A Mind is a Terrible Thing

Now this is just bloomin’ smart.  Early this month, I put in a pre-order for the eagerly anticipated new Electronic Arts game "Spore".  It’s basically a massive evolution simulator and looks to be lots of fun.  Actually, it reminds me of Sim Earth, Sim City, Civilization, and Masters of Orion. 

(Also brilliant: Selling the "creature creator" module ahead of time.  I’ve had quite a bit of fun ‘doodling’ new critters.  My undertanding is that the full game will make use of the million-plus creatures people have created and uploaded to their Sporepedia accounts.)

Computer shops in Bangalore do tend to be pretty up on the latest stuff — but I’m not there 98% of the time.  Hence, the "digital download" — meaning that I’ll download and install the game over our DSL line here in Penukonda.  I figured I’d have to wait another 10 days…and then wait even longer as everybody in more advantageous parts of the world and faster connections swamped the download servers.

Here’s the brilliant part:  The game is already downloading, as of yesterday. 

When your product is available in EA Download Manager in a preload state, you will be able to download the product ahead of the product release date.  This will save you time when the game becomes available to unlock, unpack, and install.

At our speeds (256kbs), it’ll take several days to get it all (looks pretty massive, probably about 4GB), but then the installer will wait until it gets the final unencryption/installation file, on the day Spore is released to market.  What this does, obviously, is keep the server downloads manageable and avoiding, for instance, the craziness that happened last month in the US when the new iPhone hit the market (their activation computers went belly up).  Now that’s thinking ahead.

I will, of course, post a review once I’ve gotten to play Spore for a while…

Ever since we finally found the right kinds of pots to use with our magnetic induction cooker, we’ve been experimenting far more with various recipes and methods.

Tonight, I checked to see whether it could get vegetable oil hot enough to cook french fries properly.

Answer:  Oh yes.

The result was crispy and delish.  With a side of genuine Heinz ketchup, the results of the experiment soon disappeared.

So far, the only real downside to the cooker was the difficulty we did have in getting the right kind of stainless steel pots to use on it.  For us, they actually ended up being some super-cheap Indian-style pots from a little place several blocks over from Commercial Street in Bangalore.  The more expensive stainless pots kept not working.  What we did was literally to take the cooker with us while shopping back in March, and tried the pots on it, with some water.  Once located, we told ‘em, "Okay, five of those in different sizes please.  With lids."

The upside is these induction cookers are very efficient — more than twice as efficient as gas, in fact (84% versus 40%).  Very good temperature control, plus they heat stuff extremely fast.  The single-burner cooker itself cost about 3500Rs (about $87.50 US), for a fairly high-end model.

Okay, I’ve had a little more time for evaluation, plus Stephanie decided to follow my lead and install it on her desktop PC, too.  Some observations:

• T’bird clearly isn’t quite as slick and polished as Firefox.  I’ve noticed a few oddities, with no explanation as to why the given feature or whatever doesn’t work as it ought to.  Also, nowhere near as many add-ons to choose from.
• One such area is in importing from Outlook.  There’s no reason given as to why T’bird fails to import Outlook’s settings, it just fails.  I don’t consider this a show-stopper though, as it’s not that big a deal to enter my various email account settings, but more info as to why the import failed would be appreciated.
• A trick for making sure you get all of your Outlook emails and folders imported: In Outlook, open every single PST file you have, including the archives.  Then close Outlook.  Start T’bird and run the import mail function.  If you have something on the order of 30k emails over 10 years, the process is gonna take a while.  Also, if you have tons and tons of folders as Stephanie had, it may seem as if there’s no progress for a long time at first — be patient, because it takes the import function a while to generate all the folders and mail files before it even begins to populate them with your imported emails.  We’re talking like half an hour, 45 min in all.
• There’s something hinky about the delete message function.  I wish I could describe it precisely, but on initial installation it just didn’t seem to work quite right.  Message navigation also seems strange, although it could be in part because I always prefer to use a separate message window, not a viewing pane in the main program.
• A word of caution:  When installing add-ons and themes, do them only one at a time.  Last night, Stephanie tried to install a whole bunch and on restart, her configuration was FUBAR’d.  Had to uninstall and start over.
• For those who want portability, there are some schemes and methods, but the first thing is to know how to manage Thunderbird profiles.  On Windows, the default location for the profile — which contains not only all your custom settings, add-ons, and themes, but also your email — is C:\Documents and Settings\(your user name)\Application Data\Thunderbird.  That said, you can only see that directory if you have "See Hidden Folders and Files" turned on in Windows Explorer.  Not sure what the deal is for Mac or Linux, where the files are stored.  But anyway, that whole profile can be copied elsewhere (and is a very good candidate for regular backing up).  You can also create additional profiles or manage existing ones with the command Run>thunderbird -profilemanager
• The idea is you move the profile where you want (copying is better, in case of problems), then use the profilemanager utility to point to the new location.  This is also how you can set up identical profiles on multiple machines (such as on a desktop and laptop).

Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll post on this topic again later if I’ve anything else to add.

For the record, I actually tried ‘Thunderbird’ — the cheap, fortified wine — back in college.  (Why is it, I wonder, that very nearly all of the most incredibly stupid and/or self-destructive things we ever did were always ‘back in college’?)  Let’s just say the experience is not one I care to repeat.

Ever.  *shudder* 

These days, however, ‘Thunderbird‘ most typically refers not to the quasi-wine product, nor the old Pontiac Ford (tks, LG) car model, nor the great totem of the Native American peoples — but rather to the open source email program from the collective geniuses at Mozilla.

I’ve long since been a total convert to Firefox, to the point where it’s one of the first things I install on any new or reimaged computer.  But I’ve been using Microsoft Office for just about as long as I’ve owned computers, too, and this includes the Office email program, Outlook.

Don’t get me wrong — Outlook’s okay.  I like the integrated email/scheduler/task management functions.  Way back, I switched to Outlook from Eudora and except for one memorably disastrous experiment, I never returned.  Alas though, my copy of MS office is the 2003 version; I’ve never been able to justify the expense for upgrading to the much-delayed Office 2007.

A couple things have really bugged me, too, about Outlook.  For one, its Junk email filters aren’t all that good.  For another, the customization is rather limited for my tastes (I like to fiddle with everything).

But the part that really bothered me is the Outlook PST file structure.  See, Outlook stores its email in files ending with the suffix .PST.  Most users don’t even know where this file is kept, never mind how bloated it might have become through years of use and poor deletion habits.  The bigger the PST file gets, the longer it takes Outlook to load…plus there is the risk of file corruption.  If a PST file gets corrupted and you don’t have a backup, you are screwed.

Me, I knew where the files were; I moved them to somewhere more convenient, and I also archived and backed up regularly.  The downside is I ended up with a proliferation of about 20 archive PST files ranging in size from 9 to 65MB each, and this made finding some old message somewhere darned near impossible.

Finally, yesterday I said to myself, "Self: Why are we still using a five year old email program?"

Myself replied, "Because Microsoft didn’t come out with a new release of Microsquishy Office while Morn Enterprises was still an ongoing concern, and hence a valid tax write-off against receipts."

I nodded knowingly, knowing myself to be a very clever person indeed. 

So anyway, I thought I’d give Thunderbird 2.0 a spin.  I had tried 1.0 and I think 1.5 — and felt both of those to be not quite ready for prime-time.  I downloaded it, installed it…found that the "Import Settings" from Outlook feature didn’t work — but what did work quite well were the import mail and address book functions.  Then I started installing the add-ons.  Ohhh, but I do love add-ons.  I have over 20 installed.  Plus I tried a half dozen themes before settling on "Mostly Crystal" by CatThief.  Among the add-ons I consider essential to my making the jump from Outlook to Thunderbird was ‘Lightning’ — a calendar and task utility.

I played around with Thunderbird some last night, and made the decision that if I could reasonably import all of my old archive mail boxes, that’d be it.  And today, that’s what I did.  Moreover, I went through all of the old folders, reorganizing and sorting.  (I couldn’t believe it…I actually had email dating back to 1997.)  But now EVERYTHING is inside just the one program.

Another feature I’m playing with is the integrated RSS aggregator & news/blog reader.  Oh my…sweet.    Hello, Talking Points Memo.

As always with these technical reviews of mine, I may revisit later for an updated opinion.  But for right now, I’m very happy with Thunderbird.

Is The MacBook Air A Flop? – Business on The Huffington Post
January 24, 2008 11:19 AM
Next week, the Macbook Air finally goes on sale, and starting at $1,799 for an 80-gigabyte hard drive and $3,100 for a solid state drive 64-gigabyte machine, it’s not cheap. So is the uber-thin, aluminum-clad laptop worth the price? According to several top-tier tech critics, the answer is a resounding no.

At first, when I saw the MacBook Air unveiled, my geekitude went ka-thumpa.  So thin!  So fly!  Wow, pretty, me wants! 

With my Sony VAIO VGN-TX650P ultra-portable beginning to show signs of wearing out (I’ve had it over two years now, and sometimes the DVD drive decides it wants to keep ejecting over and over, a dozen times a second), was this the enticement to finally tempt me from the Dark Side (aka, Windows machines)?

Then I started learning certain details.  Here is why I won’t get a MacBook Air:

• Battery:  They took one mistake and compounded it with another.  The first mistake was in building a machine with less than four hours battery life, and then made it worse with a non-removable/swappable battery.  For all the talk about how "great this is for travelers", the MacBook air wouldn’t even last the flight from Chicago to LA.  As a point of comparison, when new, my nearly obsolete VAIO got up to five hours on the normal battery and over eight on the extra extended battery; I could run all day on that thing without plugging in.
• Ports:  Just one USB port?!  No Ethernet port.  No Firewire.  Non-standard DVI/VGA port.  C’mon, they’re not that big!  Last thing I need is a backpack or purse full of dongles, cable adapters, and a USB hub.  Comparison: The old VAIO has two USB ports, one Firewire 400 (iLink), Ethernet, 56k modem, PCMCIA slot, SD Card slot, and standard VGA out (up to 1600×1200 resolution).
• Disk:  80GB max?  That’s basically the same drive as in my 80GB iPod.  Seriously.  (Forget going from $1800 to three Large just to get 64GB of solid-state flash storage. Ain’t worth the bump, unless one has money to burn.  And I don’t.  Unless somebody out there feels like being my sugar-daddy/mama…?  Nah, forget it.  If I had $3k, I’d rather blow it on a machine with a swappable battery and better ports.)
• DVD/CD drive:  External only.  This isn’t such a huge deal, but the ‘wireless access to another computer’s drive’ often isn’t practical.  I can see leaving it off the computer, but the external drive should be standard, not just a $99 option.  Again — my tiny VAIO has a DVD burner.  Nuff said.

Right now, there’s about a 50/50 chance I’ll get a new ‘puter on our next trip to Singapore.  If that happens, it’s far more likely to be another VAIO sub-micro or similar.  For those specs above, the battery and lack of ports are the ‘deal killers’ for me.

Sorry… it was either that, or the even worse "Phone Phollies".

Even before we left for the US at the end of October, I’d a feeling that my Motorola MPX220 "Windows Mobile" GSM quadband phone was in trouble.  There’d been a number of hiccups in the last few months where people said they couldn’t reach me — even though I knew the phone was on.  Or I’d go in to my office and discover that for some mysterious reason, the phone had decided to shut itself off.

Didn’t seem to be a battery problem, as it would charge normally and seemed to have roughly the usual time between charges.

A couple times, the phone just started vibrating madly, and wouldn’t quit until I’d pulled the battery.  And upon occasion, it was just dead — again, until I pulled the battery and put it back in.  Actually, in retrospect, that happened quite a lot, but most often in the past two years seemed to have more to do with heavy data transfers and modem use.

Anyway, yeah, clear signs of a phone on its way to the Electronic Graveyard of Broken Gadgetry.  The shutdowns and ignored incoming calls were obviously a form of silicon senility.

So yesterday, here in Bangalore, I went out and bought a new Motorola K1 Razor.  Gotta love India…I was able to get a decent price on it, and it included a bunch of usually optional accessories.  I know the phone isn’t the most advanced currently available, not even close, but it’s a nice mid-range phone and doesn’t make me feel as if I’ve given up features from the poor, decrepit MPX220.

One of the main things I really needed to do was to get all my contacts off the old phone, into my VAIO laptop and Outlook, edit to fix up the entries, and then onto the new phone.  Fortunately, I managed it with only a bit of hair-pulling and forehead bloodying (plus the MPX220 crashed again, as someone tried to call me and the phone decided to shut down instead). 

I will admit, also, that the new Motorola phone tools are pretty slick and without much trouble at all, I was able to take one of my MP3 files, edit it into a suitable ringtone and then ship it out to the K1.  (It’s "Boe", from the Doctor Who Series 3 Volume 2 soundtrack…actually a beautifully melancholy and wistful tune.)

I’ll post more in terms of a review later, after I’ve used the new phone for a time.

Just got a bunch of this stuff — "Bacon Salt" — just on the hopeful assumption that it would be yummy.

Thing is, although there is a bit of dairy in it (also wheat and MSG, FYI for those sensitive to such), it’s both vegetarian and kosher.  And it really, really is delish.  I just put some on mashed potatoes earlier this evening, and it truly does convey the taste.  I’d say if anything, a tiny bit goes a long, long way.  Right now I’m rather full from dinner, but we also got some deviled eggs from the store earlier today, and I’m thinking the Bacon Salt would go great on those.

Thumbs up.  (Later:  Yes, it’s fantastic on deviled eggs.)

And I’ve a feeling we’re gonna have to hide the shaker bottle from our friends at the ashram in Penukonda.  (Fortunately, I had the foresight to order eight of ‘em.)

Update:  It’s also really good when sprinkled on a glass of tomato juice.

2nd Update:  Great on veggie pizza, too, but I think most folks would’ve figured that one out for themselves.

Okay, so put me in a red uniform and beam me down to that odd little planet .  I’m sure those unusual sensor readings are nothing more than, um, benign life forms.  Hey, what’s this tag on the inside of my collar?  "If you’re wearing this and beaming down with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, there’s a 99% chance you won’t be coming back…"

Truth is, some of my very earliest memories are of watching Star Trek, because my father happened to enjoy the show, and during its first couple of years, it was on early enough to be before my bedtime.  (I also loved The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, even though they were scary and gave me nightmares.) 

Later, when Trek finally went into syndication, I used to watch it every time I could, and when I got a cassette tape recorder, would actually record the episodes.  Scratchy, loud whistling from interference, such that it could barely be heard on playback…but play them, I did.  Over and over, practically memorizing some shows.  I also remember that it took me years before I finally saw "Day of the Dove" — one episode that never seemed to make the rounds.

Anyway, most are aware that the franchise has lived on through movies and follow-on TV series such as Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise.  There’s also a pretty healthy market yet for Trek-based novels and stories, and even role-playing and computer games.

Fans, too, have continued to keep the flame burning.  It’s a little known fact that except for a single add-on novel by James Blish (the author originally contracted to write the episodic book versions of the original TV shows), "Spock Must Die," the only original stories at first were written and self-published by the fans.

Doesn’t take much imagination to realize that such fans would, given the technology, perhaps give in to the temptation to try to create new episodes of their beloved Star Trek.  Of course, to do it well takes money and know-how.  Some groups produce audio-only stories, and others rely heavily on green-screen overlays and computer animation.  A few, such as the bunch behind Starship Farragut, went further and have tried to really do it right.

One limitation inherent in all this has to do with Paramount and their enforcement of their copyrights on the Trek franchise.  Basically, they’ve turned a benign blind eye to these fan efforts…provided no money is made on the production.

Thus, the only people who can do this have solid financial backing and do it for real love.  And that’s where I come to the one group that’s clearly way ahead of the rest in production values.  This is the group at "Star Trek: New Voyages", headed by James Cawley, a guy who coincidentally is one of the best Elvis impersonators out there — and his Jim Kirk ain’t bad, either.

Thus far, they’ve produced four episodes and one vignette, most available for download via the link above.  (They’ve lots of mirrors, so the bittorrent is pretty quick.)  Their fifth episode is already in post-production.  Set in the fourth year of the original Enterprise "five year mission", these shows feature new and sometimes inexperienced actors playing the roles of the same characters we know and love — Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and so on.

The first New Voyages episode, "Come What May" is interesting, story-wise, but very rough around the edges.  And unfortunately, Cawley decided to wear his Elvis pompador.  My god, did he look silly.  Still, I enjoyed their bit of "Trek canon" tie-in regarding future events in the Trek universe.  I’m not sure why this one isn’t available on their website nowadays…possibly precisely because it seemed so rough.  Perhaps they consider it their pilot episode.  As such though, their episode numbering actually begins with the next one.

Their second attempt (listed as episode 4×01) was a huge step forward, and directly built upon one of my favorite original episodes, "The Doomsday Machine" — a story about a virtually unkillable planet destroying device.  "In Harm’s Way" featured not just Kirk’s crew, but also that of his predecessor in the captain’s chair, Captain Cristopher Pike.  I found it to be surprisingly well done and quite enjoyable…although I will admit that some of the time paradox stuff was a touch confusing.  A notable feature of this episode though is the appearance of two actors from the original series: William Windom (who had appeared as Commodore Matt Decker in "The Doomsday Machine") and BarBara Luna, who was in "Mirror, Mirror."

(I will also add that Cawley’s hair was rather more under control.  Plus the make-up for Mr. Spock got noticeably better.)

New Voyages’ 3rd ‘mission’, "To Serve All My Days," was a real coup: They got Walter Koenig to appear as Pavel Chekov, reprising his role from the original series, in a story written by Dorothy Fontana, a rather famous Trek screenwriter.  Again, the sets got incrementally better and the special effects shots were up to modern television quality, in my opinion.

Word must be getting around, because George Takei signed on to play Sulu in "World Enough and Time."  During our last trip to Bangalore and the Ballal Residency with its lovely high-speed broadband, I downloaded that episode.

I have to say, I was simply blown away by it.  Without a doubt, it’s their best effort to date.  The show is beautifully done, the special effects gorgeous, the screenplay well-acted (for the most part), and I literally had my throat tight and tears running down my face at the end.

Seriously, if you like Star Trek and can ignore the fact that different, younger people are playing the roles of the original crew — "World Enough and Time" is not only well worth the download, in my opinion it’s as good as or better than most of the original series episodes.  If you want to go straight to the episode downloads page, it’s here.

According to the site, their next episode, soon to be released as a 2-parter, is "Blood and Fire," written and directed by David Gerrold (of Starwolf, Chtorr, and "The Trouble With Tribbles" fame), and featuring Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar from TNG…playing a different role this time, as an ancestor of her.)  After that, J.G. Hertzler, who has played many roles on Trek, including Klingon Chancellor Martok on DS9, will direct and star in a tale involving the old space-scoundrel, Harcort Fenton Mudd.

So there you have it.  A confession from me that, yes, I’m a die-hard Trekker at heart…and for those of you out there who might also be, a ‘fix’ for our cravings.  Trust me, if you can watch "World Enough and Time" and not feel like weeping, ya have a heart of stone.  Word has it that when they showed this at the conventions, it got standing ovations.

Until next time…
Becca

Hey there–

Consider this a kind of ‘public service announcement’:
Ever have a day when things just go wrong?  In one area in particular, a little bit of forethought and taking-care type of maintenance can keep a "bad day" from turning into a total, irreparable disaster.  (No, I’m fine; nothing bad happened.  Just bear with me.)

I cannot begin to tell you how many times during my business career I was either told or received an email going something like this:  "My computer crashed this morning.  Wiped out everything.  Please re-send any important messages or emails, as I lost it all."

It’s the nature of things to break.  That little whirly hard disk in your computer is bound to fail someday.  it just will.  There is no 100% failure-proof computer memory system out there.  To borrow an aphorism and bowdlerize it shamelessly, a single computer is too fragile a basket in which to keep all your eggs.

Ideally, it’s best to copy all critical data (multiple times, even) and store it offsite, as many businesses do.  We don’t all have that option — but one option most of us do have is we could get an external hard drive, plug it into a USB or firewire port, and back up to that.  Or back up to writeable DVDs or CDs.  Or, heck, buy a handful of USB flashdrives and copy the critical stuff to that — at about $20/gb, it’s not hard to back up what’s usually not more than perhaps 2 or 3 GB of personal data — provided you ignore the big stuff, like music or video collections.

On the other hand, if you’ve bought a whole bunch of iTunes and other music downloads, spent days (cumulatively) ripping your entire CD collection, and have photos and videos and whatnot — it absolutely pays to get an external drive and do regular backups.

For instance, now that I’ve got my music and TV shows nicely organized in iTunes, I am — as I write this — copying the entire "My Music" directory to the 750GB Maxtor ‘OneTouch III’ firewire/USB drive I bought in Singapore a few weeks ago.

In case you were wondering — no, my computers and their hard drives are fine.  But I am a fiend about doing regular backups.  For me, a computer or hard disk dying is merely an inconvenience and a goodly amount of time later on rebuilding a system from backups.  The difference is I usually HAVE those backups, whereas most of the people I know simply hope nothing goes wrong.

By way of a product review?  Well, these drives are all pretty much the same.  Supposedly the OneTouch has special backup software that automates the process.  I honestly don’t care about that, nor do I want still another program and still more system services clogging my computer.  But as an external drive with lots of storage, the OneTouch III is still a great product line, despite Maxtor’s purchase by Seagate (which, I have to say, I’ve not had a lot of confidence regarding in the last 5 years).  Seagate used to be one of the top names in hard drives, but as is often the case, overall quality and reliability seems to be a coming and going thing for many of these technology companies.  For a time, for instance, Iomega was the name in removable storage…then came the ZIP drive debacle.  (Great idea — but their drives had this tendency to crash catastrophically and totally without warning.  There was this thing called "The Click of Death" — which meant not only was the drive dead forever, you also lost the ZIP disk inside.  The breakdown apparently also resulted in a head-crash, ruining the drive media.)

Anyway, Seagate in the early 2000s went through a time when I personally had not much respect for their drives.  I would always get Western Digital, Hitachi, or Maxtor — never a Seagate or, heaven forbid, a drive from IBM.  That said, it does look like much of the product in the inventory pipeline — at least in Singapore — is still Maxtor-branded.  What I can’t speak for is whether Seagate will keep the Maxtor quality.  Hope so.

Back to what I started with though:  Got email files?  Back ‘em up!  Music collection?  You’re crazy not to.  Critical letters, correspondence, tax files, and so forth?  C’mon, it’s not that hard.

The day your computer goes down in fiery flames, you’ll be much happier if you can say, "Thank god I had everything backed up" — as opposed to, "I lost everything."

Get a hard drive or a stack of burnable DVDs/CDs.  Do the right thing — and do it at least once a month.  You’ll thank yourself later.

Figured out how to get more control over which TV episodes are put on my G5 iPod, via the iTunes’ sync feature.

Yes — I know I could put the whole thing on full manual operation, and just drag what I want over to the iPod.  But I actually rather like the automatic synchronization feature, so i wanted to find a way around the problem.

Here it is:  In the section for the iPod synchronization options, the TV Shows tab, the second drop down box lets you select between choosing whether to sync individual TV series — or individual playlists.  It’s a little bit of a kludgey either-or operation here, but it works.  Switch it to playlists.  Then, go create a playlist — either normal or ’smart’, doesn’t matter which, as far as I know — and put the show episodes into it.

Example:  Using Battlestar Galactica as a trial, I picked the last episode of season 2 and the first three episodes of season 3 — comprising what I called "The New Caprica" story arc.  I actually labeled them as such using the ‘Grouping’ function (under ‘Get Info’).  Then I created a smart playlist to select episodes so labeled.  Finally, in the Devices section for my iPod, I selected the "BSG – New Caprica Saga" playlist as what I wanted to sync.  Voila, done.  (Well, after about 5 minutes…).

I likely could’ve just created a plain playlist, dragged the episodes into it, and been done.

The only drawback is I have to choose between syncing playlists OR "most recent or all episodes of some or all series".  Or no TV shows at all.  Can’t have both.

Well, in a way, you can — but it involves setting up more playlists, and finding ways to select the last X-number of shows added to your collection, or whole series (easier, this last, as you need only create a smart playlist with the series name as the selector).

Cheers,
Becca