Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up just a little after five this morning. I felt fine but I hate rushing around in the morning. I was late getting into the office because someone called down after me and convinced the concierge that he was in a hurry but then didn’t even bother to come down for his car after having made me wait quite some time for him. 🙁

Absolutely nothing happened in the office this morning. That is how I like my mornings. Very quiet with plenty of time for me to relax and to get caught up on other things. Like SGL and the Flickr photos of which there are so many now that I need to go through and caption and title. That will take a very, very long time to complete.

Oreo is staying home today. Normally Thursdays are Doggie-Daddy Day and he and I hang out all day. So today Dominica is going to walk him before going into the office and I will go home early and spend time with him this afternoon. That way he will still get the chance to sleep all day like he needs by Thursday.

My morning was pretty slow overall and I managed to get tons of images on Flickr titles and captioned. I am very thankful that I decided to go with the pro account there. It is well worth it.

I went to lunch with some of the guys from work. We went out and got some awesome Afghan food at Silk Road in Warren. I love that place. It is always so hard to get in, though, because everyone else loves it too.

I left work on the early side this evening around three thirty. There was no traffic on the way home which is great. I got home and boy was Oreo happy to have his daddy home with him. I had to play and feed him and then take him for a walk in the park.

Coming home so early meant that I had to work from home for a little while. Oreo wanted to play but I couldn’t spend very much time with him. I did get a chance to play with Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 which is supposed to be a major competitor with Ulead and Pinnacle’s video editing studios but it didn’t seem to be any better than either of them and didn’t have very impressive output capabilities so I decided against it and just deleted it. Not impressive enough to spend my time on. I can’t believe that no one makes a halfway decent video editing system considering how many people do that all of the time! Oh well, the search continues.

Susan and Dominica got home around six and we quickly ate some Subway and got ready to go out to the New Jersey Symphony. The symphony performed tonight at Bergen PAC up in Englewood, NJ which ended up being quite the adventure to get to. We ended up missing the split for the Local and Express lanes of US 95 and almost ended up in Manhattan. We were quite late by the time we finally arrived and had to sneak in after the first piece.

Following Joel Spolsky’s blog entry about how to shut down your Windows machine, Arno Gourdol write about the shutdown features of Max OS X. Both writers keep talking about all of these features that “no one uses” but I think they are forgetting that not every computer user is a writer. For example, at my day job we have a couple of key requirements that need to be met that, I believe, are not uncommon in the workplace. These requirements are: your computer must be locked every time that you walk away from it and your computer must be left on even when you aren’t around (for maintenance and management reasons.) The result?

The fast “lock my computer” features of Windows is critical because every time I have to get a drink or use the facilities or walk to someone’s cubicle or whatever I have to lock my machine. Not shutdown and restart. Lock. It has to be FAST. I can’t have my apps closing when I do it. So from a corporate standpoint the lock feature is absolutely necessary or no work would ever get done (a full shutdown and restart takes about five to eight minutes – imagine if I did that twenty times a day or more!)

At the end of the day, and anytime that my computer gets sluggish, I restart it so that it is ready to go and fresh. The last thing that I want to do is shut it down at the end of the day and have to sit around waiting for it to power down (especially if there are patches waiting to be installed) and then power it back up manually. That would cost me a significant amount of time where I would just be sitting in the office waiting to manually do a task that is insanely obvious for the computer itself to do. And lets face it, everyone you know restarts their computer constantly. It is the answer to anything that is wrong. Every time something stops working we restart. Is it a hundred times a day? No. Is it just as often as we “shut down”? Easily.

From a server standpoint (which both Windows and Mac OS X can be used as, as well as many OS’s not talked about my Joel or Arno) you often do not have physical access to a machine and need to be able to issue a reboot. Imagine how difficult customer support would be if a machine needed a reboot but the only option was to send a tech out to a customer site just because the machine had to be powered off and manually restarted again. The cost of desk side support would skyrocket.

Both Joel and Arno also argue that the “sleep” functionality need only be exposed through the physical interface of closing the laptop lid. That’s great except that desktops don’t have lids. So the answer, I guess, is that only laptops should have a power saving, fast on mode? I suppose that they think that spinning down harddrives and powering off monitors is a total waste and too complex for the average human to handle. Why should monitors have power buttons one must wonder once we go down this insane path! Why not just unplug them if they don’t need power and let them sit there on but showing nothing until the computer uses them. Turning them on and off is too complex apparently.

Both Joel and Arno seem to think that almost all computer users are unintelligent, lazy, confused people using laptops who never need them to run with the lid shut, seldom worry about their own free time being used up manually shutting down and restarting their laptops and never lock them for security reasons or log out before letting someone else use the machine. In their Utopian world there is no security needed ever and every person has their own personal laptop with them and running and working and online and full battery at all times so they never need to share. Ever.

Arno even gets so bold as to say that there is no one in the other corner defending the importance of these choices. Um, hello! I think the idea of dropping most of these functions is completely insane and clearly shows a lack of understanding as to the average uses of a computer. There are many environments in which computers are used today but the leader is still in the workplace and the needs of the workplace computing environment are being completely ignored. As are the needs of the most basically literate computer user. The harsh reality is that the needs of the computers users that cannot figure out when they want to power off their computer or when they want to reboot it to get it working again (I mean really, who gets confused about whether or not they want to turn something off?) are hardly needs that can be met through any amount of simplification. More importantly, even if we could make computers easy enough to use for people so completely incompetent we would still face the fact that these people have little to no average value to add to the world and should not be catered to at the cost of the productivity of the people who drive the economy and offer value to their fellow human beings.

I am not saying that it wouldn’t be valuable for Microsoft to whip up a “Windows Vista Clueless Edition” just to make a few extra dollars off of the moronic crowd but they sure cannot risk losing their key markets just because a few idiots can’t figure out what it is they want to do and think that Microsoft should make that decision for them. Once you let Microsoft decide whether or not you want you computer to be powered on why not let them choose your bank, car, spouse and what you want to eat for dinner? Simply put, there is a minimum of personal decision making that every single living person must perform in order to be classified above the level of vegetable. Next the “no power decision” crowd will be complaining about how un-userfriendly their television is because it doesn’t turn on whenever someone sits down in front of it (because only people sitting want to watch television and, in fact, EVERY person sitting down wants to watch television) and that they constantly have to actually CHOOSE what show they want to watch. How inconvenient!

I managed to load almost a thousand more pictures onto Flickr today! Just about everything that I have access to at the moment has been uploaded. I don’t have my entire collection scanned yet but the bulk of it has been and is now uploaded. I figure that there are a few hundred left to go mostly being sports pictures from when I was in high school. I don’t have easy access to my prints and slides when I am in New Jersey so I am only guessing. I will need to take some time and get those done. There is a lot more motivation now that I have them available online and can actually make use of them. I have made all of the images licensed under the Creative Commons so that other people can make use of them as well. No reason to horde them to myself. Maybe people will find creative uses for them. All ready I can see the total number of people checking out the pictures climbing. People must be enjoying them.

I am scheduled to be taking the early shift tomorrow which means that I have to be up and running around five in the morning so that I can be in to the office by six thirty. I will be very tired tomorrow. I have gotten used to sleeping in a bit the last few weeks. Oreo won’t get his regular Thursday with me either. That is very sad. We really enjoy our days hanging out together. But I will be home early so he will just stay home and wait for me. In the evening Dominica, Susan and I are going out to see the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra perform at one of their near but non-Newark venues.

While I was doing some work on Flickr today I remember a kid from my class at Pavilion Baptist School, Jacy Lennon. I did a quick search on his name and there was only two hits on Google. Both were local to where I grew up, Batavia and LeRoy, and both were for someone of the same age three years apart. Both links were police blotters for someone charged with felony DWI. One link was for 1999 and one for 2002. So I would say that there is about a 99.999% chance that that is him. Since the only one in the whole Googlesphere is local to my high school and the right age I think that it has to be him. Over the years my class at PBS only ever had about twenty five people in it. That is another one accounted for. We know where almost everyone is these days. But then again there weren’t very many of us.

After work a bunch of us from my team went out to the local pub for some drinks to celebrate the promotion of our new manager. We were out for about two hours. Dominica had plenty of homework to do so she was happy being home working on that.

I left the pub just a little after eight. Dominica called to let me know that she had just found out that her cousin has been diagnosed with cancer. We don’t know any real details but she was almost positive that it was non-small cell lung cancer, the same that my mother had. It had all ready spread to his lymphatic system by the time that they caught it. But that is all that we know at this point. So obviously we are asking everyone to keep him and his family in prayer.

Dominica ordered in Domino’s again tonight and food was waiting for me when I got home. At that point she decided to give up on her homework for the evening and we watched most of the original 1945 version of Christmas in Connecticut which both of us are pretty sure is not as good as the Dyan Cannon remake even taking into account the fact that Kris Kristofferson is in it and the fact that it was made for television. We didn’t finish the movie though because it was getting late and I have to be up extra early tomorrow morning.

I did spend the evening struggling through doing some editing on Ulead’s video editing studio. So far I am not impressed but it does function which is more than I was able to say for Pinnacle’s studio so we will see. I have downloaded Adobe’s attempt at a similar product so I will be testing that out sooner or later. I would like to have a chance to try out Kino as well but Kino only runs on Linux and I don’t have an IEEE1394 card on my Linux box to do the DV capture with. I have heard that Kino works pretty well though.

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame wrote about how Microsoft should eliminate many of their shut down options because turning off your Vista based computer is just too difficult. But each of the options does something specific and to eliminate the different options Joel starts coming up with some pretty ridiculous systems like “eliminate restart and make people turn their computers on and off again” which makes the task of restarting, which people do like five times a day I imagine, a very cumbersome thing. I don’t want to have to sit at my computer and wait for it just to shut down and then fire it up again manually. I want it to restart while I am in the kitchen getting a soda. I want to be able to log out and let someone else log into my computer. But Joel thinks that I should just restart the computer instead. Oh wait, sorry, no restart. He wants me to turn off the computer (this is Windows, can you say one to two minutes of waiting.) Then once it turns off to turn it back on again (several minutes yet.) And THAT log into it. That would make anyone switch to Linux right there.

Joel points out that most people don’t know the difference between sleep and hibernate. Okay, I agree that people just don’t care that much about their computer and maybe the hibernate feature should be hidden so just those who care can find it but they serve two distinct purposes. I think that when people put their computer to sleep thinking it is hibernate, lose power and then lose all of their documents they won’t be happy that Joel took away their hibernate function. Or when people who use sleep as an extended screen saver take several minutes to return to productivity will be too happy either. The reality is that computers are useful because they have lots of options. Sure, as Joel points out, people are fundamentally unhappy when presented with many choices. But he leaves out that people are only unhappy with choices when they don’t understand them and the reality is that people who don’t understand the simple differences between shutting off and restarting their computer are not going to be happy until there is a single button labeled “compute” and they just press it and let the computer make all possible decisions including whether or not to even turn on in the first place.

Joel is basically suggesting that people are unhappy that cars have a key, the ability to turn them on or off, to put them in park but leave them on or just just hit the clutch. All of these play key operational rolls to the car and any idiot can see why each one is critical. Each corresponds almost perfectly to a Microsoft “shut down” option and for almost exactly the same reasons. The issue is not that there are too many choices but that people think that computers, the most complicated, multi-purpose piece of their environment encompassing entertainment, storage, communications and security should make all of their decisions for them. If they can’t understand how to turn off a computer then the danger lurking inside of a device capable off attaching to their bank accounts is definitely far beyond then ken. I think it is important to assume a certain level of understanding when building a computer or else the world’s most popular computer would be the Staples “Easy” button. One button. No choices. No thinking. A button that when you hit it decides why you hit it, whether or not you should have hit it and then decides whether or not your needs warrant the button to do something or to just ignore you. I have read a lot of Joel’s articles and books and often he seems to be pretty good but articles like this make me seriously wonder about his ability to make software decisions. We have recently started using Fog Bugz software internally but I haven’t worked with it yet and my level of concern just went through the roof!

Once again I got caught being really busy this morning and didn’t manage to get out of the apartment for a long time.

Okay this XKCD comic is one of the funniest that I have seen of anything in a long time. W00t!

I managed to put in some time today adding titles and descriptions to the pictures on Flickr. That is going to be a long, arduous task to get them all labeled. It is especially tough because I don’t always know that much about the pictures especially as many of them are many years old. But it isn’t going to get any easier so I might as well get them done now.

I got home and remembered that tonight is the private exhibition at the art gallery at the National Newark Building just for residents of our building at 1180. Dominica and I had been meaning to go to the showing but Dominica is swamped with homework that must be completed very soon so Susan and I decided that we would go and leave Dominica in peace to get some work done. The show opened at seven thirty so at six thirty once the three of us were home Susan and I ran to Subway and grabbed dinner. We brought it up and we all ate and then we went to the show.

Susan arrived last night pretty late. She is staying with us for the week before she moves into her new apartment on the east side of Newark next weekend. Everyone was pretty tired pulling themselves out of bed this morning.

Dominica and Susan got right out to work. I started working from home this morning and quickly it turned into a work from home day as there was more and more work needing my attention. It was a rather busy day and I didn’t even end up taking off time for lunch.

I did spend some time today working on getting several movies converted to Xvid so that they can be viewed on the Creative Zen Vision M that Dominica got for her birthday. Boy is that thing ever cool. Watching movies on it is really fun and easy. It takes about one and a half to two and a half hours to get a movie transferred to it when starting from scratch but it works really well. Even with the tiny two and a half inch screen the picture looks really good. The resolution is 320×240 pixels and at that size is razor sharp and you can barely tell that you aren’t watching a full fledged monitor up close. Once text appears on the screen you know that the resolution is low but the actual movie images are excellent. It is a very comfortable way to watch movies. I am curious to see how subtitled movies will come across. They could easily be unreadable. We will have to wait and see on that one.

The bigger discovery that I made today was that I am able to compress widescreen moves at the higher resolution of the widescreen Creative Zen Vision W and they will play just fine on the M. Since Dominica has the M and I am hoping to get the W for Christmas it is very important for us that the movies only need to be compressed once for both systems. It turns out that if you compress Full Frame (4:3) movies for the M they are exactely what you would have wanted on the W anyway and if you compress widescreen movies at the W’s resolution you end up with movies that work perfectly on the M but are just a little larger than necessary which is pretty unimportant. So that is going to be really handy once we both have Zens. I am excited.

I also put in a little time uploading huge numbers of my old photographs to Flickr. Now that I have the Pro account there it only makes sense to keep absolutely everything on there as a backup and so that everyone can make use of them. There are about a thousand pictures up there now and more soon. I had to stop loading them today because Flickr had a problem and stopped being able to take the new pics. But the highlights are John and Michelle Nicklin’s Wedding in Tampa Bay, Florida from September, 2004 and Dominica and my honeymoon in Nova Scotia which is partially posted at this point. Several years worth of my prints that I scanned last year are now posted on Flickr making all of that effort to scan them really make sense now. More coming soon, I hope.

Another eBay video game arrived today at dad’s house: Golden Sun 2 which I am anxious to check out. It is supposed to be one of the best RPGs for the GBA platform. One video game arrived here in Newark as well: Boktai which is an interesting RPG that has a light sensor built into the game cartridge and the game play varies based on the amount of sunlight that you are playing in. This feature made a lot of sense when the original GBA was out and the games required bright, direct sunlight to be able to see. Now with the backlit systems it is difficult to play in direct sunlight and so the game is not likely to work anything like the way it was originally supposed to which is really too bad.

Dominica and Susan got home at just about the same time. As soon as everyone was home we headed to the gym to get a quick work out. It feels good to be back into the swing of getting exercise. We didn’t have a chance to do anything for several days there over the holiday break. I was starting to feel like a sloth.

After exercise we ordered in pizza from Dominos and whiped out any benefit that we had gained from going to the gym. But it was yummy. Dominica spent the evening working frantically on her Java homework. She is a bit behind at this point and has to do a lot of work to have everything done in time for the end of the semester which is coming up very quickly.

Today is our last day in Frankfort for Thanksgiving. We slept in a little but not very much. Oreo and Dexter came into the living room and slept on the futon mattress on the floor with Dominica and I. We are their favourite humas to snuggle with. It is extra hard to pull yourself out of bed in the morning when there are two snuggly Boston Terriers that want you to stay in bed with them.

We hung out at the Toccos’ and visited for several hours before hopping onto the road at around three in the afternoon to head back to Newark. We were worried that traffic would be really bad but with a small hiccup right when we got onto US 80 in Pennsylvania there wasn’t that much traffic most of the way. US 80 and US 81 at Binghamton were the worst spots on the road.

We were very glad to get back to our own place in Newark and it wasn’t all that late. We had made good time. We had even managed to stop at the Best Buy in Scranton on the way down and pick up an HDMI cable so that we can hook the new DVD player to the new television. It was a very successful trip.