Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Dominica, Oreo and I slept in as late as we could this morning to recover from the busy Thanksgiving week. That meant that we slept until around nine in the morning which isn’t really all that late. Check out is at eleven so we don’t have a lot of time to pack and get ready to leave the hotel.

We got checked out and took Oreo for his first walk of the day and then Dominica’s friend Jackie and her husband Tim who were at the party last night met us at the hotel and we all went out to Denny’s for lunch. We had a really nice lunch hanging out with them. It is nice to get to see Dominica with her friends from long ago. I know so few of them. It is weird for me to see her with people from her past. She is so bad at keeping in contact with people that there are very few people from very long ago that I know.

After lunch we went back to Frankfort to visit with the Toccos. Min’s parents were not home when we got there so we ran out to Herkimer to shop at the Walmart there while we had the chance. New York Walmarts are so much nicer than the New Jersey ones. Completely different stores. You wouldn’t even know that they are the same chain! We managed to get some Christmas shopping done and it was a good use of our time. We also found a bargain bin copy of the Mario and Luigi RPG for the GBA. It was cheap and looked cute so we checked it out.

We spent a few hours in the afternoon hanging out with Min’s parents and her brother Joe. At six we had to leave to run out to New Hartford to do some quick shopping on our way to Sam and Katie Bono’s house in Clinton. We first hit the big wine store in New Hartford. New Jersey liquor stores are pathetic. Apparently people in New Jersey only drink to get drunk and don’t take any pride in their wine so we are stuck buying out wine in New York and bringing it back with us. We loved the selection at the place that we found and ended up buying two cases of wine so that we wouldn’t have to worry about it again for a while.

We also ran into the Electronics Boutique in the Sangertown Square Mall in New Hartford and hit paydirt with their great selection of used Game Boy Advance games. I managed to get a number of games really cheaply there that I have been unable to find on eBay. We got Riviera (for $15 as opposed to $60 on eBay), the original Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

We got to Sam and Katie’s house around seven thirty. They just moved into their new house at the same time that we were moving into our new apartment here in Newark. There is quite a bit of contrast between our two places. Our place is tiny and theirs is huge. They are on a hill with a view of Utica but are in the country whereas we are in the heart of the city but with a view of Manhattan. We love their new place though. It is really awesome. They are going to have to buy a lot of furniture to fill that place. They cooked dinner for us and we all hung out for several hours. We had a really nice time visiting.

We got back to Frankfort and it was time for bed for us. Boy are we ever old!

Boy were we tired this morning when we dragged our sorry butts out of bed. Oreo had an early morning appointment with the vet in Ilion so we couldn’t sleep in at all. We had to be up and out quite early to get him there on time.

After the vet visit we drove back to Utica and met dad at the hotel and he drove us out to New Hartford where we met Dominica’s parents at the Hartford Queen diner in the middle of the strip. They had been up since very early doing the Black Friday shopping.

We had a nice breakfast and then dad, Min and I returned to the Hotel Utica and dad took off to go back home. I had some work that had to be done even though today was going to be a vacation day, sort of, there were a lot of people in the UK that didn’t think of it as a holiday and had a lot of work for me to do so I still was rather busy. So Dominica ran out to run errands and stuff while I worked in the hotel.

We are really happy staying at the Hotel Utica. Like I have said before, it is a grand hotel from 1912 that was recently completely refurbished giving it a feel much like our Newark apartment. The lobby is simlpy stunning and the rooms are very nice. I was quite impressed and the wireless worked really well too. And Oreo is allowed to stay with us which is very unusual for a nice hotel of this level. We will be utilizing the Hotel Utica quite a bit in the future, I imagine. It is just so handy and inexpensive.

Around half past three we had to start getting ready to go to Dominica ten year class reunion (Frankfort Schuyler High School Class of 1996.) It took me a really long time to get ready because we forgot to bring a shaver with us and I need to shave my head. So Dominica’s parents grabbed a Gillette Fusion razor for me and I used five blades (that is five blade units each with five actual knife blades on it for a total of twenty five blades) to shave with. It took forever and my head was really soar by the time that I was done. It took almost three hours to cut off all of my hair. That was a really bad idea.

We were fashionably late to the reunion but it was actually just about the right time to show up. Any earlier and we would have just been standing around waiting for things to get going. We had a good time. It was mostly a whirlwind of meeting people that Dominica has mentioned and lots that she hadn’t and trying to attach faces to names. We hung out for several hours until about ten thirty. Then a good number of the classmates headed over to Delmonico’s Steakhouse for some drinks after the party. We didn’t stay there for long. We are old and showing it.

After the party we had to run over to Frankfort to pick up Oreo before going back to the hotel to go to bed. Apparently Dominica was in a mood where everything was very funny as she went up to her parents’ bedroom to get Oreo and both of the dogs were laying in bed and being very cute and popped there heads up together to see who had come for them and apparently Min just stood there laughing for a while and woke up her parents. We didn’t find out about that until later. Joe and I were dying when we heard about that. It was after midnight by the time we got back to the Hotel Utica and got to sleep. Quite a long day for us.