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| Friday, July 17th, 2009 | | 2:26 pm |
communication
So my uncle asked me what I thought of texting. It got me thinking about communication as a whole and the choices one makes on what form of communication one uses to get information transferred. It comes down to three things 1. immediacy of communication method 2. effort used in communication method 3. importance of information There are many different types of personal communication with different levels of immediacy involved. I try and match the importance of the information I have to the level of immediacy and effort of the communication method. 1. phone call -- most immediate, you need to call and the receiver needs to pick up. This requires a medium amount of effort on both sides. If the information you need to transfer isn't that important, I use a different method. 2. instant messaging - very immediate but low effort. The down side is it requires both parties to be logged on to a service... so this can affect immediacy. 3. email -- least immediate. You send the email and the other person gets to it at their leisure. You have no real idea of when they'll read it or when you'll get a response. Now I put texting in between them. I can send a short message that is likely to be read immediately. If the recipient is busy, they can reply later. Effort wise is very small. Messages are 160 characters (iphone to iphone can be longer). Since the effort is small, I've found that I've kept in touch with people via text where I would never have called them. | | Sunday, December 14th, 2008 | | 1:32 pm |
Ironic...
So I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry... but I'll just file it as ironic. My ISP sent me a bill for this year's service, and their spam software filed it in my spam folder. It's a good thing I regularly check it for misfiled spam. You'd think they'd whilelist their own employees. | | Thursday, December 4th, 2008 | | 6:53 pm |
From the WTF catagory
Two words I never really thought I'd see together: Crispy and Asparagus  sorry for the blur... the iphone doesn't take great indoor shots | | Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | | 2:38 pm |
Trans Siberian Orchestra
I went to see the Trans Siberian Orchestra when they were in town a couple weeks ago. It was an absolutely amazing experience. I've been a big fan of their music for a few years now. They take traditional Christmas music and make rocky improvisations of them. I'm usually not a huge fan of Christmas music, but I am a big fan of TSO. How can you wrong you have more electric guitars than traditional instruments to play Christmas music. Their shows take it to another level. Not only are you listening to their great music, they make a great light show out of it. They have the standard theater and smart theater lights you'd expect. In addition, they had lasers, multi-colored gas flames, computer screens, lighted trusses and more. It was all computer controlled to the music. Oh I almost forgot the snow machine... you can't forget the indoor snow machine. The first half of the show is narrated by this guy who had the most even and interesting narrating voice I've ever heard. At some point in the middle of the show, they brought out everyone out and introduced them. He was introduced as the guy who could read the phone book and make it sound interesting. I wouldn't doubt it. He narrated a story about an angel flying around the world on Christmas eve looking for the good in people until he finally found it. The music was the story. The second half was just TSO showing off their light equipment. The second half was definitely more flashy. The flames and the lasers were used more. The trusses were moved as part of the musical act rather than just repositioned in between them. At the end, they even had several of the TSO members on a lift with gas jets on the bottom which made an illusion of them blasting up into the sky. They tour every year. If you get a chance, it's WELL worth the price of the ticket to go see them. The show is absolutely amazing. Here's a link to a youtube video to give you an idea of the kind of things they do. It's NOTHING like being there though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCL6O5ji3T0&feature=related | | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | | 2:36 pm |
car EPA ratings
I've been running an experiment over the last month and a half. The experiment: Just what kind of driving habits would it take to get the EPA millage for freeways for my prius. It took me 3 tanks of gas to learn how to do it, but I finally did. But let me back up a bit. I've owned my prius for over two years now. I bought it in May of 2006. The EPA says the 2006 prius should get 53 MPG on the freeway. For 2 years, I'd get between 45 and 48 mpg. 48 is after serious changes to my driving habits to learn how to drive the prius correctly... or what I thought was correctly. Previous to the prius I owned a honda accord. I drove it like crap, and not unexpectedly got crappy MPG. I'd drive 80 to and fro work. I started driving the prius way slower than I drove my honda. I'd slow down to about 70-75 rather than 80. This got me much better millage. I also learned the techniques of constant light pressure of the gas and most importantly, releasing and reapplying pressure to the gas. This tells the prius you want to go on battery if possible. All of these helped a lot. Well about a month and a half ago, I thought to myself... what would it take to get that epa 53 mpg? The answer: slow the fuck down. I slowed from my driving speed from 70 to an average driving speed of 53-55. As a result my average commute lengthened around 5m. I spend a few more than 20m on the road instead of around 17. It's a lesson in patience. Putzing along in the slow lane, and not worrying about the people passing you. I also more finely honed my prius driving techniques. You have instant feedback with the prius display. It's a game of speed vs mpg. You can lose speed and max your mpg, but that is counter productive. You can press the gas and lose mpg to gain speed... but also counter productive. It's a game of optimizing the two. The terrain of the road fits in greatly. When you're going down hill, you take advantage of it. Coast down the hill on battery power at 100mpg gaining a little speed and mpg. When you hit an incline, press the gas some, so you don't bleed off too much speed, but don't press it so much that you're gaining speed. You'll hit an decline soon to gain it back. I try not to go below 50mph. I figure anything lower than that in a non-traffic time on a freeway is not safe. In any case, I got off track. Last night I filled up for the third time after starting this experiment. I got 54.4mpg. I welt over 520 miles and took under 10 gallons. The prius is quite a feat of engineering if driven correctly. It would have been about 55mpg, but it hit the weekend and I did a lot of short trips around the house. The worse kind of driving you can do with the prius is short city drives. The car spends a lot of energy warming up the engine just to have it turned off. In any case, I found this neat... I'd like to title it Eat This Gas Guzzlers  So what if it was just for 1/4m while I was driving on my electric motor on the way home from the gas station =] | | Thursday, September 18th, 2008 | | 4:40 pm |
I've heard of wine coolers but...
 The best way to describe this is a Sake Cooler.... It's even carbonated. My friends and I had it when we went out for sushi the other night. We didn't realize the bottle was pink before we ordered it =] | | Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | | 2:07 pm |
health woes
So I haven't written in a while. I haven't been feeling well. I went on disability from work in March and haven't been back to full time since. My doctor initially thought it was a sinus infection. He gave me antibiotic after antibiotic. He sent me to see a ear nose throat specialist. He took a culture and sent me to get a cat scan. The culture came back negative and the cat scan showed a lot of fluid in my sinuses. He thought this could account for my dizziness and whatnot. He put me on a sinus wash and a new medication called singular. It was originally used for asthma, but recently found it could help people with allergies. I was also on a saline sinus wash twice a day. At this point he was figuring it it was a bad sinus infection made worse by my seasonal allergies (which includes dust mites). After a month and a half of this not really doing much, he didn't want to screw around any more, he put me on a heavy dose of prednizone. After a week of not sleeping well, about 50% of the dizziness went away along with the pressure in my upper sinuses. The stuff doesn't fool around. So this didn't completely fix me. My doctor sent me to get a dizziness test. This is an interesting test. During the entire test I wear this head gear with a camera which looks at my eyes. The head gear has a visor part which can cover my eyes. The test was split into 3 parts. The first part I looked at this long light board. I followed lights with my eyes. They moved down the board and I followed them down. They would move in a line and then erratically and I'd try and follow them. One time they had several lights moving down a line. I pick one and follow it down. The second part I lied on my back with the visor part down with my head to one side and look up. Then with my head to the other side and look up. I don't know what this did, but it actually produced results (more later). Lastly, I lied back with the visor down and they blew warm and cool air in my ears. This is known to cause dizziness in everyone. They were just trying to find out if one side or warm or cool was worse. Right after they stopped, they'd ask you to do think about something semi-hard like count backwards by twos. In any case, the second test showed something. My doctor explained it that there were little canals in your ear which looked like U's. They were open on one side and closed on the other. Little crystals could float their way in the open side though and get stuck in the closed side. He moved my head in a series of motions to dislodge the crystals and move them back into the general part of the ear canal where the body could correctly handle them. I hand to hold my head vertical for 48 hours... made sleeping a bit of a pain =] OK, I'm sure most of you have stopped reading by now, so I'll stop babbling. In the next exciting episodes of How Bhroam is Broken: 1) How bhroam almost got fired because the head of HR at his company is lame 2) How to traverse outpatient medica services without it taking years 3) How to recognize when your doctor doesn't know how to help you but doesn't want to say he's clueless In any case, I'm back to work about half-time. Hopefully working up to 3/4 time soon. | | Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | | 4:15 pm |
Today I had something I've never had before. I had an MRI. You see these on TV shows and it looks like you lie down, suck you into tube and that is it. The part they don't show you on TV is the noise aspect of it. Mine was just of my brain, so I didn't go completely into the tube. I was probably in about to my mid-torso or waist. I had to lie completely still, so I couldn't look. The MRI tech gave me some ear plugs saying it'd be noisy. I thought to myself that it couldn't be that bad, but I humored her and put them on. I did kind of a half assed job putting them in though. When I got in there, I heard the need for them. It is LOUD! For 20m you're bombarded with beeps, bangs, low tones, high tones. The best way I can describe it is having your own private showing of STOMP up close and personal. The tech said my doctor would get the results early next week, so I could call then to get them. | | Friday, March 14th, 2008 | | 2:18 pm |
so there I was...
I'm getting a physical next week. The doctor was proactive this year and gave me the sheet to get the blood work ahead of time. I don't know if this is their new procedure, or they've learned that I'm a putz. I went for my physical last year and they handed me a sheet to get the blood work done. I'm still in possession of said sheet. They kept asking me every time I went in if I got it done. Something tells me they're just on to me =] In any case, the lab had a small reception area. Probably about 20ft x 20ft room with two chairs to each wall. A women came in to get her baby some lab work. She wheeled in this monstrosity of a stroller. You could literally hold like 5 babies in this. It pretty much took up the entire center area between the chairs. Another patient at the lab made a joke that it was the SUV of strollers.  You'll have to forgive the crappy picture. My treo 650 is over 3 years old at this point and is showing its age. So if you at the top right, you'll see the baby in about 20% of it. It's like a double decker troop transport. The handle you push went all the way back to the wall to the right (you can see the mother's legs). I just couldn't imagine such a monstrosity being created... and why would you WANT such a thing? Oh and the other funny thing which happened when I was there was their magazine collection. I picked up an issue of mac world and started reading it. The first clue that something wasn't quite right was the ad for a macbook showing off the cool magnetic power cable connection. I'm like, "wtf, that's way old. Oh well maybe someone didn't know about them." Next up, an article about their new LED backlight bright screens. I've got one of these in my macbook which is over 6 months old at this point. I check the date. July of 2007. I pick up another one... nope, May of last year. I got to play, find the most recent date. It appears their magazine subscriptions ran out around August of last year and they haven't bothered to renew them =] | | 1:21 pm |
meh
So I caught this sinus infection. I didn't even realize I had it... I didn't have any of the major sick symtoms. No coughing, no runny nose... just a bit overly congested. I've had worse allergies. I just had no energy and felt dizzy whenever I did anything more than sit in front of the computer. You know something is wrong when driving to Starbucks feels like an olympic sport. I've been out of work for nearly two weeks now. The first few days I figured I'm not feeling that bad, I'll be better tomorrow. A couple of days turned into a few more and then I figured I'd goto the doctor on Friday. The doctor said I had a sinus infection in half of my sinuses (which he thought strange). He said this sinus infection is an epidemic this year. He gave me Amoxicillin + Clavulanate. One pill, two antibiotics. Heavy duty stuff... requires food and all that. Well a day and a half into it, I start breaking out in little itchy red bumps all over my body. Well mostly on my hands, but a couple here and there. Great... down for a week, and I'm allergic to the meds my doc gave me. I call up on monday, and my doctor doesn't work Mon/Tue. He shares an office with another doctor. The nurse is able to get a hold of him and asked if I was allergic to this other one. I've only ever been allergic to one other antibiotic named Celocin. The medicine name (Celocin is the brand), was similar to the medicine in this other antibiotic. This made the nurse was unsure. She thought it might be a derivative and she wanted to talk with the doctor again. She got a hold of the doc on tuesday and he said it was fine. I'm now taking Zithromax. It is the best antibiotic ever. Usually you take an antibiotic for 10 days 1-4 pills a day. This one has 6 pills. You take 2 the first day and then 1 each day after that. 5 days later, you're done. It supposedly front-loads the drug into your body and has enough in your system for the full 10 days. In any case, I'll be taking my 5th pill later today, and the last one tomorrow. It's taken a few days, and I'm starting to feel better. When I get sick, I'm normally very careful. The day I start to feel better, I'll it it off or work at home. This way I don't accidentally push myself too far and get a relapse. After 2 weeks at home doing nothing but playing WoW... I broke that rule and came into the office today. I'm trying to take it easy. | | Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 | | 1:43 pm |
Leopard
So I bit the bullet... I installed leopard on my mac. I was kind of skeptical of installing it from what I heard. It sounded like most of the updates went into the built in commands I don't use. I use firefox and thunderbird etc... I did want spaces though. I missed them from my linux days. I do have to say I'm very happy I have. I haven't found everything yet, but spaces indeed are lovely. Stacks are also nice. One thing I missed from windows was a start menu... easy access to my programs. I had an applications window on my dock which did work... Well now it's a stack and gives me a nice screen full of applications. Exactly what I wanted. Other nice little things are images/pdfs/etc on show a thumbnail of the image as an icon. I'm sure I haven't found all the coolness that is leopard, but I am happy with what I found so far. One thing which looked neat, but I'm not sure I'll ever use is this new ability with ichat to share your desktop. It sounds neat... but both people would have to run leopard and run ichat... which I don't see happening. Oh and I heard the OS is 64bit native... which is always nice. In any case, I'm happy with the upgrade. Anyone else upgrade? What do you think? | | Friday, February 22nd, 2008 | | 4:17 pm |
laugh of the day
So I have no idea where this is from... a guildie of mine posted it on our guild website. It's hellishly funny (and hopefully won't offend your religious beliefs).  | | Monday, February 18th, 2008 | | 6:33 pm |
Time windows
So I signed up or High Def Dish Network last wednesday. This required them to come out to my house and install a new dish and set up the receiver. They set up a time window of 8-noon today to come out and do it. I am not fond of these time windows to begin with. It basically means you give up a day to sit at home waiting for these people. Like my time is worth less than their's. Well at 7:30 I get a phone call from the dispatcher people saying he'd arrive between 8 and 9. I'm like cool.. I don't have to stay at home all morning. I doze back of to sleep (I mean 7:30am? who's up at that hour). I doze till my alarm goes off at 9:30 and still no installer. I get up and do some work. 10:30 rolls around and I call up dish. They say they'll call the dispatcher people and have them give me a call within like 20m. 11:30 rolls around and I call them back again. This time they call the dispatch directly with me on hold. They're calling the installer directly and having him give me a call. 12:30ish the installer arrives. He says that the work order is empty. It has my name and address, but no work. It turns out that the out-sourced india tech support guy I talked to last week failed me. Now the real kicker was that he HAD arrived at 8am as planned. He noticed the work order problem, and called it in. They told him they would cancel the order and go to onto his other jobs. Now you might expect that I'd get a phone call saying something about this... but NO. Now lets say they got busy and forgot. Well the first time I called, it shoulda been a kick in the butt. I didn't find out about this for FOUR HOURS. The installer called up dish and after talking to them and fixing everything the idiot I talked to last week did, I need to reschedule. A NEW TIME WINDOW... at least I made it on saturday. I usually waste my saturdays away playing WoW anyways. So at the end of the day, I get into work way late... and what do I have to show for it? a bunch of frustration. Dish Network didn't offer to compensate me in any way. I've been a Dish Network customer almost 10 years now. I've been with them since the beginning. They USED to be awesome. For the past few years, their customer service has been HORRID. | | Friday, February 15th, 2008 | | 5:57 pm |
Leopard
Welp, I finally bit the bullet and ordered Leopard today. As I've gotten older, I've taken up the opinion of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. I have a lot less patience to fix things on my computer. I loved doing it in college... played with the bleeding edge to get cool new stuff... going through the pain of it bring broken was part of the fun. Now I just want something which works. Leopard has a couple of nice things I've wanted... mainly Spaces. It was something I had to get used to when I bought my mac. I love having multiple workspaces on my UNIX machines. I know there are programs out there which do this, but if I'm gonna go though the pain of installing/learning something new, I might as well use the official version I'll eventually need to use anyways. Since I've got apple fans on my friends list... what other cool things should I be looking forward to with Leopard? I wasn't THAT impressed when I read the blurb about it when it came out. Mostly they fixed up the built in apps... which I don't use. I like firefox... I like thunderbird... why should I bother using something different on my mac than on my unix/windows machines? The whole time machine thing could be good. I like how it does it automatically if I hook up a drive too it. I might have to get a drive and let it go about its business. I'm usually really bad about backing up. So what else? How cool are stacks? They looked neat, but gimicky. | | 5:49 pm |
27 dresses
yes yes I know... I'm not very manly, but I like chick flicks. I've actually been very disappointed in the last few I saw. I went to see 27 dresses this week and really enjoyed it. It was well made and well acted. I generally find the stories fall down near the end. If you're one for chick flicks, I'd suggest seeing this one. | | Thursday, February 7th, 2008 | | 4:01 pm |
layoffs suck
So today was a first for me. Two of my coworkers were laid off from work today. Now I've been in the business world for over 10 years now. I'm not an ostrich. I know they happen. They've happened to my friends. They've happened to my friend's coworkers. They've just never happened so close to home. My coworker, Cas, and I started at the same time (like 1 day apart) back at NASA. We used to sit in the same cube. We used to work on the same project... same piece of code. The other was a part time person we've had on a couple of years. I'm a little confused on why it all happened. I looked over all the correspondence from high up to us peons and found very little. The CEO mailed a ra ra mail at the first of the year. Told us how we're doing great and how the great things going to happen this year. The email was several pages long. The only thing is he said that in 1007 expenses rose faster than revenue and we'd need to be careful. We've had layoffs in the past. We got an email that there'd be a 4% layoff. It was up front: "We're sorry, but we need to do this". We all understand about these. What's for the best of the company. Well times have changed. They think the axe should just come and whack. We got an email last night saying there was a mandatory meeting today at 11am. People came in and were let go. I understand not letting people know until the day of... but I almost feel that we were deceived. Whenever we're told about how the company is doing... it's doing great. All a sudden, layoffs. When asked at this 11am meeting, they're not done with the layoffs. They have been happening back in the company HQ in Detroit. I'm just surprised it hit us. It took us 2 years to fill 2 developer reqs. We're very picky and particular about who we hire. It takes a long time, but we get top notch people. We were given more reqs than other departments last year because of the amount of work we have to do. Now we're down 2 people. Man this sucks. I've worked with Cas for 10 years! Oh well... I still have my job. I guess I should consider myself fortunate. | | Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 | | 11:34 am |
Failure at error messages
So I wanted to look someone up on myspace yesterday. I go to log on and forget my username/pw. I log on so seldom, and I only really have an account so I can view pictures for my friends. So I go and type in what I think my username and password is. I am of course wrong. It's been months since I've logged in. Now you'd expect a pretty standard error message. Something like, "Invalid username or password" or maybe even, "You suck, you can't even remember your password". No... Myspace's failed to log in message: "You must be logged in to do that" FAIL | | Friday, January 25th, 2008 | | 5:20 pm |
Amazon bundling
So for a number of years now, Amazon has tried to "bundle" things you're looking at with something similar. This was their way to try and convince you to buy more. I very quickly realized that when they said "Buy both for X", X = Price(A) + Price(B). There is no discount at all. I then started ignoring their attempts of up-selling me. Well one time I happened to notice one which made me chuckle. I'll post and let ya all see  Amazon thought I should buy Office for the Mac... and by the way a good accessory for Office for the Mac is Office for the Mac. GG Amazon! | | Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 | | 12:30 pm |
iphone on-screen keyboard
When I played with an iphone at the apple store, I found the onscreen keyboard highly annoying and error prone. It appears it doesn't get any better http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?ContentId=7508It's a study comparing iphone error rates to a phone with a qwerty keyboard to just the standard number pad when used for text messaging. The iphone users had twice the error rates as the others. I'm still not sold on the iphone. I used to love the treo's, but with palmsource screwing around for years and not getting their new OS out... we're stuck with the same software on newer hardware. The centro does tempt me... but it's still basically the same thing as my treo 650 in a smaller, faster package. Why spend money to get what I got? One of the things which sells me on the treo is the 3rd party software library which goes along with it. I'm not interested in the new open source (mako?) or the verizon one... They might be cool looking, but if they don't have the 3rd party support, whats the point? I suspect after the SDK comes out for the iphone, it will quickly find 3rd party support... and all the stuff which we've come to assume every phone has and the iphone doesn't will be developed. I'm in a wait and see on the iphone. | | Friday, November 9th, 2007 | | 2:48 pm |
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