April 25, 2005
My Ugly White Duckling
My old 20GB ipod never would cooperate with KAMAZ. I spent a lot of frustrating hours trying to resolve the issue but things never worked out. Eventually IT frustration and a lack of music in my car prevailed, so I looked for an alternative to an iPod. The MP3 player market comes in two segments -- iPod, notiPod. I ended up buying the biggest capacity player I could find. You would have figured I could have replaced a two-year old 20GB iPod with something smaller-sized and bigger-hard drive'd. All I managed to find was a Creative Zen Touch that only had 20GB and manages to be bigger than the iPod.
So yeah, for all its talk about building 'iPod Killers,' Creative is very much an also-ran. The Zen is a pale imitator. It's heavier, uglier, and not much less expensive. I see this player and I immediately think to myself, "Creative is Fucked." They're either too expensive or not good enough. Shareholders are finding this out, this quarter Creative had net earnings of one million dollars (that's a penny per share). That's the same as zero as far as anyone serious is concerned.
At any rate, I don't care about their long-term health, I care about playing music in my car and listening to podcasts. The Zen manages to work. The Zen communicated perfectly and instantly with my pc using a USB2.0 link. Although it's no iTunes, the creative software for synching music libraries, playlists, and my player works well enough.
One thing I hate about iPods are those stupid fucking touch wheel surfaces. The Zen has nice hard tactile buttons. No tapping rubbish, just press and go. Unfortunately it does have a single touch-wheel-like slider for paging through songs but i can live with it. I'd far prefer mechanical though. Sony used to make (unpopular) hand phones that had a mechanical scroll wheel in the corner. That's what I'd like.
I bought a Belkin Tunecast II FM Mobile transmitter accessory for playing music through the car radio system. It's a generalized iTrip -- a little pod that plugs into the output jack. Unlike the iTrip, it has a display and controls to adjust the transmitting station directly, rather than the awkward hack the iTrip uses (for each frequency a songs made of tones that communicate to the iTrip). This requires that it use two triple AAA batteries. I've had mixed success with the unit and I have not fully debugged it yet. The main problem is that some songs come across with a lot of noise or come across weakly in general.
It seems that: 1) fresh batteries in the transmitter helps 2) turning up the Zen's output volume to 100% helps. It's like if the input signal is strong, the circuitry can ignore noise and emits a strong, clear signal.
I also noticed a difference where some songs sound fine, others sound weak. I realized that some of the weak songs I'd recently downloaded. Why might this matter? The older songs have been around long enough that I had iTunes run it's 'auto volume leveling' routine and make everything play at the same and full loudness. I didn't run this on the latest songs. Perhaps their volume range isn't stretched out the full way, so the signal they're emitting is a bit puny compared to the auto-levelled songs. I haven't fed the recent music through the routine yet.
Finally one more clue. Sometimes when the ambient static noise builds while playing, if I physically touch the transmitters the noise totally dissipates and I get a nearly perfect signal. As soon as I remove my hand, the noise returns. What does this suggest?
One final note... On my way to work I drive through several tunnels. With both the iTrip and the other Belkin unit I experience a strange phenomenon. My standard broadcast frequency is 88.7 -- there is no stray broadcasts intruding on this signal. Whenever I drive into the tunnel, I totally lose the signal, I start picking up other blurry signals, noise, static, etc. But if I turn the radio to 88.9, I pick up BBC just fine.
What's going on here? I have two theories: 1) the tunnel mangles the signals of other stations and sprays them as intererence on my puny 88.7 transmitting signal, but it can't overwhelm the much strong 88.9 BBC signal. 2) the tunnel was designed with some sort of broadcasting system inside it to ensure continuity of the signal, where some sort of antenna outside picks up radio stations and retransmits them in the tunnel. Maybe it does a sloppy job of rebroadcasting. [As I write hypothesis two, I realize how stupid and unlikely it sounds].
April 21, 2005
Mister
Mister standing at our living room window on Christmas Day.
Tonight Mister and Mona spotted a foot-long rat that had wondered in from the street and tried to trap it. Mona stayed on full patrol mode for the rest of the night, pacing and sniffing and checking the yard continually for an hour. She has an enormous prey drive. Mister went upstairs and fell asleep on his pile of blankets and pillows.
April 17, 2005
The losing team gets a trip to the boardroom. Someone will be fired.
Mid-season I've been caught up in the first show I've genuinely loved to watch since 31die and I spent a season of Thursdays in 2001 watching the first year of Survivor, rooting Richard Hatch to victory.
Maybe I should be ashamed to say I enjoy 'The Apprentice,' but I'm not -- I think it's hilarious.
Apprentice has the typical Mark Burnett format of two warring teams composed of a dozen incompatible assholes engaged in silly competitive tasks. The twist that makes the show so fun is 'Mr Trump' and his two grouchy henchmen. It's clear the guy is playing a satire of himself and everyone else is playing along with it -- shameless self-promotion, ridiculous photos of him doing important things -- barking into a speakerphone, sitting behind a desk piled comically high with papers, grimly climbing the ladder of his corporate jet.
It's him that makes the show funny. Otherwise it would be a very tedious show that reminds me of a lot of the business department projects I was forced to work on in university, except there the chief problem wasn't ambition and scheming, but the more pedestrian sloth and stupidity.
The shame in writing this article is that I remember so few of the one-liners that were thrown off. Certainly the funniest thing tonight was the idiotic 22-yo 'Project Manager' attempting to bribe the full time staff with hundred dollar bills. The other team members looked on wiltingly and the 'bribed' staff looked on incredulously. When that didn't work, banning access to the crunch-time pizza was his followup strategy. Perhaps if 31die ever gets his act together and gets his tenure in the EE/CS department at NUS I'll have a tv buddy that can help me remember more of this shit, but for now, I was in a room with only my two dogs and my wife, who was being kicked distressingly vigorously by a very-soon-to-arrive little boy-embryo named Luke.
April 08, 2005
The Amazing Flickr
Flickr is the most creative web service I've seen since Google showed up years ago. In just two minutes tonight I discovered, and tried out, two amazing new services I didn't know existed: 1) adding "note" areas to pictures and 2) how easily flickr will post the photo to your blog as a new entry.
April 02, 2005
Three Years Later, hardcases discover our cache
click on picture to read the log
I've always wondered when this would happen.
Three years ago, just before I returned to Singapore, Ling, Matt, and I took a trip to Death Valley. While there we planted a multi-segment cache in what we hoped was a tough terrain requiring 4wd driving, long hikes, and cleverness. Since then there have been few attempts to find the cache, and all of them have been feeble.
For no good reason, recently I took a look at our Asymptotic Linked List cache recently and was shocked to discover that it had just been found. A couple geocache enthusiasts had spent several weekends hunting it down.
The most satisfying thing is that they really appreciated the cache and seemed to enjoy tracking it as much I we enjoyed setting it. They were kind enough to send me scans of the film inside the box. It was tortured by the elements during those three years but still had servicable images that have good character.
I told the guys that they were welcome to take over stewardship of the cache. So now hopefully it will be maintained (the chances of me returning are infintessimal) and maybe even some more nodes will be added to this 'linked list'.