Wonder of technology

One of a continuing series.

When I built my new PC, I set it up with RAID-1 because, being a writer and all, I'm amazingly paranoid about my data but don't want to run full backups every night.

I had to go through this long and annoying process to set it up which involved me having to buy and install a floppy drive (which I suspect is the only time I'll ever use it), but it worked fine and I was happy.

Until one day, Windows gave me this weird message on startup ("Installing new hardware... found Seagate... found Seagate...") and then both drives started showing up. For a week I didn't notice that somehow, the array had been split and one of the drives wasn't working until today. I went to fix it, which was long and annoying, and when I got it up and going, it rebuilt itself off the older drive, so I lost a week of data (fortunately, I didn't do anything really interesting this week).

I don't mind tinkering with boxes. I've done it most of my life. It's tedious and annoying, but I understand that when you want to do cool, non-standard stuff, you end up getting into loading drivers and reading manuals. I'm okay with that.

But once working, can't it stay working for a week? Is that really too high a standard before everything -- without explanation or any kind of chance to troubleshoot -- blows up on me?

Argh.

Marketing as lying about the worst quality of a product

Watch ads enough, and you'll start to note that much of the time, the ad is an attempt at an almost Rovian sales philosophy: selling the weakest part of your product as a strength (SUVs with huge gas tanks saying "get 300 miles on a single tank!").

But Xbox 360 marketing's taken this up hilariously:

Limit 1 per customer. Due to high demand, orders placed after October 26th may not ship until March 2006.
If you're a serious gamer looking for the ultimate console, the search ends here. Fully loaded, the Xbox 360 Ultimate Bundle

It's $699.92.

The search doesn't end "there" so much as this is the waiting room for the actual place where the search ends. If you're looking for a "the ultimate console" you haven't just found one: you've found the queue. Now just wait a long, long time.

It's crazy. You could sell anything out of stock this way. "Are you tired of pedaling around on a bike that weighs over 10 pounds? Well, for only $5,000,000 you can buy a bike made of pure Unobtainium, a substance we haven't even invented yet, but which we're sure will offer amazing handling and performance sometime after 2050."

"Hungry? Get on the waitlist for Snickers."

Mmm... reverse link farming

One of the interesting things about having a blog with a relatively high Google ranking is that other pages will do things like link to you in an attempt to make themselves look relevant. So, for instance:

scotts faves alicublog busy busy busy talk left si vague nihilism alterdestiny
south knox bubba orcinus altercation the gadflyer uss mariner iraqd martini
republic war and piece american street madkane dogblog lance mannion camos axis.

Hee hee hee. A lot of "lawyer" sites lately, too, which is strange. Discount cruises.

It's interesting that search engines, in attempting to make the web navigable, have created an entire new category of noise, and the battle has changed from being trying to make information usable to trying to pick information from the chaff.

Greatest jacket ever

A Flying Tigers flight jacket.

I believe the patch on the back says "This foreign person has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect, and provide him medical care."

The fun factor in video games

I recently played two games, "Gun" and "Xenosaga 2". One's an RPG and one's an action shooter. Both received mixed reviews.

I gave up on one after the amount of time it took to finish the other.

The first Xenosaga had a bizarre sci-fi plot, some weird game elements, long, long cut-scenes (one ran 45m, if I remember) and while it didn't make a whole lot of sense, it was kind of an enjoyable ride.

The newer one's plot makes less sense, and it's boring, and the combat system is bizarre, complicated, and not worth figuring out. The boringness and general frustration make it a lot harder to sit through a long cutscene (which, in turn, is 50% awkward pauses). Some of the characters were amusing before, now they're just annoying. The weird stuff still doesn't make sense. It's not worth the effort.

Now, take Gun. Gun's this Wild West story, and you run around and shoot a lot of stuff and run people over with your horse and get into gunfights and cheat at poker (which is hilarious). It's got some gore, a dark sense of humor, and it's super, super short. I looked at the progress meter at one point and thought "there's no way I'm this close to the end." Whoops... turns out I was. But at the same time, it's fun. This is why I play these games: instead of vegging out with some bad television, I'd rather play some random game and trample people or roll up a giant ball of stuff.

There's always a balancing act going on with games, and especially RPGs. I want challenge and detail, a good, preferably somewhat complicated story, good graphics, gameplay, but those things are all really hard. If I had to choose again between those two, it'd be Gun every time: Xenosaga was hours of me trying to justify continuing to play, while Gun was hours of me blowing up trains and laughing.

This is why I loved games like Champions of Norrath and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance -- while not long on story or character development, they strip out all the not-fun stuff from the genre. Running back and forth to town's annoying. Voila! The portal scroll! Complicated controls whittled down into something smooth, easy, and powerful to use. And so on, until you're left with dungeon-crawling goodness with no rough edges. Sit down, clear an objective, save, and you can walk off. If hack-and-slash games are your thing, this is perfect.

Generally, that doesn't enter into game reviews written by professionals. If Xenosaga sucks to start playing, and you don't want to spend hours figuring out the combat system so you can win quicker victories and spend more proportional time running from place to place and then watching the equally unfun in-game movies, that's a crappy game. I have no idea how it got an average 72% rating.

I will now move on to Dragon Quest VIII, whenever I can get a copy.

Uluru

Driving down the coastal highway back to Cairns at four in the morning, I got pulled over by the cops, who were coming in the opposite direction. They wished me a good morning, and warned me that there would be a couple of trucks coming after them (four, I think) and that I should stick to the shoulder until they had all passed.

Then four big trucks went by, followed by another cop. That's how narrow that coastal highway was: shipping required the police to pull people over and clear the corners.

Which brings me to another aside: the truckers in Australia are crazy reckless. People complain here (rightly) that any moron can buy a Ford Extinction, which is an entirely different vehicle than their old Caravan or Civic. In Australia, the truckers drive like they're still in Civics, and they're mad about it. Compared to what we're used to as standard U.S. behavior, those guys were like rabid cab drivers.

Anyway. On the Qantas flight, I zonked out and came to not long before landing. One of the Qantas attendants chatted us up, talking about the hurricanes and Bush ("He's so stupid!" she said incredulously). Every time I encountered this, I had to keep from getting into a long political discussion ("Okay, so here's what you don't know about American politics...").

Uluru is a giant sandstone rock, part of a larger formation, and it sticks out from the almost dead-flat desert and it looks like it's a mile high. It's a big red rock that shouldn't be there. Even from the air, it's eerie to see.

From afar, it's a big red thing
Closer, there are small vertical ridges
Closer, there are subtle wide variations in color, and long horizontal ridges
Closer, there are pits, differences in erosion that have given sections different textures, like pits and caves
From an arm's length, the sandstone looks almost like scales

As the sun sets and the light goes farther into the red end of the spectrum, Uluru seems to glow.

Being around it provokes primal reactions. The rock seems familiar, though it shouldn't, and because of that, it's also a little threatening. It inspires awe.

We hiked around it one morning (this takes about three hours) and what was most amazing was how it changed as our perspective changed. There are sections that have eroded to look like they've been taken off cleanly with a blade, revealing curved, bulbous, almost brain-like formations. The light will catch the ridges one way and give it the appearance of tipping, and fifteen minutes further walk you can imagine the water flowing off it when it rains.

It's beautiful and inspiring and scary, and it's worth the trip. I would have sat on a trans-Pacific flight just to see Uluru.

Port Douglas

Port Douglas is not far north of Cairns, but it was the first time I had to drive in Australia. I did this by repeating "left left left" whenever I got into the car. The coastal road from Cairns is long and hazardous, more hazardous if you've only just gotten used to being on a different side of the car.

Pulling out or making turns, I always had to think it through:
- Where does my direction go?
- Where's the other direction of traffic go? Do they stop?
- Where do other people who are turning go?

and
- Are there any Americans around who might run into me even if I think this through properly?

Port Douglas is a lot nicer than Cairns. The nightclub-and-touristy thing hasn't overrun the whole town. You could get a decent meal, for instance, without being forced to pay $20/entree. There was a lot of real estate for sale or rent, and some development going on, but it wasn't so big a deal.

We stayed at a place run by a couple of Germans, so I got to use a bit of my extremely rusty UW-brand language skills on them (this, naturally, was amusing).

On the Zumsteg name
, a brief digression
I grew up with it as Zum-steg, like reading it aloud with American English pronunciation. I understand back in Germany it's more Zoom-schtaag with a quick "zoom", but I don't particularly care one way or another. Anyway, the woman who checked us in told me that Zum-steg was incorrect, and that it should be pronounced "Sum-stahg" and I smiled, nodded, and didn't protest. I've had my name butchered so many times that having someone come up with a new pronunciation was novel. And if she's right, so be it.

We spent our time in Port Douglas geeking out on the rainforests. We walked Mossman Gorge, and the Daintree National Park, finally getting up to Cape Tribulation, where the rainforest runs right out to the shore and into the water, one of the few places in the world where this happens (or so we're told).



One of the beaches had this great set of signs:



Yes -- don't swim, the stingers'll get you! And if you do get stung, even though you're a moron we're not going to let you die... here's some vinegar to use while you wait for the medics.

Then we went to the Atherton Tableland. This involved driving the Gillies Highway, which is absurdly long and twisty. The map has a road. Driving that road is crazy. The emotional roller-coaster went:
- amused
- bored
- frustrated
- angry
- amused
- exasperated
- despairing
- bored
- incredulous

Turn right. Turn left. Repeat forever. There were numbers painted on the road for no reason, counting down from 100. I grabbed onto them, knowing that something had to be at the end of the numbers. They counted back up in the same manner. I have no idea.

We stopped for a road crew once and the guy holding the stop sign wandered over.
"First time?" he asked.
"Yeah," I replied.
"Pretty curvy," he said. "Should be about five minutes." Then he walked back to talk to the next car.

Aussies. They're crazy.

We checked out a crater lakes, Lake Eacham (nice and all, but Crater Lake is way better). We got to see "bum breather" turtles that, the sign helpfully explained, have specially adapted so they can draw some oxygen out of water they cycle in and out of their... bum. We saw a 500-year old Gadgarra Red Cedar tree (possibly the last accessible native one in all of Queensland). And again, I felt aware of the wonder of all things, seeing this ancient tree in a forest of young growth (settlers had logged around it, sparing it for reasons no one knows) reaching up through the canopy.

Next up: Uluru, and the Flies of Dooooooom.

The disturbing math behind cosmetic surgery

Thought of this while reading a random WebMD article.

If 9.2 million people have cosmetic surgery in the U.S. every year (and if you work that out as a percentage, that's a couple people out of every 100),

People who get repeated surgeries on the same feature possibly suffer from a psychological condition called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), also known as "imagined ugliness syndrome." Body dysmorphic disorder, which affects 7%-12% of cosmetic-surgery patients (men and women equally), is characterized by an obsession with an imagined physical flaw to the point that it can interfere with normal functioning.

So of 9,200,000 people, 7-12% of them get surgery that won't help them (and may make things worse). That's 644,000 to 1,104,000 people getting cosmetic surgery needlessly when what they should be getting is help in the form of therapy or

Maybe that 9.2 million includes minor stuff like botox injections, or chemical peels and so on. But any way you slice it (sorry) this is disturbing.

Sick kids love that Usher

Child's Play is a great charity, and I only found this because I was browsing the list of Seattle Children's Hospital looking for what to contribute. I wanted to get that out of the way before I pointed out:

Here are the CDs they want.

After this I'm going to yell at some kids to get off my lawn, but first: do they want kids to get sicker? Learn how to tell your woman you've had a baby with another woman?

The problem with silent PCs

I put together the new computer over the last couple days (having avoided those Maxtors and instead gone with sweet, sweet Seagates with their 5-year warranty). I took a lot of time picking everything out for maximum quiet, only to find that one component, the video card, has a fairly loud fan and until I go solve *that issue* (likely through buying a replacement specialty fan or otherwise hacking my way out of this) it doesn't really matter if I've solved all the other problems.

I know this is dumb, but it hadn't occurred to me that if I built a PC where everything but one piece was far, far quieter than the old one's corresponding piece, the net reduction in noise would not be all that amazing.

I know.

Lizard Island

Lizard Island is a small island on the Great Barrier Reef. It has a small resort (max occupancy about 80), a research station, and an airstrip. The flight from Cairns in a tiny Cessna is about 60 minutes, and the Macair flight costs -- no joke -- as much as half my LAX-Australia ticket. Because they can.

In retrospect, and I say this ahead of a huge rant about how Lizard Island's the greatest place in the universe, I would have been better off booking at Heron Island.

Anyway, the whole point was that I wanted to see the Reef, which is one of the wonders of the world and which, despite my fervent donations of huge chunks of my income to environmental groups, might not be around for my kids to see. I'm a huge nature geek (I'm a geek in general, actually, let's just be up-front about it). Plus, Mrs. Zumsteg isn't into snorkeling, so being on the reef, I get to go swim with the fishies while she can read or wander around and we can still go to lunch together.

Part of my problem writing this chunk of the Australian trip is that I haven't been able to put together an adequate description of what it's like to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef.

I would put on my flippers and mask, walk out, and even in the shallows there were fish hanging out in small groups, darting in and out with the waves. The coral started after swimming out for only a few seconds, and that's colorful and it's exciting to see it up close. Coral's beautiful in its natural state, and the more you know about coral, the more miraculous and interesting it becomes to look at (here's the Wikipedia article)

And within the spires or speeding by the brain are fish so brightly colored it's startling. I found myself stopping to stare from a distance at the fish regarding me warily, because I couldn't believe it. It was nice out that day, and as much as photos you may have seen of these guys makes them look beautiful (or for that matter, looking at them in an aquarium) seeing them in the shallow water of the reef with sunlight pouring down, the only way I can describe it is that they glow a little. They're truly radiant.

Enough about me staring at fishes, though. The important thing is the treat of giant clams.

When you read "giant clams" you might be thinking "ah, so perhaps two or three times the size of a normal clam." I thought that too, once. And as I swam out, I saw clams that were that large, then larger, and then I came across one. There's a picture in the Wiki article if you want to see what they kinda look like, and offers this "they weigh an average of 440 pounds and can measure as much as 1.5 meters across."

I saw several that were that large. I understand why people think that giant clams might eat people. It's hard to convince yourself otherwise.

"There's no way it got that large filtering water," I thought. "Every once in a while it has to eat a snorkeler."

And I'd swim faster. They have giant maws, which were white with small patterned squiggles of bright color that matched their mantles.

There's something about it, though, that reached way, way back in my brain and squeezed. It's huge and alien and more than a little creepy.

I was always been disappointed that fictional aliens are frequently so close to human that you could wave off the difference. I figured that alien beings would look like a larger, weirder intelligent version of life that went down another path entirely:
- spiders (shudder)
- squid or an octopus that develops opposable digits

To which I now add
- clams

Lizard Island has this cool thing where they give you a little dinghy with an outboard motor for a day, and you can advance-order food (which was excellent!) and beverages for the trip. So in the morning, Jill and I turned up, and they scheduled us for "Pebbly Beach" (photo forthcoming), one of a couple of tiny beaches where they only let one boat out to. If we'd had more time, I'd have taken another trip and run round to to see other parts of the island, but because Lizard Island is horribly expensive, we had only two nights.

So I snorkeled and read, Jill read and watched me snorkel, and then we headed back.

Lizard Island is all-inclusive, with the exception of alcohol, which was reasonably priced.

Anyway, after that day, we came back and that night they were offering a seafood buffet -- grilled lobster tail, sushi, all kinds of good stuff.

A brief digression
My brother and I, when we're both in town, often head to the Anthony's Home Port in Des Moines which, for reasons unknown to us, continues to offer a crab feed for some high price. My brother and I then eat ridiculous amounts of crab. When we're in Alaska, we usually have at least one opportunity to go crab-wild and blissfully gorge ourselves. I have no idea why Anthony's doesn't have our picture posted somewhere, or at least show it to the servers every once in a while ("It's holiday season, and that means those Zumsteg kids are likely to be in town...") because we put on a crab-eating clinic. Our servers go through many stages:
- helpful
- amused
- a little annoyed
- annoyed
- bored
- resigned
(breakthrough)
- greatly amused and helpful

This concludes our digression.


I loved Lizard Island. I liked all the people, I loved the snorkeling and the natural wonder of it all. That it was outrageously expensive was, when I wasn't enjoying myself totally, a faint background noise, beneath the movement of sand and wave on the beaches, but still there.

I walked into the dining area, saw what the night's dinner would be, clapped my hands together, turned to my wife, and said "Let's show these Australians how we treat a seafood buffet back in Seattle."

Then I set about my task.

On our last day, I went for a walk, first up to Chinaman's Lookout (I did not name it that) and then on to the other side, where there was a long beach with many boats anchored in the bay. Small cruises, maybe, for snorkelers? I had thought the only way to get there was plane, but if it was only an hour's flight, that doesn't put it so far out from Cairns that you couldn't day-trip it in a pleasure boat.

Anyway, there was a crescent beach, a long, flat grassland, and then a marsh with bat-filled mangroves. To keep the mangrove forest from growing up and filling the marsh as it went, the aboriginals (and now the Australians) burned the whole thing down every couple of years to start the growth over from scratch. It'd been a while since the last one. It made for a great hike, walking through these cramped and varied ecosystems, seeing interesting birds and broken termite mounds. Then I got on a Cessna and headed back.

Lizard Island was in a way unfortunate. By saving and reaching so high, we got to have a brief stay in a great resort in a wonderful location and it made me content and happy. But also... discontented and unhappy. Because the only reason I couldn't have stayed for a reasonable length of time was money, and knowing that was like having an giant hourglass filled with silver dollars measuring the time we had left.

And I so want to back, but... there's a five night special there right now for the same kind of room I had, and it's $4,200.00 AUD which I think works out to $725 a night US. $725 a night! Plus the flight in and out! I booked through some random SE Asia discount travel site (which meant there was an awkward moment over who had paid what, and when, and which I'm not going to link to because they suck) in order to get the lowest price possible and I still think that's about what I paid per-night (for a much shorter stay).

This is why people engage in white-collar crime like stock fraud. I almost launched a fraudulent IPO just to stay a third night. A long time ago, I started to make a comfortable living, and I knew I'd done it because I could go to the store and if I really wanted Redhook and Redhook wasn't on sale, I could afford to buy it anyway. I know that kind of seems trivial, but once I got to the point where I could pay rent, keep the lights on, and provide for my basic needs and had enough left over that I could drop a small amount of money randomly, without worrying about it, it was a great relief.

I found from working briefly for Expedia's luxury consumer brand that there was a whole other level of quality that I hadn't experienced before, where money buys you service, time, and the best components. At the Fairmont Orchid, the Gold Level (or whatever it's called, I love the Fairmont Orchid but I don't remember) gets you a little lounge on your floor, where breakfast is served, and there are snacks and free beverages all day long. Headed out to the pool? Snag a bunch of water. Sure, the rooms are far more expensive, but you don't have to buy water from the little deli, or flag down a pool-side attendant and then tip them when (if) they ever come back.

Lizard Island reminded me of this. To me, that's the next level from edging out a comfortable margin in life, where you stop worrying constantly about overdrafts if you miscalculated the utility check. It's what I think of as affluence: where the money it costs to get something truly wonderful, like a week on Lizard Island, is maybe not as easy to come across as the coin for a six-pack of your favorite beverage, but isn't cause for conern.

As you may have noted from my carping about the cost of the really good office chairs, I'm a long, long way off from that.

Next up: Port Douglas, where I learn that I say my name wrong! Ja! Ist zutreffend!

CNPS9500

If I didn't have a second, currently working computer with which I could go to Zalman's site and check out a (quite instructive) short video on how to install the CPU cooler, I would have no idea how to install the CPU cooler. I generally find poorly translated instructions easy to live with if the illustrations are sufficent, but holy crap, this one was baffling... and it's not as if installing a CPU fan incorrectly might result in melting your whole computer into a toxic heap of polycarbons and angry silicates.

To answer my own question, yes

There are many, many knock-offs.

The Russell Executive Mesh Chair is supposed to be nice, and like $230 bucks.

Anyway, here's a weird Google trap for you, because I'm obsessed with link farms and bizarre fake pages like this:

http://www.officechairalley.com/aeronknockoff/

In URL, first three words: aeron knock off

Then: generic text with that phrase inserted a couple times. Followed by a bunch of Google Ads.

Then: article of some kind, probably poached, maybe not, and a bunch of totally random unrelated news items...

You could probably auto-generate these pages, waiting for people like me to come by and (you hope) click on one of those ads and earn you $.05 or so.

Office chairs

While I'm whining: how can the kind of quality office chairs I want (and, as someone who spends a huge chunk of their day sitting writing, doing research, and so on) cost a thousand dollars?

Aeron: $900+ easy
Steelchase Leap: $800+

Can't someone knock off a decent copy of these things for $400 even?

We're all quite dumb

I ordered parts for a new computer off newegg over the last couple of days, only to discover to my joy that the motherboard (and possibly the motherboard chipset) may have data corruption issues and that, moreover, the hard drives, which I bought because they're supposed to be super-quiet, have huge problems running with anything that's not like one Intel-based chipset. Better still, they don't work well with computers that support RAID, when part of the whole point of this upgrade was that I could set up a RAID array and stop worrying all the time that the latest version of my manuscript was going to blow up unless I backed it up that instant.

Argh.

The solution may involve half-assembling several computers, downloading drivers onto floppies (floppies!), updating the hardware repeatedly, and generally drinking beer and growing increasingly frustrated.

So at some point this week, which is goingn swimmingly already, I'm going to get a boatload of computer equipment and throw it together knowing full well that there's a 90% chance it's only going to give me trouble.

This is why people buy Dells. Yeah, they suck, yadda yadda yadda. But you don't buy a Dell off the shelf and find out that when you plug the keyboard in acid squirts out of the monitor into your eyes. In fact, lemme just look.... about $500 more. That's not bad, for no acid squirting.

I'm still amazed though that this is still where technology is: not just that hard drive firmware has to be flashed, but that the process has to be so freaking horrible. If everyone's going to build crappy products that blow up all the time and are compatible in degrees, couldn't they make the process to fix those inevitable problems modestly less painful?

I'm hoping the grocery store has some cheap beer on sale this weekend, because I suspect that's the only way I'm going to get through this.

Comment spam trick of the day

I saw this weird thing hovering in someone's comments on another site today, and so I went through the guestbook. Instead of that person's comment containing like

... size=0 a href="http://www.randomspammerlink.com/" ...

It wasn't there at all. It was much further down, in a generic "your site was a good place to meet people" comment:


... p style="position:absolute;bottom:1.8px;font:normal 1.5px sans-serif;"(BR)
Best places on the Web: (br)
(spammy link) (br)
(spammy link) (br)
...
(100th spammy link) (br)


The absolute tag is a CSS element. This is the first time I've seen it used as a spam tag -- and the comment was left last year.

What's particularly interesting about this is that it's the use of a largely overlooked HTML tag that might be allowed by some filters that attempt to enforce filtering on malicious HTML. Here, a tag that was supposed to free people from using tables allows a commenter to jump out of where they're supposed to be and cuckold another commenter (so to speak).

It also makes enforcement a pain: the list of spammy links appears overlapping other, normal content, and to find what the thing is, you've got to figure out what one of the links is, then search the page source or query the comments.

Madness of crowds

Okay, first, this has absolutely nothing to do with my current job, which I recently quit but have not yet left. No, really.

Why do companies make large, insane decisions? If I decided that every developer at my company had to spend half their day sweeping out the parking garage, they'd all quit -- and anyone could tell me that. It'd be crazy to implement that, no matter how dirty the garage was.

But a lot of executive-level decisions are like that. "We need an underserved market... Hey, let's go give out cell phones to people in prison for cell phone fraud if they sign up for a year's service! What could go wrong?"

Now with less cancer!

I'm amazed at what gets into commercials. "The new Ford Extinction now gets even better gas milage -- 15 city, 20 highway!"

My first thought was "holy crap, what did it get before, -2?"

But then, I'm probably not the target demographic for that ad.