. He was half as much & for us, at least as good anyone else we came across. They work fast & the results are excellent. Dan is the man.

The picture is of the turf area now installed on the side of the house. Very cool for our dog. She loves running around on it. Easy to clean. Porous so it doesn’t puddle. No mud. No stickers, no bugs.

Best of all. No Maintenance. No grass sucking out time from my weekend. No water bill. Or fuel burned. Just a green playground for the life of my dog.

Pretty neat. From what I learned, this is starting to gain traction with households in California. I’m jazzed with the idea of turning unused space into something useful.

-Mike M.

Can't buy a laptop this weekend

2009-10-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

We have a puppy in the house. She loves to chew on everything. Especially that which you have told her not to touch.

The end of last week our little puppy decided the power cord to my wife’s laptop would be something new to try. Fortunately we didn’t end up with a zapped dog, but by the time my wife got it out of the jaws of the monster on four paws, she had just about severed the cord at one point.

So what to do? Apple bitter is a wonderful training tool to use with dogs, so ours won’t go after cords again. But she’ll find something else to run off with.

For the laptop, its an old, crusty HP/Compaq my wife uses to surf the net with. A new power supply is $60. So my wife decided that a new laptop may be in order.

So we went laptop hunting. Fry’s & then Best Buy. The first for a feel of what is what, the second for a better selection. At Best Buy my wife found an HP notebook, a dm3 series. It cuts out the optical drive & weighs about four pounds. Decent memory & build quality. So find a sales dude to get one.

Nope. He can’t sell me one. Oh, they are in stock. But I can’t have it until Thursday. Witching hour for Windows 7.

Which is the problem. All but a junky few of what is in stock has Win7 preloaded, so they can’t sell anything until then. eh? I’ve been told I can’t buy a laptop until then.

Let me clarify that point: I can buy a MacBook. But anything else, no can do.

So because of this, that sales dude lost a slam dunk sale. It gave me the time to come home, ask Amazon for their deal, which is better. MS will still get their money, but the local economy didn’t. I find it all a bit silly. I didn’t care if it had Vista - you can give me a voucher for Win7 & I’d take care of it myself. You could even yank the hard drive & I’ll take it from there. But no. In Silicon Valley, I couldn’t buy a non-Mac laptop for my wife.

Time to go show her the deal on Amazon.

-Mike M.

Lego goofyness

2009-09-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve been playing with Lego sets over the course of 30+ years. Big pause somewhere between 12 & 32. I started building sets again when I was sick as a way to distract my brain from the pain. Worked. Then I discovered whole groups of adults who can’t get enough of building creations & sharing them with the world.

I have been inspired by many of these builders to take the parts I have, mess around with them to bring forth a new creation. Then use Mini-figs in such a way to put the spark of humor & personality into the build. This then dovetails right into practicing macro photography, which is also very interesting to me.

In sorting all of my Lego parts, I pulled down my old Galaxy Explorer. I got it for Christmas when I was either 9 or 10. Alex also had space Lego sets & they were a lot of fun to build with. The Galaxy Explorer was one of the bigger sets at the time, it sure seemed big even though it is only 325 parts. Which is a bit on the small side these days. In that box, I found all of my space mini-figs, still smiling after 20 years in the closet.

My Canon S2 IS camera isn’t too good with macro, at least the mini-figs don’t move. But I got a few usable shots of my spacers all lined up. So I thought of a few captions to go along with what we see:

“Dude, the meds are so good, I’ve got a big grin on my face while I’m doing pushups in a pressure suit on a nameless rock. Dude”
“I may be doing pushups, but at least I’m not a Red Shirt”
“It was Red day? But those are in the wash, Sarge!”
“I’m yellow, through & through. That & this big stick mean I’m in charge.”
“Dude, clones...”
“Ah, Red dude. Not you, the other Red dude. Not you, that Red dude. Oh screw it, White guy, down & give me 20”

And so on. My wife thinks this is a very healthy outlet too. Which is great, as you should see the stack of bins I’ve got started in the living room. Helps keep parts out of the puppy’s mouth.

I’ve also been playing with story ideas that can be told with the assistance of Lego builds. The newer mini-figs have better expressions & more interesting accessories. Think illustrated stories, using Lego to bring out the humor. Or at least what I think is humor.

Diving Deep

2009-09-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since I’ve written on the blog. I do have a lot of notes in my journal that I jot down in the course of a week. The past month has been kinda nuts. Its all I can do to spend a Saturday morning sorting Lego parts so I can detach my brain for awhile. Sorting is kinda Zen. Maybe I should take a shot of my bins. My sister calls it my version of arts & crafts. I head to the neighborhood craft store for the bins. I’ll post a shot of nostalgia a little later.

In the house we have a new puppy. Her name is Mina. A little, highly energetic fur ball. Her breed is Havanese. Smart little buggers too. They also try to work the sympathy with the eyes. Loves people. My wife said I could spend more hours in the office if we got a puppy. So I’ve been replaced by the dog. Poor me.

I’ve been diving more and more into wireless networking. I find it a lot of fun, as it leverages all the RF theory my dad taught me over the years. He is used to dealing with kHz or MHz. I’m in the GHz range, either 2.4 or 5.8 where Wi-Fi lives. A lot of people with Ham Radio licenses could jump right in and easily grok the first third or so of Wi-Fi.

I’ve started to study for CWNA (www.cwnp.com). Wireless networking certification. It is a vendor neutral mix of RF, protocol, & network planning. It assumes you already have a wired networking foundation & then builds on top of it. I like the idea of a vendor neutral certification - that is why I never really got into CCNA, CCNP tests as you are locked into Cisco. Yes, they own a good chunk of the routing & switching market, but if you walk into a customer & they have HP ProCurve, you’ll be grabbing the manual.

So for the rest of the year it’ll be puppy, wireless studying & getting ready for winter. I can’t wait for fall to hit California. Couldn’t tell that from this week - 94F tomorrow. ick.

So if I go dark for a few weeks, I’m either reading or chasing the dog through the house.

-Mike M.

Keeping the change

2009-07-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

I remember hearing ads from Bank of America that they had a program that would round up purchases on your debit card, placing the change into your savings account. A way for the bank to keep ahold of their customer’s money a bit longer. The ad even said BofA was applying for a patent on the concept. Which struck me as following Amazon’s patent of one-click.

I use cash for a lot of transactions, so I collect a lot of coins. A friend of mine gave me the coke bottle coin bank several years ago (sans coins). Every night I put the collected coins in, separating the pennies & putting them into their own container. The picture is what I collected in 2-3 years.

My wife counted the coins after I took the picture. Came out to about $190, which she rolled & took to the bank. Gave me CD money. Not too bad for saving a quarter here and a couple dimes there.

So why do I need a bank to save my change for me? I can do that myself. Think of all the loose change in the house, small in value scattered, but together can buy much more than a taco. Just like making a habit of bringing bags to the grocery store, make a habit of putting all of the loose change in one place. Then watch it grow.

-Mike M.

Typing on Crushed Velvet

2009-07-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

I take the health of my hands pretty seriously. Kinda burned them out during college, before I understood posture & the idea of ergonomics. Just like hearing protection in loud network labs, a person in the technology trade where keyboards are the primary interface needs to take precautions to keep from being hurt.

Engineers put themselves at risk of injury every day using straight keyboards, desks at the wrong height, & wrists rests that are nothing of the kind. Even ergo mice are not that adaptable, as each person has a different size of hand & length of fingers. Unfortunately basic health & care of hands isn’t covered during school & only if ask for it in larger companies. Plus the “its good enough” crowd is in charge of cheap keyboards, mice & monitors where ever I’ve gone. It is this thought, that there is nothing better or needed, I’d like to dispel.

I’ve used split keyboards for 15+ years. These rotate out 15-30 degrees to allow a person’s wrists to stay flat & let the fingers dance across the keys. A straight keyboard will force the wrists bend, putting a lot of strain on the tendons as they rub on the carpal tunnel. An ergo book I read back then said to think of typing like playing a piano. The hands float above the keys, fingers reaching keys without strain and the wrists straight & supple.

The first split keyboard I had was an Apple Ergo ADB device that worked wonders. I kept that for many years until I had to give up ADB for USB. At work I had a similar keyboard made by Cherry that was expensive & PS/2 only. But it allowed me to type of many a page of documentation without trouble. At home I had a MS Ergo keyboard (something Elite, I forget the full name). It was big, made a lot of noise, but it did work. I saw many tech writers with them as a way to stave off the stress of typing continually.

But I knew there had to be a better way & looked around this summer for a replacement. I had heard about Kinesis & started to do my research. There is a lot of discussion as to fit of a keyboard to a person & how well it adjusts. Each of us is different, so a one size fits all approach won’t work. The Kinesis Freestyle is detached - only a cable connects the two split halves. This is very cool as it allows for proper placement for each hand, including tilt. The numeric keypad is separate.

The feel of using this keyboard is nothing short of nirvana. At least to a sensitive hand person like me. Only way I can explain it is typing on crushed velvet. The scissor keys require just the right amount of pressure to be pressed, snapping back quickly. It is pretty quiet too. I find I can use it for much longer periods than the old MS keyboard & hours longer than anything found on a laptop.

What is its impact on my work? I actually put off typing up my notes & the drafts of reports till I get home. My hands dislike laptops very much & my head is looking for any way to keep the pain down as much as possible. Also I work much faster with the Kinesis Freestyle than with any other keyboard I’ve used. Talk about efficiency. Less time typing, more time reading. Or building Lego sets.

As with all things that are better than the norm, the Kinesis costs a bit more than your usual keyboard. About $100 or so. But that is little compared to the amount of pain suffered & quality of life lost when using inferior keyboards. I’ll be keeping this keyboard till it turns black (the Mac version is white), then getting another one.

-Mike M.

Exemplary Customer Service

2009-07-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

A few years ago my wife bought me a wallet for Christmas. Don’t groan, as she bought me a stainless steel wallet from Stewart / Stand. I wore out the leather wallet I had previously and this looked like a great solution. It worked great and stood up to the abuse I put it through. But then it started to fray.

The Stewart / Stand wallets are made of a very fine stainless steel thread that is very soft to the touch. At first glance, it is difficult to pin down what it is made of. Light weight & very durable. It’ll even act as a pretty good Faraday cage to keep RFID readers from finding your cards.

My wallet began to fray at the spine, both top & bottom. It looks like the act of placing the wallet into my pocket, spine down, wore at the edges, eventually causing the stainless steel thread to come off. Mind you, my wallet has numerous scrapes & dimples that would have ruined a leather wallet a long time ago.

Stewart / Stand has an updated model that places a fabric reinforcement around the spine to deal with the fraying issue I experienced. Without knowing their warranty or any word on how they dealt with customers, I sent an email to the company explaining the condition of my wallet & if it would be possible to exchange it for a new one.

A few hours later Paul (who I later learned is one of the two brothers of Stewart / Stand) replied that they stand by their product & what was my address so he could send me an updated wallet. That simple. He didn’t even want the old one back. A couple weeks later I receive an envelope with my new wallet. Very cool!

Talk about customer service. To have a company make a decision to support a customer and not ask for anything in return, is just superb to me. In this age where pleasing your customers is many times just words with no actions, it is great to have a company that backs their product no matter the issue.

-Mike M.

Blog neglect

2009-07-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t realized it has been two months since I lasted posted something on my blog. My wife will be bugging me soon to write something new, so I’d better take some time to write out what I’ve been jotting down since May.

My work is keeping me very busy, which is a good thing. There is a lot of potential business in the second half of this year. I have the opportunity to follow through on some ideas to see if I can make them into cash generating ventures. That would have been nearly impossible at my last company, sitting in a cube wondering when the day would end, like Dilbert. In a small company like ours, my boss is very encouraging with such things. When the US office is a couple desks in a room & there is no committee to stamp out ideas that threaten their position at the trough.

No support staff, but then I can work directly with my customers, which is a great feeling. I learned that is what I really missed.

So I have a lot to do that keeps me either in my home office or at a customer site. Not much use for “real time social networks”. I like writing, not burping of words with little context to “followers”. I use IM, but mainly for business. Skype is the best free piece of communication software around. I use it almost daily for speaking with my team in India (voice & IM, no video). Sure it has jitter issues, but it isn’t too shabby for 7000 miles through non-QoS routes. I don’t have an interest in FriendFeed or Facebook, no interest in keeping up to the second with the world. I am usually on-site & billing time, so a customer would frown if I participated in such things using their network & money.

I’m doing a lot of work in the wireless networking space these days. Learning a lot about edge devices, something I didn’t do very much as my focus previously was at the routed Core. Big iron routers with numerous high speed optical links. Now it is testing wireless network devices, which is a still maturing technology. Very cool to be involved.

Time to post some short things I’ve been saving on a list. Then it is back to work.

-Mike M.

Unleashing an iPod's true self

2009-05-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

I like my iPod touch. It stores a lot of music, allows me to control my iTunes server, plus check out the local Wi-Fi deployments without much bulk. But two things annoyed me about the neat little music maker. Until the end of 2008 there was a bug that caused audible pops if using Apple Lossless files. Which, when fixed, left my main gripe of most portable devices: The headphone amp just plain sucks.

Plug in a pair of decent earbuds and I’m greeted with a nice background hiss. This isn’t something to strain for, it is so noticeable that it tells me when the iPod is paying attention or not. Sucks.

But there is another way. I started to look through the forums on how people were able to get better performance from their iPods. I knew there are a couple sets of Line Out pins on the dock connector, the key is to get the fixed Line Out which bypass the headphone amp. I discovered there are a lot of small shops that will build you an over the top dock connector, getting at the signal at the source.

I wanted something decent so I could plug my iPod into my Graham Slee Solo headphone amp. It is a desktop amp for use with my AKG701’s when I want to work on the couch but not listen to the baseball game. I had read many audio enthusiasts using other headphone amps with iPods and found a supplier that wouldn’t empty my wallet with cryo-treated copper.

Ram Electronics has iPod docking connectors that end in dual RCA’s. The connector is a clone, ie this isn’t “Official iPod Certified” stuff. But it doesn’t need to be either. I picked up a IFEPDRCA3, 3 foot cable (made in the USA!), which I plugged into my headphone amp. Ah, sweet music.

No hiss. No compressed dynamics, no stilted highs. The Graham Slee Solo will drive just about any pair of cans & render the source without veils or coloring. It was able to demonstrate that the iPod Touch has a more sophisticated side, one where the music truly flows. Yes, it is still a portable device & has its own constraints when put up against decent full sized stereo gear. But one doesn’t have to fall into the trap that all iPod docks are cheap crap marketed as the only way to get music from it to your stereo.

-Mike M.

Jacuzzi Toilet

2009-05-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are slowly changing things in the house. New floors in the bathroom, along with new fixtures. I have really gotten into the jazz of neat bathroom toys. But what I didn’t know is Jacuzzi makes toilets.

I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1980’s. Jacuzzi to me means hot tub, like Kleenex is a tissue for others. The name just means one thing. Excellent marketing, except that everything else they make is lost in the buzz.

Over at Lowe’s, we found a Jacuzzi Espree toilet on sale. 1.28 gallons per flush and pretty small too. Which is great for our water bill & the tiny dimensions of our master bath. There are pantries & hot tubs bigger than what is our master bath.

But what I find even more interesting is the marketing copy that is written for their line of toilets. Remember that a real person had to write this stuff.

How to make a toilet sound like it’ll take on the world? Give it a cool tag line.

Jacuzzi Propulsion™ Advanced Flushing System

What’s more espree has been performance- engineered for greater flushing power, exceeding all industry performance standards. more power. less water consumption. That’s the beauty of espree.

“Performance engineered” makes it sound like a car. And there is actually a flushing power standard that is noted on all displays. Who came up with that? Come home for dinner & your spouse asks what you did that day - “Well, dear, I finalized the draft for committee review of the specification of how to measure the force created by a standing body of water through dozens of small apertures. In other words, toilet flushing.”

Doesn’t have the spunk of testing iPhones all day, but someone has to do it. I have to say they did a good job, as my Jacuzzi toilet works as specified.

-Mike M.

Been working

2009-05-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

A day to pause. A day to remember. A day to push things to the blog while the wife naps. Which also means I can blast the office stereo just about as loud as I like.

I haven’t written in nearly two months for I have been occupied with many things, most it work related. But I do make sure to spend time with my wife and get the sleep I need. The blog & other pursuits go on pause, but my collection of ideas to write about continues.

My journal application helps with that. My wife says I’m getting old and my memory isn’t as sharp. But I counter such arguments with using the tools at my disposal. The Singularity is near!

Work though is challenging. I am currently the Director of our US office. Or as my wife says, “Solutions Dude”. I wanted to work at a small company, well, that is what I got. Such a place is not for someone who wishes to stay within a strict job description. For me, each week the list of what I am responsible for expands as my boss fires off request after request.

It is a lot of fun, working with our client companies and ensuring they are successful. Plus neat to see how competitive the smaller Bay Area companies truly are, looking to the world stage to show they are better than all the rest. The valley has a vibe of hope. Actually a lot more than hope, more like determination to restore the world, one piece at a time.

As a suggestion to look for jobs that are not connected to the current economy, look for startups with VC money. That cash is about the future. Look at Ventureloop.com for a whole slew of jobs at companies that are in need of talented individuals to help bring their products to market.

Oh, I’m rambling again. :)

-Mike M.

We need more Engineers

2009-04-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

I work with engineers in India on a daily basis, in various capacities, including mentor & manager. I have spoken with literally hundreds just this year & they are all sharp, full of energy, and looking for a challenge.

During my studies at SJSU, a physics professor told us that it is engineers who solve the world’s problems. This was during the early 1990’s and a recession was in full swing. He said it is always engineers who can take the problems facing society and build solutions that energize economies.

I came across this chart in the March 10th Business section of the Mercury News. To my eyes, one item leaps right out. Top discipline producing degrees in the Bay Area: Business & Marketing. Engineering (I’m assuming all flavors) is farther down, 1/4 the number. Even if you add Computer Science in there, it is only 1/3 of the size of the top line. That is a big problem, in my opinion.

What I see is a lot of people who want to play in the business world, sell products, creating marketing programs, or simply trade stocks all day. But is that making anything that solves problems? If engineers were in charge instead of Wall Street, would the financial markets look different?

Two items to ponder: China’s current leadership all have Engineering degrees.

Second is what my boss told me last month about India. Every year, their schools produce one million engineering graduates. 600,000 of those are in the computer / software / networking disciplines. The “kids” (crap, I feel old) I talk to see Engineering as a way to rise up in the world, to have a high paying job that has a future. To them Engineering is the path to stability. Much different than here in the US, at least in my opinion.

So what to take away from all this? Unless the US wants to end up playing second fiddle to the world, Science & Engineering need to be at the forefront of public education. It isn’t enough that a kid can make a web page or plug cables into Linksys boxes. It is to understand how all of this stuff works. I run into a lot of people who resign themselves into not understanding even the basics of networking. I point out that India & China one day will have more technically qualified people than the entire population of the US.

Enough of my ranting.

-Mike M.

U2 Live

2009-04-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

I’m catching up on posting things I’ve found as I reorganize my papers and other junk in my Lab. The other day I found this ticket stub in a box. Yes, I saw U2 live, in concert, at the Oakland Coliseum.

Proof that in my mid-20’s I did get out and rock. I usually like smaller venues. But a group from work was getting tickets and I put my name in. The lady who stood in line for us to get them went on to win front row seats for the following day.

Our seats were to the far right of the stage, up in the stands. Still lots of fun. Even then, the fans were not very interested in anything post 1990. When songs from War or Joshua Tree played, everyone stood up and let the wave of old times remembered wash over them. Newer songs, people sat, went to find a beer or just started to chat with their neighbors. As if Bono became live background music.

The encore was very weird. I remember the four members of the band coming out in eggs moved to center stage. It brought back memories of watching This Is Spinal Tap at Z’s house. The stunt didn’t make any sense, other than to give the fans that stayed till the end something to tell their friends the next day.

Still, something great to experience.

-Mike M.

When I grow up...

2009-04-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate to grow up knowing my great grandparents on both sides of my family. They lived into their 90’s, generally healthy & full of spunk.

This is a picture of my great grandmother. It was from about 10 years ago when she was about 90. I told her that when I got to be her age, I wanted to be like her. Basically running around and causing trouble. But in a good way.

I learned a number of things from them. One is to remain active in some way, visiting with family & friends. Plus have a hobby or two. Grandma’s was reading everything she could get her hands on and drinking coffee. When she would visit us, she would read the Mercury News from page 1A all the way through to where the classifieds started. Then she would want to discuss what she read with you.

I remember sending her a couple magazines that were about the history of the Old West. She grew up in the mid-west in the early 1900’s & was married just before the Great Depression. Her comment about the stories of people in those articles? Yes, it was accurate, for that is what -her- parents & grandparents had told her. Very neat to speak with her about a time that was not that far removed from her living memory. Kinda like what the 1940’s are for me, the late 1880’s were for her.

I think I got my bug for history from her and my grandfather. Such stories, such lives.

All of my great grandparents have passed away. I still have a great great aunt that is her younger sister. Every couple of months I take half an hour to write her a letter to let her know what my wife and I are up to. She writes back too. Email doesn’t exist for her. Paper does. So take a few minutes and write a short note to an older relative. It’ll make their day.

-Mike M.

Green, the New Feel Good Color

2009-02-28T19:53:00.000-08:00

The scan is from today’s Mercury News, showing the changes in median prices of home values here in Santa Clara County. I noticed something about the map. They switched the colors around. Is this to make me feel better?

The map used to have green mean “UP” and red meant “DOWN”. Usual thing you learn as a kid and see in everyday life. Green good, red stop. That kind of thinking. But now the meaning is reversed so the map has an overall green look to it.

I wonder if this is to keep the citizens calm about their dropping property value. The power of color choice then affects feeling.

Grumpy me for wanting consistent color markers. When values rise in the future, who decides when the chart changes once again?

-Mike M.

LED monitor goodness for everyone

2009-02-27T15:39:00.000-08:00

Computer monitors are like speakers. You upgrade the source components all the time, but monitors can last a long time. Until you need bigger. Or more of them.

Apple made a splash late last year with their LED lit monitors, both desktop & laptop. My sister’s MacBook Unibody looked leaps and bounds better than her original MacBook (white). Apple’s desktop version looks great, but at $900 and super narrow in what it supports (Mini DisplayPort), it is not meant for the many, only the few. But it put in my head to watch for others to source such panels.

My good friend Alex put me onto Dell monitors a bit more than three years ago as a well supported, high quality and cost effective solution. My 2405FPW is just about to go through its warranty period of three years. I told my sister to get a panel from them for her Mini to drive. It is good stuff in a non-fancy frame.

I noticed on Engadget they mentioned Dell had new energy efficient monitors, the G2210 & G2410. 18 & 20 watts respectively (I think my current 24 is about 50-60 watts). LED lit. $239 & $349. Sweet!

The only thing I see limiting on the monitors is the stand. It looks to only pivot. My current stand rotates, pivots and just about any other way you can get it to groove. I wonder if there is aftermarket stands (it has a VESA mount) that sits on a desk (I have an arm, but won’t work with my current desk). But there is bolting the arm to the wall and have the monitor float over the desk. These panels don’t weigh very much, even with their built in power supplies.

But my whole point here is that if you want 90% of Apple LED monitor goodness at a third the cost, the Dell’s look very, very good.

A Public Service Announcement to those seeking Energy Efficiency without breaking the bank.

-Mike M.

History of Video Tape

2009-02-15T13:38:00.000-08:00

I love history. I dig into many topics, from military to technology. This is about a neat Silicon Valley story - how video recording came to be.

I posted the pages of the booklet up on my Picassa page. It was printed up by Ampex in 1981, written by Charles P. Ginsburg. The article describes how a small team of engineers went through the high stress times of creating something the world hadn't seen before. The project in the mid-1950's, centered in Redwood City, would make it an early success story examplifing the spirit of the Bay Area.

These days we think "tape delay" is something to groan about, that live trumps all. But in 1956, it was something to trumpet. First was CBS with the "Douglas Edwards and the News" show. Another piece of trivia: Ray Dolby was part of the team. It is his company Dolby Labs that give us the audio encoding advancements today.

-Mike M.

Unintended Symbolism

2009-02-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

I received something else recently in the mail that caused me to blog my thoughts. More like riffs of a bass line. When using symbols, sometimes unexpected meaning comes through due to circumstance. Or in this case, just poor choice.

The History Book Club always is wanting me to rejoin. This time they sent a catalog along with a metal eagle, pictured here, as a token gift. The History Book Club in their literature attempts to woo me through my American patriotism. Stars & Stripes, Eagles, all sorts of American symbols.

But right there on the plastic case containing the metal eagle, Made In China.

I saw this in two ways. One, that it is sad that the USA farms out national symbol manufacturing to the cheapest contractor possible. American flags say Made In China. So how can a symbol of the country carry any weight if it isn’t made within the borders it represents?

But I also saw a deeper symbolism. That the USA is Made In China. That China is in control of our destiny, of our way of life. Through their deep reserves of US Treasury notes & export economy, the metal eagle can be made no where else on Earth. I’m not saying that this is entirely true, but the symbolic pairing brought that out for me.

For me, I’m a World is Flat kind of guy. The Net levels playing fields, forcing those connected to it to compete without thought to borders. I am a part of that, working with teams in Bangalore, exporting my expertise to mentor engineers in the art of testing. I hope that our way of thinking becomes one of “Made In China” makes sense, for it is the most efficient place to make the thing that I designed, which will then be sold around the world.

But it still begs the question of how symbols are defined, shaped, and given meaning for future generations.

-Mike M.

CD Spam

2009-02-11T21:05:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I received something in the mail that I thought was deader than a door nail. In 2009 nearly all machines are connected to the Net, the great delivery system for all types of digital information. So a company decided to market their service with CD spam. Yep, I got mailed a CD (WinXP & older != Mac OS X).

Stamps.com thinks that I need a CD sent to me cold in order to try out their service. I thought that went out with AOL. CD to get on the web, a CD to join a service. Silly that a .com is still using physical media to market their wares. It is 2009, not 1989.

What a waste. Wouldn’t it have been easier to spam my email and not send plastic, aluminum & paper through the post office? Why in 2009 would such a marketing campaign work on a tech savvy populous?

I rant, because the Net gives me a place to rant. Which also provides the infrastructure business can use to reach customers and provide services they need. I wonder if an iPod kid knows what to do with a data CD... :)

-Mike M.

Hot Wheels - Tesla

2009-02-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve come to paw through the clearance isles of Target to see if there are any interesting airplane toys. Not everyone wants to have a diecast metal X-29. Looking through the Hot Wheel & Matchbox cars, I found a Tesla Roadster. Cool! For less than a dollar, I have a little electric car on my desk.

So does it mean you’ve arrived if Mattel licenses the likeness of your car to sell to kids around the world? Lots of Porsche, Corvettes and classic American muscle cars. All cars with big engines that go real fast. Instead this little beauty has batteries and goes real fast. With that mindset, I doubt a Prius will ever grace a Hot Wheel track (I jumped many a car in my Grandmother’s house when I was much, much younger).

Tesla did send out today a bunch of updates. I am very interested in seeing what the Model S looks like, which was called the Whitestar at one point. It is the four door sedan that Tesla wants to build here in San Jose. Tesla does get DoE money to help them develop the Model S. Pretty cool that - build up a new American car line as Detriot goes down in flames. Also telling that their design studio is at SpaceX Corp. The same guys who built their very own rocket with private funds and put it in space.

-Mike M.

Language of losing your job

2009-02-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

George Carlin had it right. We use language to hide things, soften the blow of what we should be really facing. In reading the results of Cisco’s Q2 results, it seemed their PR people have come up with more ways to say, “Dude, your unemployed.”

I was without a job for awhile and no spin or term can change the fact that my primary source of income wasn’t there. It was nice not having a boss, but I still have to answer to the overseer that is my wife. (Hi dear!)

The article from Infoworld seemed to have the most $1 (inflation adjusted) terms.

When I was in the middle of the big layoffs of 2001, the term used then was:

RIF - Reduction In Force

Or “Downsizing”. Best one then was “The employee will be in transition”, as if you are being transfered to a better place.

But now, Cisco has some good ones:

A “realignment and restructuring of resources” will result in 2000 jobs lost. But it isn’t a layoff. Last quarter the article states the company realigned 1000 jobs. But it isn’t a layoff.

Quote from John Chambers:
“We are not planning across the board workforce reductions,” he told analysts on the call. “We are not going to consider a layoff at this time. We may be able to avoid large scale downsizing events,” he said.

What is a large scale downsizing event? How is that different than a layoff, workforce reduction, or just plain old job cuts?

I don’t like flowery language in my corporate messages. Good in poems, satire and other things that don’t take themselves too seriously. I pick on Cisco for it has the latest quarterly results and their PR is usually pretty inventive. But I think other companies will be using similar language to mask the fact that global rightsizing (<-- spellchecked!) is just cutting down the number of people employed.

Now that we have all the doom and gloom words out of the way, there isn’t much you can do to punch up “You’re Hired!”. We need to come up with bigger words for job creation. Or just simply call a spade a spade, and get back to implementing ideas to employ those that have found themselves without a job.

-Mike M.

Robert Parker novels & ship names: A mashup

2009-01-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

My long time friend Mike Z introduced me many, many years ago to the Spenser novels of Robert Parker. He started me off right, with the first three in the series. Then he hit me with _Love & Glory_, a story so gripping that I read it in a day. My great grandmother read _Gunman’s Rhapsody_ twice. Her parents were actually in what we today call the Old West. My I digress, my main point is Z got me hooked into Robert Parker.

So the other day I read the latest Spenser novel, _Rough Weather_. All the usual Spenser dialogue and Hawk as cool as ever. Looking at the author’s book list, it occurred to me that many of the titles would make neat ship names. Why?

In the adult Lego world, building space going ships from scratch designs is more than a hobby. It is the realization of an idea in 3d using snap together plastic blocks. And goofy minifigs. I follow blogs of builders, each giving a ship a name. So what struck me was how appropriate Robert Parker titles are.

Take:
Early Autumn
Mortal Stakes
Crimson Joy
Stardust
Sudden Mischief
Small Vices
Back Story
Cold Service

Tack one of those on a pirate ship or a bulk, long haul freighter. A salvage tug. To me they just fit so well. Something with character & whit.

I don’t think the US Navy would be interested. They use states & cities for submarines. Admirals for older carriers and newer destroyers. Ex-Presidents for newer carriers (except for Carter, he has his named attached to a special Seawolf boat). Lots of politics with such names. So could fans of Robert Parker petition for a boat to be named Walking Shadow instead of Boston? Just a thought.

-Mike M.

Purble Died

2009-01-18T19:31:00.001-08:00

I have no idea what a Purble is. Maybe the Cloud knows, as a Purble is a name of a game in Windows 7. My discussion isn't about interface, style, or pretty graphics. It is about code quality & what happens when testing isn't done. Or you let the public test your stuff for you. In this case Win7 choked on a Purble. And died.

I'm a software test professional. I've written lots of test plans, filed too many bugs to count and worked with code so fresh it had a new car smell. And may not work past the splash screen. For weeks. So I've been around the block in testing software & systems. I don't blanch when something that says Beta dies.

Last week MS offered up Win7 to those who wanted to give it whirl. I pulled down the ISO to run on my Mac under VMWare's Fusion. I was curious to see their take on the ever rising complexity of modern operating systems & push a few buttons.

The VM I set up has a real 2GB of RAM & one of the two fast cores of my machine, so Win7 was going to be a little starved for resources, but I wasn't looking for speed. Just mess around (hence screen shot). It boots pretty quick and uses soft high pitch tones to announce its arrival. Ribbons as an interface theme is much different than OS X, so I stumbled around a bit as I don't have Vista the machines I use. But stumbling around as a tester isn't a problem. Until Purble died.

I can lock Win7 up by navigating through folders to where the included games hang out. If I dive into the folder where the actual game executable is, the VM locks. No blue screen, no nothing. Locks. No core dump, no watchdog to come along and give a stack trace. Dead.

I can get it to happen every time. I can run around in other folders fine. I can play around with all kinds of settings in the control panel without causing a crash. But touch a folder, dead.

So where are the test teams in this? Has the system even gone through a set of regression scripts to give a view into the stability of the system? Has anything been validated to work before sending it out to the public or is MS saving money by having the world file bugs to its latest OS?

I ask since moving around in folders is a common task within a file system. If the OS has such basic issues, then it is not fit for the public to see. If it is the VM that is locking and not the OS, then Win7 is trying to mess with things through the hardware abstraction layer that it shouldn't.

Software quality is, to me, the always big elephant in the room. Everyone talks about features. But who cares about features if the backbone of the system is built on a foundation of sand. Developers many times will push the Quality portion of the SDLC as far to the right as they can. MS development managers have written some neat books on building in quality (the Excel team in the 1990's did some really cool stuff), do the OS folks read what the application folks have written?

Hopefully there will be a Build 8000 of Win7, for I'm curious as to what a Purble is. For all I know on my system is they are dead.

-Mike M.

Merging That Name

2009-01-18T19:26:00.000-08:00

Back in college, I maintained near contiguous employment due to the demands of economics. Sure it took me a couple more years to get out with my degree, but on the other hand it was quite educational & better prepared me for my career in high-tech. One place I’ll talk about another time, as it is still a good story. The second place has had many names.

Changed three times during the three years I was there. Now it has a new name that I can’t help to wonder if the assistants (like I was) will be able to rattle off this new mouthful as they answer phones.

First (for me) it was called: Shearson Lehman Brothers
Then: Smith Barney Shearson

Then: Smith Barney

Always good to keep a business card in front of the phone to make sure you have the right name. Think of all the paper that will need to be recycled, signs changed and letterhead printed. TARP?

The firm was always part of a family of companies, run by, in order: American Express, Travelers & eventually Citicorp.

This week I read that Citicorp, in a bid to raise cash, is putting its Smith Barney unit into a joint venture with Morgan Stanley (itself a combination of old firms, such as Dean Witter). And the name?

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney

Eh? Try to do marketing spin on that.

Morgan Stanley gets to be named first as it has a 51% stake in the joint venture. Always counts to be the top dog in this business. I wonder who gets to pick out the new color schemes?

Certainly not the back office folks – they would be that cost savings of $1.1B. The front office stays put, as they are attached to the individual broker.

It was a good time (even if I had to wear a tie every single day) & I learned quite a lot about how the finance works & the funny things money makes people do. We never did care too much as to the name in the end.

-Mike M.

Keeping my car in the future California

2008-11-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

Or: Connecting the dots to drive without burning fossil fuels.

Here in California we've watched fuel prices rise and fall over the last year, bringing the specter of inflation & economic disruption into the light. To finally realize how serious the lock is of the fossil fuel companies within our lives. Without further shocks to the system, we may never seek a solution that can be rolled out world wide. But if we solve the problem here at home, it could change the world. Isn't that why we are here in Silicon Valley?

There is a way and it isn't a pipe dream. And Mike isn't high. Just an engineer seeking a solution.

Driving in a future California may take on the form of hydrogen powered vehicles. A time when you refuel at home and it doesn't cost you a dime. When the first maintenance item on the car is to change the brake pads (no oil changes). That even on the hottest days, commuting in the car isn't leading to Spare the Air days.

How? As with all things engineers deal with, the present solution isn't perfect and it isn't put together as a package, but the potential is definitely there. More iterations need to be run through to iron out bugs and incorporate customer feedback. As any early adopters know, there are glitches. But we haven't crossed the chasm yet, though we need to start becoming serious about changing our view of transportation & burning fuels.

The first step is solar panels on your house. The latest generation out of the lab is at 40% efficiency. That should allow several kilowatts of available power during the day. Free power just pouring onto the grid if you don't use it. But let's use it.

Usually to get hydrogen, electrolysis is used to split H2 off of what ever it is connected to. Oxygen most likely in the form of water. Takes a bunch of power. But what if you could speed that up? Researchers in South Korea have found a way to break apart molecules very efficiently. Take their process to create H2 and store it in the garage. Nearly free fuel. Granted H2 is hard stuff to store, so have a system that keeps it around for only a day or two. Vent what you don't put in your car each evening into the air and start over.

What car? A Honda. Currently Honda will lease you an FCX Clarity, a real fuel cell car running around in southern California. Better than a prototype, but not at a stage to make 400k a year. The biggest issue with the Clarity around town is finding an H2 fueling spot. Half the time drivers are figuring out if they can make it to the filling station before running out of H2 while on the way home. No AAA service currently. But if you can create the H2 at home, for daily commuting, you can top off each evening easily.

Three pieces to the puzzle. Ultimate solution for 2020? Maybe. I'd like to be a part of it. As California leads, so does the country in terms of transportation & pollution control. It isn't a solution for gridlocked traffic on our aging highways. But it would allow us who need to drive for work & family a way to bridge the car culture to the future that our kids dream up.

-Mike M.

Spinning Vinyl

2008-11-29T19:27:00.001-08:00

I got my music bug from my dad. He collected albums in the 1960's & 1970's, usually with a rock & pop slant. I grew up learning how to string a reel-to-reel and properly cue up a record. Age 5 my favorite was "Rubber Ducky".

Visiting my parents this holiday, I pulled out some records to play. My iPod battery was dead and I didn't feel like pawing through their CD collection to find something listenable. But I do know the basic order of dad's record collection and what is in it.

So I started with the Beetles. "Sgt. Pepper" first and then the "White Album" (#6130 to be precise - that is it spinning in the picture). These are original pressings my dad bought when they were released. Then some Herbie Mann. Rolling Stones. Led Zeppelin.

It does sound different. I think the mixes are a little different than the current CD versions (at least in the stereo image & levels of instrument tracks). Nothing double blind. Just a gut feel. Threw on a Symphony and got no bass. But with America, the strumming guitars, especially the higher registers is clean. Very clean.

But it is fun. Playing music from 40 years ago. The vinyl heads speak of a connection to the music as analog requires more involvement to make it play & is only 20 minutes at a time. Maybe there is something to it. Analog is warm to iPod's cold digital. Or it is due to needing only one step to play a record (move stylus to play) where it requires many steps to put music onto an iPod.

In the end it is the music that matters, which is the cool part about spinning vinyl at my parent's house.

-Mike M.

Dogcow Lives!

2008-11-29T18:33:00.000-08:00

My mom has a new dog this year. Her name is Abbi and she is a Havanese. But truly she is the reincarnation of the Dogcow.

If you are not up on your Apple pre-OS9 Finder trivia, the Dogcow is the animal found in the Page Setup dialog. She says "Moof!" It's even trademarked.

Throughout the last couple of decades as OS X came to be, the Dogcow has dropped away as another icon that didn't make the cut from b/w pixels to 32-bit color. Sidelined to be only seen in nostalgia blogs and at swap meets, where the old timers tell of a time long ago when displays were bulky and 8-bit color all the rage. But now, she has returned.

In the form of my mom's dog, Clarus the Dogcow has returned to the material world to do something. Presently with me, she just plays & runs. I am waiting for a message, enlightenment if you will, on why has she chosen this Macintosh family & the reason to appear this year. Is it to reward my parents for their nearly 25 years of Mac loyalty? Or that they are just a happy home for animals?

I don't have an answer yet. She may be in hiding or waiting to test me on my knowledge of OS 1 through 9. Prove that I am worthy to learn about something that threatens all Mac users big and small.

Or she is just a dog that likes to lick my nose. And ears. And anything else she can get ahold of. The Dogcow is real. Even if she'd rather chew on bones than lead Mac users into a new age.

-Mike M.

A small step to using less electricity

2008-10-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

2 Watts.

A very small amount of power. My TV uses more asleep. But that is all that is takes to illuminate the picture. No flash. Just 2 watts of LED illumination. My solar power watch sits beside the meter, charging off of the light.

For 100 years we have measured light output by what it took to make a tungsten filament glow. Most of it is wasted as heat. 100 watts, 250 watts. 500 for halogen. Only recently has there been a push to make lights more efficient. Packaging will say 27 watts w/100 watt equivalent in parentheses, still speaking in the language of glowing wires.

It would be better to discuss color temperature and lumens generated, like with video projectors. Then a customer can compare light output vs. power consumption and make a more informed decision.

To run my LED desk lamp is just about free. 1 watt to power the LED’s, 1 watt used in the power supply. Residential power is measured in kilowatt hours. Mine runs 11 cents. Using that metric, it is drawing .002 kw/hr. Or 500 hours to cost 11 cents. 500 hours is about 3 weeks, continuous. And the bulbs will last for a decade or two. Some would call that “green”.

My point about my LED lamp?

A lot of discussion in the last few months about America needing to become energy independent.

Read _Hot, Flat, & Crowded_ by Thomas Friedman and you’ll get it (I’ll write about it in a few days - it is very cool).

The desk lamp is made by Hampton Bay. It is made in China.

I bought it at my local Home Depot.

Making a difference in your energy usage at home is just steps away from where you bought the parts to fix the toilet.

-Mike M.

The limits of 32-bit computing

2008-09-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

Back in school, I was nuts about CPU design. Wanted to dig into the world of snooping & snarfing the L1 / L2 / L3 caches resident either on the chip or off to the side. When building my i8088 based computer, it was a big weight off my shoulders in being able to use Memory Mapped I/O. You’d have a set of addresses for RAM, then another set for a printer. Made things very easy. Not a big deal to use up a 1MB address space (20 bits) in that way when I was playing with kilobytes of memory storage. And 32-bit? 4GB of addresses to use (kinda like IP addresses). But that was the early 1990’s.

AppleInsider has a good series about the limits of 32-bit computing and how Windows & OS X approach the problem. I believe the second part of the discussion is quite good at describing the infrastructure of the two operating systems, as it pertains to address space using Intel chip sets. These chip sets still use MMIO, but installed physical RAM amounts have been rising such that the IO space & RAM are butting heads.

What I didn’t realize is that the VRAM on a video card is also counted in the IO address space. I had thought that memory was controlled by the GPU, fed data through the PCI-e bus. But it seems that the chip sets need to carve out everything plugged into the motherboard. The chart is quite good at illustrating the architectural issue at hand. If you have 1/2GB on the video card, you lose 1/2GB of RAM addressing, even if the physical RAM is there. This is the crux of the issue facing users of Intel chip sets (maybe AMD too, but I’m not sure).

There are two parts to the issue: Intel CPU’s & MMIO (now spreading out their 64-bit goodness). The OS approach to memory usage.

As shown, newer hardware can easily work with 64-bit address spaces. It is the operating systems we use daily that are lagging behind. Windows is a system that is either all 32-bit or all 64-bit in its dealing with the world. OS X has taken a hybrid approach, moving portions of the infrastructure from 32 to 64 bits over time. This allows those parts to take advantage of the huge memory allocation space. Windows went down one path which traded performance (their TLB management is better) for future expansion (harder to move legacy 32 bit software forward).

Why is this a big deal? It is a historic fact that CPU speeds and RAM usage always go up, year after year. But the seemingly vast expanse of 4GB is about to hit the reinforced siege wall of address limits. Sucks when math rears its ugly head. OS X has a plan, over time, to address the issue and move their users to an environment of 2^64. Microsoft user base and its like of XP make for a more interesting future. Interesting in that XP will be around for quite a lot longer than MS wants it to. By that token, so will Vista as that is split into 32-bit & 64-bit versions as well. Win7 is supposed to help fix this, but that is not for another 18 to 24 months at least and that will be a v1.0. There is no consistent effort move Windows users to x64 Vista over time.

This is not to make a joke, but to point out that users will begin to find the real limits of the systems at hand. The majority of those systems are x86 + WinXP. It is stuck under the 4GB limit, along with the Intel MMIO handicap, which lowers useable RAM. Just legacy things piling up on each other. The question to pose is how will the memory limit affect application development and subsequent data manipulation. HD Video editing needs lots of space. As does image editing. Same each iteration of an OS. What kind of stagnation will WinXP users find themselves in 12-18 months from now?

For some users this is a tempest in a teapot. 2GB of RAM is more than enough. As long as they don’t want to change applications or the base OS. There is no rule that a computer can’t run the same software for 20+ years. An Apple ][e will still run VisiCalc just fine today as it did in 1985. But if you want to play Spore, manipulate HD video, or anything else that needs memory, design trade-offs will need to be made. For software innovation to move us forward, especially as more CPU cores become available, the systems need to grow. More RAM to hold data locally so as to not take the hit going to the hard drive to swap. WinXP users may find themselves stuck with fast CPU’s hog-tied due to too many page swaps. OS X users will find that as the amount of memory expands beyond 4GB, their systems will run faster. The short leap to Snow Leopard next year will be a lot easier for users than the long leap Windows users have to either x64 Vista or 2010 Win7.

-Mike M.

Change the name

2008-08-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

I hadn't thought about the little title of the blog I push my thoughts into. "Mike's Space". I looked at that the other day and felt it sucked a whole lot. "Space" has been taken over by MySpace and anything attached to social networking. I was thinking more about space between planets and stars.

So I came up with "Lab". It suits me. A place to play and learn. Break apart and discover. Test and refine. So out with Space and in with Lab.

-Mike M.

Sitting on glass

2008-08-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting on glass. Really.

For my birthday, my wife ordered a GlassMat to replace the plastic chair mat I was destroying under my desk in the home office. At 200 pounds, even heavy duty plastic mats would dimple then crack as I sit in front of my machine several hours a day.

My wife is a master shopper either on the web or in the mall. She is always looking for quality - things that will last a long time. In looking for a new floor mat, she found GlassMat in Colorado.

My mat is a 48“ square, with a 12” square cut out of one corner. This way it fits perfectly under my L shaped desk. It usually takes a couple weeks to get one, as they are custom made. But in my case it took about six weeks, as the first two attempts didn’t arrive as they were damaged while in transit. The third did get here without a problem. Marsha, the lady in charge of orders and customer service, made sure that I was kept apprised of the situation. I think my case was an anomaly and was handled in a first rate manner.

It is packed very well, as long as you don’t run a forklift over it. The GlassMat has a lifetime warranty against breaking once it is in place. It is a 1/4“ sheet of glass, kinda like clear automotive glass. On carpet it doesn’t seem to slip or move around.

The interesting part is how different it is sitting in my chair, atop a GlassMat. You do not sink down when you sit, nor does the chair spring up when you stand. Duh, right? Mike, glass doesn’t flex. Yes, but it is a bit weird the first few times. But it works a whole lot better than any plastic mat out there. My back has told me so.

-Mike M.

What to do with all that extra Argon

2008-08-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

In the September 2008 issue of Scientific American, there is a one page article about hunting for Neutrinos at FermiLab, looking for proof that there are more than four dimensions in our universe. Experiments have discovered unexplained behaviors of the little neutrinos, with one possibility is they are able to short-cut our four dimensions by slipping to where a total of 10 exist. No Sci-Fi here. It’s kinda the opposite of massive black holes where time gets screwed up. Here on the small scale, humans may be able to observe a whole other set of rules.

What’s Argon have to do with 10 dimensions? In the article, it discusses the proposal to build a new neutrino detector called MicroBooNE. The scientists want to use 170 tons of liquid Argon. Holy crap! Where do you find 1000 pounds of the stuff, not to mention 170 tons. Do you hit up the local chemistry supply shop for a few tanker trucks full?

Researchers are always looking forward, so after 2011 when MicroBooNE is up and running, they want to look at building a much bigger system, possibly containing hundreds of thousands of tons of Argon in a tank that would be the size of a football stadium. That’s a lot of gas to cool down.

So if you need Argon, just hoof it down to northern Illinois and knock on their door. That is, unless they’ve been able to shift the lab to the next state over following neutrinos into their hyper-dimensional highways. :)

-Mike M.

Apple moving upscale?

2008-08-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Yep, I’m looking for a job. After hearing my parents talk about their positive experience at the Apple Store in Roseville, I keyed up the retail side of the business.

Look what I found in Apple retail job listings. I didn’t know there were personal shoppers at the Apple Store. So a couple questions: What do you need to do to hook up with this level of service?

How much does it pay and do I qualify?

Full text below (I bolded a couple spots):

Requisition Number	3297030
Job title	Personal Shopping Specialist - Full Time
Location	San Francisco- San Francisco
Country	United States
City	San Francisco
State/Province	California
Job type	Full Time
Job description	KEY OBJECTIVES Primary responsibility is to implement the Retail vision for a transformational customer experience by providing complete and appropriate solutions for every customer. This individual focuses on providing an exceptional service experience through appointment based shopping. Develops and implements a strategic plan specific to their store. This person is passionate about our products and our customers, and is relentless in providing an unparalleled personal shopping experience. They build and maintain personalized and sustainable customer relationships. Supervises the operations of a personal shopping team comprised of Mac Specialists, under the direction and supervision of the Red Zone leader. DUTIES Passionately drives the store team to build long term relationships with customers through personalized service that exceeds customer expectations. Briefs management on the activities of the Personal Shopping team during leadership meetings. Partners with Red Zone leaders to identify individuals to participate on personal shopping team. Work with management to ensure all red zone customer service escalations are addressed in a timely manner; leverage personal shopping services to create promoters from detractors. Organizes and maintains all client contact and purchase history for the purpose of building sustainable client relationships. Develops in-store strategies to attract new customers, market personal shopping services and build loyalty to the brand. Maintains detailed knowledge of current promotions and programs, local demographics, and event opportunities. Good knowledge of company policy and procedures and ensures compliance with all personal shopping policies, programs and initiatives. Educates and trains, Mac Specialist Mac Genius and Creative teams on the positioning of personal shopping. Conduct weekly meetings with Red Zone leader and personal shopping team to review store performance, goals and develop upcoming activities and strategies. Manages and maintains concierge with to ensure adequate allocation of personal shopping resources. Typically requires some High School education. 2-3 years of retail experience preferred and proven ability to provide complete solution

Open government helped by Microsoft?

2008-08-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

Ain’t the Internet great? I’m home, so I can tune into the Democratic National Convention. Or specifically, grabbing the video stream of what is happening on the floor. This way I can listen to what is being said (I’ve never really paid attention in the last eight years) while I’m working on finding a job. No need to turn on the TV, all of my information flows through the computer.

I was a bit worried at first that the DNC website requires Microsoft’s Silverlight. eh? I’m a Mac guy. But I saw there is actually an OS X plug-in. Hey, that’s cool. It works under Safari too. There are stutters from time to time, mainly because of all the stuff I’ve got running on the CPU concurrently. The codec being used is pretty good at keeping the video crisp while my DSL line maxes out at 1.6Mb/sec.

So I give credit where it is due. MS built a no-pain video streaming sub-system. For Macs. What is the world coming to? :)

(As an aside, how many people chose their delegate that went to the DNC or the RNC? I did. Met the local superdelegate too. Please Vote in November)

-Mike M.

Two observations

2008-08-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

I came across two things this weekend that led me to reflect how weird the consumer technology is.

While building a simple spreadsheet in OpenOffice, I noticed that the save button is a floppy disk icon. A 3.5“ sliding door variety. It has been 10 years since Steve Jobs banished the floppy from Macs. In this first decade of the 21st century, can’t we come up with a better icon?

The second is another observation on people’s living rooms. Specifically the pattern of consumers pushing for big LCD TV’s & speakers as small as possible. See this all the time. That isn’t what I noticed. Rock Band & Guitar Hero are big hits and require a bunch of large controllers to mimic actually playing an instrument. ION is releasing their premium drum kit next month. In the Engadget picture of the kit in the living room, it takes up a lot of space. Is such gear now the elephant in the room, literally? What’s the WAF here?

-Mike M.

A quote of History

2008-08-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

I found this paragraph about History by Alan Moore in the second installment of Hellboy. As a history nut, I think it explains the allure quite well.

==
The history of comic-book culture, much like the history of any culture, is something between a treadmill and a conveyer belt: we dutifully trudge along, and the belt carries us with it into one new territory after another. There are dazzlingly bright periods, pelting black squalls, and long stretches of grey, dreary fog, interspersed seemingly at random. The sole condition of our transport is that we cannot halt the belt, and we cannot get off. We move from Golden Age to Silver Age to Silicone Age, and nowhere do we have the opportunity to say, “We like it here. Let’s stop.” History isn’t like that. History is movement, and if you’re not riding with it then in all probability you’re beneath its wheels.

Lately, however, there seems to be some new scent in the air; a sense of new and different possibilities; new ways for us to interact with History. At this remote end of the twentieth century, while we’re further from our past than we have ever been before, there is another way of viewing things in which the past has never been so close. We know greater detail, than we’ve ever previously known. Our new technology of information makes this knowledge instantly accessible to anybody who can figure-skate across a mouse pad. In a way, we understand more of the past and have a greater access to it than the folk who actually lived there.

-Alan Moore, 1997
==

It continues on, discussing comics and how they are shedding the image of pulp and becoming high art. But it is the comment about History itself, that even as we find ourselves farther away each day, through persistent information access, the life and times of peoples past are immediately retrieved.

History can teach us many things, key among them is who we are. Culture, family, ideas. History is always being made, every day. We just have to realize it.

-Mike M.

Music on heavy rotation

2008-08-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

As it is baseball season, I am not in control of the TV in the evening. The wife is. But I still listen to my music out in the living room. Nothing a proper headphone amp and extension cable can’t handle. So I listen to my iTunes playlists while on the couch. Music instead of the play-by-play. Much better.

What I have found in the last few months is a few gems. Albums that stick with me and I look forward to queuing them up again. They are -fun-. Not to be consumed due to the marketing hype. But to be enjoyed. Whole albums, not shuffled tracks, randomly put together.

The Odd Couple by Gnarles Barkley
What a collection of tracks, all a small piece of the greater whole. Sure its highly processed sound, but it is fun! A good system can show the layers this odd couple has put down mesh together. Good foot stomping music.

Age of the Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets
Another fun album. This new band has a bit of a British pop sound to them, but as they move from song to song, you find yourself pulled along. I always seem to get a song or two stuck in my head when I’m out walking.

Piece by Piece by Katie Melua
A wonderful voice that I found in a used bin. A wonderful British artist that has brought to life a set of pearls, music that moves you. It’s all about the voice. Doesn’t hurt she is writing more of her songs as she matures. Paraphrasing what my friend Z once said, a young artist can’t sing about relationship angst unless they are old enough to vote. No worries with this lady.

Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree
The concept album taken to new heights by a veteran British rock band. They do rock. This is not a album of singles, but of six tracks that all meld together. Driving guitars, quiet ballads with hints of Pink Floyd. The themes help drown out the world and remind me that it’s not all about the mall.

Goldberg Variations by Bach
What is this? Mike is putting classical piano music with a bunch of modern day rock & pop. eh? Another album that must be listened to from beginning to end, otherwise its precise meter & pacing is rendered moot. It is an example of the wide range of music in my library. But it still fits the bill of music that seems to yield something new at each listen.

A good sign that these albums just work? Turn off the bloody TV, lower the lights, curl up with the spouse, close your eyes and press play. Then sing and air drum your way through an hour of aural bliss. It helps if you turn the volume up to drown out the singing - your spouse will thank you. :)

-Mike

Summer Books so far

2008-07-22T17:45:00.000-07:00

I always have a book on my night stand that I’m reading. There are two shelves overflowing with books yet to read. I’ve been like that since middle school. My wife says books are boring. But for me they are a good escape in fiction and a good teacher in history.

To feed the history nut, I received two books from Bookmooch. One is _Fast Movers_ by John Darrell Sherwood. The other is _The Ultimate Battle: Okinawa 1945--The Last Epic Struggle of World War II_ by Bill Sloan.

_Fast Movers_ brings together the stories of Air Force, Navy & Marine jet fighter pilots during the Vietnam War. A crazy time when hundreds of aircraft were shot down & pilots captured. A place where the villagers found themselves in a very tough spot, between the forces of the North on the ground and the US planes sent to bomb them. A glimpse is given to the life of fighter pilot, asked to do a tour of 100 combat missions before being able to rotate back home. For some, 100 missions was less than six months. Others wouldn’t last more than a few, victims of SAMs. As the book put it, North Vietnam was the densest anti-air cover in all the world. MiGs wouldn’t come out to play very often, as there only a few of them. But those that did knew their planes very well and those of their adversaries. MiG-19’s fought in the horizontal - they could out turn anything in the sky. F-4’s on the other hand fought in the vertical - their afterburning engines could rocket them up through the clouds with a velocity the underpowered MiG’s could never match. The lessons learned on both sides paved the way for the modern fighters of today. But hopefully the lessons of how deadly air combat can be lives on too (throwing men and machines into the combat zone without tactics will lead to a ruinous end).

_Okinawa_ is a different slice of history. The battle for Okinawa during the spring and summer of 1945 was the last large invasion fought anywhere in the world, with over 100,000 troops on each side. It was a place of mistakes and poor intelligence. The Japanese fought nearly to the last man, designing their defensive lines in such a way so they could give ground while inflicting the most casualties. The book is told mainly from the American point of view, with numerous interviews with veterans. Some information is known from the Japanese side from the letters and orders of the officers found in the rubble. My interest in this island is two-fold. One, it’s the closing chapter of combat in a time that only knew fighting. Two, I lived there for three years and my sister was born there, as my Dad was in the Air Force. We lived on base at Kadena and Mom still tells of what Naha was like in the mid-1970’s.

For something fun, check out Joel Shepherd. He’s an Australian Science Fiction writer that wrote an awesome trilogy following the adventures of Cassandra Kresnov. Take Heinlein’s _Friday_, mix with Gibson’s _Necromancer_, add a dash of Aussie terms (take-away, java, and the British spelling of terms like colour) and mix with gusto. Start with _Crossover_, then into _Breakaway_ and finish with _Killswitch_. Which is what I did last night, finished the series and it’s a good sign an author has it nailed for characters and universe when you want it to keep going. The books dig into numerous topics, central is what it means to be human. Cassandra is an artificial person, created by the League to fight their wars. But she is also made with a high degree of intelligence, which allows her to be deadly as commander of an elite special ops unit. She comes to realize that the ideology that she fights for she no longer believes in and thus makes her way to the Federation, where humans may be augmented with neural links, but all have been born. Conflict, some of it running & gunning, some with coming to grips that Cassandra is entitled to pursue her dreams like any other citizen. All on a world that is well realized, a place that feels like it really exists. Plus I like Aussie authors (they have the British flavor I enjoy, but with more flair).

Awesome stuff. Now I’m into the latest P.I. Garrett novel from Glen Cook & a business book called _The Blue Ocean Strategy_.

-Mike M.

The Geek Squad & Macs

2008-07-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

I was flipping through the Sunday flyer from Best Buy when a service of the Geek Squad caught my eye. On a page touting Apple & Macs at the big box store, there is a plug for the service of “Mac Optimization & File Transfer” for $130. Wow. Where can I sign up to do this kind of work at that kind of pay? When I worked at a car stereo shop in the early 90’s, the standard practice was for the installers to get half of the quoted labor rate. $65/hr sound good to me. Are these guys in the skinny black ties serious about charging such rates? I must be in the wrong part of the business.

But what does your $130 get you. Not much:

“We’ll help you make a smooth transition to Mac by setting it up for you and transferring your photos, music and more from your old PC.”

Here’s the kicker, in the fine print:

“Price includes transfer of up to 9GB of data.”

huh? 9GB? So what happens if you have 30GB+ of pictures, music and other stuff to move (but not applications, more fine print)? Do they charge you by the GB or at 15 minute increments as the copy from one machine to the other takes place? Using FireWire, 9GB should move quite fast. Better would be GigEthernet, back to back. Even 1TB wouldn’t big that big a deal for if your system is semi-automated, then it’ll just be time sitting in front of the machine while it does all of the work. 9GB is also the amount of raw data held by two single layer DVD+RW’s. Is that their yard stick?

All I know is what they are doing is simple and setting up customers for more fees. If they move all the data and you refuse to pay the additional charge, do they erase all but 9GB on the new machine? Setting up a Mac is simply turning it on and answering a few questions to create a user account & tell it which time zone you are in. It’ll even help you move data from an old Mac using FireWire Target Disk Mode. Apple, among others (many with free or cheap applications, which are just essentially scripts), will also help you move data from WinXP drive paths to OS X paths.

Save the money and buy more memory, then find a local kid or MUG that can help you for a smile & a “Thank You”.

(Now if I could get a job installing home theater and stereo gear for big fees, I’d be in heaven.)

-Mike M.

A Different Kind of Plumber

2008-07-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Being home, I get saddled with little projects. Today was plumbing. I fought the toilet and prevailed. In the course of making a big mess, I found a bit of the American economy.

I call myself a plumber, but in the network sense. Instead of moving water around, I help people move bits, which represent their business or latest hit on YouTube. Tackle a big router, no problem. Trying to get at a decrepit plastic nut, huge pain.

Networking connectors seem better organized for standards than water connectors. 1/2", 7/16", etc. Of course it takes a few runs to Home Depot to get it right. Yes, in the middle of all this I turned the water back on which created a good jet of water out the crack in the bad connection I put back temporarily. It's good for a laugh at my poor plumbing skills. But it is now has the tightest fit of new rubber seals I could make it, using a new wrench as my others were not large enough for this version (think new tool to get the "standard" hard drive to fit into a new case...).

But I had a pleasant surprise when I looked at the new tools and parts I collected from Home Depot so I could wrestle with this common critter of the bathroom. My new red Crescent wrench is made in the USA. The new braided water line is also made in the USA. The plastic parts inside to regulate the water level (crap, I have no technical term for the gizmo...) was made in Mexico (good old NAFTA).

Nothing made in China. Nothing made in a factory on the other side of the world and moved by a oil burning ship to eventually find itself at my local Home Depot. I didn't take the time to figure out where my parts were made before I left (I usually check these days, as I want to know where the ripple of my purchase will go). It was refreshing to see in taming the water beast I supported our local economy.

If we citizens want to assist in turning the economy around, take a look at where your purchases are made. I am finding many things made within our borders. With the dollar staying weak, hopefully the incentive to manufacture in the USA will continue to expand.

Oh, if you need water plumbing help, don't ask. Sure I'll let you borrow my shiny wrench, but you don't want me anywhere near a pipe. :)

-Mike M.

Any non-iPhone person out there?

2008-07-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

I will be the first to admit that I do not have an iPhone. Or really care about them. Neat device that fits in your pocket. But does it really need all the digital ink that has been gushed over it during the last week? Is there anything else going on in the world except the iPhone 3G? The SF Giants won today and I didn’t need an iPhone to tell me. Is there another human that is comfortable being in public without an iPhone in their hands?

But, seriously, is the technology media so desperate for the warm and fuzzy that an updated model of a cell phone is cause to ignore all else? Who waits in line for hours to get a phone that I can go down and pick up, without the line? Sure, I’d be 50+ hours behind those were the first in the Bay Area (though flying to New Zealand to be first in the world does take the cake). But who cares? Why should I care about a phone? It won’t make me happy. I’m quite happy without a phone in my pocket. Can the news reporting people just get past the iPhone and throw me press releases on anything but the iPhone?

I would like to point out that instead of wasting time in line, spend time with your friends or spouse? I did. Had a good chat with the neighbors about their dog and what we’re doing in the gardens this year. Yes there was even an iPhone (1st gen) in evidence, but it was off to the side, doing what phones should do. Just sit. And not become the center of attention. I’d rather talk about avocado trees than the App Store.

In all this hype to intimidate the populous into thinking they are not cool without this hunk of plastic & glass, something is lost. What happened to sitting still for half an hour and talk to someone? Not “multi-tasking” their time, by talking, walking, & texting while slamming a latte. Sit, put all the toys away, and chat. I haven’t found the core reason many people I’ve met that believe the phone trumps the face to face conversation. If the phone rings, a pause. Constant reminders to college educated technology people to turn off the ringers on their phones while the presentation is being made. eh?

I complain because I can, in this forum. I feel that proper manners & decorum are being lost in the Western world due to the cell phone & music players. Please & Thank You. Common courtesy. Opening the door for someone. Acknowledging the human person putting your groceries in a bag.

Maybe I’m “old”. Maybe I pine for a time with slower connection speed (remember I’m an Internet plumber guy too). Which is to say I can walk away from this machine and have dinner, with nary a worry about the blog or comments.

-Mike M.

Terms and phrases in July

2008-07-13T16:57:00.000-07:00

I come across or create my own weird phrases & term definitions in the course of a week. I jot them down in my journal and now have collected a few to share. Isn’t sharing great?!

Royal Navy Lt. Cdr. John Wells made a statement recently as part of his presentation of the RN’s use of helicopters in Iraq, had this gem: "A marksman is a sniper who's not very good at hiding."

It is not a weed patch. It is my carbon sink. Or even better, it’s my carbon off-set project. So pay me not to cut it down. (PG&E has hooked into a program that pays land owners not to cut down nice trees)

Why be green? Global warming caused by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the air will help keep things green. As in growing plants. Why not be blue? Reduce pollution in the air, the sky turns from orange muck to clear blue. If it is a green sky you want, then you’ll get a red ocean. Not good.

Digital download. What weird marketing guy came up with that? As with such lingo, I try to look at its opposite. There is no analog download. Though taping off the FM radio of my boombox when I was 13 might count there.

When did headphones become “Micro Speakers”? I saw this recently in a catalog of stereo gear, sounding the virtues of aftermarket ear buds. True, the white buds sure do lack. But why have the iPod people changed the name of headphones? Do they need to control everything?

“We’re a freelance capitalist group.” Flanagan, space pirate.
_Debatable Space_ by Philip Palmer

Found in the book _The Perfect Thing_ by Steven Levy (a history & discussion of the iPod, its impact on music & society). Dr. Carl Rohde is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He studies coolness. He writes and consults with the largest global companies about their brand and interest of people around the world.

-Mike M.

OS X 10.6 - Cleaning House

2008-06-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

Apple’s WWDC was this week. I watched the live blog roles of the keynote. Dull, at least for me. Over an hour of iPhone gushing, nothing about OS X on any other platform. I wanted to hear about new non-i named devices, things that have Pro around them. But that was not to happen. By the end of the week I had learned the focus of OS X 10.6 and I saw in it how Apple feels about their place in the computing world.

For me, OS X is pretty stable. The screenshot is of my Jukebox Mini, up for 61 days. I sleep it every night, then wake it up in the afternoon. It runs off of a Compact Flash card. I’ve only needed to reboot the machine when new OS updates arrive, such as 10.5.3, which is what prompted me to get the shot before the timer starts back up again. Pretty good for a general purpose operating system.

What Apple gets, in my opinion, is that they need to stop and take stock of where their OS is at the moment. All big software projects build up huge balls of cruft over time. Especially if it’s just easier to bury a feature and push out something that fixes an issue. Which then raises another issue, which requires another patch. And so on and so on. In a highly competitive environment, features count, speed can be taken care of by faster CPU’s and stability you hope to hide under the covers. Infrastructure changes don’t bring revenue. Features do. So efforts to ensure the foundations of your system are solid are only done sporadically.

I was involved in feature rich ISP size routers, running an OS that was several million lines of code. It is filled with kludgy things and funky code. I was attached to an Infrastructure group at one time who’s task it was to keep the OS stable and provide the means for other groups to utilize the improvements. It was the will of a very senior engineer and a director to push for the building of such a team. Otherwise it was features, features, features. Always worried the competition would catch up.

Apple with 10.6 is taking a step back. Looking at what they have built and focusing the software teams to improve the system, not add to it. This takes a lot of confidence in both how customers feel about the current system and how far they are ahead of their competition. The goal is to increase stability, speed and security. Those are not warm and fuzzy features that most of the iPod people can understand. But I as a software test guy am delighted. It shows that Apple management understands that the user experience is based upon the system “just working”, which requires cleaning up the cruft buildup. To me, it also shows they don’t see Microsoft being a challenge until Win7 hits the streets in a couple years. Apple can get it’s house in order and then return to focusing on features.

One big change in 10.6 - removal of all the PowerPC code. Leaving those machines behind and expelling any compatibility issues that the code created. Spring cleaning, if you will. To move forward, you need to leave some people behind. Apple did this with the big change from OS9 to OS X. Now they are doing it again. Being nimble allows them to remain a competitive company. By offering cool features that easily sit atop a solid OS makes them a creative force to be reckoned with. By making OS X more solid within a year, MS will need to bring Win7 to market and demonstrate it is serious about quality at the same time. It is difficult to ship a bug free product, especially something as complex as a main computing OS on its dot zero release. The pressure will be on to perform above current customer expectations.

It would be neat to see more software companies & engineering teams focus on quality instead of time to market. But I know realities of competition force us to make judgement calls on which path to take. I just like to illustrate the decision of Apple to step up to quality.

-Mike M.

Orange Moon on Friday the 13th

2008-06-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

For some people, the date of Friday the 13th causes a sense of dread. Others hop over to the Winchester Mystery House for a night of fun scaring themselves with a flashlight tour. I haven't been one to put much credence into numbers or stars telling my fortune, but this last Friday evening found the sky turning a dark orange.

I posted a couple pictures of the early evening sky. The smoke in the air was due from a fire near Highway 17, say 2-3 miles from my house. My camera had a hard time trying to convey the yellow tint the house and yard had that evening, under a deep red sun. But the pictures of the sky do give a feel of what we saw. It makes for an interesting view of the world - with the longer wavelengths coming through (more red than blue), making the red roses and our japanese maple quite vibrant in color. Which at the same time made the green grass seem a sickly yellow.

A telling view was of the evening moon. An orange color from the filtering effects of the smoke from the fire. Others may call it an angry moon, one that got grumpy when getting up that day. I wonder what such a rising moon foretells of us here in Silicon Valley.

As I said, I'm not one into superstition. But I had to say, "Wow, a funky moon on Friday the 13th."

-Mike M.

My First Computer

2008-06-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

Or real CompE students hand wire wrap their creations.

I’ve been cleaning out closets and going through boxes, as I’ve been in my house four years now. I haven’t touched some stuff since moving in. Which is fine, as I’m learning how to archive things into smaller containers.

One item I came across is the first computer I built. No, this isn’t PC. That kind of computer building is like Lego bricks. Everything plugs into sockets and off you go. This computer I built for CompE127, with every connection made by wire wrapping each end. I don’t remember all of the details, but I do know it’s purpose in life.

To print my name. On a parallel printer. From now till the sun goes boom.

The CPU is an Intel 8088 set to run at 1MHz, but it was rare to allow it to do so. Most of the time it was set to step. That is what the switches and button are for in the upper right corner. The LEDs would allow me to see what is on the lines at each step. An i8088 uses the same pins for both memory I/O & addressing. That way they keep the package size down. But it makes it a pain to work with.

The EPROM is UV-erasable. None of this whimpy Flash stuff. It took about 15 minutes to erase the thing, so you always had several EPROMs cycling through. As with the rest of the project, the EPROM was coded by hand. We used a simple PC application that would take our hex code and burn it into the chip. But that was all the help we would get. Each byte needed to be laid out exactly, otherwise the CPU might get lost. No compilers here.

The 8255 was the interface to the parallel printer. I started out with polling, but my instructor said no. Its a quick and easy way to solve the problem, but it isn’t elegant. So interrupt driven it is. The CPU hangs out waiting for the printer to come back saying it wants the next byte.

One thing Dr. Ozemek, my instructor, taught us was appreciation for the modern tools that are available to the engineers out in the field. This is not how a modern hardware engineer would lay out a prototype. Its all simulated in software, then taped out to an ASIC or pushed into an FPGA. But my motherboard is a real computer that speaks x86 and has a couple kilobytes of ROM to work from.

-Mike M.

Two applications that I bumped into

2008-05-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

It’s funny. I come up with a need for a piece of software and I wander across a solution. This has happened a couple times this last month. The first is a helper app for iPhoto, the second a Mac journaling application. I’m still in the hunt for a drawing program though. (Mac only apps ahead)

iPhoto can store thousands and thousands of images. And the latest version puts them all into one big file. It used to just have pointers to the image files. So now you get one big blob. I wanted a way to have different iPhoto libraries residing on the same machine. Give me some flexibility to group pictures instead of having 10,000 to index.

I came across iPhoto Buddy that does just that. Through some deft scripting, it helps spoof iPhoto into using one of many libraries, each separate and can be anywhere on your drives. There is still the limit of one library per iPhoto launch. It is bitter that way. But with this little helper application I have a better handle on all the pictures I have accumulated over the years.

I have learned about journaling applications and what they can do. I was trying to use Open Office as a way to gather notes but it didn’t work. Enter journals, a program concept that allows for tagging, gathering, and melding ideas together. I eventually settled on MacJournal. Two features stood out for me. One, it could post directly to Blogger from the journal entry. That’s cool. The other is the ability to go full screen, green on black, removing any distractions from the screen and leaving only the words you type. Too cool for me. Sure its little things, but it makes a difference.

So with the journal, I can through thoughts and ideas into entries and come back later to expound upon them. It’ll even allow voice annotation (I think video too). But it looks like a good tool to help me better organize the blog, my job search, chores and errands to do and CD’s to look for.

A couple focused tools that seem to do their job well.

-Mike M.

Feeling better, writing less

2008-05-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t realized how long it has been since I last posted. Time sure goes by fast when you don’t have enough to do. Spending a good amount of time looking for a job. Lots of almosts there, but I push ever forward.

Another reason I haven’t written much is because I am feeling much better than a year ago. One advantage of not having a job? Being able to do a 30 minute walk every day around the neighborhood. This then makes my doctors happy. My wife is and isn’t. She is for my headaches are about gone and I can do the walks. The problem is I’m backing to my old walking speed, which starts as fast and goes up from there.

My good friend Mike Z. also pointed out that I haven’t said anything through this forum in a while. That’s not good.

I have been reading a lot of books too. Mostly fiction. Some history. I get 25% off coupons from B&N through email, so I pick up a paperback I have on my list. Amazon doesn’t discount much for trade paperbacks. Bookmooch helps me get a few more.

So a block of posts as I play around with journals and collect the blog entry ideas I have.

-Mike M.

Conservation ideas

2008-05-07T18:01:00.000-07:00

Green is the new black. Green is hip. I like green, it’s my favorite color. Goes good with conservation. Nice color for plants. As we in the States head toward the cliff of inflation, how about a few things to save energy or resources. Starting small & simple is key. Kinda like a diet - too much at once and you’re doomed to fail.

I’ve collected a few ideas I myself do or use. Lead by example and all that.

Solar powered watch. I’ve had mine for over eight years now, never needing a battery. I discovered the Citizen Titanium watches when I got fed up replacing batteries. Now they are stylish - my wife has one and you’d never think it was anything more than a nice looking lady’s watch. Less battery consumption, less energy & process to recycle them.

Reusable grocery bag. Many months ago, Trader Joe’s in Campbell gave out free reusable grocery bags. Not sure why, but it got me to keep bringing it back. Saves them a couple bags a week and me storing those bags. Now I get a raffle ticket that puts me in for a weekly drawing of a $25 gift card. I keep the bag in the car so I don’t forget it. Simple and easy. I see a lot of customers doing the same thing. Think of the paper & plastic bags not used and fuel not burned by this simple change in my shopping habits.

PG&E has been pushing CFL’s for light bulb replacement for quite a while. My wife and I have been there for many years. In our living room we use 6500K wide spectrum CFL lights, two at 27 watts each. Great for reading and giving the room a crisper white light, instead of headache inducing yellow/orange. This simple change removed a couple halogen lamps that were burning up a 100+ watts each. A 75% drop. Not using 150 watts of power at night may not seem like a lot, but like the bags, its the small increments multiplied over a large area that make a difference.

My wife came up with a good trick for drying clothes. I had routinely hung laundry in the house to dry instead of using the dryer. Use the ambient air in the house, especially in the winter, to dry your clothes. But she took it a step further. She put in some metal rods in the garage so she can hang clothes out there. Why? The waste heat created by driving the car, then placed into an enclosed garage makes a good dryer. Slick. Come home from a commute and clothes are dry by morning.

Near my house there are a couple strip malls, plus a post office. I make it a habit to walk there instead of driving. Have a couple books to mail? Put them into a bag and walk them a few blocks to the post office. Need a few things from Target? Take a walk and bring them home. Save a bit of fuel and I get exercise. Gets me out of the house and walking the neighborhood. Think of how much metal you are moving to pick up a gallon of milk. In suburbia I think we can make small adjustments and save fuel. Until we’re using something else other than carbon based fuels, we need to conserve. $4/gallon gas now. $8/gallon will truly hurt in the future.

My ultimate goal is to put solar panels on the house. But until then, I’ll keep looking for ways to keep my energy bills low and environmental impact down.

-Mike M.

Testing Alpha, Beta, Charlie

2008-05-07T17:51:00.000-07:00

I’m playing with a new s/w toy. A journaling application that can cobble together notes and also push entries to my blog. So I’m testing...

I’ll talk about what I’m doing in a few posts.

-Mike M.

Quotes from a VP

2008-03-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

During my downtime while waiting for interviews to form, I am getting through my reading stacks. Tried a new Australian sci-fi author that rocked and a history of the naval commanders at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. But that is for a later post.

I wanted to post a couple quotes from a book I started last night, Al Gore's _The Assault on Reason_. When I see the term VP these days, it's the title of an exec at a company, not the #2 guy of the USA. But this time I chose to take the time to learn what he has to say.

"The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.
Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but they do not speak. They see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." "

Read this out loud. This is a statement about what has become of American society. TV bound. The Founders wanted the citizens to read and discuss their views in an open environment. But now, the majority of Americans get their information through TV, a medium that takes free thinking potential and replaces it with drone like conformity.

I find that I do not fit the average American in many categories - I do not watch 4.5 hours of TV per day. I do read the newspaper every morning. I listen to music without an iPod. I say and write my opinion, asking for those of others. I talk with my neighbors.

Democracy is fueled by the people having access to the information needed to form opinions and debate courses of action. Democracy is the poor and middle class being able to dictate to the wealthy what is important and what is not. Each person has a single vote, which means everyone is equal. But if access to information is restricted, controlled by a few to manipulate many, then democracy is in trouble. If every citizen cast their vote each election day, doing so with the widest breadth of information at their disposal, this might be a very different country.

"The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound overly complex or obscure, but the phrase packs a lot of meaning. Feudalism, which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played almost no mediating role. The great masses of people were denied access to knowledge and, as a result, felt powerless."

Here is another quote from the Introduction of the book. Another to read aloud. Powerless... that is how people feel. Fearful. But why? A question to ask oneself. I was told recently that our government representatives count a web page vote / button as one, an email as ten and a written letter as one hundred. ie The power of the hand written word is still seen as the most vocal, a power the people should exercise.

Think about these quotes. Make your own opinion. Discuss with others. Being a patriot means standing up for the right to speak, not to roll over when the government says to. They're elected, you know.

Back to my reading.

-Mike M.

Quotes from Musicians

2008-03-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

One of my many little house projects is to go through the stack of Paste Magazines I've been stacking up for sometime. Try many years. Its a very cool music magazine that comes with a CD loaded with music to try, along with long articles on bands, film and culture. I have found a lot of Indie bands this way. Now I have some time to catch up (I think I've got at least 20 issues still to go through). I sit with that month's CD playing, going through page by page, along with a notebook to write down band names. In my notebook I've also jotted down a few quotes that seemed to resonate that day.

“Pain's inevitable; Misery's Optional” - John Hiatt

I've been in a lot of pain. I learned this simple lesson the hard way. I must of missed it in his songs, as I listened to many of his CD's when sick (especially like “Perfectly Good Guitar”).

“Most places in Europe... no one gets accused of being a traitor for merely questioning something. We sort of have the corner on that market.” - Steve Earle

What happened to being able to voice an opinion against current government programs that are wasteful or idiotic (like TSA)? Our Constitution guarantees this right, but I'm seen as not being American if I speak up. Hell, that is what being an American is! Speak up!

“The industry should spend more time developing the artist roster and less time developing disposable music, undercutting the ability of artists to have any depth to their career.” Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay

“The Music Industry Mafia is pimping girl power, sniping off sharpshooter singles from their styrofoam towers.” - Ani diFranco

These two quotes about how artists and the big labels clash sum up a lot of what is wrong with music today. The labels want to feed the public drivel and tell them its good, pushing for 3 minute hits. Good music takes time to grow, which is lost on the suits. Artists are seen as indentured servants to be exploited. American Idol is not a ticket to the promised land – its a debt that will takes years to repay and hopefully leave you with your soul intact when you are kicked to the curb with just a few coins in your pocket.

A title of a mid-90's Gus Black album: The Progressive Science of Breeding Idiots For a Dumber Society

A CD title that I came across. I thought it was quite inventive. Something to ponder if you don't ask questions, seek the hard answers and not be satisfied until you do.

-Mike M.

Who are you talking to?

2008-03-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

Cell Phones. The little things seem to be everywhere. One billion units sold per year. 1 in 6 people in world. As a network guy, cell phones are one avenue of increasing load. Voice is just data that can't deal with too much jitter. But as a member of society, why do many of those around me figure I want to listen in to what ever inane topic that's running through their head?

As I do my lunchtime walks, I've noticed people doing a variety of things while a phone is slapped to their head. This isn't headsets, but one hand in use at all times. We've all seen and cursed those who hold a phone and drive (which will be illegal in California come July 1). But what about these:

Walking

Walking the dog (lots of this)

Walking the dog with your spouse, holding hands, ignoring the spouse

Skateboarding

Riding a bike, sans helmet

Adult on a kids swing (she even had her hoodie up)

I'm not even getting into the bad social graces, like while in line at the grocery store or bank. These are all people in motion, yakking with someone else, who may also be in motion. Why would I want to gab with someone who is huffing and puffing their way around the neighborhood?

I haven't been on a proper hike in the hills for several years, due to my then bad feet. I wonder if hikers are going up a trail and just talking away, like its their backyard. What happened to quiet or at least speaking with someone within arms length? I feel something is being lost by being able to speak to a large number of people anywhere in the world, at nearly any time. Random access to any endpoint in the network is cool, unless that endpoint is attached to a person that has decided the person on the other side of the connection is more important than the person standing next to them.

Maybe I'm just not hooked in as others may be. I don't carry my phone most days and when I do its usually off. I don't feel the need to be always available when I'm out and about. It seems to me we got along pretty good 20 years ago without having a cell phone to enable hooking into the network. If I was more intent on my phone while going through the CD & vinyl stacks, I would have missed many occasions to strike up a conversation with a fellow music collector. Which is something I would consider more meaningful and lasting.

-Mike M.

The $2 CD

2008-02-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

Trader Joe has Two Buck Chuck, their famous $2 wines. I have the $2 CD, an inexpensive way to fill up on a rich musical diet. Yep, its another rail against the juggernaut of the iTunes Store.

At the local CD shops, you can find whole sections devoted to the $2 CD. Basically clearance or close out. I prowl the Jazz & New Age racks looking for gems. Sure there is a lot of dreck, but you can find quite a bit. At $2, its easy to explore and venture into the unknown. As with all used CD's, they are all casts off from someone's collection. But like all things, one person's junk is another person's life changing guitar riff.

At the local shops, if you don't like the CD, you can return it within 7 days for 75% credit towards another CD. This further encourages exploration. You could go stumble your way through a genre without too much out of pocket.

At $2 each, plus a buy 3 get 1 free offer, plus %5 off due to a member card, you can easily get 12 CD's for your $20. Since much of what I seek in Jazz, New Age, Industrial and Goth most people don't really like, there can be quite a bounty waiting for me to bring home. For my money I get my music as 16/44.1 PCM, full liner notes and on an easily stored medium. iTunes Music Store can't touch this.

For the same $20, I can buy on-line two albums at a much reduced bit rate (so actually getting less sound information per album) without physical liner notes and I have to supply the medium to back it up on. And if I don't like it, I have no recourse to trade, resell or even give away the tracks without breaking the EULA. Your stuck with something you don't like. That's not music, that is a software application contract.

Maybe its because I'm not into the three minute pop song of the week. Or the band with the “shove it down your throat” marketing. That I find it a good thing when the number of songs on an album is less than ten and duration of those songs approaches ten minutes. Porcupine Tree is an example of a band that doesn't lend itself for good over the air radio play (“Fear of a Blank Planet” can't tell its story in pop song slices). Jazz as a whole too. But I'm not the target market for the big labels anyways.

My point of rambling is that a good way to stretch your music dollar is to visit your locally owned used music store and pick up a stack for a few bucks. Do that instead of downloading tracks off the Net. More for your money. Encourages trying new things. Plus you can talk to actual people!

But if you want the same compressed crap sold to you 10 different ways for $10 a pop, no interest in getting out of your comfort zone, no interest in supporting a local artist or even listening (instead just hearing what's piped through those white earbuds), then be the lemming the Big Labels want you to be.

Just agree to keep your hands off of my music. I like it just the way it is.

-Mike M.

Converting Aluminum to Aluminum

2008-02-24T20:01:00.000-08:00

You can't chat while shopping at the iTunes store. I'm not talking about forums or comments attached to individual albums. Actually chatting with a real person, while in a store, about what's around you. You know, being social. While in Berkeley yesterday, that became my revelation. A gentleman named Phil started my thoughts down this path.

I headed up to the college town up north to hit the two big used music stores, Amoeba & Rasputins, there on Telegraph. I had a whole rainy Saturday and the money I made selling the old PowerBook. Converting the aluminum of the laptop to the aluminum of CD's. Sounded like a good trade.

So I started at Amoeba. What a neat place – row upon row of music. Lots of jazz, which is where I brought my basket and started to rifle through the stacks. While doing so, a friendly shopper next to me struck up a conversation about music and the sale that was going on at the time. His name was Phil. I learned that he had been a true radio disk jockey a couple decades ago up in Seattle. He had both CD's and vinyl in his hands. We discussed the variety of used CD's before us. He seemed to have worked the stacks over several times in the past few months so he wasn't as wide eyed as me.

He made an interesting comment before he headed off in another direction. He said that I'm chattier than most California natives. That struck me as odd. He was used to natives being more private. I told him that as long as we were talking about music and artists, I'm quite open to discussion and small talk. He laughed and said that sounded fair. We shook hands and departed for other rows in our hunt for music.

That little social interaction can only happen in a physical music store. You can't do that with your nose buried in a screen picking the pop flavor of the week on your laptop. Sorry, sitting in Starbucks and buying a CD with your iPhone to impress the latte girl doesn't count either. And Best Buy seems to make it so you won't talk with your fellow shopper.

I love wandering around music stores. Maybe its the thrill of the hunt – not knowing what is in the used stacks. Or maybe its the feeling of something physical in your basket instead of just a string of letters and numbers. I never know what I'll find.

This time around in Berkeley, I scored a Yello disk I've been seeking, “The Eye”, several Eric Dolphy disks (including a session with McCoy Tyner), an Australian pianist, and a couple new jazz groups (at least to me) – the Chicago Underground Trio & The Hot Club of San Francisco. Plus a lot more. But most of it I didn't have in mind when I went there. Just that I was looking for things I hadn't seen or heard before. And be around like minded people too – those that enjoy music.

-Mike M.

It Isn't Halloween

2008-02-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I got a knock on the door at around 6:30pm. Dark out. I've got a kid (ie younger than me, ie teenager) on my porch wanting to sell me cleaning products. For Real. I sent him on his way after all of his protests, as if I had to give him money, just because.

But what dawned on me a bit later was that, in this part of the country, at this time in our technological evolution, someone thinks its good to sell door to door. My neighborhood is the cookie cutter single family home style that represents post-WWII design. So not very dense when compared to an apartment complex. Wouldn't it be better to sell your products on-line to the world? Welcome to the World Wide Web.

I figure that it takes 2-3 minutes per house. Walking door to door, making your pitch and then moving on. Say 50 houses in two hours. Your sell through will be a low percentage of those houses. So your stuff better have a super high margin, otherwise you are losing money on every step you take. Instead use the Net, advertise your stuff and find a much wider audience. Wouldn't that be a better use of one's time instead of pitching face to face a commodity product that I already have in my house?

My sister's reaction to a sales kid on my porch is the title of this entry. Its not Halloween, that last reason to knock on a stranger's door and make a pitch. Its not the Depression and your not selling apples. Please leave my house in peace and just spam my email box like everyone else. At least you won't get doors physically slammed in your face or chased out of the yard by dogs.

-Mike M.

Turning an old laptop into quick cash

2008-02-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

It was time. The old G4 PowerBook just couldn't cut it any longer. Ubuntu Linux helped it limp along for awhile, but once I was given a three year old HP laptop to play with, that sealed its fate. But how to turn the silver slab into cash?

I looked around for someone to buy it. Not eBay or craigslist. I was looking for a shop that bought for parts. After picking through some places, I came upon CashForLaptops.com. On the site you can fill out the details of your machine and it'll give you an instant quote.

The details. He'll cover shipping, sending a box and label to you by UPS. He gets the laptop, checks it out and a check is sent the next day. Poof, old laptop to cash. It worked exactly like that.

The PowerBook G4 12” I had was 5 years old. Good case and screen. Bad Battery, but the power supply was fine. Max memory (640MB) & combo optical drive. No box, manuals or recovery DVD. $280. Score!

I pushed the button and a couple days later I had a box. The outside looked like hell – duct tape all over. But the interior was pristine and ready to pack the laptop. The shop is in Reno, only a day away by UPS Ground. I received an email that the laptop matched the details entered and a check was on its way. USPS takes two days back. Just like clockwork.

Sure I may have made more selling it on eBay or by classified ad. But in this case I didn't have to pay any fees or deal with any hassles. Just a straight business transaction, turning a laptop into cash. If you need to clear out a bunch of gear you are no longer using, check it out.

-Mike M.

Green Skies - Something to think about

2008-02-19T21:59:00.001-08:00

As I've said here, I read quite a bit. During the month of January I went through a stack of science and non-fiction that had me do a bit of thinking. With February here in the Bay Area bringing sunny days where I could walk in shorts and a t-shirt, climate change is coming to all of our doorsteps. We may have already reached our tipping point, one from which we can only hope to ride out until the planet can heal the damage. What can we expect? Looking through the past we may be able to see the future.

Under A Green Sky by Dr. Peter D. Ward tries to do just that. Dr. Ward is a fossil hunter, among many other pursuits. He uses the fossil record from around the world to see how the climate changed over millions of years in the past. He focuses on the many great extinction episodes that have been recorded through time. Usually the planet is quite cold, with thick ice at the poles and in many other parts of the globe. But there are records within the strata that tell us the planet has been quite hot, with the polar ice melted and reptiles living comfortably north of Washington State. This is where we may be headed.

As the oceans warm, the balance of biological forces will begin to favor a particular bacterium. It produces hydrogen sulfide, a particularly nasty gas that is toxic to most living things. But nature likes balance, so there is a microbe that loves the stuff. Except that water temperature can throw off that balance. As more organisms die off in the ocean, the H2S bacterium can come to the surface and release the gas into the atmosphere directly. This has happened according to the fossil record. At that time, it took thousands of years for the cycle to hit bottom and come back. Life on the planet always bounces back, as it has time to adapt. But this time around, the cycle is happening much more rapidly. Nature can't adapt fast enough.

The title of the book is a reference to what the sky will look like when the oceans are about dead, the ocean currents hardly move and a breeze is almost non-existent. The gas in the air turns the sky green and the water purple. That is where our planet may be headed, as the past is a good indicator of the future. This time around humans are at the top of their game. In all past mass extinctions, other animals were dominate. Most perished, some survived. The planet heals and it starts all over again.

Yes, such cycles take eons. But I strongly suggest as stewards of the world, we should learn as much as possible about the science of climate change, what the past can teach us and then determine what it will take to survive as a society. Dire, sure. But I'd rather know what is happening around me and why instead of sticking my head in the sand. Read the book (its not long) and form your own views and opinions. It may give you a perspective you hadn't seen before.

-Mike M.

100% Solar Music

2008-02-19T21:56:00.000-08:00

The rain has returned to the Bay Area. That is a good thing. We need all the water we can get. Though it does make solar power generation take a hit, which brings me to my first topic.

On the back of the booklet for Jack Johnson's latest CD (my wife is a huge fan), it states that the whole disk was recorded with 100% solar power. That is a new declaration for me. Then add in that the disk jacket has no plastic (100% paper), he's making a pretty good statement about renewable resources.

Inside the booklet of “Sleeping Through the Static” is a picture of the panels atop the recording studio. The place is called “Solar Powered Plastic Plant” in LA. A pretty cool idea, generating all of the power used in making an album from the sun. Though I do have one question: Musicians seem to be most creative after dark. Did they only record during daylight hours? How did they make sure they have their mojo working when the power is flowing?

These are not questions to knock the effort – actually its to learn how to replicate what was done. One album recorded without burning fuel may not change the world. But for us as a society to move to more locally derived power sources, it will take numerous steps to get there. For my part, I will continue to watch the solar industry and dive in when our savings account, tax credits and install costs reach a happy medium. Then PG&E will pay me to generate power for my neighbors. :)

Here's to more 100% solar powered albums.

-Mike M.

Books to learn from

2008-01-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

I read continually. There is always a book on the night stand, which then follows me around the house, to enjoy at all times of the day. Books are one of my two personal vices (the other being recorded music). I read two books this month that really got me thinking.

The first is called, _The World Without Us_, by Alan Weisman. It is a wonderfully written thought experiment centering around the idea of what would happen in the world if humans disappeared one day. He goes into detail how nature would retake the planet, one tree or stream, at a time. Examples are given for areas in the world where humans did disappear. It gives hope that the planet can and will heal from the wounds we have made. It also gives hope that we can help the healing and still remain on this pale blue dot. Read it and come away with a new view of life and its ability to adapt and thrive.

The second is _The Starfish and the Spider_, by Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom. It was recommended by a friend of mine who is active in the open source community. As a student of corporate organizational theory, the concepts truly stuck a cord. The Spider model is the traditional corporate entity, single leader up top with a hierarchy below. Fully centralized control - lop off the head and the body dies. Starfish, on the other hand, are fully decentralized efforts, with circles of members, but no one single leader. Lop of an arm of a Starfish, it grows another one.

In the world of the Internet, entities modeled after the Starfish can grow and thrive. The authors use craigslist and Wikipedia as examples of communities on the Net that self regulate and ebb & flow as the group feels is necessary. Open source projects defined within Sourceforge.org would be another example. The idea is for catalysts to drive the idea or concept so it will grow into something that will change the world for the better. Catalysts help, but know when to let go. That is key for Starfish. Spiders dictate central control, people at the top want public recognition and reward. Squeeze the profit, but hurt the individuals.

Starfish and Spiders fits exactly my final year at my old company. I would call myself a Catalyst, though with some Spider tendencies. In a Spider type of organization, I see this as the nature of things. But many of my decisions and actions were Catalyst in nature. I would put my team first and fight for their rights and fair share. I traded gear with other teams in order for everyone to benefit. I had gear that was depreciated but not being used and others within the company could use it. So my trading post was copied in various places, but eventually it was centralized. But the idea was for the company as a whole to realize more return on investment. I didn't need the spotlight for my idea, just a pat on the back. I was doing a Starfish kind of thing without knowing it. I would do it a little differently today, after reading the book. More energy into building a community, instead of letting it drift.

But the sad part was the Spider model was paramount. As a Senior Lead, I was trading cards and other small things to other test teams. It was stuff we were never going to use in the future, as my team was moving from serial protocols to Metro Ethernet. I'd see a request from a test team (say in RTP) for some older serial PA's. I would reply and ship the cards, with no further reward than a nice Thank You. It was leading by example, with the hope the newer engineers would see and learn from the old timer. But my manager clamped down on my trading. He/She wanted to keep track of dollar amounts and to whom it all went to. It was all fully depreciated, so the company thought it was worth $0. He/She wanted to extract leverage on those teams we helped, so as to squeeze them in the future. I'm for trading favors, that is how you run a lab. But I never kept track, as we just helped each other out. But the Spider wants total control, which takes a lot of energy to do. So to control this effort, which didn't need a leader or a ledger, now had both. I was not to touch it again and those I traded with became quiet very quickly, as the Spider tried to exert control in every corner.

Putting trust into the hands of those at the edge, those that are in the thick of things, takes a leap of faith in those individuals. Empowerment was what my old company called it. Most large organizations have a hard time with it, thinking that those that do the work don't know what's best. As the authors point out, creative people thrive in a Starfish and are stifled in a Spider. No wonder a lot of neat things come out of decentralized entities.

Enough of me. My head hurts (headaches are back for the evening) and it looks like I'm rambling. Tomorrow I should be of clear mind to write more.

-Mike M.

Trees vs. Solar

2008-01-26T17:43:00.000-08:00

Solar vs. Trees

A couple days ago the San Jose Mercury News had an interesting article on the front page. It describes the legal squabble between to Sunnyvale neighbors, with one invoking a little known state law regarding solar panels. It basically says that property owners whose trees cast a shadow upon more than 10% of anothers panels during the hours of 10am to 2pm must be cut or trimmed. What a weird state we have.

The gentleman who has the panels has a large installation, at 10kw. The trees in question are tall, beautiful redwoods. What a quandary, with two people taking two different paths to help the environment, yet clash. I wouldn't have a solid answer to this if asked. I bring it forth as another nugget in the discussion on local energy production.

My feet are in both camps. We've planted 10 new trees since owning our current house. We turned a lousy, weeded back yard into a future fruit orchard. I'm a big tree guy - our neighborhood is filled with 40-50 year old trees, which makes walking our section of San Jose a very interesting time. In the newer developments, there are no old trees, which makes the areas seem bright and sorely lacking character.

But in the coming years I want to put a solar installation on my roof. Looking at our own trees and then those of our neighbors, during the hottest months of summer, the sun takes a line that is nearly straight down, front to back. Shadows upon the house from outside our fence may only happen in the deepest part of winter, as the sun is low in the sky at noon. Which makes the issue moot in that regard. But I am only one home owner in the state. Other home owners in California in their effort to follow the governor's lead and install solar (plus taking advantage of tax breaks) may smack right into tree owners and ruin neighborly bonds in their zeal "to be green".

Maybe the right answer is for neighbors to talk with each other and work out details. Its a good thing to reach out and say hi. We try in that regard. No one is perfect or has all the answers. But we should be able to figure out a way for trees and solar to co-exist without needing to bring in the lawyers.

-Mike M.

At Home Power from Unlikely Sources

2008-01-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

Here in Silicon Valley, "Green Energy" is the buzz word. I've been following the development of non-carbon fueled turbines for awhile. Here in California, PG&E charges us 11.5 cents per kw/h. Quite a bit. Most power here is generated by natural gas fired turbines, along with large hydro plants and a nuclear facility. The law states that any power you generate yourself that is above what you need, PG&E has to accept onto the grid and pay for. So you can build credits during the year.

I'm interested in eventually putting solar panels on our roof. They are starting to sprout up in our neighborhood. I like the idea of during the hottest days I can run my AC without putting load onto the grid. That's a big deal. Multiply that by a fair number of roofs in the state and it makes an impact. With the thought of generating power as close as possible to the customer, I wanted to put forth a couple companies I noticed that I didn't know had such programs in place.

The first is Honda. If you look, you can discover they are building solar cells and panels. Their thin film material doesn't use silicon, but rather a material made of copper, indium, gallium and selenium. I had seen this combination announced by a couple other solar startups, as they wanted to stay away from the pricey silicon ingots, as that competes with the semi-conductor industry for material. If the cost can be brought down through economy of scale and competition, then many more people could afford to cover their roofs with panels. The magic number seems to be $1 per watt, which would be $3-4k for a 3-4kw installation. Add $2-3k for labor and the inverter. Here in California, solar is seen as an investment that pays for itself quicker than many other home improvement projects.

The other home power concept goes in a completely different direction. I didn't know that Toshiba had purchased Westinghouse, the company that pioneered Tesla's AC concept (unlike DC put forth by Edison). Westinghouse builds nuclear power plants, along with GE. In this article, it discusses an installation of a small nuclear reactor that can put out 200kw for 40 years with little or no human monitoring. All housed in a container that is six feet square and twenty feet high. How cool is that?! Dig a hole in my backyard, put it there and I can power my street.

Don't go off on a tear that nuclear power isn't safe. This self-contained reactor is similar to a nuclear powered submarine. Very safe and very efficient. It is said that while living on an Ohio class submarine, the crew receives less radiation than standing outside on any beach. Between the heavy shielding around the nuclear reactor and the several hundred feet of water shielding them from background radiation, very little gets through. Such power plants are designed to operate for 20+ years at much higher output levels (think small city). Our nuclear navy (submarines and carriers) is quite safe. I believe a personal nuclear plant would be just as benign to its neighbors. But I do realize that this doesn't address the issue of storage once the nuclear fuel has been exhausted.

But one has to admit that the CO2 generation is non-existent with either solution, solar or nuclear. Plus there is no fuel burn in the transport of the fuel itself. Take this idea a step further - plug in hybrid or fully electric car. Panels on the roof charge the car. Which then disconnects you from the petroleum industry and the ravages of $100 barrel oil. The more you can bring power closer to home, the more freedom you have from a chaotic market. Such concept are already being explored by many countries around the world. The USA better start or she'll end up like the dinosaurs.

-Mike M.

Yo Scobleizer - Ask Me

2008-01-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

I get to poke a little fun at Robert Scoble this morning. He posted a blog entry that shouts Eureka at discovering his Mac Mini has a Toslink output. Dude, I could have told you that a long time ago. The Intel MacBooks and MacBook Pro's also have the same feature (but not the Air). Maybe you should retain me as your technology adviser. :)

What the Scobleizer forgets to mention is what the part in question is or what it looks like. Here is one example.

Second is to change the Audio settings to make sure the sample rate is always correct.

To Application: Utilities -> Audio MIDI Setup
Once there: Properties for: Built-in Output, Audio Output set to Format: 96kHz & 2ch-24bit.

TosLink comes from the term Toshiba Link, created in the mid-80's as a way to move the new fangled digital data around. The mini-plug seen on the Mac Mini & Books comes from Sony's Mini Disc players. With little room for both connectors, this was devised as a compromise.

With TosLink out, the Mini becomes a very competent digital source. It has very low jitter and runs pretty quiet (though I am trying to devise a way for it to be silent). I have mine connected into a Tact S2150 that sounds wonderful. Other machines without a TosLink connector can also do the same trick if you pick up a USB -> TosLink adapter box.

Let me know if you need an easy solution to get music streamed from a NAS to any machine running 11g or 11n. Its best to leave the noisy disk farms somewhere else in the house.

-Mike M.

Walkabout

2008-01-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

Its good to have a goal. The winter sun is getting higher in the sky and the storms have abated for the time being. I feel a lot better than last week. Got my energy back after being sapped by the flu bug. So today I decided to go on a short walkabout.

My goal is to get to Rasputin's by foot, which is about 2 miles each way. Today I made good progress on the goal. Got about 75% of the way there. I could see Bascom just a few blocks away. Pretty good for someone who could barely walk to the end of the block a year ago. Now I'm working my route to the place where I can forage for music. Take another week or two to get there, working my way ever farther. I still haven't found a good rest stop in the middle. Part of the trail exploration.

Its like an eco-friendly music trip. Walk to buy used CD's. No fuel burned to get there, all CD's recycled into my home music server. Now if I could get someone to sell me used CD's without the bloody jewel cases. I toss those into the recycle bin and put the physical disks in a big case. Saves a lot of space that way (I keep the physical disk in storage and place the tracks onto the NAS for random access by the Jukebox).

One big observation during my lunchtime walk. Its the middle of January and I'm in a T-shirt and pants (and maybe could have done shorts) and feeling warm. Something is wrong here. Yeah, Northern California isn't New England, but still. Where is the cold weather that makes the squirrels huddle together and kills off a good portion of the annoying insects? We need a lot more rain and snow to keep us in water for the summer.

More to come, now that I can think straight.

-Mike M.

By the bucket

2008-01-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

I haven't started off too well this New Year. Got hit with a stomach virus over the weekend. Talk about going from feeling great to feeling like I got run over by four horses and a stagecoach. Talk about crashing...

Since my queasy stomach was becoming quite unpredictable, my wife stationed a big bucket by the bed for a few nights. Nothing says I trust you like a tall white utility bucket on the floor. Alarm clock, lamp, slippers, bucket. Doesn't go well together. As with many things, you get used to it. But it has been removed, so she trusts me again.

Also nothing says I love you as when your spouse sits with you on the bathroom floor as the soup she lovingly cooked a few hours before comes back up. Doctor gave me something for my queasy stomach and to start on a diet of crackers and Gatorade. Forget Panera sandwiches for a few more days.

Feeling better after five days. Getting sick stalled my job search. Also my writing. So its back on the horse Monday.

Now back to more interesting discussion topics...

-Mike M.

Old laptop, new trick

2008-01-10T20:58:00.000-08:00

Check out the picture. What did I do? Me running Linux? Yeah, but here's the twist. This is on a 12" G4 Powerbook, with a birthday of around Feb. 2003. Old.

With OS X 10.4.11, the CPU was constantly spiked and the fan ran to keep things somewhat cool. Using the machine was almost unbearable. 867MHz on a very slow bus just doesn't cut it. Except when the OS isn't trying to run a whole slew of threads who's contributions to the user experience is questionable at best.

I started to play with the i386 version of Ubuntu on my Mini. Its a really nice distro, as the main parts fit on a single CD and then goes out to get the latest versions of applications in the base install. I noticed in a corner of the Ubuntu web site they did build a PowerPC version. Looking further I saw that the install would work on just about any PowerPC machine, Mac or not. With the laptop needing some serious help to remain usable, I grabbed the ISO and went to work.

Its funny to see the startup screen in plain text on the G4. Apple never lets you see any type of terminal on these machines. The install was pretty smooth, but there are some issues that I haven't resolved so far. Wireless requires a hack that I haven't been able to implement correctly. This is due to an older Broadcom chipset used by Airport. In this build there isn't a straight forward way to sleep the machine. At least nothing obvious so far (though it might be due to the PPC nature of the machine). No OpenOffice install, again due to the PPC CPU.
What has Ubuntu done for me on this aging laptop? Made it usable as a client. The CPU runs at about 20% most of the time, uses about half of the installed RAM of 640MB. Which all makes the machine run much quieter. Firefox is snappy, not as fast as my hot-rodded Mini, but much better than under OS X. Then I get to turn my terminal window green/black and dive into the CLI. Cool.

Next up is to get a VNC client running so I can remote into my other machines. That way I can use the laptop as a oversizes remote control for the Jukebox using the open standard of VNC instead of Apple Remote Desktop.

Will this exposure to an open source OS get me to move all my machines? Nope. For my main machine and the jukebox, OS X stays. It works well in those configurations and I can take care of any issues quickly. But as a thin client for Web, VNC, and document writing while sitting on the couch? Yep, it gives me the clients I need in a hardware package that after its mind wipe can now run likes its 2003.

What does this show? That with Google on your side, Ubuntu (or other distro), Firefox and a cheap laptop you can accomplish quite a bit without sending money to Microsoft or Apple. As long as the web sites you frequent stay to open standards and work well with Firefox, most of your solution is right there. I would be able to do even more if I was using an i386 based machine. The PPC is just a niche, with less support. But its neat to see there is even something being built.

-Mike M.

New Years Stretch

2008-01-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

Its a new year, but I feel like I'm still in the last. Seems to be a more common occurrence as I get older. Maybe time around me is accelerating as I slow down physically. My wife calls it getting old. (My black hole books would discuss how velocity and time are connected.)

My mom's squirrels are much more limber than mine. The picture is of one recently performing a good stretch. Mine are just fat and fluffy.

But the picture is a good starting point for the new year. My former work place was filled with the term "Stretch Goals". Which was code for "Minimum Accepted Performance". Naw, I'd rather say that this year I want to stretch a bit out of my comfort zone and get into something new. I have no idea what that may be, but a journey starts with a single step.

In the last 12 months, I have been able to go from walking 5 minutes, to walking 2 1/2 miles. From barely tolerating standing for 5 minutes, to wandering around the CD shops for an hour. This was not overnight and it was not without its ups and downs. But with a bit of perseverance and some nudging from my wife, I made it work. Now I try to stretch my walks by a couple more blocks every couple of days. That way I sneak more distance and my feet don't seem to figure it out.

I'm not much for new year resolutions. More on making small steps in the right direction once I put my mind to it. Tortoise. Landing the right job is right up there on top of the list. After that? Try to suck down as many CD's as my budget and server can handle. I want to collect whole catalogs from several small labels and do it through used CD's. $2 disks just rock.

Reading and writing. I want to stretch to read at least 30 books for the year. I have two shelves full, plus a long list on Bookmooch. Expand my reading in new directions and absorb new ideas on history and the world around us. Plus more writing on the blog. I have fun with it, though I stray away from time to time. My wife whacks me when I haven't posted anything for awhile.

2008 will be an exciting year. Presidential election. Olympics. Can the Giants make the playoffs now that Barry Bonds is gone? How cheap will solar power get? Will I actually feel like I'm old this year or just keep thinking I'm more of a big kid? Ah, only time will tell.

More writing soon. I must or Whack!

-Mike M.

Cool present from my sister

2007-12-27T19:50:00.000-08:00

I am not one that is very interested in getting stuff at Christmas. I don't need more stuff that will sit in my closet or garage. I try to keep the clutter down, except my bookshelves and desk. I don't want to be given anything expensive. I've learned that the more it is, the more likely that it will need to be returned. Best gift you can give me? A cool, weird plant. Next? A nifty T-shirt that no one else around me has.

My sister has picked up on the wacky side. This Christmas she gave me a box that contained a cool t-shirt and a catalog from Skulls Unlimited. Perfect.

See, my sister is an RVT. Think registered nurse for vets. She loves anything that deals with animals and the more icky gore, the better. Where I would toss my cookies at the beginning of a surgery, she revels in it all (All those CSI episodes when they check out the body, she's in heaven). So giving me a t-shirt with all kinds of skulls on it, along with the catalog (as if I wanted to have one on my desk), just fits.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. I'm using the holiday time to put together more posts. My wife reminded me that I haven't written in a while.

-Mike M.

The Coming of Ethereal Media

2007-11-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

Today Newsweek has a big article about Jeff Bezos' new eBook toy, the Kindle. A very interesting device that tugs the toy loving book nut in me one way, but then the traditionalist in me wonders what will happen to communities of book borrowers.

I have to vent - who ever coined the term "digital download" into the popular lexicon should be striped of his English writing credentials. As with such terms, I like to turn them around to see just how redundant it is. Ever seen or heard of "Analog downloads"? Nope, no such thing, as least through a computer. It's already digital! How about "Ethereal download" instead?

But back to the Kindle. It uses the same eInk screen as the Sony Reader. The eInk screens have to be seen to fully appreciate just how beautiful they are. Easy to read and not fuzzy or distorted like LCD's. No battery power required to hold the image, though it does take a couple seconds to change pages. The Kindle has one really cool feature not seen integrated in a reader, EV-DO built right in so you can call up, literally, the Amazon library and purchase a book just about anywhere and have it downloaded right into the reader. What a neat way to short circuit the whole dead tree book route to reading. But such wonders do have a downside.

With music, I have mostly stayed away from buying and downloading albums off of the Net as they are mostly hyper compressed MP3 or AAC (I frequent Linn Records and Burning Shed because they understand the ideal of placing quality in the hands of the paying customer). Books haven't, for the most part, gone digital. Magazines more and more are. I get a couple in digital form, with all of the ads as they would be in print. But I hadn't seen a decent solution for books. Maybe Kindle is one way that might get me to join in the digital reading party.

My big concern with Ethereal Media is that it can't be shared, as laid down by their EULA's. Since there is no physical vessel holding the media, it can be easy controlled. Whereas physical media follows the laws covering just about any legal way to buy, sell and trade. No eBay for music purchased through iTunes. Used CD's and books are an inexpensive way to expand one's own stacks. Or a quick way to raise some cash for stuff just sitting around. With physical books, I can lend it to a friend to read, I can trade it through Bookmooch for others to enjoy or I can put it on my shelf, knowing that it will never become obsolete. ie as long as my eyes work and my brain converts letters on a page into thoughts, I'm good to go.

Ethereal Media becomes locked down to a device. No more lending or borrowing. No more giving a book as a gift. Getting screwed if the device is no longer supported by its parent company. I like books and I like neat toys. But what I see is the potential to cut off a segment of the population that can't get a Kindle to read a novel. They won't enjoy the kindness of strangers in the world of book trading. Public libraries would not be the wondrous places kids can visit so they are introduced to the joy of reading. Something is lost in the translation from paper to eInk.

Its something to think about as blogs and other technology writing types trumpet the latest media toys. The locking away of media is something I want to explore further. I see a further separation of technical have's and have not's. As its vanguards we need to be making sure that everyone benefits from advancement and change, not just our little corner of the universe.

-Mike M.

Take 2: Working with Leopard, in .1 guise

2007-11-18T18:53:00.000-08:00

Apple was pretty quick to get out a .1 release to Leopard, 10.5. Three weeks. In a previous post I discussed placing 10.5.0 onto my main Mini and watching it begin to melt down. Kinda like a huge personality shift, corrupting disks and network traffic. So off it came. But I can happily report that the first update works wonders.

I brought out the 10.5 install DVD from the drawer I buried it in. Did an install and archive, which took about half an hour (just skip the media check - seems like a waste). Then I told the machine to do an update. About 150MB to pull down, but that is the blanket Intel updater. Restarted and then went to work.

This time around I kept Spaces off and continued to use You Control:Desktops as my virtual window app. Upgraded Little Snitch to v2.0 so I can keep monitoring network traffic in Leopard. I've done a lot of work on the machine, with my usual variety of applications and no hiccups.

My 1TB RAID 0 disk runs like a top through Firewire. Previously the .0 release tore through it and corrupted the directory. Now .1 wants to give it a warm hug as it rifles through all of the files for Spotlight. I have it currently transferring music onto my iPod. Need my tunes when I head up to my parent's house for the holiday.

Also have been downloading beta apps, RSS feeds, and assortments of video to make sure the issues with wired Networking don't crop up again. So far its as solid as ever. I am pleased, for the moment.

The Scobleizer has hit a snag with his Mac laptop and is venting against the great Apple PR machine, known in other circles as the Reality Distortion Field. See, the machine hardware is mostly standard parts sourced from many of the same OEM suppliers as other laptop makers. MS doesn't have anything to do with hardware. Software glitches are a fact of life with more and more complex systems. In relative terms I believe OS X 10.5.1 is much more stable than WinVista. I also think it self defends better too (not from outside attack, but from the effects of poor code quality within - another discussion topic).

Oh, and I didn't have any issues with 10.4.11 either. Smooth as silk. I have the Jukebox at that code level as it doesn't need 10.5.1 to do its job. I won't change it until iTunes requires the higher code base. I also use a G4 PowerBook (12" Al, 867MHz w/640MB of RAM). It runs fine as a text writer and remote control for the Jukebox. It'll never change its code base from this point forward (pretty good for a 5 year old laptop).

-Mike M.

Why I took OS X 10.5 off my Mini

2007-11-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

I'm a Mac guy. Been using one incarnation or another since the first 128k Mac in 1984. It's had its ups and downs for over 20 years. I'm usually considered an early adopter, that group of technology nuts that like to get the latest toys, even if they are a bit rough around the edges. With computers, that means euphoria and frustration mixed together as you explore what the next generation of code has to offer.

I had Apple ship me my copy of OS X 10.5, Leopard, so I wouldn't have to stand in line at their store at 6pm. Only Apple can get people to stand in line at dinner time on a Friday, no less, for an OS upgrade. I got the shiny little box, put the DVD into the drive of my main, hot-rodded Mini, and let it spin. It looked good on the surface, but after a few days the shiny OS wore dull so the seams and duct tape began to show.

I'm a software test professional. I'm used to digging around high end router code and watching a half million dollar machine crash several times a day. I'm no stranger to software bugs, coding funk and developer "specials". Been in deep with the code during synch damage, customer "requests" and slipping deadlines. Sufficient to say, I can roll with being on the consumer side of bleeding edge.

OS X 10.5 has a lot of funk. It also has a lot of basic problems. It does boot fast and goes to sleep even faster than before. While setting things up (I do an archive and install to make it as clean as possible) I begin to put together a picture of the systems personality. At first, it looked nice. First date. But then I started to run into issues with Spaces, where it would lose Finder windows. Application windows were where I left them. But simple Finder windows were off in the ether somewhere. Looks like a basic functionality test was skipped.

But two things made me so irritated that I removed the OS wholesale and returned to the land of Tiger. First was an inability to copy files from my internal HD to my RAID 0 drive system connected by FireWire. OS X kept saying the files on the internal drive were corrupted and could not be moved. Funny, they copied to a DVD+RW just fine. Any external drive, other than the optical, was either corrupted or not even mounted. This is a serious problem, as I have many external drives (need to, with the Mini's size). Disk Warrior couldn't repair the array under 10.5, but once under 10.4, it did. Something changed in the OS when dealing with external devices. Looks like another regression problem not addressed.

The final straw was when dealing with the external disk problem, the OS began to corrupt the packets it was sending out on ethernet. Oh, local stuff worked just fine. But once it had to transverse the DSL link, it got creative. From what I could tell, either the return address was corrupt or the CRC told the end station that the packet was bad so it should be dropped. I could see the packet go out about five or six hops, then die. Sneaky. So DNS was fine, DHCP was there, but reaching out to servers on the Net, nope. I saw that other users were seeing issues with wireless, but not wired Ethernet. The wireless issue looked like a classic memory leak situation and a regression shop that used only wired machiens and not wireless so as to load OS images faster. No amount of reseting the Ethernet interface, rebooting, or chicken dance would bring the Network core back into working order. Crap.

I, as an end user, expect core services to work from one release to the next. IPv4 Networking, Disk I/O, video redraw, etc. to just work. I can understand that Spaces has issues - its new. But the central reason to having an OS on a machine isn't to put funny pictures on the screen. Its to create and communicate, at least to me. Here, Leopard failed. I put 10.4 back on, pulled down the .10 update, repaired my external drive and went back to creating and communicating. Leopard goes into the drawer, with the hopes that the first scheduled maintenance release goes a long way to fix the problems I've seen.

Sure I like Macs and Apple products. But I'm also a software realist. I don't have access to the source, in this case, so why waste the energy trying to find the magic sequence to make it work when its supposed to do that with a single click. Can't fix it if it doesn't work. Their Software QA group better spend the time and money putting people and tools in place to find the bugs and keep them from reoccurring. This dot zero release feels like either test wasn't there to say what was wrong before ship or they were silenced by management in order to get the OS out by the end of October. Been there and have the T-shirt. I hope Apple will realize the deficiency and correct it. Or they could just hire me to test everything. :)

-Mike M.

Discovering Home Theater

2007-11-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

It's the beginning of November and that brings a couple anniversaries with it. See, I'm a nut for history. Love to learn the progressions from nothing to present day. In this case, its when the idea and reality of Home Theater, well, came home.

I discovered Laser Disk the beginning of November, 1991. I bought my first, and only, LD player from a family run shop called Laser Land. A basic player was $300 and I picked up three movies with it. I believe "The Hunt for Red October" was one, but I may be wrong. I brought home the big player, plug the composite out into my parent's 25" RCA CRT, stereo analog out to the receiver and I was in business. Stunning. In growing up with VHS tape, then watching an LD movie in letter box with digital sound, I could never return to the land of pan & scan.

I remember attempting to demonstrate to friends that letterboxed movies were true to the print, even though black bars appeared. Those same people now watch letter boxed DVD's without complaining. But in 1991, hardly anyone got it.

LD wasn't without its issues. The 12" disks were heavy and difficult to make. The players were big. For a CLV disk, you get up every hour to turn it over. With CAV, try 20-30 minutes. It became part of the ritual in watching good quality video.

A year later, in 1992, I bought a Yamaha Dolby Pro-Logic decoder & amp. It was designed to be used with a receiver, which provided the LR amplificiation. The decoder took care of amplifiying the center and rear surrounds. Not the most elegant solution, but it did work. Movie sound went from murky to balanced. It was then I learned the value of a good center channel. You need to pull the dialogue out from the rest of the movie sounds. Otherwise all you have is mush.

The Dolby Pro-Logic sound & LD video was my staple home theater set up for many years. It taught me the value of a high quality source in the enjoyment of movies. Watching a Panavision 2.35:1 movie on an iPod is just wrong. But so is paying $10/head to watch a movie in a theater with a group of strangers that think they are at home instead of in public.

It was two years ago this week that my wife and I bought our current TV, a Sony 60" SXRD RPTV. Oh, what a difference in going from a square to a rectangle. For me, the move to an HD quality source (720p/1080i) is like when I moved from VHS to LD. Can't go back to the crud I was subjecting myself to earlier.

With HD DVD, true 5.1 surround sound and five feet worth of screen, we don't go to the theater much any more. Movies hit disk fairly quickly, a month of Netflix is about the price of two tickets to a first run film, and I can pause it for a bathroom break.

So here I mark 16 years of watching movies on optical disks instead of magnetic tape. May the rest of the world join me at the shrine of the rectangle, for no one should watch a square TV in the 21st Century. :)

-Mike M.

All done - one Lego set

2007-10-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

I finished the Millennium Falcon Lego set last week, taking me about 20 days or so to complete. Dang, it's big. All of the building pictures are posted here.

Now its time to find a suitable berth for it among all of the other Lego vechicles. Presently it is safely resting on a temporary stand in the middle of my office/library room. Best to get it off of the main factory floor where the wife could trip over it. Do not want to see my latest prize smashed into its component parts... which is why I'm told to stay out of the kitchen. :)

The designers of the set (10179) have learned a lot in laying out the building instructions. In many cases the use of color to quickly determine which side of the ship was to be focused on helped immensely. In the main space frame, there are yellow L's that hold things together. There is a hidden deck plate that is red instead of gray so as the ship begins to come together your eye doesn't stray to the wrong side.

I would have liked to have seen more interior detail. With the ship at mini-figure scale and the inclusion of five figures, I thought they would do more. The play set edition had more going for it, inside wise. But that is not to say the ship as a whole doesn't exude detail and build sophistication. It feels large enough to be one of the scale models used in the movie. Bloody heavy too. Supposed to weigh in around 13 pounds. Never thought Lego parts could weigh so much. The top gun turret comes off so you can get your hands on the space frame. That makes it easier to lift and move around.

Check out the pictures to see the Lego craziness. I wonder what they will have up their sleeve next. A mini-figure scale airplane? I'd vote for XB-70, A-10 or an F-14. Or add Aston-Martin to the vehicle license - a DBS in the scale of the 599GTB would be cool. As would a Honda F1 car. I just need to find more display space in the house. :)

-Mike M.

I get to put something new into CDDB

2007-10-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a first for me. CDDB came back empty on a CD I purchased locally. Guess they are not the all knowing musical oracle. I have put more than 1300 CD's through iTunes. I've seen mistakes or a question asking me which of two entries are the disk I put in. But never a blank. And that includes all kinds of locally made CD's, small labels in far off places and even Paste Sampler CD's (which are also embedded with CD Text too).

The CD in question is "Follower of the Sun" by Mystic Dreamer. It was recorded at Soundtek Studios in Campbell, CA. Just a couple miles away from where I bought it. Paul Josef Garibay is the composer and main dude on the disk. Guitars and other instruments - no vocals so far. Nice to find a local guy and support him.

So I put the track info into CDDB so future users can get the data. Now find to find other disks that make CDDB go "huh?"

-Mike M.

Does anyone think of the musicians?

2007-10-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

Running through the blogs and music sites is the proposal Universal is socializing on how it wants to take music distribution back under its control. They want to do a run around Apple and the iTunes store. But this isn't another version of the MP3/AAC file store and sell them for a buck (like Amazon's approach, which I think is a fair attempt). Its a strange combination of "free" music funded by a "tax" on portable audio players. eh? What happens if I only listen on my main rig in the living room?

Because Universal seems to feel they don't make enough on the albums they have along with control over those same titles, they want to screw those of us who actually spend a lot on music per year. Putting a tax on players to fund near unlimited downloads (probably with rivet tight DRM) is the worst way to encourage people to enjoy music. Why would I want to buy one of those players that has an inflated price? How do I buy music without a portable player in hand? Does Universal also look to stop CD production world wide as part of this poke at Apple?

ick.

But the biggest question for me is: What about the artists themselves? In such a model, they are made to be little more than serfs. Granted most musical acts make their money through live performance, but if the big labels are going to exert draconian control over the albums to take over the second largest cash cow they have (the first is CD sales, third is license sales like ring tones), why do the artists need to stick around? Apple's iTunes store will take on bands from around the world and distribute it with little front end costs. I noticed that the latest Patrick O'Hearn album was available through iTunes first, CD direct from the artist's web site second, in the stores a late third. If more artists took control of their own marketing, use Apple to push their tunes through iTunes, allow people like me to buy the CD's from them directly, Apple begins to look like a music label.

If you look at models outside of iTunes & major labels, artists are able to get their music into the hands of new and returning fans and make a fair buck in the process. Look at MagnaTunes.com. Half of the price goes directly to the artist. FLAC files available. Look at CDbaby.com. A good portion of the CD price goes to the artist, with CD Baby making a fair profit for doing the shipping and handling. I find a lot of new music through Paste Magazine (they include a sampler CD with each issue) and then go find it through my usual list of CD vendors.

The reason I spend the money and put in the time to search is to get at the music which moves me. The big labels don't make the music. It's the artists. One may argue if what some artists peddle is music, but that is secondary. If you screw the artists, why will many starve to produce the music that lives in their souls? As a good portion of the world that has disposable income integrates the Internet further into their lives, will we find more original music in the way illustrated by Patrick O'Hearn?

I sure hope so. I always advocate artists to supply the FLAC or PCM tracks to their albums so I can hear what they intended (most music is recorded at 24/96, why slam it with MP3 or AAC compression?). CD's are still cheaper than downloading, at least for me. Plus a lot of what I'm looking for can not be found through iTunes. Burning Shed has a lot more of Porcupine Tree up for FLAC downloads (the band insists on high quality). As the pop music arena goes down in flames as we approach the second decade of the 21st century, I'll be in bliss. Keep selling those old CD's to Street Light and Rasputin's - I'll keep buying. :)

-Mike M.

Start of a Corellian Contract

2007-10-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Mike's Shipyard. We are proud to announce the start of a construction contract for a Corellian freighter, the venerable YT-1300. The sponsor of the contract has named the hyperspace capable ship the Millennium Falcon.

A few days ago the Corellians saw fit to arrive, with little forewarning, deorbiting the entire kit for the freighter. Usually we receive electronic notice of about a week ahead of time which allows us to plan out assembly space. But this job was bid upon many months ago and a vague start date was given. So we had to hurriedly rearrange the layout of our assembly floor in order to fit all of the parts under one roof.

Here at Mike's Shipyard we do not rely upon automated assembly of the starship you have contracted for. No droids here. Just skilled craftsman, proud of their trade. We assemble the entire ship by hand, making sure that each and every component, from the main spars on the frame to the avionics in the cockpit are joined together in meticulous detail.

We focus on one ship at a time. That is our commitment to our esteemed cliental. No unnecessary distractions from other contracts allows us to keep context change to a bare minimum and deliver quality within a reasonable amount of time. Delays in assembly are known to happen, as quality is our highest priority. But the results are second to none in the galaxy. There is a certain pride of ownership from having your very own Mike's Shipyard assembled starship in the hangar at home.

For future contracts, please feel free to contact our sales team. They can arrange a tour and discuss the details of the contract. We do not design ships here on-site, that is done with various partners. That does not preclude us from changing or modifying the final design of the ship. We can discretely modify or upgrade any portion of the final assembly for a moderate fee. If such modifications are done during primary construction, it will be covered within your ship's warranty. Any changes made afterwards will void such contract and you'd better be able to fix it yourself if your stuck on a backwater system.

Once again, thank you for your interest in Mike's Shipyard.

-Mike M.

Fastest Hunk of Junk in the Galaxy

2007-09-25T20:38:00.001-07:00

Today a famous starship landed on my porch. Or shall I say the largest Lego set ever seen in this corner of the Galaxy. #10179, the Millennium Falcon. I have had it on pre-order since it was first annouced some months ago. Lego had said sometime in October. They are not very good at getting tracking numbers for orders out in a timely manner. Hence my surprise when I opened the door.

I put a couple pictures here.

It came double boxed. Very nice of them. The shot of the bottom of the box shows that the shipping container is specifically for the Falcon set. In all of the other times I've ordered Lego sets they all come in a box with the air packing around them. Generic shippers. But not this set.

The Millennium Falcon is 5000 pieces of Lego bliss. It is at mini-figure scale. Take one of the Lego people, call them 6 feet or 2 meters in height. Then translate that into vehicle. Awesome.

Since the bags are not numbered (some Lego sets are separated into 3 or 4 encapsulated parts) its going to be a fun time organizing the parts and committing to memory where things are. Time to take over the living room floor. Good that baseball season is on the wane. Otherwise I might have to take over my wife's office.

It'll probably take me the whole month of October to put together. I did the big Star Destroyer in two weeks a couple years ago. That set was dull - a lot of repetition of panels and the same gray throughout. This set, 10179, is just the opposite. Detail and color abound.

Where am I going to put it once it's completed? No clue. My wife wonders, but I have no answer. Not important at this time... Its all about the building. :)

I'll take more pictures as it takes shape. For now, its a pile of potential waiting to take form.

-Mike M.

Peanut Butter

2007-09-14T21:18:00.001-07:00

A View from the other side of the world

My wife and I are from opposite sides of the world. Literally. The width Pacific Ocean is the scale, she from the East, me from the West. We always seem to have good conversations about growing up in different cultures. She is wonderful at having me see things from a completely different point of view.

Take peanut butter. Yes, that spread of peanut goodness that is the staple in just about every house in the US. But on the east side of the Pacific, its considered a treat. A special treat I have come to learn. Its an interesting trip to take, to a place that knows no PB&J everyday.

In January, her family is taking a trip back to their homeland and in their luggage will be a dozen or more jars of peanut butter. Here in the US, kids see it as something as common as white bread and Cool-Aid juice in the fridge. College kids live off the stuff. As adults we go back to that happy place with a bit of peanut butter providing the comfort.

But in the poorer countries along the East side of the Pacific, the kids do not know peanut butter like we do in the US. For them its a treat that comes once only in a blue moon. Its either not found in the bigger markets or too expensive for a people that live on a few US dollars a day. When my wife's family return, the younger cousins, nieces and nephews will descend upon them looking for the peanut butter. For them its like a super sweet chocolate fudge sundae that you earned by getting good grades. To say they polish off a jar a day is not an exaggeration.

What we take for granted, another place on this Earth sees as special. She reminds me from time to time that we have it very good here, that even on a really bad day, its still better than many parts of the world. Peanut butter may not change the course of a Communist country, but it will surely bring smiles and cheers to those that need a lift.

Its always the little things that make a difference. In this case, a jar of peanut butter.

-Mike M.

Two very different Music links

2007-09-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

I try to put together original content and thoughts here, keeping the linking to other people's stories & links to a minimum (why repeat what the search engines can find). One thing I hated about some pointed haired managers was for them to forward just about anything they received in email. They were trying to make themselves look connected and important, instead they were just coffee swilling spam bots. But I digress...

This time I feel two music sources need to be spoken of, and linked to, as they are just cool. How cool? I don't know, I have only recently learned of them. But, so far, the cool factor is there. At least for me...

First is a new music label (to me, that is). Not Lame Records. How's that for a name? My buddy Z asked that I check them out. I'm always interested in new, indie-type music. Smaller labels are where I find a lot of my music. So this fell right into place. Over at Not Lame, Bruce, the head dude there, has a Club, which for a yearly $25 he'll set you up with a bunch of stuff and give small discounts on future purchases. I'm game. Got my care package Friday (sans T-shirt, coming in a week) - wholly crap. Bruce said he send along a few samplers. I received 9 CD's - some pressed, some burned. How cool is that? He encourages members to email him about the bands he has and the music that is under his care. He wants to know what I like out of the samplers so he can point me to different portions of the catalog. What other label would do that for you? I have no idea if I'll like anything he sent me, that is the unknown which makes it fun.

From a completely different tangent, I learned about Jonathan Coulton. A submarine blog I read, The Stupid Shall Be Punished, had a link to a video using the song, "Code Monkey", as the source. Hit Videos and see what fans have been doing with this song. Mr. Coulton has released some of his music into Creative Commons, which is very cool.

As a former software engineer, he has a good perspective on the life of a cube dwelling, coffee & mountain dew drinking, coding monkey. This has to be the anthem of the year for us cube dwellers. Watch the anime based Video. The guy who did the mash-up did a great job of editing.

Maybe some day I'll tell the tale of when I got in trouble for using the term "Scripting Monkey" one day at work. :)

-Mike M.

Crazy housing in Silicon Valley

2007-09-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley is a funny place, real estate wise. We sit between two mountain ridges and near, atop or close to several fault lines. Yet our property values are among the highest in the country. It was always fun to talk to first time visitors to the Valley at my last job. They would be on a trip for training from another major city, but high priced. Say, St. Paul. They scoot back home with a housing listing to show their friends how crazy we are out here.

But for me, this is home. My dad's side of the family goes back to the late 1800's, when it was just orchards. My wife's parents live near by. So I've learned to endure the high cost of some things. One is a house.

Owning your own home is part of the great American Dream. The government gives big incentives to own your house. Plus its nice to be able to change things without hassles. Some parts of the US this is easy, some places much harder. Scaling, I call it. Where a friend of mine from high school went to live after he was married, it was $40k for a house in western Nebraska. Amazing. But he's in the middle of corn fields and isn't close to any large cities. But where I live, the median price hovers around $750k. A much bigger pill to swallow when trying to figure out where the down payment is going to come from.

My neighborhood is mainly houses built in the mid-50's to the mid-60's. The lots are, I say, medium sized in comparison to new housing in the east bay. My zoning laws are from that time, which have minimums for distance between houses, from the street and from the back. These are quite inflexible, as when I discovered I could not put an AC unit on the side of the house for it would then extend out from the house and be that much closer to my neighbor (we put it on the roof instead). But times change.

There is a small housing development going up in my neighborhood that I took pictures of yesterday. Some facts: The piece of land is 1.68 acres. There are 23 -houses- going up. San Jose zoning laws have been relaxed to allow near zero lot line houses and still call them houses. If they were attached, it might then be townhouses, but that is not as appealing as owning a -house- in the valley.

From the pictures, I tried to capture the cozy (or cramped like economy class) arrangement of the houses, in relation to each other and to the street they sit on. There is six feet between the walls of two houses. The front porch is right on the public sidewalk, which faces Leigh, a very busy four lane street. The garage opens up to the center of the property, like condos. Also like condos, there are only 13 parking spaces within the development as a whole. Yowza. So if you like less privacy, noise of cars and trucks constantly going by (there is a Home Depot a 1000 feet away), plus no yard then these places are for you.

Then add in the price on the sign. $700k+. Sure there is some living space, but no land. If these places sell for that price, my price per square foot of -land- will rise dramatically. For a smaller house, we have a decent sized yard and buffer from our suburban neighbors. Try putting seven fruit trees into a post '90's house around here and they'll need to be in pots along the side of the house. But this is the sad trend here in the valley. Any piece of land that can be zoned for residential, will be. Houses didn't exist on this lot before, it was two buildings that did adult and special education. But the land was sold, rezoned, and this built.

I'm not here bitching about housing. I'm here to show where the housing market has gone in the valley. If you want a new house in Cambrian San Jose, this is what you get. If you want a smaller house with a decent sized lot, you can go over a few blocks and pay the same price. These houses will sell - there is a demand and median priced homes are selling quick around here. When we see For Sale signs go up, it usually takes about two weeks before Sold shows up. Yep Sold, not Sale Pending.

I couldn't see myself buying into such a place. Where are the trees? I did this squished kind of living when I had my condo. That is where such an environment is expected. Though $500k is the median price of a 1000 square foot condo in my zip code too. I'd rather have a larger lot and a smaller house then the other way around.

I will continue to watch these houses being built and we'll go tour the model when its completed. Get some more pictures. If you are from outside California, have a good laugh on us as we shoe horn in the people that make the valley hum.

-Mike M.

A Way to Know Your Neighbor

2007-08-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

It's a funny thing living in the middle of Silicon Valley. I have good friends half way around the world, yet barely interact with my neighbors. Post World War 2 residential design puts the car first and a porch on which to sit dead last. Where my parents live in the Sierra Nevada foothills, they know their neighbors. People look out for each other and have an easy time of just chatting on a summer afternoon. But here people are wrapped up with themselves.

I am part of this problem, not knowing your neighbor. But my wife and I are making an effort. We try to chat regularly with the two ladies next door. My wife adores their dog. Cleo is the dog's name. The ladies do not have the time after work to walk Cleo - she is a medium sized dog that is nearly all muscle and love. One evening chat about the antics of their cat, all four of us hit on the idea of letting my wife and I take Cleo for a walk in the morning.

My wife and I are on a Silicon Valley sabbatical. In other words, we're unemployed, looking for jobs and spend a bunch of time waiting. So we've taken to walking around the neighborhood every morning. Now Cleo comes with us. Or shall I say, Cleo takes my wife for a walk.

Ever since we started to walk Cleo, we find ourselves talking with the neighbors more. Maybe its because we're out or Cleo brings out the warmth in people. The mailman waves, people say hi and the feeling of a neighborhood begins to emerge.

So offer to take your neighbor's dog for a walk. Gratis. Everyone is happy. Cleo is ecstatic as she gets to find her stride and take in all the smells. My wife is happy for she loves dogs (even if she is being pulled most of the time). I'm happy for Cleo makes sure we move at a fast clip. The ladies are happy for their dog is getting some exercise and gives us an opportunity to chat.

If you lean more towards the side of cats, offer to watch your neighbor's cat while they are away on a trip (in this case, the cat stays put, you go to it). Call it social networking. Or just what it is - being neighborly.

-Mike M.

A Quiet Place to Hear Yourself Think

2007-08-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of a road near my parent's house in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They have a house that is out in the sticks, as my Mom would say. Or it sure seems that way to this suburban adult. One thing that is a bit jarring at first is how quiet it is.

I walk along this road to see what I can capture with my camera. Plus get some good ups to build the leg muscles. I also walk the road to hear myself think. It didn't occur to me until this visit for some reason. It might have something to do with the fact that I hadn't been able to walk the road for the last few years. I thought my San Jose neighborhood was quiet. But what was different was the relaxed sound of my thoughts.

Along this road you can hear the cows from more than a mile away. Cars for quite a bit longer. Cars are loud when there is no other sound to dull the cacophony of pushing a metal brick through air. You know when a hawk is nearby when the birds become silent. The buzzing of hummingbirds and dragonflies is easy to follow as they dart in and out among the flowers and grass. But my thoughts were not fighting to be heard when walking the road.

A gentleman this last week in the career workshop I now attend weekly commented that I seem to have a lot of chatter in my head. That I have so much stuff in my head that wants out it bunches up so that it comes out all at once. Need to tone down the thought stream enough so others can follow along. I see that the road allows the thoughts to flow and form in a cohesive way. This road that so few know, but many have imagined.

The streets of my neighborhood are filled with sound. Filled with the chatter of life in the valley. Maybe that is why I like my music loud while sitting in the living room writing. Then I don't have to hear the yelling of the neighbor trying to make his dog sit. I do hear our birds and squirrels, but one must focus, otherwise they, too, are lost in the audible spectrum.

Close to Silicon Valley I have been to a place where you can walk the path and hear your own thoughts without struggle. When my good friend and backpacking nut Z took my to Henry Coe State Park on winter, we found ourselves with no human within miles. We had lunch on rocks at the side of a stream. Peace. An amazing place so close to home, yet far enough away.

I look forward to another trip to this lonely road in the winter, when the holidays come, the trees are bare and Jack Frost is nipping at your nose.

-Mike M.

My Xbox 360 returns

2007-08-27T21:43:00.001-07:00

A team at Microsoft in the Xbox group must be on the ball. I must give credit where it's due.

Today I received a replacement Xbox 360 from MS. Their email system is four days late as they let me know today the tracking number. A couple hours later UPS is knocking on my door with my new machine.

Inside is a new/refurb Xbox 360 (not the one I sent in), a letter explaining that they did change the serial number attached to me account to reflect the change in machine, and an Xbox Live 1 month Gold Card. I thought that last touch was icing on the cake. I have a Gold account and they made sure that I would receive credit for the time my Xbox wasn't home. How's that for customer service?

The machine works as it should. Took a few minutes for it to update itself along with accessing my profile on the HD. I'll add the HD DVD drive tomorrow. If the internal heating issue has been resolved I look forward to playing many hours this week. And catch up on the HD DVD movies.

-Mike M.

The customer I love and hate

2007-08-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

I am a professional tester (or QA dude) and have a blast taking a new product or feature and running through the mill. I have learned that you test to the specification, that document that contains marketing's wish list and the developers dreams. Or that is how it seems when it finally gets to me. But then there is the other side of testing, the part I have fun in. Negative cases. The type of stuff real customers do. ie Toss the manual and start pushing buttons.

Today's (August 25th) Cathy comic sums it right up for me. Cathy is ever careful with her toys. An iPhone class? Is there such a thing? But her husband is the type of customer I love and hate. More love though. See, he is comfortable with trying new things and playing around with his new toy. The flip side is he'll be doing things that are not in the manual. Not the correct sequence of key strokes that the spec. says is ok. For a good user experience and to keep up those customer satisfaction numbers, the device or feature better not lock up, crash, or spit out foul language when not used in the proper way. Gently nudging the user and failing gracefully is what I strive for (though if the VP will sign off on the foul language part, I'll cover those cases too).

An iPhone or similar such device requires a prodigious amount of testing to make sure the average Joe on the street doesn't brick their new toy within the first few minutes of getting it out of the box. I used to test routers and switches - the class that sit in large ISP's. Not good if your customers half million dollar box dies during configuration. Or collapses when its put live into the network under a real load. Quite embarrassing. My line of work is to make sure such a thing never reaches the customer. Sure there are corner cases in which routers can get confused (ie state machine ended up where it's not supposed to be), that is where defensive coding styles will help. But I'm no coding guru. I break the toys, not fix them.

I want more of Cathy's husband out there trying new toys. Companies need to be aware that testing is not an afterthought, but an integral part of the development cycle. It is not simply to make sure it follows spec, it needs to be able to not break when the curious user starts to play.

-Mike M.

Space

2007-08-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write on a number of topics this week, but have found myself distracted by other hobbies. The usual, Legos and music. Plus the job search.

To get things rolling, I wanted to post this picture of the Shuttle & Earth during STS-118. The higher rez version is here.

Out of the 100+ pictures I've looked at from the latest shuttle mission (there are hundreds), I'd vote for this as the money shot, from a completely artistic, step back and be in awe point of view. I always find these pictures truly amazing. Being up that far above the atmosphere and zooming around at high speed. Yet to be completely at peace.

I know the shuttle is a flawed system that is aging fast. The next set of vehicles NASA is committing to don't inspire much, being bigger versions of Apollo command modules. Plus the new vehicles come down on parachutes into the water. Its cool the shuttle can return itself to its launch center. You've got to give it props for that. And the images it captures of its LEO adventures.

Enjoy a quiet moment care of the members of STS-118. :)

-Mike M.

Getting your Xbox 360 fixed

2007-08-10T09:05:00.001-07:00

I have found myself like many others with an Xbox 360 showing the three red lights of death. I am not a heavy player, mainly casual gaming on the weekends. But it seems it was my turn.

Fortunately MicroSoft extended the warranty of the Xbox 360 to three years (mine is 18 months old). They now have a web site where you can set up a warranty repair without having to go through the phone tree.

First you need to register your Xbox on the site. Then from there you request a warranty repair. They ask you a few questions - one of the drop down answers is "3 red lights". Once you've filled in the blanks, they ship you a box. A near empty box, which I think is a little funny. This box becomes the shipping container for your Xbox 360. They even give you a strip of packing tape to reseal it. They are becoming as thorough as Apple when it comes to packaging.

The catch to the free warranty repair & shipping? 4-6 week turn around. Ouch, that bites. For a box that was supposed to last 5-10 years. At least it gives me a reason to take apart some of the stereo cabinet and get behind the gear to dust. Serious dust bunnies back there.

The latest Premium Xbox 360's have been reported with both HDMI & 65nm chip sets, allowing for a smaller cable for video and cooler operation. But it seems that the DVD drive is still loud.

-Mike M.

Late night music listening

2007-08-03T12:52:00.001-07:00

Last night I was drained from putting all my energy and enthusiasm into a couple hours of interviews. Like riding a crest of a wave, a huge blast being there, but you've got to come down off the high sometime.

So last night I put the book down and had the lights low and turned the music up. One guy and one guitar. In this case it was Kelly Joe Phelps. Sit down between the speakers and let the music flow. The Focals made the voice and his battered guitar sound ethereal, sitting before us, giving us his all in our little listening space.

I do this from time to time, just get lost in the music. My wife likes these times - no worries, no problems, just music. She always curls up next to me and listens. Kelly Joe Phelps is a bit of folk, a bit of rock, some blues, and a lot of spirit. Hate to put labels on people. But its just one guy and one guitar. Magical because its so simple. A voice and guitar strings captured together - no more, no less. It felt good.

I challenge people to listen to their music. Not consume it, not run with it, not drive with it. Sit still and listen. Maybe you'll discover something - emotion. Vinyl junkies say digital strips away the soul of music. I understand where they are coming from, but I'd beg to differ. Performance and sound are two separate items, though audiophile nuts have a hard time figuring that out. If I can close my eyes and feel the warmth or light or sadness wash over me, then the music has succeeded.

If Kelly Joe Phelps piques your interest, also look into Dayna Kurtz and Hamell on Trial. Not always happy, not always sad. But sure to rock in a way only a guy and his guitar can. Enjoy.

-Mike M.

Vinyl debate while CD shopping

2007-08-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

In my little corner of San Jose, I have two excellent used CD's stores close by. One is Rasputin's, the other is Street Light Records. Both are on the same street as Tower Records, Bascom, so the street has been a bit of a central point for recorded music for some time. I don't count Target, Best Buy, B&N, or Wal-Mart (#1 music seller) as legitimate music stores. No, I need my music clerks with tattoos and various piercings. They usually seem to know their material much better than the clerks in vests at those other stores...

I was in Street Light last week looking through the stacks. Found some more Black Tape for a Blue Girl, along with the latest Suzanne Vega & Delerium CD's. But while I was looking through the disks, I over heard two older gentleman (older than me, younger than my grandfather) discussing the merits of vinyl. Cool. I'm not a vinyl junkie, but I like the fact that such people are big into music. Here these two guys were saying that CD versions of their favorite albums were pale ghosts versus the vinyl they had purchased a couple decades ago. The experiments one had done to prove that PCM digital recording couldn't capture the nuances of a piano, as it can't sample fast enough for tonal interaction or decay.

It was cool that these two guys were discussing this in an independent shop. Also take in the context - they were surrounded by vinyl. In both Street Light and Rasputin's, vinyl takes up a decent part of each store. They wouldn't have it there if it didn't sell. Also down on Fruitdale Ave., not too far from these stores is the Analog Room, an independent stereo shop that is devoted to vinyl. In an era of cheap Chinese gear flooding the market, the American and British manufactures can not keep up with demand of their vinyl gear. As I said, I'm not in that crowd, but I'll give credit where its due for anyone interested in reproducing the best quality sound to get into and live a musical creation. Its not meant to be "consumed", but experienced.

-Mike M.

My summer book report - USPS eats them

2007-07-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

I have been enjoying my book trading through the Bookmooch site. I'm at 76 books sent, though that is really about 100. One of the members asked me about getting 25 books at once and if I would do something out of band. I said sure, as my goal is to find homes for my old books and not profit from this in any way. The lady gave me six points and I filled four flat rate USPS Priority boxes. In return I received a nice card and a small gift card to B&N. I like the people involved, as this is a labor of love, then one of building an empire.

I have been amazed in the last couple months how fast someone will jump on book I post to my inventory list. Yesterday morning it was about 10 minutes from post to request to send.

But there is dark side to book trading. You need to use the USPS to get them from one place to another. Usually don't have any problems. But today I received my second destroyed package from them with a form asking what was eaten by their sorting machines. I use only new bubble wrapped envelopes. What comes back is stripped bare and with burn marks. If the USPS can find it they'll send me the book back. eh? If the packaging I got back was barely identifiable, the book must surely be lost. It took them nearly a month to figure out something was wrong. My package was rendered into small pieces at the San Francisco Bulk Mail Center in Richmond (why not call it the Richmond Mail Center?), so it didn't get very far.

The letter also scolds me for not putting an address inside the package just in case this does happen. Its not their fault, its all mine. Hate these government letters where even if I put it in a steel case and they ran it over with a truck, I'd still be to blame. sheesh. Looks like I might need to revamp my book shipping process to heavier envelopes and copies of the address label inside. I don't think I should be required to do this - its the bloody USPS! Aren't they supposed to be the best in the world in getting things from one place to another?

Now this isn't to knock my local postal carrier. He has been on our street for over 15 years and knows just about everyone. He makes it a point to say hi and learn names. Another reason I like my older neighborhood.

My rant for the day.

-Mike M.

New Barry Eisler book out

2007-07-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I strolled through Borders Books the other day, mainly to browse and pass some time. The force was with me as I discovered that Barry Eisler had a new John Rain book out, _Requiem for an Assassin_. This is the 6th book in the series. He is a local author (Palo Alto).

But the cherry on top was finding that the copies on the shelf were all signed! Score! Needless to say, a signed book came home with me.

If you are interested in assassins, martial arts and the complex world in which John Rain lives, you must start with _Rain Fall_. Its all first person narrative. Wonderful descriptions of Tokyo's jazz culture, where a trained assassin can stop and wrap himself within the musical creation. Amazing reads.

-Mike M.

20 years of CD collecting...

2007-07-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

I have been remiss in not posting the thoughts and travels over the past few weeks. Distractions abound. Like figuring out what to do next in my career as a software test lead/manager. But that is for another entry.

This is about an anniversary in July. 20 years ago this month my parents gave me my first CD player and 3 CD's. I still have those CD's, all from Telarc. I have been collecting music ever since. Strange to think that 20 years has gone by. But I feel I've only started in my pursuit to find even more music from around the world.

According to the Delicious Library, I have 1258 CD's logged. The actual physical number is higher by about 50 or so, as the Library count sets as 1 (such as Beethoven's Symphony's 1-9 in 5 CD's). Taking the number in inventory and dividing it by 20 gives me 62.9 CD's per year. More than 1 per week. But statistics need context. The first five years I didn't buy that much as I didn't have the money to do so. Only in the last ten have I had the income to really indulge and I'm pretty sure its accelerating.

Looking at the collection from the perspective of iTunes, its a bit more than 50 days of music, 16,000 tracks, taking up 400GB of space (all in Apple Lossless, ie FLAC, ie MLP). I will probably need a second drive by the end of the year.

Its not the sheer size of the collection that I am trying to reflect upon. Its the growth of musical interests from when I was a teenager to now that I am older (or just "old" according to my wife). In the beginning I bought a lot of symphonies and soundtracks. Then I started to explore pop and rock through college. Most of the CD stores that I visited to find that new band or genre have all disappeared. I could spend hours in CD Warehouse listening to a tall stack of used CD's to find a gem. Or a possible gem. It is a continual search, a desire to discover that which moves me.

Recently I have been digging through acoustic guitar artists - think crisp Spanish guitar. Hadn't realized the beauty that can be evoked from a solitary guitar played just so. The power of the strings, feeling as if the instrument is floating in front of my eyes. Bliss. Then there is the dark side, some call it goth or industrial. Look at Black Tape for a Blue Girl, which is in the same vein as Dead Can Dance. Dread, black, foreboding. It has its place along side everything else within the collection.

The artists span a gamut that is always expanding. I do draw the line at no country, no rap, no opera, and no bubblegum pop. But that leaves a whole lot of territory to swim in. This is my vice, it is a view into my head. A person's art helps to illustrate who they are. Art, in this case music, is able to give a form and voice to something that is difficult to articulate in words. It is a normal day if I go from Dire Straits to Handel's Water Music to Jesse Cook's guitar to fun pop of Chicks on Speed.

With used CD's in the $5 range, my CD budget can take me far. There are whole blocks of sub-genre and labels that await me to liberate them from a dusty corner and place them with new friends. Second Spin is my on-line home and Rasputin's in Campbell is where I can browse the stacks in person. CD's are where its at and where I will stay. No compressed files here.

What do I see for myself in the next 20 years of music collecting? More hard drive space. A much larger collection that will have music and artists I have yet to learn about. A constant pursuit of something new, the joy of finding that gem. Filling in the holes from whole labels (I collect labels along with individual artists). Rediscovering CD's in my collection as I go through to find that which I haven't touched in years. Fun that is.

-Mike M.