Jeff Boulter's Weblog

I've switched

In 1997, Bill Gates made a visit to Barnes and Noble. He wasn't buying books, he was visiting with the guys who ran BarnesAndNoble.com. After that meeting, they switched from their Solaris-based platform to Microsoft servers.

I was working at Firefly in 1997 and Barnes and Noble was our current big customer. To keep our big customer happy, we had to port our software to Windows NT to make it work for BarnesAndNoble. To get that done, I needed to get a PC and soon one showed up on my desk at work, previously only inhabited by a Mac and a terminal window.

So I guess I can claim that Bill Gates directly caused my switch to a PC for my primary work machine. I resisted it at first, but after a while I started to see that some of the apps were better, notably Internet Explorer. It was faster and crashed less than Netscape. Later when I went to work at Microsoft, it was a no-brainer - everything was Microsoft software. I swore I would never use another crappy Netscape product again.

That's the way it remained for quite a few years - until very recently. Outlook, then Outlook Express wasn't cutting it for my email needs, so I went looking and found Mozilla (nee Netscape) Thunderbird, which is a pretty good email client. That's been working out pretty well for the last few months.

Even more recently, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 0.8, the latest rename and version of their open-source next-generation browser. I gave it a try and quickly found it very well done. I began to use it more and more until I decided to make the switch - I made it my default browser.

There's a few issues with some websites (mostly ones I wrote!), but for the most part, it's become my preferred PC browser at home and at work. Tabbed browsing is great, it's fast, and compatible. Search integration is cool. Type-ahead find is amazing.

The intial versions of Mozilla (and Netscape 6 and 7) were horrible, slow, bloated apps that crashed often. Firefox and Thunderbird seem to be a great step in a new direction and I think they're finally ready for primetime.

Videos worth Viewing

Video on the net is always iffy. When I'm in interactive mode, stopping to sit and watch a tiny video is hardly worth it. Lately I've found a few which are worth the effort:

Sacramento TV News Report on Geocaching
If you still don't get Geocaching (or know someone else who doesn't), this video is a good intro.

Snow Tow
You know what's going to to happen, it's just a matter of when.

Hey Ya!, Charlie Brown
This is better than both the real Hey Ya! video and the classic Peanuts special. Unfortunately it's been taken down for copyright reasons, but it's widely available on Kazaa or other file-sharing networks. For Macs, Acquisition rocks.

101 Reasons Not to Work at Yahoo!

I love working at Yahoo!, but it seems lately that Yahoo! is creating more and more reasons not to do work while I'm here.

There's the free, very nice gym for one. Personally I've never stepped foot in it, but lots of people do use it. They offer classes in yoga, aerobics, volleyball tournaments, and whatever. There's the bocce courts, sand volleyball, and the bay trail for other recreation. I'm glad they want to keep us in shape. I bet it keeps the health care costs down.

Of course we have a subsidized cafeteria. Soda and gourmet coffee are free, so there's no reason to get in your car and drive down the street to a local sandwich shop or Starbucks. On the way in, stop by and use the no-fee ATM, or pick up a birthday card in the Yahoo Mini-Mart.

Don't bother going home to wait for the UPS guy. Have your packages shipped here and they'll magically show up at your desk. Need to ship a package? You can do that here too.

You can go to school here. You can take classes in everything from Flash programming to managing your priorites to buying and selling a house.

Twice a month, a Winnebago with a full-service hair salon shows up and you can get your haircut right here at work. There's also a dental winnebago that visits every so often. I've heard horror stories about that one. Yesterday "The Bike Doctor" showed up and provided bike-fixing services. On most Fridays, you can drop your car off to be washed while you work.

Notary? Check. Travel Agent for personal trips? Check. Foosball, Golf, Hockey, Rock Climbing, Running, Scrapbooking, Softball, Ultimate Frisbee, Volleyball or Mountaineering Clubs? Check. Discounts at HP, Apple, Sprint PCS, Ford, Office Depot? Check. Dry cleaning service? Check.

I guess the rationale here is that by giving us fewer excuses to leave campus, we'll spent time more time doing work. Theoretically you could live here. You have food, shelter, showers, recreation, and a fat internet connection. You could even clothe yourself in Yahoo! from the Yahoo! Store. A couple of years ago, the employee Christmas gift was a nice sleeping bag so you could sleep (more comfortably) under your desk.

But I can't help think that some people might spend more time doing this other stuff rather than working.

"That project plan I owe you? No sorry, I won't have it today. I've got a financial knowledge class at 10, yoga at 11, lunch at 12, then I need to drop off my dry cleaning, get the car washed, rent some DVDs and do some shopping. How does next week sound?"

It's something like this phenomenon I noticed in college which I refer to as procrastination by proxy. Hey, Steve and John are out playing frisbee and not stidying, so I can too. Julie's chatting in the hall and she aces every test. I'll go chat too. Of course you could do this all day long because at any one time, someone is always not going to be working/studying.

The latest reason to live at work is this DVD Station service, where you can rent DVDs from the Yahoo Kwik-E-Mart. The dumb part is that you have to browse and rent the movies from little kiosks next to mart, not browse from the comfort of your desk. I'll keep my Netflix, thank you very much.

As long as they're going to try to keep me here, I'm holding out for the opening of a Home Depot next to the parking lot. That would be really convenient for me and prevent me from running errands there at lunchtime. Then again, what could I possibly need at Home Depot if my "home" is Yahoo!?

I want my $3.24 and 45 minutes back

Dear Fry's Electronics,

I would like my $3.24 and 45 minutes back.

Yesterday I went to your store in Sunnyvale. All I wanted was a male-to-male DIN-9 null modem adapter so I can connect my GPS to my Treo. That's all. Since you're THE nerd haven, carrying everything from resistors to deodorant, I thought of nowhere else to go but to your store. I looked on the web for it, but it's such a small thing that I'd get killed on shipping and I was drawn by the allure of having it RIGHT NOW.

I got there and wandered through the aisles, looking for such a device. First I found DIN-9 ends. No, I don't really want to make my own cable. In a different section, I found DIN-9 ends with the wiring and cases. Close, but not what I want.

About 20 minutes later someone detected my aimless wander and asked if I needed help. I told him what I wanted and he directed me to some older guy who seemed to know what he was talking about. He immediately told me they he only had RS-232 null modem adapaters, even though he admitted that DIN-9 is what most people wanted.

I stared and stared at the wall of connectors and gender changers. Not wanting to go home empty handed, I got a DIN-9 gender changer, even though I was pretty sure that wouldn't work.

On the way out, I remembered a needed a book for work, the Apache Cookbook, a fairly common and popular O'Reilly book. You didn't have it. You did have a completely obsolete book on Object-Oriented Programming for the Macintosh that I bought over 10 years ago though. Great. Thanks for keeping that stocked.

I walked out the door with $3.24 less in my pocket and 45 minutes of my life lost. I'd like those back please.

I don't want to go return the item as my time is more valuable than the 30 minutes I'd have to spend waiting in line to return something to your store. I accept Visa, Checks, PayPal, Yahoo Paydirect, cash, and baseball cards - basically anything but store credit.

As for the time, I'll accept in in the form of productive work OR 45 minutes of extra sleep on a Monday morning. Your choice.

As for the gender changer, I'm going to keep it. I'll throw it in one of my boxes of miscellaneous cables and electronics in the garage. It'll sit with the 2400 baud modems, 100-ft serial cable, AppleTalk dongles, fat ethernet adapters, and other stuff that I'm sure I'll need at some point. Who knows, maybe someday it will save me a trip to your store.

Sincerely,

Jeff Boulter

There's nothing interesting in the middle, anyway

I've visited 52% of the U.S. States. I counted ones I've driven through, but not ones I've flown through.

create your own visited states map

I can't cook

I think that if I wasn't married, I'd starve.

The other day I decided to have some fish sticks. Fish sticks. Just stick em in the oven for a few minutes and eat them. I put them in, then came back later to find them rock-hard. Overcooked. The french fries I made with them were undercooked. I ate them anyway.

This afternoon I had soup. Soup is ok. I can cook soup. You can't undercook or overcook soup. It's either cold or you have to let it cool. No problem.

Tonight I decided to finish off the fish sticks. Having learned my lesson, I cooked them alone, without the french fries. I read the directions and put them in the oven for a little less time than the box suggested. I even set a timer.

The timer went off and I noticed a funny smell. Smoke filled the kitchen. The fish sticks were completely charred. At this point I considered going to Wendy's. No, I can cook something. Searching through the cabinet again, I found some Rice-A-Roni that Anne doesn't want to eat. Yes, I can cook rice. ($191.00??)

Browned the rice OK, then went to add the "special beef seasoning" (i.e. miscellaneous animal parts ground into powder) and the bag exploded, most of it on the floor and on my clothes. It seemed to cook ok after that. It was at least edible. Lacking in flavor for obvious reasons, but edible.

Next time, it's Wendy's or soup. Or maybe I should just go pick up a sack of Bachelor Chow. I wonder if they make Wife-is-Out-of-Town chow?

I'm packing heat

You can never be too prepared in the 10th safest city in America. After a recent distressing incident, I decided it was time to arm myself. So if anytime things aren't bending your way, I'm now your gun for hire.

Especially if you need something heated to 760 OR 920 degrees Fahrenheit. That's right, I bought a heat gun.

What will I do with such a tool? Well fix the plastic bumper of my car which I bashed in a few weekends ago for one. After that, uh, dry my hair really fast? Melt stuff... I'm sure there are thousands of things I haven't thought of yet. Anyway, who knew they invented such cool toys? I can at least feel proud of owning one.

Like the random guy ahead of me in line at Pep Boys said, "19 bucks? You can't go wrong!"

I've found it

I've finally found it - the most obnoxious personal home page in existence. Oh boy. Bonus points to the first person to identify the midi song.

Meetings on the West Coast

One thing I've never really gotten used to on the west coast is how people go to meetings. Today was a perfect example.

I had a meeting at 1 pm and I arrived a few minutes early, because that's what you do when attending meetings with people from the east coast. There were some people in "Yosemite" conference room when I arrived, so I patiently waited outside for them to finish.

1 pm rolled around and they weren't leaving, but I also didn't see anyone else arriving for the meeting. I thought maybe that I had the room wrong, so I took a lap around the floor to see if anyone I recognized was waiting in there. Didn't see anyone so I returned to wait outside the conference room. 1:05 arrived and still there was no one, so I took another lap. Maybe I got the date or time wrong? It was in my Treo though.

After a full lap, I ran into a coworker who told me that the meeting was at 1 today, but in the "Yellowstone" conference room. There are plenty of National Parks, couldn't they name them a little more distinctively?

Anyway, after wandering around some more, we found a conference room map and then the room. At 1:07 we were just the second and third people to arrive. Of course there was someone else in the room already, so we had to kick them out.

Seven minutes into the meeting, the first task was to get the presentation up. This wasn't my presentation of course, but what else did I have to do while others showed up? The computer in the conference room actually worked, except for the small fact that there was no network cable attached to it. And it wasn't just unplugged - there simply was no cable. So someone else ran out to find a network cable. Amazingly the projector worked since those usually never do.

In the meantime a few more people showed up. At 1:12, the organizer of the meeting appeared and began trying to figure out how to conference in the participants from remote sites on the phone. He tried this and no one was there, which was strange. So I sent an IM from my Treo to Todd who was supposed to be calling in. He said he was waiting for us. Something wasn't right. So the organizer called the admin and got a bunch of different conferencing numbers. I'm sending confusing IMs back and forth trying to fix this. Then the admin calls back and gives us the right numbers and someone else sends out an email to everyone who was invited of the correct numbers.

Finally we called the right number and everyone was there. I'm amazed they waited for 25 minutes. The meeting then started promptly at 1:30, just before the final participants moseyed in.

The meeting was pretty free-form, with half-presentation and half-discussion. At 2 pm, people started gathering outside for their meeting in the room at 2. So we got kicked out.

No wonder people hate meetings. With meetings like these, it's a wonder we get anything done at all! Campus wi-fi would sure help the networking situation, but I'm not sure what to do about these west coast meeting attitudes.

In light of recent events

In light of recent events, I think it can be finally proven that Michael and Janet Jackson are NOT the same person. Then again, maybe Michael has had more surgery than just his nose...

Traffic hit an all-time high on news on Monday. A little nudity goes a long way.

Who Let the Cats Out?

I did.

Our cat, former 20th cutest object in the universe, is an indoor cat. The apartments he 'grew up' in were not suitable for him visiting the outside world. Since we now live in a house, with a small yard, occasionally we let him wander outside for a bit to eat some grass and mostly just sniff everything in sight. This usually ends when he decides the yard is boring and he'd like to jump up and see what's on the other side of that fence.

Since he now has a view of more 'wild' territory, occasionally he spys another animal, usually a cat or dog. His reaction to this is perfectly rational. For a cat. He screams.

MMmmmrraaaaarrrwwwwrrrraa!

Really loudly. Over and over again. It's quite disturbing. If you get too close to him while he's in this mood, he might just attack you. He took a chunk out of Anne the other day because she was just in the vicinity. His tail expands to the point where he looks like a racoon. I guess he figures if he can't physically get to the animal to defend 'his' turf, he can at least yell at them loudly enough that they might go away. It doesn't work.

So this morning there was a cat on the fence again and he started with his yelling. Walking around him carefully I went over to the back door and opened it. You wanna go out and fight, fine. Go ahead. I called him and he carefully slipped out the door, meowing as to say "Is this really OK??".

I expected him to bolt for the fence and yell at the cat, but no. He completely forgot about the cat and just did laps around the yard, nervously sniffing everything that could be sniffed. The whole time the other cat was looking down on him from atop the fence, relaxed as could be.

I tried to show him the other cat, but it he just didn't see him. Finally the other cat started moving around and Pixel spotted him once I held him up and pointed his head in the right direction. "Mwrrrrarrrrraraaarrraaaa!" But by this time the other cat was casually walking away and it was time for me to go to work. I shooshed the cat inside and he went without protest.

Stupid cat. Cute, but stupid.

I could be a NASA Engineer

When my computer starts acting really funky, I'm pretty good at reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows or MacOS or whatever. It seems that this will work even if your computer is on Mars.

Yes, I'm the last person on earth to see "Return of the King"

Well, that's not exactly true. There were a whole theater of people who shared this distinction with me. It was surprisingly full actually.

After a long day of geocaching, we stopped to grab dinner when we decided to see what movies were playing across the street. Low and behold, Return of the King was playing in half an hour. We quickly grabbed some grub and headed in.

It was a very good movie with battle scenes that more impressive than any others I can remember. The special effects were seamless with the live action.

It was quite long though and I wish some of the "character building" scenes were a little shorter. Yes, he's dead. Get over it.

If there's ever a drinking game based on the Lord of the Rings movies, you should have to take a drink every time Frodo appears to be dead or Sam starts to cry. You'd probably have alcohol poisoning by the time the three movies ended.

I was glad to see that Sam has gotten over his athsma since the days when he was a Goonie.

I wonder if Elijah Wood had a personal trainer to prepare for these movies. Not for his physique, but for his eyebrows. He spent most of the movie with his eyebrows pointed up in the middle, looking bemused at just about everything he came across.

The scene in the pub after they return to the shire could have been straight out of Budweiser commercial. "What do you do after you've saved the four lands? Enjoy a cold, refreshing Budweiser with three of your short friends."

Having never read the books, it was a great story to discover even if the ending was a bit cliche. They literally sailed off into the sunset. Then again, maybe that wasn't cliche yet when Tolkien wrote it.

We're still only about halfway through the Fellowship of the Ring audio CD set we got for Christmas last year, but I'm looking forward to hearing the full story of all three books and all the details that come with it.

Long live the King!