Category: food

Cascade Bicycle Club: Chilly Hilly

Join us Sunday, February 29 on the ride Bicycling Magazine named “One of Four Classic Rides” in the nation! This ride is 33 miles around scenic Bainbridge Island. Guaranteed to be hilly, chilly and a heck of a lot of fun.

Well, since I indulged in some after Christmas retail therapy and got new pedals and shoes (I’m going clipless) but have yet to try them out, here’s my motivator. Seven weeks . . . .

[posted with ecto

Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows “Longhorn” FAQ

But Mac OS X already has a lot of these features. What’s the big deal?

A: Apple has implemented some basic desktop composition features in Mac OS X “Panther.” But the basic problem with Mac OS X isn’t going away: It’s a classic desktop operating system that doesn’t offer anything in the way of usability advancements over previous desktop operating systems. Today, Windows XP and its task-based interface are far superior to anything in Mac OS X. In the future, Longhorn will further distance Windows from OS X. From a graphical standpoint, there won’t be any comparison. As Microsoft revealed at the PDC 2003 conference, Longhorn is far more impressive technically than Panther.

OK, so who wants to break it to this guy that Longhorn isn’t due out until “late 2005”, to quote his own site’s timeline.

That’s two years from now.

I draw two conclusions from this:

1. Apple has two years (two release cycles, at their current pace) to pick and choose what features they think are worth implementing from the Longhorn catalog
2. IT buyers may decide to stick with current releases of Windows products and wait to see if any of this comes to pass

Anyone remember Adam Osborne, who managed to kill demand for his Osborne II by touting the features of impending Osborne III? The time involved here is not the same: people may not be willing to wait that long.

Apple Store – University Village

My second visit to my local Apple Store today . . . I went to the opening, but not for long and after the grand opening.

I walked around a bit, played with stuff, and found it enjoyable, if a little sterile. Perhaps that’s more an insight into how sloppy I am . . .

I like that everything is plugged in and networked, ready to play with. I’m looking to spring for an iBook, most likely the littlest one, given my financial situation, so I played with it some. Kind of hard to make up my mind when I’m used to a 2 x 1.25 GHz machine 8 hours a day. And I am totally used to the ThinkPad’s little pointer and multiple mouse buttons, to the point if someone made a replacement keyboard with a pointer, I’d want one. It’s hard to go from pointing with, well, your pointer finger to using your thumb.

And speed might be an issue. It might be worth jumping up to the G4 ‘Books. I get some discount as a UW employee, but not enough to bridge the gap. (It gets me the babyBook for $1399, without any added options. Adding the Airport card would take it to almost $1500.)

I also like the wide array of peripherals, printers, scanners, business card scanners, speakers, and the rest. Cameras were also available in abundance. And of course, lots of iPods, including some with those curious Creature speaker rigs.

Lots of traffic, lots of helpful staff. I think it makes it even more clear why Apple took this route. They’re not selling commodity hardware, but an experience, and you can’t sell that very effectively through the ads in the back of Computer Shopper. People need to handle the merchandise like they’re picking fresh fruits and vegetables.

Idle Words

Finally, I should make it clear that I don’t mean this post to heap dirt on the GeoURL project. This kind of stuff happens wherever there are many users and a potential for error. GeoURL has a large enough data set to make these patterns visible, and maps are something we can all understand. But the deeper point is that we are all fallen in the eyes of the metadata god.

Just another example of how important it is to supply some feedback or self-correction on any system that takes input from naive users . . . . I think Maciej‘s idea of the GeoURL interface showing a map with the user’s selected location is simple and elegant: I wonder if they’ll do it.

Google Groups: View Thread “sub-amateur has dumb questions”

Someone gave my son (and by extension, me) a Meade 155W telescope, and as far as I can tell, it’s complete.

I needed some help understanding how this telescope is supposed to work. I posted a query around 11 PM and had 10 responses by the time I woke up the next day.

So I returned my 2003 Fuju Finest today for store credit to PerformanceBike and got en earful about the reputation and ethics of the shop that currently has my 2002 Finest. Apparently, in addition to having loads of attitude — plainly everyone would rather be riding than waiting on pesky customers — there were a lot of comments on RecycledCycles taking in a hot bike and paying out so quickly.

There’s a lot of backstory there that has nothing to do with me, so I’m not putting a lot of stock in it. I keep coming back to what would be the outcome if they *hadn’t* bought my bike. Who know if I’d get it back?

Interesting that the person of interest had to walk or ride by the University Police Department with a hot bike: with the new law taking effect requiring helmets, your savvy bike thief will need to carry a helmet along with his lock breaking tools.

And that one would be me, evidently. I learned today that my purchase of a Macintosh (or perhaps more accurately, the way I did it) forced the creation of a new computer purchasing policy to make sure purchases are more tightly controlled.

The fact of the matter is, I was able to take a handwritten purchase order into the University Bookstore and buy a 2 * 1.25 GHz PowerMac with 17 inch flatscreen monitor and some software on the strength of that document. I drove there and back myself, and it occured to me that I should have charged for mileage. I set it up myself (the difficulty of that mustn’t be overrated) and that was that.

So while I agree that my methods were less than forthright and open, I’m not pleased to have an even more constrained workplace be my legacy. But it’s well-known I would never have gotten one otherwise, even though the University supports the platform and the Bookstore sells them. The fiefdom in which I work is declared to be off-limits to anything but the Leading Brand. I gave it a try and found it didn’t work for me: my observation after a particularly bad spate of crashes and general uselessness was that using Windows in a multidisciplinary way was like driving nails with your bare hands — bloody, painful, and unproductive.

Oh, well, religious wars are unwinnable: better to go along as best as you can without compromising too much.

The conflict for me is that as a probationary employee I feel compelled to prove myself as a valuable asset but it’s not easy to do that with uncooperative tools. Do others in my position have the same problems?I don’t know, but I doubt their expectations of themselves are as high. Not to be arrogant, but all I heard when I arrived was how unsophisticated everything was and how I was welcome to bring my tech experience to bear on that. But as I’ve learned, it’s hard to buck the system, even in small ways, without hurting someone’s feelings.

Put this script on your crontab:

#!/bin/sh 
/sbin/mount_smbfs //username@server/share /Volumes/share 
cd ${HOME}/Documents/ 
find . -mtime -1 -a \! -type d -exec cp -rp {} /Volumes/server/username/Documents/ \;

It mounts a server share that you know gets backed up, finds all your files that got touched today, and copies them to your directory on the share.

Set it and forget it.

Microsoft limits XML in Office 2003 | CNET News.com

But analysts contend that WordML’s compliance with industry standards is a misnomer. Because the schema isn’t fully documented, people who want to edit files created in Office 2003 will only be able to do that with Office itself, as before. Text in Office 2003 files stored in XML format might be viewable in other desktop programs, but all document formatting would be lost and most other files would be unreadable.

Such a move could also hamper data exchange with competing desktop productivity software that recognizes XML, such as Corel’s WordPerfect or Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice, say analysts and competitors.

“From the beginning, there was a question whether Microsoft was going to buy in completely to XML,” said Technology Business Research analyst Bob Sutherland. “Microsoft is often trying to spin their message, and they want to appear as if they buy into (open) standards. But they always put in the proprietary hooks somewhere in the final release of the product.”

[ . . . ]

“We’ve never believed that Microsoft would truly make their XML format interoperable,” said Gregg Nicholas, a technology manager from Berrien County, Mich. Microsoft’s “standard operating procedure with standards seems to be embrace, extend and exterminate. Despite the hype from their public relations department, I’ve seen no reason to believe that they would act any differently with XML.”

I was really hoping they were getting it at last, that open standards were good, and perhaps they were dominant enough to let other players exist in the same market. Alas, no, it’s the same institutional arrogance we’ve seen for years.