jeff's WebLog : misc

scoble and ballmer

jeffdav — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 02:59:00 GMT

Scoble posted the video of his chat with our CEO. It is a short 10 minute affair.

audiovox 5600

jeffdav — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:56:00 GMT

A long time ago I got one of those fancy full-color, polyphonic, joystick controlled cell phones made by a company that shall remain nameless. I hated it. It was slow; it took too long to dial. The interface was clunky; entering contact data was difficult. I realized I did not care about games, cameras, etc; I just wanted something that would make a call as soon as I hit send. So I entered the store with a relatively high degree of trepidation and pessimism to get this Audiovox phone that I now hold in my hands. All of that fear was misplaced though; this is a really good phone. In fact, I have not owned a device that was this cool since I got my Palm III in college.

The form factor is perfect-- it is actually smaller than my previous phone, which was some generic el cheapo model. The screen is bright and easy to read. The keys are well sized. The multidirectional control (Is there a technical name for those? I am refering to the joystick-esque thing in the middle.) is easy to use, if a tad imprecise at times. Even the black and silver color scheme is perfect. (Side note: I try to by everything in black, white or silver so it always matches. This is true of my clothes, furniture, car, computer equipment, etc. One of the things I hate about snowboarding is you cannot get anything in "just black.")

The UI is responsive. It is not blazing fast, but it never hangs. I do not find myself hitting buttons repeatedly. With past phone I would do this because I did not know if it was hung or if I failed to press the button hard enough. This is why I have always owned the el cheapo model--at least they tend to make calls quickly. The UI has only gone wonky once to the degree I had to reboot the phone. In general I have had to reboot it a few times, but I blame myself for causing some of those problems. The most egregious issue was when a menu just would not go away. But I have a tendency to push a lot of buttons rapidly without waiting, so it must have been a random timing issue. I could not reproduce the issue.

It comes with an AC outlet power charger, which is normal, but it also comes with a USB cable for synchronization with a PC. The USB cable charges the phone, which is great. I can leave the AC charger at home and the USB charger at work, which is where I do my syncing.

The best part, which you will note I saved for last, is the Sync with Exchange feature. ActiveSync, which I first used about five years ago with an HP Journada, is still a bit clunky. It took me a while to figure out the magic incantation that was needed to get it to sync with my Exchange server as I walked around the city, but I learned the secret from a coworker. You have to enter your mail server as: yourserver.yourcompany.com, with no protocol at the front. I was putting https://. It should have been smarter than that, but this is not the phone's fault. Now I can send and receive e-mail anywhere.

My only complaint: Browsing the Web is still too slow, but, again, that is not the fault of the phone but a bandwidth limitation.

i continue

jeffdav — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:40:00 GMT

I have returned from my Holiday holiday. I am back, hard at work on Internet Explorer the Next. I will, hopefully, have more interesting things to post soon. In the meantime, for those of you who may care, I present a brief summary of my Midwestern Wanderings:

I flew home, spent time with my father and grandmother, hung out at The Coffee Shop. I drove halfway across the state to my Mom's house, stopping for a night in the town that houses my Undergrad University. I drove back home, repeat. Flew to Chicago, saw The Ike Reilly Assassination on New Years Eve, flew home, repeat. Flew back to Seattle. There were, of course, other details but this is not really the forum for such things.

Anyway, I am back.

chess

jeffdav — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:06:00 GMT

I am currently taking an AI class in the evenings. I am posting this link for my own reference. This is a chess program that draws its thinking for you. It is really pretty.

Chess program.

installation woes

jeffdav — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 23:48:00 GMT

After successfully getting Windows XP SP2 installed on my laptop, I started installing other software.
This post has nothing to do with IE, but I need to vent.

Nameless 3rd Party App: Where do you want to install me? How about c:\nameless?
Jeffdav: How about c:\program files\nameless?
Nameless 3rd Party App: It is a bad idea to install me somewhere with spaces in the path. Continue anyway?
Jeffdav: No. Lame. At least it knows it is lame and told me while I still have a chance to do something about it.
Jeffdav: Okay, fine, c:\nameless.

Nameless Microsoft App: Installing...
Nameless Microsoft App: Installing... <30 minutes later>
Microsoft Windows: You have lost your connection to the wireless LAN! (I was walking to a meeting.)
Nameless Microsoft App: Internal Error 3452. [OK]
Microsoft Windows: You have reconnected to the wireless LAN!
Jeffdav: <clicks OK>
Nameless Microsoft App: Uninstalling...
Nameless Microsoft App: Thanks for playing. Please start from the beginning again.

Of course I did have success stories. Windows was easy to install off the slipstream CD. Putty, as always, was easy to install since setup for putty is simply xcopy.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that Setup is Hard.

computing too long

jeffdav — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 17:25:00 GMT

I think it is safe to say I have been around computers too long when I recognize the sound the harddrive makes during Windows setup as the "bad-sector" noise.

In other news, I think I need a new laptop.

oppressive fork clarinet

jeffdav — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:32:00 GMT

Raymond's eagerly awaited spam-graph post went live today. Since he works downstairs I got a sneak peak at it earlier this week. Since then I have been thinking about spam a bit. Spam used to really annoy me. I have an old university account that does nothing but accumulate spam now, but I login and delete the 40 or so new spams everyday. They fall into several catagories:

Unreadable - I use mutt to read my university mail and it does not support any strange character sets. This is the catagory the majority of e-mails fall into.

Creatively Formatted - These are the ones that do stupid tricks to get through filters but in doing so give themselves away as spam. For example; V/i/a/g/r/* !?!!, [M | 0 | r | t | g | a | g | 3 |] a.p.p.r.0.v.ed!!, etc.

Creatively Subjected - These are the insidious ones that put things in the title like "Our meeting on tuesday..." and come from cs-admin@<myuniversity>.com. I can usually spot them.

Randomly Subjected - These are my absolute favorites. These are the mails that have a few random words in the title. These things make great rock band names. This is the reason for this post. Everything up until here was merely context. I got one today that was perfect: "oppressive fork clarinet."

Anyone want to play drums in OFC ??

recently consumed culture

jeffdav — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 00:16:00 GMT

Wicked was a very clever take on The Wizard of Oz and a great vehicle for exploring the nature of evil. The new McSweeney's is something no comic lover should be without. Wonderland seemed to me to be a sentimental waste of time, but some people go in for that sort of thing. I prefer views of highschool more in line with Napolean Dynomite, except I think I am too old to care about the highschool-sucks-and-everyone-just-wants-to-be-loved genre anymore. The Breakfast Club and Heathers filled that void in me. Other recent movies in one sentence: Dodgeball was funny, King Arthur was long, Anchorman was what you would expect, The Bourne Supremacy was sold out, The Castle in the Sky reminded me of Spirited Away (same guy, aparently). I let Scott borrow my copy of the new The Cure box set, so I have not listened to all of it yet. There is a good cover of Purple Haze as well as the more widely known terribly bad cover. I had a really drunken night at the See Sound Lounge. I do not know why I enjoy that place, but I do. Slate continues to amuse me.

In other news, kayaking/camping in Sechelt, B.C. was amazing. We saw seals and only joked about trying to club them. Camping at Shi Shi is always amazing and I recommend everyone camp there (or somewhere equivalent on the pacific ocean) at least once before they die. Also I was accepted to the Univeristy of Washington's Computer Science Professional Master's Program. But do not worry--I will only be going part time so I can continue to make browsing the Web with IE better.

questions

jeffdav — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:39:00 GMT

Peter and I have both been doing a bit of travelling recently. Between STL and NYC, I got Peter to make me a cup of coffee using beans I brought back from Meshuggah. Over coffee we discussed the various reactions you get when someone finds out you work for Microsoft. Oddly enough the list is pretty short. In no particular order:

(1) Do you know (have you met) BillG?
(2) Have you been to BillG's house?
(3) Are you rich?
(4) Can you fix my computer?

(The answers, btw, are Yes, Yes, No, Probably Not.)

When geeks find out I occassionally get “Oh, how do you like that?” or “What do you work on?”

I dunno, I find it amusing.

what have i been up to?

jeffdav — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:36:00 GMT

In May I was in STL, visiting my family and friends.
This past week in of June, I was in NYC visiting friends, visiting museums, eating good food, drinking lots of Hoegaarden and Guinness.
Between STL and NYC I went to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.
Yesterday I got my Kayak out into Lake Sammamish.
I really like the new Modest Mouse CD.
I am reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, because I find that sort of thing interesting and the French Guy I eat lunch with sometimes said he failed history and had no idea what went on.

So my question is, why I can I not get prints of every piece of art work I come across? Why do museum shops only have prints of the most famous paintings? Is there some wierd copyright thing going on? Is it not cost effective?

windows media player 10 tech beta

jeffdav — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:17:00 GMT

I installed the WMP10 Tech Beta on my workstation here at work. At first I was mildy annoyed by some UI bugs, but it is a beta and I have faith they will hammer those out. What really made my day though was a new play list feature. I had added a carefully chosen subset of my music collection and was reading some site-o-links. I clicked a link and it turned out to be a video. The video promptly played in WMP, destroying my play list as has happened so many times in the past. But, lo! There was a little line of text saying I could click 'previous' to return to the play list that had just been destroyed. This made me indescribably happy.

i hate moving

jeffdav — Sat, 29 May 2004 21:15:00 GMT

This is the last time, I swear.

thursday update

jeffdav — Thu, 27 May 2004 21:47:00 GMT

A quick post to let those of you who are interested know I am still around. I just got back from the midwest where I was visiting my family and friends. The weather was hot and humid and my hay fever was in overdrive, but despite that I managed to have a good time, eat a lot of good Italian food, see some old friends, get beat repeatedly at chess by said friends, and meet one or two interesting new people.

I also learned that American Airlines use IE for their E-Ticket check-in terminals. Here is the photographic evidence.

the black ink blot

jeffdav — Thu, 13 May 2004 18:01:00 GMT

Saw this today on metafilter. A CS grad student in Dublin has found a way to figure out what is under those black ink blots in classified documents. I was just wondering last night if there was some way to do this. We had been discussing censoring soldier's letters at lunch yesterday. I wonder how this will effect declassification of documents. Perhaps they will start converting declassified documents to random fonts and sizing, like the cliched ransom notes. Maybe they will start censoring random words or entire paragraphs, a la Yossarian.

the rhyme of the remittance man

jeffdav — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 21:15:00 GMT

There's a four-pronged buck a-swinging
In the shadow of my cabin,
And it roamed the velvet valley till to-day;
But I tracked it by the river,
And I trailed it in the cover,
And I killed it on the mountain miles away.
Now I've had my lazy supper,
And the level sun is gleaming
On the water where the silver salmon play;
And I light my little corn-cob,
And I linger, softly dreaming,
In the twilight, of a land that's far away.

Far away, so faint and far,
Is flaming London, fevered Paris,
That I fancy I have gained another star;
Far away the din and hurry,
Far away the sin and worry,
Far away — God knows they cannot be too far.
Gilded galley-slaves of Mammon —
How my purse-proud brothers taunt me!
I might have been as well-to-do as they
Had I clutched like them my chances,
Learned their wisdom, crushed my fancies,
Starved my soul and gone to business every day.

Well, the cherry bends with blossom
And the vivid grass is springing,
And the star-like lily nestles in the green;
And the frogs their joys are singing,
And my heart in tune is ringing,
And it doesn't matter what I might have been.
While above the scented pine-gloom,
Piling heights of golden glory,
The sun-god paints his canvas in the west,
I can couch me deep in clover,
I can listen to the story
Of the lazy, lapping water — it is best.

While the trout leaps in the river,
And the blue grouse thrills the cover,
And the frozen snow betrays the panther's track,
And the robin greets the dayspring
With the rapture of a lover,
I am happy, and I'll nevermore go back.
For I know I'd just be longing
For the little old log cabin,
With the morning-glory clinging to the door,
Till I loathed the city places,
Cursed the care on all the faces,
Turned my back on lazar London evermore.

So send me far from Lombard Street,
And write me down a failure;
Put a little in my purse and leave me free.
Say: "He turned from Fortune's offering
To follow up a pale lure,
He is one of us no longer — let him be."
I am one of you no longer;
By the trails my feet have broken,
The dizzy peaks I've scaled, the camp-fire's glow;
By the lonely seas I've sailed in —
Yea, the final word is spoken,
I am signed and sealed to nature. Be it so.

-- Robert W. Service