New Notebook, Part 2

When my shiny new Dell Studio 17 finally arrived in the mail a few days ago, I was like a kid in a candy store. So shiny! Alas, reality is slowly setting in and the candy's melting.

I've no real complaints about the core of the notebook itself. The screen is gorgeous although I've some concerns on how well the new hinge will hold up after extended use.

What's driving me batty right now is the new keyboard and touch pad. I've only seen positive comments about the new keyboard in reviews floating around the net, so I have to wonder if those reviewers actually do much typing on their notebooks. The problem is that they've added a dedicated number pad on the right, just like a standard standalone keyboard. Sounds good, right? Not for me:

• The center of the home keys are now shifted to the left, which means that when your hands are on the home row, you're effectively off center of the screen, which is not an ideal situation. This is compounded by the fact until I get used to this, my hands start out shifted, so my instead of having my left hand on a-s-d-f, it's on s-d-f-g instead.
• While this shift is something I'll probably get used to, the fact that they moved the Page Up/Down and Home/End keys to the top of the keypad is not. Those keys are so far away that reaching them now requires me to move my entire right hand to reach them instead of just angling it a little. Very frustrating for a touch typist.
• Finally, the track pad edges are now so smooth that when I'm not paying attention, I don't even notice I've moved past its edges. Another thing that I'll probably get used to, but right now, it's a little hard to find the edge to scroll around.
• I'm not even going to mention the silly media buttons.

And don't get me started on the software. It came with Windows Vista installed, and it is my first real experience with the new "improved" OS. What a load of crock. I now totally understand everyone's complaints with it. It seems hell bent on making it twice as hard to accomplish anything other than starting up applications. I'll try and live with it for a couple of weeks, but I haven't really encountered any redeeming qualities so far.

In both cases, my complaints are against the UI. I've come to expect certain modes of interaction, and I'm easily annoyed when those expectations aren't met. While in the back of my mind I'm wondering if it's because I'm getting old and set in my ways, I can't see too many good reasons for the changes that have been made, other than perhaps "it looks cooler," which is not a good reason in my book when you sacrifice functionality.

New Notebook, Part 1

When I first found out that I could get a new notebook at work, I thought it was a blessing. Silly, silly me.

Due to the way the budget is set up, I had to order the notebook before the end of June or the money would just disappear into some accounting black hole. Not a problem, I thought. I'd always been a fan of Dells, surely they'd have an updated version of my current Inspiron 9400 I could get. After all, I'd fairly simple requirements:

1. 17" screen that supported 1920x1200 resolution (this is my primary work machine)
2. some kind of digital video output (i.e. HDMI or DVI)
3. The control key must come before the function key on the bottom left of the keyboard (because by now my typing is pretty much accomplished through muscle memory)

After much research, I realized that I had very few choices. #1 rules out most notebooks. Dell, in their infinite wisdom, decided to remove the DVI outputs on their 17" Inspirons, so those were out, and their XPS's are just ridiculously heavy. Lenovo and Gateway notebooks all break rule #3. The only thing I could find that met all my requirements was something from HP's business line.

Unfortunately, at almost twice the price of anything else, the HP notebook wasn't quite going to fit into the budget unless I cut out on more options that I really wanted to. A few days before the deadline though, Dell announced their new Studio line, which pretty much gave me everything I wanted in a slightly lighter package to boot. Problem solved! Or so I thought...

Reading Binge

Been reading a lot of thrillers lately. Seem to have found some reliable writers in Clive Cussler, Jack Du Brul and Steve Berry. Short, fast paced, and just enough of an escape... probably in response to the fact that our tivo has died and we haven't watched any tv in a while.

Steve Berry's books have the added benefit of being educational since they're borderline historical fiction, and he takes care to inform readers exactly what's real and what's a figment of his imagination in the appendix.

FISA Ammendment Act

Now that Obama's the nominee I'm paying a bit more attention to how he's voting on major issues. So far, it's not been too good -- he voted for the FISA Ammendment Act. Booo!

For the record, McCain also voted for the ammendment, while Hillary voted against.

Hope: 0
Disappointment: 1

Green Change #3

Time to do something that will require a bit more effort: no more paper cups. I'm a coffee fan, and while I'd love to drink coffee from a real cup, more often than not I find myself getting it to go, which means I end up using either a paper or plastic cup. This month I'm going to give that up as much as possible. This means being prepared and traveling with one of those travel mugs.

I've not quite decided yet if I'm going to go so far as to say that if I don't have my travel mug I'll just skip the drink. I'll have to play it by ear and see how frequently this problem crops up.

Lesson of the Day

Today I learned... that if I ride my motorcycle around with a bottle of root beer in the trunk, it will have exploded by the time I get to my destination.

Harvesting Shampoo

We had a few friends over for some board games on Thursday and the conversation somehow made a detour into the topic of "harvesting" bottles of shampoo when staying at hotels. While this definitely qualifies as a very Chinese thing to do, I also pointed out that this wasn't very eco-friendly either. These mini bottles of shampoo are almost more plastic than shampoo, and collecting them means you end up throwing out way more plastic. I argued that not only should we not be harvesting them, we shouldn't even be using them -- just bring some shampoo from home.

If you don't want to travel with your Costco sized bottles of Shampoo, the best alternative is to fill one of these mini bottles with shampoo from home and just carry that around instead.

The most unfortunate thing about the recent decision by airlines to charge for checked bags is the spate of news articles discussing how to pack light, with an emphasis on disposable items. Today's San Jose Mercury News' Travel section's front page had the following tips which made me groan:

• For overnight trips, use half-sandwich size baggies to pack squirts of soap, shampoo, etc. and toss them when done.
• Just bring the basics and a small allowance to buy inexpensive things at your destination. I assume if you couldn't bring it with you, you're not taking it home with you either, so that's more trash generated.

Kung-Fu Panda

...is awesome. Absolutely hilarious and 100% entertaining. If you haven't seen it yet, you've got to go watch it as soon as possible. 5/5.

Oh, and a couple notes:

• Shifu's name actually translates to "master", which I found endlessly amusing the first time I heard it...
• Oogway's name translates to tortoise, which I didn't realize until after the movie when C told me.

Green Change #2

Hmmm... I kind of skipped over May, didn't I? Well, this'll have to be a double header then. After noticing the strange recycling practices at Whole Foods, I sent them an email asking them what the deal was and actually got a response back. They do recycle, but apparently shoppers just do not understand the difference between compostable trash, recyclable trash and everything else. Since things just got mixed up in the different bins anyway, they've resorted to sorting the trash themselves in the back and will be getting rid of most of the different trash cans in favor of a generic one. So they still get points for recycling, but I think it's a shame that they're not taking the opportunity to educate their shoppers.

Which leads to this month's change: recycling. I've always tried to recycle as much as possible, but it turns out that recycling is a tricky business. Exactly what's recyclable and how things should be sorted varies from town to town, but it looks like Los Altos has some fairly simple rules. Things I didn't know until I started doing some research:

• Polystyrene (e.g. styrofoam packing blocks (but not styrofoam packing peanuts) and take-out containers) can be recycled!
• Clean aluminium foil and pie pans can be recycled!
• Oil filters can be recycled! This matters since I change my motorcycle's oil and oil filters myself.
• It's important not to contaminate what you want to recycle. For example, no oily pizza boxes and rinsing food and beverage containers. I sort of knew this before, but am usually too lazy to clean containers before throwing them out.

The flip side of recycling is to just generate less trash. The one thing I find myself throwing out on an almost daily basis is junk mail, and I've been trying to eliminate that as much as possible. One of the best services I've found to do this is Catalog Choice, which seems to be doing a pretty good job of slowing the flow of junk into my mailbox.

We've also switched to getting milk from the Strauss Family Creamery. Not only does it taste great, but they use glass bottles that can be returned to them for re-use.

Finally, C's doing her bit as well, as she's started composting a few weeks ago, and seems to be having quite a bit of fun doing it too.

So the goal here is to reduce the amount of garbage I produce, and recycle as much as possible.

Jeff On Tour

Got an IM from Jeff today letting me know that his band Thief Thief is going on tour and will be in Oakland on July 29. Woot!

Coffee in Juneau

If you ever happen to be in Juneau, Alaska and are looking for a good cup of coffee, check out the Heritage Coffee Company. They've a couple locations in town and they roast their own beans. Bonus points for offering free wifi!

Pandering

*sigh* I'm going to have to withdraw my support for Hillary. Maybe too much experience can be a bad thing, because right now she's being too much of a politician. The bad kind. With the race dragging on she's now resorting to pandering of the worst kind with her advocacy of a gas tax break for the summer. It's not going to make any difference, and the only reason she's doing it is to gain a few more precious votes.

And it's not just this one thing. It's been disappointing to see that she's always the first to resort to negative attacks and mud slinging.

I still have issues with the details of Obama's health care plan, but based on his conduct during the race so far, at least the character and tone of his administration (assuming he wins the presidency) will be more elevated. And hopefully, his policies will be driven by logic rather than emotion.

Recycling

Recycling is a great idea, but lately I've been noticing a lot of problems when trying to put the theory into practice.

Things that make you go hmmm #1: I was at the Whole Foods in Cupertino a couple weekends ago and was throwing out some trash after lunch and was happy to see that they had trash separation for both regular garbage, compost, and glass/plastics. Shortly after I threw out our refuse from lunch however, an employee came by and collected the garbage from these separate cans and just threw them all into one large cart. The separated trash wasn't bagged, it was just mixed together in the big cart. Seriously, what's the point of even having separate containers if you're just going to mix them up anyway other than to fool customers into thinking that you care?

Things that make you go hmmm #2: I'm at a conference at the Moscone Center in SF right now and they have water coolers scattered around instead of bottled water, which seems like a good idea. But then right next to some of these water coolers, they also have garbage cans marked "compost". Of course, no one else seems to care and just throw out their plastic cups into these garbage cans. While you can accuse these people for not paying attention, I think more blame goes to the organizers for not having the right trash cans in the right locations, because they do have plastic recycling receptacles as well.

Maker Faire

Went to the Maker Faire with C. on Saturday. Traffic around the San Mateo fairgrounds was reduced to a slow crawl and it took us over 30 minutes from the point we got off 101 to the time we finally found a parking spot. I later heard that this was quite good compared to earlier in the day. Even after we got to the gates it was another 30 minutes in line before we could actually get into the event.

Once in though, the Faire itself was pretty interesting. Add odd convergence of DIY, crafts, electronics, environmental and slow food interests. C. was captivated by the booths on composting and Scharffen Berger chocolates while I was drawn to the guys showing off their high speed photography flash kit. We were both intrigued by the possibilities of the Maker Controller Kit, and have been trying to come up with ideas on what we could do with one. Yeah, we're both fairly geeky.

Since we got there fairly late in the afternoon, we didn't spend too much time there since it turned cold as the sun went down and the wind picked up.

Iron Man

Let's do this quick: Iron Man is un-freaking-believably good from beginning to end. Jon Favreau did an amazing job and Robert Downey Jr. is great as Tony Stark. And let's not forget the guys in charge of making the armor come to life...

Definitely go see this on the big screen. Now. 5/5.

Laid Low

Not sure what caused it, but I was laid low on Tuesday with some kind of stomach virus. I ended up sleeping for some 26 odd hours, broken up only by trips to the bathroom. Fortunately, by Wednesday my fever broke so I was feeling much better, and today I'm almost back to normal except for the ominous growlings from my stomach every now and then.

Construction Day 78

Most of the painting is done. We were looking for a low or no VOC paint that we could color match, and ended up with Kelly-Moore's Enviro-Cote line. We're pretty happy with it so far, and there's no new-paint smell.

The maple flooring is also down now and it looks gorgeous! I'd been thinking about staining it to something a little darker, but now I think I'm going to try to keep it as close to its natural color as possible.

Our contractor estimates that it will take another two weeks of work to finish things up (the cabinets, the lighting, the trims, the tiles...). Unfortunately, it'll probably take a bit longer than that to actually finish everything since one of the tiles that we want for the master bathroom won't be available for another month! We're contemplating our alternatives, but since we are not in any rush to move back in, we'll probably just wait.

For now though, I think I'll hold off posting any new pictures until everything is complete so that the final results will be a surprise.

For the record...

People have wondered why I refer to my wife as "the wife" in this blog. I'd much prefer to just use her name, but she insists that I not use her name because she'd prefer to remain anonymous. I don't really understand it as she maintains her own blog, but there you go.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. What have you done for your planet lately?

Personally, I've been trying to use less whenever possible, recycle as much as is feasible and curbing my more materialistic tendencies. I've also tried educating my friends and family, but there's a fine line between educating and nagging or preaching and I'm always struggling to figure out where that line is.

For example, how can you persuade a new mom that buying a second hand stroller is just as safe as buying a new one? You're basically arguing against an emotional response, and there's no winning that one.

Lately I've been thinking more and more about what concrete changes I can make in my day to day life, and I've been inspired by Vanessa's experiment to do one thing a day that betters the environment. Since I know I won't be able to come up with something new every day, I've decided to try something a lot simpler: something new every month. And hopefully, if this sticks, I'll switch to something new every week. We'll see how it goes, but once a month is something anyone should able to do. And whatever that "something new" is, it will continue to get done from then on. If I decide to stop using something, that change is permanent.

For this month, I'm going to stop using paper towels in the kitchen and reverting to good old fashion cloth towels. We never used them before we moved to the US and survived just fine, so I'm pretty sure that habit won't be too hard to break.

If you're thinking of making a change, here are 50 simple things you can do.

Elevators

More than you ever wanted to know about elevators. Worth a read if you've the time. Here's a little tease:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button.