Chaos Server

Audible - My First Complaint

2013-05-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. - Voltaire

I love audiobooks. Love love love them. In my previous job I had to commute (via car) about six hours a week - that was two three-hour drives in a week. I started by checking out audiobooks from the library and once I had finished everything there I moved on to buying from iTunes. People forget, but in the days before the iCloud, you were only allowed to download your book once and if you lost local copy *poof* it was gone forever.
When I discovered Audible I found that it was the right way to get audiobooks. You buy them once and then you have them in your Audible library forever and can play them, more or less, anywhere. They do have DRM - but they play through iTunes and through every device I have had. At one point I got an error message that I had reached my device limit - but that was installing on around twelve different device - so I guess I forgive them. I guess.
I have been an annual subscriber for the past three years getting twelve (12) credits every year. The first year it worked out great. The second year Mrs.Chaos joined in and was burning through the credits (Song of Ice and Fire is 2 credits per book) and we had to renew early. This past year I started getting Audiobooks from the library again and I ended the year with seven (7) credits as my account came for renewal.
I figured that with seven credits left over I could wait until I ran out to renew my subscription, but Audible is a JERK! JERK! I went to cancel my subscription it tells me that it will expire all of my credits, "please make sure to spend all of credits before expiring your subscription or you will lose them." I don't know what books my book club will pick, so I can't expire all of my credits. But the cheapest subscription they have will give me twelve more credits!
Audible - I'm angry with you. For the first time in three years. I am angry.

#followateen

2013-05-05T22:50:00.001-07:00

Many friendships have started with mix tapes. - Om Malik

These is this new meme going around about finding a random teen or tween on The Twitter and following them to give you better insight into the kids today. Seems like a good idea, eh? I think I've been meeting or following random people online since the start of the internet.

I initially put up a homepage my freshman year of college, back when there were about ten websites. My page was filled with a lot of random imagery and animated GIFs that would link to various things. I really wish I had saved copies of those early things - but they are lost to time and don't show up on the Internet Archive. One of the random visuals was a picture of Sailor Mars, alt-texted with something like "Sailor Mars - My Future Wife", that linked to my About Me page. This is how homepages rolled - it was the early days. The result of doing this back then is that when you Yahoo'ed for "Sailor Mars" my site came back in the top 10 results. A nice young lady named Cindy from somewhere in Tennessee did this Yahoo search, found my page, and wrote me an e-mail. I think we exchanged e-mails about life and times for a couple years - and eventually she dropped off the radar. We had very different backgrounds and world views - so it was interesting discussions. Lost to the wired... so it goes.

Sometime my sophomore year of college, a junior in some art high school on the east coast dropped me a line. I can't quite remember, but I think her opening mail also had something to do with Sailor Mars. Apparently a college dude having Sailor Moon on his website was quite the thing! We traded mails for about a year and I got to relive the joy of junior year of school as she went on her first date, got dumped for the first time. Like most - she eventually changed e-mails or something and was lost to time... so it goes.

Henry was fun - I think I was a junior when I found his Geocities site when looking at various "Shrines" about Evangelion. Henry was a senior at some high school. He was a smart kid and I had a lot of fun exchanges with him over the year. I think when he went to college he switched emails and once again... poof... gone to the internet void... so it goes.

When I was taking a compilers course and searching the internet for help I ran across "CompSciChick's" online journal (we had moved on from "homepages" but we hadn't made the technological leap to 'blogs' yet). She was a computer science student at some school in Chicago taking a compilers course and compaining about project partners. Her journal was filled with nice and interesting computer science updates for a few months and I enjoyed reading about her take on learning a similar field to me. Then it got really weird. She decided that it would be fun to make extra cash by stripping. So she spent a few months practicing pole dancing and working up the courage and finally auditioned at a few "classy" places - all of which told her she wasn't good enough. She didn't want to work at non-classy places, so that ended that. Eventually her site stopped updating... so it goes.

When I was living in Memphis, TN, consulting for a casino management system I was bored out of my mind and going through a tough patch of "what am I doing with my life?" The office was on a huge plot of land and I would spend my lunch hours wandering off somewhere and squirrel fishing--you tie a peanut on a string, have a squirrel grab it, and then attempt to lift the squirrel off the ground. It is referred to as a "catch." I did an internet search on the topic of squirrel fishing and found Yasuhiro and Annie. Yasuhiro hadn't been updating his site in ages, but Annie was still updating and I was fascinated. I would be describe her site as a collection of personal essays and she was a good writer. Heck she has become a professional writer. While her site has a habit of going dorment, taking vacations and the RSS feed seem to always be broken (RSS hasn't updated since 2011? come on annie), I still follow it and she still updates. When she moved out to San Francisco we even met up a few times. Now she if off to the east coast and recently engaged (congratulations!). While her updates are less frequent, I still look forward to continuing to read the small personal essays on her life.

When I joined The Twitter right after it debuted at SXSW - none of my friends were on it and so I started following strangers. And it was really quite interesting being connected these strangers lives and micro-updates. Alas - all of those people have dropped off the twitter over the years.

When I saw the #followateen meme start trending I realized that I am not currently following any strangers! None! So it was time for me to start looking for some random teen to start following to get back into the game of learning about randon people's lives. But how to find a teen? You could search for "i hate highschool," "im only 15 but," or "i hate the SAT" - but I thought I could one up it. Why not find a teen who is currently attending the highschool I went to? A little bit of searching on The Twitter and BAM! I'm following him. I'll see if I have anything to report back in a few months (years? (decads?)).

Excited to the Max!

2013-04-28T22:28:00.001-07:00

Thunderdome? How do I get in there? - Mad Max

Big week for mini-Chaos! On Tuesday we went in for the twenty week ultrasound to check out that everything was coming along correctly. They did all the basic pictures to make sure everything was developing properly, all the organs were there, and things look good. Only one heart - so no Timelord this time around. But then they went for the money shot to determine: IT'S A BOY!

I think I would have been equally happy either way, but Mrs.Chaos is pretty darn excited the first one is a boy. She loves the idea that the two youngest nephews are going to have another boy cousin and he's not going to be too much younger than the others. Those two older ones are going to get us in so much trouble.

I was pretty set on the first boy having a particular middle name (like his uncle, great uncle, other great uncle, grandfather, and so on), but was more relaxed on the first name. We really like having simple short first names - and had really liked the idea of Jack up until his Mini-Chaos's cousin was born and named Jack. When Mrs.Chaos asked, "What about Max?" I smiled. "That would be great!"

On Wednesday night we went out with my parents + bonus family to do the gender reveal and the name reveal. Mrs.Chaos bought a bunch of "baby boy" confetti, put it into opaque balloons, and the had them filled with helium. Before dinner everyone got a balloon and a push pin and BAM! It's a boy.

The Friendship Dance

2013-04-16T21:39:00.001-07:00

I believe that we are all—human beings—waiting for the opportunity to become monsters. It is IN us. - John Roderick

The first time my friends went to an event at Mrs.Chaos' house, back when she was Ms.Chaos, I found a pair of them looking at her DVD shelf. "What are you doing?" "We are judging your new girlfriend based on her DVD collection. Next we'll move to the bookshelf."

I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't handle things this way - but I'm not one of them. Sure, first you meet some nice new person, and you start getting to know them and learning about their interests. You think, "what a lovely person. We could be chums."

At some point you decide it's time to become their internet friend. Twitter? Facebook? Google+? App.net? Whatever your poison you send the request (or not) and they accept (or not). Then, all of sudden, you have this blast of information about the last 1, 2, 3, 5+ years of their life. Now you can review their virtual bookshelf, or DVD collection, or whatever, and judge them. Really the internet has streamlined the process.

Updated: Doing the Math

2013-04-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

That is why you fail. - Yoda

Prior to the premier of the midseason return of Doctor Who, we broke out a game of Star Wars miniatures. I'd never played the game before and it looks a bit like Warhammer 30k. There is board for the game, just use any flat surface as the cold emptiness of space and then your ships fly around using various move guides (aka rulers).As a pretty standard combat system you have attack dice and defense dice, each side rolls, and then the result is attacks - defense. The pilots have skills like "focus," "target lock," and "dodge" that allow you to do various things with your roll. As my Darth Vader was zooming in on the Millenium Falcon I asked the obvious question, "is it better for Vader to focus or target lock to maximize damage." The owner of the game replied, "I feel like I've had better luck with focus." Not the answer I was looking for. "It's a simple probability analysis. One will be statistically better. Have you done the math?" "I have not." Wait. What?!? Isn't this how you play strategy war games? You do the math about attack, defense and causality rates. That's how you judge what to do.So when the game was over, while we were watching Doctor Who, I did the math!The idea with focus is if the "focus" comes up on the roll, you can convert it to a hit or a to a miss. If you choose to Target Lock ~~or to Dodge,~~ you can re-roll any of the dice you want. If you choose dodge you get one dodge for free.

Sides of the Attack Die: 2 Misses, 2 Focus, 3 Hit, 1 Critical Hit

Normal Unmodified Hit: 4/8 = 50%
Normal Unmodified Critical: 1/8 = 12.5%
Focused Hit: 4/8 + 2/8 = 75%
Focused Critical: 1/8 = 12.5%
Target Lock Hit: 4/8 + (4/8 * 4/8) = 75%
Target Lock Critical: 1/8 + (4/8 * 1/8) = 18.75%

Attack Conclusion: Focus and Target Lock give the precisely the same change of damage. Doing a target lock slightly increases the chances you can score a critical.

Sides of the Defense Die: 3 Misses, 2 Focus, 3 Dodge

~~Normal Defense: 3/8 = 37.5%~~
~~Focused Defense: 3/8 + 2/8 = 62.5%~~
~~Dodge Defense: 3/8 + (5/8 * 3/8) = 60.9375%~~

Dodge Conclusion: Focus gives an advantage over Dodge. If you have Focus available, you should always focus.

I misunderstood the rules of dodge. Need to redo the math. What dodge actually does is give you an extra dodge. The math is a little trickier.

d Dice - Normal Defense: 3/8 x d
d Dice - Focused Defense: (3/8 + 2/8) x d
d Dice - Dodge Defense: 3/8 x d + 1

So the question is - how many dice before it makes sense to focus instead of dodge? When will: (3/8 + 2/8) x d > 3/8 x d + 1? The answer? When d > 4.

Roll Type	1 Die	2 Dice	3 Dice	4 Dice	5 Dice
Normal Defense	0.35	0.75	1.125	1.5	1.875
Focused Defense	0.625	1.25	1.875	2.5	3.125
Dodge Defense	1.375	1.75	2.125	2.5	2.125

Updated Dodge Conclusion: If you have fewer than four defense dice, dodging does giving an advantage over focus. Focus doesn't give you an advantage until you are rolling over four defense dice.

Strategic Conclusion: Always Focus. I suppose under rare occasion the addition 6.25% of critical hit might be enough you want to Target Lock - but it really seems like Focus is the way to go. Because after you attack, you can choose not to use focus and save it for your dodge. So if you roll a good attack, save your focus for defense.

Focus seems to be an obvious choice over target lock. But from a dodge perspective it does make sense to dodge over focus. So play on and may the Force be with you.

That is how you play Star Wars Minatures.

Casual Times at Workplace High

2013-03-25T22:53:00.001-07:00

Job satisfaction is what people feel right before they die from stress-related problems. - Wally

I broke my usual schedule of heading to the office every other Mon/Tue to head down for a team event where we spent the afternoon just having fun together. I normally wear slacks and a button-up to the office and have always been clean shaven. In fact, I think the entire time I've worked there I have never "dressed down." But for the team event we were going hiking so I wore a t-shirt, hoodie and jeans. (Or did I mention I started wearing jeans? Mrs.Chaos has been pressuring me for years to give up my jean boycott and I have finally given in with the acceptance that dads wear jeans.)

I stopped shaving for a week because Mrs.Chaos said, "do you remember how cute you were when we first met and you had your beard?" I showed up to the team event dressed entirely casually with my week of scruff and got a multiple compliments. One of the young ladies on my team pulled me aside, "Like - totally don't take this the wrong way - but you're always dressed so formal. With your hoodie and jeans and your scruff, you totally look like a Brogrammer. I mean - you are really good looking."

I went straight to HR over the sexual harassment! I mean! Sheesh!

Summer Flowers

2013-03-17T23:26:00.001-07:00

The earth laughs in flowers. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we got the house a couple of years ago just had them put a ton of lantana everywhere. It's pretty in the summer, but when winter rolls around it all turns into dead plants, the yard doesn't look so nice. I have to cleanup all the dead lantana leaves and trim back all the bushes. It's not that nice.

When we choose to put in the lantana it was a temporary thing - but few things can last as long as a temporary solution. Over the last weekend we got four rose bushes and I put my back into it! Give it a few months and it'll be beautiful.

Automation is Automation

2013-03-09T20:23:00.001-08:00

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. - Bill Gates

I've got all of my music and movies and TV shows out on a shared drive on my Drobo. I've got this great script I wrote a little bit ago that scans across those drives and automatically adds it into iTunes on the home server. So the theory is that I can run Handbrake on my DVD on any machine, drop the MP4s onto the shared drive, and viola - they appear in iTunes. This command is the magic:

osascript -e "tell application \"iTunes\" to add POSIX file \"${VID_FILEPATH}\""

We're struggling with home Internet again, because this is my life, and AT&T came by to check things out. Whenever AT&T comes back I revert my home network into a standard configuration. Normally I have the AT&T supplied device just bridging the connection over to my much better AirPort Extreme. The challenge is that the AT&T response to this is, "Oh, you're running a non-standard configuration. Obviously the fact that our PPPoE server is dropping your connection is caused by this! It has nothing to do with our servers."

How are these two things related?

iTunes does some sort of magic where it checks if it has already added the file, but it is not doing this through a POSIX path, it is instead doing this through HFS+ magical references that I don't understand. Here is what I do understand: when the AFP mount goes away (because I switched my network back to standard mode) and then comes back, even though the POSIX filepath doesn't change, the HFS+ reference does. And iTunes re-adds.

Switching my home network back to standard mode on Friday was the first time my server had lost connection with Drobo since I started running the script months ago. I have good uptime! Once I switched the network back to normal and ChaosServer reconnected to Drobo - 100% of my content duplicated.

So I solved it by having it add all the POSIX paths to a text file and then checking the text file before loading it. Not the most elegant thing, but it's working.

It's kind of our friends fault

2013-03-07T23:36:00.001-08:00

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. - Walt Disney

For countless years one of my friends went to Disneyland for her birthday. The annual trip in November became know as Birthdayland. With the annual trip we learned to maximum the Fast Pass system. In fact, we realized that Disneyland was really just a fluid dynamics problem. With multiple scientists in the group, solving simple partial differential equation just meant have six fast passes at once

Many of my friends have had annual passes. Then one year MsChaos and I got annual passes. The problem with annual passes is that once you have one, every day you are not at Disneyland, you are losing money! So we went a lot that year.

We still have a lot of friends with annuals passes who still lose money ever day that they aren't at Disney and so we still get a ton of invites. Got a free weekend, why not go to Disneyland.

All this Disney got a little bit infective. I mean, I did propose at Disneyworld. Which caused Disney-themed wedding gifts. MrsChaos did walk down the aisle to "When You Wish Upon a Star." So even though I look at my friends and think, "they are way more Disney nerds then I am," I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I get a present from my dad with the first photo of Mini-Chaos inside a Disney frame.

When you wish upon a star and all...

Adulthood

2013-02-26T22:16:00.001-08:00

Here's the problem with new information--once you get it you always have to step back and reevaluate everything you thought you knew already. - Point Blank

Being a responsible adult is hard and expensive work. For a long time my financial strategy was "put a ton of money into retirement and savings and worry about it later." I think that strategy worked well for me throughout my 20s. The problem is, now it's later.

Now I've got a mortgage. Just as Mrs.Chaos is finishing up under-graduate there is a baby on the way. So now is the time to actually make sure all my retirement is organized how it's supposed to be and start to figure out if I'm going to be paying for college educates and when I'm going to retire. Now is the time to figure get life insurance in case I don't happen to make inherit the right set of longevity genes. Now is the time to have a living trust. Now is the time to have a living will and a real will.

Man - being an adult is lame.

Podcast Bankrupcy

2013-02-25T23:18:00.001-08:00

Privacy. Some day in the future people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was. - Jodi Foster

I am not commuting enough! In the old job my commute consistent of eight hours in the car every two weeks. In the new job my commute consists of six hours on the train and one hour in the car every two weeks. So I would have expected that my Podcast listening time would have remained about the same.

It turns out that when I'm on the train I spend the time working, reading, and other things that don't involve listening to podcasts. The end result is that I can't keep up with all my listening! It's horrible! I wasn't listening to my audio books at all. The I realized that Game of Thrones will be resuming on HBO pretty soon and I hadn't even started of the latest book.

So I've updated my listening strategy! Now I alternate between one Podcast and one chapter of the book. That keeps me making progress on both. Additionally I've been declaring Podcast bankruptcy on my lower priority podcasts. Haven't listened to "From Our Own Corespondents" episode from two weeks ago? Mark as played.

Mini Chaos

2013-02-20T22:05:00.001-08:00

A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it. - Frank A. Clark

We found out that Mini-Chaos was on the way around the earlier possible time. I'm a by-the-book kind of person and figured as soon as found out that we would just wait until the recommended 12-week period to inform anyone else. Mrs.Chaos doesn't have the same philosophy on things - "it's like a present! You don't hide presents at home you give them to people!"

For this period of time from about 4-weeks to about 10-weeks every day was a bit of battle. "We have to tell someone!" "No, we're going to wait." "But I'm going to see my friends, and they're going to notice, so I'm going to have to tell them." "They aren't going to notice or ask." "Ohhh, I bet they will. The only way to keep this secret is just to not see any of my friends. Is that what you want? For me not to see my friends."

So thankfully we passed this period of not telling anyone and lifted the embargo - I mean, super lifted the embargo by posting to social network sites. Still, since it was such a stressful period of time of not telling anyone, now I still feel a little unsure. "Am I really allowed to tell people?" I know, I know. The answer is yes. Tell the world. It's like a present, and you have to give people presents!

Buying Another Headset

2013-02-17T19:34:00.001-08:00

"Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous." - Violet Crawley (Downton Abbey)

"It seems like you're always buying new headsets." It's true! I have bought a lot of headsets over the past few years, but when you are remote phone warrior, the headset is a very important weapon in the battle against work.

When I first switched to be super-remote a couple of years ago, I worked out a fantastic trick combining my AT&T phone plan and Google Voice account to be able to get all my work calls through my mobile phone with unlimited minutes. It was awesome and I needed a good headset for my phone. I got the BlueParrot Xpress for my iPhone and it is amazing. I has a giant boom mic and the most incredible noise cancellation I have ever seen. I will be walking home in San Francisco talking with Mrs.Chaos and semi will pass by making it impossible for me to hear anything and she will say she can hear my just great and didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. Amaze!

Now with all the fancy AT&T fiber-to-the-door upgrades we've had, I've switched off my expensive wireless phone plan with AT&T and instead focused on using Google Voice, GoToMeeting VOIP, Skype, and all the other fancy ways to talk on the phone through my computer. While technically my BlueParrot can multiplex between multiple devices, I haven't found that it works very well.

I was using in iMic adapter connected to another fancy in-ear boom mic system, but there was a problem. With that setup I'm tethered to my computer while on the phone. So I can't easily walk into the kitchen to refill my coffee and that is an essential part of my productivity.

After doing internet research I settled in on the Logitech ClearChat. World of Warcrafters agree it is the bomb. I haven't had too much opportunity to use it yet, but I have confirmed that I can be chatting away on it and easily walk into the kitchen for a refill of coffee. What more do I need?

2012 in Review

2013-02-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

So the thing is that Apple has not provided a good way to share iPhoto Libraries. So our solution was to merge into a single iPhoto Library on the fastest computer: MrsChaos. That means for me to do my Year in Review, if first requires me to find a time when I am allowed to use MrsChaos' computer for a long period of time. Those times are not actually that frequent. So that's the dealio.

Download Video: MP4

Are you supposed to enjoy beverages?

2013-01-28T23:27:00.001-08:00

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee. - Abraham Lincoln

I've come to the realization that if you put a drink in front of me I will drink. I will drink it relatively quickly. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing it wrong. Give me a glass of water. Gone. Give me a milkshake. Gone. Give me a cappuccino, latte, or tea. Gone. Give me a soda. Gone.

I had this habit working from home that I would have an empty glass in front of me and then go fill it with an americano, coke, something, and then give it fifteen minutes and it would be gone. My first step to avoid having an empty cup was to brew a pot of coffee (instead of making an americano). This was a bad idea. You know what happens when I have a pot of coffee available to me? Yeah, that's right. Gone.

Now I've got myself on a beverage regiment at home to keep myself from going overboard. One cup of coffee in the morning. One "something" for lunch - could be coffee, tea, soda, or other. One more "something" at 3pm for afternoon tea. Dinner is an non-caffeinated something. I've mostly been having water. Then I usually treat myself in the evening to one last non-caffeinated beverage.

All drinks beyond that are just water. Water water water. I feel like other people don't need to regiment themselves like that, but if I didn't, I would drink a pot of coffee, a two-liter of soda, and who knows what else - every single day. Because if it's there, I drink it. YUM!

When I go to work - things go out the window. I drink a LOT of coffee. But hey, that's only two days every other week.

This Should Be Easier

2013-01-27T20:49:00.001-08:00

By the summer of 2012, because the product cycles are long, the majority of the televisions that you see in the television stores here will have Google TV embedded in it. - Eric Schmidt

Our household has a Google TV (Logitech Revue) in the living room and an AppleTV in the bedroom. We have no cable and yet things are not as easy as they should be. I frequently find myself on the couch using Reeder to go through my RSS feeds on my iPhone and when a video comes up I just watch on my iPhone. Sure, I could airplay it to the TV, but why bother.

Last week I found Mrs.Chaos in the bedroom watching a TV show on her iPhone in bed. She was probably twenty minutes into it and just said, "I don't know why I'm still watching this on my phone."

I frequently walk into the living room to find her sitting at the coffee table watching a movie on her external monitor instead of playing it on the GoogleTV. To some extend, when you think about perspective, if it's just you watching than the 24" LED monitor one foot in front of you is larger (relatively speaking) than fifty inch plasma across the room.

I can taste a future where all of this is controlled through my smartphone - but things block me! Abc.com, Nbc.com? Sorry - you cannot play this on your phone. Got the app? That's nice, you can't AirPlay it to your TV.

So we end up with beautiful televisions and we watch the all of television on the iPhone, iPad, or computer. Sheesh.

Nice Things

2013-01-26T00:10:00.001-08:00

What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us? - Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey)

I must have been around twelve or thirteen when I was out at a store with my mother and they had cool plastic mugs on super-sale. I think they were four mugs for one dollar. That is a quarter a mug! For reasons I don't understand, I fixated on these mugs and convincing my mother we should get them. For reasons I don't under she gave in and bought them.

That investment paid off. All the time when my friends came over throughout high school I had them use the plastic mugs. Why? You can break the plastic mugs. I remember a time when one of my brother's friends broke one of the glasses and I said, "my friends haven't broken any of the plastic mugs yet!"

When I got my first apartment after university, my mother gave me the mugs to take--along with all her plastic dishes. I took them with great pleasure! She also gave me a bunch of glassware that she didn't have a complete set for any more. A decade later many of the glasses were broken, but the plastic mugs were still going strong. Every time a friends breaks one of my glasses I say, "this is why I can't have nice things!"

I moved into an apartment with two friends and are cabinets were overflowing with dishes. It was suggested that we get rid of the plastic mugs and just stick with the nicer dishes. I fought back - and over the next five years I watched as the nice dishes broke and my plastic mugs came into greater and greater use.

I got married and we combined our kitchens and my plastic mugs lived on. They are "raised" so that there's a couple inches of plastic at the bottom which keeps them from sweating and damaging the surface they are one. They don't need coasters! Mrs.Chaos admitted at one point that she liked them.

We had already gotten rid of all my plastic plates and now we just acquired new really nice plates. As Mrs.Chaos cleaned out all the dishes we no longer need she put the plastic mugs back out. They are on the chopping block! Will they find their way back into the cabinets? Or have they finally been voted off the island?!?

The Pace of Innovation

2013-01-20T22:31:00.001-08:00

Most of the world doesn’t want to be revolutionized. - Jon Evans

I suppose that as I get older I will continue to have more and more "the kids these days" moments. While we were picking up the nieces from church I was staring at the nutritional guide board that was explaining how to judge portions and it compared 4 oz to "a roll of film." Like anyone knows what a roll of film is these days.

The nieces had house is a cord cutting house that only has access to television via DVD, Netflix, etc. They were at their grandparents and watched morning cartoons on the TV (Scooby Doo) and later that day they wanted to watch more. They were totally upset with the idea that they couldn't. "It was on TV, so we can't watch it." "Nono! Put the disc back in!" "No, it was on television, we can't watch it again." "Can't you just rewind to it?"

For Christmas Mrs.Chaos got me a TV in the bedroom - because she likes watching TV in bed. She watches a ton of shows off of the network websites (abc.com, nbc.com, hulu.com) on her computer. So I got an AppleTV so that she could AirPlay mirror from her laptop to the TV.

In the living room we have a GoogleTV, which supports AirPlay, but non AirPlay mirroring. We were planning to watch a show out there from the computer and Mrs.Chaos asked how we would do it. 'We'll just attach it like with the cables like we used it." "With cables? Like animals!?!?"

Home Upgradation

2013-01-14T21:49:00.001-08:00

The road to success is always under construction. - Lilly Tomlin

The thing is, when I bought a brand new home, I thought I was done. Maybe it comes from all those years of apartment living, but I have this avoidance to making any permanent changes to the house. Mrs.Chaos is always talking about home improvement projects.

For Christmas Mrs.Chaos got a wall mountable vanity mirror. Of course it wasn't one that just sits on the counter top, but requires boring holes into the wall. Okay okay - it's up! But we're never going to get the deposit back at this rate.

Juicing for Fun and Profit

2013-01-13T20:06:00.001-08:00

Rumors are mostly a projection of the individual who started them. - Roya Rad

Mrs.Chaos asked me if fruit juice has less nutrients than eating the raw fruit. I did an internet search for it and the first result came from a raw foods propaganda site and said something like, "you must drink juice right after you make it! All nutrients are lost within about fifteen minutes." It didn't pass my common sense test. Where did the nutrients go? Do the nutrients evaporate into the air? What happens?

The internet is a big a scary place. Whatever crazy idea you happen to have, I promise that there is a website out there which is going to support it. It's so much worse when the top hits coming back from the main search engines are written by the crazies. I had a coworker convinced he suffered from electro-magnet sensitivity. He sent me the link to a really well done medical research paper on it which had me pretty convinced. The site hosting the research paper also sold various crystals that could help minimize your symptoms (sigh).

When I was dating Mrs. Chaos she told me that she if she got too cold she would get hives. I did what any loving boyfriend would do, I went to the internet with the purpose of telling her she was crazy and that she should stop whining so much. You know what I found out? "Cold allergy" is a real thing. Allergists can test you for it by placing an ice cub on your arm and seeing if it triggers allergic hives. Crazy, right?

My sister-in-law told me that if you get sick you need to avoid sugar to get healthy? Quackery? Turns out that one is true. It only requires a couple of sodas to have a medically proven bad affect on your immune system's ability to fight off illness. Crazy, right?

Anyway - vitamins in juice degrade due to exposure to oxygen, light and heat. There are numerous studies from the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical Review that juice a fruit or vegetable, story it in a cold, dark, and air-tight location for a months and then show no loss of nutritional value.

MSG does not make you sick. Aspartame does not cause cancer. Organic farming produces more green house gases. You can be allergic to the cold. Sugar makes it hard to fight the flu. The jury is still out on EMF sensitivity, but crystals definitely don't protected you from it.

I Walked 40 Miles and My Shoulders Hurt

2013-01-02T22:57:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the Mayans WERE wrong.Maybe we WILL enter a new era of consciousness. - John Hodgman

We went to Disneyland for New Years Eve. Disneyland must be one of the ten most jam-packed places to ring in the new year. We got up at 7am to go into the park and didn't leave until 1am. That is the first and probably last time I will ever spend seventeen hours in Disneyland. We used our last Fast Pass around 6pm and there were none left to be dispensed. We looked at one another, "Well, just six more hours until new years." Four and half hours later we were about to watch Fantasmic and Mrs.Chaos said she was very particular about making sure to see the fireworks over the castle. "Oh yeah, we're going to do this right this time around, because we are never coming back here on new years again!" We Hi-Fived each other. An hour and a half later we watched the fireworks from Main Street. Happy New 2013!
(ps. don't trust people who can't build straight pyramids to predict the end of the world.)

Information Super Highway

2012-12-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

We can rebuild him...we have the technology - Oscar Goldman

I have been a customer of ATT High Speed DSL over the past two years and I've had a mediocre experience with it. It wasn't horrible, but it was a long way from being good. We paid for the maximum speed available to us, which was 3Mbps down and 256Kbps up. It's not the fastest out there, but it should be good enough for what we need to.
After running on this for about a year we were having a lot of problems streaming movies in the evening. I grew up in a world starting with 300 baud modems and I have been doing large content files since the days of 56k. So having to buffer a video for ten or fifteen minutes before watching it was no big deal to me. I was used to the early days of spending hours downloading a video to watch it later.Mrs.Chaos expects more from her internet. What we eventually realized was that during the evenings our connection speed dropped to 0.5 - 0.8 Mbps and that is too slow to effectively stream much. If we both wanted to watch movies at the same time? No go. Even during the working day I would have a online meeting and come running out, "Stop using the Internet!". No big deal to me, but I suppose in the modern era these things shouldn't happen.
We called ATT and told them the internet was slow and asked if they could do anything about it. ATT customer care reported that we had the fastest internet available to us. We tried again at a later time and got the same response. We looked at getting SureWest but they said they couldn't supply our home. SureWest could supply five homes down in each direction, but not ours. So we resigned ourselves to having a barely usable internet in during the evening "Netflix hours."When I got my iPhone 4s with its psuedo-4G speed, I ran a speed test, and it was blazingly fast. I tweeted it about it, sarcastically congratulating ATT on its ability to deliver fast internet to me through a highly saturated wireless spectrum but not through a copper wire running into my home. Something happened. @ATTMike tweeted back an offer to help. One of his team gave me a call, escalated me up to Level-2 support and they fixed things. "Looks like the upstream router is completely saturated during peak load times, let me just move you over to a different router." For the next eight month, we had pretty good internet speeds.Then came the dropped connection saga. The internet would drop unexpectedly for about 1-5 minutes. This would happen on average once an hour, but that meant sometimes it was happening every twenty minutes. You cannot have work teleconferences. You cannot stream shows. The Internet was mostly unusable. This went on for a few days and then everything was fine for a week and then it happened it again. I tweeted with ATT and Mrs.Chaos called ATT.I did what I expect anyone would do. I connected the DSL modem directly to my laptop, put the DSL modem into bridged mode, ran PPPoE on the laptop, increased the debug logging levels and looked at what was going on in the console log. AHA! The ATT PPPoE server was sending disconnect commands downstream and my client was happily disconnected and then immediately reconnecting whenever that happened.
I told this to each ATT person I talked with, but I was never able to gain access to one of the Grey Beards in the back room and so these comments fell on deaf ears. One of the ATT people on the phone said, "It looks like your DSL modem is about two years old. Those things tend to give out after a couple years so we'll send you a new one." This problem was intermittent, so as soon as everything was fine for a couple days, they would close the ticket. The problem would come back and I'd start over.They sent a technician to the house to make sure all of our wiring was fine. He was the first person who seemed like he understood my comment about the PPPoE server and said, "that makes sense. I'll put a note about that into the ticket so the server-side guys can take a look." Each time the problem would go away I hoped it would be the last and that there would be some person at ATT who looked at some dashboard and said, "Oh hey! That red light there is blinking and it should be green. Let me just reboot this." Everything would then start working magically. His last thought would be, "I wonder if there are open tickets about this issue? Whatever, I'm going home." But each time we had a few days of perfect service it would follow up with a few days of useless service.
We spoke a few times with SureWest. Surely they could pull their fiber six houses down? When complaining to one of my friends over this whole ordeal he talked to me about ATT U-Verse and I learned something very interesting. ATT runs two different internet services from two different companies that it acquired. It runs the "ATT High Speed DSL" over its copper wires. It runs the "U-Verse Internet Service" over its newer fiber cables. While our 3Mbps speed was the fastest "ATT High Speed DSL" available to us, "U-Verse Internet Service" ran with speeds of up 32Mbps running fiber to the home.I called to switch. It required a technician to come on site, but no problem, they setup the appointment for three weeks later. The cheapest way to do the install was to get TV for one month along with the service. Weird, but okay. Obviously, during those three weeks of time, the DSL line didn't have any issues. High Speed DSL was scared and making a last ditch effort to stay connected.
The installation was a bit more of an ordeal than I expected. The first ATT technician showed up at 9am to "run fiber" from the pedestal at the intersection down to the pedestal in front of the house. I assume this means lighting up some dark fiber, but maybe he dragged a wire through half a mile of smurf tubes. I can't say. I do know that it broke my home internet at 9am. He left around 10am and our internet didn't work.The second technician showed up at 1pm (when ATT told me he would) and started the home installation process. It was interesting to watch as he installed the fiber termination point into our garage through the wiring box and run the cables into it. He then plugged our home phone line and coax into the fiber termination device. Three and a half hours later and he the new ATT provided 2WIRE router installed and providing internet to the home. I let him go.Once he was out the door it was time to put the home internet back into non-standard configuration. I turned off the 2WIRE wireless network, plugged in my Airport Extreme and then set 2WIRE to provided the Airport Extreme an "External IP" and to use the Airport as the DMZ machine. It worked flawlessly (I'm thankful!).The end of the story? I now have 12Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up for the same price I was paying before. All of my home services are running exactly as they were before. Knock on wood for me that everything continues to be awesome. Stay classy ATT.(Update: The two days after installation, the internet dropped to less than 1Mbps during the day. But after those days it has been fine.)

You're Holding it Wrong

2012-11-22T21:38:00.001-08:00

Things don’t have to change the world to be important. - Steve Jobs

The saying goes that every family needs a doctor and a lawyer. Something like that. Though in this past few decades the need for the family IT technician has clearly arisen. My circle of friends tends to serve that role for our families and much as an IT professional will joke to his savvy friends about dealing with clients, so we talk with one another about the family issues and excitement that we are having. One of my favorite positive stories come from the college days when most of us we dual booting, triple booting, quadruple booting out machines. One of my friends said over the summer he walked in to find his mom on his machine happily writing up a letter in StarWriter under OS/2 with no clue that she was on the cutting edge of computing technologies. Recently I have been seeing my family slowly making the shift from Windows and Blackberries onto Apples and iPhones. It's an interesting shift. Four years ago when my dad asked what phone he should buy I told him to buy a BlackBerry Bold. One month ago when he asked, I gave him the choice between an iPhone or Galaxy S3. My in-laws upgraded to the iPhone 5 while I was at their home for the holidays. I am their extended computer support as well. When I was a PeopleSoft consulting I was taught a very interesting way of thinking by PeopleSoft. "We are experts in human resource software and human resource process. Our software is designed around the best processes and the most common processes. If you consult at a company that wants to do heavy customization to PeopleSoft to support their processes the most likely thing you need to change is no the way PeopleSoft does things." Apple expressed a similar sentiment during the iPhone antenna issues explaining how people should use a case or hold it differently, aka "you're holding it wrong." "So we've been syncing our old iPhones to this older computer. Now we got our new iPhones and we synced it the new computer. We've got most of our settings back on the new iPhone, but our Apps, Photos and Music don't seem to be there. I tried syncing the old iPhones to the new computer but it doesn't get it back." Correct. To me this thinking is trivially wrong. But how do you fix it? So you've got 100% of your music on your old computer synced to your phone. And you've re-ripped 20% of that music to your new computer plus another 20% that's brand new. If you just copy your old files to your new computer you'll have 20% duplicates. "Can't you just download the music off the old phone onto the computer?" Sorry - no. You're holding it wrong. Now my dad is making the switch from BB to iOS. This one is going to be painful. I can feel it my bones. So I told him step #1 was go to Apple store (or AT&T store) and they will plug the two phones into their magic device that will transfer stuff from one to the other. I saw these thing work wonders when it transferred Ms.Chaos' Palm data into her first iPhone at the Apple Store. The genius told me, "we have a magic elf in the back that does it." Well done magic elf.

Social Segmentation

2012-11-13T18:07:00.001-08:00

App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications. - Orian Marx

I generate all this content and I lose a lot of it. There was a time when my website was fully updated using a bizarre local workflow of text files and AppleScript. As much as it was a person Rube Goldberg machine, it made me happy to know that the system of record of all of my stuff was on my computer and that was pushed up into the cloud. You know - so centuries after I was gone archeologists could use the forensics of my hard drive to reconstruct my life. Assuming someone saved my hard drive for centuries after I was gone and cared.
Now I am "in the cloud." Truly. My website updates are pushing into the cloud. My micro-updates are pushing into the cloud. My nerd updates are in the cloud. My source code? In the cloud. It's all up there somewhere as the system of record and sometimes it's not on my computer. In reality, in my day-to-day living and even in the grand scheme of things, I don't know why that should make a difference to me. But it does. There is something about knowing all the stuff that I create is sitting in my house. Physically.
Anyway that's how things are. I've also now fully segregated my three "social streams." So if you're interested in my all the nerdy stuff I'm working on in my personal time, my attendance of various Sacramento technical user groups, compliments about my Drobo or Google TV, than the right place to go is App.net (short) and Google+ (long). If you're interested in my nieces, nephews, vacations and other commentary the place to go is Twitter (short) and Facebook (long). If for some reason you're interested in what I do for a living, find me on LinkedIn.

Birthday Spending Spree

2012-11-06T22:42:00.001-08:00

It's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, long-term, really excited about it - Mark Zuckerberg

I'm used to getting little bits of money for my birthday from parents or my grandparents and being told that I'm supposed to spend the money on "something fun." You know how that goes, they are trying to get you to treat yourself to something you wouldn't normally buy because it would be too expensive.
This year I did a little bit of a technical shopping spree! First I got myself a subscription to App.net for no particular reason. I now segregate my online streams to personal (Twitter -> Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and Nerd (App.net / Google+). Why not collect them all?
Second I purchased Coda from Panic Software. In my new gig I we do PHP development and I've been using Sublime Text since its basically the only text editor that supported my Retina MacBook Pro. Sublime Text is okay, but I've been avoiding purchasing it since I know at some point in nearish future TextWrangler will start supporting Retina and I would have the option to switch back to a free alternative. Yet I've been having a stare down with Coda. After getting it, I have no regrets! I've got the Git integration working for my work as well as for all my personal projects. And for my personal stuff that gets SFTP uploaded the publish action is all built in. It's fantastic.
Third and last - I got iA Writer for iOS. I've been doing a little bit of writing for NaNoWriMo and since I've been mostly using my iPad as a Desktop replacement I wanted a program that I can write in that will sync across all my devices. So iA Writer to Dropbox sync across everything? Perfect. And why not iCloud sync? Because it would require me to purchase iA Writer for Mac, and I don't see a point in that.