The printer I normally use at work was acting a little strange this morning. I have no idea what this means.
Insert obligatory (PG13) Office Space quote here.
12
May
Mopy Job?!
One of my co-workers is selling some of her new-in-box iPods (her husband gets her a new one every year, and she’s never opened a single one) to another co-worker. They’re discussing the sizes she has to sell.
“This is a 30gig. I don’t know why anybody would want anything bigger. Did you know they sell a 160 or something? My kids and my husband have every popular song that’s been on the radio for like the past 12 years, and they can’t even fill 5 gigabytes.”
I respond:
“My wife and I have over 40 gigabytes, and we have some CD’s we haven’t ripped yet.”
To which she says:
“What kind of music do you freaks listen to?!”
Apparently, having more just just top-40 radio hits is freakish.
That tricky Google Reader. Sometimes it takes forever to grab the latest item from a feed, and sometimes it’s almost instant. Anyway, for those of your reading via the RSS feed, I updated the Babyproofing the Bookshelf post because it’s the PARENTHACKS (plural) tag at Flickr with lots of good content, as opposed to the PARENTHACK (singular) tag which is almost never used.
We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.
A blog I subscribe too posted about a couple who brought bribe bags of candy with them on a recent airplane trip to help ease the pain and frustration of nearby passengers should their newborn son cause any unpleasantness. (And giving credit where it’s due, my brother-in-law suggested to me this weekend that we could hand out earplugs to airplane neighbors when we fly with the girls.)
The post mentions that the story of these parents doing this was found via the ‘parenthacks’ tag on Flickr. People who think they have a photo (and hopefully an explanation) of some trick to make parenting easier or better can include the tag ‘parenthacks’ on their photo to have it added to the Flickr stream.
So it was through the this tag that I saw this solution for preventing toddlers from accessing a bookshelf and tipping it over (crushing themselves), jumping off the top shelf (breaking themselves), or emptying the shelves and/or destroying books. I rearranged some furniture last night to make room for some new, used, donations, and somehow it was decided that my daughter’s room was the best place for an 8-foot-tall, narrow bookcase. We could screw it to the wall, but then she still has a nice tall ladder to climb and plenty of grown-up books to rip and color on. Covering the shelves within her reach with some kind of adult-removable, kid-friendly surface (I’m thinking magnetic board/paint as opposed to confusing her with a wall-sized surface you can write on) is brilliant.
The Google Reader blog announced some BIG features in the sharing department today. Now you can add shared content from anywhere without having to subscribe to its feed (also meaning you can add from sites without a feed), and you can add notes or commentary to anything you share. Google Reader’s previous lack of these two abilities is exactly why I chose to use Tumblr to import my Google Reader shared feed in to it to be published.
I’m not sure if the Google Reader team added these features to compete with Tumblr (which would be kind of odd since their main purpose is as a sweet web-based feed aggregator, which Tumblr isn’t even trying to be), or if it’s simply because their users have been asking for them. I know I submitted a feature request or two along these very lines. Tumblr still has one-up on Google Reader in that you can add feeds (such as Flickr favorites or Twitter tweets) to automatically be shared as they’re updated.
I’m planning to leave my Link Blog at Tumblr for now. I’m assuming the new Reader features will still work fine in the feed I send to Tumblr, and eliminating Tumblr would mean people subscribed to me would need to change to subscribe to my Reader Shared Items feed again. Still, it’s nice to see the Google Reader team continuing to improve and listen to user feedback.
05
May
She Has A Point
My daughter (20 months) and I were walking around the block while I was home for lunch today. Excited to spot an ant scurrying along the sidewalk, she let out a squeal of glee and started pointing.
“Yeah, that’s an ant, Sweetie.”
“No,” she says. “BUG!”
We always use “ant” to refer to my sister and my sisters-in-law as part of “aunt so-and-so” (after marrying an Iowan, I had to give up my my Minnesotan/rural/British pronunciation of the word).
I wonder what other homonyms are going to take her a while to get used to.
Last Friday I ordered my first eBook. At work with a crashed hard drive and nothing to do, I decided to use my Palm Centro smart phone to buy an eBook edition of the novel I’m reading. I chose Mobipocket.com because
- It was the first store that came to mind
- It allows you to keep and read the book on as many devices as you want (PC, Palm, etc.)
- Assuming you have an Internet connection, it lets you buy and download books all from your mobile device (unlike many eBook stores that require you to buy the book on a PC and transfer it to your Palm device from there)
Downloading the free software to my phone was fast and easy, as was buying the $10 eBook and downloading that to my phone as well. It took less than two minutes to go from deciding to get an eBook to actually reading it.
My phone’s screen is big enough and the font clear enough (after I changed to white text on a dark blue background) to make for a reasonably pleasant reading experience. The Mobireader software is easy to use, and actually offers some good features (although I wish it gave you the ability to look up selected words on a free website like Dictionary.com instead of requiring you to buy a dictionary eBook separately).
Unfortunately, it would appear that eBooks aren’t inspected as well as their physical counterparts. After a few hours of reading, I noticed a page was missing. There’s no direct way to contact support at the Mobipocket website; instead of an email link or even a phone number, users are simply presented with a message board forum. I greatly prefer contacting support directly, but this strange support system is all Mobipocket offers. I posted my notification of the missing page Friday morning and received a response this (Tuesday) morning. The response said that the missing page was confirmed, the publisher had been contacted to request a corrected eBook, and that if I don’t hear back from Mobipocket or the book’s publisher in 5 days then I should respond to initiate a refund.
I have to admit that this complication has somewhat curbed my enthusiasm for buying eBooks. I was excited about how easy and fast things had been until I noticed the inferiority of the product I had purchased. If you can’t trust a book medium’s fidelity (”is this eBook corrupted or was that just a weird way to end the chapter?”) it’s hard to spend money on it.
Still, the Mobipocket format does seem to be ok for something crippled by DRM. The reader format can be used on a wide range of mobile devices (even the Kindle), although it’s foolishly not available for Mac or Linux systems. If you don’t mind the DRM (which essentially means you can’t convert your eBook to any format other than the Mobipocket format it comes in), and aren’t afraid of a strange, slow customer support system, you could do worse than Mobipocket. Assuming I can get a refund if the publisher doesn’t quickly provide a corrected copy, I’m likely to buy from Mobipocket again.
Not even an hour after waking up this morning, my 20-month-old daughter was sick of being inside, and wanted to go out and do something. The problem was, in addition to being wet and muddy from the recent rain and storms, almost nothing (with anything good for a toddler to do) is open before noon on Sundays. On my list of possible places to eventually go today I had the Noelridge Park greenhouses.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the hours that the greenhouses are open anywhere on the Cedar Rapids, IA city website. And various Google search results turned up vague and sometimes conflicting information. I called the number listed in the city directory, and got a recording that said nothing of hours of availability.
So we drove there, not expecting them to be open, but hoping we’d at least find a sign that would tell us when we could come back in the future. Here it is:
That’s Monday through Friday, 7am to 3:30pm, and also Easter weekend, and Mother’s Day.
I know the hours are quite restrictive, but considering that the greenhouses are tended to mostly by volunteers (due to some unfortunate budget cuts) it’s nice that they’re open to the public at all. Since they were closed like I expected, I was nice that it actually wasn’t as wet as I had thought. We ended up playing at one of the playgrounds as well as chasing ducks and squirrels.
So hopefully somebody wondering what the hours are when people can come and visit the Noelridge park greenhouses can find there way here and save themselves a trip! Continue reading ‘Noelridge Park Greenhouse Hours’
A lot of Windows users these days are used to tracking down and killing a runaway program. When a program isn’t responding or the whole system just seems sluggish for some reason, you hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc (or maybe Ctrl-Alt-Del) to bring up the Windows Program Manager and see if any programs or processes listed are using a lot of CPU (that’s your processor). But often times you may have noticed that when you do this, no programs or processes stand out as the culprit. The System Idle Process is accounting for the majority of the CPU (as it should when your computer isn’t thinking hard on something) and you’re stumped.
Well, my computer at work is regularly (and mind numbingly) slow. And it’s not the processor speed or even the RAM size (although I wouldn’t mind more of either). It’s the hard drive.
Continue reading ‘Why Is Your Computer Being Slow? Process Explorer Knows’
08
Apr
Book Review: The Sparrow
I finished Mary Doria Russell’s debut novel, The Sparrow, last night. I’ll say first that I liked the book and enjoyed reading it. As I neared the end over the weekend, I dragged my family to the library with me (arriving only twenty minutes before they were to close) just so I’d have the sequel on hand when I finished. I was enjoying it enough to want to continue with wherever the author might take the story next.
That said, the ending left me somewhat…deflated. The short prologue foreshadows catastrophe, and the first page informs the reader that our protagonist is the lone survivor of a failed interstellar first-contact mission. So I knew not to expect a triumphant closing to the ill-fated flashbacks. But I still expected both a more shocking or climactic series of fatal events, and some kind of poignant observation or redeeming revelation by our protagonist or his associates. Instead, the somewhat abrupt ending (while not necessarily hurried ending) was steeped in irony, futility, and justification for the protagonist’s despair and anger.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the book once I finished. I knew not to expect a happy ending, and yet I still held out hope for something more (even when the Jamaican bobsled team of Cool Runnings loses their climactic race due to sled sabotage, they still carry their sled across the finish line to rounds of applause and cheering from the Olympic crowds).
It took a while for it to sink into my head that this book wasn’t meant to be a roller-coaster ride of climaxes, under-dogs, and heroes. There was no Gandalf to lead the Rohirrim from the east at dawn of the fifth day and turn the tides at Helm’s Deep. Bad things happened, and nothing came about to change or even justify them.
And now I’m reading the sequel. I wasn’t sure I wanted to in the hour or so following my completion of The Sparrow. I didn’t exactly regret reading the book, but I momentarily wondered if I had wasted my time. But I eventually accepted that a book that raises philosophical question but doesn’t force its own answers at you isn’t a bad thing (in fact, in the case of The Sparrow I believe that would have been exactly the wrong thing to do). So trusting Mary Doria Russell to tell a story with characters I care about, events I’m interested in, and questions I feel are good to be asking is all fairly easy to do now that I’ve finished and had a chance to reflect.
I wasn’t planning to write a review today, but I did mean to read some other people’s reviews this morning (not to get ideas for my own review, but simply to find more insight into the book). The first and only review I’ve read so far today is this one by Steven H. Silver. I especially liked that he addressed my biggest problem with the plot (and easily least favorite chapter):
“On [some] levels, the novel does not work as well. Despite the backing of the Society of Jesus, the mission ot Rakhat retains the flavor of a 1950s sf novel in which the characters decide to build a spaceship in their backyard.”
I agree with Silver’s closing enough to want to borrow it here for my own:
“The Sparrow is a novel of ideas and characters. Not the sort of ideas which make the reader gasp and say ‘Wow,’ but the type of ideas which make the reader continue to think about them long after the book has been set aside….If the action occasionally slows to allow more philosophical and religious discussion, it does so in order to make The Sparrow a stronger novel.”
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