Brandon's Blog

11/25/2013 #

Mark Steyn

I just shamefully purchased Mark Steyn’s Christmas album, and – after struggling to get a refund on Amazon – found this gem on his website’s FAQ:

Q: What does he like to do when he’s not writing?

A: Dogsledding.

Q: That’s it?

A: He also likes recording Christmas singles. Would you like to hear his latest?

Q: No.

A: Sure?

Q: Yes.

A: Wait a minute, how did the Qs wind up doing the answers and the As doing the questions?

Q: Beats me.

A: There you go again.

Update 1: the album isn’t that bad.

Update 2: it’s pretty bad.

11/21/2013 #

Lifehacking

I find myself fairly devoted to Gawker-run blogs, and I don’t really know why.  I enjoy reading Deadspin (mostly for Drew Magary’s stuff, which has a nice blend of sports, nonsense, and parenthood humor). Gizmodo is far superior to Engadget for tech stuff.  Lifehacker is quite nice for apps, projects, and advice.

“Lifehacking,” a term with rising usage recently, is not a great word to use for what I like about the site.  Typical lifehacking, to me, is lame stuff like “Get a Hotel Upgrade by Emailing the Manager Directly”, which is kind of the zero-sum thinking that can often be seen on college campuses, sticking it to The Man.  And by The Man, I mean a middle class small business owner who now has 100 more e-mails per day thanks to idiots wanting a bigger bed for free.

I see what I might call “white hat lifehacking” to be more like “life engineering,” in the sense of applying principles and resources in a sensible way to deliver value beyond the status quo.  I would provide “Build a Cheap Home Automation System in 10 Minutes with Ninja Blocks” as an example of the noble type of lifehacking.

11/21/2013 #

Life Thoughts

As work begins to tail off for the holiday season, it’s time to get back to blogging, which means back to introspection, retrospection, and prospection (the Internet says it’s a word and Chrome disagrees!).

Before I get to tech stuff, writing that first line made me think a bit about adding the parenthood element to life.  I find that my post-Claire consciousness is less apt to turn its eye inward.  I used to do that thing probably every tweens-era former honors student type does, just looking at people and internally remarking on how vacant so many people look while walking around.  Making my drive out in the afternoon these days, I feel like I probably look that part pretty well myself.

The word I arrive at the most is “consuming,” not so much in the “consuming fire” sense, or the “consuming things” way, but more like inflating a balloon within a crowded box, “consuming space” kind of way.  Our society’s extension of youthful conditions to adult circumstances has afforded us the luxury of sole person-hood for unprecedented periods of time within a lifespan.

A lot of the “startup culture” in Silicon Valley is obviously supported by this trend; if I were an academic I would cheekily call it the “fecundity-prolificacy gap.”  People on Hacker News are constantly giving the “you have nothing to lose” argument to college grads regarding taking jobs for little pay and zero stability in high cost of living zones like San Francisco.  Why not?

It’s interesting, and probably a great thing for the world in general.  This probably makes the transition into parenthood more intense than in the, say, pre-1950’s era.

8/7/2013 #

Personal Shopper

It just struck me that a lot of the more superficial privacy concerns (e.g., Facebook knows what kind of coffee I like!) would be considered positives in a personal assistant or a personal shopper.  Although I suppose a personal shopper who then sold that intelligence to junk mail companies might be the better analogy to what goes on online.

But if you think about it, there are some similarities with the sort of romanticized small business owner who knows your order and when you like to come in.  And I really find depersonalized or swing-and-miss advertisements online to be more annoying than properly keyed ones.  Like, I don’t want to see a week’s worth of livestock medicine ads because I did a search on swine flu.

It’s especially annoying when I buy something on Amazon and then they advertise it to me for a week afterwards like I didn’t really buy it.  I know this stuff is hard to do at world-scale, but come on, you made the sale already.

8/1/2013 #

Collisions and Vibrations

Microsoft, in just the kind of bad luck fit that tends to happen when more important stuff is going wrong as well, has had its second major branding debacle in recent memory: first Metro, now SkyDrive has to change its name for trademark infringement reasons.  Well, Metro didn’t so much change its name as relinquish its name.  But anyway.

Amazon decided to phone in a Prime order and dumped it into FedEx’s deplorable Smart Post system.  The fact that the delay only cost a day off of their guaranteed two day shipping, while a third party seller can’t seem to find their packaging tape in that amount of time, is stunning to me and to complain would make me feel small and whiny indeed.  But it’s the temperature sensor for the pool, which for some reason has felt extremely important for me to fix, despite it not being at all important to fix.  I think the poor advice we got from our “pool school” session made me eager to square the thing away myself as soon as possible.  There’s some deep but unimportant psychology going on there, and I’ll be happy to stick a bow on the whole situation and be done.

We got the TV and the non-in-wall components of the accompanying sound system set up in the media room over the weekend.  We’d piddled with the TV some already, but last night I cranked up the volume (extensive testing shows we can get away with this after 7pm bedtime!) on the Top Gun final scene.  The surround was very effective, “transparent” being the word that came to mind.  The TV is glorious and awaits full HD cinematic content versus old DVDs.

But the thought that was stuck in my head, amazingly, was “that’s a darn good sub-woofer.”  The sub was the only item for which I overran my guideline expected budget by just a bit, and I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it at the time, but I’m glad I did.  It doesn’t bark at you, announcing its position in the room, but it really puts out the vibration.  I’m not a bass head, but for a theater room it’s amazingly effective at establishing the “movie feel,” much more than I expected it to be.

I’m also finding that having a true center channel speaker makes the otherwise wretched-seeming audio mixing in modern movies actually make sense.  It’s like the dialogue is actually coming out of the television and, with a good speaker, really does stand out over background music and ambient stuff.

Work stuff is really calming down, which I expect to be a trend heading toward the end of the year.  This is giving me a chance to think about things more than usual and do some project work.  My big programming project has been well-received, which is a load off.  MS Access is decreasingly stable with higher version numbers and needs to be eliminated from the majority of my architecture, aside from management tasks.  All good stuff to work on in the months to come.

And now it looks like I get to charter my second IT project of the year!  Oh joy!

6/24/2013 #

Cam Newton and Me, Not to Be

I went to the AT&T store and paced around until I located the unadorned Windows Phone 8 section.  I was actually more impressed with the HTC 8X than the Lumia 920, aside from it not having several of the features that were making the overall WP8 calculus seem to play out favorably for me.

The wireless charging hardware burden on the 920’s chassis is blatant and painful to see.  I picked at the wraparound portion of the colored rear bezel for a few seconds hoping that it was an aftermarket case or jacket of some kind.  It was not.  It’s hard to talk seriously about weight differences on the order of magnitude of a handful of grams, but the phone was uncomfortably heavy at least on a perceptual level.

The screen was gorgeous as promised, really making my aging Eclair/Froyo-era device look toy-like, and perhaps challenging Kristin’s iPhone 5.  I’d say that the vibrancy is challenged by the dichromatic proclivities of WP8, with perhaps more perceptive weight going toward a feeling of crispness around text versus a general feeling of unscientific “LCD nice-ness” in alignment with what we would normally assess on a television or computer monitor.

IE 10 for WP8 didn’t upset me in my brief moment messing with it, but I felt uncomfortable, more than I expected to feel, with the idea of me as a WP8 user.  Something about watching the music app tiles fly by made me feel like I was renting a room in those shadowy, commercialized corners of Windows Media Player that I prefer to remain irrelevant to me.

In a similar vein, the online materials I read about SkyDrive integration, poor as it may be in some scenarios, made me also uncomfortable.  After “upgrading” to Office 2013, I believe I was compelled to have a SkyDrive account registered under my name, although I am not using it.  I think the point I’m trying to cobble together here is that I felt anxiety about leaving one ecosystem and entering another.  I knew that my Gmail experience would be crippled, but just the feeling of “Windows” this and “Xbox” that had a more severe impact on me than I anticipated.

I felt like the phone I was holding wasn’t mine, which maybe makes the rest of this relatively unimportant.  If you showed me a skinny, sleeker 920 that still supported wireless charging, I might see moving things to SkyDrive, or at least tolerating its limited use in the phone’s scope.  But for now it just didn’t feel right.  Nor does the S4, so I hold off on everything for now.

6/20/2013 #

Paging Jessica Alba...

I think maybe all the change we’re preparing for at this point with the house, plus preparation for a full-time decked-out home office, has made me question my existing sensibilities and “established norms” from a tech perspective.

I wonder sometimes why I’m not using Windows Phone 8.  Okay, there, I said it.

Android phone hardware is either in a renaissance of ascendance or a rut of stasis depending on how you look at it.  I feel the Google experience is significantly enhanced on my Nexus 7 versus my Galaxy S, especially now that I am a - deep breath - Google Play Music All Access subscriber.

I found that after I went to CyanogenMod 10 on my Galaxy S that I wasn’t installing apps anymore.  Apps are on the tablet except for a few critical mobile workhorses: Pocket, Kindle, Fidelity (for depositing checks), Google Maps (although I’m not hugely loyal).  Pocket doesn’t have a WP8 client, but you can read using your browser.  That would sting a bit, but having Kindle support is really nice, and Fidelity supports WP8 just fine.

I can feel my eyes get starry just thinking about wireless charging on my nightstand, and I really think the Metro thing might work for a mobile device.  Plus, it has that kid mode thing Jessica Alba talks about, which could potentially be a lot better toddler lock than what you can do on the Android side of things.

I want to say that Google Now is just as amazing as the tech writers think it is, but it’s really not for me.  If I took an airplane flight every week or wanted to track a billion packages it would be good, but most of the time it just quotes me the wrong “time to drive home” 30 minutes after I arrive at the office in the morning.  It’s again far better on the tablet and great for travel, but on the cell phone it just feels like it’s playing catch-up.

I think, now that my apps are generally segregated to the tablet, I am much more a hardware buyer than an ecosystem buyer for phones, and I really can’t argue with the Lumia’s hardware.  If I build a Windows 8 desktop in the relatively near future and get that syncing properly with the phone, that’s kind of nice compared to SD card hell on Android.

I think I need to go to a store and just mess around with the phone for a while, to get out of the echo chamber of the tech media and really see how it feels.

6/17/2013 #

Servant to the Fuzz

There was a pointless discussion on Reddit regarding a TV whose volume level setting was a scale between zero and 63.  I hadn’t made the connections, but that implies at a bit-by-bit level they optimized their setting value into six bits (2^6 = 64, the number of settings from zero to 63).  Maybe there’s another bit or two used for indicating the mute and/or speaker disabling or something like that to use up the rest of the 8-bit byte, but regardless, from a technical standpoint it at least makes some kind of sense.

One usability person chimed in that a well-designed application would hide such details from the user, instead only showing a graphical indicator.  Essentially, if you can’t influence the scale of the number, just hide the details.

Of course, if you’re a little neurotic and like to know the number, this would probably drive you nuts.  I have the typical levels (at least ranges) memorized for our AV receiver, for example, and would be very irritated to have to think spatially to assess where I am in those ranges.

Given the kind of work I do right now, I just thought, why in the world wouldn’t you just multiply the 63-based number by ¹⁰⁰⁄₆₃ to scale it up to a 100-based number?  The only reason we choose 100 is because of the “natural” concept of percentages, so why not just lie to the user and pretend you’re storing it as such?

It was just interesting to me that a reasonable sample of a technical crowd didn’t think to “misrepresent” the number; the only acceptable solution was to obfuscate, not transform.

6/8/2013 #

Acid Test

My definitive test for a series finale is whether or not it makes you want to watch Episode 1 immediately after.  As tough as it was to make it all the way through (or at least nap through) the 170+ episodes, Star Trek TNG’s finale did just that.

6/6/2013 #

Wups

I just realized that Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have always been the same author in my head.  I have now read or am reading books by both, and never realized I was reading from two different authors.  Ha.  I’m 35% through Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), which is no easier to read after several hundred pages but is finding its way toward being a bit of a page turner, in a slow-bleed marathon kind of way.

I am realizing that one of the least fancy but most deeply important professional attributes is actually reliability.  I think that, in times where I feel my localized reputation has exceeded the value of my work to date, I can often attribute this to being reliable.  Even in fairly deterministic analytic work, enough relies on trust that reliability really factors in.