Jeff Boulter's Weblog

Where Not to Geocache

'Homeless Island' is kind of like Survivor, but instead of food rewards, the reward is heroin. The San Francisco Chronicle is doing a very revealing 5-part series on the homeless problem in SF.

Question of the Day

Where does mouse gunk come from? You know, that crusty stuff that accumlates on the contacts underneath the ball. Is it dust, skin, or something even more sinister? I'm not sure I really want to know the answer to this question.

On the move

Today is our first day at the new Yahoo building. There was much controversy about who was going to move across the street. Personally, I don't care. The buildings look nearly identical inside.

Some first impressions:

- Something's weird with the floor. My monitor is constantly bouncing.
- I have a window cube now, which is nice, but my cube needs to be reconfigured so my back isn't to the window and I don't get all the glare on my monitor.
- My commute is about 30 seconds shorter. Woo hoo!
- I got a full-sized parking spot very close to the building. That never happened at the old building.
- My cell phone appears to get better reception here.
- The conference room computers look new, which mean they may actually work. Wow.
- The conference rooms on the first floor are named after Gilligan's Island castaways: "Ginger, Maryann, SS Minnow, etc'.
- The second floor rooms are "in" names like "competent", "appropriate" and even "conitent". I've got to think of a work arrangement that will avoid sentences like "I'm in 'compentent'."
- The third floor rooms are named after remote places like Siberia, Pluto, and Timbuktu. No, we're not bitter!
- There are these weird mogul-like things in the courtyard lawn. This is what happens when architects run out of ideas.

This is definitely not going to be a productive day.

I'm a world record holder

Well, not by name, but yesterday I participated in the world's largest group yodel. Not that I can yodel really, but I can move my mouth and pretend to, just like in church.

The event was sponsored by Yahoo as some promotional thing. It was actually quite a bit of fun. They lured employees, family and friends with promises of free beer, a t-shirt, some free entertainment and a chance to win an iPod. Sadly I did not win the iPod.

They had all kinds of media there and the mayor of Sunnyvale, so I think they had to make sure they would break the previous Guinness record of 937. They had thousands of buttons printed up with "I broke the record on them", then the execs upped the ante with promises to work the cafeteria for the day if we did it. At 4 pm the COO got on the intercom system (which I didn't even know we had) and told everyone to stop working and go yodel.

There sure were a lot of people there. 1773 to be exact which was enough to break the record as long as it's certified by the Guinness people. That must be one strange job to maintain those records.

This must have had some serious promotional value to the company. Let's say the average Yahoo makes $50/hour and there were 1700 employees there for a half-hour. That's $50 * 1700 / 2 = $85,000 plus all the setup, t-shirts and other event-related costs probably made it over $100,000. In any case, Terry Semel looked relieved when the Mayor of Sunnyvale annouced the total.

Tyler Marie Ware was there and she has quite a voice for an 8-year-old. They also showed the commercial that she was in as part of her prize for winning the competition.

Wylie Gustafson led the yodel (who seems to have made amends with Yahoo) with an answer and response, but I'm not sure that we really had everybody continuously yodeling for one minute. I guess it was good enough for them.

Apparently it was on the local tv news last night and I expect more news to appear.

It was a good bit of fun and if nothing else, it made for something to write about in my blog. :-)

Update: My Dad found a bigger picture and I'm in it! See if you can find Waldo.

Thank you for choosing Sprint

I got this email from Sprint (my cell phone carrier), suddenly thanking me for being a customer and explaining how much better they'll be in the future.

Methinks they're a bit worried about number portability kicking in next week.

--

Dear Jeff,

I want to thank you for choosing Sprint. It is our commitment to provide our valued customers with the best in wireless communication and I want to personally reaffirm that your satisfaction is our number-one priority.

You'll see our commitment to your satisfaction in our ongoing dedication to expanding the Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. We have already invested over $17 billion to build and expand our network. But we've taken your feedback seriously, and we know that there is still room to improve. We are building 1,700 new cell towers this year, so you'll be able to connect whenever you like and experience improved coverage within homes and buildings.

You'll also notice improvements in customer service. Now it's easier than ever before to get your questions answered the first time you contact us, with faster access to a PCS Customer Solutions Specialist.

We look forward to continuing to serve you. Again, I thank you for choosing Sprint.

Sincerely,
Len Lauer
President
PCS Division of Sprint

Please help me kill my answering machine

I really hate my answering machine. It's the type of device you can't really try out in the store and you have no idea how well it will work until you get it home.

Ours has a particularly bad interface for indicating when it has messages - it flashes a light. The light flashes faster when there are new messages, but I can never remember how fast that is, so I can't tell if I have new messages or not.

It's digital and has this really annoying voice that speaks 3 complete sentences before it actually starts playing the messages. To delete a message, you hit the delete button while the message is playing. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation given when you've deleted a message. If you hit delete when no message is playing, it deletes all the mesages, making it interesting when trying to delete the last message.

I don't really want to buy another answering machine because I hate the device to begin with. I can never remember how to listen to my messages remotely or what the magic keys are to replay or delete a message from my phone.

The problem is the very limited interface of this throwaway device. What I want instead is a system that uses interfaces I'm familar with and use every day, like email and the web.

I want a service (or program I can run on my Mac at home) that will take my calls, record them, and then email them to me. Yes, email. Send me a little sound file that I can listen to whenever I want and speed up or slow down. I can save them just like email.

The email would also be accompanied by a website where I could browse messages, review callerID history. I would also be able to browse this site on my Treo instead of messing around with trying to translate phone digits into commands.

This may be asking too much, but it would be nice of the system could actually use voice recognition to translate the message into text. After all, I can read a lot faster than I can listen and some people tend to ramble. I hate trying to write down phone numbers from messages though. Something in my brain doesn't quite work right and I can't remember 7 numbers long enough to write them down.

When I worked at Microsoft, I tested a system that would email your messages to you. It was really cool. That was 5 years ago. Surely this is possible now.

I'm looking at VOCP, but I'm doubtful that I'll be able to get it to work on my G4. PhoneValet is in the right direction, but doesn't answer calls. Plus, I don't think the built-in modem is caller-id or voice-capable. Damn. I once bought a Supra Voice-capable modem specifically to try to kill my answering machine, but I don't think I ever got it working.

Hi Apple, in your quest to create the ultimate media hub, how about creating iPhone? You've added builtin faxing into Panther, it should be easy, right? You could integrate it in with the whole iLife suite - AddressBook is a no brainer, but you could do other cool things like Dial-a-Song with iTunes and Macintalk. Please?

It's a braaand new car!

Anne is tired of taking the train to the city and I'm tired of walking to to work in the rain, so we've been talking about getting another car. We've been a one-car household for 4 1/2 years now. We really like our CR-V, but it's sometimes inconvenient to rely on only one car, especially when one of us goes away for the weekend for whatever reason. It will only get worse when Anne put lots of miles on the CR-V driving to San Francisco.

So we started researching cars.

It was surprisingly easy to come up with our criteria. We were looking for a car that:

1. Was reliable. After having owndd some of the least reliable cars (Chevy Cavalier and a Mercury Topaz), I just didn't want to deal with the worry, expense and inconvenience of having to repair a car.
2. Got good gas mileage. Since Anne would be driving it to the city, the better mileage it got, the more money we'd save over the CR-V. We actually used MapSource to figure out how many city and highway miles were on her commute, then put the numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the yearly gas cost.
3. Was short! Part of the challenge of working in San Francisco is finding parking, and the smaller your car, the better chance you'll be able to squeeze into that parallel parking spot.
4. Was cheap. We really didn't want to spend a lot of money on this car, especially because we've survived without a second car for so long.

Some quick research on the Internet turned up a few models that most closely matched our criteria - The Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, Civic Hybrid, Toyota Echo, Mini Cooper, Volkswagen Golf and Ford Focus.

The Hybrids (Prius and Civic) were cool, but were more pricey. 50+ miles per gallon was definitely attractive, but when we did the math, the reduced gas requirements wouldn't offset the additional cost of the car for like 10 years. So, they were out. Sorry Mother Nature, this wasn't your day.

The regular Civic is a good, reasonable car, but we already have a Honda which is based on a Civic. They're unbelievably reliable, but also pretty boring. They're not exactly cheap either, even for a stock model. Plus, I'm philosophically opposed to having two cars of the same brand. How do you know which ice cream flavors are best if you always have vanilla?

The Mini Cooper definitely had the coolness factor and gets great gas mileage, but it it's not cheap other, is not at all reliable accoring to Consumer Reports and requirespremium gas. I guess we're just not that cool.

The Golf seemed like a good choice, but it also has reliability problems. The New Beetle had the same problem and was even more expensive. I really like the Passat though and maybe someday we'll get one of those, but it's not what we're looking for right now.

The Ford focus is a Ford. Unreliable. Nixed.

That left the Echo, which seemed like a reasonable small car. Not very exciting, but it seemed like it would do the job reliably and cheaply.

Then we accidentally came across another car, the Scion xA. Scion? What the heck is that? It's actually Toyota's new brand, targeted at capturing the youth market. They only started selling them in June and only in California. They'll be rolling out to the rest of the country in 2004. It's pronounced 'sigh-on', like 'sci-fi'.

The reviews we read were really positive for the car, even with only a 108 hp engine. And it comes fully loaded in the standard configuration - power windows, locks, mirrors, a kickin' stereo system by Pioneer with a CD player that plays MP3s(!), air conditioning and more.

It met all our criteria - Toyota's reliability record, 154 inches long (only behind the Mini and MR 2), 38 miles per gallon, and best of all, only $13K for an automatic. Wow.

Like Saturn, the price is non-negotiable. You pay what's on the window sticker. While normally I'd rather negotiate than pay all the dealer markup, it's hard to complain at $13K.

There's also an xB model which is a really funky-looking small SUV, but we definitely didn't need that.

After researching for hours, we couldn't really find anything not to like about it. On Saturday we headed down the closest Toyota dealer to check it out. It was actually pretty nice and the styling inside was interesting, looking somewhat like a Mini. The most shocking feature was the odometer and tachometer placed in the center of the console. 'Alex' the car dealer was a little slimy, but didn't pressure us. He also didn't seem to know the car very well. We checked out a used Echo (the only one they had), but it definitely didn't excite us and the Scion seemed like a much better value. Some of the reviews went so far to say that there's no reason to buy an Echo.

We left for other errands of the day. I was amazed that I had that much self-control to not buy the car.

After some more research that night, we went out to another dealership on Sunday. We liked 'Dave' better and went for a test drive. It had decent pickup for a 4-cylinder car and drove well. The seat was pretty high for a small car, making it easy to get in and out. The back window is pretty small, especially with the headrests blocking it, but the headrests come out to leave sufficient room to see behind you. The trunk space is pretty much non-existent, but the seats fold down in a 60/40 configuration AND they're removable. Since we already had a car for cargo, this would definitely suffice.

I quickly forgot about the display being in the middle of the console. It's actually kind of nice not having to look through the steering wheel and it made it easier to see the road in front of you. Anne drove it too and liked it, even practicing parallel parking. For a short car, it doesn't look small at all. In fact, it looks like they shrunk a minivan. They didn't have the one we most liked (gray, automatic, no options), so they said they would call when they got one in stock.

More research at home and we chatted about casually during the week. I was pretty much sold, but Anne wasn't quite read.

On Wednesday, my ploy to convince Anne that a Segway would cost 1/3 as much failed miserably. Oh well, that wouldn't solve the problem of getting to work in the rain and I'm not sure if I wanted to be stared at and known as 'The Segway Guy' at work.

Then one dayvAnne got annoyed on her train ride to work, and when she finally got there, she sent me an email. "We should just get the car." "Dave" called too and said they had one in stock. I really wanted to buy the car in Sunnyvale, since it was so much closer and if I had to go back, it would be more convenient, but Dave helped us more and I didn't want to deal with Alex. I still had a bunch of questions though, so I called Dave back. He wasn't there and I left a message. Dave didn't call back, so I called Sunnyvale again instead. Apparently 'Alex' had quit in the last 5 days for some reason, so I talked to 'Fred'. He answered all my questions, so I told him I'd come by. Sorry Dave.

I went down there found Dave, and checked out the cars. I found the one we wanted. It was actually the same one we looked at on Saturday. This must have been the easiest sale Fred ever made. He started it up and I opened up the hood, pretending that I really knew how to inspect the engine of car. He took down the VIN and we went inside to fill out the paperwork.

I must have signed my name 20 times. So much paperwork in buying a car. Even so, it took only about an hour. When we bought our CR-V, I remember it taking 4 or 5 hours, but that's probably because we weren't nearly as decisive and it took a while to get the crappy 11% Honda financing on the spot.

After the finance guy tried to sell me an extended warranty and other crap (I declined), I signed my name a few more times, paid for it, and that was it. It's amazing how quickly you can spend that kind of money. Of course it wasn't $13K by that time, not with stupid CA taxes (8.5%) and licensing fees. I miss New Hampshire.

Overall, it's a pretty cool car and a great value. I've been looking for them on the road for the last week and haven't seen any, so I imagine I'll get some looks until more Scions are on the road. It definitely doesn't scream "I bought a cheap car" either, like the competitors in that price range like the Kia Rio or Chevy Aero. It's not a car that you're embarrassed to drive around by any means.

The only problem is that it's not "my" car, it's Anne's, so I won't drive it much, except on weekends. Well, I hope she enjoys it. Merry Christmas!

Finally, God is doing something about Los Angeles

Frogs will be next.

One Night with a Roomba

With friends coming to town this weekend, I desperately needed to vacuum, but I didn't really want to do it. Being the nerd I am, this seemed like the perfect
time to borrow my coworker's new robotic vacuum cleaner, the Roomba and try to convince my wife that this was the next life-changing gadget after TiVo.

I got the unit all packed in the box, so I got to pretend I just bought it. One of the pieces of paper in the box is a letter from the president of iRobot corporation. It starts, "Welcome to the iRobot Revolution!" Hmm, hasn't there been a lot of movies about robot revolutions? As I recall, none of them turned out very well. Hopefully this Roomba won't go renegade on me.

It's kind of funny that they call it a 'robotic' vacuum cleaner. When dishwashers first came out, did they call them 'robotic dish washers'? I bet some day my kids will be agast when I tell them you actually had to push vacuum cleaners around the house in the olden days.

I took it out of the box and plopped it down in the middle of the living room floor after clearing out some furniture. The cat came over to check it out and sniffed it a bit. He didn't seem to mind it - yet.

Using the remote, I turned it on, set it on 'Max' (vacuum 'till you drop) and let it rip. It instantly came to life with some enthusiastic beeps and started in a spiral pattern around the living room. The cat was terrified, yet fascinated. His tail was huge. He couldn't help but follow it around and yell at it when it happened to head in his direction.

The first thing I noticed about the patterns that it followsis that it's not very efficient. When people vacuum, we tend to go in straight lines. The Roomba likes its spirally pattern, then gets bored with it and goes straight for a little while. It leaves these interesting crop circle-like patterns in the carpet. When it bumps into something it turns, and tends to do a reasonably good job at following walls. I guess the Roomba doesn't need to be so efficient because it's a lot more patient than humans. It will vacuum for as long as it has juice.

The thing is pretty noisy, but it seems to do a good job picking stuff up. A few seconds after it started up, it got stuck underneath the heating unit. It was just the right height for it to wedge itself under there. I freed it quickly and sent it on its way.

It worked on the living room for a little while, then wandered into the hallway, and then a quick tour of the study. It apparently didn't think that room was very dirty because it made a few runs, then headed back down the hallway and into the living room again. Later it bumped back into the hallway and into the bedroom. One really cool thing was seeing it vacuum all the way under the bed. That's something you just can't do easily with a regular vacuum.

It ended up back in the living room again, then headed into the dining room.
The cat is still stalking it, but his tail is a little more normal size now. It just got stuck on the bottom of of my chair. It strugged for a bit and grinded (I hoped it wasn't scraping the wood), then stopped with a sound that sounded like a robotic "Uh-oh". I picked it up with no damage done, gave it a reassuring pat, it started it up again.

It's fun to watch it scoot under bookcases. Oops, it just got stuck on the border of the carpet into the closet. I guess it's a matter of learning where it has trouble and blocking off those areas. Hmm, somehow I imagined my robots being smarter than that. It just got itself under and end table and got frustrated trying to find a way out without bumping into any legs, but eventually it succeeded.

A half hour into its tour of the house, it still hasn't entered the guest bedroom, so I stopped it before the batteries went dead, put it in the bedroom and closed the door. Here I am watching my robotic vacuum, posting to my blog on my laptop over a wireless internet connection. I'm truly living in the future.

A little while later, it finally ran out of juice, stopped and periodically made some beeps so I'd know where to find it. I grabbed it and plugged it in to charge. I was confused when the battery indicator pulsed when I inserted the plug into the Roomba, but before I plugged the other end into the wall. Oh well.

Roomba cleans like a classic procrastinator. It will do part of a room, get bored, then work on another room until it gets bored with that one, then head back to a room it already worked on. I just hope the battery lasts long enough that it gets the whole house done. I don't want to have to do touch-up jobs where the Roomba missed. It clearly doesn't seem to be making any sort of map of the house, it's just going where it can and turning if it bumps into stuff. It tends to enter a room the same way and clean mostly the same areas. Hopefully with enough entopy, it will eventually cover everything. It would be fun to attach a GPS to this thing and capture its travels around my house.

The Pro Elite comes with remote you can use to drive it manually if you want or start or stop it. It's also easier than trying to track it down to stop it, not that it goes very fast.

It seems pretty sturdy, but I don't really want to know what would happen if I accidentally stepped on it. It's got two really knobby tires underneath. By moving them in opposite directions, it can achieve a zero-degree turning radius. A third wheel in front is on a spring, so when you pick it up, it immediately stops. The spring is also activated when it encounters a cliff like a top stair, so it doesn't plunge itself off the edge. Instead, it just turns around. Smart.

It's definitely the kind of thing you'd just want to start when you leave for work the morning to avoid the noise and the hassle of dodging it when it wanders over to wherever you happen to be in the house. It's not the fastest way to vacuum for sure, but with so little effort involved, I'd definitely 'do' it more often. Right now, we only really vacuum when people are coming over. The only problem with this scheme is that if I automate the vacuum cleaning, my wife will delegate another chore to me. Sigh.

Well, my soiree with the Roomba is over. Tomorrow I have to give it back to my coworker or I think his wife will go into Roomba withdrawal.

MY Roomba is on my Amazon wishlist right now. Won't you please bring it home?

What does this dream mean?

I had a dream the other night that my cat opened a lunch stand in our backyard. He had people lined up behind a picnic table and was taking orders for sandwiches.

We had to help him a bit because he was having trouble understanding the orders in english, keeping people in line and making change.

This woman waited a long time in line for some butter for her bread.

That's about all I remember and that's probably a good thing, because any more would probably qualify me for the looney bin.

To Heat or Not to Heat

It's that time again when it gets 'cold' in the Bay Area, that being in the 50's. Gasp! Mostly it means the return of this phenomenon called "rain", which I think I vaguely remember from when we lived in Seattle. It's actually quite neat to see fields of dead brown weeds suddenly spring to life again.

Unfortunately it's also the time when my arch-enemy oxalis returns to take over every livable spot of dirt. Last year I let it get way way too long and it thickly covered huge areas of previously uninhabited dirt around our house, even killing other plants which it shielded from the sun. It wasn't until it started invading the lawn that I declared war and spent many hours weeding it out and liberally using Roundup on the bastards. A little doesn't work. You've got to soak 'em. I don't know what those things sustain themselves on, but they sure grow quick.

So as it gets colder here, we are faced with the decision of when to turn the heat on. It's partially a test of how much New Englander we have left in us. This is summer in New England! Then I start feeling cheap. I wonder how much money we'll save if we leave the heat off for a couple more days. After, it becomes a contest - how long can we last? Right now we've resorted to dressing in layers indoors and wearing heavy sweatshirts. Thank God for the hot tub. We can get really warm, then just hop into bed.

It also seems wasteful to heat the house when we're only here and conscious for a few hours of the day. The cat doesn't seem to mind the cold; he's showing off his new winter coat. I've set up the timer in the past so it only heats when we're here, but it takes so long to heat, it's hardly worth it.

Our heating 'system' is pretty horrible anyway. They really don't bother to insulate houses in California. We might as well just leave the windows open and enjoy the fresh air. Our house is often the opposite of what it is outside. If it's hot out, it's cold inside. Later when it cools down, it's hot inside. Now, it's probably warmer outside than it is inside. One of the smartest investments we made this year was a pet door for the cat, so he can go out to the garage to eat and do his business without us needing to leave the door open. All the heat would just go right out the door and escape up to the attic.

Our heat comes from gas, burned from a single vent in the wall between our kitchen and hallway. It takes a couple hours to actually heat up the house and even then the bedroom at the other end is still freezing.

Again, we'll debate about buying a space heater for the bedroom everytime we see them at Home Depot, but we'll decline to buy it, mostly likely because Anne thinks we'll burn the house down.

I imagine we'll break down in a few days and see if the pilot light is still on. How many days until spring?

Look Mom, no Viruses!

I've always been pretty lax about virus prevention. Having mostly Macs, it just really hasn't been much of an issue. I've got this laptop running Windows XP which I've had for over a year and a half and I've never run any kind of virus scan on it. It is behind my router, but who knows what it's been in contact with.

If you read the news (or watch any tv show or movie with computers in it), you'd think that viruses are rampant on every computer. They can magically jump through the air and infect your computer. You might as well give up, they're already emailing your credit card numbers to every Estonian hacker.

Generally I'm pretty careful about the attachments I open and I apply security updates frequently. My mail filters even automatically delete some of the worst email-based worms. But then my XP machine started doing some weird things and didn't want to shut down, so I decided to check on viruses.

I downloaded Avast, a free virus scanner. I installed it, set it to run a thorough search of my whole drive including archive files and went to bed.

This morning it reported that it found nothing. No viruses, worms, nothing. I was actually surprised. Surely I would have picked up at least one benign virus somewhere. As a matter of fact I can't think of a time when I've ever had a computer virus, except maybe way back in college on some used floppy. Maybe I'm just missing out on all the promiscuous computer use fun.

Hiding from trick-or-treaters

To my neighbors:

I apologize if you knocked on our door on Friday, hoping for candy and no one answered the door. We hadn't bought any candy and weren't really in the mood to deal with halloween. So after Anne picked me up at work, we circled the neighborhood a few times to see how much activity there was. There were a lot of kids roaming around, so we decided to go out to eat.

The problem was I wasn't feeling that great, and we couldn't decide where to eat, so we just ended up driving around for a while until we just decided to go back to work and hide out there for a while. I never do get very many opportunities to take advantage of the air hockey or pool tables anyway. I'm happy to say both matches were a trouncing! (In my favor, of course.) After hanging around a bit more, we thought it would be safe to return home for dinner at 9.

The coast was clear when we got home. The cat sure was freaked out though - he yelled at us, seemly saying "There were all these people coming to the door and ringing the doorbell and I was really scared!"

Now that we've successfully whimped out of Halloween, my favorite part of is now here - the post-holiday discount candy. We picked up some candy corn for ourselves this weekend. Yum.

You Know It's a Slow News Day When

This is one of the top headlines:

Polar Bear Gets Two Root Canals