Life Intrigued

Hi all, I’m fresh off of the range having let the lead fly for about 6 hours.  My friends and I are sufficiently prepared for any zombie attacks … how about you?  For my sanity, let’s just assume that answer is a resounding YES!  (if not, you might want to befriend a Republican and get them on speed dial immediately or figure out whether you prefer salt or mustard on your brains).  This, of course, has nothing to do with the post topic today unless you take into consideration that that I was cleaning my weapons last night while my mobile computing device was happily being upgraded (foreshadowing).

As a professional IT Architect, I’ve spent most of my professional career designing and consulting on large computing systems.  To grossly simplify this landscape, there are really two defined camps in this space.  One camp puts forth the mantra of interoperability is king with a nod to Best in Breed.  The other camp preaches the tight integration card with a willingness to reduce capabilities at a gain of simplicity.  The challenge is to mediate between these ideologies and come up with the best solution.  For years, the Best of Breed camp enjoyed big success riding the benefits of reduced vendor lock in and the ability to pick and choose the best answer for each specific need.  This all started changing about 10 years ago when the complexities of integration and the inability for vendors to deliver on open standards (I’m speaking to you SUN).  Suites and proprietary solutions found their weak spot in the system armor.  Since then, the Best of Breed roar has become more of a whimper and the vendor suites have become as sweet as they sound.  There is one place where this battle raging … probably the last real battleground for this argument.  Any guesses where that is?  If you guessed the mobile computing field, you are dead on… and the players?  No need for extra power to the synapse – Android vs Apple.

I am on the Android side of this colossal tug of war.  As of such I am barraged with the “It Just Works” sermons from the other camp.  Apple is so great because everything just works, my Apple products are a gift from heaven because they just work, I did not even have to do anything special to get this new feature functioning because it just works.   Hell, Apple is so cool I’ll immediately go out an buy the next version even though it doesn’t really provide me much more value, but I know it will just work even better than what I have.  Wow, I have to hand it to Apple, their marketing arm is amazing.  I can see how this would be so appealing based on the quirks and idiosyncrasies we encounter with their competitors.  Clearly there is room for improvement in the other devices, but what is the price of that discomfort over the benefit of not being held captive to a vendor that essentially limits your freedom on what can and cannot run on YOUR computing device?  To me, that price is $100.  I can say that because we bought an HP Touchpad during their fire sale.  A quick mod of the kernel and we had swapped out the WebOS for Android!  Linda now had a fairly functional tablet device she could use for her photography business and (gasp) Facebook.  The downside of this is Linda had to put up with the quirks.  Not a big deal for me, but I can understand the annoyances of not everything working all the time but some of that is due to bad programming – take for example the Facebook app requiring a location indicator before it will run – this was solved with a fake GPS app, but again, it took some effort to figure out what was wrong.

Flash forward to last month when I decided to breakdown and get Linda an iPad HD.  Her photography business was doing well and figured switching over to that platform would work out for her… and we all know .. it just works!  Eventually this showed up in the mail:

Hit the jump to read the rest of the story

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And then there were 4.  I figured I’d just close out the Halloween Party Series with a final post of decorations on the cheap.  I didn’t want to keep in you suspense from the last post.  Believe that?  I didn’t think so.  Actually, I am relying on images that were preloaded on our Smugmug site due to some web access limitations we are fighting through at the moment.  Since all the decoration pictures were uploaded at once, I can simply reference those rather than fighting any new image uploads.  Hopefully concentrating on this post will help take my mind off the Cardinals’ second blown game of the series.

As mentioned previously, we originally went to the Dollar Store to find specific materials for our Halloween Party Haunted Trail (link here).  The pumpkins mentioned in that previous post were a bonus find.  What I was really looking for was some round looking objects that were made of glass or plastic that was roughly 6 inches in diameter.  That was pretty much the entire description we were heading in with.  Oh, and it needed to deflect or reflect light in some manner.  “Should you choose to accept this mission …”  After the euphoria of the foam pumpkin find had fallen off we started down each of the aisles trying to find something that fit the bill.  This resulted in 20 minutes of “Nopes” until halfway down the glass and candle aisle.  Right there on the top shelf was the perfect item.

It is actually pretty heavy glass similar to what you would put on a ceiling fan light except it has a flattened bottom. I have no idea what the real purpose is, but this was going to be a nice add to my Halloween decorations … if it worked out as planned. Since this was an unproven idea, we went with 4 of them – each for a very respectable $1.00. Going this route made the decision on which of the two ways to go on the design. If they were plastic, I was going to cut out shapes and put a candle in them to help light the path. Glass as the base resulted in the second option to simply paint the globes. A quick stop at Home Depot was needed to get some paint. After a lengthy discussion with the paint clerk, it was decided that the Rustoleum Multi-Purpose Orange Gloss would work best on the glass. There isn’t enough time to go into details on my checkout experience, but it is worth mentioning I had to go through nearly the same process to buy spray paint as you do Psuedophedrine.

Hit the jump to see how this and an another Halloween decoration turned out

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As an admission, I am officially behind schedule on the blog but we need to delegate blame to a guilt trip a certain person placed on me.  Apparently queuing up a few posts is second on the evil meter only to kicking an elderly woman down the stairs because she is impeding your timeline to rob a convenience store.  Being haunted by the stigma this would bring to my parents, I was forced to immediately stop using the post buffer to compensate for busy times of the month.  Of course, now I am left foregoing all charity work and our annual prairie dog mission of peace to free up enough time to bring you this month’s quota.  When those dogs take up arms and start ravaging our countryside that person is going to have some apologizing to do!

I’m to close to completing my 4^th year of blogging to blow my quota now, so it’s time to get to it.  Today’s post comes to us courtesy (and by that, I mean lack of courtesy) of Bridgestone.

As a little level setting, Linda and I finally gave up dealing with all the annoying problems we were having with our Dodge Durango.  The car was actually fun to drive when it was actually working but it was plagued with electrical problems.  This was similar to problems we had with our Grand Cherokees.  During our hunt for a new car we were ignored by a dealership while trying to buy an Explorer (shocking at the time because they were in the middle of the economy crisis and cash for junkers was in full swing).  After a few other failed dealerships we broke down and checked again at Dodge – guess what, they decided to get out of the large SUV business with what appeared to be a failed attempt with the Aspen.  Frustrated, we stopped into Toyota, had a wonderful experience and promptly came home with a brand new SUV (built in San Antonio so hold the complaints).  This vehicle has been mechanically free of errors since we bought it with the exception of the special deer magnet (link here).  BMW could learn a few things from this automaker (link here).

Now is good time for the BEFORE shot:

hit the jump to read “The rest of the story”.

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Holy crap, it’s almost the end of the month and I’m down one.  Time to get on the stick (or rather the keyboard) and get the final post in for April.  I can’t believe how fast this month has gone.  For this entry I am going to share a bad experience with a recent online purchase.  Earlier in the year I broke down and upgraded from the Motorola Razor to a Galaxy Mesmerize.  This was a difficult task due to how reliable the Razor was and the hell I put it through while out working in the lot.  Let’s just say both the secret (yeah right) water disks were bright red from all the sweat and rain it was exposed to.  The new smart phone finally provided me the ability to map runs to Google with the built in GPS.  Probably more beneficial, it also provided  the ability to swap out the iPod Touch for my running MP3 player with the added benefit of now being able to call for help if I get lost or (knock on wood) injured while out on the long runs.  In order to do this, I had to purchase a new armband. Having checked out all the Internet stores (Amazon etc.) I decided to go with one I found at http://www.galaxyarmband.com.  There was some hesitation since I prefer to purchase things from companies I am familiar with, but this was pretty cheap and went ahead and used our Internet only credit card in case something undesired happen.  As a note, this was the only product that actually called out my specific phone model.  All the others explicitly stated it only fit one model (which couldn’t be validated since it was using model numbers that were different from the names the cell phone providers give them).  Soon after hitting the submit button, the PayPal notification email came confirming the purchase and indicated the charge will show up under Talisman LLC.  The email also provided their mailing address:

Merchant information
Talisman, LLC
talismangroupllc@gmail.com
http://evoarmband.com

Several days later we received another email saying the product had shipped and if there were any issues to contact Talisman LLC directly.  Sure enough the package arrives and the excitement starts to rise…. that is until I opened up the package.  There was a large glue stain on the inside of the clear front of the holder.

Hoping it was superficial I tried wiping it off with water, but that was futile.  With a heavy dose of disgust I dragged the camera out, took pictures of the armband condition, hunted down the memory card reader, transferred the images to the computer, cleaned them up in Photoshop to help cut down the glare, added the best one to an email along with some comments regarding my dissatisfaction with their quality control and sent it off.  Probably an hour of completely wasted time because of their poor attention to good service.  I did not expect an immediate email response, but actually expected something in a day or two.  This was an assumption based on their webpage that had the following comment:

“We are a small company, located in the USA. We ship our products anywhere in the world. We have a customer service team that will pick up the phone. And we will ship your products to you promptly, without error, guaranteed.”

Anyone want to take a guess on when they responded?  If you answered with anything other than NEVER, you are dead wrong.  A week had passed since the defective product arrived and there was nothing left to do other than contact them directly.  Back I went to their webpage to get the support numbers.  Oddly, the support number was added at the bottom of the page as a graphic and not basic text even though there were only letters and punctuation characters.  Their contact number at the time was 608.385.7795 (verified that it still has this number on their website).  With some angst, I picked up the phone, dialed the number and prepared myself for some serious ranting.  Unfortunately, that never happened because there was only an answering machine for a house realtor.  I ended up leaving a message indicating who I was, the reason for my call and even indicated where I got the number in case this was really a realtor and not the Talisman LLC customer service number.  That effort ended up with the same results as the email did… nada.  A few quick searches on the Internet located this site http://evoarmband.com which looks almost like the Galaxy website with a few different colors, but the same Talisman LLC vendor and a different contact number.  Note, the products looks EXACTLY the same.  Thinking I was clever, I called that number hoping to be transferred to the real Galaxy number.  Failed!  That number was a Google Voice number which required me to state my name before putting the call through.  No one picked up on the other end and guessing they were using the forward or ignore voice feature.

In a last ditch effort I asked Linda to stop the payment assuming this particular vendor was not entirely on the up and up.  Guess what, according to our Visa research, we can only stop payment on a purchase if it is over $50.00.  Stick a screw in me boys I’ve been turned.  All I can do now is make sure others do not make the same mistake.  After some elbow grease and Goop I was able to get some of the glue off that makes it useable, but the quality of the product does not warrant that price tag.

This is what I get for deviating from my standard Internet purchasing process.  A lesson learned and another blog entry

I hope my blog readers know by now that my wife and I share a photography habit… I mean hobby. Unlike Linda’s dog agility hobby and my addiction to running, this hobby is one we equally enjoy. It also gives us an opportunity to spend quality time together which is difficult in today’s hectic corporate world and what seems like an endless queue of errands and fix-its. It is also one of the few activities I willingly leave the comfort of my bed BEFORE the crack of dawn. Every once in awhile we get the opportunity to upgrade our equipment. This always a stressful event based on the fact that photography can be an expensive hobby and we have specific shooting interests that can, unfortunately, force you into higher dollar items. Lately, Linda has been shooting in low light facilities trying to capture dogs on the agility course. I am always trying to close the distance between my camera and wildlife. In both cases, the telephoto is generally the go-to glass. Up to this point, our workhorse has been the 80-200 f/2.8. This glass is solid and has never failed us, but the lack of VR can result in hand held fuzziness and probably more annoying, the inability to put a teleconverter on it (thanks Nikon) keeps us just out of optimal distance. To be honest, I will always complain that I am just out of optimal distance no matter what lens we have because that’s the wildlife photographer’s creed.

A few weeks back, we decided to pull the trigger on new glass. There were a few options in the zoom category we investigated including upgrading our 80-200 f/2.8 to the newer VR (vibration reduction), going with a superfast prime lens (300,400,500) or bite the bullet and go with a relatively fast longer zoom with VR. Linda wisely pointed out that buying another lens in the range we already have seems pointless (even if it has VR). The fast primes in the 400+ range is wicked expensive and really inhibits composition due to not being able to adjust the distance making it difficult to use for the agility ring. This left us with the longer zoom option. After much debate, sleepless nights and more than a hint of hesitation we pulled the trigger on the Nikon 200-400 VRII f/4 (end to end). The VRII offered some compensation for the uplift in aperture and fit our budget a little better than the house mortgaging below f/4 models. With that decision out of the way, the hunt was on to actually find one. The tsunami in Japan had a big hit in inventories leaving a few older models available and only ONE current model in stock across every photography retailer we could find on the Internet. Long story short, we took an availability premium hit and locked into the new lens.

After a quick inquiry as to the arrival date (since the delivery date was fast approaching without notification), we were informed it was on its way. I do not know if it was a result of the inquiry or in respect to the purchase price, but the glass was upgraded to two-day express. Sure enough, the package arrived as notified. This is when reality set in. Check out the packaging required. (Note, Rizzi was a reluctant participant, but I needed some scale)

Exactly what have we gotten ourselves into. We knew it was going to be larger than our current zoom, but this might be on a whole different level.

Hit the jump to see what was in those boxes.

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There are a few things I really look forward to over the course of the year. This includes standing at the top of the slopes with the feet strapped into the Burton, lining up at the start of the Bix7 race and setting up for the annual Halloween cookout (oh, in case she is reading this, coming home every day to see Linda). Not to be left out, ripping into the first box of frozen Girl Scout Thin Mints is ranked right up there in the top ten. Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder to actually order boxes. The daughters of my friends are now either to old for selling cookies or on the other end of the age spectrum. This year a friend of mine let me order from his relative and my Sister-in-Law was able to put in n order for me with one of her contacts from the school she teaches at. Once the orders came I rushed home and cleared space in the freezer and patiently waited for those babies to chill. Now I have to ask, is there really any form of food that tastes better than a frozen Thin Mint? (any answer other than NO is an unacceptable response by the way)

So, after a couple of hours, the time had arrived.  Freezer door opened with haste, the green box grabbed with zeal and seconds later I had ripped through the packaging to get to the goods.  Suddenly, the frantic pace came to a halting screech.  Have you opened a chip bag lately and been disappointed in the amount of empty space inside the packaging?  Regardless of whether the vendor feels guilty enough to add the “Some settling may occur” marketing line to the packaging, you feel a little empty inside, an emptiness originating out of a overwhelming feeling you’ve been taken.  Actually, I think the better word is d-e-c-e-i-v-e-d.  To my surprise, this is the exact same feeling I got while staring at the inner packaging … apparently some settling had occurred.  This picture below doesn’t provide the best angle for comparison, but you can tell there is a definite difference between the height of the box and the interior sleeve of thin mints. Due to the fact these cookies are like crack, I had consumed a majority of the package before realizing I forgot to assess the difference in cookie units between the inner packaging and the extra space in the box.  Post estimate has this at about 4-5 cookies x2 for the two sleeves and you are looking at 8-10 cookies that won’t be pleasing the taste buds.

However, there is more to this devious story.  My friend’s order was fulfilled by a Chicago area scout troop.  In line with how politics goes in this state, the “down-staters” once again take it on chin.  Cookies in the Chicago area are sold at a cost of $4.00 per box.  Contrast that with the local scout troop charge of $3.50 per box.  My Sister-in-Law’s order came in this week allowing me to verify that the local cookie boxes also had less than a full cookie box sleeve.  This means both investments fell short of expectations, but the empty space in the first box cost my $.50 more.  I wonder if they get a merit badge with a giant screw on it if they sell a certain number of boxes.

Okay, before someone gets all worked up, this post was somewhat in jest.  I realize it is a fund raiser for a good cause and I not at all concerned about the monetary difference between the various troop regions.  Actually, I congratulate them for embracing supply and demand principles and charging what the market can bear.  They might want to consider hanging out on streets and passing out a  free frozen thin mint to people who pass by – guaranteed people would be back drooling with money in hand looking for the next hit.. I mean bite.  I did get the empty feeling in my stomach when I saw the dead space in the packaging.  After all, per Wikipedia, the Girl Scout code consists of “I will do my best to be honest and fair”.

Before I leave this post, I wanted to mention something my brother brought to my attention.  During one of our calls, he mentioned that McDonald’s had their Shamrock Shakes available again.  Don’t ask me how we ended up on this topic, but he confessed when he orders these shakes he has them add in the crushed Oreo topping used in their McFlurries.  The resultant concoction tastes like a Thin Mint shake.  Intrigued, Linda and I ordered one while traveling to a dog show in Wisconsin.  After 15 minutes of trying to explain what I wanted to the cashier, her calling over the manager, both exchanging looks of utter contempt and a hundred buttons being pushed on the register they finally produced the augmented shake (note, based on the amount I had to pay for this sucker, I think they ended up charging for the shake and a small cone).  I grabbed the shake and headed back to the car taking special effort not to look back for any mocking that might have been going on.

Safely in our car, Linda and I dug into the experiment.  Survey says… Not Bad!  I am not entirely sure it was worth the trouble to order, but it definitely tasted like a Thin Mint shake.  Kudos to my brother for discovering this.  On second thought, we probably should not be that surprised since his repeat business has basically earned him an honorary degree from the McDonald’s Academy!

Later peeps, I’m heading down for some tasty frozen slices straight from heaven.

It’s a new year and that means a new set of convictions (to add to my existing set of course).  Over the course of last year I would stumble on some food products that left a bad taste in my mouth.  Generally this was due in part to the ingredients or preparation.  However, every once in awhile something in the product marketing overshadowed how good it might have tasted or just put the experience even further in the hole.  This year I’ve decided to call attention to these situations for a couple of reasons.  If it is a deceptive practice, then you should be aware of it as a consumer.  If I’m just viewing it wrong or missing some aspect of it, I would like to know so I can adjust my opinion appropriately.  No surprise, this particular post is case in point.

hit the jump to see the details of the issue:

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Happy Halloween Everybody!! Yeah, I know it’s a little late for that, but this post was suppose to be done last weekend. I was awaiting a response to an email that has not come yet and decided waiting any longer would be wasting the moment. Those that know me, are aware of my passion for this particular holiday. Of all the big ones, this has to be my favorite. The reasons for this are not entirely clear to me except there are many fond memories of reading horror book after horror book while in my early school years and always had fun carving up the scariest pumpkins my brother Ron and I could dream up. By the way, the former did result in a note of concern to my parents from my 7th grade teacher. Apparently reading Amityville and The Shining is not normal for that age. Never mind those books were huge and I was spending my time reading instead of boob tubing it – oh, and not to mention I haven’t had any urges to ax murder any members of my family – must be all those right from wrong discussions my parents were instilling me at the same time. To this day, the house gets decorated with all kinds of Halloween related items and as mentioned on a previous blog we have an annual Halloween Party.  Every year I also try to add a new pumpkin carving to the collection.  Try is an accurate word since it often requires more time commitment than is available.  The carving concepts have remained over the years, but the implementation has changed significantly since the days Ron and I laid out the newspapers, found the sharpest knives in the rack and splattered pumpkin guts all over the place.  These days, it is all about the foam and Dremel.  The hardest part about spending all the time carving real pumpkins is always watching the shrivel process destroy all your hard work.  Technology has come to the aid of us pumpkin aficionados.  Some genius has developed the fake pumpkin created out of an orange coated thin foam shell.  This shell even mimics the two toned orange found in real pumpkins providing for the same half cut shavings we have cherished from our real pumpkin experiences.  Adding the fact it can be carved with power tools, we are truly living in a golden age.

This brings me to the topic of this post.  This year I took the time to add another carving to my collection and in addition decided to give a little something back to all the up and coming carvers out there looking to branch out from the store bought stock patterns.  For the last 6 or so years I’ve been perfecting my abilities to create unique patterns and scene combinations.  The following is a mini tutorial on how to create that special pumpkin to impress all your friends.  But first off, a quick notice regarding a copyright issue.  Although drawing is a pastime of mine, my skills have a long way to go before being able to capture exactly what images are floating around in my conscious.   When it comes to the horror genre I tend to defer to the absolute stunning talents of others.  As a result, I tend to lurk on Google Images searching on horror related keywords looking for a image that would translate well to a pumpkin.  None of my creations are for sale nor do I market any of the resultant patterns so there is zero monetary gain on my part in this effort.  With that said, I still want to honor any copyrights and bring appreciation to the talents of others.  This year, I stumbled on an image from an illustrator in the UK name Paul Mudie.  It took me awhile to find the owner of the image I based my pattern on, but through the use of Google located his website.  I also sent him an email detailing my use of the image as a base for the carving and even sent him the actual finished pattern as a small token of appreciation.  He has yet to respond (thus the delay in this post), but want to point out that the original image rights remain with Paul Mudie.  Any use of his original image must be approved by him and any monetary use of the images in this particular post must be approved by both Paul and myself.  Thank you for your understanding in this situation.

With that said, you can visit Paul’s site at: http://www.paulmudie.com/index.htm and specifically, the base image can be seen here: http://www.paulmudie.com/werewolf.htm. Enough of the words, let’s get to the carving!.  So this is the subject of today’s tutorial.

To see the details on the tutorial, just hit the jump!

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Let’s just keep the Halloween theme going.  The previous post was driven by our annual Halloween Cookout Party.  While I was gathering up the materials for the fire pit patio, I decided to go ahead and pick up some extra items in order to attempt a new decoration  idea that I had been kicking the tires on for some time.  Each year, we try to add one new decoration to the collection.  Typically these are the latest air blown offerings, but this year we went in a different direction.  Living out in the country, it can be difficult to actually navigate to the house.  This is even more difficult at dark since there is little ambient light in the area.  This makes for a great stargazing, but not so great on the driving.  Oh, and to top it off, the GPS directs everyone to my neighbor’s driveway which is a down the road a bit.  What started as a internal debate on how to ease the difficulty for our guests resulted in this new decoration:

This particular shot was taken before darkness fell making it look a tad less scarier than it did once the guests started arriving.  Not only did this fit the overall theme of the party, but due to the clever hand placement, it also provided a functional role since it was placed at the road as an indicator for drivers to turn left into the correct driveway.  I wanted it to last from year to year, be able to withstand various weather conditions and (most of all) be relatively easy to disassemble and store away.  I don’t know about you, but those types of conditions almost always lead me to PVC.  In the sharing spirit, hit the jump to see how it was built.

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Pretty much chalking this up to the month of angst.  It is hard to say if this is just due to over-sensitivity to all the poor service we have encountered over this period or if the current state of the economy and the incompetency in our government is starting to weigh too heavy.  We will know soon enough with November just around the corner, but for now, I’ll just chalk it up to the former and just assume we’ve stumbled into a nest of stupidity.  If you recall, from my previous post on Steam, we are very sensitive to bandwidth since our satellite service has limited throughput and a 24 hour 300M cap.  Yes, I know this is my own choosing, but you keep your large pipe and I’ll continue to use my firearms, burn when I need to and most of all enjoy the peace and tranquility the country offers.  With that said, we do have fun when everyone can make it out for  some Rock Band.  Up to this point, we have worked around the network requirements.  A few hours before everyone shows up, I fire the game up to make sure any required updates are completed and pull down any new songs for the night.  Well, that was up until last weekend.   Linda bought me LEGO Rock Band game as a gift sometime back.  One of the features of this release is it allowed you to export the songs into the Rock Band 2 DLC cache.  Not for free, of course, but like the AC/DC pack it just takes a key code, some Microsoft points and the physical disk to copy the songs from.  That is what I thought before 4:00pm the day of the gig.

First off, hop over to the LEGO Rock Band website and use the key code bundled with the game disk to generate a redemption code for the export – Check.  Next, get on the Xbox marketplace and redeem some Microsoft points – Check.  Following that, load up the LEGO Rock Band game and head on over to the Export option – Check.  Now purchase the export package and sit and listen to the disk whirl away as it extracts the songs off of the disk – Ch…. hmmm.. wait a second, it sounds a little too quiet.  Now that I recall, it did mention something regarding 1.2G download, but figured that it was just how much space the songs would take up once copied from the disk.  Could it be that it is really trying to download all those songs from the Marketplace?  This was not how the AC/DC pack worked.  A quick Google check seemed to confirm the download conclusion.  So let’s do some quick math… 1.2G / (300M) per 24 hrs gives about 4 days worth of standard download allotments.  Comparing that to the 3 hours I had left before the rest of the band showed up and you get SOL.  As with the Steam issue, the disk was legally purchased, I have the physical media in my hand, paid the required fee which added $10 to the overall cost of the disk, followed all the procedures and yet some genius decided everyone had high speed Internet and would be more than happy to wait for a 1.2G download before being able to play the songs.  Up to this point, RB has done everything right – plenty of DLC and imports of expansion packs, but this latest requirement is not appreciated.  Later that evening, I started the download in my uncapped window (1-5AM) and got it down that way so, at least  next time I’m ready.

Note to the RB coders, I’ll let this slide if you  will finally add some decent stats to the game so we can assess our efforts better.