It was pretty packed there, too… definitely the most folks I’ve seen there before. They closed one of the entrances so they’d have more room for lines, and I was directed by one of the attendants, to the second to last line. Fine, I pull in, OK, only one car ahead of me, then a guy with a trailer and a boat, and a couple guys at the pumps. The two guys pull out, and Mr. Boat pulls in. Hmm, won’t pull up to the front pump, huh? Great. So this is going to take longer. Mr. Boat and his buddy, we’ll call him Mr. Dinghy, jump out and try to figure out the pump. This takes a few minutes, and finally they start getting gas for the truck. Time passes. Folks in other lines are moving ahead. Finally they stop filling up the truck, and — you guessed it — start filling up the boat. This is when I get out of my car and ask them why they didn’t pull forward to the first pump. “There isn’t enough room” they say. Looks like there is, to me. There’s at least 25 feet in front of the pumps for cars to maneuver around, even if they stuck out 10 feet, it’d be fine. Grr.

OK, so, it’s a small boat. How much gas can it hold? How long can this take? Nearly 15 additional minutes, is the answer. I’m thinking this boat must hold a TON of fuel! I’m getting really impatient now, and I’m thoroughly bored both by NPR on the radio and by Valleywag on my iPhone. Hurry up already!! As I reach to honk in arggravation, they start capping up the tank on the boat. Sigh. So now the guy in front of me, and I, pull up to the pumps. The Boaties left their receipt. This ought to be good, I think, they must have spent $300 on gas. Hmm, only 24 gallons. What? Really? How can you only pump 24 gallons in 15 minutes? Lordy.

I swiped my card, pumped my less-than-7-gallons (the Prius has an itty bitty tank), and was back in the car within 3 minutes. That’s 20 fewer minutes I had with my kids tonight, thanks to the Inconsiderate BoatJerks.

However, last night was the exception to general Comcast goodness. Just before 10pm, Val calls down to me in the office… “the internet’s not working.” Usually, this is some wacky wifi issue on the mac, like the microwave interfering with it… oh wait, that’s right, she’s now hardwired in. Hmm. Let me check… sure enough, seems down. Check the router. The “online” light isn’t lit, but everything else is. Let’s try to reset it. Little switch on top does nothing, let’s try pulling the power cord… no dice, that’s right, I forgot. This is a VOIP modem as well, and we wouldn’t want that to die when the power went out, right? It’s got a big honking battery in the bottom. Sigh. OK, let’s actually call Comcast.

After digging up the number from a statement (paper statements, what a novelty! I guess they’re good in this case, when otherwise, everything is online and I can’t really, get online easily^*). Call them, navigate the voice menus, and “we’re experiencing difficulties in your area. there is no need to stay on the line to report this issue.” Grr.

OK, well, the cable still works at least. But yeah, no data. No voip (so no telephone). Meh. I did want to know how long this outage was actually going to have lasted by the time they resolved it, however, so I just set up a commandline to record pings: while true; do sleep 5 && date >>pings && ping -c 1 -t 5 www.google.com 2>&1 >>pings ; done and I figured I’d check the ‘pings’ file in the morning to see when it started having output. (I’m sure there’s a smarter, simpler way to do this… this was the 2-minute hackery version.)

Well, according to the file, pings started working at 1:25am. Three and a half hours Comcast data was down. That’s pretty sucky. I hope this was a major fiber cut somewhere that they dispatched everyone in the area to fix… for voice customers particularly, that’s really lousy, on a holiday night (hey, relatives can be calling! your great grandfather who served in the Big War might decide to call you from beyond the grave on Memorial Day, who knows?)

^* by “easily”, I mean, without walking upstairs. Yes, my iPhone would get me online. Yes, my 3G card would get me online. But mighty sloth, would not let me traverse the steps unless absolutely necessary…

I was trying to explain to some folks what it was, and tried “family-friendly burning man”, which isn’t quite right although gets the spirit pretty accurate, and “high-tech state fair” which is close but no cigar as well. It is, to some extent, like a ham radio convention, skipped ahead a couple of generations. Well, but with (much more) weird, whimsical art. It’s hard to describe, but a fun time was had by all. Alex especially liked the Disney (sigh) section with WALL*E (ok, the $200 toy robot version coming out later this year actually does look pretty cool) and the DIY model rockets (with launches!). Oh, and the battling robots. Ohhh, the battling robots…! We saw some way cool robots that shot flames… and then promptly had their owners chastised by the local police/security folks. I think that was predictable

So anyhow, after a few hours, as we were getting pretty tired (the two kids make it a lot more unwieldy, but a lot more fun too) we sat at a bench and had some ice cream, and then headed back to see WALL*E one more time (please, Daddy, please!) When we emerged, I was checking out the t-shirts and Val ran up, “I think I lost my phone!”. After some frantic digging through the stroller compartments, we couldn’t find it. Val said she thought she might have recently lost it out of her back pocket when we were eating ice cream, so I went off to look. Nothing near where we were, and I asked the info booth if anyone had turned on in recently… they pointed me to the main info booth, they pointed me to lost and found, they said they thought “yes” one was turned on, and pointed me to security office. Off I went, halfway across the event in a sprint. After I got there, sure enough, that had one just turned in! The security officer held it up and said “is this it”? Of course, this was somewhat funny, as basically all iPhones look identical. But I unlocked it in front of her, and it was Val’s (right wallpaper, for example.) So, the Maker Faire bunch are also an honest, or at least helpful lot.

 

reboot system boot 2.6.xx Thu Mar 6 03:46 (00:01)
root pts/1 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:37 - crash (00:09)
root pts/0 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:29 - crash (00:17)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Wed Mar 5 07:26 - 07:26 (00:00)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Tue Mar 4 11:55 - 12:02 (00:07)

Hmm, if they could log into it the previous day, it really doesn’t take much longer to just log in and run ’shutdown’, huh? Apparently flipping the power switch is a lot easier. Alright, I can deal. Anyhow, they did install it, so I log in and happen to do ‘history’. Looks like the tech wasn’t too sure of him/herself:

1 fdisk -l
2 exit
3 ls
4 exit
5 fdisk -l
6 reboot
7 fdisk -
8 fdisk -l
9 reboot
10 fdisk -l
11 df
12 mke2fs ext3 /dev/hdb1
13 ls
14 mkdir /Backup_drive
15 mount -t ext3 /hdb /Backup_drive
16 fdisk -
17 fdisk -l
18 reboot
19 fdisk -l
20 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 Backup_drive
21 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 /Backup_drive
22 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
23 df
24 reboot
25 fdisk -l
26 ls
27 cd ..
28 ls
29 fdisk -l
30 reboot
31 fdisk -l
32 cd ..
33 ls
34 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb /Backup_drive
35 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
36 fdisk -l
37 history

Wow, that’s a lot of fdisk’ing. And kind of a lot of tries to mount it, considering you just ran fdisk so much. And hey, you didn’t add anything to my fstab or similar… but you did create a silly directory in the root of my other drive. Feh.

Ah well, at least it’s installed and seems to be working fine, and the turnaround was really quite fast to get it done.

As I get older, I have this huge media library — about 400 DVDs, and probably close to 1000 CDs (not including Prince bootlegs, which probably number another 300). Most of the CDs are off in storage, with the ones I play most frequently, or really at all, ripped and accessible via iTunes. But what to do with the DVDs? I don’t want huge piles of DVD cases everywhere, although I do have that to some extent — but most of them are in ‘binder’ style storage. Disk storage still isn’t quite cheap enough to copy them all to HD (at 4-8G per) and back them up regularly, and I don’t watch them often enough to justify the time to rip them, either. In fact, except for a bunch of kids’ DVDs (mostly Pixar titles), discs don’t hit my player more than about twice, ever. So why do I even own them? Sure, some are because they are fantastic movies and have great extras like commentaries, and I intend to watch them again, maybe even a lot of times. But it doesn’t typically happen. If I could rent them “instantly” for $3 or $4 a pop, when I want them, I think I’d be OK with that. But I want them in good quality (i.e. at least SD DVD bitrate and resolution and full DD or DTS sound) and with the extras as needed. So far, there’s no way to get this… but we’re getting close.

Let’s look at the contenders. Well, I guess there’s rentals by mail (Netflix/Blockbuster), which isn’t bad, I mean you do get the exact original disc content, but it’s far from “instant”, and means a fixed monthly commitment. That’s not going to suffice for me. I’ve had Netflix and Blockbuster, and I just don’t plan that far ahead. It’s fine for weird foreign films I want to see “sometime”, but by the time they show up I’m often not in the mood and end up with it sitting around until I am. Sometimes that means I only rent 1 or 2 DVDs a month, which is hardly worth the price considering the waiting time, etc. Netflix has an on-demand service as well, apparently, but since it doesn’t work on the Mac, it doesn’t work in my household, otherwise it seems like an option with possibilities. I know they hired the guy who “invented the DVR” and so obviously they’ve got plans for some kind of set-top box (I tried grilling them on this about 8 months ago when I interviewed there but they were keeping quite mum). That might be interesting, especially if it’s basically free to subscribers. I think I’d probably sign up with them again if they did have that.

There’s “on demand” from my cable provider — Comcast. Now, I basically hate Comcast because of their exhorbinant prices. But I am overall relatively happy with the actual product. I have the dual-tuner HD DVR, which most of the time works well. Sure, it’s no Tivo, but it costs $9 a month to rent, instead of $13 for Tivo (and you buy the hardware for Tivo). Plus, if it ever breaks — which happens, I’ve had 3 bad boxes in the past 2 years — they replace it, no questions asked. I’ve had good luck with Tivos as well, and still have a SD Series 2, and I hate to say this, but the Comcast Motorola DVR is “good enough”. Sure, its interface is clunky. Sure, it’s not as responsive to the remote. Sure, it doesn’t have some of the cool searching features. Heck, it’s even got annoying ads interspersed in the guide UI… but it does record HD from 2 tuners, and give me OnDemand. And there’s actually a good amount of on-demand content available, both in SD and HD, for no additional charge. And I can order movies in SD or HD via “pay per view”, which works reasonably well. However, the on-demand stuff definitely is not up to snuff in bitrate, as even I can see blockiness in fast-moving scenes on a 37″ 1080i display occasionally. For my $4 (for SD even), I want no jaggies! And, while there’s a reasonable amount of stuff, there’s nowhere near the breadth of my DVD collection available, and things “come and go” from the availability, in a seemingly random fashion. So not terrible, and there are definitely times I’ve found something interesting and watched it instead of browsing the DVDs.

What I think is definitely the next step, and a great competitor to HD disc players, is Apple TV, with the new software to enable HD streamed content from the iTunes store. The original incarnation of AppleTV left a lot to be desired in my opinion, most specifically, that most of the content needed to by ’sync’ed from your iTunes on a Mac/PC. I don’t want to do this — I want to play stuff as I want, from my home network, or from iTunes, and the new software (coming out soon) looks to support this. I don’t want to store much of anything on the local HD on the AppleTV; just to use it as a local cache. The $179 version should be enough for anyone with a home network with storage and media on it (which is probably anyone with a nice HD setup using HDMI, etc. anyhow). I’m finally going to pick up ones of these, and give it a shot. The HD rentals from iTunes are $5, which does seem still about $1 too high, but they look to be at least 720p, which is probably ‘good enough’ for most movies, especially ones I might only buy the SD versions of anyhow, if I were to buy them.

So aside from items like Pixar movies (which will one day come to HD DVD I hope, but doubt due to Disney’s relationship to Sony and Blu-ray, won’t) and others that I play over and over again for the kids, and really justify purchasing (and even those, will probably just get ripped and converted to an iTunes-friendly format as soon as I get the Apple TV), I don’t plan to buy many more optical discs with movie content on them. Or what I do buy will likely be second-hand, at “throwaway” pricing… which is actually how I view most of the DVD pricing now. If a DVD is $15-$20, it’s still less than two movie tickets, and I can watch it without people talking and with pause-ability, and no babysitter required. And I can always resell it, to boot. But I’d rather not even have another acrylic disc taking up space, requiring cataloging and care. Just let me see what I want to see, in good a/v quality, when I want to see it (really, like right then) and I’ll pay a reasonable price. I’ll even pay again, if I want to see it again, a few months later. I think AppleTV and iTunes is the closest to being able to offer this, in the very short term. And hey, with the current slump in the market, it’s probably time to pick up some more Apple stock, too [well, or would be, if I wouldn't take a bath selling anything else!]

Here’s some photos of the action:

About a dozen more in my Tree removal PicasaWeb album. And here’s even a video, if you’re really into forestry-type stuff :)…

Anyhow, I knew the album was forthcoming, not because I follow him that closely, but because I went to the Oracle OpenWorld party back in… December? It was pretty amazing actually, quite impressive, with 3 separate stages, free for conference attendees (of which I wasn’t, but my friend’s husband was and gave me his ticket), and featured the likes of Billy Joel, En Vogue, Stevie Nicks, and our man Lenny. There were some bands that would appeal to a younger demo as well, but I have to admit I must be getting close to the Oracle vendor target market in age, because a couple of the bands were too heavy metal-ish (or what passes for it these days) for me, and a couple others were just plain going on stage too late. Yes, I am coming to terms with my lameness is later life. But, I got to see Lenny anyhow, and he definitely puts on a good show. I also saw him at the Shoreline many years ago, and was impressed with the energy he put into the corporate gig, it was about at the same level as his concert. He did play a track (the title track) from the new album at the Oracle thing, and it was Zeppelin-ish Lenny goodness, so I’ve been awaiting the new album.

So I saw it at Costco on Thursday night, but for $13, which seems un-Costco-like. I figured it’d probably be on sale cheaper at Target or similar, and sure enough yesterday I was at target to buy valentine’s stuff for my kid’s playgroup, and saw it for $9.99, with a “Only at Target” sticker that said ‘Digital Extras: Video downloads include a behind-the-scenes look at the new CD PLUS 2 acoustic songs and 4 of Lenny’s classic videos. Over 30 minutes in all! Also featuring the single “I’ll be waiting’ & ‘Bring it On’. Offer valid while supplies last or through 05/05/08″. Sounds pretty good. I’m going to buy the album regardless, but a couple acoustic songs sounds good. Now, how to go about actually getting to this content? Beats me. No insert in the (hateful) thin paper packaging (I don’t mind the reduced environmental impact, but there have to be more usable designs than this!). Nothing on my receipt. Nothing on the product page on target.com. Nothing on Lenny’s site. OK, I’m stumped.

Does it not make sense to publish an URL on the sticker? Maybe that checks against my receipt that I bought it? Or put an insert in the CD itself with a special code (as Kanye West has done)? How difficult is this?

52.8 MPG. Yep, I am enjoying this so far!
(Update: so it’s more like 42 MPG after 400 miles of driving… but still about 3X what I was getting in the M3!)

You see, I own a copy of the ‘Adobe Design Collection’, which is basically what they called Creative Suite 1 before officially rebranding it that way. I use it occasionally (Illustrator mostly, but sometimes PhotoShop too.) I’m pretty happy with the older versions of the apps in it, but after upgrading to Leopard (and getting a new Intel Mac), it wouldn’t install and I decided to flip for an upgrade to the latest version, CS3, for $400. Pretty steep given my usage pattern, but heck, it’s pretty good software and I would like to be able to use it when I want to.

Some background: the Adobe Design Collection has all the exact same software as CS1 (PhotoShop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, and Acrobat Pro 5). It cost me $900 when I bought it. Since it has the exact same software as CS1, I thought the upgrade path would be the same. However, there is apparently two big differences between the ADC and CS1: 1. I have serial numbers for each individual product, instead of just one for the suite as a whole and 2. that means I can’t upgrade as if I had CS1, even though I own licenses for all the same versions of the apps. This really sucks, and I didn’t know that, and I didn’t figure it out until I got to the step in the installer (near the very end, 40 minutes in, after it’s actually installed) that my serial number(s) wouldn’t work. Grrr. I called Adobe sales and it went something like this:

Adobe Sales Rep: “yeah, you have to have real CS1″

Me: “well, I do, I have ADC, which came with the same software”

ASR: “I know, but sorry, you need to buy the ‘UPSELL’ version of CS3 instead”

Me: “how much does that cost?”

ASR: “$900″

Me: “uh, but it says here [as I check amazon] I only need any of the older apps to qualify for that. I have ALL of the older apps. Seems like it should be a lot less expensive. And I don’t even really care about a couple of these apps. Illustrator and Photoshop mostly.”

ASR: “Well, you an upgrade the individual applications as well.”

Me: “Oh, ok, how much would that be?”

ASR: “It’s $200 each except for Acrobat which is $150″

Me: “So, $200 for each of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and $150 for Acrobat. So even if I were to upgrade ALL of them to the CS3 versions, it’d still be cheaper than buying the ‘Upsell’ version of the suite–$750 vs $900?”

ASR: “Yes, but when you have the suite, you can then upgrade to the other suites, and get two more programs, Dreamweaver and Flash, for just $400 more!”

Me: “Hmm, I care about those even less, though. [I notice 'upsell' is certainly the key word here!] I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

Now, the sales rep was actually very friendly and patient with me as I was getting kind of frustrated, so I’ll give him a lot of credit here. But seriously, what kind of sense does it make that folks with CS1 pay $400 to upgrade, people with only one of the three qualifying applications pay $900 to upgrade to the full suite, and me, who bought the suite already, and could pay $750 to upgrade the apps individually, has to pay $900 as well? That seems nuts. I mean really, at least make it cost the same to upgrade to the suite, as it does to upgrade individually. Preferably, make it cost a lot closer to the $400 than the $900 price, too. Adobe did offer to refund me the price of the non-functional upgrade DVD (well, assuming Amazon wouldn’t take it as a return), but I really don’t know if I want to spend $900 on upgrades for software I don’t use that much. I’ve been working hard to get legit and pay for all the shareware and other apps I use, even buying Office for the Mac (even though I extremely rarely use it), but that just feels too expensive. I’m a little worried, though, that CS4 will come out at some point and my old versions won’t qualify for any kind of upgrade, so that would suck even more. Bah.

One more thing, I also asked the rep if there were any plans to just get the old apps to work under Leopard, since I really could live without the upgrade completely if that were the case. He said no, only CS3 runs under Leopard. Apparently, even CS2, which was being sold as recently as 8 months ago, doesn’t install/work under Leopard, and they don’t plan to make it do so. That really sucks! I’d be a lot more upset if I had just upgraded to CS2 recently. In the meantime, I’m still mulling over the options. I’m leaning toward just upgrading Illustrator for now, as that’s the one I actually “need” at the moment.

Pretty funny. Most Jews aren’t that big into Kwanzaa, but hey, who am I to judge?!