About time, VZW

Could it be? Looks like Verizon is FINALLY going to be releasing some decent smartphones!

The XV6900 in April and the BlackBerry Curve in May.

Looks like my Q's days are numbered...

Spring break in Tampa

Click for Pictures

Political Email Flood

Note to self: Don't register on a political candidate's website unless I want to receive daily (and sometimes twice-daily) email messages from said candidate.


Geesh. I'm glad I used my spam email account on Barack's website...is this many emails really necessary????

This definitely makes me glad that I don't have a home phone for them to call.

Watch out for upside-down cars

My GPS unit traffic screen this past friday evening at rush hour. The upside-down car icons are traffic accidents and the exclaimation point icons are incidents like road closures.

Made for an interesting drive home, but knowing where all the accidents were in real-time was pretty handy.

Digging out from the storm

Weekend in Hocking Hills

Stephanie and I spent the weekend in Hocking Hills with friends. Here are my pics and videos:

2008_02_22 Hocking Hills

And here are Jeff's pictures from the weekend.

Weekend in Cincy / Oxford

Stephanie took me down to Cincinnati & Oxford this weekend for my birthday. It was fun to roam around Miami and revisit my college days.

Click for full album

Vista after 2 months - Prognosis: poor

It's been two months since I got my new work laptop that came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. During these past two months, I've endured a countless number of system hangs, windows crashes, program crashes, poor performance, and lots of headaches.

I thought it was nice, however, that Microsoft includes a tool with Vista to show you just how crappy of an experience it is. It's called the "Reliability Monitor" and it is a running graph that plots your system stability on a scale of 1-10. My system started off from the factory at an 8.92 (even Lenovo can't get this machine to a 10) and has tanked ever since.

As of yesterday, my system was rating itself as a 1.62 out of 10. It will probably be even worse tomorrow since I've already had Firefox crash on me about 6 times as well as Windows Explorer freeze and require a hard reset.



(note: you'll have to excuse the pasted-together image, but Windows only lets you see about 3 weeks at a time on the graph. I stitched the past two months together into one image)

Mail non-innovation

I recently took advantage of an offer from HP where they will send you a "skin" (big sticker) for your laptop for free. Why not, right? I'm not planning on putting any stickers on my laptop, but you never know when a 10" wide sticker of the Miami Redhawk might come in handy.

I ordered the sticker back in mid-January and recieved an order shipment notification email on 1/16/08.

After 3 weeks, I finally called the company SkinIt to inquire about the status of my free sticker. The British (?!?) gentlement who answered the phone verified that my order shipped back on 1/16 via UPS and that I should expect my package by 2/7/08.

Now, I know that sometimes UPS ground shipping is slow...but over 3 weeks? That's just crazy talk! I asked for a tracking number, since one was not provided in the shipment notification email, and was told the following: "Your tracking number is your order number followed by 'skinit'". Huh? What happened to the familiar 1Z* format of a UPS tracking number. Then I was given a non-UPS website that I need to use to track my package (www.ups-mi.net/packageid/).

If I hadn't made this purchase through HP, a pretty reputable company, I would have assumed at this point, that this is some kind of weird phishing website since it's obviously not UPS.

Skeptically, I visit that website (which is branded like the UPS site) and enter my tracking number. The results that were brought up are displayed in this post.

As you can see, my package was shipped via "UPS Mail Innovations", not really by UPS. I had never heard of this service before, but after reviewing the tracking information, I'm convinced that it is completely worthless.

UPS (the real UPS) transferred my package from California to Columbus, OH in less than two days. Columbus was the "UPS Mail Innovations Destination." Apparently this is a new fancy term for the dead-letter office, because that appears to be the end of the line for my package. After making it across the entire country in two days, my package is trying to journey up I-71 from Columbus to Cleveland. A trip that usually takes about 2 hours by car has now taken more than 17 days. Did they send it via pigeon?

I'm failing to see how this process is any sort of innovation. If UPS had just kept my package, it would have been delivered in 3 days. However, the innovations part has caused my package to get lost somewhere down in buckeye country.

I suppose I don't really care if this package ever shows up or not - since I have no idea what I'm going to do with my free sticker, but at least now I know to avoid the Mail Innovations.

Sony: The bad and good

Sony BMG has finally agreed to sell DRM-free music downloads. However, if you want one of the 37 available albums (no single track downloads), you have to go to your local Best Buy or other retailer and purchase a card for $13. You can then bring the card home, and download that album to your computer.

Why would anyone actually want to do this?!?


Sony BMG trades cards for downloaded tunes - USATODAY.com

On another Sony front, I got a chance to see Sony's new prototype OLED TV yesterday at the Sony Style store at Beachwood Place. It's pretty amazing to see a 3mm thin tv screen that has a picture that blows away any LCD TV on the market.

Sony's 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio 27-inch OLED HDTV - Engadget

Powered by ScribeFire.

I'll take cash, please

I use a credit card that has the "WorldPoints" reward program feature. I have always just waited until I build up enough points for a 1% cash reward and then request a refund check. I decided, however, to see what sort of value WorldPoints is providing for the merchandise in their catalog. I found an item that was just over the 1% cash back point threshold of 25,000 points.

See the image below for the Hamilton Beach Eclectrics mixer which can be yours for only 25,200 points!



Now take a look below and see that, alternatively, you could redeem those 25,000 points for $250 in cash.



So...is buying the blender for those points a better value than the $250 in cash?

Ummmm....no.

According to the Hamilton Beach website, this blender has a MSRP of $200.



And anyone who has shopped online in the past decade knows that you can usually find products cheaper than MSRP on stores like Amazon. Here is the same blender on Amazon.com for $186.



So, if you were to redeem 25,000 WorldPoints for a blender, instead of the $250 in cash, you would effectively be overpaying for that blender by $64!

Cruise Pictures

Click below for pictures from the cruise that Stephanie and I went on over the holiday vacation. We sailed from Port Everglades in Ft Lauderdale, FL to Key West, Cozumel, and Belize City.

Holiday Cruise

Vista Initial thoughts

I got a new laptop for work last week and elected to order it with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. I had been dragging my feet about moving to Vista on any of my computers because I really didn't see any benefit other than aesthetics, but my company wanted a few of us try out the new OS.

So far, I've been using Vista for about a week and figured I'd share my initial thoughts and impressions since the people that read this blog are usually the ones that ask me about computers / technical stuff.

Memory requirements:

I ordered my new computer with only 1 GB of RAM and then bought a 2 GB module from crucial.com. I wanted to get all of the initial system updates applied and the antivirus software installed prior to opening up the case and installing the additional RAM, so I was using Vista Ultimate for about 2 hours with just 1 GB of RAM. I would liken the experience to running Windows XP with only 256 MB of RAM and wouldn't recommend it to anybody. After popping in the additional memory, the system runs MUCH better.

Graphics / Interface:

The new Aero features are pretty slick, and I do enjoy using the 3D task switcher (Win+Tab) much better than the old-style task switcher (Alt+Tab). However, other than that, I don't see a whole lot of benefit over XP.

I do like that the desktop icons seem to now be vector images instead of rasterized, which, you may recall, means that you can make the icons larger without sacrificing quality.

One interesting (Ultimate only) feature of Vista that I've tried out is DreamScene. Apparently people weren't happy with just having an image as their desktop background so Microsoft decided to let users set a MPEG move file as their desktop wallpaper. I'm guessing that Microsoft kept this as a Vista Ultimate-only feature because they assume that if a user ponies up the extra $$ for Ultimate, they'll be using a system with high-end hardware that won't mind giving some resources to DreamScene. In my completely un-scientific testing, I found that DreamScene increased CPU load by around 5% compared to just using a solid-colored image as the desktop wallpaper. I can't imagine very many people using an animated background other than the subtly animated Vista background because it just gets to distracting.

Program Compatibility:

Because this is my work laptop, I haven't put too many non-Microsoft applications on it. However, I did load it up with open-source apps, and so far have found that most of the apps that I use work fine in Vista. Pidgin, Audacity, GIMP, VLC Player, and Firefox all work great. I did have one quirk with Firefox that popped up error messages until I ran Firefox using the "Run as Administrator" option. After doing that once, now Firefox runs without error even without running with the elevated security.

Hardware / Device Compatibility:

I was easily able to connect my Motorola Q and browse it the Explorer. I was also able to install the Motorola drivers that would allow me to charge the Q via USB. However, when I tried to sync the Q with Outlook, I hit a wall. First of all, Microsoft has replaced the old ActiveSync that we're all used to with a new application called Windows Mobile Device Center. This came pre-installed on my machine, so I was surprised when my computer refused to establish a partnership with my Q. I finally got it working by downloading the most recent version of WMDC and now it works great. It baffles me that the version of WMDC that was pre-installed wouldn't work for me, though: my Q is running Windows Mobile 5...an operating system that's been around since 2005.

Security Prompts:

One of the major gripes that people have with Vista is the frequency of the security prompts that are designed to make sure that your computer doesn't get infected by all of the nasties out there on the internet. I agree that these alerts are extremely annoying, however, it does point out how frequently you're modifying Windows files. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to disable the prompts, or just learn to deal with them, but I usually don't find them as intrusive as I'd expected.
What really bugs me so far is that a security dialog will sometimes open but not come to the forefront like normal. So I'll be waiting for a program to install or a setting to change and nothing will happen. Then I'll look at my taskbar to see that there is an alert there waiting for me. When I click on the alert then the screen will go dark like usual and I can approve the action.
For a home user who would not consider themselves a power user, I can definately understand how these alerts are helpful. However, for somone like me who is constantly tinkering with settings and protected files, they really become a hassle.

Misc. Notes:

I have encountered a problem with the "Safely remove device" feature that is used to make sure that all I/O is stopped before ejecting a hard drive/flash drive/camera/etc. In Windows XP, as long as nothing is accessing a device, you could eject it. In Vista, however, I have found that even with no programs running, it will not let me "safely" eject my external hard drive. I have requested a hotfix from Microsoft that purports to fix this issue, but I haven't tried it yet.

This was more of an issue with Microsoft Office, however, I'll list it here because it may have been Vista-related. My laptop came pre-installed with a 30-day trial of Office 2007. One of the first programs that I installed was a licensed version of Office Ultimate 2007. I was a bit annoyed to find that even after installing this licensed version, all of my office applications put the phrase "non-commercial use" in the titlebar. After researching if there was a way to remove this from the titlebar, I finally resigned to completely un-installing both the Office 2007 Trial and the Office Ultimate 2007 installations and then re-installing Office Ultimate 2007 in order to get rid of the "non-commercial use" message. What a pain!

Good riddance to a crappy store

The store that I love to hate is finally going out of business for good. CompUSA - you will not be missed.

While I absolutely despise CompUSA, it has been good to me over the years. Between my dad and I threatening to sue them over deceptive marketing practices (resulting in them practically buying me a laptop) and their last round of store closings (which got me some good eBay-able items), I've gotten some amazing deals from CompUSA.

For just day-to-day shopping, however, CompUSA was a close #2 on my crappiest stores list (after Marc's) and I won't miss it at all.

Happy holidays from wendy's!

Stephanie and i stopped at wendy's for lunch. We were so impressed by their holiday display in the back of the restaurant. Wendy's really knows how to decorate for the holiday season.

Chanukah already?!?

Happy Chanukah!

Vector Magic

Anyone who has dealt with editing images files that contain text or drawings knows that once you save a file as a raster image (.jpg, .bmp, .gif), the text / drawing will look really bad if you try to zoom in on it.

I came across a new site/service called Vector Magic (by a group at Stanford University) that will automatically convert a rasterized image into a vector image. The vector image actually defines the text/drawing as a series of shapes which can be blown up with no loss of quality (it just draws bigger shapes).

For an example, I took the tiny logo from my site at margelefsky.com:




At the normal size, this picture looks just fine. However, since it is a .jpg file, when you zoom in on the file, you can see that it looks extremely pixelated and blurry.





Now, compare that zoomed view to the version of the file that I produced using Stanford's Vector Magic site:


(note: you can click on the image above to see a bit more of the file)

Obviously, the vector graphic produced by Vector Magic is MUCH clearer. Notice, however, that when the text was "traced", some of the letters did get a bit distorted (like the curved sides of the letter Y). However, considering that the old way of ray tracing an image was to do it manually in Photoshop or Illustrator, this is a HUGE improvement.

Android....not impressed

I just looked through Engadget's "Visual tour of Android's UI".

I was shocked at how little innovation Google has done to the mobile platform. I know that this is an open-source effort, and that the OS will evolve as more and more developers start to dedicate development to the project. But come on, Google! Is that seriously your first crack at a mobile platform? Definitely more evolutionary than revolutionary.

I wanted to demonstrate how similar the brand new Android interface is to my outdated Windows Mobile 5 phone. You'll have to excuse the big "DEMO" text over my screen captures, but I didn't feel like actually paying for a screen capture utility for Windows Mobile device.

See my side-by-side comparison here.

Storytelling in Toledo

Stephanie and I drove in to Toledo on Friday night to see my mom perform in the Frogtown Storyteller's event for Tellabration 2007.

I wouldn't want to prevent anyone from being able to share in the joy of listening to 2.5 hours of storytelling, so I present to you the full video of all 150 minutes of storytelling. Enjoy.






Just kidding...it's just a clip of mom's story.

Detroit news...or lack thereof

Val, Steph, and I went up to Detroit on Saturday to visit the newly renovated MGM Grand Detroit. We were making great time until about 6:00pm when we encountered a fresh accident about 11 miles South of Detroit.

A car had, apparently, flipped and turned sideways, blocking all lanes of traffic on I-75 North. Only the left shoulder was getting by...until the police arrived on the scene and used the left shoulder as a police-only parking lot.

While the police, and a handful of Fire and EMS vehicles tended to the accident the motorists on I-75 just sat and waited. Some got of their cars and wandered up to the accident scene - or into the nearby trees for relief.

I looked up Detroit traffic on my phone and saw that they had completely closed down I-75 a couple exits behind where we were sitting. At that point, we knew we were going to be sitting there for a while, so we found some snacks to eat in Stephanie's car and enjoyed making fun of the motorists-turned-pedestrians that were wandering the expressway.

 

After over an hour of waiting, the police finally moved their cars over and re-opened the left shoulder, allowing us to continue on our way to the MGM Grand.

We spent a few hours there at the casino: gambling a little bit and waiting in long lines for crappy food. We left at around 10:00pm, heading back down I-75.

Much to our surprise, I-75 North was STILL closed at the scene of the earlier accident. Police were still on the scene with surveying equipment and the vehicles involved (there was a second vehicle about 100 yards away from the flipped car) hadn't moved since we had last seen them.

When we got home I looked online to see if there was any mention of this accident and road closure, assuming that for them to close down the road for that long there must be some sort of story. However, I found NOTHING. No mention of the accident and/or road closure on the Detroit Free Press website or any of the local Detroit TV station websites.

I just looked again today, figuring that maybe all reporters in Detroit took the weekend off and STILL find nothing. How can you close a major expressway for at least 3 hours and have not a peep in the local news? Were all of Detroit's news crews at the MGM Grand? That may explain why there was a 40 minute wait for crappy chinese take out food at the casino's food court.

(Is it just me, or have I seen an unusal number of accident recently? Maybe I should just lock myself in my condo like my neighbor)