December 3, 2007: We Have a Wii Again

It is still quite cold today and we still have yesterday’s snow on the ground.  But the snow is out and it is a beautiful day.  I got paged out at five in the morning, though, which is not exactly how I was hoping to start the day.  At least it wasn’t anything major.

Oreo was off to daycare today.  We figured that with all of the rest that he got this weekend that if he didn’t go to daycare that he would be bouncing off of the walls.

Tomorrow I have to take Dominica to the oral surgeon because she is having her wisdom teeth removed.  We have been putting this off for a really long time and we really can’t wait any longer.  So Dominica is skipping her lunch and leaving work early to run to Eleven80 to pick me up.  Then it is off to Kearny for the surgery.  Then I will drive her home (if I can remember how to drive – maybe we should take a cab.)  She is only have a local anesthetic but she will still be unable to drive for a while.  Her surgery is likely to be far worse than mine was.  I had a full anesthetic and I didn’t have to witness any of it.  I just woke up without my teeth.  So Dominica is in for a really tough week.  We have no idea how she is going to answer the phones on Tuesday.

My day was much, much slower today than any day was last week.  Today was really just a normal day.  I put in so much time last week on overtime and skipping lunches to try to keep up with the workload as it came in and then with putting in several hours over the weekend keeping up with the weekend work and doing some stuff from the week it really caught me up and today reflected that.  It is nice to have calmed down a bit although I was enjoying the overtime too.  None of that today.

I ran over to Newark’s GameStop on Broad Street for the first time even though they have been open for months.  They didn’t have what we were looking for but they do have a really good selection of used games which is good to know.  I found a game for the PSP that looked interesting and I hadn’t seen before used and inexpensive so I decided to give it a try.  It is called PoPoLoCrois.  But I didn’t get a chance to even consider playing it today.  I had meant to pick up a Game Cube controller (preferably a wireless one) to use with the Wii but forgot about it once I was at the store.

Dominica got home with Oreo a little after six and we walked next door to the new deli that opened up in the building on Saturday.  This was our first time checking them out.  It is exciting to have a restaurant, although a small one, here in Eleven80.  The menu is extremely limited and has practically no vegetarian options but for us it has: breakfast all day, veggie burgers (the only ones that we can get in the area other than the Subway veggie patties which are not the same), French fries, onion rings, mozzarella sticks, grilled cheese, fried shrimp and tuna fish products.  The big deal is the proximity and the hours that they keep.  They also have a minuscule mart there that handles bread, milk, crackers, toilet paper, bottled water, paper towels, whip cream, and other basic items.  The selection is very small but it does provide a few things that we just can’t get easily otherwise.  And the prices are very good.  Dominica and I got a large dinner this evening (two grilled cheese sandwiches, two orders of fries, a fried shrimp basket, a big half-moon cookie and a can of soda) all for just $10.04.  That would have been an easy thirty quid in London!  So we expect that this will fall into our dinner rotation and happily it is the least expensive option so will most likely reduce our average dinner cost slightly.

After dinner we finally took the time to hook the Nintendo Wii back up – now in our bedroom. We haven’t played it in months and don’t even remember which games we have!  Dominica spent most of the evening reacquainting herself with the system and learning how to play The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess again.  She got several hours in on that game but got completely stumped at the section where you have to go fishing and get a fish for the neighbourhood cat near the beginning of the game.  She spent a lot of time there to no avail.  I tried for a while and we kept reading the manual and getting nowhere.  So I did some searching online even but we were getting nowhere fast.  It turns out that the manual, IGN and GameSpot all have completely worthless and incorrect instructions on how to fish in the game.  One of the sites that I read not only had poorly worded or ambiguously incorrect directions but was totally and completely wrong to the point that it is very likely that they never played the game at all but were clipping bits of game reviews from other people (and made the mistake and clipping some bits from a Wii review and some from a GameCube review!)  In the end it was GameFAQs that came through and saved the day.  (I will let you do your own research Mr. TooLazyToLookThingsUpForMyself.)

We played until midnight when the crew from downstairs stopped up to the apartment to pick up the futon.  Originally it was going to leave on Wednesday but the opportunity came up today so we figured that it was perfect timing.  Now we can get the area cleaned and the furniture rearranged tomorrow.  I always feel better to move ahead with a plan once a decision has been made.  I prefer action.  Once we knew that we weren’t going to keep the futon I wanted to get it out of the apartment and move on as quickly as possible.

I did some looking at the SGL stats for the past month and surprisingly, far and away the most popular post that I have written is my coverage of IP Networking on the Netgear SC101 Consumer SAN Appliance.  It is amazing how few resources exist out there for this device.

December 2, 2007: Late Lunch, Football Americano and ChuChu Rocket

I feel so much better today waking up in a house that is actually clean! It took a bit of doing but the apartment is looking pretty good. We are still encumbered by a large amount of stuff sitting around that is all “shipping to dad’s house” the next time that we go up there – if it will even all fit into the car which I seriously doubt. We have two computers, several empty computer boxes and several bags of clothes that are “to be donated.” In reality we need to find someplace down here where we can drop off clothing donations because it just isn’t realistic to try to get all of that stuff into the little BMW in a single trip.

I got up this morning with Oreo at eight in the morning. Oreo isn’t big on sleeping in on most days. We got up and checked outside and discovered that Newark is very white this morning. Sometime after four this morning the snows came and stuck pretty well. It isn’t deep, maybe a quarter inch at most. But enough to coat the city.

Dominica wasn’t up for a while after Oreo and I headed out to the living room. It was a late night for her and she needs her sleep.

We did pretty much nothing this morning. Just relaxed and hung out in the house. It is so much easier to just “hang out” now that sitting in the living room doesn’t mean looking at the piles of stuff everywhere that we need to do something with. Dominica finally decided that playing Dungeons & Dragons might sound like fun and something that she might enjoy. She even picked up the “Player’s Handbook” and read some of it on her own.

We called Kevin and Pam around noonish and we all decided to do lunch. We couldn’t find Ryan as he is a party pooper. It took till about one until Kevin and Pam made it up to our apartment. We had decided that it is cold and not worth walking anywhere to get food – especially as Oreo would need to be taken out an extra time. We didn’t get around to ordering lunch until a quarter till two or later. And then lunch took over an hour and a half to get to us. So the original “late breakfast” morphed into a “late lunch” and then into an “almost dinner.”

By the time that we were done eating our “brunch” it was just minutes until four o’clock in the afternoon which is when Eleven80 was throwing their Giants vs. Bears party in the media room (that is American football for those who don’t know – fortunately both of these teams have been around since I was a kid so I actually knew who they were.) So around a quarter after four we all went down to the media lounge and joined a good number of people from the building to watch the game. Ryan made it down eventually as well. None of us really watched the game (I haven’t seen an American football game is many a year and have no idea what is going on anymore) but we had a good time hanging out. Eleven80 provided a bit of food – huge six foot long subs, chips, beer, soda, cookies, etc. We had meant to eat early enough that we would really be able to eat there as well but because our food came so late we were only able to really just have a snack. The food was really good though.

After the game Kevin headed home and Dominica and I went over to Ryan’s apartment to play a little Chu-Chu Rocket on the Sega Dreamcast. Even though Dominica bought this game for herself over two years ago she has never, ever actually played it or even put it into our Dreamcast. So this was a nice chance for her to get to play it.

We came home and just relaxed for a little while before going off to bed. We did some planning on what to do with the living room to make things actually work in a more useful way because we have had a terrible time deciding on how we want the living room to be laid out. It is hard making the room attractive, comfortable, good for entertaining and good for use a media room all at the same time. The way that we had it before, when the television was in the living room, it was pretty good as a media room but useless for entertaining. Now it is pretty good for entertaining and useless as a media room. And in both cases there was a large section of the room that is completely wasted because we can’t figure out how to use all of the space.

So what we have decided to do is to give up the futon which isn’t very good for sitting on anyway and is almost never used for people to sleep on since we have only ever had about four nights worth of house guests since moving to Newark. The only time that it was used in any significant way is when Susan was camping out here for a week when she first moved to Newark but we don’t anticipate any of our other friends moving to Newark and needing a place to stay during the time that we will be living here. That was probably a once in a lifetime coincidence.

So once we remove the futon, which is tentatively scheduled to leave here on Wednesday evening, we are going to move the television stand which we really like over into the living room corner where the futon is now and open up that space at the end of our long hallway leading to the bookshelf.  Then the loveseat will move back and there is no longer any reason to have all of that open space behind it (it is currently facing away from the television stand, not towards it which is what gave us the idea for the reorganization.)  We will get a new chair for the living room to replace the seating lost by the futon but just a normal chair.  Then, when we do get a television at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, we will hook it up in the corner of the living room fairly high on the wall so that we can watch it from the “living room” space and so that I can see it easily when sitting at my desk.  That way Dominica can watch television and I can work and we can be hanging out together.  The television will float just about the field of vision of my monitors so it will be perfect.

We have been wondering what to do with our video game systems because it is difficult to figure out which ones will work better where.  But with the new setup it will make a lot of sense for the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo Wii to be in the living room.  This is for several reasons but mostly because they use five connections each (three video and two audio) instead of using a single HDMI connector which is much more important in our bedroom where the cable are dangling between the top of the bookshelf and the wall mounted television.  So the XBOX 360, which we do not have yet but anticipate getting either for Christmas or shortly thereafter (because I really want to play Assassin’s Creed and Blue Dragon) will be perfect for our bedroom.  And the Wii needs “moving around” space in order to play it properly and in the living room is the only place where that really works.  The PS2 is the only system that I really wish that we could have in the bedroom instead of in the living room because I have so many games for it that would be perfect for playing just before going to bed but Dominica has several Guitar Hero and SingStar type games for it that are really “party” games which would work better in the living room so I guess that it works out pretty well.  Hopefully we will have enough space to hook up the Dreamcast as well.  Since it doesn’t have wireless controllers it is limited pretty much to the living room.

December 1, 2007: Cleaning

Ah, the weekend. Finally. I have been needing some normal “down time”. Not that I get a lot. But some is good enough. Today continues the cleaning binge that I have been on as I attempt to convince Dominica to do some cleaning between bouts of watching Dancing with the Stars. She is attempting to complete the entire season today as she finally got ABC’s television viewing application working on her Windows Vista desktop. Up until now she has been unable to watch ABC television shows because ABC was indicating that Newark, NJ was not a part of the United States. It might seem like the third world depending where you are in the city but that is a pretty harsh view to take of things. Using automatic location detection based on IP address or whatever ABC is using isn’t a very useful tool when you are using it to limit access to resources of this nature. It just alienates users who feel wrongfully punished for ABC’s technical glitches. Mixing up countries is pretty weird.

Speaking of Newark, Eleven80 has begun its holiday tradition of having free breakfast in the lobby on Saturday mornings for the year. So we are all set for Saturday morning breakfast now until after Christmas. Very handy. Also, here in the Eleven80 building, the new deli and mini-mart on Commerce opened this morning. We did not get a chance to go down and to check it out but the hours that we have been told that they will be open are pretty handy and I am sure that we will be going there sometime soon. The menu looks to be completely uninteresting and nothing more than a copy of two or three other deli-style restaurants within a stone’s throw of it but it will be open slightly earlier and open somewhat later than its competitors. A seemingly obvious but unpopular business choice here in downtown Newark, New Jersey.

I slept in until nine and then Oreo and I got up. He wanted to take advantage of the sun this morning and I wanted to get started on cleaning up the kitchen. Dominica slept in for another hour before getting up so that we could take Oreo on his morning walk and then go down to have breakfast from the lobby. We just ate it in the apartment though.

It is quite cold today. Almost freezing. We have the heat running in the apartment and Oreo has to be all bundled up in his knit jumper to go outside. Unfortunately the drunk crowds from the new Prudential Center are causing all of his walking areas around our apartment to have more and more shattered glass on them. It is becoming harder and harder to keep him away from it. Rock concerts and sporting events are not the types of attractions that tend to bring in the best types of crowds.

Last night we received, in the post, the adapters that we have been waiting for so that we can hook up our new Brita water filter. Up until now (that is, for the past year or more) we have been living off of bottled water here for drinking and cooking. That has been rather expensive and has caused us to constantly stock several gallons, as many as ten, of water. This is a problem for people who live in such a tiny apartment. We don’t have the space necessary to store as much water as we really need to keep on hand. It is also a problem because I don’t have a car so only Dominica is really able to go out and pick up water. It also means that, since we can’t stock enough, that she would often have to make emergency shopping trips with no other necessity but water. So our friend Ramona suggested that we switch to an “on tap” water filter. She had used one here and said that it worked fine. So Dominica bought one but it didn’t come with the faucet adapter that we needed so we had to wait for that to arrive. Now we have it and now we are working our way through the very last of the bottled water.

I managed to get just tons and tons of cleaning done today. I feel very good about the day from that perspective. The apartment shows significant improvement. There is still plenty more to be done but the basics are done. My really big accomplishment of the day was getting the kitchen completely organized and cleaned so that we are not storing anything at all on the counters anymore except for the obvious stuff like the toaster and the knife set.

Dominica and I were supposed to go into Brooklyn to see Ryan’s opera performance tonight but Oreo told us not to I had a lot of work to get done and Dominica was addicted to her television show online.  Around ten thirty Kevin called to see if we wanted to go out for some drinks.  I decided to go out but Dominica decided to stay in so Pam stayed in as well and just Kevin and I went out.

We tried going to the Key Club but, as far as I can tell, they are no longer in business.  Three times in a row now I have gone there on three different days of the week and at least two of those times were quite early in the evening and it has been closed every time.  I haven’t seen it open since John Nicklin was here several weeks ago.  So Kevin and I walked up to the Kilkenny Ale House on Central Avenue and hung out there for the evening.

I got back home around two after the Kilkenny closed down for the night.  Oreo and Dominica were still up.  We went to bed but Oreo got me back up at four in the morning to walk him again even though Dominica had just walked him at one!

Shortcuts

I’m a technologist. I use Windows shortcuts and their equivalent, softlinks, on UNIX all of the time. These are incredibly useful and important tools that make computers much more useful than they would otherwise be. The concept of softlinks, symbolic links (aka symlinks) or shortcuts is incredibly important and many things that we do everyday with computers would be nearly impossible without them. However, I have noticed recently that the average computer user is unable to grasp shortcuts conceptually and this causes a myriad of problems.

The issue generally arises when an everyday computer uses needs to make a copy or a backup of a particular file. Most computer users do not fully understand what a file, an application or a shortcut is or how these are conceptually different, yet related, things. Thinking of filesystem mechanics is not something most people do every day. I do, but I’m weird like that.

The problems caused by this are fairly obvious. When attempting to copy or transfer a file – whether to another drive, to removable media such as a CD-ROM or USB Flash Memory Drive or to email or other network transfer – a user will often become confused and send the link to the file instead of the file itself. In many cases this error is nothing more than annoying. A grandparent sending a CD or DVD full of links to their grandchildren’s pictures instead of the pictures themselves. This causes a loss of media and shipping cost but generally little more than that and aggravation as this generally only afflicts those who are not prepared to troubleshoot what has happened.

However, in cases of critical data files that have been expected to have been protected this can be a critical issue. Often you can blame the end users themselves for making backups without checking them thoroughly – an unverified backup is no backup at all. Okay, this excuse has its merits. But what we are dealing with here is an underlying problem of conceptual comprehension and not one of diligence. Take the example of making a backup to a second hard drive (internal, USB, network – doesn’t matter) or to removable media (CD, DVD, USB Memory Stick, SD card – again, doesn’t matter.) In this example any user with only a single computer to work from or only a single computer with the necessary applications installed to load the files being backed up (critical files are often from applications like QuickBooks, FileMaker or Microsoft Accounting) would discover that they could make successful backups, remove the media, reload the media and open the files “from the media” flawlessly only to discover that once the original files had been lost, deleted, changed or corrupted that the “backups” changed along with the originals! That is the nature of symbolic linking – transparent access to the original application. What we are seeing is a library backing up the card catalogue while letting the books burn.  At least we will have a good record of the loss for the insurance company.

On servers this functionality is critical and anyone who is working directly on a server and cannot understand symbolic linking certainly can’t be trusted not to lose data but when we are talking about non-expert desktop systems like Windows and MacOS we might need to take a different view. The average user simply has no use for shortcuts. Sure there may be times when shortcuts would be more useful than a second copy of a file but the times that this is important are rare enough that the impact would be generally negligible and the benefits in “ease of use” would be important. Shortcuts, while meant to make computers simple, have become a major point of fear by a large percentage of users who don’t even realize what it is that they are afraid of – knowing that would practically solve the problem.

I am not suggesting that shortcuts be eliminated completely from the operating system.  This would be ludicrous.  What I am hypothesizing is that shortcuts should not be made so easily accessible to casual computer users.  Currently, in Microsoft Windows operating systems, the standard context menu that is available whenever doing a copy/cut/paste operation always presents the option of creating a shortcut as well and, at times, does this by default.  This is horrible behaviour.  Users do not need to be presented with this without some level of effort being expended.  It should, in my opinion, be made available by context menu only if placed some distance from the common copy/cut/paste options and should never occur as a default “copy” behaviour.

At the very least the operating system should detect when a shortcut is being put onto remote or removable media and should optionally (and by default) prompt for confirmation and give an opportunity for users to be told that they will not have access to that file away from the current computer.  For most of us who read and write articles like this shortcuts are so conceptually simple that it is extremely difficult for us to empathize with normal users who aren’t even aware of their existence or purpose let alone put ourselves into the shoes of a user who is blissfully unaware of all filesystem structures and has never been in a position to have access to a second computer on which to test file copies.

Perhaps the next generation will grow up with a thorough enough understand of computers that they will be able to widely grasp simply data structures such as shortcuts and will be able to use them appropriately and intentionally.  But at this time I place little hope that this will be the case.  The only real hope is that the ubiquity of hyperlinks on the web being shortcuts themselves just might cause users to think about this more critically.  But this seems unlikely to occur on any real scale.

November 30, 2007: Addicted to Rice Crackers

This morning began earlier than I had expected. After working until two in the morning yesterday the phone was already ringing before seven this morning about the same issue at the office. Five hours of sleep isn’t bad. Just not as restful as I had hoped.

It is a bright and sunny day today. I can’t be unhappy. The day is just gorgeous. Crisp and clear. Oreo is enjoying his spot in the sun and the house is much cleaner than it has been after I went on a cleaning spree yesterday. There is a lot more to do but I feel much better about the apartment than I did yesterday. It was such a disaster after our trip that it was driving me crazy.

Today was insanely busy. Normally Friday mornings are slow and evenings are busy. But today, because of several disasters piled on top of one another, the morning was even busier than a normal evening so I had time to do nothing at all.

After work (for Dominica, not for me) Dominica went grocery shopping and stocked up the kitchen after we completely depleted it (except for those few yogurts that Kevin never managed to get.)  She picked up Graples which she thought were a hybrid apple grape product.  They are, in fact, apples injected with grape flavouring.  So since that got us thinking about artificial grape flavouring, I looked it up: Artificial Grape.

She also got rice crackers.  I discovered that I loved rice crackers when they were given out as snacks on a flight that I took with Air Canada from Newark to Toronto.  Then Dominica found the exact same rice crackers that they used on the flight in a Zen Trailmix from Target.  So she got addicted to them too.  So now we are looking to figure out where to buy the ultimate rice crackers.

I worked until around eight.  Today was better than yesterday but still incredibly busy.  At least during the day I was able to continue by cleaning spree and the apartment is beginning to look better.  It was a major battle with the dust bunnies but I seem to have the upper hand – for the moment.

Dinner was eggs, beans and toast.  Just like in the UK.  Once my work was done for the evening we watched the final two episodes of Ballykissangel Season Five.  That is the last of that show that we have here.  Dad has the sixth season on order.  We discovered, though, that our favourite character in the show, Brian Quigley, played by Tony Doyle won’t be in the final season because the actor had a heart attack and passed away in 2000 between the two seasons.

After that it was off to bed.  But Oreo decided at one in the morning that he needed to take a walk out in the cold so I had to get out of bed to take him out.  And it took a long time and a lot of walking back and forth before he was done.