WhimsyLand

This caught my eye:  "When is a Cocktail Worth $1,000?"  For some reason, that reminds me of the time in Tokyo when a friend took me to a special bar that served sake with puffer fish (fugu) scales floating in it.  They brought out the bottle with a flourish and rounded up some special glasses.  I had had enough biology to know that eating puffer fish was a dicey proposition, and that sushi chefs had to be certified to serve it.  Mainly because it can kill you with neurotoxins in a couple of minutes if something goes wrong.  The glasses got poured and down the hatch it went.  My lips didn't actually get actually numb for at least a couple of minutes.  I remarked on the phenomena and Furusho-san looked at me like "duh".  Pretty expensive drink, as I remember, but everything was expensive in Tokyo.  A good Kobe beef steak was $90 and this was 1984.

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I hopped over to Julian Sanchez's blog on a link from Andrew Sullivan.  Pretty interesting guy, but why do I keep running into Libertarians?  I always thought the Cato Institute and everybody at Reason were only slightly less crazy than the nutcase at, say, RedState.  I'm probably getting link-cycled because I grow tired of listening to the same old liberal whining and I'm hopping off from the thoughtful moderates (like Andrew Sullivan) to their quasi-conservative sources.  While these guys often make a lot of sense, their commenters range from sentient articulators to downright knuckle-draggers.  Anyway.  McArdle and Sanchez have some interesting ideas, and I'm so inextricably connected to the "free market" (being an entrepreneur and all) that I like listening to their ideas.  Not that I tend to agree with them much, but that's another matter.  For example, Julian had a blog post about trying to walk a mile in another ideologue's shoes, which I thought was an interesting take on fairness, enlightenment, and game theory.  The only problem with Julian (my opinion, of course) is that his education has run to philosophy and poli-sci, and whereas I think Wittgenstein is hopelessly over-rated, he gets invoked in every 10 posts.   But, I digress.  The biggest problem that I have with the Megans and Julians of this world (other than the fact that they are both young and very attractive, and you have to wonder how that factors into things) is that, for all their high-minded, even-handed discourse, they contribute a patina of respectability to a) the truly evil organizations and individuals who fund the right-wing noise machine, and b) the legions of right-wingers who can use their few rational voices to legitimize their outrageous notions (guns, gays, God, . . .).  If you think I'm overstating the problem, read the comments on any of their blog posts.  It's like throwing artificial pearls before real swine.

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Seth was kind enough to send me a signed copy of his first book, The Suburban Ecstasies.  What I find amazing, more so than the excellent poetry within, is that I've read a large number of these poems in some of the nations finest journals (Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, . . . ), as individual pieces and they have been weaved artfully into a Poetry Book With A Narrative Arc.  In fact, one reviewer said he read the book at one sitting and likened it to a book-length poem with sections.    Here's a very small sample from "Gideon At An End":

For instance, what Gray's has to say
about your anatomy. . .   

    and the selfless acrobatics of sex ‒
how afterwards
    everything is mere negotiation,
an exit strategy lapsing to speech:  someone
will refuse to move a hand from somewhere
    to somewhere else,
someone will announce the changing times.

If you want a copy, gratis, drop me an email and I'll mail one to you (well, Amazon will, but I am an Amazon Premium guy and won't have to pay for shipping).

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I can't remember if I commented on the latest APR (yes, senility is a terrible thing), but I liked Tony Hoagland's article on The Dean Young Effect and the interview with the almost always hilarious Kay Ryan.  Hoagland cites poems from many of Young's imitators, but none has the wild-eyed élan of a true DY poem.  Ryan intrigues me because she is one of the poets that I admire greatly as a person, but can never get that excited about her poetry.  Mainly, the rest of the poetry sucks in a way that only the elevator music nature of APR poetry can achieve.  I always want to post some of the most completely horrific poetry therein, but then I think "these are probably really nice young people with $80K in student loans and can barely find a job with their newly-minted MFA, so why add to their problems?"  There's no excuse for the oldsters, of course, like Gary Snyder's mini-riffs, but every industry has its heroes.  Try dissing Jack Welch among a bunch of businessmen, for example.

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As much as I have kvetched about the medical community over the years (apologies to CDY and Peter), the persistence of 19th century technology, the lack of true access, the inexplicable difference between an experience at the average doctor's office and almost anything, including trying to explain a flight reservation problem to a resident of Bangalore, I have good news.  A couple of month's ago, I switch from the despicable Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage I had (and I use the term loosely), to Kaiser Permanente.  My first appointment was with a 30-something physician who seemed to have answers to questions that I had not yet fully articulated.  Their pharmacy seemed efficient and well-organized, well, kind of like Walmart on a good day.  A couple of days ago, I started having this really annoying pinched nerve that starts in the muscle of my left shoulder blade and radiates into tingles in my left hand.  Just peachy for someone who sits in front of a computer 60-80 hours a week, but then, that's probably part of the problem.  I logged into kp.org and there was a link that said "Make An Appointment".  Amazing.  Next up was a Travelocity-like menu of times and docs, and I picked one.  30 seconds later I received an email confirming the appointment for the next day at 9 AM.  There was also a page for emailing the doc to state in under 1000 characters, anything you wanted, so I outlined the problem which gives him a chance to think about it and not waste time with chit-chat in the examining room.  I'm pretty much gobsmacked.  This is what everybody in the country should have, assuming their problems aren't really serious (a situation I haven't encountered yet, and yes, you can pray for me all you want).

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Paris:  Junie got us a taxi reservation between JFK and Newark on the departing leg, check.  Junie will make sure that we have adjoining seats, hopefully in an exit row at a cost of $25 or so, acquired online the day before the flight, check.  Junie is checking out the pros and cons of buying Metro passes and such in advance or waiting until we get there, check.  Junie is researching the various shops, restaurants and grocery stores in our apartment's neighborhood, check.  Junie is making a list of things we really need to pack, clothing we need, things we can do without, check.  Watching her do all of this is really exhausting.

Posted by jbahr at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those who care about the current maelstrom that is the health care debate, I urge you to read the best article I've seen in a month:  David Goldhill's "How American Health Care Killed My Father".  Goldhill, an ex-executive and seemingly mildly and intelligently conservative, describes what happened to his father when he was admitted for pneumonia into a Medicare-funded average hospital.  The answer is 5 weeks of care, a number of hospital-borne infections, death and a bill for over $600,000.  That's about $17,000 a day, enough to stay at one of the most luxurious hotels in the world.  How did he rack up these kind of costs?  At $11,500 a day for ICU stay, it doesn't take long.  One of Goldhill's more interesting observations is that health insurance is now something it was never intended to be.  It covers predictable medical events, such as childbirth and checkups, when it should be a risk aggregator for catastrophic events.

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In a world in which sports figure are subject to nightly hyperbole, Usain Bolt is truly extraordinary.  For starters, he has shattered the notion that only muscled gentlemen of modest height can be sprinters (he's 6'5").  More importantly, he's not breaking world sprinting records, he's obliterating them.  I almost fell out of my chair when I saw him run in the last Olympics, breaking a world record and decimating the field, and he even slowed down at the end long enough to show off a bit.  Let's take the 100 meter dash.  Since 1975, when electronic timing universally recognized, it has been broken 12 times, never by more than 5 hundredths of a second (0.05).  On August 16th, Bolt broke his own record by .11 seconds.  Here's a graph of the records set:

Do you see that precipitous drop at the end.  That's Bolt's last three records, 9.72 seconds, 9.69 seconds, and 9.58 seconds.  He's says he thinks he can run it in 9.4, which would be something like a 30-foot pole vault, or a 10-foot high-jump.  Who knows?

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Sweet Junie and I have been trying to keep up with the flurry of flight-time changes communicated by Northwest, and now, OpenSkies.  NWA has changed our times a number of times, and actually changed my connecting city from Minneapolis (so I could accompany Junie halfway back to Denver), to Detroit.  Oh, joy.  I talked for 20 minutes to an NWA rep last week, a perfectly nice person with a suspiciously Indian accent, and she said that the flight that I booked and wanted was "unavailable".  I asked "does that mean it's booked up or doesn't exist?".  She said one or the other.  I said, "well, that's interesting, because I'm on the NWA site and the flight exists and has over 100 seats available".  She said, "sorry, sir, but our computers say that it's unavailable".  Sigh.  I need to call back and ask for the manager of her manager.  Meanwhile, OpenSkies changed the departing airport from JFK to Newark, but an $85 cab ride should fix that problem (we allowed lots of time between our NWA arrival and Paris departure). 

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My old friend Bill emailed me to remind me that "90% of the software is completed in the first 50% of the time….The remaining 10% of the software takes the other 90% of the time….."   How true.  It's not really much of mystery, it's just Software Darwinism.  The easy bugs get killed early, the really bad bugs linger on for a lot longer than you thought they would.  Which bugs do this is mainly unpredictable. 

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I've found a new, intelligent, thoughtful blogger:  Matt Steinglass at True/Slant.  He makes the kind of sense that Andrew regularly does, perhaps with a little less passion.  I wrote him an email today to tell him that I like what he's doing.  I was going to write him and tell him he needed a comments section, but then I started reading Megan's comment section, filled with trolls of the conservative persuasion and ranters of the liberal aesthetic, and decided that maybe he was doing the right thing.

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Speaking of whom.  Somebody must like McArdle over at Atlantic Central.  She's shown up in the last few print issues with an article, and pushes libertarian ideas all day at Asymmetrical Information.  There are a few commenters who, like me, think that her musings sometimes have that twenty-something's Ayn Rand epiphanic sense to them.  Most, however, are just plain vanilla anti-gummint conservatives piggy-backing on her usually intelligent commentary.

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This young man, somewhere between 18 and 22, knocked at my door this afternoon.  He said his truck was broken down, needed a new radiator and he wanted to mow my lawn, if I'd let him, to make some money.  Ignoring the fact that it had been mowed 4 days earlier, I agreed and $15 passed hands.  His grandma picked him up and I helped him load the lawnmower in the trunk.  His name was Brandon and he had a bicep tattoo, a firm handshake, and an apparent desire to go fix the problem he was encountering with enterprise and hard work.  How could you say no to that?  Besides, he mowed on the diagonal, which I just love.

 

Posted by jbahr at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've fixed the last bug in the audiobook firmware derived from Our Chip Vendors software development kit.  That's both a joke and a euphemism in the computer biz, of course.  There is no last bug.  There is also seldom a way to explain the software development cycle to non-developers (except that it's probably no different than the development cycle for new drugs or new cars or new lines of haute couture).  The problem arises from three phenomena:  a) the development curve, plotting completion-of-functionality against time, will curve, starting out with rapid upward motion and leveling off, and b) the final 10% of the effort will take from 20% to 50% of the budget/schedule, and c) you often don't know what's going to be in that 10%.  So, your manager (or client) asks you how far along you are and you want to say 90% along, thank you, but if you do, the client/manager is in for a big shock when the project takes another 8 weeks, during which time you're either drawing a paycheck or issuing invoices.

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I read the last 5 or 6 article/blog-posts by libertarian Megan McArdle today.  Because the (very interesting) comments often run into the hundreds, I probably read 100 printed pages of discussion about health care, the pharmaceutical industry and related topics.  I find myself less and less often agreeing with Megan, but she seems to argue her points with conviction (although often the arguments are supported by anecdote more often than statistics).  Her latest contention is that Big Pharma will lose the will to innovate if the US does what every other country on the globe does and engages in large-scale price negotiation.  Megan proposes that only the lucrative US market remains to provide the profit margins necessary to continue extensive R&D which leads to new drugs for new maladies, which then lose their patent status and become available (cheaply) as generics for everyone.  There are a lot of holes in the argument, to my eye, but read for yourself. 

In the course of all this, something occurred to me that made me laugh.  I spent 3 hours over the course of the day reading these articles and comments, plus many of the links provided.  Then, I googled up the 10-K's of the major pharmaceutical companies to see if I could detect what their profitability is for US vs. non-US drug sales (which was difficult, because many of the players in Big Pharma are European and don't issue 10-Ks).  It reminded me of the time, some months ago, when I ran across a book describing the cosmological constant, which in turn led to musings about the expansion of the universe (kudos to Simon DeDeo for straightening me out on that). 

It doesn't matter whether it's health care or cosmology.  My problem is, basically, I want to understand everything.  In detail.  Where all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. 

Does that every happen to you?

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I received my usual email from Salon.com, linking me to interesting bits, and who do I see as their lead link but our own blogosphere's Laurel Snyder?  This one was called "Addicted to Twitter". 

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Sweet Junie is in Oregon with her mom, visiting her sister and brother-in-law.  The latter work for the Park Service (or something like that), and have taken time off to drive together to visit the shore and the mountains and whatever else there is in Oregon.  I admit to being abysmally ignorant about Oregon, my only trip there being one to a conference at Intel in Portland and since it rained all of the time, all of my preconceptions about Oregon were confirmed.   I think Rebecca lives in Oregon, too, right?  Or is it Washington?  I'm really hopeless about the Pacific Northwest.

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Well, the driveway and walkway to the front door are now poured, set and beautiful.  All it cost was about 2X my property tax bill, or if you will, about my grocery bill for the year.  Probably worth it, however.  The firm I chose (which goes by the weird name of Eviroshapes) had dozens of Angie's List 5-star raves and did a bang-up job.  They put in a tight mesh of re-bar, and tied it into the existing concrete house pad by drilling holes into the latter.  Very nice job.  As a side note, all of this happened while the housing development's officially sanctioned once-a-year garage sale weekend was going on.  My neighbor (whom I once rescued from her own bedroom, locked in by her 3-year-old, but that's another story) asked me to drag an old overstuffed chair into my garage, so that she could get it out of the house before her husband noticed.  Derek (who is home from his CA thumbing-trip) will be carting it off to Goodwill next week.

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Speaking of whom, Der and Max, who are roomates in Chicago and both attend Columbia College, decided to spend 2 weeks hitchhiking up Pacific Coast Highway.  Der and I spent an hour at Lucille's, our local Cajun restaurant, where Der gave me the blow-by-blow of their trip:  the police office in Oceanside who had them spread against the cruiser while he searched their backpack for contraband and had them tear up their hitchhiking signs;  the apparently wealthy young orthodontist in the red convertible who toured them around Santa Barbara;  the two cute girls who picked them up and escorted them to local parties, then disappeared while Der and Max were making a run to the beach;  a wild variety of people who picked them up and admitted to have hitch-hiked themselves, back in the day (and you know how much I hate the phrase "back in the day");  their search in Berkeley for a co-op, which led to an invitation to sleep on the roof of an indeterminate building;  their boredom after a day or two with San Francisco as it wasn't that long ago that they toured The City together;  their sudden decision to hop on a plane to Las Vegas, where Max's family lives.

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I actually did what I said I should do one day, and looked (however briefly) at each of the 300+ channels available on my Direct TV last night.  My God, Saturday mid-evening is an amazingly poor time to try to watch cable/satellite.  Not as bad as infomercials at 5 AM, but close.  I ended up watching Ratatouille again, which was at least entertaining.  I was looking to see if NCIS was on, which I've grown to like.  It's on when House isn't so, I got hooked.  There's a funny cast of characters including the cute Pauley Perrette, and of course, Ilya Kuryakin.  One of the funny coincidences is that I've actually seen the lead actor, Mark Harmon, in another life.  He was the QB of UCLA against USC when I was a senior, and had an outstanding career there, defeating the #1-ranked Nebraska the next year.  I seem to have met or known a lot of famous Marks.  I grew up on the same block as Mark Hamill, of Luke Skywalker fame, and a friend of mine swears that it was that kid I remember that nobody wanted on their pickup tag football team.  His Wikipedia entry says he attended Annandale HS, just like me, so I suppose it's true.
 

Posted by jbahr at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Rockies continue in second place in their division, with a win-loss percentage that is 3d best in the National League.  The bad news continues to be that the LA Dodgers are also in our division.  They also have Manny Ramirez.

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After a couple of days of using my new WD TV media player, I noticed that the big Sony TV produces considerable heat being on all the time.  I can't turn it off, because the WD TV senses the loss of HDMI connection and stops playing.  So, . . . I bought a small LCD TV ($129 at WalMart) and put that on the top shelf, with no other purpose in life but to display the music choices.  I found that I could route the HDMI cable to this little guy and then route the audio from the WD TV down to the Denon receiver/amp with an optical audio cable.  Works great, and I can even turn off the little TV without disturbing the audio playback.

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Sweet Junie and I are P-minus-six-weeks.

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I used Skype for the first time the other day.  In the old days, I used to call Europe every morning and Japan every evening, and it would have saved me (and the company) a lot of money to have something like Skype around.  Signing up was a 3-minute affair, and really user-friendly.  I had purchased a USB headseat at BestBuy from a very large selection in the $25 to $100 range (mine was $39).  After downloading and installing Skype, the installation led me through a) testing the headset output, b) testing the headset microphone, c) making a sample call.  At that point, I received a call from a client (I got a charming little ring on both my computer speakers and headset).  The quality of the connection was mind-blowing, easily the best telephonic connection I've ever experienced.  This is probably because they allocate more than the usual small bandwidth for the audio (which is what cell-phones, land lines, and VOIP does).  The sound was rich and I could actually hear the other party breathing. 

The bad news is that Skype (currently owned by eBay) is under threat.  The owner of the peer-to-peer technology, Joltid, is "seeking to terminate its licensing agreement with eBay".

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"Keep your government hands off my Medicare."  I don't know why I'm amazed that people can show up and shout while being completely ignorant about the issue they're shouting about. 

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Camille Paglia, whom I admire but usually disagree with, says: "Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing."  Jeez Louise.  I really don't understand why health reform proponents fail to address rationing.  Health care is being rationed now.  Not only are there millions who can't get health care or can't afford it, there are those like me who can do both, but have medical procedures (like a colonoscopy) or prescription drugs routinely disallowed.  As an aside, Megan (a self-described liberatian) agrees, but distinguishes between price rationing and other forms.

I also don't understand those who say you can't put a price on human life, because we do it all the time.

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How can New York City hot dog vendors afford a monthly rent of $53,558?  Admittedly, the two stands are outside the Met, but at three bucks a hot dog, that means he has to sell 200,000 hot dogs a year to break even (and that doesn't count the cost of the hot dogs).  Say, he sells cold drinks too, so maybe it's 100,000 meals a year, or about 3,000 a day, or 200 an hour for 15 hours.  That's one hot dog every 20 seconds.  Is that really possible?

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"High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy"  Whoodah thunk?

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Only 54% of surveyed North Carolinians (probably those near RTP) thinks President Obama was born in the US.  On the other hand, 8% either didn't think Hawaii was in the US or weren't sure, so it may not matter.

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This month is the Wine Spectator Food Issue and (predictably enough), it's dedicated to dishes inspired by Julia Child (who is all the rage this month).  Emeril Lagassse (bam!) did a nice take on coq au vin, updating Julia's recipe with oyster/shiitake mushrooms instead of button mushrooms, and adding Cognac to the broth (with the mandatory flambé).  The dish starts with bacon (or lardons if you want to get fancy) sautéed in olive oil, in which you brown a cut-up chicken after removing (but saving) the lardons.  After a short while, he adds the onions, bay leaf and thyme.  Next comes a quarter cup of cognac, to which a lit match is applied when it's boiling.  After extinguishing the flame with a pan cover, the concoction is allowed to cook on low heat for 10 minutes, at which point 3 T of flour is added.  Next up comes 2 cups of chicken stock and 2 cups of wine (preferably Burgundy, Pinot Noir (which is what proper Burgundy is made of, actually), or Côte du Rhône.  I tend to like a little heavier wine usually, but maybe the Cognac makes up for it.  Now add the lardons, 4 chopped garlic cloves, and a T of tomato paste, and cook for another 25 minutes.  Take out the chicken, piece by piece, as they become tender and hold aside.  When the last piece is done, put them all back in the pan and add a quarter pound of oyster and/or shiitake mushrooms, "trimmed, washed and quartered".  Cook 5 more minutes and serve.  Somewhere in there, you're supposed to "adjust the seasoning", of course, which is something like a chef's disclaimer.  

Thomas Keller (of French Laundry fame) has a Boeuf Bourguignonne recipe that looks killer-bee, too, though the ingredient list is a bit daunting and precise (the list includes "14 Italian parsley sprigs"), and the recipe goes on for 3 pages.  His recipe calls for a heavier wine (he recommends Cabernet Sauvignon, but I think an Australian Shiraz would do), and includes onions, sliced and baby carrots, leeks, shallots, mushrooms, parsley, bay, garlic, beef stock, fingerling potatoes, bacon, pearl onions, French salt (of course), and Dijon mustard, all of which is in service to surround 3 pounds of boneless short ribs.  Sounds pretty wicked, actually, and I may actually try to make it.

Julie Powell contributes Baked Cucumbers, which looks pretty good.  Lydia Shire chimes in with Pavlovas with Lemon Curd, which I would probably pass on.

Posted by jbahr at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My house was a model home, and so, both different than all others in the development (mine is the only one with cathedral ceiling, apparently too expensive for normal models), which includes apparently the fact that they rushed the driveway concrete job.  Over the years, the miserable lack of good base, use of flimsy wire instead of rebar and general shoddiness made my driveway the only one in the neighborhood that looked like it had gone through a San Francisco quake.  I used Angie's List to find a good concrete guy and they started breaking up the old sidewalk and driveway:

And, meanwhile they were using the Bobcat with special jackhammer attachment to demolish my driveway:

When they were done, they carted all of it to a recycling center that crushes the concrete and makes a composite that they (and other firms) buy back for backfill under the concrete jobs:

Tomorrow:  pictures of the The Pour.

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I found another hundred CDs or more that I had not put in my Sony 300-CD changer.  I used 4 of our Vista machines to start ripping again (Windows Media Player 11 on Vista is faster and smarter than the XP version 9).  As the day wore on, I decided to cull some of the most objectionable CDs that I didn't know I owned.  Oh, I kept Spice Girls, but I axed Milli Vanilli.  The CDDB lookup worked remarkably well, even on CD's that are getting close to 30 years old (Cars, Simply Red, UB40, et al.).

There were also some CDs that were not recognized:  RLJ's The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, for example.  The last CD burned?  Green Day's American Idiot.

Once I had the USB drive filled up with CDs, I ran Windows Media Player's Library function.  I really didn't intend to play anything off the drive, as it was going upstairs to be attached to the little WD TV gadget.  However, by invoking WMP, I found that it placed album art thumbnail JPG's in each folder.  I hoped that would be enough for the WD TV to display album covers instead of folder titles.

I had to rearrange the cabling a bit.  My Sony Bravia LCD has 4 HDMI inputs, and my Denon has 2 (I wished it were the other way around).  Now, I've got the WD TV plugged into one HDMI socket on the Denon as a "DVD Player".  The monitor out HDMI goes the Sony LCD.  Now, I've got a Blu-Ray player and Direct TV satellite receiver with HDMI outs, but only one HDMI input left on the Denon.  I could use conventional RCA jacks from one of them, or just plug Direct TV directly into the Sony (which has its own built-in speakers).  Too bad there isn't such thing as an HDMI hub/switch, like there is for Ethernet and USB.

The only downside so far is that the WD TV can't play DRM'd content, such as that which you download from iTunes.  However, Apple is lobbying for DRM removal, so who knows, it may be do-able soon.

OK, it's still a bit of a mess, but here's where I am.  On the bottom shelf is the Denon and satellite receiver.  The small unit on the second shelf, beneath the Sony TV, is the WD TV.  The top unit is the Blu-Ray (the box on the left is HD-Radio, which I haven't installed yet).  The screen is showing Music Folder mode, so I can see CD's organized by artists.  Next step is to get album art working.

Meanwhile, I bought AnyDVDHD and CopyDVD from the folks at SlySoft, which cost about $100 (the units are in Euros when you check out).  AnyDVDHD reads and plays on your PC just about anything, including Blu-Ray. CopyDVD leverages ANyDVDHD and then lets you copy off the DVD, including or excluding just about anything (do you want the trailers?  Do you want to get rid of the FBI warning?).  I quickly tried Lethal Weapon (I), and directed CopyDVD to just decode the whole mess of VOB files into one directory, preserving just about everything on the DVD (without conversion to AVI or MP4, for example).  Then, I dropped the decoded folder (which, by the way was stripped of all protection, including "region" protection) onto the WD TV USB drive.  I plugged the latter back into the small WD TV and voila!  It started playing just as if it were a DVD.  Next step is to transfer over a Blu-Ray and see what happens.
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While I was at Best Buy (those guys love me), I also picked up a Western Digital World Book.  It's actually just a small Network Attached Storage device, and for under $200 (which included a terabyte of storage), it seemed like a good deal.  I also bought an extra terabyte USB drive, as it accepts one additonal external drive (actually more than one, if you use a USB hub). 

It was very easy to set up.  I just plugged it into our GigE Ethernet switch and loaded the WD Discovery program off the installation CD.  That permitted me to configure it.  It comes up as a Windows-recognized network drive as soon as you set the workgroup or domain, and you can also turn on its ability to be an FTP or NFS server.  All of this is through a web interface, so I was actually configuring it from a system across the room. 

Within 10 minutes, our domain controller had recognized the new system and broadcast the fact to the other systems in our shop.  At that point, I could just click on Network (Neighborhood) and see it.  Because I had configured all the shared folders as public and read/write to all, every system in our office could use it.

I set aside one terabyte for server backup.  The backed up locations spanned 3 separate servers and  included our Project directory (which contains everything important about a project), our FTP site (which I lost last year and had to painfully put back together), the WebSites directory (including WhimsySpeaks, which I lost a couple of years ago and had to salvage), and a half-dozen other important folders.

To do the backup, I used Argentum Backup, which is a simple but effective daily backup program that costs about $20 in quantity 3, and doesn't complain when it has to backup a Windows Server 2003 system (like almost all of the others do).

Short of a fire that burns the whole house and office down, I'm good for backup for now.  Except for Dima's private stash of project files that he keeps on his own workstation, but I'll harass him tomorrow about that.

~~~

Time to go make myself a codburger, although I'm tempted to make something out of Julia's French cookbook.
 

Posted by jbahr at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sweet Junie has flown back to Eau Claire, so it's just me, Ms. Emily and a cloud of fruit-flies.  They almost certainly arose spontaneously from that banana peel in the waste basket next to my desk and wandered upstairs to see what the vittles were like up there.  I have a soft spot for Drosophila melanogaster, having raised so many of them in my youth.  My biology teacher, Mr. Ailstock, got me started with petri dishes and agar agar early on, doing genetics experiments the details of which I forget, but which had something to do with tracking various traits among successive generations of offspring.  The fruit flies also came into play when we were raising Latrodectus mactans (black widow spiders) from a egg sac that Mr. Ailstock has found in his wood pile.  It was my job to put a couple of the little widows into a test tube and make sure that every day they got a fruit fly or two as a snack.  The little spiders were quite beautiful with black bodies and red stripes.  We didn't have them long enough for them to develop their trademark hourglass, as Mr. Ailstock had a friend who wanted the batch for their silk, which he used to make scope cross-hairs.  One day we packed up a couple of dozen of the test tubes and mailed them off.  I've often wondered if that was legal.

~~~

Well, I decided to try out the Western Digital WD TV ($120 at BestBuy).  It is a multimedia player that you connect to a USB hard disk as input, and to a TV or audio system as output.  I bought a terabyte USB drive for just over $100 and started ripping all my CDs to it.  I figured I might as well just use lossless WAV files (the underlying content format for CDs), since my 200 CDs were still not going to consume 10% of the terabyte drive.  I plugged the USB drive into my  main workstation, fired up Windows Media Player 11, and popped in one CD after another.  I had already set the options for WAV and rip-on-CD-detection, so it was pretty smooth.  WMP went out to CDDB and looked up the CD name, track titles, and other metadata, and organized the CDs by artist, with subfolders for each album. 

I'm just about done ripping.  I'll take the small WD TV upstairs (it fits in your palm), plug in the USB drive, and power it up.  The HDMI cable will go between the WD TV and the Sony Bravia (so I can see the on-screen-display), and then I'll route the audio from the Sony via optical audio cable to my Denon receiver.  If all goes well, I will have gotten rid of my big, clunky, unreliable Sony 300-CD changer, and gained a lot of footprint on the top stereo shelf.  Then, I can sort the CD's back into their respective jewel cases, pack them up, and store them in some corner of the basement.

Next up will be video.  The WD TV purports to handle a dozen different video formats in resolution up to 1080p.  There are plenty of DVD ripping software packages, but I have my eye SlySoft's AnyDVD, which claims to be able to handle Blu-Ray also.  How do they avoid prosecution under our DRM protection legislation?  They're based in Antigua.

DVD's run about 4 GB apiece, so I should have room for another hundred CD's and maybe 200 DVDs.  Half of that if they were Blu-Ray.  If I run out of room, I can just plug the terabyte drive into my PC and copy it to a 2 TB drive (about $250 retail).   By the time that gets filled they should have 4 TB drives, I'm guessing.

~~~

Junie had some great ideas for the wedding, including a beautiful 1920's dress for her and a modified zoot suit for me.   She's on the lookout for Art Deco table decorations and we have to learn the Charleston for The First Dance.

~~~

Junie and I had breakfast with my BIL Roy and my M.D. nephew as they took a break from their cross-country drive from Louisville to Redding, where he will be taking up residence as an ER doc.  Being of a liberal bent (said nephew has a Masters degree in public health and worked with Doctors Without Borders in Central America), we discussed the woes of the current health-care system, and the degree to which it motivates physicians to a) specialize, b) reduce patient loads, c) raise prices, and d) decline to accept Medicare patients. 

~~~

I'm almost done with the latest player firmware for my favorite client.  The units play audio books and music flawlessly, and the navigation glitches seem to be out of the way.  The last big bug is that when you turn off the player, it doesn't really turn off, and you have to pop the battery out to get going again.  Nearly identical firmware sources don't do that on the development board, of course.  Nor does a prior release that I created.  I've posted a HELP message with Our Chip Vendor's support staff, but they're all in Shenzhen and I won't hear back until Sunday evening, when it's Monday in China.  I need to get this right, as the firmware will be shipped in millions of retail units.

~~~

One thing you learn when ripping your CD collection is how many times you bought an album that you probably played once and then forgot about.  Not the Door's first album, of course, or The Best of Ella Fitzgerald, more like that Sarah Brightman album you bought after being infatuated with Phantom.

Posted by jbahr at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Like most people over 40, I have a lot of CDs (as opposed to downloaded WMA/MP3/AAC files on my iPod).  I bought a Sony 300 CD player a year or two ago, but the mechanicals are always a problem (CDs get stuck, the player rotation mechanism is slow, et cetera).  Knowing a fair bit about storing audio (and video) on storage media, I wondered:  "why aren't there more hard-disk-based media players?"  There are a fair amount of them out there from Asian suppliers (like here), but they just don't sound quite right.  There's a very nice Naim unit, but it runs $6,500 (!).

A perfect media player would:

1.    Permit me to add my own hard disks.  Then, I could load up two or three fast terabyte drives, which would hold a couple of thousand CDs in uncompressed format.  An e-SATA external socket would be nice, too, for add-on storage.

2.    Have a fast method of getting CDs and DVDs onto the media.  This could be handled from a PC, too, using ripper software.  It would be nice to avoid USB 2.0, though, so the PC that does the ripping should have an e-SATA connector so you could drop media really fast to the external hard disk.

3.    Have a decent user interface, perhaps an on-screen-display (which most do).

4.    Have and HDMI and optical audio out jacks.

5.    Not do much processing.  Just decode the source and get its digital signal out the port.  I have a nice Denon receiver to do the actual preamp and amplification functions, I don't need the player to do that.

6.    Handle CD recognition.  Most of the ripper apps have the ability to access CDDB, for example, so that arbitrary tracks on arbitrary albums are recognized.  It would be great to get the information back from CDDB (track title, album, artist, et cetera) into the media player, so that the choice tree could be traversed by album name, artist, and so on.

7.    Handle DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs.  I have to guess that somewhere in the process, I'm not going to be able (with conventional rippers) to override the DVD/Blu-Ray DRM protection, but it would be nice.  Why I can't transfer DVDs that I've purchased to another convenient medium is a mystery, except that, of course, I could also copy rented DVDs onto it, and we can't have that (says the recording/movie industry).

8.    Be able to handle Blu-Ray and upconvert DVDs to 1080p.

Now, I know that you can get iPod docking stations that plug into your audio/video system, but a) the source material is probably compressed and I'd rather have the original WAV files, or better yet, a lossless codec, like FLAC.  Also, I don't think any of the docking stations interface to the TV as the user interface (I could be wrong about that, of course).

One possibility is to just build a small PC in a tight enclosure and add a good sound card (for the audio, anyway) that has digital output, and any of a zillion decent video cards with HDMI output.  I think you could add Media Player and something like Roxio DVD Decoder and be able to legitimately play DVDs.  However, it's not clear that it will play a DVD image recorded on a hard disk, have to investigate.  The hardware is going to cost $300 (you don't need much of a processor or much memory, but get a good cooling system), plus $125 a terabyte for hard disk space.  I'd probably just buy a small footprint commercial PC, if I could find one with a PCI-X slot for a good video card and e-SATA connector.

Anyway.  So, I'm executing my usual Japanese Tea Ceremony prior to Junie's arrival.  This entails mopping, dusting, washing, vacuuming, the works.  I want to carry a remote in my pocket and point it at my 42" Bravia, which is displaying a choice tree.  I'm upstairs on the bridge that overlooks the cathedral-ceiling'ed TV room, the one that connect the master bedroom from the other bedrooms (actually, now Junie's office, the workout room with the Red BowFlex and treadmill), and the guest bedroom.  I click down to Bob Dylan, then pick Blood on the Track, then hit play, and go back to work.  All the tracks are organized on a couple of terabyte drives in FLAC or WAV format.  Upon selection, Media Player kicks out the audio to the HDMI or optical audio out jack to my Denon, which then does its magic and pumps out Tangled Up In Blue to the pair of speaker columns.  Later that night, I click on Videos and scroll down to Princess Bride and hit PLAY, and out it goes to the Denon.  So far, the only hitch is I'm not sure if DVD decoding software does upconverting or handles Blu-Ray.   You may need to play the DVDs and Blu-Rays directly on the PC with something like this, and they only probably work with actual original optical media.

Any ideas?

Posted by jbahr at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The secret is out:

~~~

Another classic wine description:  "On the nose, this explodes with intense aromas of freshly sliced granadilla joined by notes of lemon curd. Hints of geranium and just mowed lawn, with suggestions of asparagus braised with tarragon, rise from the glass to add intrigue and complexity to the top notes."  I mean, come on, you can smell not only asparagus, but "asparagus braised in tarragon"?

~~~

By poet buddy Ally just informed me that the number of Facebook friends I have is the Mark of the Beast.  I'm tempted to leave it there.

~~~

I have this badass personal workstation where I do 50% of my development, handle email, and surf the 'Net.  Today it's been pretty much a nightmare and Vista is popping up with dire warnings about my C drive.  I have a C, D, E, F and G drive.  The F drive is the DVD.  The rest are 150 GB Raptor drives, generally pretty reliable and 10,000 RPM to boot.  Of COURSE, the one going out is the C drive, where I have Vista installed.  This is, to my mind, the greatest problem with Microsoft operating system products.  If I swap out the C drive, which is no problem, I have absolutely no choice but to reinstall the operating system, which means that the former registry is gone and I have to re-install ALL applications that I've added since the original installation.  Over the course of a year or two, that amounts to hundreds of apps.  I can't just copy off the registry somewhere (it's not damaged) and import the settings.  I have to find the original downloaded install files and CD and all the passwords.  I have to contact dozens of vendors who have the application locked to a particular machine and won't authenticate twice (like QuickBooks).  It's a process that takes at least an entire day, if not more.  And it takes active management and participation, not just "load and go and forget".  I'm surprised that this doesn't come up more often in the Microsoft gripe list.

~~~

 Nate has an interesting post on the composition of the Senate, and the degree to which small-state Senators are proportionately more often funded by special interests:

"As you all surely know, the Senate is not a terribly democratic institution. A voter in Wyoming -- population 533,000 -- has about 70 times more ability to influence the Senate's direction than one in California -- population 36.8 million. And the lack of representativeness can be particularly acute when the Senate is conducting business at the committee level. Max Baucus's Table for Six, for instance, which may very well determine the fate of efforts to reform health care, is made up of members who collectively represent about 6.5 million people, or around one-fiftieth of the country's population."

Now, more than ever, with the Obama administration trying to fulfill its mandate, the House in pretty good shape (and accord), it's sobering how difficult it seems to be to get the Senate to toe the line.  These numbers tell the story why.
 

Posted by jbahr at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)