Indie Game Guy

Comcast - maybe not as bad as I implied

zman — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Never let it be said that I'm not capable of admitting when I am wrong.

After my last blog post where I wasted several hours on fixing up email when Comcast pulled the plug on port 25 I got a blog comment directly from Comcast. Initially I was very impressed when companies seek out problems and try to react proactively. The same thing happened when I bitched about network solutions but when I replied to them they completely ignored me.

So Comcast - lets see what you have got:

They searched out my complaint and offered to help +1
They replied to my email - in under 2 hours.... very well done +1
They said they did try to notify me:
We normally send an email to the primary Comcast.net email address (if you do not use your Comcast.net email address, I do recommend forwarding it to an email that you do use).
Well yes apparently I do have a comcast.net email address - which I never use of course. Sane people stopped using email addresses that change with your ISP many years ago and they have no way to give them an alternate.
So I checked the account and sure enough there it was. Score one more for comcast and I take back my comment about not being told. +5
But wait a minute lets just read the email.....

ACTION REQUIRED: Comcast has determined that your computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email ("spam"), which is generally an indicator of a virus. For your own protection and that of other Comcast customers, we have taken steps to prevent further transmission of spam from your computer(s).
I find this VERY unlikely - I run plenty of security scans, I am behind hardware firewalls, I rebuild my machine regularly and I've very paranoid about running software.
Note also that nowhere in the email does it tell me WHAT they have done? There is no mention of port 25 anywhere.

If you use Outlook Express, the steps we have taken to protect the Comcast network will not allow you to send email until you apply a simple one click fix available at http://www.comcastsupport.com/alternateport.
Well I don't but even if I did are they seriously suggesting I follow a link and DOWNLOAD AN ACTIVEX control... heck this is how most of their customers probably got infected anyway. Of course this update can only possibly fix things if you are using the comcast mail servers because every mail provider seems to use a different alternate port.

If you are using a third-party client other than Outlook Express (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc.), please click here for instructions.
Note that the link initially takes you to a page all about Outlook Express and finally we see our first mention of port 25. But it tells you to change it to port 587. This port doesn't work for any of my mail providers. The email never mentions what to do for 3rd party mail providers - so while the email would have speeded things up for me it wouldn't help anyone who just follows the instructions on GoDaddy or whatever

Overall -10 on the email guys.
My response to them explained how useless the email is to many customers and then they went quiet. I guess there is no canned reply for someone with good suggestions... more minus points. I also asked for proof I am sending Spam - I would like to try to tidy that up if its true... no surprise they sent nothing. You would think if they wanted to help they would be able to do something there. And Yes I've scanned with all known tools..

So I apologize for saying Comcast doesn't tell you - because they do. However I still maintain that they need to be able to have technical conversations with their customers instead of relying on canned responses.

I predict an identical comment being attached to this blog by the comcast RSS feed bot ;-)

Comcast, I guess all the stories are right...

zman — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:22:00 GMT

I've had comcast internet for 5 years at least and I've always scoffed at those who mock their customer service. Really the only choice around here was DSL with Verizon (a company I think I have spent about a week on hold with in the past) or Comcast. In all that time I've suffered no serious downtime, didn't get bandwidth capped (I don't torrent so maybe that's why) and I've never had to call their support line.

So imagine my surprise today when I spotted all my emails piling up in the outbox and getting an error about not being able to connect to the server. I've seen this before, usually blame the email provider and switch to a different address while it gets fixed. Today ALL my outgoing emails - 4 accounts across 3 different email providers was failing. After half an hour of fiddling and googling I noticed that GoDaddy sugest using different ports if you have problems so I changed it and magically that account started to work. I hunted down alternative ports for all the accounts and everything was back to normal.

It seems comcast randomly turn off port 25. Its rumoured they monitor traffic and then block it, or they do sweeps across some servers or something. Either way they turned off a service without bothering to tell me. Nice, real nice.

If only FIOS wasn't provided by Verizon and if only they would publish the prices for FIOS and FIOS TV on the internet instead of making you phone up and talk to some sleazy agent..... and if only FIOS TV would work with my old analog DVRs.... makes you want to go back to a 56k modem and rabbit ears on top of the TV...

Stealth Pruning

zman — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:57:00 GMT

Once a week The ZMan likes to head off to his local pub for a pint and a pub quiz/triva night. Since its close and I want to avoid drink driving I walk there but its got to be a bit of an obstacle course lately. The nice summer weather has encouraged many blackberry bushes and other greenery to grow across the sidewalk (pavement). Now The Zman is very good at keeping the sidewalk outside his house clear but sadly not all my neighbours are so good.

So on Wednesday I took a pair of pruning shears(Secateurs) with me to the pub and then on the way home I removed anything that was withing my head height.

So neighbours - if you found some branches had 'fallen' from your tree late at night maybe you should take a hint and keep your yards (gardens) clear for those folk who choose not to pollute the air and walk on occasion.

Now if only I can find a way to convince the local electric company to fix the street lights so I can see what I am doing on the way home.

More running madness

zman — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:11:00 GMT

For those of you worried about my lack of marathons lately fear not - the best is yet to come.

The year started by running my 5th Marathon and 5th half marathon back to back at Disneyland. This is still the hardest thing I've ever done. Then just to make sure I was really crazy I did a 50k. Then I took some months off. I've still been training but for nothing major. So what else is coming for this running stud. Well this week is going to be somewhere around the peak of training for the year ending craziness - Andy's goal to be an official maniac.

There's this club in Seattle for people who run lots of marathons called Marathon Maniacs. These are the sort of people who run 50 a year, sometimes in 50 different states. People who run 50 mile races just to warm up for the 100 miler the week after. People who make me look like a normal sensible runner. Not anyone can join - no you have to prove your level of maniac. The easiest level requires you to run 2 marathons in 2 weeks or 3 in 3 months. I would have thought that the first option was the easiest but given the Disney experience and some good advice by coach N I am actually taking the other approach.

So October 12th Victoria, November 30th Seattle (for the 2nd time) and December 31st Last Chance Marathon. My birthday is December 30th so I will have to give up my usual birthday beers for that final race!

Its going to be an interesting ride. I hope to scrape under 4:10 in one of those races in my slow, slow climb to breaking 4 hours. But which one? I had assumed the 1st one when I am fresh but it turns out that might be the road to ruin - tiring me out too much for the next 2. But will I have anything left by December? And the normal 2-3 week recovery is going to not happen as I will have to up my training again in between each one.

So as always watch this space for stories of lycra and other humorous tales from the marathon.

Using LinkedIn as an email collection tool

zman — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:22:00 GMT

Thanks to Holly Carinci and Jack Weatherell over at The Elans you might find it a little harder to make it only The ZMan's LinkedIn contact list.

I'm not 100% sure how Holly ended up on my contacts list, I dont recall meeting her and she's not in my address book so it may have been one of those 'Hi there I'm in the industry requests' that I used to allow in if they seemed interesting.

But in the last month I've had 6 unsolicited emails about the Elan awards. As I've mentioned before I give out a different email address to each company I work with and so it's pretty obvious that they are using the one they got from Linked In. Today they sent me 3 so I was forced to send them a reply asking to be removed from all of their lists and also removing Holly from my contacts.

I can't find anything on the LinkedIn user agreement that forbids people from using contact information commercially in this way (though as always 90% of that agreement is legal gobbledygook) so I am guessing they don't care.

So I have been and removed several 'friend collectors' from LinkedIn and I'm down to people I have actually met, or spoken to extensively online. I'm also a little worried about the groups now as the owners get to see your contact information - not sure if everyone else does too.

So if you DO know me well enough (i.e. you worked with me, chat to me about XNA/DirectX or other game development related things) then feel free to invite me: Andy Dunn (aka The Zman) on LinkedIn

Oh I'm on Facebook too - but thats for personal friends only. Don't be upset if I ignore your request - I have too many people sending me stupid plants for my garden as it is. Andy Dunn (aka The ZMan) on Facebook.

Hey web pages designers quit moving the focus...

zman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:59:00 GMT

I've noticed a recent trend of web pages that set the focus control to a sensible place but do it after the 3-4 seconds it takes their page to load. This means that if *I* have already moved focus you steal it back from me.

Live login is the prime offender. The page displays, I click in the password field because my email address is already there and half way through my typing the webpage finishes loading, fires the Loaded event and the stupid jscript moves the cursor to the username field and I type most of my password for the world to see. Bad enough at home but worse on my laptop somewhere.

So web designers - The ZMan says enough:

Make your pages fast enough that they load and fire the event quickly. Heck if google can do it I'm sure the rest of you can make things a little more minimalist. I know this means you arguing with those people who don't understand technology and think that a web page is "the same as a magazine" but your job is to make my life easier.
Check to see where focus is. If its NOT where you expect then do nothing - it means the user already did it
Just stop it - we lived for years without this, it won't kill us to press tab.

Outlook or Vista not indexing? Check your power options!

zman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks (months?) I've noticed my searches in outlook getting worse and worse for accuracy. Oven more odd the searches are always accompanied by the:

"Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details"

When you click you get the indexing status box (also available from Tools/Instant Search/Indexing Status) which always tells me there are 40,000+ messages to index. Quite worrying but not enough for me to do anything. Well today I couldn't find a piece of email which means me getting some money so I felt obliged to fix it.

There's various fixes out there Exchange System Management Tools breaks indexing or Rebuild the index on your computer. None of these worked for me. I even hit "restore defaults" which deletes the index and forces a reboot. I did notice that when I hit rebuild it always said "Complete" right away. Even more annoyingly it would then say "0 items indexed" and to really rub it in "Indexing speed is reduced due to user activity"

Googling for that final phrase found this: Power Options stops indexing. I checked my power settings and it was on balanced. I switched to Power and as soon as I did the index count started going up. I guess at some point in the past I had decided to be a little green and one of those settings convinces the indexing service to do ABSOLUTLY NOTHING. This wouldn't be so bad if there was any other way to search in outlook. At least Windows explorer will drop back into slow mode where it actually looks in the file but outlook just DOES NOTHING BUT SIT ON ITS HANDS while telling you that the search results at STILL incomplete. What a horrible design flaw. At least in the indexing status box put a message that says "Al Gore has decreed that indexing is bad for the dolphins so we stopped doing it".

Anyway now I have 9000 items indexed and a few of them appear to be my outlook emails since that count is now down to 33,000ish. Lets hope I put all the right keywords in here so that others can find it a bit quicker than I did.

(Yes I know that's a lot of email - I'm a VERY popular guy you know)

BEST. MEAT. EVER. (and Blueberries)

zman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:07:00 GMT

J & I popped out to Cle Elum last Friday - we were helping out with a race series called Street Scramble. You never know what the traffic is like so we headed out early and arrived with enough time to eat. Cle Elum isn't a very big town so its always hard to know which restaurants are the ones to eat at. Boy did we luck out.

After driving around we settled on Mama Vallones which serves mainly Italian food but has some steaks and prime rib. I decided to get the 8oz prime rib which was around $20 or so. Seems like a bit of a cheap price so I was not expecting the menu claims to hold up:

Indulge yourself with some of the best prime rib you'll ever taste. The Midwest Angus beef is aged a minimum of 21 days. We prepare each rib by expertly trimming excess fat. We season with our own homemade seasoning salt. The ribs are then roasted in our special ALTO SHAMM Prime Rib Oven for a controlled period of time then served to you at its best-almost fork tender and very juicy.

But I was wrong. Damn that was probably the finest prime rib I have ever had. I'm used to picking the fat and chewy bits out (too many Vegas buffets - I know its my own fault).

Now you know The ZMan loves to rant and reserves his praise only for the very best. So if you are ever in Cle Elum and you enjoy eating a nice bit of cow then remember that ZMan's Food Guide gives Mama Vallones 250 stars!!! (out of a maximum 256 - I'm a geek what do you expect)

And while I'm in a praising mood I feel the urge to also point out that Blueberry Hills Farms at Lake Chelan gets a spiffing 200 stars for their blueberry pies (and big points for a funny menu and website). Just the thing you need after doing a Triathlon.

Network Solutions - why do I hate thee?

zman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:09:00 GMT

Its not just because they think there is something special about domain registration that they can charge more than anybody else. its because every time I have had to deal with them they treat you like they are used car salesmen.

I'm helping a friend transfer a website and domain and I suggested that he use godaddy for the registration and the hosting since its a nice tidy way to do things at a great price. However this meant dealing with Network Solutions. To make sure all the emails went to us I logged into the NS account and changed the contact details to my friend. Immediately NS locked the account because this is 'suspicious'. Even though we had all the right credentials they lock it down for a MONTH.

So now when we try to transfer to GoDaddy even with the right transfer code NS refuse to do the transfer. We can either wait 30 days or, no surprise, we can call them. Of course calling means sitting on hold for a long time and then when you get through you end up talking to salesmen who want to do anything rather than let you go. No surprise suddenly the registration price is a lot cheaper and they will kiss your ass until you give in. This doesn't help since we have already paid GoDaddy to do the transfer. Even worse they can't take the lock off until they 'escalate' which can 'take up to 3 days'.

The REALLY stupid thing is that requiring the phone call doesn't provide any extra security - I've already used the credentials to log into the site and update everything so there is nothing they can ask that wouldn't be available to someone who was trying to steal the domain. SO its pretty obvious why they do this.... retention of customers... sadly its having the opposite effect because it just further convinces me never to use their services and to tell people I know of their craziness.

Honest People and Dishonest People

zman — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:57:00 GMT

2 years ago I lost my wallet. I wasn't 100% sure where I lost it but I had been to 2 parks in the Seattle area. There was less than $50 in there but it did have my drivers license and my green card so I was a little concerned. After half a day of retracing my steps and talking to park rangers I gave up. A couple of days later I went and got a replacement license but found that a replacement green card was $300 so I decided to put that off for a while. A week later I get a phone call from the park service - someone found my wallet in the bottom of a trash can in one of the parks. All the paper money had gone but the ID was still intact.

Of course this meant that I now had 2 valid drivers licenses. They have the same number on them and the dates mean they are both still valid. It turns out its handy to have 2 copies. I can keep one in my wallet and take the other with me for ID when I go running.

About a year ago I did exactly that - went for a run and since I needed gas I took my credit card and tucked it in the pocket with my ID. After I got home all I had was the credit card. The license must have fallen out when I took the card out to pay for gas. I called the gas station and nobody had handed it in. Since you can't actually cancel your license I just had to suck it up and watch out for an ID theft which thankfully never happened.

Today I got a nice letter from a chap at the Seattle Sheriffs department with my missing license. Yes a year after it went missing a postal worker found it in a mail box in front of the gas station where I guessed I had dropped it. I can't believe its been floating around on the ground for a year so I am guessing that somebody found it and dropped it in the mailbox a year ago. It must have dropped to the bottom and was only found eventually by a postal worker who looked carefully.

So to the person who stole my money 2 years ago - YOU SUCK

To the person who found my ID, the postal worker who handed it in, and the police officer who mailed it back to me - YOU ROCK.

TRI-ing it again [groan]

zman — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:28:00 GMT

Those of you paying attention will remember last years triathlon at Lake Chelan. Well it was such good fun (well maybe the wine tasting) that J and I heading out there with some other runner friends for a repeat.

Triathlons vary quite a bit. Seems like the Olympic, Half Iron and Ironman distances are fixed but the sprint distance varies by the mood of the race organizer no matter what wikipedia says. This year had a longer bike ride and the swim was in a different place but it didn't seem like it would be too different.

Last year this was my 'comeback' race after 6 months of injury and recovery - I had plenty of time to practise swimming, biking and was running in pretty fresh legs. This year I think my swimming has been good, not enough bike and its been a while since my last race so my running should be better and stronger..... notice I say SHOULD!

The weekend went well. Saturday was an early start to get to Chelan to see M head off on her Olympic distance triathlon and D & M (different M) on the 10k. Great performances all round including 1st in his age group for D and M barely missed breaking 3 hours in the triathlon. Then some relaxing for the afternoon and racked our bikes ready for an early start the next day. We've herd rumours of the elite or wannabe elite moving bikes if they think they deserve your spot so we rack way at the back where nobody else wants. We go down at 9pm to check and they are right where we left them

7:30am Sunday we head out to set up our transition bags to find out bikes are not where we left them. Some wankers have decided that they are more important than us and moved ours about 6 bikes down in the rack so they can get the position at the end of the row. These bikes are nothing special so its hardly anyone who thinks they are elite. Seems we should have taken the advice and locked our bikes in position. These losers never show their face before and were VERY fast in removing their bikes after the race. I debate letting both tyres down or disconnecting the brakes but that would lower me down to the level of the pond scum that did it in the 1st place. Next time I am taking a cheap bike lock with me and if you move my bike I am going to lock YOURS in place and write the combination on the back of the ladies bathroom door. See how fast your transition is when you have to fight your way past a bunch of women with full bladders.

Before you know its 8:15 and we are off to the start. J has decided its warm enough to not need the wetsuit but I like the extra confidence and most people swear it makes them faster. I don't see how I can improve on last years stunning under 17 minute swim (it usually takes me nearly 20 in the pool) but I'm figuring my run should be a bit better and hope to improve on the transitions.

As usual I start at the back to avoid all the feet and walk the 1st 20 yards while everyone else flounders around like salmon in their death throws. At the 1st buoy I choke down a big mouthful of lake water which throws me a little but I've got a nice even stroke going. There's a buoy line under the water to follow for the middle section though most people don't seem to care and are all over the place. Around the final buoy and I can see the beach. I've not pushed hard this time because I remembered being totally wiped last year but when I get out of the water my watch says 14:04... Yes that's not a typo almost 3 minutes faster than last year. D&M on the beach with the cowbells for me to show my watch to - pretty stupid really as they can't read it as I run by.

Transition feels better than last year. I only had to dry my feet once and I am about to put on my helmet when I hear the cowbells - I wonder who they are ringing them for when suddenly there is J. She started 5 minutes behind me in the women's wave and she is already out of the water. Stunning swim for her too. So I get out her way and jump on the bike. Right out of the start its up hill and I already regret not training more. Once again my computer is not working - that's 2 years in a row - so I just have to try to pace myself by effort. My fast swim has put me in front of a lot of fast racers so I am being passed by guys with stupid pointy hats and solid carbon fibre wheels. They are very encouraging even though they are all thinking "how the hell did a guy on a mountain bike get in front of me". Eventually the passing stops and we get to a short but very evil hill. I go down the gears and then get out of the saddle so I don't have to use granny gear. Quads are burning so bad and I think I'm only about quarter of the way there. Thankfully a nice downhill the other side and suddenly my excess weight plus a heavy bike is worth something and I catch up towards the guys in front of me. Sadly not for very long and then the women (who started 5 minutes behind me) catch up and start passing me. I passed nobody this year :-( Eventually the turnaround point comes and my legs are feeling rough. I've been in my highest gear a lot of the way though so I think I'm doing OK. The ride back seems easier and I see J coming the other way. She's less than a mile behind I reckon. I get back home in 47 minutes so even the extra mile means I was a lot slower than I thought. But I don't think I could have gone any faster.

Dash through the transition and out on the run.... Holy Smokes Batman... I had forgotten this special kind of dead legs. Once again we start up a hill OUCH. I keep running and I'm right around 9:30 at the 1st mile. Not too bad but I can't make my legs move faster. At least they are moving which is more than some folk. At least I pass a few folk here. I'm not feeling too tired just jelly legs. Turnaround and on the way back see J again. Still about a mile behind me so she's having a great race. My legs never really recover but I hold the 9:30 pace and manage to stay under 30 minutes. Even the little sexy outfits and abundance of lycra isn't helping me here. At the last bend there is a big crowd and ALL of them seem to shout my name due to the magic Andy shirt. M&M are on cowbell station #1. Running down to the finish line even the guy on the microphone reads it and calls out my name and somewhere in the crowd is D with cowbell #2. I have no clue where but I could hear them loud and clear dude. Total time 1:37:42.

Lets compare the years shall we? (this is where it gets boring folks!)

Swim	min/100yd	T1	Bike	mph	T2	Run	min/mi	Total Time
00:17:22.900	00:01:59.2	00:05:37.540	00:37:42.920	20.4	00:01:42.920	00:28:10.030	00:09:05.2	01:30:36.31
00:14:17.900	00:01:38.0	00:05:03.000	00:47:28.700	16.6	00:01:37.400	00:29:15.100	00:09:26.2	01:37:42.1

Last year was a 20k (12.4 mile bike) this year was a 13.1 mile bike. Correcting based on speed that would add 1:58 to the 2007 time for a total of 1:32:34 so I was still 5 minutes slower. But STUNNING swimming improvement and I felt very very easy. Transition 1 was a little quicker but still sucks. The bike bit me hard for some reason. Last year I was surprised to average over 20mph but this year I was shocked to have dropped that much speed. T2 about the same and then I even lost a minute on my run. Heck that's what I'm supposed to be good at!

2007: 11/13 in my age group
2008: 8/10 in my age group
So that seems about the same - I am a year older but I ought to be fitter too.

Swim: 2007 5/13, 2008 6/10 - 3 minutes faster and further down the field!
T1: I don't even want to talk about this. I'm on the last page of the results here. Pathetic.
Bike: 2007 13/13, 2008 9/10 - so much slower but an improvement on place? Odd
T2: 2007 6/13, 2008 7/10
Run: 2007 4/13, 2007 7/10 - amazing the difference 1 minute makes.

So some room for improvement if I want to do better at this in the future. I (WE) really need new bikes - ours are so heavy and I run out of gears at the high end fairly often. Please Santa?

Twitter is NOT........

zman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A way for you to chat 1 on 1 with a buddy...... there are already plenty of applications for you do that.
A way to notify us of your blog post.... this is a well solved problem
A discussion area.... there are much better places to do this
A place for you to let us know every time you belch, fart, perspire or breathe... I wish there was a limit to # posts per hour for those people who love the sound of their own twitters

Phonebooks are a waste of paper

zman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:29:00 GMT

I just got my new copy of Dex and it went right into the recycle bin. What a waste of money charging advertisers (I'm pretty sure all the yellow page directories are paid for by ads), chopping down a few thousand trees and paying some guy a lot of salary and gas money to drive round the entire town delivering them. Internet usage is fairly prevalent these days so it seems that its about time for phone books to become an opt-in service. Print them for the people who want them.

What's really sad is that the French worked this out many years ago by giving people a free 'online' terminal to access Minitel in exchange for not getting the white pages.

They didn't even bother sending me the small phone book which at least has the advantage of fitting nicely in my car. Yes I know I contradicted myself there but while I am pervasively online at home I'm so far resisting the urge to be online the rest of the time by paying an addition $30 a month on my phone. Bad geek!

I'm officially a Northwesterner

zman — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:46:00 GMT

It took almost 12 years but since I now own a Subaru Outback with a Yakima rack on the top I think I qualify as someone 'from around these parts'. I really should get myself a recumbent bicycle and some hemp underwear I suppose.

Pemco did a whole series of ads on this subject - thankfully almost all of those don't apply to me. Here's a good competiton... Which of those stereotypes do you think apply to me? I would say 2 of them apply and one of them used to apply.

Hard Drive 'End of days'

zman — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:14:00 GMT

Was it really only April when I last had to talk about drive failures and backups. Well here we are in May its happened again. Different machine, different hard drive and a more spectacular death.

Yesterday afternoon I had several very odd 'hangs'. IE would just stop responding and lock up for several minutes. Outlook emails would pause for a couple of minutes before they would send and downloading new email was taking forever. I rebooted a couple of times to try to clear it and it kept happening. I did notice on reboot I would get a strange 'strangulated' noise from the computer. I tried to listen to where it was coming from but it would last less than second and everything was working.

Finally last night it just got crazy. Nothing was working. Everything was hanging and I couldn't open the Storage Manager to see if there was a hard drive problem. So I opened to case up and pulled the drives out and rebooted. No noise... dammit not sure which drive is failing. There's no clicking or ticking that I am used to but then a sudden thump and the machine hangs. Won't reboot properly either. So I pull the power on the data drive and now it reboots. Dammit.

So once the traffic cleared this morning I headed off to Fry's again to get me a new drive. While I was waiting I took the opportunity to reinstall Vista as I had hit my limit of OS crap. Right now I'm copying all the files from my server backup to the new drive. 138,578 items - 3 hours it says!!! Man I have a lot of stuff.

My backup software doesn't cope with open files and I don't always remember to close outlook when i go to bed so I think my email backup is a couple of days old which is a big shame. The old drive is deader than a dead thing. It doesn't even appear to spin up. So time to try the quick feezer trick to see if I can get that one PST file. Otherwise I can live with a few missed emails.

Suppose I need to check if the drive is under warranty too. At least I might get a spare out of the deal.

Where do they put all the bits?

zman — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:06:00 GMT

I got a new GPS unit last week in the REI sale. It came with a DVD of all the TOPO maps of the USA and a 128Mb microSD card. Well that's pretty small these days so I popped down to Fry's to get a bigger one.

Its simply stunning to think that this has 4Gb memory. I don't even see the point of buying anything less than 4Gb at the moment because its so cheap. When I think of all the 16K ram packs from the ZX81 days its really quite stunning. J was equally impressed and its not like her to be impressed by small things . I feel like I could be a spy or something and fill it with secret blue prints and then smuggle it inside a button or something very James Bond. Heck its totally swallowable though I don't suspect the manufacturing covers stomach acid and I don't facy the idea of finding it.

The real problem now is what the hell do I do with the 8Mb, 16Mb CF cards I have sitting around. I think I have a 512Mb microdrive that I paid a small fortune for 10 years ago. I need to find a hobby where the price of things goes UP not down.

DRM vendors thanks for shutting down...

zman — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:14:00 GMT

[Wow 2 posts in one day and neither about running!]

There are a lot of people out there who hate DRM with a passion. I'm not one of them. I understand that its a necessary evil in a world where most people will get something for nothing if they possibly can. Though I disagree with some of the high profits and salaries that some entertainers and entertainment companies get there is a reason we all lock our doors at night - to stop people taking what is not theirs. The entertainment industry is no different other than its far easier to steal content than it is to take my TV.

However this doesn't mean there are not some parts of DRM that annoy me and I just had to spend my valuable time working around some of this. You see I supported MSN Music when they first went live and I purchased my 99c tracks from them. I was a bit annoyed when one day I tried to go to the site and was told they were shutting down. They sent me over to Urge which was mildly annoying. They promised that the DRM validation that happens would continue to work... but for how long? Since Urge is owned by MTV I figured they were a pretty safe bet for the future. Of course I was wrong and at some point Urge was shut down and we were all sent over to Rhapsody. At least my login from Urge works there but wait a moment whats this? I need to download the Rhapsody player? I cant use them in Media Player where all my other music is. No I don't care if there are workarounds.... you just lost my business.

In the last month I got a Zune - mainly to try out the XNA Game Studio development platform but since I've never had an Ipod it was an opportunity for me to join the cool kids. Zune software has to be installed to sync which is pretty annoying again but at least it picks up my media library.... well almost. Ripped CDs are there but nothing from MSN Music or from Urge. Woo hoo for DRM. So I can't sync my DRM songs to the Zune from Media player because the Zune team and the Media Player team have some sort of ongoing feud to ensure there are multiple ways to do everything in Windows. AND I can't sync my songs from the Zune software because it doesn't understand any DRM other than the Zune store stuff.

Now I could spend half a day finding out if I'm an idiot and there is a way to do this but the easiest way was to burn all the DRM music to multiple CDs and then rip them all back in. Now Zune is happy and all works again with my songs.

Of course the chance of me buying stuff from Zune Store is pretty low expecially since Amazon appears to be happy to sell me unprotected MP3s and I suggest you do the same. The Zune pass stuff is vaguly interesting but there are so many 'just another $9.99 a month' things out there for me to spend my money on and thats more then I generally spend on music anyway.

Digital paper still isn't good enough

zman — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Today I got an email from the ACM regarding the ACM queue magazine I get as part of my membership. Seems that they are not going to print the paper copy any more. The reasons they give sound like they paid a marketing consultant to come up with them:

"In response to a growing demand to offer a richer, more robust online presence"
"in response to a changing business environment for specialized print magazines"

Whilst I can appreciate the first point its certainly no reason to drop the print issue. The second point I suspect actually means "we are not making enough (any) profit on this 'free' magazine even though its usually full of paid ads". Now I certainly don't see why any business should continue to make a product if there is no money in it for them but this is one of those times that you should just come out and say it.

The problem, for me, is that for me magazines are some of the few times I am away from the computer. I spend most of my day in front of one of my machines so in bed, in the little boys room, on a plane etc are the places where I catch up. Whilst I could take my laptop to those places its not as portable as a paper magazine (and you can't tear it up into little square if you are out of toilet paper!).

I've seen a couple of magazines go this way in the last few years so I suspect its a trend which is going to catch on. Several of the magazines I read regularly are already offered in a digital version though oddly enough like e-books very few of them are offered cheaper. For example Reader Digest Paper costs $1.25 per issue. Readers Digest Kindle Edition costs $1.25 per issue. I doubt if electronic delivery can be more expensive that physical delivery and I'm sure that the electronic copy has all the same ads so where is the savings to me? Come on Amazon make it worth my while if you want me to pay $400 for your Kindle.

Even worse it appears that every magazine publisher wants you to read the magazine THEIR way. Some I have tried have their own viewer applications, others let you download PDFs of the magazine which are great if you have a 17"+ monitor to read it on. Amazon appears to have a proprietary format which means that right now there is almost no magazines or newspapers available. I suspect the range of books is equally a small percentage of the total out there though it looks like they are somewhere around 80k books which should be enough to keep people busy for a while.

The final failure point for me is a lack of color. Magazines add a lot of value with diagrams and images and right now there's no color devices out there. Hopefully this will change soon - there is speculation on several. Sadly its hard to see all of these in one place to know what form factor is good and what display size will work for you. Resolution and contrast are improving over older models but we are still a long way from the paper printing so having a screen that is smaller than the average current book doesn't cut it for me. I'm so tempted to order a Kindle but my gut feel is that it will annoy me and not give me $400 worth of value.

A quick trip to Vancouver

zman — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:34:00 GMT

Time for another running story - with tales of lycra and nasty smells abound.

For the second time my running group headed North from Seattle to the frozen wastes of Canada and a the city with one of the worst traffic systems I have ever seen. I swear that they randomly change which streets are one way and which are not every time I visit and with no turn lanes and badly synchronized traffic lights you need to ensure you are on the correct side of the street if you intend to get anywhere.

For those long time readers you may remember that Vancouver was the site of my 1st marathon 2 years ago. Yesterday I was running the shorter half marathon. Its only been 3 weeks since my 50k and although I am recovered well day to day pushing my legs too hard in a race increases injury risk and, as I found, finds all the aches and pains that are not really recovered.

Last time in Vancouver it rained heavily but we awoke Sunday morning to a clear sunny day. As usual an early start so we walked down to the start around 6am and checked our bags and went to the start line. Vancouver is a nice race and generally well organized but they have no pace markers at the start line so everyone including the walkers decides its OK to stand near the front. It took me 6 minutes to cross the start and I was passing walkers for 2 miles. Come on marathon organizers PLEASE put up big signs asking the walkers to start from the back.

Considering the potential of tired legs I was not sure if I should go for it on this race but after the 1st mile I was doing pretty well so I figured I'd just keep going. The sun was out and directly on us so it was warming up. But the really odd thing was that I could still see my breath and the air seemed chilly. Lots of twists and turns so sunglasses on and off and on and off again. My pace started well and seemed pretty even for the 1st half of the race 9:38, 9:05, 9:08, 8:59, 9:07, 9:04 and hitting the half way point at exactly 1 hour. I was quite surprised that it had gone so well. If I could keep up this pace there was a pretty good chance of running sub 2:00. I'd not got to the only hill yet but things seemed to be going well. But it seems that my body had some other ideas. Right after the half way point my legs seemed to remember the 50k.... it would seem that an hour was all they were prepared to give me for free and they started feeling heavy and I started to slow. Miles 7 and 8 were 9:30 and 9:58 (though mile 8 I think had a water AND gu stop in there so its not quite as bad as it looks).

Right after mile 8 begins the slow climb up and over the Lion's Gate bridge. Exactly at the time my legs need something more optimistic. Oh well - its not that big or long so I shorten my strides and use my considerable marathon experience to get me up there... you know what this means right? Yes its time for more "ZMans's rules of Lycra"....

From Seattle 2007 we already have one and the hill in Vancouver has contributed 3 new ones...

Underwear: There are 3 kinds of underwear allowed under lycra shorts - granny/big pants, thong/g-string, nothing! If you must wear regular underwear that cuts your buttocks in half remember that whilst its tough to see the problem in jeans or a skirt the lycra shorts will accentuate your now very visible 4 butt cheeks and anonymous marathon runners will mock you. This shall be known as a muffin-butt.
Color: Grey/Silver looks the best if you can pull it off. Black is best if you shouldn't be wearing lycra but insist on it
Gender: If you have the ass of the average 55 year old guy then you need to switch from lycra, lose some weight or wear a longer shirt. Dude you got me moving up the hill faster than any of the cute lady bottoms today just so I could be past you!!!
Length: Shorty short lycra pants are a little 'cheeky' but can be quite hill inspiring on the right people. Sadly it appears that not many of those people run at my speed in races. Folks not everyone can be Daisy Duke. Here's the test: Wear your shorts one day and show 3-4 of your close male friends. Watch their reactions.... it should be pretty obvious if you should inflict that on several thousand people.

So back to the hill. I'm huffing and puffing my way up and seeing my sub 2:00 race disappear and coming to terms with it when I hear someone call my name. Its S from my running group who is having an awesome run. She seems as shocked to see me as I am to see her. After a pretty breathless conversation about being close to 2:00 pace (a HUGE PR for her) I let her know that my legs are very heavy and I am going to be no use to help pace her in to the finish and tell her to get on and go for it and off she goes. My legs are very jealous. Approaching the top I see she has taken a short walk break and I am catching up. I'm glad of someone to chase to take my mind off things so as we go down the hill my extra weight gives me a bit of an advantage and I catch her around mile 9.5 after putting in a 10:11 mile - my slowest of the race.

The down hill has been very kind to me and I'm feeling pretty good again. We are slightly off 2:00 pace but I start to convince myself that between the two of us we can do it. So I keep up the pace and S comes with me and we hit mile 10 in 8:32. Everything is looking good and we need to run a 27 minute 5k to break 2:00 which means its going to be close. Then the flat runs out and the very slightly up hill whips my legs into submission once again. I can tell I'm slowing so I tell S to run her race and go break 2 hours while I start to play those mind games that happen at the end of a race.

I keep her in sight for a short time and then I blink and she is lost in the crowd. Mile 11 is 8:51 and mile 12 I slow back to 9:30 when I take a slightly extended water stop. At mile 12 I decide that if I REALLY push it I can still do a respectable time so I ignore the heavy legs and knock out an 8:08 and scream down to the finish. It feels really good passing lots of people and for a minute I wonder if I will catch S but I never see her till after the end. My final time 2:01:06 which I think is my 3rd fastest half if you don't include my crazy split in Seattle. (S by the way was just slightly over 2:00 - an awesome time and 10+ minute PR for her).

We head off to meet the crew. D finished his 1st 8k and got 2nd place in his age group! Out come the cow bells to cheer in the rest of the gang. 1st half marathon finishes for A, C and M - 2nd half and a PR for J even though she's not been feeling great all week. I think a PR for M (a different M - there are too many people I run with called M) too. Finally Coach N running the full and finally finishing Vancouver which for various reasons has eluded her. She ran the 50k with me 3 weeks ago so no surprise she found this one quite hard. I'm glad she recommended I only ran the half!

After the race some beers and great fish & chips at an English pub and a chocolate waffle for dessert afterwards. Mmmmmmm

Oh and I missed blogging about the smells. I passed a couple of guys who just stank.. now I'm not one who thinks you should shower BEFORE a half marathon but jeez people there's no need to hold off for a week. This is a crowded sport near the start. J also found a couple of stinkers on her run.

And finally my favourite guy was a guy who had 'Happy Star Wars day - May the 4th be with you' on his T-Shirt. (For those who didn't click the link its goes to 'Wookie-pedia')

The luck of the British

zman — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:03:00 GMT

Yes I know its supposed to be the Irish but I'm not sure what is lucky about a country famous for a Potato Famine. While the big data drive was in the freezer I booted up the server to see what shape the rest of it was in and to my surprise I found that I was so lazy that I had left the databases in their default location on the C drive. So I have lost none of my databases.

This evening I headed off down to Frys to get some new storage hardware. I got a 1Tb Sata hard drive for $199. That's just amazing to me... I remember paying 3-400 pounds for a 10Mb hard drive for my Atari ST in 1990 and I never filled that up.

To solve the problem of backup up the backup machine and to keep a safe copy I also purchased a external 1Tb drive for $189.

Took no time to get them installed. Now I need to find some software to do backups. I don't care for image based ones - I just need something that copies files. I suppose I can do it with a robocopy script but that sounds like more work than I want when I'm sure there is a shareware product out there. I used Second Copy 2000 for many years so I should give their new version a look see. All I want is some UI and a tool that only copies updates and doesn't steal too much CPU or disc time.

The final bit of luck was opening up the music folder and realising that due to some (Vista?) magic the folder was marked for sync which means that all my ripped music was actually stored locally somewhere too. A simple copy back up to the server and that was all fixed.

So all I lost was my old backups - no problem since I dont need them and have a new one now - and the ReplayTV movies which are not important... maybe those will show up on the frozen drive in the morning.

NICE!

Is it important enough to back up?

zman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:29:00 GMT

I admit to being a smug bastard when it comes to backups. I've managed to keep backups of all/most my data intact for close to 10 years now. At its worst I would copy the important stuff onto floppy once a month or so but for the last few years I had regular backups copying data to a server. Sure it didn't cover me in the worst case of a fire but in those cases I have backups of photos with my family in the UK.

When people tell me they lost data due to hard drive crashes I would say "at least it wasn't important stuff" and they would say "yes it was" to which my response was always "If it wasn't important enough to backup then it couldn't possibly be that important".

Well today it looks like you can all be smug back to me....

A few months ago I notice my home server making a funny clicking noise and when I rebooted it wouldn't come up. I switched my backups to a USB drive while I got round to fixing it. Turns out the hard drive is toast (and 6 months out of warranty). I've tried it in 2 machines in a vain hope I could get to it.

No worries eh? I've lost nothing important?

Well it seems that at some point I decided to copy all my ripped CDs and downloaded music to the server since that was where the big hard drive was and so I could access the music from multiple machines. Of course that meant that there now was no backup of that data. I still have all the CDs so all is not lost other than my time. The downloaded music are from the now defunct MSN Music and the now 'merged with Rhapsody' Urge so I have no clue if I can ever get those back. Thankfully I burned a few of them to a CD for a road trip so I think I may be saved again.

Also on there were a load of movies that I had collected using my Replay TVs and stored using DVArchive. Again a shame but nothing I can't eventually get back from TV or rent from NetFlix.

But the real flaw in my system and the one I should have known better because I spent 10+ years of my career making sure other people did it right is my SQL Server. When I set it up it was really there just to help me play with websites or restore backups. It wasn't for production usage. But at some point I installed AxoSoft OnTime as a trial and then I started using it to store important things and I never set up any kind of backup.

So everyone after 3...... 1-2-3.... "It couldn't have been important otherwise you would have had a backup"

The data on there is certainly not important enough to warrant paying thousands of dollars to some data recovery team to get it back but its a serious pain in my ass.

Right now the hard drive is in my freezer even though I think that 'urban myth' only works in certain cases and the click, click, click head move of death doesn't seem to be one of them.

[edit: Seems like I am lucky and got away with it even without the freezer trick]

How to be annoying at a conference

zman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:26:00 GMT

Last week was the annual(ish) MVP Summit here in Seattle and as a regular observer of idiotic behaviour there was no shortage of things for me to watch out for.

When there is free food its there for you to stock up your hotel room with. To the MVP who was loading his bag and pockets with candy bars and potato chips. I know you are out of pocket because Microsoft only covered 4 nights in a nice hotel and fed you for 4 days and made you pay your own airfare but seriously how much candy will you have to steal to make up the difference.
See the silver thing sticking out of the wall in your hotel bathroom - its called a shower and some people (that means you!) need to use it every day. Conferences are places where lots of people are in very close contact and when we have to sit next to you on the bus or in a talk its pretty rough. (Thankfully this wasn't a problem with the DirectX guys I spent most of the time with)
Its pretty obvious they are filling all the buses every day. So sitting on the inside seat, putting your laptop bag on a seat, pretending to be asleep are just plain rude. Though I guess if you know you smell bad you were probably saving someone from a rough bus ride.
Stop asking stupid and long questions to the keynote speakers there is a limited amount of time and though you will disagree IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU even if you did get an MVP award.

If the previous 3 people have asked about sharepoint and groove then sit down - the rest of the room doesn't want another one
Nobody cares about where you are from, when you started developing or how much you want Steve Ballmer to kiss your ass
Get to the point.... when your question takes 5 minutes and the speaker answers in 20seconds you should get the hint that maybe you went on too long.
If you are smart enough to have written your question down in advance then read it and shut up - don't read it and then keep reiterating the same question 4 more times.

Its the MVP summit people - not a celebration of Canada day. Guys we love your enthusiasm but its getting a little much when you take over the keynote question time with your marketing stunts.
Conference organizers - try to get internet access sorted out. You know exactly how many people are coming and its a geek conference so assume 90% of them will be trying to get online.

Make sure you put the session evaluation questionnaire on the internet where nobody can access it because the connections are so slow.

Ultraman

zman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:37:00 GMT

It used to be that running a marathon was a big deal - until Oprah ran one! Now every man and his dog, and his cat, and his parrot and his pet stick insect has run a marathon. So how can you possibly stand out from the crowd? Run an ultramarathon!

Yes my dearest family and friends you can now say you know or are related to an ultramarathoner - and not one of those skinny muscly kinds either, no this ultramarathoner is still pretty cuddly in places.

Admittedly 50k (31.0685596miles) is the baby of ultra marathons but it still counts. The event was the Mt Si Rely and Ultra - here in WA state. This is a race that I love to do. I've been in the relay twice (once officially and once as a 'run along' due to injury) but spending the day in a sweaty car eating junk food with your running friends is something special. As you may recall I was supposed to run the 50km last year but due to an injury I was unable to take part. Well after a year of recovery and building back up everything was looking good. I did my longest run (3:30 in the rain 3 weeks ago) and have been tapering down ever since. Given how hard the last 6 miles of a marathon is I knew doing another 5 on top of that was going to be a whole new experience - one that needed some official plans. Normally for marathons I take a short break at every water stop and then just see how I feel at the end. This is a trail run with limited water stops and no mile markers. So I've been running with a CamelBak and J bought me a Garmin GPS watch for Christmas but where would I stop? For training runs we normally do 30 or 20 minute runs with 1 minute stops. But for the 50k I switched to 2 minutes - pure luxury. At the start it feels just wrong to stop when your watch beeps and see everyone else run on by but I knew that this was what I needed to do and really its not dissimilar to what I do in marathons anyway, just that EVERYONE stops at the water stops. The course starts out pretty flat for 4 miles then there is 11 miles slowly uphill, a steep half mile downhill to the turn around point and then you reverse yourself. After chatting to coach N the plan was to take a nice slow 11:00 pace to the turn around and then see how the downhill went.

The 50k group went out fast... at mile 2 I was 4th from the back. But I keep my pace very even and slowly but surely up the hill I started to pick people off. I think I passed about 8 people on the way up. It was a beautiful day and the views up in the Cascades are great but I'm used to marathons with lots of people. Sure everyone was friendly and you can have short chats as you pass or get passed but its a lot of running on your own. At 10 miles you hit the first bag drop where you can dig into any supplies and refill whatever you are carrying. Being British I had stashed a bacon sandwich and a cadbury creme egg. Apparently it takes a strong stomach to eat this sort of stuff while running but its was something for me to look forward to.

Mile 4-15 is pretty much uphill all the way but I was feeling great. I slowly passed a few of the people who went out too fast and eventually got to the turnaround point. This is the cruelest part of the race. The turnaround point is at the bottom of a hill. Yes after spending 2 hours climbing when you deserve to just turn around and reap the rewards they make you drop down a steep hill just to grab some food and turn around. This of course means an instant climb back up and for those at my speed this means a walk. I had taken a Gu at the top of the hill, eaten food at the bottom and then grabbed another Gu at the top. At this point I hit some sugar limit and decide I needed to go a while before I took any more food - my stomach was not happy with the overdose. In good news at this point I am exactly at 11 minute pace so the race plan is perfect... time to pick it up a little.

So now its easy right? 11 miles of a gradual slow downhill followed by 4 miles of flat. All on nice soft gravel trail. Well that would be a big fat No. For a start the hill is not steep enough that you feel like its that much easier which is odd because it did feel easier last time I ran this trail - it just wasn't after a 15 mile up hill. In addition the wind is now in my face which is nice and cooling but means that I had a tail wind on the way up that I didn't know about. The 5 miles back to the bag drop seem to take forever. I'm calling out the distance to the people coming up still - some seem grateful and others seem not to care. A couple of the 50 mile people pass me - amazing that they are 19 miles ahead of me in terms of distance and still going faster.

Sadly I miss my friends doing the relay at the changeover point - they are about 5 minutes behind me in time so I eat more cream egg and head off down the next 6 miles. Glancing at the watch I can see that even with the downhill I am not gaining any pace. I'm still right on 11 minutes. I can't really understand - somehow I am running downhill at the same speed as I ran uphill. My legs are getting tired sure but I'm slower than my marathon pace so I should have some left. I pass my running team mates who are running the relay and are on the way up towards me - lots of high 5s. I also pass a couple of other 50k people. I reckon I have passed about 10 people since the start so I think that I am still doing pretty well.

Getting to the bottom of the hill I pass 2 big milestones.... at 26.2 miles I start my longest distance run ever and at 4 hours 57 minutes my longest time run ever and I still have 5 miles left to go. My legs are tired but nothing like the Goofy race. As I plod along some people are catching me up. I am pretty sure most of them are 50 milers as I don't recognise them as anyone I have already passed. They are mostly taking regular walk breaks like me so we pass each other several times with various witty comments. Everyone looks so tired. The fast relay runners are cruising past us like we are standing still and most of them yell something encouraging. I'm especially grateful to the lady who yelled "you guys are amazing" to all the ultra runners as she passed us. The trail is long and straight and seems very much longer than the same trail just 4 hours earlier. Taking walk breaks at this point is a double edged sword. On one hand your tired legs really appreciate the walk and the water but restarting those legs is quite horrible. During the 20 minute part of my run I often convince myself that I should just run through the break to avoid the pain of restarting but by the end I always need and take the break.

It seems to take forever to pass the golf course and get to the bridge with the steps down to the road. Yes I said steps. The small group I am with takes them very easy. Some go down backwards - I choose a sideways approach holding onto the hand rail very well. Once at the bottom I know there is less than half a mile to go and somehow find some energy. I pull away from the couple of people I have been running near and head up a slight hill to the town. There is a bar on the corner I recognise and I pick up my speed and get to the school. Less than 400 yards to go and I hear coach N yelling and amazingly my legs feel just fine and I even manage another speedup round to the finish line. Final time 5:53:33 a little slower than I hoped but under 6 hours. That's an 11:20 pace so I know I slowed for those last 5 miles. I end up 39th out of 56 people.

Amazingly enough my legs are stiff but after a few minutes of stretching and walking around I feel pretty good. I get my blanket and my box of little debbie triple chocolate super fudge high fructose lard cakes and start the refueling process. My watch says I burned 5552 calories in those 6 hours so for once I am allowed to eat whatever the hell I want. I have about an hour to wait before the relay teams come in. Thankfully the weather is nice so its not too bad.

That evening I was moving around far better than I expected. The more marathons I run the easier the recovery gets. Don't get me wrong - I didn't run anywhere for a week and stairs and buses were not my friends but in general people don't believe you ran 31 miles when you just have a few aches and pains.

So is this the end of craziness for The Zman? Who knows? I will be doing some more half and full marathons coming up and hopefully at least one Triathlon this year. I'm hoping to run 3 marathons in 3 months at the tail end of the year to qualify for Marathon Manics. The 50k was overall easier than the 39.3 miles in 2 days that I did at Disney so I think I will try some more of these. Will I ever run the 50 or 100 milers that tantalize me despite knowing that only insane people do them? Well time will tell I suppose. I can't say never because 3 years ago I would have said 'Never' to running 5 miles let alone 5 marathons and an ultra.

Oh and for those keeping count the final food count for the run was 7 Gu's, 2.5 bags of shot blocks, 2 cream eggs, half a bacon sandwich, 2 handfuls of potato chips, about 6 cookies and about 1.5 bottles of gatorade. Final verdict - cream eggs great. Bacon sandwich great but takes too long to chew and eat - I wonder if I can make bacon flavoured Gu?

Procrastination Irony

zman — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:51:00 GMT

Some friends were twittering about an InBox Zero video a few days ago. Of course since I am such a procrastinator its taken me 4 days to finish watching it and a lot of that was reading email.... Hmmmm ironic eh?

My in boxes:

zman: 3570 emails oldest 11/19/2004

non zman: 2060 emails. Oldest 6/12/1999 (WOW!!!!)

And that doesn't include some folders that I automatically filter things into...

Good video even if it makes me feel like I am not in control of anything.

Mexican coke... more over-hyped nonsense...

zman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:46:00 GMT

I had heard the hype about the legendary Mexican coke that has sugar instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). I honestly believed that this was "the real thing" and I would just die from the flavour and taste like most other people who have tried it. I even heard that if you are in the right place at the right time in a large US city you can get specially formulated passover coke.

I must admit to being a little skeptical about the claims - most of the hype behind this sort of thing ends up being rather exaggerated with rabid fans of whatever is supposed to be better raving about it so that everyone else ends up wanting to rave too so they are part of the cool kids club. So when i saw that they were selling the mexican stuff in Costco I knew I had to buy some... even if it did cost over twice as much as the evil US variant.

So I chilled my bottle and drank my first sip of the nectar... hmmm it tastes like coke... let me remember what the blogs said it SHOULD taste like. sweeter that's right... well maybe I can taste that. J tried hers... she doesn't seem convinced either. So what does a computer programmer and a scientist do in such a case... a doubly blinded taste test.

Now there's a dilemma - how can 2 people perform a double blind test on themselves. It took a little debate but eventually we came up with a protocol. I write A and B on paper cups and pour Mexican in one and USA in the other and record which is which while J is out of the room. Then I leave and J writes 1 and 2 on paper cups and randomly pours the coke from A and B into those cups and records which is which. She has no clue what was in A&B and I have no clue what is in 1&2 so we are fully double blind. And we taste.

At first I cannot taste any difference and I have to drink a lot and really think hard to find one that is sweeter. Now its J's turn. She also can't taste much difference but eventually chooses. I chose A as mexican - she chose B - and I was right (praise be to the Flying Spaghetti monster). Even though I Iove to be right this isn't enough samples (we have 21 more bottles) but the one thing we agree on is that the difference between them side by side is negligible. We may also have to add some palette cleansing into the protocol to ensure we get a fair taste - what kind of cheese goes with coke anyway?

Of course this turned into a 'debate' over which should be sweeter - the sugar or the HFCS? Well before J strangled me for being argumentative we put a hold on the discussion for another day (which I promise to blog even if she is right!).

Now its not to say there isn't a good reason to switch the mexican coke - HFCS has a pretty bad reputation nutrition wise and mexican coke does come in those nice glass bottles which always make my coke taste nicer (in my head). But just to provide a balanced view in the world of blog hype... my personal opinion is that most people can't tell unless you let them know how much better it is supposed to be.