John Mort's Weblog

/me just discovered the Eye-Fi SD Card

Basically it's an SD card that has a wireless interface device built into it that communicates with a dongle that doubles as a card reader. You can map the dongle to a folder on your computer, or point it to a web service like Flickr, and when the camera with the card in it comes in range of the dongle it wirelessly transmits the photos off the camera to wherever you mapped the dongle. This effectively eliminates several of the steps for handling pictures, which is useful if you use your camera every day.

People have been reporting that it even works in linux under Wine, which is awesome. I currently have a 1GB SD card, and never fully utilize it, so this being 2GB makes it ideal for my purposes. However, since I already have a fully functional camera and memory card, I can't justify spending the money on it. Definitely going on my wish list, though.

Since our tax return was generous this year, the financial overlords (a.k.a., trian) have finally approved my building a new system, and even upped my budget from $800 to $1000! So I've been pouring over hardware stats and wikipedia for the last week, struggling to learn everything I haven't been able to afford since I last built a system and thus didn't keep up with.

For awhile now I've been trying to figure out how to fit a quad core cpu into my budget. My thinking is that even though there really isn't any practical use for a quad core system right now, if I have a quad right now, once programmers start taking advantage of such environments my PC will be able to take advantage of such features, and thus it will have more life. Thing is, I only have so much I can throw at a CPU since I also need the motherboard, RAM, case, power supply, optical drive, etc.

High end quad cores run over $1000, which make them not an option. So I poked around on newegg and found a few that run for ~$250, but they're 2.4ghz. Newegg also has some dual core 3ghz processors for about that much, and thus I have a dilemma. Do I take a slower processor that can handle a larger workload that might be useful in the future (but also might be too slow for all practical purposes), or do I take a significantly faster processor that can only handle half the workload, but who's speed might make it tolerable in the future?

So over to freenode I go and visit ##hardware where I'm told:
< wols> no one can foresee 4 years of hardware
< wols> and I can tell you that in 4 years your GPU will be very obsolete no matter what
< L4m3r> yeah, stupid me built a 939 system, and I'm not gonna be able to afford a new box any time soon
< wols> Mortuis: rule of thumb: anything you don't need for 18 months is wasted money when bought right now

So, it looks like the smart move is the dual core processor. Which is hard for me right now, because I was sort of getting attached to the idea of being able to watch four processor graphs going to work on my system, but really they're right, it's better to go with what I know will be useful. And the reality is that with the motherboard I'm looking at, there are a lot of processors available, so in theory if I really did need to move to quad core I would be able to just swap the processor.

Unless something comes along and makes this motherboard obsolete and not worth upgrading like my old one, which in hindsight was built for what would be useful at the time, and has served us rather well, surviving a few hard drive and optical drive failures.

In New York, we only wear black because nothing darker has come out. Well we've finally succeeded! New York researchers finally made a material blacker than black!

Since our DVR stopped working a couple weeks ago, we've experienced a sort of thankfulness for not having TV available all the time. It's just been sitting there, being broken, eating power because I haven't turned it off just in case it suddenly wanted to work again. Unlikely, but I wasn't willing to rule it out.

Today I decided that I wanted to take it apart and see if I could harvest the hard drives for my computer, that and poke around, see if a DVR has anything else that might be interesting inside it. So I decided to call the DirecTV support one last time, just to make sure our options at this point were limited to buying a new box or purchasing a service plan that would cost about the same amount as a new box.

DirecTV starts you off with a VRU that runs you through some basic troubleshooting, making sure you're on the correct channel or that your box is on, etc. I was tempted to test the rumor I heard about how you could bypass a VRU by swearing at it, the theory being that profanity would indicate agitated customers who are thus swiftly moved to a sympathetic tech. Instead I just went through the motions of doing what it said until I was moved on to a technician.

Bambi greeted me and we did more basic trouble shooting. I reset the DVR while she was on the phone, as if this was a magically different attempt than any of the other times I reset it. After doing that a few times I started applying what I remembered from working in tech support myself.

I asked if there was an update around the time the DVR stopped working. While she was looking it up I mentioned a forum post I saw on their website that started the same day my DVR stopped working where several other people with my model had the same complaints. She noted that there were updates the day before and a week after my DVR stopped working. So we tried forcing the DVR to download the newer update in case the problem was bad firmware. I was extremely nice and accommodating the whole time, waving off her apologies when certain operations took a long time, basically making her job as easy as possible.

Tech support is generally a thankless job. You get a lot more abuse than praise, so being nice to a tech can go a long way. I talked tech with her for awhile, we talked about how the DirecTV model DVR's weren't as good as the models they used to subcontract, but how the software updates since then had made them more usable. It wasn't manipulation for manipulations sake, I really prefer to be friendly with people, but I also knew that endearing myself to her would make it more likely for her to pull whatever strings she could, and it worked!

After downloading the firmware and restarting, the DVR still hung, so she decided the next best step would be to send a technician. When trian called tech support last time they told her it would cost $80 to buy the service plan which would enable them to send a technician, so I asked if this visit would cost us anything and she said it wouldn't. She then took a long time to enter my information in their system and determine the soonest a technician could come out. Many apologies later she said a technician could come in a week. I checked again to confirm that the visit wouldn't cost anything because my wife had been told it would cost $80 and she said that normally it would!

So there you have it, being nice can pay off. If it didn't I've have called back and tried again, different tech's have different levels of knowledge, and some techs have more power than others to pull strings. So if you get an unhelpful or combative tech, it's often helpful to call back and try for someone else.

Of course, now I'm a little apprehensive about having the TV working again. We all agree that life is better without it dominating our evenings. It's definitely a better experience to watch shows like Lost and Heroes on the TV than on the computer. But not having access to the TV has forced us to spend more time together. With the DVR back, we'll have to use discipline to only record/watch shows that we really want to see, and not junk TV. There's still a chance that the technician won't be able to fix our box and we'll still be without it, but even if he is able to fix it, I think this experience has given us an awareness of the effect the TV has had on our lives, and the importance of leaving it off most of the time.

Looks like the spamfembots have made their way to facebook. I got a friend invitation on facebook from some random woman today. The url in her profile to "her private pictures" it an escaped hex url that takes you to a tinyurl redirect. I happen to have previews enabled on tinyurl so I clicked it anyway and confirmed that it goes to some website that sounds a like porn. I highly recommend going to tinyurl.com and enabling previews in case someone ever sneaks something like this on you.

Very fun little clicking game.

Cursor 10

One thing I dislike about is registration limits for the primary. It's a closed primary, and that's fine, but what doesn't make sense to me is party switching. The deadline to register for a party if you aren't registered to vote is January 11th, which is roughly around where all the other states set their deadlines to switch parties as well. Not New York. Here the deadline to switch parties if you are a registered voter is all the way back around October 25th! Why are these not administratively equal tasks?

Of course I'm only annoyed about this because when I had decided to register for a party and support a primary candidate this year it was October 26th. Is this to punish those of us who decide to have no party affiliation?

trian talked me into us getting some new knives. I didn't think it was anything we really needed but it might be nice to have some more sharp knives around as we're frequently running out. Would also be nice to have some knives longer than five inches.

They came in two days ago and I washed them yesterday, and wow, chopping up vegetables last night had never been so easy. I almost cut off the tips of my fingers three times as I'm so used to having to push through the vegetables. I'm happy with the new knives (until I chop myself a few times, that is ;-), it makes prep time much shorter.

So now that I have youmail working with Adblock Plus, I have been wanting to address a pet peeve of mine. I really hate cellphones. Mostly.

I enjoy having the security of being able to call for help if my car breaks down (a frequent occurrence when I was driving cars that were > 15 years old), I also enjoy trian being able to contact me when she needs to. I just hate the random interruptions, infrequent they may be. It's not that I don't want people to be able to contact me on my cell phone, it's just that most of the time a message will do.

I think I've figured out a solution though. Something tells me that I read about this somewhere, but I can't remember where so I'll tentatively take credit. Tomorrow I'm going to make a silent ringtone, make that my general ringtone, then assign audible ringtones to people on my contact list. I already have a certain ringtone for family members, one for friends, etc. But this time I'll set one for everyone I want to talk to, so that unimportant calls will only vibrate my phone which will make them less obtrusive and can be passed to voicemail with none of that latent psychic stress that occurs when you know you have a message waiting but haven't checked it yet.

I had a hard time picking just one picture that summed up my day for my daily photoblog. I thought this one was appropriate as well. There's a graveyard on site, most people drive right past it without seeing it. I did until my Manager took me up to check it out while talking about what I was doing for the department. It's located here, but it's a little too blurry to see the gravestones unless you know what you're looking for.

I just had to share this photo though, I thought it was too cool not to. Plus it has a sort of metaphorical meaning, the end of my job there and whatnot.