Disorderly Content

I've been agonizing over getting a new cell phone for a while now. It was definitely time, both because I was just past that two year point that would get me a break on the price and because my old phone was becoming steadily flakier. (Doesn't help that I've dropped it more than a few times, but let's move on.) And besides, now that I'm carrying a Blackberry for work I was hoping to find a device that's both a good phone and a good emailer, so I can stop carrying -- and having to worry about charging -- two devices. The Blackberry wasn't it, or at least not the model they gave me; no Bluetooth, painful to use as a phone, and I'd have to switch carriers and get it switched to my number.

Hence my dilemma: what's the right -- or at least the least wrong -- device out there. I'd been waiting for Palm to get its new Treo out, and in the meantime read up on Motorola's Q, the HTC Wizard (I think) and the latest Blackberries. Then I heard about Nokia's E62, a Symbian-based PDA phone that my carrier (Cingular) offers. So I went out and tried one, and was pleased with its web browsing, which was faster than my Blackberry and borderline acceptable. So, throwing caution to the wind, I signed up.

And began having problems almost immediately. Some of them were self-inflicted; I can break just about any computing device within minutes, and this one was no exception. I managed to misconfigure my email in several ways both small and large. And my web experiences weren't nearly as good as at the Cingular store; I managed to wedge things entirely on several occasions, including a couple of times when only pulling the battery would bring my phone back to life. After a week I was ready to beg Cingular to take it back.

But, as I often do, I gave it another chance. And after wedging things even further, I wiped the phone entirely and reconfigured it from scratch. With my newfound knowledge of what to do, and more importantly what to avoid, I had it all working: personal email, work email and calendar, SSH client (so I can fix things on my website in between network connections), lots of cool ringtones, and even phone functions. I even managed to merge my personal and work phone lists. And now, a day after the reset, I'm planning to keep it.

It isn't perfect; the software is sluggish at times, it's not quite as polished as the Blackberry, and the little joystick isn't as nice as the Blackberry's scroll wheel. But the screen is nice and detailed, the keyboard is usable, I've managed to make Bluetooth work with my Mac, my earpiece and my car (but not, strangely enough, my work laptop, may Dell and Microsoft rot in Hades), and the coverage in my apartment is better than I've had with any other phone I've tried. So all in all I'm feeling pleased. We'll see if I still feel this way the next time I write.

Writing a blog, it's hard not to sound authoritative even when you really don't know what you're talking about. Especially when you don't know that you don't know, if you get my meaning. So think of this post as a mea culpa for a couple of past wrongs, and an acknowledgment that I might just be wrong at some future date. Yeah, I know; I'm shocked too.

Errata entry number one concerns a post from July about how my new Camry Hybrid claimed it was running low on gas when it wasn't anywhere near that point. Turns out it may not have been lying. I was at a seminar put on by Toyota where they explained a lot more about the magic of hybrids. And one of the ways Toyota reduces pollution is to have a collapsing fuel tank in its hybrids. As the tank empties, it shrinks like a giant concertina, which leaves less empty space in the tank, less room for gasoline to vaporize and therefore less vapor to escape and pollute the atmosphere. Depending on outside temperature, the tank may expand more quickly or more slowly, meaning it won't always fill to max capacity. Which also means you can't double check the car's claimed fuel economy by dividing your miles driven since last fill-up by the amount you just put into the tank. Depending on conditions, you could be off by a couple of gallons.

Erratum number two concerns a post from a few days ago about my Mac's poor performance since its last OS upgrade. Turns out I didn't have the solution after all, although I was in the right ballpark. The Brother software wasn't at fault, as I found out when after rebooting I didn't have the slowdown problems. They did return, and it finally occurred to me that they were most severe on the hour, when a script I had for image processing would run. Buried in that script was a call to a tiny piece of C code I'd written. And which, I realized, I'd never recompiled after my move from PowerPC to Intel. After a one-second recompile I'm back to having a relatively zippy Mac, which will be even better once Adobe and Microsoft get Intel native versions of their Mac apps out. I don't know why that little executable caused such grief for Rosetta, the module that emulates PowerPC code on Intel. But I'm guessing that whatever the problem is, the fact that the code was being executed thousands of times each hour was making a small problem far worse. So it was sort of my fault. And sort of not.

I was saddened to hear that Tower Records was sold and liquidated; I've been buying music and then video there since I lived in L.A. And it was nice to have an alternative to Fry's and, more recently, Best Buy, both of which are unpleasant shopping experiences at best. Still, the shutdown might be an opportunity for a bargain or two. So it was that I stopped at my local Tower a couple of days ago to see what deals there were to be had.

The shelves were well stocked; they'd moved things around to make the empty places less obvious. And the 20% discount on merchandise sounded good, at least until I found a few things I might like to buy. $28 for a recent movie? Even at 20% off that's more than I'm used to paying. Did they raise the prices before they lowered them? Maybe I won't miss them so much after all.

I've already voted, so the current run of campaign excesses kind of wash over me like a PBS viewer who's pledged and then realized that won't make them stop asking. Still, I'm hoping for some good news come Election Day. Like that the country will wake up and stop accepting the president's latest lies about the lies he's ready to stop telling and now denies he's ever told. When he says he's never talked about "staying the course", does he think we all have Alzheimer's? Fortunately, video is forever...

One of the disadvantages of letting my blogging slip is that so many whacked out stories become unstoried before I can write about them. Like a piece a couple of days ago about how the Guvmint was confiscating containers of vegemite to keep it away from our citizenry. Vegemite's kind of hard to describe, but think of a dark, salty and strong-tasting paste that's a byproduct of beermaking or something. Aussies spread it on toast in the morning, which I think is what makes 'em so mean. (Maybe if the French put vegemite on their croissants they'd be tougher. Or not.)

Anyway, turns out the whole story's a crock. No ban, no confiscation, and if I want to bring some vegemite back from my trip to Oz next year, I won't have to sneak it through Customs in dog-sniffing-proof containers. Because I happen to like the stuff, if only because I believe it'll make me tougher.

That's the sound of a blog without posts: nuthin' but crickets. Gotta work on that. And if I don't have anything exciting, there's always observational humor, right? Like what's with Chrysler's gun fixation? On my Rochester trip a few weeks ago Enterprise rented me a Dodge Magnum. And last week it was a Dodge Caliber. Somebody clearly has an inferiority thing going on...

I stopped at the Mountain View farmer's market this morning, both to pick up some groceries and in hope of finding something to photograph to feed my stock habit. Among the more prosaic edibles I found some Asian dates, which I thought might make an interesting subject. Of course, one important aspect of shooting for stock is coming up with keywords a potential customer can use to locate the images, so I brought up Safari and typed "asian dates" into the Google search field. Oops! Finally found what I was looking for on page three, after a couple of dozen entries for rock groups performing in that part of the world and, well, the other kind of Asian dates. Which wasn't at all what I had in mind, not that there's anything wrong with that.

So my Mac has been running... no, running doesn't describe it. It's been crawling. It's been slower than anything I've used since... well, even my Atari 800 with the 88KB floppies didn't feel this slow. Suddenly my 2GB memory Dual Core Mac Mini was sucking big time.

And it was sudden. I was pretty sure the problem happened with the last OS upgrade, from Mac OS 10.4.7 to 10.4.8. What added insult to injury was listing to a Mac Geek Gab podcast where they talked about how much better things were running since the update. Especially old PowerPC apps running under Rosetta; apparently Apple had done some major tweaking.

So like a Republican who heard about the Foley scandal and finally decided even he'd had more than he can handle of the abuse, I decided it was time to figure out what the flock was going on. While I was in Southern California for work, I tried some Googling to see if anybody else had run into any problems. (No, not when I was supposed to be working. I'm better than that. Besides, they wouldn't let me plug into their network.) And I found mention of somebody having similar issues to mine, which were identified as problems with their scanner drivers. That sounded interesting, especially since I have this multifunction Brother printer/scanner/fax. And when I got home I shut down the management software, which I didn't need anyway, and got quite a reasonable speedup. And a little later I brought up the Activity Monitor, found another process that belonged to the printer and killed it as well. And my snail-with-arthritis Mac is suddenly a speed demon once more. Well, maybe that's overstating things a mite. But it's back to usable, which is what counts. And I can still print, which is nice.

The only thing I have left to do is figure out how they're starting these processes on bootup, so I can make 'em stop. But there's time for that.

If you've never experienced total boredom and total fascination at one and the same time, clearly you've never served on a jury. Okay, truth be told, neither have I. But I got to experience jury selection firsthand for the very first time, which is enough boredom/fascination for me to make my claim. It isn't nearly as dramatic as Perry Mason or Matlock made it out, I must say. Granted, the case in question wasn't murder, although it did involve the phrase "deadly weapon". And maybe there would be some surprises and oooh! moments during the actual trial. But I doubt it.

Why, I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you something I never saw on TV drama: by the time the juror questioning was done I (and the rest of the prospective jurors) knew pretty much everything about the case. We knew the charges, we knew who the witnesses would be, we knew what the chief witness was likely to say, we knew that the accused wasn't going to testify. In fact, we knew the defense wasn't going to put on any witnesses at all. And we knew that that defense wasn't questioning what happened, merely what the defendant was thinking when he did what he did. (Do you have to say allegedly if neither side seems to dispute it?) So even though I won't be there for the actual trial, about the only thing that's in question is the verdict. And I know where I'd place my bet on that one.

The other big surprise were the jurors, who either didn't watch much courtroom drama or didn't understand what they were seeing. Some of the questions and comments from the jurors would have been laughable if they weren't so serious. Heck, even then; I was wondering how the judge and the attorneys kept a straight face when one juror explained about a domestic violence incident in her own family that was, as she put it, never persecuted. Which might have been a slip, expect she used that same word twice more within a few minutes. A pretty embarrassing mistake, I'd have thought, but even worse from a schoolteacher. I always thought you were supposed to know more than your students.

Anyway, jury selection took three hours yesterday and another hour and a half this morning, at which point the rest of us were sent on our way with a promise of $15 payment plus .34 a mile for our one day of service. But we only get paid one way; I guess they don't care how we get home. Or if.

I don't often get accused of subtlety, but at least my intentions are rarely subject to misinterpretation. Not so a Mr. JD Rhoades, whose blog entry on right-thinking Republicanism and the Mark Foley coverup was too much for a commenter calling him- or herself Maezeppa. Read the post and then read the comment. Then ask yourself if maybe Mr. Rhoades was just being too subtle for some people.

Welcome to part three of my report on my first college alumni weekend, which, not to spoil the surprise, is likely to be my last as well. I'll admit that yesterday was a vast improvement over my disappointments of Thursday and Friday. The day started with a lecture about a research project to visualize colliding galaxies. Reading the description I thought there might be some small relevance to my work with clusters of thousands of servers; turns out not to be the case. But it was still interesting, in a high nerd quotient kind of way.

That was followed by a barbecue lunch, where I talked to the wife of one alum and a computing student and her parents. And realized that the weekend was much more tuned to the needs of students and parents than it was to us grads; they have more of a stake in the here and now than I do, lo these many years since I trod the bricks of RIT.

After that there was a guest lecture by Erin Brockovich, a remarkable woman chiefly because of how unremarkable she really is. Her talk, and her life, are an object lesson in what can happen when an ordinary person siezes an opportunity to do something extraordinary. If the rest of the weekend was a study in the uninvolvement of my fellow alums, about which more anon, Ms. Brockovich was the counterexample we all need.

My alumni get-together was next, or it would have been if there had been any alumni to get together with. There were a grand total of six people from my graduating year to celebrate our 30th. Okay, seven; one guy showed up who hadn't preregistered. And he was the only one I knew, from our days together on Student Senate. (A time I'm just as happy not to remember.) Okay, you might say, thirty years is a long time. But the other anniversaries were equally poorly attended: seven people for the 20th, eight for the 10th. I guess once you get the hell out of Dodge Rochester, you're not all that interested in going back.

That evening was the high point: a performance by actor and comedian Brad Garrett. Mr. Garrett was a lot more animated and a lot bluer than he was allowed to be on Everybody Loves Raymond. And a whole lot funnier. He took particular delight in interacting with (and heckling) the tag team of interpreters who were signing his act, a regular part of life on campus thanks to the presence of the National Technical Institute For The Deaf. The interpreters somehow managed to persevere, and to avoid cracking up in the process. And the audience of several thousand laughed our proverbial asses off, hearing and deaf alike. For at least those couple of hours, I was reminded of how much fun college life could be.

That takes us up to this morning, and a poorly attended alumni brunch. In a little while I'll head back to campus to catch a city tour, and maybe get a few more pictures for my stock photo portfolio. The weekend hasn't been a total loss, at least on that score. On this particular weekend Rochester is a pretty nice, or at least photogenic, place to be. But not a place I feel connected to, not any more. As I said at the beginning, I doubt I'll be back.

Wandering around my old college campus has taught me some interesting lessons. Like how much the world has changed in the last thirty years. Just think of all the things I've seen that either didn't exist or weren't available to me back then. ATMs. Cell phones. PCs. Walking down the hallway in the College of Computing, I keep reading about specialties that weren't even pipe dreams in my day. It's all enough to give a guy a sense of dislocation.

But not in the way you think, or at least not entirely. Because there was a good side to my more primitive CS experience: it was actually possible to know a little about everything, how it works and how the pieces fit together. Today's students can pretty much forget about that, as they become game programmers or database software developers or network infrastructure architects.

So I feel a little bit superior at the same time I envy these grad and undergrad students. But what I don't feel is connected to them. In a very real way, I feel like an alien in an environment that was once mine. I don't fit in; I don't connect. And they don't connect to me. Ironic, isn't it, that the act of revisiting my college makes me feel less a part of it.

Or maybe it's just the experience of not knowing a soul among the faculty or the other visitors. Perhaps I just waited too long for this visit, although I don't know what I can do about that now.

...but that doesn't mean we don't try. Which is what I'm doing for the next few days. Not going home exactly, especially since home isn't there any more. But back to college, for RIT's version of homecoming. It's my first time; I figure once every thirty years is just about right.

Anyway, after spending all day flying across country by way of Dallas, I arrive to discover that dinky and overtaxed brick terminal building that had served Rochester for decades is no more. Now there's a real terminal, one with jetways and all the other comforts of civilized air travel. Like free WiFi, which I may try out on my way back home. But first I had to wait for my bag, which arrived rather quickly, and get my rental car and find my way to my hotel. I had foolishly not printed the map I'd found on Orbitz, but I knew the hotel was close to the airport. Sadly, the rental agent didn't know the street I mentioned. Fortunately, the agent who gave me the keys did. And wasn't that funny: the street in question is the one that leads right out of the airport!

Needless to say, finding my way to the hotel took about three minutes. And then I had a new problem: for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to open the hatch on the Dodge Magnum they'd given me to get my bags out! I tried everything I could think of with no success. There's no trunk release inside the car. And even the owner's manual didn't help. Until I put two and two together and guessed that the hatch release was tied to the door locks. Unlock all the doors and you unlock that fifth door. Obvious, at least once you know it.

So now I'm in my room, enjoying the free WiFi (aren't those two of the most beautiful words in the traveler's vocabulary?) and wondering how long it'll take me to get to sleep, what with my body being on Left Coast time. Also wondering whether I'll know anybody when I visit campus tomorrow. Or if I want to. After all, they'll just be a reminder of all those years since my first visit up here...

Last weekend I drove out to Clements, a flyspeck of a town near Stockton in the Central Valley. My reason for visiting: a Civil War reenactment I'd found out about after one of the reenactors read an earlier post and recognized a smoke ring as being produced by his very own replica 1841 cannon. He pointed me to his group's site, which got me to a calendar of upcoming events. So when the day arrived, I headed east in search of some interesting photo ops. Which I got; you can see some of the result on my Flickr page and others in my stock photo portfolio. But that's not what I wanted to write about.

What I found interesting is how real it started to feel, with the cannons blazing and the rifles firing and the few mounted combatants racing at each other. And the fallen, doing a pretty good job of looking injured, or dead. That's when it stopped being fun, at least for a moment. I thought about the real battles, a long way from here and a long time past, when it wasn't about entertainment, and when the discomfort of living rough lasted for months and years instead of a long weekend. It was a relief to see the battlefield dead rise up, shake hands and relax before their next encounter.

One other thing: in rating one of my pictures for a different stock photo site, a reviewer emailed me about how strange he found it that people in California stage Civil War reenactments, since California didn't even exist at the time. Turns out he was wrong. As any West Coast football fan knows, California took on a certain prominence with the 1849 Gold Rush; it became a state a year later. And even though there wasn't any Civil War action out here, there were battles as close as Arizona and New Mexico, to say nothing of tens of thousands of volunteers who saw action elsewhere. Not that any of that matters to the reenactors. I bet they'd be at it no matter where they lived.