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.

November 29, 2007: Really Long Day

Today was another very busy work day. Most of the day wasn’t as bad as it has been most of the week but it ended up lasting forever.

I started a little later than usual – not until after seven. Almost seven thirty.

The day was mostly uneventful. Oreo is at daycare. If he doesn’t get some serious playtime he is going to be crazy rambunctious this weekend and will drive us crazy.

Dominica came home but I was so busy that I didn’t even get to say hello for a while. This evening was all about emergency coverage.  So we got very little time to spend together.

We ordered in Nino’s and luckily I managed to watch two episodes of it with Dominica before getting called out to work again.  I ended up only getting a two hour break from seven thirty until almost two in the morning.  I am going to be tired tomorrow.

November 28, 2007: All work and no play…

I am still very much backed up at the office and have just tons of things to do to get back on my feet.  Things are improving but I am staying very busy.  I started work this morning around six fifty!  No rest for the weary.

Today was another heavy working day.  I worked solidly until almost ten in the evening.  There is just so much work to be done.  But I am making very good headway.

The sun was out even though it was pretty cold here.  Oreo loved being able to lay in the sun for the first time in ages.  He is so happy to be home but unlikely as happy as we are to have him back.

Dominica grabbed some McDonald’s on her way home from work.  We have both been craving it for a while.  It wasn’t very good though.  They salted the fish again and burnt it.  I will never understand the need for so many McDonald’s to pour salt onto the fish sandwiches.  It is so gross.  Not sure that it satisfied our craving but I don’t feel like having her get McDonald’s again for a very long time.

I ended up working almost solid until around ten thirty.  I took a little time off to eat dinner and to watch an episode of Are You Being Served? with Min and Oreo.  But the moment that I was away from the computer the phone rang and back I went.

It’s been a long day and I am turning in so that I can get back to work early in the morning.  Dominica and I had kicked around the idea of going home this weekend but we think that we have it worked out so that we don’t have to.  We would like to get home (my home that is – Min was home for a night a week ago) but we have been traveling so much and time is so tight that it will be a problem.  So we are staying here this weekend.  That is probably best.  I already have at least one thing scheduled for the office for Saturday.