My wife found a yellow jacket nest the hard way this afternoon and was stung three times. She's fine, but I am keeping an eye on her.
And I will be putting up traps in an attempt to reduce their population. Nasty things. I hate them.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
A Friday Night Interrupted
I just sent the following to a local email list... a list of residents of my mountain area. Figured I'd post it here too, just because someone else might see it and think it over.
Just throwing this out there for others to think about...
Back on Friday night my wife and I were at home, watching a movie. It was warm-ish, as you may recall, so we had a bunch of doors and windows open. At about 10:15pm we both just about levitated out of our chairs because we were suddenly overwhelmed with the smell of smoke. Fresh smoke, not stale, perhaps with some chemical overtones to it.
We checked all around the house, both inside and out. It was definitely outside, and it was probably coming down the hill from somewhere above us. We could see no visible column, and there was no wind, so whatever was burning probably wasn't all that close or that large, and it wasn't going anywhere quickly. I dithered, but I have been explicitly told to call these things in by a Cal Fire captain I trust who used to work at Burrell station. So after I was sure I had no more detailed information I could report, I did just that. I hoped the dispatcher would just log the information and see if anyone else called in. (That way they would have at least one additional data point before sending people out.) But that isn't what happened, and on thinking about it, they probably aren't allowed to do that. Get out and find it if you can is the rule, I'm sure.
So at 10:30pm they dispatched the volunteers and Burrell crew to do a smoke check, that is, to go looking for the source of smoke that someone reported. When I was on the VFD these kinds of calls bugged me a lot. Not because they were called in - that's fine and good - but because they are difficult to handle. Even in daylight smoke can be a very hard thing to locate, when you can see it at all. At night, though, it is much more difficult to find something that has only a smell and almost no way to pin down a visible source. Still, I was doing what I was told back when I responded to these things, and so were the folks who went looking on Friday night when I caused their pagers to go off.
Burrell station and Loma Prieta both responded. Two engines crawled the neighborhood for over 30 minutes each. There was radio traffic saying they smelled it, but they never found the source, and it dissipated over time. In the end, 5 people from LPVFR and the full Burrell crew both reported it UTL (Unable To Locate) and went back to their normal Friday evenings. And I am really sorry I dragged them out of whatever they were doing at the time to go on a wild goose chase, but again, that's what I was explicitly told to do.
So why bring this up? Because something, somewhere, was actually burning. Someone was using a fireplace, or an outdoor fire pit. Possibly that someone put something a bit odd on their fire that created the acrid odor. Whatever the case, that smell caused my wife and I to wonder exactly what was happening, and to call it in. It was a very strong smell in our house that night at 10pm.
What I would like to ask is to please be considerate of your neighbors in the summer months. If you do not have to start a fire, please don't. Smoke drops down to near the ground once it cools off, and it runs downhill, pooling in hollows and valleys. It definitely doesn't disappear. If you start a fire, someone below you will be wondering exactly what we were wondering: what is on fire and where is it? And if there is any wind at all, the worry level only goes up.
Frankly, the same goes for fireworks. Last night at around midnight I heard a bunch of firecrackers go off somewhere. While our weather has (wonderfully) been a bit cooler than usual, we're still in high fire danger season, and fireworks of any sort are a serious risk. Every year I am reminded just how much I hate the 4th of July as things go boom, or even worse, I see colored lights above the local trees. I know this is obvious, but forest fires kill people and destroy property. And I know people love fireworks, but this really isn't the place to be setting them off. Common sense is required.
A quick google search indicates that something on the order of 75% of forest fires are started by people or their equipment in one way or another. 75%.
I'll keep calling these things in when I have to, but I would really like it if that didn't happen when things were dry and the weather is warm.
Thanks.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Rain Gauges... What Works And What Doesn't
A while back I posted about rain gauges as we started testing some new ones with the goal of figuring out which one(s) we liked and thought were accurate.
Now I have final data for the 2011-2012 rain year I can present my conclusions. To help with that, here's the original picture of the gauges in question:
From left to right, here's what I measured with each gauge last year and what they are called:
I need to move the Stratus gauge about 40 feet from its current location. There are some oak trees nearby that are going to start impinging on the rainfall in particularly windy conditions, so I need to get it out of that area. But when I do that I don't know how much the new location will affect the totals. 40 feet doesn't seem all that far, but I suspect I need to prove it actually isn't important.
I think what I will do is move the Stratus gauge to the new location and leave the 6" wedge gauge where it currently hangs. The idea is to use the wedge to cross check the Stratus and see if they continue to read about the same or not. If I can get through one more year and remain convinced that the 40 foot move hasn't affected things, then I will be done and have only one gauge to work with again.
The other gauges will probably be discarded. None are worth passing on in my opinion, so I will recycle them.
I'll update rain data on my web site - see the links to the right - as things happen in the new rain year, but I'll probably only record the numbers from the Stratus unless I see big differences between it and the wedge.
Now I have final data for the 2011-2012 rain year I can present my conclusions. To help with that, here's the original picture of the gauges in question:
From left to right, here's what I measured with each gauge last year and what they are called:
- 32.86" - A Stratus gauge, 12" capacity
- 32.15" - A weather.com 6" gauge
- 33.02" - A wedge shaped 6" gauge
- 35.20" - Our ancient, yellow, plastic 5" capacity gauge
- 75.81" - A decorative, glass 8" capacity gauge
- The Stratus gauge is far and away the easiest to read if the amount of precipitation is less than 1". The central tube holds 1" of rain and is easy to read in linear 0.01" increments. None of the other gauges were nearly as easy to read, nor were they as accurate (as far as I can tell). That said, however, if the amount of rain goes over 1" it overflows into the outer tube, and the reading process gets more complicated and error prone. Still, this gauge works very well, and after having used it for a season I trust it. It's also the standard in use by anyone doing anything serious with the weather as far as I can tell. There are many places to purchase it. Here's one, for example: http://www.ambientweather.com/stprraga.html
- The 6" weather.com gauge read about 2% less than the Stratus gauge. It is difficult to read in amounts of less than 0.1", so the fact that it was that close is probably due to my rounding readings off in opposite directions enough to even out the error. There is a fundamental design problem with this gauge, though: it slides into a support that is screwed down, but the wind could blow the gauge right out of that support in some cases. While I never had that happen, it got close a couple of times. As a result of those issues I cannot really recommend this gauge. You can find on amazon.com, though, if you are interested.
- The 6" wedge gauge presents a mixed bag. It read only about 0.5% more than the Stratus gauge - essentially the same - but it is hard to read because the markings are small and faint. Any condensation on the side of the gauge and it is nearly impossible to read without wiping it down, holding it up in the light, and squinting. It is also the case that the scale isn't linear, so the more it rains the less accurate your reading will be. And it has only 6" of capacity, so if you're getting a lot of rain you'll be out in it, emptying out the gauge before it overflows. This is the second best gauge here, though, and for some it may be more than adequate. It can be purchased from several online vendors, or directly from the manufacturer: Tru-Chek. It's not particularly expensive either, so consider it if the Stratus isn't to your liking.
- The yellow 5" gauge is really old, and was a hardware store special back when we bought it 20 years ago. It read about 7% higher than the Stratus, and though it is heavily embossed and thus easier to read than the wedge, it is marked only in increments of 0.1". It isn't quite linear either, with a slight taper to the shape. And finally, the 5" capacity is too limiting if you get heavy rains. Despite living with it this long I really cannot recommend it, but you can find something essentially identical at amazon.com if you really want one.
- The butterfly gauge is essentially worthless, having been created by someone who thought they knew how a rain gauge works but actually got all the details wrong. This gauge read 2.3 times the rainfall logged by the Stratus gauge. Yes, really. It's supposed to have 8" of capacity but the impossibly bad design means you actually have less than 4" if you want to bother correcting for it. I could write a tome about all the things they did wrong with this product, but I'm not going to bother. Just don't buy it. Here's a link to a very similar product from the same maker that you can ignore unless all you want to know is that it rained. (You certainly won't have a clue about how much water actually came down if this is the only gauge you use.) In short, give this one a wide berth.
I need to move the Stratus gauge about 40 feet from its current location. There are some oak trees nearby that are going to start impinging on the rainfall in particularly windy conditions, so I need to get it out of that area. But when I do that I don't know how much the new location will affect the totals. 40 feet doesn't seem all that far, but I suspect I need to prove it actually isn't important.
I think what I will do is move the Stratus gauge to the new location and leave the 6" wedge gauge where it currently hangs. The idea is to use the wedge to cross check the Stratus and see if they continue to read about the same or not. If I can get through one more year and remain convinced that the 40 foot move hasn't affected things, then I will be done and have only one gauge to work with again.
The other gauges will probably be discarded. None are worth passing on in my opinion, so I will recycle them.
I'll update rain data on my web site - see the links to the right - as things happen in the new rain year, but I'll probably only record the numbers from the Stratus unless I see big differences between it and the wedge.
A New Rain Year Dawns
Here in California - or at least the bay area - we track our rain annually from July 1 through June 30. That's because our rainy season falls in the winter and spans the new year. If you are trying to figure out how much water the farmers, watershed, reservoirs, and/or water table is going to get, you need to track it around when it falls, rather than splitting it across an artificial date like January first.
So, July 1 marks the start of the 2012-2013 rain year, and the end of our 20th year of collecting rain data at our home.
This year I tested a bunch of rain gauges, and have revised the way I record and display data. I'll write another post about the rain gauges shortly, but first, here are links to the data I have available:
I will provide links to those pages in the right side navigation bar as well, so you can find them in the future without having to find this post.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions from the data. I stress, though, that rain fall amounts vary widely over even small distances, and we have nothing like a statistically valid sample to analyze anything over the long term. We use this data mostly to try and assess how our well will perform over the coming year. If we have less rainfall we can bet we'll our well will low on water before the next rain year gets going and the aquifer can be recharged.
Another thing this data helps us understand is our local fire danger. Rainfall that is well spread out in time keeps the vegetation moist and thus less likely to be a problem. 2011/2012 was the first time I recorded actual rainfall amounts by the day and kept them, so we still have a lot to learn here.
I hope this data is interesting and useful to someone other than me.
So, July 1 marks the start of the 2012-2013 rain year, and the end of our 20th year of collecting rain data at our home.
This year I tested a bunch of rain gauges, and have revised the way I record and display data. I'll write another post about the rain gauges shortly, but first, here are links to the data I have available:
- Annual Rainfall Totals - going back to the 1992-1993 rain year
- Daily Rainfall Amounts - starting with the 2011-2012 rain year
I will provide links to those pages in the right side navigation bar as well, so you can find them in the future without having to find this post.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions from the data. I stress, though, that rain fall amounts vary widely over even small distances, and we have nothing like a statistically valid sample to analyze anything over the long term. We use this data mostly to try and assess how our well will perform over the coming year. If we have less rainfall we can bet we'll our well will low on water before the next rain year gets going and the aquifer can be recharged.
Another thing this data helps us understand is our local fire danger. Rainfall that is well spread out in time keeps the vegetation moist and thus less likely to be a problem. 2011/2012 was the first time I recorded actual rainfall amounts by the day and kept them, so we still have a lot to learn here.
I hope this data is interesting and useful to someone other than me.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Downsizing The Entertainment Gear - part 2
Those who read my earlier post about the entertainment stuff know the situation.
What has gone on since then is pretty simple, really.
I followed through on the HK equipment and got a set of freestanding Elfa shelves to use as a new rack for it and the few things I am keeping. The rest of the old gear has been hauled off to a place in San Jose that will go over it, fix what they can, and sell it all on consignment. No idea what I will get for it all, but it is out of the house and we have much more air and floor space as a result.
Other than the HK receiver requiring that the TV be on when you change input sources (I guess it has to tell you it is doing something via the screen, even though the front panel notifications are more than adequate) it works perfectly, and sounds great.
I did a lot of digging on wall mounts for the speakers as well, and that is a project coming soon. There will be a picture in the end, I suspect. More when I know it.
What has gone on since then is pretty simple, really.
I followed through on the HK equipment and got a set of freestanding Elfa shelves to use as a new rack for it and the few things I am keeping. The rest of the old gear has been hauled off to a place in San Jose that will go over it, fix what they can, and sell it all on consignment. No idea what I will get for it all, but it is out of the house and we have much more air and floor space as a result.
Other than the HK receiver requiring that the TV be on when you change input sources (I guess it has to tell you it is doing something via the screen, even though the front panel notifications are more than adequate) it works perfectly, and sounds great.
I did a lot of digging on wall mounts for the speakers as well, and that is a project coming soon. There will be a picture in the end, I suspect. More when I know it.
One From The Collection - Kaki King
The other day I posted a link to a performance of Comfortably Numb from Roger Waters's tour of The Wall to my G+ stream. That got me thinking about writing more posts about music I like. In fact the thought kept me awake for a while, plotting what I might write about.
I'm not going to re-post that video here. Please chase the G+ link above if you are curious about it (and you should be... it was a historic occasion, and the song is amazing). Instead I am going to post something else I like.
Here I introduce you to Kaki King. I think I heard about her some years back on NPR, but I am not sure of that. Regardless, her work is amazing, and she is an astoundingly talented artist.
She's justifiably famous for her guitar playing, and there really is nothing to do but to listen to her playing something all by herself on an acoustic guitar to understand it. She has an amazing style. I guess you would call it finger percussion, but she plays the fretboard from above or below as needed, and she slaps, taps, and otherwise uses the body of the guitar as a percussive instrument. Her style is generally upbeat and her first couple of albums were just about all instrumental songs. YouTube can show you many of her works and give you a good idea of how she plays.
Her later work has included electric guitar, drums, and vocals, and I have enjoyed that just as much as her acoustic stuff. The song I link to below is from her 2010 album, Junior, and while it is an instrumental, she performs it on an electric guitar. It is titled My Nerves That Committed Suicide.
The gentle opening shows only a bit of her amazing skills, and avoids all the fret board flash that she is justifiably known for. The song builds, though, and it gets loud. It's simple, but powerful, and I really like it.
Here's a link to the original album version that I found on YouTube.
It turns out that she plays with this song a fair bit in concert, though. Here's a link to two tracks: Doing The Wrong Thing and My Nerves That Committed Suicide, performed at Cat's Cradle Carrboro, NC 4/30/10. As with many amateur concert videos the audio quality isn't stellar, but you definitely get an idea of how she performs this one live, as well as the energy she puts out on stage.
Kaki King has several albums out and she is in the process of producing another one even as I write this. I encourage you to listen to her work and see if it is your thing. If so, please support the artist and buy the songs in some way. I'm old fashioned and want the CDs in my hands, but you can buy from whatever source works best for you. Just so the artist gets some support and can make more music.
Finally, please leave a comment here and let me know if more posts like this would interest you or not. Thanks!
I'm not going to re-post that video here. Please chase the G+ link above if you are curious about it (and you should be... it was a historic occasion, and the song is amazing). Instead I am going to post something else I like.
Here I introduce you to Kaki King. I think I heard about her some years back on NPR, but I am not sure of that. Regardless, her work is amazing, and she is an astoundingly talented artist.
She's justifiably famous for her guitar playing, and there really is nothing to do but to listen to her playing something all by herself on an acoustic guitar to understand it. She has an amazing style. I guess you would call it finger percussion, but she plays the fretboard from above or below as needed, and she slaps, taps, and otherwise uses the body of the guitar as a percussive instrument. Her style is generally upbeat and her first couple of albums were just about all instrumental songs. YouTube can show you many of her works and give you a good idea of how she plays.
Her later work has included electric guitar, drums, and vocals, and I have enjoyed that just as much as her acoustic stuff. The song I link to below is from her 2010 album, Junior, and while it is an instrumental, she performs it on an electric guitar. It is titled My Nerves That Committed Suicide.
The gentle opening shows only a bit of her amazing skills, and avoids all the fret board flash that she is justifiably known for. The song builds, though, and it gets loud. It's simple, but powerful, and I really like it.
Here's a link to the original album version that I found on YouTube.
It turns out that she plays with this song a fair bit in concert, though. Here's a link to two tracks: Doing The Wrong Thing and My Nerves That Committed Suicide, performed at Cat's Cradle Carrboro, NC 4/30/10. As with many amateur concert videos the audio quality isn't stellar, but you definitely get an idea of how she performs this one live, as well as the energy she puts out on stage.
Kaki King has several albums out and she is in the process of producing another one even as I write this. I encourage you to listen to her work and see if it is your thing. If so, please support the artist and buy the songs in some way. I'm old fashioned and want the CDs in my hands, but you can buy from whatever source works best for you. Just so the artist gets some support and can make more music.
Finally, please leave a comment here and let me know if more posts like this would interest you or not. Thanks!
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Downsizing The Entertainment Gear
As per my previous post from sometime back in the dark ages, we are remodeling our kitchen. In fact, we are almost done, and the results are great. But, of course, once you start something like this, you discover a slew of other things that need doing.
This post is (I think) the first in an ongoing series of posts about a very specific problem... making a big, ugly, but reasonably nice entertainment system much smaller and nicer, without blowing the budget too far out of the water.
We are happy with the new TV, which has worked, looked, and sounded just fine (to us) so far.
This post is (I think) the first in an ongoing series of posts about a very specific problem... making a big, ugly, but reasonably nice entertainment system much smaller and nicer, without blowing the budget too far out of the water.
For that to make any sense, you first need some background.
I was an audiophile at one point in my life. While I never spent thousands of dollars on most of my gear, I own reasonably nice stuff that dates back to the audio equivalent of the Cretaceous period: aka the 1980's and 90's.
Well, that over simplifies, because not everything I have from then still functions or is used. I long ago gave up entirely on vinyl. (Why it is making a come back I have no idea.) I never wanted or liked tubes either. (Distortion is distortion. If you like the way your tube amp sounds, that's fine with me, but I don't really care about it. Solid state amps might sound a tiny bit different than tube amps - particularly when pushed hard - but at my age, and with my ears - the idea that I will hear any difference is laughable.) Tape is dead, too.
Digital is the way to go, and I remember the days when people were happy to buy albums that were recorded on digital masters. Now no one talks about that era... and everyone who cares about high fidelity is doing vinyl and tube amps and (maybe) putting green marker on the edges of their CDs (Google that one if you're too young or your brain is failing an you no longer remember it. Snopes.com is a good place to start.) and other things I think are bogus. Just give me reasonable quality gear and simple lamp cord to connect the speakers. That's all I want. (No, really. Anyone buying high end speaker wires, power cables, or power conditioner boxes is being ripped off. A fool and his money, you know.)
Anyway, despite going digital, life is more complicated now, particularly in the area of video, which isn't something I have had to mess too much, but that is changing.
Enough rambling. Here's what we had in the big pile of entertainment gear when the kitchen remodel started:
- A Rotel receiver. About 100 watts per channel (only 2 channels). Irritation: stand by mode (rather than being totally off) and an annoying pop that is emitted to the speakers when you first power it up from being fully off. It's done that since it was new, alas.
- A Marantz 5 disk CD changer. (I have chewed through and spit out so much Sony gear, particularly CD players that whine after a year or two, that I will never, ever, buy anything made by Sony. That is irrational of me, I know, but I simply won't go there. Every single thing I have bought that was made by them has irritated me in a big way, except a phone answering machine that we finally ditched because we wanted to avoid the tape. Yes, really.)
- An LG blu ray player.
- A Philips DVD player. (We keep this only because somewhere in our DVD collection there is one disk that causes the blu ray player to choke. Everyone tells me I am crazy and that should never happen, but it does. The problem is that we don't know which disk it is now. We might just ditch the DVD player and the problematic disk when we find it, but that hasn't happened yet.)
- A Nintendo Wii. We are not big gamers, but some of what is available for this machine is fun.
- A Philips 32" somewhat high def CRT TV. 1080i was the best it could do.
- A Sanza Fuze mp3 player. (I have a long standing hatred of all things Apple because they have hacked me off in a manner similar to Sony, as mentioned above. I don't buy Apple gear as a result, and thus will not and do not own and ipod or an iphone.) For the Fuze I also have a dock sort of thing that will let me connect it (via 3.5mm or RCA jacks) to a stereo device.
- A pair of KEF 105/3 speakers. These were the biggest single investment in anything audio related in my life.
Note that I have spared you the ancient separate integrated amp, the separate tuner, the turntable, and the cassette player. All junk now, and all gone (or going). And you can learn more than you want to about me by noting that I never bought a separate pre-amp and power amp(s). Could have. Didn't. Money has always had better uses for me.
So, the first thing that happened during the remodel is that we had to move entirely out of the upstairs for a week while floors were being refinished. That meant that the TV had to move too, and being a CRT it was big, heavy, and did not fit on top of the dresser in the bedroom. Too deep to go there, and there was nowhere else to put it. That meant we got rid of it and replaced it with a Samsung 40" LED TV. Low end Samsung... this isn't expensive stuff... I think it cost $600 or something. Cheap in the modern world. Amusingly, though, the Samsung has a very narrow bezel, and the old CRT had a very wide bezel. As a result the new TV is only about 1" wider and 1" taller than the old one, but increases the viewing area substantially.
We are happy with the new TV, which has worked, looked, and sounded just fine (to us) so far.
Next up, the floor refinishing ended, and we moved things back upstairs. Very quickly we determined that things had to change up there. (Remember, we're tearing up the world, and change is a given.) The first thing that was obvious to us was that the TV had to be wall mounted so we could get rid of the TV cabinet that had been under the old CRT.
I researched for a while and selected a Cheetah mount that gives me 26" of extension, so I can move it a fair distance, and mounted up the TV on it. Not bad, but now the sound quality is poor. Dialog in movies is hard to make out. (Note, we aren't running the sound through the stereo... just using the speakers in the TV.) It turns out that when the TV was on a stand and sitting on a dresser or TV cabinet, it sounded good, but when hung from a wall mount nothing deflects the sound towards the listener, and the net result is less than ideal. Grrrr.
In addition to that problem, the KEF speakers, while they sound wonderful, are way too frigging big for us anymore. We barely use the stereo as such, and having those huge things taking up floor space and looking gigantic is just not what we want.
Time to downsize.
The first step was to do a ton of digging, looking for ways to simplify life.
Every manufacturer has moved to HDMI these days, which I guess makes sense, but neither the Wii nor the old DVD player have HDMI outputs. Now, depending on the choices we make as we go forward, the DVD player could just disappear, but the Wii we'd like to keep. That means making it cooperate with the new TV setup, however that works, and that is something of a challenge if we put an AV receiver in the mix. (Most AV receivers that cost less than, say, Greece, don't do video upscaling or convert non-HDMI inputs to go out over the HDMI cable. So you wind up connecting everything from the source to the receiver, and again from the receiver to the TV, creating a rats nest of wires and having to tell the TV to change input sources every time you change input sources on the receiver. PITA.)
Looking at this logically, the first problem was the Wii. How to make it talk simply is step one, and today, finally, I found a cheap answer. I hope. There is a Chinese company named Lenking that makes inexpensive video conversion equipment. Among other things they make this Wii to HDMI converter. It plugs into the back of your Wii and gives you an HDMI port. No power supply, nothing funny, just convert the composite video and RCA audio outputs of the Wii into HDMI, and upscaling to 720p or 1080p. Reviews on Amazon vary about how well this works and how well made the device is (or isn't), but for the $21 I just paid, I will give it a try. (Most amusing are the reviews from people saying that the converter from company X failed, so they tried one from company Y. They are all clearly made by just one original source, folks: Lenking in China. The US distributors merely silk screen on a logo and sell the things. Get a grip.)
Looking at this logically, the first problem was the Wii. How to make it talk simply is step one, and today, finally, I found a cheap answer. I hope. There is a Chinese company named Lenking that makes inexpensive video conversion equipment. Among other things they make this Wii to HDMI converter. It plugs into the back of your Wii and gives you an HDMI port. No power supply, nothing funny, just convert the composite video and RCA audio outputs of the Wii into HDMI, and upscaling to 720p or 1080p. Reviews on Amazon vary about how well this works and how well made the device is (or isn't), but for the $21 I just paid, I will give it a try. (Most amusing are the reviews from people saying that the converter from company X failed, so they tried one from company Y. They are all clearly made by just one original source, folks: Lenking in China. The US distributors merely silk screen on a logo and sell the things. Get a grip.)
Anyway, assuming that Wii converter works when it arrives, then the next step will be to replace the guts of the world. At the moment I am leaning towards replacing nearly the entire setup (receiver, speakers, blu ray and DVD players) and going with this blu ray AV receiver from Harmon Kardon. This would do everything we need and has AUX inputs for the CD changer and mp3 player, so it may be the answer.
If we go that way I also need three adjustable shelves on the wall below the TV mount, but that is trivia. I'd need to arrange to attach the center channel speaker to the TV mount, which should be possible, I guess, and wall mount the left and right channels. The entire thing is much smaller than the current setup, and should be much nicer to look at, while still having reasonably good sound quality and all the features we need.
I think.
But one step at a time. First we try the Wii adapter to see if I can make it work, which means I can avoid AV receivers which to video upscaling, which is good. Then I reassess the world and see where things stand.
If anyone reading this has any comments please feel free to leave them. I know I am out of my depth here, and any information is appreciated.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
How to Mess Up Your Life
This is simple... just remodel a kitchen. Really.
If it goes smashingly well - as ours has so far - you will still find yourself out of your kitchen and with strange people crashing around in your home for a minimum of 5 or 6 weeks. Add a dog or three that cannot be allowed near the construction area because there are always doors that are left open and distracted workers there, and suddenly you have a routine of doing nothing but making sure progress continues unimpaired because anything else is impossible.
In other words, I am still here, just distracted. For a while longer. Whee.
If it goes smashingly well - as ours has so far - you will still find yourself out of your kitchen and with strange people crashing around in your home for a minimum of 5 or 6 weeks. Add a dog or three that cannot be allowed near the construction area because there are always doors that are left open and distracted workers there, and suddenly you have a routine of doing nothing but making sure progress continues unimpaired because anything else is impossible.
In other words, I am still here, just distracted. For a while longer. Whee.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Privacy Matters
The recent hubbub about the iPhone app Girls Around Me has me thinking a bit more than usual about privacy, and about what it means in the real world.
There's been some fear mongering about it, and some statements that it represents the future. In the latter camp I even saw an article by someone from Forbes in which she claimed that perhaps the people with open profiles on Facebook and open access to their FourSquare data chose to set things up that way.
Really?
Here in the USA, where people cannot name their elected officials with any regularity, where evolution is not a fact, and where we care a lot more about American Idol than we do about the real questions facing us, do you really want to suggest that the average person has a clue what their privacy settings really are in Facebook, FourSquare, Twitter, and who knows how many other systems?
I wouldn't make that claim.
I'm a software engineer, and I can assure you that the privacy settings on Facebook are hard to find, default to the wrong values, and are very often difficult to understand in any depth. I assume FourSquare is similar, though I have to admit that the very idea of checking in and announcing my presence away from my home seems crazy. It's an invitation to a robbery, at the very least, so I have never signed up.
But let's run with that theory. Perhaps some of the women who showed up on Girls Around Me really did want to announce their presence in that way, and perhaps most of the people using that app weren't rapists, muggers, and so on. That's fine, and it might be true, but stop and think about your friends list for a bit.
I suspect most Facebook users have friended individuals they barely know, or don't know at all. Are the people checking into places being certain to navigate Facebook's fiendishly complex privacy settings so that only friends they actually know and trust are seeing their location? I seriously doubt it.
Geolocation data has a whole slew of downsides when applied on a personal level. There is, I will admit, some upside to this data when properly controlled, but what we are seeing with Girls Around Me - and any number of current or future apps that do similar things - is the use of that data in ways that many aren't comfortable with. (And don't even get some of my more reactionary friends talking about the dangers of geolocation data in the hands of the government. No, really... don't go there.) More interesting, to me anyway, is that most of us have no idea the data we give to Facebook and other services can be used like that. If we could control our data more easily, this would be a non issue.
And in my opinion, it is the fact that control of our own data is so hard that is really the problem. To pick on Facebook - because they are an easy target, though they are far from the only offender - your profile should default to being visible to friends only. You should have to make individual bits of profile data public one at a time, and geolocation data should never be shared publicly.
If I ran the zoo, when you friended someone in Facebook (or any other service) you would have to assign a level of trust to each person, and if you didn't pick something different the default would be "no trust". People you don't trust get very little in the way of data from you, including almost nothing personally identifiable. With just a few levels of trust, you could get all the way to your spouse and/or anyone else you would give a blank, signed check to. And levels of trust would be used when posting your status or checking in, defaulting to only the most trusted group every time, but letting you broaden the recipients as needed (by allowing less trusted people to see the post).
In a nutshell, these systems should default closed - to avoid unexpected sharing - but allow broader sharing when the user specifically chooses to do so.
In general, people don't think about privacy and consequences when they post. The vast majority of the time they don't even bother worrying about who should see a post, which is why we have so many stories about bosses and employees sharing inappropriately on Facebook and elsewhere. Given that, claiming that many people want to be as exposed as Girls Around Me makes them doesn't seem right. I'd bet most of the people who were that exposed would react negatively to finding out just what they were subjecting themselves to.
If the author of the Forbes piece wants to make herself available publicly, that's fine, and the various platforms are welcome to support that. But it should always be a conscious choice with every post to make that kind of information available, never the default. That's were the current systems get the design wrong.
There's been some fear mongering about it, and some statements that it represents the future. In the latter camp I even saw an article by someone from Forbes in which she claimed that perhaps the people with open profiles on Facebook and open access to their FourSquare data chose to set things up that way.
Really?
Here in the USA, where people cannot name their elected officials with any regularity, where evolution is not a fact, and where we care a lot more about American Idol than we do about the real questions facing us, do you really want to suggest that the average person has a clue what their privacy settings really are in Facebook, FourSquare, Twitter, and who knows how many other systems?
I wouldn't make that claim.
I'm a software engineer, and I can assure you that the privacy settings on Facebook are hard to find, default to the wrong values, and are very often difficult to understand in any depth. I assume FourSquare is similar, though I have to admit that the very idea of checking in and announcing my presence away from my home seems crazy. It's an invitation to a robbery, at the very least, so I have never signed up.
But let's run with that theory. Perhaps some of the women who showed up on Girls Around Me really did want to announce their presence in that way, and perhaps most of the people using that app weren't rapists, muggers, and so on. That's fine, and it might be true, but stop and think about your friends list for a bit.
I suspect most Facebook users have friended individuals they barely know, or don't know at all. Are the people checking into places being certain to navigate Facebook's fiendishly complex privacy settings so that only friends they actually know and trust are seeing their location? I seriously doubt it.
Geolocation data has a whole slew of downsides when applied on a personal level. There is, I will admit, some upside to this data when properly controlled, but what we are seeing with Girls Around Me - and any number of current or future apps that do similar things - is the use of that data in ways that many aren't comfortable with. (And don't even get some of my more reactionary friends talking about the dangers of geolocation data in the hands of the government. No, really... don't go there.) More interesting, to me anyway, is that most of us have no idea the data we give to Facebook and other services can be used like that. If we could control our data more easily, this would be a non issue.
And in my opinion, it is the fact that control of our own data is so hard that is really the problem. To pick on Facebook - because they are an easy target, though they are far from the only offender - your profile should default to being visible to friends only. You should have to make individual bits of profile data public one at a time, and geolocation data should never be shared publicly.
If I ran the zoo, when you friended someone in Facebook (or any other service) you would have to assign a level of trust to each person, and if you didn't pick something different the default would be "no trust". People you don't trust get very little in the way of data from you, including almost nothing personally identifiable. With just a few levels of trust, you could get all the way to your spouse and/or anyone else you would give a blank, signed check to. And levels of trust would be used when posting your status or checking in, defaulting to only the most trusted group every time, but letting you broaden the recipients as needed (by allowing less trusted people to see the post).
In a nutshell, these systems should default closed - to avoid unexpected sharing - but allow broader sharing when the user specifically chooses to do so.
In general, people don't think about privacy and consequences when they post. The vast majority of the time they don't even bother worrying about who should see a post, which is why we have so many stories about bosses and employees sharing inappropriately on Facebook and elsewhere. Given that, claiming that many people want to be as exposed as Girls Around Me makes them doesn't seem right. I'd bet most of the people who were that exposed would react negatively to finding out just what they were subjecting themselves to.
If the author of the Forbes piece wants to make herself available publicly, that's fine, and the various platforms are welcome to support that. But it should always be a conscious choice with every post to make that kind of information available, never the default. That's were the current systems get the design wrong.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
It's Not That SImple
This post has been around for some time. I wrote some of it a long time back and then sat on it. Then I read this post by Phil Plate and was inspired to complete it. Then I let it sit again, just because. Today I am tired of seeing it in my list of unpublished posts, so it gets kicked out of the nest. It's still accurate and timely, particularly given the rhetoric of the presidential campaign.
Modern politics really bothers me. It's full of people who only see things one way.
Is the only fix for our current economic situation to get the government out of the way of business? Or is it that there isn't enough regulation in place to keep things under control?
More importantly, why do so many people I know - and so many pundits and candidates for office - fall into the trap of thinking like that?
Let's start with something obvious. Governments and businesses share something: they are composed of people, and people inevitably do stupid things. Whether it's the federal government writing regulations no small business can possibly follow, or wall street bankers creating derivatives no one can possibly understand, the results can be disastrous for all of us, and there are always unintended consequences.
Does anyone honestly think that any given government here in the US is actively trying to stifle business and thus harm the economy? By the same token, does anyone actually believe that businesses are inherently more honest than any other group of people?
It seems to me that governments and business are both tools. Sometimes one tool is better than another for a given task. Arguing over which tool to use may be fine, but suggesting that we should throw one or another tool out of the toolbox entirely is short sighted in the extreme.
There are things that only a government can reasonably be expected to handle, and there are things that business is better off doing. At any given point in history we, as a nation, are attempting to strike a balance between these two things, and that balance is constantly changing thanks to external influences.
If you're going to argue that the government cannot possibly pay for everything it has to do, fine. You and/or your elected representatives, though, must make rational suggestions about what to cut and where. You must be honest in detailing what those cuts mean, and you need to be fair about how the pain of those cuts is apportioned.
Similarly, if you think that businesses of some sort must be reigned in, you need to be honest about your expectations, and forthright in your statements about what needs to be changed or regulated and why. The results of those regulations must be anticipated as best as possible, and the consequences understood and accepted by all of those affected. Regulations should not be needlessly burdensome, and limited as best as possible to affect only those things desired.
Note, though, that any change - on the side of business or government - will give rise to unintended consequences, and unexpected behaviours on the part of people somewhere. None of us can see all the repercussions of our actions in that depth. The systems we're talking about are far too complicated and variable to allow for accurate predictions. (If any of this was easy we'd already have agreed on and implemented a fix, don't you think?)
And humans definitely do not always act in their own best interest, even when they know what that interest is, which, frankly, isn't all that often.
For me, the upshot of all this is simple: an opinion about some complicated political issue is just that: an opinion. You are welcome to it, but none of us can be declared right or wrong until all the data is in, and probably not until well after we're dead. Until then, polite discussion and compromise are required. Of all of us. All of us.
Modern politics really bothers me. It's full of people who only see things one way.
Is the only fix for our current economic situation to get the government out of the way of business? Or is it that there isn't enough regulation in place to keep things under control?
More importantly, why do so many people I know - and so many pundits and candidates for office - fall into the trap of thinking like that?
Let's start with something obvious. Governments and businesses share something: they are composed of people, and people inevitably do stupid things. Whether it's the federal government writing regulations no small business can possibly follow, or wall street bankers creating derivatives no one can possibly understand, the results can be disastrous for all of us, and there are always unintended consequences.
Does anyone honestly think that any given government here in the US is actively trying to stifle business and thus harm the economy? By the same token, does anyone actually believe that businesses are inherently more honest than any other group of people?
It seems to me that governments and business are both tools. Sometimes one tool is better than another for a given task. Arguing over which tool to use may be fine, but suggesting that we should throw one or another tool out of the toolbox entirely is short sighted in the extreme.
There are things that only a government can reasonably be expected to handle, and there are things that business is better off doing. At any given point in history we, as a nation, are attempting to strike a balance between these two things, and that balance is constantly changing thanks to external influences.
If you're going to argue that the government cannot possibly pay for everything it has to do, fine. You and/or your elected representatives, though, must make rational suggestions about what to cut and where. You must be honest in detailing what those cuts mean, and you need to be fair about how the pain of those cuts is apportioned.
Similarly, if you think that businesses of some sort must be reigned in, you need to be honest about your expectations, and forthright in your statements about what needs to be changed or regulated and why. The results of those regulations must be anticipated as best as possible, and the consequences understood and accepted by all of those affected. Regulations should not be needlessly burdensome, and limited as best as possible to affect only those things desired.
Note, though, that any change - on the side of business or government - will give rise to unintended consequences, and unexpected behaviours on the part of people somewhere. None of us can see all the repercussions of our actions in that depth. The systems we're talking about are far too complicated and variable to allow for accurate predictions. (If any of this was easy we'd already have agreed on and implemented a fix, don't you think?)
And humans definitely do not always act in their own best interest, even when they know what that interest is, which, frankly, isn't all that often.
For me, the upshot of all this is simple: an opinion about some complicated political issue is just that: an opinion. You are welcome to it, but none of us can be declared right or wrong until all the data is in, and probably not until well after we're dead. Until then, polite discussion and compromise are required. Of all of us. All of us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)