Navigating in iTunes, you’d think they would use Backspace to navigate backwards. It’s used in almost every application that has a concept of “backwards”. What does iTunes use instead:
“Go to the previous page in the iTunes Store Control-Left bracket ( [ ) “
Yep, it’s so easy to ctrl-[ my way around!
The iPhone didn’t bring touch screens, gestures or a great internet experience to phones. The iPhone brought the idea of “direct manipulation”.
Most mobile phone platforms are list and menu driven. Items are presented in a list and then you’re offered a menu (yet another list) of actions you can perform on these items. This is confusing because the action may be performed on any of the following:
There is no real way of knowing what is going to happen when most labels are under 20 characters with little explanation. To put this in context, if you select a contact on one of the latest builds of S60, you get TWENTY-NINE different menu items. Some of these include “Print”. When’s the last time you printed from your phone? Hell, when was the first time you printed from a phone? Yeah.
When people ask me if I like my iPhone, I always say “What it does, it does very well.” Apple took a different approach. You won’t see long menus offering actions you may never need and you won’t even see some key applications like MMS and video recording. Instead, you have direct access to the content. Think of this in three applications:
You can do “less” in comparison to S60, but you can do just about anything you’d really want to do:
It’s more natural to click on an email address than to have to focus on a contact name, hit a softkey, scroll through a menu and then click “Email”.
Another reason why the interface feels so natural is the speed. Unless I’m doing something silly like running Safari with 5 tabs and trying to get directions at the same time, the interface is snappy. Every application is fast when running. The only slowdowns I ever see are switching applications, which is almost to be expected on a mobile phone.
Navigation is still not as smooth as I’d like. You have the Abort button (AKA Home) and most applications have “Back” buttons built into their upper tool bars. This doesn’t feel natural, so improvements can be made there. I have a few ideas, but nothing for public consumption yet.
It was a trooper, purchased on launch from Costco. Why yes, I did abuse the Costco return policy, how’d you know? Walk in with the original box, a broken 360 and come out with a $550 cash card. Glorious.
The Altamont running of the 24 Hours of LeMons has come and gone for 2008.
As you might have heard, a horrific accident occurred on the first day of competition and we lost a racer. Court Summerfield was not a member of my team and I did not know him, but he will be missed. The racing community is always devastated, no matter the circumstances. I’d rather not write more about this and will leave you to click the Donate link on the home page and let this post suffice.
Preparation
Another year, another car. Along the lines of the first Festiva, we picked up another one from the same dirt trackers. This was an ’88 Festiva using a carbed 1.6L from a 323. It supposedly had a bad coil but would work just fine after that! After the replacing first the coil, then the plugs and wires, then the cap and rotor and finally the distributor itself, we got the bugger to fire up. We had NO idea what else was in store for us though.
Thankfully, another Microsoft friend decided to join in on the mayhem. I’ve told him twenty times so far but I’m going to say it again. If it wasn’t for Dan, we would not have made it to the race. Without going into all the build details, which would take pages and bore most of you, here’s the list of everything we did:
Priority 1
Priority 2
Priority 3
There are other things that we didn’t capture, but just look at all of that! This was probably 50 hours of work and Dan did innumerable other tasks in between our meets. By this point, the car was purring like a kitten, was quite stable in turns, braked as well as we could expect and decently reliable. In addition to all of that, we cobbled together a bunch of spare parts, including front struts with the springs pre-mounted. We were not going to face the same issue that took us out last year!
The Cast
Let’s step back and outline the cast of characters:
Before the Race
The cars were trailered down using a gutted 1974 Holiday Rambler towed behind a rented 1-ton truck. This greatly overshadows the open one car trailer towed behind Nat’s beat up truck last year. Nat, Becca, Richie and Heather made the tough trip this year and I heard it wasn’t the most enjoyable. Everyone but Jack made it to the track well in advance of necessary. We had tons of time to set up the pits, check on the cars and more. Jack’s luggage was delayed and I’m still not sure what ungodly hour he arrived on Saturday morning.
Friday night, we all went out for pizza and my god, did we all get along well. I had spent quite a bit of time with Dan, Jeev and the Jeffs fixing up the car but it was great to see the PLRs and the new faces. A couple pitchers of beer, some mostly fluff race preparation and a bit more drinking and we were all ready for the race. I spent quite a bit of time trying my hand a t-shirt iron-ons, using this cheeky design of my own creation:
I wanted to make shirts for everyone, but I couldn’t find enough iron-on transfers and then I the directions didn’t explain one crucial aspect of the tools, yadda yadda. I was only able to make five shirts, but we might get them printed up for real later.
The Race
The two race days were pretty much a blur. You get bullet points:
It’s auto show season and I’m already lusting after a few of new concepts:
The new Saab interior is very Saabesque but gorgeous. This just goes to show how numerous, minor, incremental tweaks can improve a design from acceptable to breath-taking.
The press pictures are contrast-deprived and reduce the visual punch the CTS-V should have, but again, the interior! I would gleefully slip into the luxurious folds of those seats, caressed firmly yet gently as I forced my will upon the highway with 550 HP.
I think I’ve figured out the perfect automotive combination for performance-minded people in Seattle. Many of us spend upwards of 1.5 hours every day driving between Seattle and the Eastside, usually in stop-and-go traffic. The side streets of Seattle experience congestion as well and our hills are second only to San Francisco. Sounds like a terrible place to own a manual, eh? It is, to be honest. I’ve got 39k miles on it now and I’ll be damned if my clutch makes it past 50k. You know those people that get 300k miles on a single clutch? Their daily commute takes them from Bumblenowhere, Ohio to Flatsville, Kansas. Clutch longevity isn’t about miles, it’s about clutch engagements and how rough the engagements are. I digress.
Though it is not available in many vehicles as of yet, the DualTronic transmission from Borg-Warner seems to offer the performance benefits of a manual with the ease of an automatic. The DualTronic, known to many as the DSG in various WV Group products, is a computer-controlled, dual-clutch transmission. Since it uses clutches instead of torque converters, you get none of the parasitic loss of an automatic transmission. The two clutches can independently engage different gears, the algorithm of which can be changed on the fly. If you’re on a Sunday drive, gently accelerating while in third gear, fourth gear will be pre-selected. Well below red line, the first clutch will disengage and the second one will smoothly grab onto fourth gear. Looking for performance? The system can be put into full manual mode. The algorithms can be changed such that if a potential downshift situation is detected (sudden reduction of the throttle with concurrent application of brakes, for example), the second clutch could pre-select a lower gear instead and rapidly snap to it as decelleration is detected (8 milliseconds is the publicized shift time). Good compromise, eh?
Even better than just having the option of throwing your DualTronic into automatic mode would be the inclusion of Bosch’s Adaptive Cruise Control. Available on various luxury makes such as BMW and MB, the latest version is capable of full stop-and-go control. I’d absolutely adore being set a maximum cruise speed of 65 MPH and then let the car get me across 520. I’d definitely be attentive and not place full trust in the technology, but this would allow me to relax my left foot and frustration after a hard day of work.
I bet that the 2009 BMW M3 will be the first vehicle available with this combination of technologies. BMW have announced they will offer a DSG-style transmission at some time for the M3 and sources say it is coming in the spring of 2008. BMW already offers adaptive cruise control as an option so they may incorporate the latest stop-and-go system by then as well. It’ll be years before this combination is available at a reasonable price.
It only took a few months of calendar time and about twenty hours of actual time, but my photo gallery is finally available at bibik.org! It has been updated with numerous pictures from this year, as well.
What I have now:
During the move to the condo, all of my surround speaker stands broke so I’m currently running 2.1 audio. Since I finally own a place, I figured I can finally do something decent with the surround speakers. Since I’m in a condo, I can’t run the speaker wires completely hidden in the wall (no access to ceiling or floor and no desire to rip open the wall at every stud!). I looked into a few different ideas for hiding the wires:
The only solution that seemed to work would be to use raceway so I picked up a few hundred feet of corner raceway from CableOrganizer. The room with the home theater has a bay window, a few hallways, et cetera so the only way to run the cable is as such:
The raceway was just delivered last night and I’m quite impressed. It’s attractive, well-sized, durable and not too heavy. Installation shouldn’t be a problem at all. Based on this fairly annoying Dolby site and the fact that I have to mount the right surround at a certain spot, I’ve found what I would consider the optimal positioning for the four surrounds. I’m going to get some cheap wall mounts that offer some adjustability.
Here is where I’m not quite so sure as to my plan. I know the speaker wires will be run along the ceiling and then will have to drop a few feet to the speakers. I could try to make it look extremely clean by running the wires behind the wall for that short stretch but that would require putting EIGHT holes in the wall. I could make very small holes; just enough to fish the wires. I could install keyhole plates but if I’m running the cables to the exact location of the speakers, why bother? I could also just run more cable raceway down the wall. I think I’m just going to run the wires bare for now while I contemplate these options.
I am going to toss the included speaker wire, get some bulk wire and do this right. I’m pricing wire out from Blue Jeans Cable, Parts Express and Monoprice; looks like PE is winning. I’ll run bare wire at the speaker and use banana plugs for the receiver side. Using those plugs will alleviate the headache of trying to do side-entry screw posts for 18 connections of 12 gauge wire! Just getting these speakers finally mounted and using some quality wire should help immensely.
But what about after that? The TV is currently sitting on an ugly IKEA TV bench, the 360 is hiding behind that, the cable box on the other side and the receiver is the only thing in the bench. Unfortunately, the only place for the center channel is under the bench! Highly suboptimal. My desire would be to wall-mount the TV, wall-mount the center channel just beneath the TV and hide all the cables. Hiding the power for the TV would require something like a PowerBridge and right now, the TV itself is doing all the video switching. It has to deal with the 360, cable box and the PC I have just off to the side. Running all of those cables up the wall sounds terrible! The receiver I have now can do 3x component and 3x composite in and does composite out. That would cover everything but the VGA (or DVI) in from the computer, which I can deal with for now.
An HDMI-switching receiver would be a great investment as I could just have the single HDMI cable run up to the TV. I could even use a DVI-HDMI cable to connect the computer to the receiver. I’d also replace the TV bench with an open component rack, for better cooling. The receiver and 360 both get extremely hot! Since I would have space on the rack, I’d probably get either a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player to enjoy the setup. At that point, I might try to upgrade the speakers but they seem fine to me. I’m not an audiophile by any means.
Ah dreams, oh for the want of time and money to make them true.
Clare and I just found the cutest cat in the whole world and he’s turning out to be quite the lover!
We had been scouring petfinder.com for the last few weeks, toying with the idea of getting a cat. I’m pretty much settled in to the condo, Clare is staying with me every night and we both wanted a pet. She’s more of a dog lover but my little condo just couldn’t support a dog lifestyle. We’ve sent each other tens of petfinder.com links but none of them seemed like “the one”. Finally, Clare sent a link early one morning titled “HHHOOOOOOONNNEEEYYYYYYY!!!” and a wave of realization hit, here was the one!
I had a few criteria in mind when picking out a new cat. These criteria were not of the “must have” variety, but more of the “must not be” variety:
The cat that Clare linked to was six years old, had a teratoma removed from his neck and needed a tooth removed. On the other hand, you could tell he was so sweet and once healed up, would be beautiful! He’s a Siamese mix: mostly a domestic short-hair body but with blue-points and the cutest blue cross eyes! We ran through a few name ideas but since he’s mostly a light cream color with blue points, I came up with the name Roquefort, or Ro for short. Here he is:
I’m a bad dork. For the first time since my parents bought a Tandy 1000 and then some Acer with a Pentium 60, I’ve purchased a computer instead of building my own from parts. I’ve been running my last homebuilt computer for over five years now and loading a simple video now takes five steps:
1) Shutdown all other programs
2) Fire up Task Manager
3) Kill any rogue process that is taking up more than 10% of the CPU (I’m looking at you, trustedinstaller.exe! Hey, svchost, pipe down!)
4) Fire up the video and pause it after it thrashes for 20 seconds like a fish outta water.
5) Promote the wmplayer.exe priority to High, but NOT real-time. High allows the player to suck up enough resources to play a video properly, real-time seems to override the scheduler causing… problems.
After watching the first four seasons of The Sopranos in this fashion, I decided enough was enough and started trolling for deals on new computers. After realizing that buying a pre-made system was cheaper than assembling one, I focused on Dell deals. Finally, I picked up this system for only $520:
That processor stuffed in a mini-tower with those other components sorta seems like stuffing an AMG 6.2L V8 into a Festiva (…if only engines were free, I’d have a great LeMons car there) but my old computer has a DVD burner and I’ll upgrade the new computer over time. That processor retails for $200 on its own, same with the monitor!
I barely booted the computer before reformatting the drive and installing a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. So far, I’m happy with the box and the 2 GB of RAM I have coming my way will only improve the situation.