Ugh.

Stupid not being able to fall asleep until after 3AM. It's probably the third night out of the last four. And now I'm waking up wicked late.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

*sigh*

Modern Consumer

We're looking into getting a HD front projector for our new "playroom" instead of one of those buhgiant flatscreen LCD TVs. I've been cruising some of the online forums and review websites, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what's out there and what our options are. The hard part now is figuring out which one to get.

Traditionally, you'd go to the store, compare how things looked on the different models, weigh the costs and then make a decision. The problem being, where do you go to actually SEE what the projected image looks like?

• The high-end audio store we went to for our new speakers didn't have any projector systems on display (although the sales rep had a recommendation for us).
• The SOOTTAD and I rode over to the Best Buy on Sunday to see what they had, and what they had was a shelf with FAKE display models and an apologetic sales guy who thought the only difference between different models was the number and type of input ports. (And a prospective buyer whose totality of experience with projection systems that was driving him to buy one was that he'd seen a projector setup and THE PICTURE WAS HUGE AND IT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME!)
• I went to a Tweeter store today -- they actually have a home theater demo room (Score!), but they only demo one projector, the 1080p Sony VPL-VW100. Which is better than nothing, I suppose -- at least I now understand that a high-end projector with the highest resolution currently available with a given throw distance and display size will give us what we're hoping for. Helpful, without actually being all that helpful. Like learning that it's dark at night, or that rain is wet.
• The local high-end audio store says that they have a demo room, but it appears to be, once again, a single model, and in their case, one of the senselessly expensive models. May go anyway -- it may be a 720p projector (or at least has a native resolution less than the max 1080), so maybe I can see whether the resolution is adequate for the screen size and viewing distance that we're hoping for. Perhaps their webpage is just hopelessly out of date.

Ugh.

So, does anybody know how one can actually see how well these things perform? Do people who buy them just buy them sight unseen and rely on the "expert" discussion in the online forums or online review sites? Are we being just soooo last cenury? Do these things not matter to "normal" consumers? Was the BestBuy guy actually speaking truth when he said the different models were all basically the same and we should just make a decision based on price?

What's the standard operating procedure these days for the modern consumer of the high definition front projection system?

Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE 01Sep2007: Did some Googling today, and this looks promising... (too bad their website doesn't actually tell you when they're open)

Eye of the beholder

Towards the end of my run yesterday, I was on a section of the Charles River Walkway that passes through Waltham as it approached dusk. The light was already starting to fade, but I noticed a short woman and her dog walking slowly along one of the larger grassy areas that bordered the path.

I assumed that she had just gotten up or had simply been standing motionless because I hadn't seen her until her movement caught my attention. And in my head, my brain immediately came to the conclusion that she must have been quietly taking in the sunset, admiring the late summer sky as the colors slowly faded beyond the trees. She walked casually, and I imagined that she was lost in thoughts about the transient beauty in the world, the value of each moment in the sea of moments in our lives.

I took a moment for myself to appreciate the failing light. And as I passed her, I noticed...

...that she was talking on her cellphone.

So I guess all that other stuff was just me.

POSTSCRIPT

A few minutes later I saw two girls walking together on the sidewalk who seemed to be engaged in a bubbly conversation with one another. (At least, that's how it sounded to me as I approached.) And as I passed... Nope. Just one girl talking on her cell phone, and her... friend(?) quietly accompanying her, destination unknown.

TECHNOLOGY: bringing people together.

Bah, I tell you.

I just spent over $600* getting the driver side seatbelt fixed in my car.

$600!

Seatbelt!

And apart from the whole money thing, it makes me feel pretty stupid and useless that I couldn't figure out how, if it was possible, for me to fix it myself. It's not like it's the fuel injection system or something; it's a SEATBELT! BAH! I thought about trying and then managed to convince myself that it was probably hooked into a bunch of stupid crash and braking sensors and that was the end of it.

On the plus side, we've been all ecologicalibly-minded and crunchy-granola and rode our bikes for all our errands on Sunday, which carried over to dropping the car off and then biking home yesterday, and biking back to the shop to pick up the car today.

And 2 days of working from home and not driving to the office. Bonus.

* And they also nailed me with a $5.94 hazardous waste disposal charge. FOR A SEATBELT!

picking blueberries

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Not the worst way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Updates

Originally uploaded by foodnerd.

I haven't felt like I've had much time to post, or had much to post about, but I finally got around to updating the About page. Quite a bit has changed, and I guess I'm a little sad that I didn't bother to save some of what used to be there. But one of life's lessons is that, oftentimes, once you've done something, it can't really be undone. And at that point, you just have to let go and move on.

Anyway, all the big craziness of the year is finally over. Well, mostly, anyway. The wedding, the travel, the house sale, school, massage certification and licensing. There's still plenty of leftover crazy to go around -- we've got thank you notes to write and we're finally starting to take some baby steps getting the new house in proper order, but otherwise it's just everyday normal crazy.

In the last week, I took my car to the shop, had the SOOTTAD's car insured and registered in Massachusetts, played some ultimate, worked in the garden, ran shopping errands, went to a BBQ, a baby shower, a birthday party and a roofdeck concert eavesdrop (the Police concert at Fenway Park) and finally broke down and installed the window A/C* units in the bedroom and the SOOTTAD's office.

There always seems to be something. We're still busy, although I'm happy to say that it doesn't feel crushingly so. Maybe there's something about our lives that really is unusual or extraordinary, but in this, I think it's just business as usual. There will always be things that we need to take care of, planning, working, fixing, building. We have projects now, and when those are done, there are already plenty of others that are waiting in the wings. It never ends.

But I think I'm ok with that. It seems normal. Life is an everyday kind of a thing, after all. All is well.

...although a bit hot and sticky, at the moment.

* Unfortunately, no A/C in my workspace at the house, but I should be back in the office-office for the rest of the week.

Back, but still busy

...but at least we have a little more control over how we're spending our time these days.

Ingredients...

...for a good time. (for starters)

Text Spam

I got a new cellphone for the massage business. The idea was to provide a separate number that would provide clean boundaries between my personal life, my engineering life and this new massage business, while also providing a separate voicemail where I could provide more business information than I would on my own cellphone.

And so far, I've received 2 voicemails in some slavic language (I think it's Russian, but I'm not entirely too sure), 1 voicemail that was a recording selling loans, 1 voicemail from a live person trying to sell ads for the WeeklyDig. And today, I got a text message for some loan website.

Up until the last one has just been an annoyance. I try to check the voicemail on a regular basis, and actually spending the time to listen to a junk message just wastes my time. The text message however, costs me money, since I don't pay the flat rate to send or receive them. (I find that the flat rate has so far always exceeded the expense of paying on a message by message basis.) Sure, it's only 10 cents a message, but it's 10 cents I never should have had to pay in the first place.

I called Verizon Wireless about it, and basically there's nothing they can do. It's some "Premium Message" that apparently originates off the internet that they have no control over. (I really hope that means that it costs them money.) The customer service rep told me I could reply with a message to unsubscribe, but I'm a bit confused since I never subscribed to any messages in the first place. I don't even really use this phone.

The concern, of course, is that if I don't unsubscribe, I'll get more messages. But if I do unsubscribe, that unsubscribe message is also going to cost me money. And worse, I wonder if, as with Spam, you respond to one of these spam messages, they then know the line is "live" and they'll put me on a list that that will receive more messages from different addresses from the same unscrupulous spamming "marketing" company or sold to other spammers.

Fuck. I swear, the assholes make it really hard to have a kind and compassionate attitude towards the world sometimes.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Wedding Present from the MBTA

We thought it was bad enough when we discovered that the MBTA had closed the Arlington Station Entrance and exits for renovations through 2008. It happens to be the station closest to our wedding venue. Thankfully people can still use the Berkeley entrances, but it's a slightly longer walk, and doesn't open up right at the public garden. But at least people will still be able to use the station.

Today, JBar forwarded this gem published on the Globe's local news site:

Summer repairs on Green Line will halt D branch trains
"The shutdown will commence on June 23, 2007*."

Great, thanks guys.

At least there are supposed to be bus shuttles and extra express buses. And the notice says something about "distributing materials and making other preparations for the major production work activity." Hopefully that means the lines will still actually be running. But who knows?

We'll cross our fingers and hope that peeps will still be able to take public transportation and get to the ceremony on time.

UPDATE: just called the MBTA and it's confirmed -- they're shutting down the D line from Riverside to Reservoir starting on the 23rd. Yeah, thanks Boston, we love you, too.

* For those that didn't pick up on it, that's the day we're getting married.

Holy Maps, Batman!

Looks like GoogleMaps has been updating their databases and rendering engines. You can actually see buildings at the higher zoom levels of Boston, including the parking exit structures on Boston Common. Crazy cool.

Certified

Whew!
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

More later...

For now, I think I'm going to go for a run.

A list, of sorts

This is just a mild rant. Apologies in advance.

So I've mentioned that I'm studying for the National Certification Exam for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. Anyway, I picked up the review book at the school that was being used for a review class. Didn't go to the class; figured I'd get just as much info reading through the book, and it'd be easier to schedule my own time rather than block out the time to attend the class -- plus I think I saved fifty bucks.

It seemed like a reasonable enough book -- it broke the subject matter into several sections and chapters and had review questions. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't come with a CD or something, since this was going to be my first time taking a computerized standardized exam (yes, I think that dates me a bit), but my concerns were somewhat mitigated because the book indicated that you could access several practice tests online with a handy-dandy passcode that was protected by that crappy silver stuff that you find on lottery tickets and game pieces at McDonald's. (Do they still do that? Is that dating myself again?)

So anyway, the book.

Basically, I'm unimpressed. I'm going to resist calling it a steaming-pile-o-crap simply because I have no other points for comparison, but really, pretty crappy. But I am going to enumerate (ironically, in an unenumerated list) my issues with the book. I'm hoping to find it at least a wee bit therapeutic. Because, you know, it's all about growth and healing.

Anyway, here we go:

• The book includes little notes in the text (which they call "display boxes") which provide "practical applications, additional explanations, and real-life examples for the material covered in the book." Great. Seems helpful. Except for the part where the authors consider the information included within them (and solely within them) important enough to create practice questions on them. Sorry, if it's important enough to be tested on it, it's probably important enough to be part of the main text of definitions.
• Y'know, I'm really glad you provide practice questions -- it's helpful to go through a few questions to see if you've understood a section, or conversely, to determine whether you need to study a certain section of material. Great. It'd probably be more helpful if you'd provide practice questions after every chapter rather than say, after the first 22 chapters, 100 pages into your 300 page review book. Whaddayathink?
• And while I'm at it, it'd be nice if the questions you're asking for a given section could actually be answered by the information in the chapters that make up that section. (ok, maybe part of this problem was that some of the answers might have been found in those stupid "display boxes" mentioned in item one, er, I mean that first dot there.)
• But you know, I'll take the ones that were in different sections, if you'd at least make sure the answers were provided SOMEWHERE in your book.
• Oh, and when you provide practice questions, it'd be really nice if your answer key ACTUALLY HAD THE CORRECT ANSWERS IN THEM. I found 3 errors that I had to confirm by corroborating them with the text and with my old class notes and textbooks. It made me wonder whether some of the other answers were sketchy. Especially when it was unclear what material was being used to derive the answers.
• and when you say "additional practice exams," I generally take that to mean EXAMS, as in, several exams. If you use the same questions and just mix up the order of the questions and the order of the multiple-guess answers for each question, that doesn't count.
• And I'm sorry, even if you're going so far as to call a reordered test a different test, um, you're only providing three tests? Way to underachieve, guys.
• And incidentally, not fond of questions that test for pattern recognition of text rather than understanding concepts. Ever heard of a paraphrase? Especially since I can't be certain that the National Certification Board is going to use the same choice of words as you. An example:
  

  Name the technique that uses the palpation of tender points to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness.
  (a) Muscle energy
  (b) Myofascial release
  (c) Strain-counterstrain
  (d) Structural integration
  
  From the text: "Strain-counterstrain is a technique that uses the palpation of tender points (or trigger points) to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness, ..."
  

  Do I really understand that? No. Did I get the question right? Yes. The second time I saw it. Do I feel confident that I'm ready for the real exam? No.
• And, by the way, the "full index" (that they hype in the preface) is not, in fact, particularly full.

And FWIW, I found the book's overall organization to be fairly poor. But that's probably pretty obvious.

I suppose one way of looking at it is that the authors' choice of organization forced me to review more subject matter because I had to spend additional time scanning through whole sections, multiple whole sections, to figure out answers to some of the questions. Not to mention my own class notes and old textbooks. Hey, thanks guys!

Anyway, annoyed, but done now. Hopefully I'll do alright on the test on Saturday.

More with the bad timing...

Civic duty
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

So, we're pretty much settled into the new house, but there are still boxes of crap littered about, as well as new islets of detritus that are forming where systems have yet to be put into place. We just need a little time, but unfortunately, that's the one thing we don't seem to have much of these days.

Oh, and the bed we bought in February hasn't shown up yet. (We're expecting it this week. Fingers-crossed.)

The SOOTTAD has been managing the final stages of our exit strategy from the old house as well as managing its updates and repairs. But meanwhile, plenty of wedding stuff has begun backing up in our queue. We finally signed a contract with a photographer that we really liked but, um, invites? Right. Yeah, they should probably go out in the next few weeks and we haven't even come up with the wording that's going to go on them.

Oh, and I'm taking the National certification exam for massage (technically, the National Certification for therapeutic massage and bodywork) this Saturday. Which is good, because the National Cert. exam is required for the Newton practitioner's license which I'll need for the space I'm renting with a friend and classmate. It's a room in a Chiropractor's office... and the lease started Sunday. So there's a bunch of stuff that needs to be dealt with for that too.

Oh yeah, and the project at work is in the final two week stretch.

So, of course the last thing I needed was to be selected as a juror in Federal Court.

Lucky me.

Convergence

It is perhaps ironic that I have to log into my Google account in order to access my Blogger account in order to bitch about how my online identities are converging. Or perhaps it is simply telling. Or appropriate.

Regardless, I'm annoyed.

Flickr wants me to link my account to my YahooID, and frankly, the idea makes me a little uncomfortable. I remember back when they first announced that this was happening that there were some people making a stink about it in the forums, and others who couldn't see what the problem was.

Perhaps it's just more evidence of the generation gap that was described in a recent New York Times magazine article -- the gap between those who try to keep a certain amount of privacy online and those who put themselves completely online, their private life, public.

Sure, to be wholly anonymous nowadays, you pretty much have to be off the grid entirely, but I'd like to think that there's still a middle ground somewhere in there that I can carve out, with a little anonymity through obscurity and obfuscation, at least. I probably want people to find me if they're looking hard enough, but I don't really want to just drop it in their lap. A bit paradoxical, I suppose. Or like the article says, maybe I'm just fooling myself:

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure.

Back in the day, I only set up my Yahoo account so I could sign up for online stuff without getting my "real" email address spammed. Then my YahooID got tied to a bunch of my mailing lists when Yahoo! assimilated eGroups. That was the beginning of the end, I think. When that happened, all of a sudden my hidden email address was mapped to my "real" address and could be seen by groups of people that I actually interact with in the real world.

So now, if I attach my YahooID to my Flickr account, all those peeps will probably be able to see my photostream. Which seems pretty benign. Except, my Flickr account also links to this blog. And somehow, I've always thought of this blog as being a separate sort of thing. So if I link the ID, the connection's made. Probably fine, right? What's the big deal?

Well, if it's done, it's done. The internet sticks around.

And then how easy is it to out the SOOTTAD, who is fiercely protective of her personal information to the point that there are no unprotected pictures of her on our *private* online photo gallery. I don't even post many pictures of myself in order to reduce the odds of her being identified by association.

Except that the information is already out there. There is a picture of the SOOTTAD out there on the interwebs, with her real name attached to it even. And the Yahoo email address has always been tied to the Blogger account. It just didn't have the reverse mapping from Yahoo to Blogger is all. Oh, F. I already linked to the blog on that stupid Yahoo360° page.

Dumbass. (F'ing Yahoo, pushing and pushing and pushing to continue the convergence. At least I'm not bumping into the namespace issue that other people are having.)

Like I said, maybe I'm just fooling myself.

My timing is impeccable

So, I just switched over to Vonage last week. I've been really happy with the service so far -- cheaper with more features. I get voicemail notices via email. I can check my messages by calling in or online via the web. And I had totally forgotten that my phone supported caller-ID. Schweet.

So, what happens one week later?

Vonage Owes $58M in Patent Case
In a ruling that could have wide-ranging consequeces for the entire competitive voice replacement market, a federal jury Thursday found Vonage guilty of infringing several patents held by Verizon, and awarded $58 million in past damages and imposed a 5.5 percent royalty fee on future Vonage operations. ...

I see that things are operating business-as-usual around here.

On the non-technology front, we're hoping to be largely moved into the new house later this month. There's still lots of little stuff that needs to get carted over or triaged, but I was thinking that I'd finally have some more time to refocus on work, get more wedding planning completed and maybe even hit some side projects I've been setting, er... aside. But I forgot that I got called for Federal Jury Duty at the end of March through mid-April.

As always, perfect timing.

I expect we'll end up closing on the old house right around mid-June, just to properly gum up the works.

When life gives you lemons...

Ice sculpture
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

...make lemonade.

'Course, seeing as lemons aren't really in season 'round these here parts, it's more like:

when life gives you three hours' worth of shoveling of hard packed snow and layers of ice... make art.

In other news, my lower back is now wicked sore, and I can barely hold a pen in my hand to write from all the shoveling. Oh, and we met some more of the new neighbors helping them get their car unstuck from the snow(ice)bank at the front of their driveway. (Which, incidentally, probably would have been unnecessary if the son had accepted my offer to help dig out the driveway. But, whatever.)

New Banner

Having some trouble getting the image uploaded and usable from Blogger.

Jumping back in; 5 Things

Well, school's done. We only have graduation left this coming Sunday and that'll be it. I'm going to have to spend some time reflecting on what I'm really going to do next -- plenty of half-formed plans that I've tossed around, but I need to give things a chance to sink and settle in.

Of course, there's no shortage of things to do right now. Things are finally getting under control with the new house -- I don't even want to go into the saga involved with hiring people to refinish the floors on the first floor except to say that it was scheduled to be finished in the middle of January and we just had our last interaction with the contractor this morning. We still need to pack and move. And we've really kind of dropped the ball on that whole wedding planning thing... I think we were supposed to send out save the dates about two months ago. We still need to meet with caterers, find hotels for guests, invitations, flowers, photographer? honeymoon?

I finally got around to dealing with some mail that was lying around and as I looked more closely at my National Geographic renewal, I wasn't quite getting what it was saying about getting the January issue or the next issue until it finally dawned on me and my brain was like, HOW THE HELL IS IT ALREADY FEBRUARY?! It's like I completely missed January.

Anyway, my friend Leah tagged me with a meme, like, a million years ago, so I figured this might be a good time to have at it. It's called "5 things you might not know about me." And, of course, the problem that most people experience with this exercise is trying to figure out what people don't already know. People either already knew me before they started reading this here blog (hello, Dr.J) or things are fairly self-evident simply from what I've already written, even if I haven't stated them explicitly. (Hey, did you know I'm a bit insecure? Wow, really?) And then the big challenge: the SOOTTAD has instilled in me a great distrust of putting out too much personal information out on the interwebs, so I have to balance telling you about me, without, y'know, really telling you about me. And more importantly, without outting the SOOTTAD.

So anyway, all that has probably made this exercise more of a challenge that it's probably supposed to be, but hey, I have a history of overthinking problems, so it's really just par for the course.

Ok, here we go:

1. After a shower, I always swipe off as much water as possible with my hands before towelling dry. I'm pretty sure I didn't away do this, but I haven't a clue when I started. I think I'm trying to make the towel have to do less work.
2. In high school, I was the fry guy at the local Carl's Jr restaurant. I worked 3 hours a day (the lunch rush) and the moment my shift ended, I would drive home, strip off my brown polyester uniform and take a shower to try and wash the smell of grease off of my body. I don't think I swiped off back then. That job lasted about 2 weeks, and is the only time I ever worked in food service.
3. I have the (unfortunate) habit of singing when I play certain songs on the piano (and guitar). The repertoire has dwindled somewhat over the years, but I'm still left with a handful of songs, including one or two by Billy Joel.
4. I started using stippling as a drawing technique because it was easier to cover up mistakes. While it's not always an optimal form for creating certain textures, (wavy hair comes to mind, actually, all hair) for the most part I think it's generally easier to render recognizable images because it lets a viewer's brain do more of the work. It's sort of like the way we see specific shapes in clouds -- your brain trying to organize information into identifiable patterns -- and sort of how it's hard to draw clouds that look like specific things while still looking like clouds and not a drawing of those specific things.
5. Despite the aforementioned issues surrounding the publishing of ever more personal information on the web, I do have profiles on several social networking sites, including MySpace. But for the very same reason, my MySpace page currently has 0 friends.

That last one seemed kind of lame, but I'm kind of at a loss for anything else. I mean, you all know that I was divorced, right?

I'm not so much for the meme-tagging, which is probably best since there are only a handful of my peeps that actually do this blogging thing. (and there's that intrinsic Ponziness to it that does kind of bother me) But I will send an optional tag to the SOOTTAD, just in case she wants to participate. Despite feeling strongly against posting personally identifying information, she's mentioned that she's felt sad about being left out of the meme game by some of her food blogging peeps in the past.

Almost There

Hope all y'all are doing alright; I'm hanging in there... not really ready to jump back into things just yet. School is just about over -- just one more day of class and graduation the following week -- but there's still plenty that's keeping me occupied. Maybe I'll try easing back into it sometime next week.