Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

We’ve started a “development blog”:http://spaces.msn.com/members/startcom to make it easier for folks to keep track of start.com changes & additions. We’re making good progress on v3: I’ll let you know when you can check it out!

I always say Sony are good at taking things invented by others and developing them into kick-ass products. Take baby monitors, for example. When the twins were born, we got two monitors (can’t have ‘em waking each other up). They were complete crap. Hissing, noisy, things that would squawk with static whenever you walked near them. We upgraded to 900MHz models, which are somewhat better, but still hissed a little.

Enter Ian. Now we need a third monitor. But all of the monitors only support channel A or channel B and we’re already _using_ channels A and B. Well, we went back down to Babies ‘R Us to buy one of the crappy, hissing, 49MHz models, but discovered that since last year, Sony has come out with baby monitors. And their first entry into this world has 27 (yes, 27!) channels to choose from. It’s got voice-activation so you don’t listen to background noise, and it’s super-quiet. It also costs no more than the crap monitors. Bravo, Sony! I’m tempted to trash my other monitors and get three Sonys!

Those of you waiting for the hate part of the relationship can stop waiting because here it is. We also have a digital video camera made by Sony. It cost something like $700. So, I’m thinking, if I like Sony’s $40 stuff, their $700 stuff has got to be dynamite. After all, my old 25″ TV that I bought in 1992 is still going strong, right? Yes. But.

The thing with the video camera is: the only way to get full-quality video off of it is via firewire. Well, that’s no problem: I bought a firewire card for my PC. Oh, they didn’t bother to include a firewire cable with the camera. Fine, I’ll buy one of those as well. I didn’t see the footnote on page 842 of the manual which says to buy only cables which are branded “iLink.” Even if I had, I’d have thought it was just marketing foo. How many recipes have I seen on a box of something that specifies the exact brand of some third ingredient just so you stay in the Kraft family? More than enough to make me suspicious of such things.

Well that, my friends, was my mistake. You see, it turns out that when most cable manufacturers make a 6-pin to 4-pin firewire cable, they actually hook up all 6 pins on the one side. iLink-branded cables only have 4 pins hooked up. This turns out to be critical if your cable is of poor quality and shorts out, causing the power leads (the extra 2 pins on the 6-pin connector are for power) to be routed over the data channel and down into the camera, whose firewire controller chip is quite fragile and will burn out forever if you send power at it.

So now I have a camera with a broken firewire controller, so I can’t get high-quality video off of it. Sure, I can use USB streaming, but the framerate is like half of what it otherwise would be. Sony helpfully has a flat-rate repair program, so it’ll only cost me $350 to have it repaired. Gah!

Andy is “ranting about Microsoft”:http://blog.aharbick.com/archives/000090.html and his frustrations about incompatibilities and mistakes.

From time to time, I start yearning for simpler days, my engineer’s propeller spinning furiously at the notion of a clean, unix-like OS with a UI that borders on art running on hardware with industrial design second to none. After all, I’m writing this entry on Bonnie’s iBook because Ian’s sleeping on me and I just don’t like my TabletPC.

But part of it is certainly that I’m just susceptible to peer pressure. I bought the “Microsoft phone” before “coming to my senses”:http://www.themcdaniels.net/michael/2005/03/28/smartphone-treo-650/, and I got this iBook just after “Ben”:http://randomlyhumming.com and “Andrej”:http://andrej.mobileduo.com got their new mac laptops. I’m sure I’d have a G5 tower by now if I were still working in the big room at Amazon.

But there are really good reasons to use Windows as well. I’ve yet to find a program to match Microsoft’s own Digital Image Library (with easy tagging and meta info stored _in the file_ so it moves with the files). And Microsoft Money (at least 2004 and earlier) is hands down better than Quicken. (I had thought about using Money via VirtualPC, but that wouldn’t solve my Digital Image Library problem). I’m also rather used to Outlook, though I haven’t really looked at Entourage yet.

Anyway, my PC is getting unstable again, which has given rise to another bout of Mac lust. I’m going to try and ride it out, though. I’d get a Mac Mini to tide me over, but I don’t think it would have the power to run much of anything.

I tried the “Treo 650″:http://www.palmone.com/treo back when it was only available on Sprint. I liked the phone, but coverage at home was lousy and Microsoft hadn’t deployed a patch for Exchange server to allow it work with the newest ActiveSync (so I could get my corporate email on the phone).

I returned it and got a “Windows Smartphone”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00068577C/ instead. “Steve”:http://spaces.msn.com/members/steverider/ had me convinced: I’d have no trouble learning to be proficient at T9 text entry, I could write my own apps in C#, I’d have superiour access to the corporate Exchange server, and so forth. Plus, this is the phone that everyone (and I mean everyone) has at Microsoft.

Just after getting the smartphone, I went out to lunch with “Andrej”:http://andrej.mobileduo.com/, who had just sprung for the Treo 650 himself (having none of my situational objections). He was pretty excited about it, and that was my first moment of remorse about my decision.

You see, the thing is, I don’t have time to write apps in C#, and though Japanese people use T9 phones because you can type with one hand (the other is holding on to something on the train, I’m told), I was never quite as fast as I had been using Graffiti on my old Palm Vx. Plus, the promised Exchange connectivity was a little overpromised and under-delivered (though they’re now in beta with a firmware upgrade to fix it, supposedly).

At the end of the day, though, the thing that made me switch was all about UI. I’m tech-savvy, so it’s not that kind of ease-of-use problem. Really, the trouble is that it took too many keypresses to get to my tasks. I had to hit the home button, then the start menu, then the number 1. Yes, I could shorten it to home followed by holding down some number for a second and a half, but that takes just as much time. I bought the “oxios to do list”:http://www.oxios.com but it just wasn’t convenient enough. Want to change the priority of a task? Hit the action button, then the edit button, then hit down 6 times, right, then up or down to choose the new priority, then done and done again. Ick!

So, I called up Cingular and got my Microsoft discount for the Treo 650. I’ve got 30 days to play with it and decide whether to keep it.

Sadly, it’s not a perfect machine, either:

• It has reset itself four times in three days so far. The only software patch available seems to have to do with voicemail, so I don’t expect it to help me.
• There’s a new filesystem that is 30% less space-efficient than the older models.
• The blazer web browser, while far better than the smartphone browser, has dumb little things like bookmarks you can’t delete and it won’t let you scroll down until the page is loaded.
• And the first several menu items in the phone app are fixed (unmovable and undeletable).

I hope there are some enterprising folks out there who have already solved some of these problems and it’s just a matter of figuring out what to type into google.

Overall, though, I *can* get to my tasks a lot easier, so I probably will make the best of it. I use it more as an organizer than a phone, so I’ve just got to have a combined device.

You might wonder why I abandoned my Kyocera 7135 on Verizon. Verizon has no coverage at all inside the Microsoft RedWest buildings. For whatever reason, only Cingular and Sprint seem to work there.

It’s been a while since “Baby Einstein videos”:http://www.babyeinstein.com played on our TV, but it’s back on tonight. Ian has been getting sicker for the past couple of days and of course Bonnie is also getting sick. Fiona has been crying for the better part of an hour; I imagine she’s also getting this nastiness.

The near perfect contagion of illness is not something I was expecting from parenthood. I figured it’d be nice to cuddle with a sick kid. Instead, it’s like an epidemic: everyone gets it (including the nannies, of course), the stress level goes up, and sleep goes way down.

Anybody know where I can get one of those plastic boy-in-a-bubble things? I’m starting to feel like Adrian Monk!

Alton Brown has me inspired about cooking. His combination of chemistry, food anthropology, and great gadgets makes it one of my favorite shows and one of our few Tivo season passes. If you haven’t seen it, tune in! It’s on the Food Network. I have a Tivo, so I have no idea when it’s on. But if you read my blog, you’re resourceful enough to find it.

I have a 20 minute commute each way. While driving, I often think of things I need to do. Rather than try to type them into my phone while driving, I use the build-in voice recorder to record notes for myself.

Ideally, these notes would be automatically transcribed for me and put into my task list, but I realized that almost equally good would be a program that accepts voice recordings and then sends them to my email address so they show up in my inbox. Then I could make tasks out of them when I’m processing email.

Anybody know of an app for smartphone or palm that would do this? Anybody want to write one for me? I’ll put down my $50 right now!

When our TV eventually dies, I’m going to have to upgrade to HDTV, necessitating a reconfiguration of our built-in entertainment center. Not trusting myself to do it and keep it looking nice, I’m looking for a good finish carpenter to take the project on.

If you know of somebody in the Seattle area whom you think could help, let me know!

Okay, so apparently, I just got off the bus. I came across a reference to smugmug.com today. Some web searching seems to suggest that they’re less of a community than Flickr, but that they offer more upload bandwidth and the same unlimited storage for about 3/4 the price.

That makes it a tough call for me — I’ve never had anyone discover my photos on Flickr, and certainly never had anyone tag my photos. As an offsite storage facility and web-hosting location for my pictures, either would probably do, but I *am* having to reduce the size of the pictures I’m uploading to stay under 1GB/month with Flickr, and I wouldn’t have to do that with smugmug.

Advise me. oh lazyweb!

Or have I mucked up my rss feeds so much that nobody is listening any more?

Flickr has announced their acquisition by Yahoo. This is definitely good news for the folks at Ludicorp, but I wonder if the scrappiness will evaporate, leaving us without the attitude we came to love. I guess we’ll see how good Yahoo is at acquiring companies and leaving them alone. Oddpost and Flickr were two of my favorites before the acquisition. Will Yahoo ruin them for everyone? Only time will tell.