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Wii Fit kicks my tushy
August 19th, 2008 (1 week, 2 days ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
My wife recently bought a Wii Fit. She’s been coveting the device ever since she first heard about it. I would say I’ve caught her looking into the window of the local gaming stores as much as I have lately, but she actually plays more computer games than I do. The Wii Fit has just made her look even more frequently. So it wasn’t really much of a surprise when she announced to me via e-mail a week or so ago that while she was at a toy store during lunch looking for birthday presents for Ben (who recently turned two), she snatched up a Fit just as they were opening a new case.

I’ve been mildly skeptical of the device. I’ve known enough fitness nuts and I’ve got enough head knowledge about fitness matters to know that a wireless scale that talks to your game console isn’t likely to be a good substitute for a membership at the local gym. And it’s not. But it’s certainly better than nothing, and right now between my day job, a 1.5 hour commute each day, chasing after a toddler entering his Terrible Twos, and squeezing in three new comics per week plus site updates… well, nothing is about all the exercise I’ve been getting.

The Wii Fit is far from perfect. As stated above, it’s essentially a wireless scale that is sensitive enough to detect shifts in weight. Thus, it knows not only how much you weigh but where you’ve placed your feet, where your center of balance is, and with some sophisticated guesstimation, where your body is in space relative to the device. Believe it or not, that gives it an incredible amount of flexibility as a game controller. For example, there are a number of balance games included, such as a ski slalom course that you control by shifting your weight just like a real skier would, and a “table tilt” game where you try to roll little balls into the holes of a disembodied table by shifting your weight to tilt the table this way and that. It looks to have a lot of interesting potential as a controller beyond the Fit game, especially for sports games like skiing, snowboarding, surfing, etc. The sensitivity is a little questionable sometimes; there’s a step aerobics “game” where you almost have to stomp on the device to get multiple foot presses to register. But all in all, it expands Nintendo’s Wii game play innovations in a new direction.

Another beef I have is its use of body mass index as a general gauge of health. BMI is a better indicator than weight alone, but a good read over the linked Wikipedia article will give you tons of reasons why BMI alone isn’t very useful. OK, I know I’m overweight; I’ve already come to terms with that, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been using the thing pretty religiously for the past week or so. But your weight (and thus BMI) can fluctuate all over the place during a given day and even day to day. One good Sunday dinner with the in-laws was enough to blow the previous week’s progress according to the all mighty Fit. Unfortunately, it actually gets worse as you improve. Muscle is more dense than fat, so a fit person might have a higher BMI than and overweight person of comparable height and weight. Of course, it would probably have been too difficult (and not to mention spooky) to have little robotic arms with calipers come out to actually measure your true body fat, so I suppose this is better than nothing.

I’m also mildly annoyed with the Fit’s preoccupation with posture and balance. I know my posture isn’t the best in the world. There was concern when I was a child that I might have mild or borderline scoliosis, and my right foot actually turns outward a bit when I stand naturally and comfortably. Both of these, probably combined with years of desk sitting and (admittedly) weight gain, have made my posture less than ideal. The Fit constantly chastises that my center of balance is off-center or, worse, that it can’t get a good measurement because I’m constantly “fidgeting”. Of course I’m fidgeting; I’m constantly readjusting myself to stand perfectly straight just so you can take your blasted measurements. Sigh….

Probably the most useless thing about the Fit is the “Wii Fit Age”. This is some magical, arbitrary calculation based on your real age and BMI that is supposed to determine your overall wellness relative to your true age. In reality, it’s completely pointless and has no basis on anything useful. My Fit Age has bounced around from the mid-50s down to the mid-20s, sometimes within a day of each other. For a man in his mid-30s, that’s a big range. As previously stated, my sense of balance isn’t the best in the world and the Fit Age calculation is based in part on how well you perform on two arbitrarily chosen balance tests such as balancing on one foot, shifting your weight to certain pre-determined ratios, or simply whether or not you favor one leg over another as you walk. Thus, I stink at these games and they throw my Fit Age out the window. I’ve learned to mostly ignore it, as the minor buzz you get from a negative difference between it and your real age is easily offset by the buzz kill when it swings positive the next day, just because you’re tired.

But enough dumping. Let’s say what’s positive here. The big plus is that the Wii Fit has gotten me off the couch and doing something, anything, rather than plopping on my rear every evening after Ben goes to bed. It’s cut somewhat into my comic production time, but not any more than regular household chores. It has a nice balance of different types of activities so it’s extremely hard to get bored of the same old routine. There are yoga exercises (which I pretty much ignore), aerobics (my primary focus for trimming the fat right now), strength exercises, and balance games. Many exercises make combined use of the Fit board and the standard controller; for example, the synchronized boxing has you stepping off and on the board to “block” while the Wii remote and the Nunchuck are used to throw punches. Since the board is a sensitive electronic device, the running activities use the accelerometers in the Wiimote (you stick it in your back pocket) rather having you smash the board with your feet. Unfortunately, it is possible to cheat on such activities, i.e. you can “run” perfectly fine by sitting on the couch and shaking the Wiimote with your wrist. However, you’re on the honor system in that regard and having someone else playing with you can keep you honest.

As stated, I’ve been concentrating on the aerobics portion at the moment. Aerobics are all about burning fat, and I’ve got plenty of fat to burn. At the least, I want to turn that spare tire from a full-size to a compact. So I start by doing a regimine of step aerobics (first the easy beginner mode, then advanced). (You would find this hilarious if you had seen me join my wife’s aerobics class several years ago; it’s quite a mental picture.) I follow this with a nice long run then the sychronized boxing. Once I’ve done all this, I’ve done a good 25-28 minutes of real aerobic exercise. I pad this with a little bit of balance games or strength training to make sure I’m over 30 minutes. Some of the little things it does to encourage you are cheesy, like having other Miis stand on the sidelines and cheer you on while running or by participating in big group step aerobics sessions. This is particularly funny for me because in addition to friends and family running or stepping beside me, I’ll occasionally see some of the GPF Miis my wife created. It’s mildly disheartening to see Dexter run past me at three times my speed, but equally enjoyable to see him trip and land on his face.

The Wii Fit isn’t a suitable substitute for a serious diet and exercise regime by any means. But it’s a fun, entertaining way to get started. I’ve started and stopped many exercise plans over the years, and this is perhaps the first one that really has made me want to get started each evening. Some of the scoring seems arbitrary at times, but each time you beat a previous record you get that sense of gaming accomplishment that motivates you to keep trying. I’m hoping it will be a gateway to a more serious exercise plan, but for now it’s at least getting me to do something more with my evenings than watch TV.
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Maybe I should have persued a career in radio…
July 7th, 2008 (1 month, 3 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 6 Core Dumps
I’ve picked up an interesting new job function to add to my résumé: voice-over narrator. Nobody could be more surprised about this than I am.

The primary project I work on at my day job is a series of interactive, computer-based training initiatives for the U.S. Navy Reserve. Until recently, my work has mostly been software development, building a Web-based learning management system through which reservists can take CBTs online and receive the appropriate credit. My time has since been split among several other projects, such as a custom content management system for our digital artists, but it’s largely been in the programming arena. That is, after all, what that fancy paper that hangs on the wall in my office says I’m good at.

As hinted at above, we also have a full digital creative team filled with artists, animators, and specialists in instructional design. While my team builds the nuts-and-bolts front end to serve the training content and keep track of the results, our creative folks actually build the training content itself. This can range from the individual diagrams and 3D models used in illustrations to complex animation sequences and all the way up to the final Flash-based instructional GUI. We’ve got some incredibly talented folks who work here, and I’m pretty proud of some of the things I’ve seen each of them do.

Lately, I’ve found myself crossing the line between coder and creative type. My managers took note with great interest during my initial interview that I’m both an artist and a programmer. My first year or so here, though, I’ve spent most of my time in front of Microsoft Visual Studio, bashing out C# code. Recently, however, I’ve found myself being pulled into more creative endeavors on our team, such as writing the storyboard for a promotional video that will be shown at a major defense contracting conference in December.

The biggest surprise came several months ago when my boss pulled me into a meeting that I normally don’t attend. During that meeting—in which I spent most of my time doodling in a notebook because nothing seemed to apply to me—my ears perked up when it was announced that I would be doing the narration for our interactive security scenario builder demo to be released at that year’s conference. I was a bewildered to say the least.

Later, my boss recounted how my name came up in a previous meeting between several people involved with that project. You see, one minor problem we tend to have here is that the overwhelming majority of us at this site are natives to the region. Well, that’s not exactly a problem from the “mining the local talent pool and supporting the local economy” standpoint. It is a problem when the vast majority of us have noticeable West Virginia “hillbilly” accents. As much as I hate stereotypes, this was is pretty darn close to true. Almost everyone here has a noticeable accent, some so far to the point that they sound like caricatures. It’s almost laughable, really.

During this meeting, the team was musing over this problem. They didn’t exactly want a backwoods hick accent talking about how to report potential corporate security violations. It was then when my boss proffered: “Have you ever heard Jeff Darlington’s voice mail message?” I was apparently out of the office at the time because he called my desk and played my outgoing message over the speakerphone. The consensus was undoubtedly unanimous.

And that’s where I am now. In addition to the aforementioned security scenario demo, I’ve recorded narrations for multiple training sessions surrounding shipboard computer administration within the Navy. I can’t really say much more about those lessons, largely because I don’t know how sensitive the material is. It’s not top secret by any means as I don’t have the necessary clearance. Still, it’s probably sensitive enough that I can’t share any samples. However, below you’ll find a link to an early draft of the security scenario builder demo. We’ve reworked it multiple times so the final outcome sounds much better than this one. Nonetheless, it allows you to hear my melodious tones. Enjoy.

Sample Interactive Learning Narration (MP3, 277k, 23 seconds)

I still find it bizarre to be doing this. It’s not something I’ve foreseen myself doing. I’ve been told that I don’t really have an accent, although I can hear it in my own voice especially when I’m tired or when I’m around others with more pronounced accents. My biggest concern right now is for our poor test team, who has to listen to my voice over and over again for hours while debugging the lessons.
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Jesus Geek guest hosting
March 20th, 2008 (5 months, 1 week ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Just a head’s up to say I’ll be guest hosting Friday’s installment of the Jesus Geek podcast. I apologize in advance for any static or artifacts in the audio; chalk that up to my podcasting inexperience and not as an overall indicator of the quality of Jesus Geek as a whole. I’ll post a direct link to the download page as soon as I see that it goes live.

Update March 21: Aaaand… here it is.
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Geeky Christmas loot
December 31st, 2007 (8 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Sorry for the dry spell, all. With the holidays I’ve been largely offline with the exception of keeping up with my daily webcomic reading and uploading new comics into the queue. (Yay!) I hope everyone had a happy holiday, no matter what holiday(s) you celebrate, and I wish everyone a slightly premature Happy New Year (or, if you celebrate Chinese New Year, either a very belated one or a slightly advance one).

Firstly, in case you haven’t seen it or don’t subscribe to the RSS feed, make sure to check out the latest GPF News post. Some important updates are mentioned there. I’ll expound upon one of those in a separate post here.

I thought I’d share with you my list of “geeky Christmas loot” for this year. I don’t do it to brag, but more just to share. I always like hearing about other’s newest geek toys, and I love sharing the same with others. So maybe if I share about some of my new playthings, others will chime in and share as well.

Perhaps my favorite gift this year was not one that I received, but one that I gave, and technically it wasn’t even a Christmas gift. My wife (”kmd” on the forum) has a birthday in December, and I always try to make it special for her. Being a December baby can be tough as many people either buy you one slightly larger gift to cover both the birthday and Christmas or worse, completely overlook your birthday altogether. So I try to make her birthday extra special, take her out to a nice dinner, and just give her as best a day as I can. This year, I gave her one of the brand new third-generation iPod Nanos. One of things that made this special is that it appeals to her geek side; she too is a programmer, and sometimes I know she feels “overshadowed” by me in all things tech among folks who know both of us. It’s also significant because most of her geeky gadgets are my hand-me-downs; when I get something new (like a new Palm), she usually ends up getting the old one. So now she has a brand-new geek toy all her own, as well has her entire “Weird Al” Yankovic collection in her pocket wherever she goes. (I also got her the one “Weird Al” album she didn’t have on CD, so now she has his entire discography in digital form.)

As for me, my geek gifts were numerous and plenty. My parents had a definite Doctor Who theme: I got the third series of the new Doctor Who; the transition between two of my old-time favorite Doctors, Tom Baker and Peter Davison; a Tardis 4-port USB hub; and a “You Never Forget Your First Doctor” T-shirt. There were several other DVDs amongst the list, including one of Pixar short films. My wife surprised me with a terabyte(!) external USB hard drive (because you can never have enough disk space).

But probably the credit for the most unexpected and most played-with gift this year has to go to my sister-in-law and her husband. For now I’m suffering from an affliction I only heard about while growing up: Nintendo thumb. I am now an owner of a Nintendo Wii.

Well, I guess I’m having less problems with “Nintendo thumb” as I am with “Wii shoulder”. I’ve suffered tendinitis in my left thumb for quite a while now (it kept me from drawing for an entire month back in 2002) and I actually think the workout it’s been getting from the Wii has been somewhat therapeutic. But several hours of Wii Sports, especially bowling and baseball, had me running for the pain relievers the next day. Man, am I getting old. I’m doing better now, though. I never had a popular gaming console while growing up (or an unpopular one, for the matter); while most of my friends were playing with their ColecoVisions, Intellivisions, or NESes(eseses), I was hacking away in BASIC on my Tandy CoCo. (Gee, that didn’t date me at all, did it?) So this this was an entirely new experience for me. We quickly ran out and purchased a second controller (”wiimote”) and “nunchuk” and added a game or two to the ones that accompanied the system as separate gifts. The system has been loads of fun, although I must admit I’ve done far less comicking this past week than I had hoped.

So… what nifty geek trinkets did you get/give this holiday? And do you have any suggestions for utterly awesome kick-butt Wii games that I supposedly must absolutely, positively have or my life will be incomplete? Dump core below.
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Dirty little secret
September 11th, 2007 (11 months, 3 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Recently, I received a surprise in the mail. My good friend Wally (who accompanied us to our very first con, Dragon*Con 2000) and his wife sent me a much belated birthday card. I say much belated because it was several months after the fact, although I certainly wasn’t expecting it and would have been perfectly content with the knowledge that they simply remembered me on that day. (Sadly, many of our old friends are scattered across the country now, and seeing each other in person is becoming a rarer and rarer occurrence.)

Enclosed with the card was an iTunes gift card. Obviously, Wally had been reading the blog and found out about my recent iPod acquisition. After a reading over the note in the card (which was written in orange highlighter; Wally is anything but conventional), I stopped and examined the gift card itself. My first thought was that I doubted that I would take advantage of the free That’s So Raven episode download advertised on the front. (If it had been Kim Possible, maybe.) My second thought was that I hadn’t a clue what in the world I would spend it on. My brief excursions to the iTunes store in the past had borne little fruit, turning up very little that I was actually interested in. At that point, every single song stored on my iPod was either ripped from a CD I (or my wife) already owned or was a freely available download collected from somewhere else.

My first purchase choice came quickly thereafter. When I browsed the store before, I noticed my nifty little fifth generation device was capable of playing specially formatted games. Lo and behold, Ms. Pac-Man was among them. I had already downloaded the one-level demo and played it, which brought back waves of nostalgia. (For some reason, I had always enjoyed Ms. Pac-Man over her masculine predecessor, probably because of the “super speed” version that doubled Ms. Pac-Man’s speed and made it more difficult to play.) So the first thing I bought was the full game. For some reason, my thumbs have been much more tired lately.

That done, I was at a loss of what to purchase next. I searched and searched to no avail. Perhaps it’s just my eclectic tastes in music, but I had trouble finding anything that either piqued my interest or I didn’t already have on CD. (Naturally, I’d much rather have my music in physical form so if a hard drive crashes (since that’s such a rare occurrence) I’d have a handy backup.) I saw a couple things I seriously considered, but I waffled back and forth on because I’d much rather have them on CD first.

Then some little dormant trigger fired in my brain.

I’m sure that everyone has one. You know, that dirty little secret. That one album you keep squirreled away, hidden from prying eyes, that you secretly relish but you hope that no one every finds out about. It might be that one Mozart symphony stuffed between gansta rap discs, or that one bubblegum pop boy band stashed among your vast country collection. You know what I mean.

Personally, my CD collection largely consists of motion picture soundtracks (or, more appropriately I suppose, instrumental scores) from the likes of John Williams, Danny Elfman, James Horner, and Jerry Goldsmith. It also contains my wife’s and my combined collection encompassing most of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s discography and a smattering of contemporary Christian albums I’ve grown fond of over the years. Lately, a couple of lullaby CDs have been added for placating Ben in the car, but I consider those largely transient.

It is also worth noting that I have a rather adamant distaste for country music. Perhaps it’s because country is so pervasive here in West Virginia that I had difficulty avoiding it while growing up, but as soon as a country song starts playing, going on about how somebody’s spouse left them, their hound dog died, or their pick-up truck has a flat tire, my brain enters some sort of dormant protective state and shuts down. I block it out like some devastating traumatic experience and usually can only be resurrected by playing the Star Wars or Star Trek themes. About the only country artist I can really stand is Ray Stevens, and that’s because his humor is catchy enough to override my self preservation urges and let me actually enjoy the music.

However, during the days after Wally’s gift card arrived, I caught myself unconsciously humming a song I hadn’t heard in years, if not a decade or two. I was surprised at first that I remembered it so clearly and that I could recall most of the words. I was also surprised that it stirred up other musical memories, to the point that I was able to mentally reconstruct most of the album from which it came. The music became so conscious in my mind that I caught myself singing one of the songs to Ben at bath time one evening. And that album is the dirty little secret I’ve come to reveal.

You see, my dad, being a child in the 1950s, grew up on the two staples of television and films geared toward boys of that era: science fiction and Westerns. Thus, it was natural for me growing up to find classic sci-fi novels lying around as well as Dad’s favorite Gene Autry or Roy Rogers films in the VCR. And one of his favorite tapes to listen to in the car on those long family road trips was Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

Technically, I suppose this album should be considered a “Country & Western” album, as the genre was known as back in the day. Of course, the “Western” part has long since been dropped from the genre’s title, probably because that sub-genre fell out of favor at the same time the Western started disappearing from TV and the big screen. Most of the songs retell stories of the Old West, of gunfighters, cattle rustlers, and Arizona Rangers, although they are largely the work of fiction from the romanticized West of Hollywood than the real thing. Many of the melodies are very simple and singable, but the tales can be as graphic and violent as the period in which they are set. And as I pondered whether I should actually spend Wally’s gift on such a purchase, I caught myself humming these songs over and over. Eventually, I gave in to a combination of nostalgia and frustration over the few lines of songs that I couldn’t remember.

So now my dirty little secret has been revealed. If you’re interested, here’s the link to the album in iTunes. The link above will let you find the CD on Amazon. Either place should have samples you can listen to if you’re curious enough. Now I’m going to go hide under my desk and listen to “Big Iron” one more time.
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Missing: One peacock. Blue and shedding feathers. Answers to “Pretty Boy Napoleon”
July 30th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump
For those that may recall, back in February I mentioned the neighborhood peacock that took shelter during the winter on our back porch. Well, it turns out he’s gone missing. A local TV station recently ran a story calling for help in locating the bird, as he has been missing now for over a week. Not that I expect any of you guys to have any leads, but I thought it was interesting enough of a follow up to mention it. Then again, if someone named me “Pretty Boy Napoleon,” I think I might just run away from home myself.

Then again, the rather morbid part of me can’t help but wonder if Napoleon’s disappearance is in any way related to our other recent wildlife encounter….
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“We’ve moved into a freakin’ Mutual of Omaha nature documentary.”
July 18th, 2007 (1 year, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps
Back when we still lived in North Carolina, we had the odd encounter or two with wildlife around the house. The back of our yard sat next to a wooded area, and there were plenty of birds and small mammals roaming about but they rarely made an appearance. You could hear the occasional owl hooting and sometimes while driving on the main road you’d see a deer or two gallop across. A couple of times we had little black lizards scramble into the house, much to the delight of our younger cat Kiki (who quickly earned the nickname “the Mighty Huntress”). But aside for these isolated incidents and the occasional “present” left in the yard by a neighborhood dog, that was about it.

But since we’ve moved back to West Virginia, it seems Mother Nature has been making more and more house calls. It’s not like there’s a big difference between the two locations; both houses are in relatively rural areas, but not all that distant from civilization. Still, we’ve had more critter issues in the year we’ve been back than we had in all nine years or so we had down South.

I’ve already mentioned, of course, the peacock. Since the weather has turned warmer, we’ve seen a lot less of him. We figure he’ll perch on our back porch again once winter comes. He seems to now prefer a tree across the street to roost in and spends a lot of time in another yard further up the hill. (There are two chihuahuas that live up there, and we often imagine them being terrorized by this great big blue buzzard strutting through their territory.) He has made a few appearances this summer, though, even once walking up on the back porch right next to my wife and Ben as the little guy was playing in his sand box.

However, it seems our trash has become the neighborhood buffet. I’ve caught a big, fat raccoon rummaging about, leaving muddy paw prints all over the lids and chewing holes in the bottom corners of the cans. One day I left a couple of trash bags on the porch while I went back in to empty the cats’ boxes, only to apprehended a local dog (a liver and white spaniel of some sort) snacking when I got back. But last night took the cake.

It was getting late, around 9:30 PM. We had just managed to get Ben to fall asleep; he hates going to bed and usually fights naps and bedtime with a passion until he’s collapses in exhaustion. We were waiting for him to fall into a good deep sleep so he wouldn’t be disturbed when he put him in his crib. My wife was holding him on one couch while I sat on the other, watching whatever was on the TV at the time. Then I heard a loud crash outside. Our first instinct was Ben. Yep, he’s still asleep. I then stood up and peeked through the blinds to see what caused the noise. I did a double-take, then quietly jogged to the front door and opened it so I could get a good look through the glass storm door. My wife looked at me with an expression that seemed to ask “What’s going on?” at the same time as warning me “You better not wake the boy.” When I didn’t answer, she eventually verbalized the question.

I responded, “A bear. A big black bear. Rummaging through our garbage.”

Sure enough, there he sat. (Or she; there’s no way to tell at that distance.) Silhouetted by the street lamp on the garage across the street, he shoved his big head deep in the trash can, pulled a bag out with his teeth, and sauntered across the road to the neighbor’s yard to consume his dinner. My wife got up, still holding a sleeping Ben, and walked up beside me, mouth agape. We watched him for several minutes as he dined on the contents of one can and proceeded to knock down the other and continue the buffet.

Well, what exactly are you supposed to do in this situation? We called animal control, but of course their office was closed. My wife then called 911, and they said we should call the Department of Natural Resources. However, the DNR (also closed for the night) probably wouldn’t do anything unless the bear was injured or was a threat to humans. He definitely looked fat and healthy to me, and he was perfectly content to snack in solitude. So we stood there and watched him chow down for several minutes until he had his fill and eventually meandered off. My wife begged me not to go out and clean up the mess, even though half our garbage was strewn across the neighbor’s lawn.

After the encounter was over, my wife put Ben down and called her mom. The first thing she said when her mom answered was the subject line of this post: “We’ve moved into a freakin’ Mutual of Omaha nature documentary.” My first thought upon hearing that line was “That has to be the subject line for the blog post.”

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll end up seeing Marlin Perkins or Peter Davison outside in our lawn soon….
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I am now a technology lemming
May 29th, 2007 (1 year, 3 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
Last week was my birthday. I usually try to keep very quiet about it, and I don’t go advertising it on the GPF site as a way to drum up artificial congratulations from fans. I know it’s always annoyed me when other webcartoonists do that, expecting their readers to all sing in chorus and make them feel self important, so I expect it annoys others as well. Such cults of personality extend into the blogosphere and other similar user-generated realms, of course, but I know I saw it in the webcomicing world long before the term “blog” came into being. But I digress. I don’t do GPF to have tons of people become my personal cheerleaders and gush on and on about how much they think of me and my work; I do it for myself first and foremost, and it’s an added bonus if one or two (or several tens of thousands) of you enjoy it as well. It did kind of surprise me that nobody on the forum mentioned anything, given I know there are a few of you out there who are obsessive enough to keep track of such things, but I’d much rather have a low-key quiet birthday anyway.

And it was a nice birthday. It started off kind of lackluster, as I had a doctor’s appointment to have some blood work done and had to fast (only black coffee… no cream or sugar… blech), followed by Ben’s nine month checkup (which went very well). We ended up throwing a third doctor’s visit into the mix, as Randi the Wonder Kitty was throwing up (more than usual) and suffering from diarrhea (as if cat feces wasn’t unpleasant enough already). Still, she turned out to be doing just fine, and whatever was bothering her seemed to pass pretty quickly. After that, my wife took me out to finally see Spider-Man 3 (which I’ll agree with most critics that it wasn’t as good as the previous two) and have a nice dinner by ourselves. I received some nice gifts from all my family and nobody made a particularly big fuss about it, which is exactly what I wanted.

But I will tell you about the most interesting gift I received, which was “from” Ben. (Yes, I’m realistic know that a nine-month-old baby probably would have had extreme difficulty picking out and purchasing such an item over the Internet by himself, so I know he had help from Mommy.) I have finally plunged off the technological cliff with the rest of the lemmings and am now a proud owner of an iPod.

For some reason, I seem to resist some trends, even when they’re obviously techie. It was years after cell phones became hip and commonplace that I finally caved and signed up for one, and even now my current phone (my second) is rather spartan and utilitarian. No music or video, no Web access, not even a camera; it makes phone calls and that’s about it. The most useful secondary features it has are the contacts list (which is a watered down version of what’s in my LifeDrive) and the tip calculator (which is usually handier to get to than the one in the Palm). I had no immediate interest in MP3 players initially, preferring the permanence of CDs. Even once I started using PocketTunes on the LD, I have never purchased music online; I always ripped my existing CDs and encoded them myself. In fact, with the LD’s built-in 4GB drive plus any number of Secure Digital cards, I never felt the need for a dedicated MP3 player.

However, I now have some nice discounts with Apple through my current job, so I’ve toyed with the idea of adding some Apple products to our technology collection. While I’ve used my share of Apple ][s and Macs over the years (boy, does that first item date me), I've never owned an Apple product. I've eyed a MacBook a few times to make our little home network truly operating system agnostic. Still, I'm cheap and lazy, which does not make for a good combination for impulsive spending. I waffled back and forth in a similar fashion about purchasing a PDA before my wife broke down and bought my first Palm (a IIIc), and I'm now on my third. Sometimes it takes a good solid shove to get me moving in a give direction, and my wife is pretty good at that.

So now I'm the owner of a sleek, black, "fifth generation" 30GB iPod. (I understand the "video" part of the name was dropped at some point.) I've got to admit, this thing is pretty slick. There are some very good reasons why these things dominate the portable media market. I had always heard the interface was intuitive, but I didn't realize it was so ridiculously easy to use. I barely even looked at the instruction card (it's hard to call it a manual, when there's only a few fold out pages and very little actual information). I was using it almost right out of the box with no tutorials. It did take a day or two of on-again, off-again syncing to copy all my media onto it, but that was relatively easy to do. It imported my previously ripped CDs without (much of) a hitch and ripped the rest (new CDs I received for my birthday plus a few I never bothered to copy before) very quickly. I re-encoded some of my home videos of Ben into a compatible format and they look awesome on that tiny screen. It took a bit to figure out the podcast subscription setup, but once I got it down I was able to add the few podcasts I listen to with relative ease. The jury is still out on battery life as I haven't been able to listen to it too extensively yet, but it does seem to be holding up better than the LD for extended listening.

Some of the few caveats I've encountered, which are mostly personal irks than anything else and actually have little to do with the device itself:
- Charging takes place through a USB port. What the...? Who came up with that bright idea? Okay, yes, it can be a bit unwieldy lugging both a sync and charging cable around like I have to do with the LD, but I know there's been plenty of times I've had to charge the LD away from my laptop (or any computer for that matter). I've also set up iTunes in a rather custom way so that Apollo the ThinkPad runs the program but the actual files are stored on a shared drive off of Diana, our ThinkCentre desktop. (Diana has much, much more disk space.) What happens if I need to charge the iPod while I'm in San Diego in August, and Apollo can't access Diana's share drive? Will iTunes barf? Will my files on the iPod be lost, since my library can't be found? I don't know yet, and I'm dreading finding out. Fortunately, I used my sister's gift (a Best Buy gift card) plus some extra cash to get an outlet adapter so I can charge the iPod without a USB port. Why that doesn't come standard seems completely idiotic to me. (I suspect it's just another way for Apple (and it's army of third-party accessory makers) to get more money.)
- iTunes, at least for me, is a hog. I don't know if it's my setup (program on one machine, files on another) or just that Apple has trouble writing for other OSes than Mac OS, but iTunes seems to lock up or get really sluggish sometimes. I mean, it worked fairly well at ripping and organizing files internally and it did really well at ripping things, but it's annoying as can be when I'm actually trying to sign up for an iTunes Store account and it goes off into lah-lah land for five to ten minutes while I'm trying to enter a credit card number. (And why do I need to put a credit card on file when all I've done so far is download a free game demo? C'mon, Apple. I'd feel much safer if you asked me to enter it on each purchase, rather than trusting you to keep it on file. Yeah, it's more work for me, but I work in the computer industry and I know how sloppy computer security can be.)
- The iTunes help file is pretty useless. On the few times I've had to look something up, it's taken forever for find it in the help file or I've never found it and had to figure it out myself. Other forms of help are only available online. I understand that iTunes works as a largely online application with the whole integrated store, but what if I'm just charging/syncing without a wireless connection and I run into trouble? How is the Apple website going to help me then?
- Minor personal irk: iTunes by default organizes files by artist, then album, and there's no apparent way to change this. Yes, I found out too late that you can organize your files manually yourself, but I only found that setting after iTunes completely reshuffled my files every which way. While I'm sure artist-to-album makes sense for certain setups, it really trashes compilation albums. I ripped one Dr. Demento collection and ended up with dozens of artist folders, some with only a single song file in them. Now without iTunes it's impossible to find everything associated with that album again, which makes me wonder just how stable iTunes really is. The same thing happened with my Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, which put all the instrumental pieces under Danny Elfman but each song under the person singing the solos.
Now that I've vented, I thought I'd share a little humorous bit I thought up. Shortly after I had toyed with the iPod a while, an imaginary conversation popped into my head about what the LifeDrive and iPod would say to each other on their first meeting:

LifeDrive: So... you're the new guy, huh?

iPod: Yep! Hi, I'm an iPod! And you are...?

LD: A Palm LifeDrive.

iP: A... what?

LD: A LifeDrive. From Palm. You know, they make PDAs.

iP: Oh... one of the "old guard." Gotcha.

LD: "Old guard?" What's that supposed to mean?

iP: Heh... ah, c'mon. A PDA? Who uses those anymore? I mean, with cell phones doing all that PIM stuff...

LD: And playing MP3s...

[Uncomfortable silence]

LD: So… you play music. What else can you do?

iP: Oh, I can do much more than that! I do podcasts as well. That is, after all, where podcasts got their name.

LD: Jeff used me to listen to his music and podcasts all the time.

iP: I can do video too!

LD: Got about a hundred megs of baby videos right here on this SD card. And I saw the files he converted for you. They’re several megs bigger than the files he encoded for me.

iP: I can also play games!

LD: Been there, done that, bought the leather case with a belt clip. What else you got, kid?

iP: Uh…

LD: Got BlueTooth?

iP: Not… built-in…

LD: Wi-Fi?

iP: N…no…

LD: Voice recorder?

iP: As an $80 add-on accessory…

LD: Copious amounts of storage space?

iP: HA! Got you there, old man! 30GB right here. How much do you have?

LD: Er… built-in? Only 4GB.

iP: AH HA!

LD: But with SD expansion cards I have virtually limitless capacity!

iP: And just how many cards do you have?

LD: Well… um… if you add them all up…?

iP: Yeeeessssss…?

LD: Um… there’s the ones here in my case… add in these old ones in the briefcase… maybe count the ones with the old Tungsten C… so… approximately 3.84375 GB?

iP: Approximately?

LD: Well, some are less than a gig. And if you include the built-in hard drive, that brings me up to 7.84375 GB. But then, realistically, you have to subtract the drive space used for “memory” and that brings it down to…

iP: Never mind. I’m sorry I asked.

[More uncomfortable silence.]

iP: Well… at least you’re not a Windows Mobile device.

LD: Of course not. I’m from Palm. Although some might say my OS is becoming outdated, at least it’s not a watered down version of a piece of desktop bloatware. The only reason those guys have so much more memory and processing power is because they need it just to make the darn OS run. And I won’t even associate with those Treo 700w’s and 750’s. Traitors.

iP: Amen to that.

LD: Why do you say that? You got something against Microsoft?

iP: Well, duh. I’m from Apple.

LD: OH…. That… that says a lot right there.

iP: Yup.

[Still more uncomfortable silence.]

iP: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

LD: Just keep your ear buds to yourself, kid, and you’ll get along here fine. Just wait ’til you meet Cell. He’s… special. If his antenna falls off, try not to notice.

iP: Um… right.
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Jesus Geek interview now up
April 25th, 2007 (1 year, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
And here it is.

It’s funny how after you do something like this and you listen to yourself hemming and hawing and stuttering, you realize just how many things you wanted to say that you completely forgot about at the time. Oh well. And of course Suddenlink would have a major outage today, meaning the blog would be down half the day, starting about when the interview went live. [Rolls eyes]

Anyhoo, enjoy the podcast. There’s a lot of interesting discussion, especially around Year Seven’s Providence, Nick and Ki’s relationship vs. Fooker and Sharon’s, and this here little slice of the Intraweb. Discuss the podcast either on the podcast’s comments page, or use this thread on the GPF forum.
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Jesus Geek interview
April 23rd, 2007 (1 year, 4 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core
One of the impending things hinted at in today’s GPF News item is that I should be interviewed in this week’s Jesus Geek podcast. Jesus Geek is a weekly Christian/technology podcast “hosted by a geek, amateur astronomer and homeschooling dad.” When I received their interview request, I went back and listened to a number of episodes in their archives, and there’s a good chance I’ll become a regular subscriber. I’ll be putting up an official link in the next GPF News post as soon as the podcast goes live (as well as a permanent link down in the GPF Links Off-Site portion of the GPF Link-O-Rama), but I’ll give you guys a heads-up here.
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