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I Blog, Therefore I Am
 
Amma Vicki and the Monks
 
Let It Rain, Let It Rain …
 
The Fate of Microsoft Outlier Customers
 
Just a Little Bit Facebooked
 
By Your Start Bars Shall Ye Be Known
 
Golden Geek: Sibling Memories Revisited
 
Monday Morning NaN: Confirmable Experience with my...
 
Saturday Geek Photo: A Back-to-the-Future Moment
 
Friday Cat Picture: Hide-and-Seek Fail

I Blog, Therefore I Am

This is different than my main blogs.  I wanted to experiment with Windows Live and have a blog that employed the features and organization of Windows Live blogs.  I have since become disenchanted with having a blog that is not on a server that I manage.  Thanks to the capabilities of Windows Live Writer, I can successfully lift the posts from the Hideout and repost them in the place that is more-appropriate for me.
This is different also.  This is a sandbox blog that I use only for trying things out.  It is different in style but it serves me as a way to try out various changes before introducing them on one of my current blogs.  My four main blogs have the following descriptions:

I have six blogs to my name, where I set the purpose and content of the blogs.  These are various expressions of me. 

There’s one other blog that is an expression of my partnership with Vicki and her vocation as a potter, Millennia Antica: The Kiln Sitter’s Diary.  My presence is as web master and technical support, along with contribution of my perspective on some of the activities that I participate in.  But the purpose of that blog is to be part of Vicki’s expression of her vocation and love for pottery.

Labels: computers and internet, cybersmith

Amma Vicki and the Monks

On Wednesday, June 17, 2009, Bodhinatha came from the Kauai Hindu Monastery to the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center in Bothell, Washington.  The visit (pdf) is part of travels that will end up in Edmonton, Canada.

It is a rare treat for Amma Vicki, as she is known (scroll to the bottom), to visit with members of the monastery family at times other than her annual visit to Kauai.  She is always hopeful to learn whether son Senthilnathaswami is along on the journey.   She was delighted to be able to see Bodinatha and Tehadevanatha on this particular visit.

Although I have met Bodinatha, I had not heard him speak to a Hindu gathering until Wednesday.  The subject, “Passing On Our Hindu Tradition” dealt with the challenges of Hindu grandparents and parents living in the West and raising children in the midst of Western cultures and schools.   For a non-Hindu, I found the explanations and suggestions direct and remarkably gentle. 

Labels: friends and family

Let It Rain, Let It Rain …

[Update 2009-06-19-08:47 –0700 (pdt) Let this be the end of silliness about rain-free-days records.  There was a steady though light rain overnight.  This morning at 07:15 the streets and grounds were wet except inside the drip line of some heavily foliaged trees.  The rain has changed from light sprinkle to mist now, with the morning temperature just crossing 60F (15C).  The forecast is for occasional light rain through Sunday, 06-21.  This may not assuage the agricultural concerns.]

[Update 2009-06-19-01:54Z I got it all wrong.  The first paragraph has been corrected based on information from King5.com for 2009-06-18.]

As of some time overnight on June 17-18, we had officially gone 29 consecutive days without rain, breaking tying the May-June 1951 1982 record for such events.  [The longest dry spell is the 51 July-August days in 1951.]  For some reason, a local television station news team thinks that is exciting.  Not at summer water rates and what it costs to sprinkle a lawn to keep it from going dormant, the dry-weather response here.  Of course, in brushlands and forests there is even more to be concerned about.

The rainfall that we drove through yesterday afternoon did not count.  The test is weather or not a sensor at the Seattle-Tacoma airport detects measurable rainfall.   This shower we ran into was while driving on the I-90 floating bridge toward its connection with I-405 and our continuation North to Bothell, Washington.  The rain did manage to make drivers nervous, apparently because most knew the roadway can be dangerously slippery when wetted for the first time after a long dry period and accumulation of surface oils and greases. 

Cloudbursts and lightning strikes in the mountains to our West and East also don’t count as an end to our dry spell.  (Can you say “forest fire?”  Sure you can.)

Now, how the heck will we convince tourists and other visitors to stay away because they think the sun never shines in Seattle?

Labels: neighborhood and Seattle

The Fate of Microsoft Outlier Customers

I recently noticed that three of my favorite Microsoft products are to be no more: Windows OneCare (why are they still selling it?) , Microsoft Encarta, and Microsoft Money.  That was striking for me and I have created a contingency plan for each of those products.

On reflection, it is not a new thing for various Microsoft applications to transmogrify and eventually disappear.  Although I have never had an interest in Flight Simulator, I am still a devoted user of Microsoft FrontPage.  If Microsoft Works were as clean and simple as the MS-DOS version, I would still use it.  I have also used a variety of picture editors and photo editors that were bundled in various Microsoft products and that seem to come and go with each new computer system and occasional Microsoft Office upgrade.  Some day, I suppose I will have to do without Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker, especially as future versions/replacements demand hardware capabilities I don’t possess.

Now, Microsoft is not making a fortune for me as an occasional upgrader of these products (though I quietly paid my OneCare subscription renewal each year).  It is interesting that not until the abandonment of FrontPage was announced did I begin to feel the squeeze and the lack of an appropriate replacement for abandoned Microsoft products.  (E.g., Expression Web is both more and less than what suits my current web-development practices.)  Now I now need to look for three more substitutions and also look at long-term measures for protecting my systems and my electronic financial records as well as maintaining my web sites.  For the three latest-discontinued products, I find that I have three different contingency measures in place. 

Wait, I Like Encarta

When I read that Encarta was to be no more, I resolved to go find a copy of the latest version.  I have a version completely installed on my hard drive and it is a handy reference.  I confess that I mainly use the dictionary (the default setting for the Encarta Search Bar kept handy in my Windows XP task bar).  The encyclopedia is handy but it doesn’t get searched by Windows Desktop Search (a little incoherence there) and I find myself on the web (and Wikipedia) more often than in Encarta because that’s where Windows Desktop Search (and now bing) lead me best.

I’m currently running version 14 (Encarta 2005) and I actually had one monthly update that I didn’t install until last week.  The reluctance to update has to do with needing to be administrator when I do it, and I usually forget Encarta updates when I am running as administrator for other maintenance purposes.  It is a demonstration of my unnoticed waning interest that I didn’t know I had one update left from 2005.

Nevertheless, I wanted to have the latest and greatest if there were to be no more.  Unfortunately, the latest version seems to be Encarta Premium 2007 and it is still pricey, even though pro-rated refunds were cut off on April 30.

I settled for the less-expensive Britannica 2009 Deluxe with the hope that the included dictionary and thesaurus is as easy to use as the one I am abandoning from Encarta. 

Not Money Too.   No, Not Money!

The shocker for me is last week’s announcement that Microsoft Money will also be no more.  I checked, and my oldest Microsoft Money backup is dated 1999 and it has entries from 1998-01-01.   I tended to hold onto versions of Microsoft Money.  I didn’t switch to Money Plus 2007 until the version I was running under Windows 98 couldn’t be installed on Windows XP as I was off-loading the Windows 98 machine at the end of 2007.

I don’t like Money Plus 2007 as much as the older pure-desktop versions.  The change of the user experience to one with integrated web features is mostly a nuisance.  The software performs more slowly and I don’t do those on-line things.  But I like the reports and the extensive history of purchases (and depreciation records) is important for me.  I prepare my tax returns from records maintained in Microsoft Money, and I have had some success balancing my bank accounts using downloads that Money will rely on.  (The experience is rather variable and I often simply balance statements manually instead rather than deal with what it takes to correct for a failed automatic account update.)

I discovered that my version of Money Plus “expires” in September at the end of November.  Ones activated this summer will have support extended through January, 2011. 

It seems like a no-brainer that what I want to do is install another downloaded version and continue to use it until I have a satisfactory replacement.  I will also want to keep a copy around as long as possible to enable my use of existing records.  I will need to discover how to export some of those for use in other products, or as spreadsheets that I can preserve in OOXML/ODF.

So I have another Money Plus Home and Business download and a product key for it.  I will install it at a point this summer when I am carefully backed up, exported, and ready to risk an upgrade.

Goodbye OneCare, It’s Been Good to Know Ye

Microsoft OneCare arrived at just the right time for me.  I had tired of Norton Antivirus upgrades and a growing drift from what worked just right for me starting before Norton/Symantec Systemworks and going back to a time when there really were Norton Utilities.  I valued the simplicity all-in-oneness of OneCare for the following provisions:

• Annual support on up to three SOHO computer systems (exactly what I had that needed the protection around here)
• Constant nagging and support for regular backups
• Outgoing firewall protection

It wasn’t the most wonderful product, but it was also steadily improved over the time I used it, right from the beginning of its availability.  It did deal with my dominant computer security concerns. 

OneCare also provided me with a great source of system-incoherence anecdotes, and I must recount some of those while I can still capture screen shots of the experience.

Actually doing backups onto DVDs was not the most exciting experience, as much as OneCare made that possible.  Once backup functions were taken over by WHS, the cleverly-named HP Mediasmart Server (with its Windows Home Server version of Windows Server 2003) now on the network, that difficulty was mitigated and there are now automatic, incremental backups every night. 

Still, OneCare works well and effortlessly for us, even if it reports that backups are woefully out of date (a new little incoherence on how OneCare has forgotten WHS is on the job). 

It was also great that Microsoft announced that all OneCare support agreements will continue until their expiration.   That means mid-September 2009 here. 

On the other hand, the promised Microsoft replacements for OneCare are not in sight.  I believe the last promise was for around August.  I am beginning to squirm.

There appears time to find an adequate substitute, taking into consideration that Microsoft will offer some sort of solutions for some unknown degree of protection where I find it the most valuable for the computers here.  Unfortunately, it is not clear that there is a decent non-Microsoft product that works here, regardless of the high reputation a number of Antivirus producers have achieved.  The low reputation that is Microsoft’s automatic prize is apparently more myth than reality in my experience.  On balance, OneCare works better than anything I have attempted to replace it with.

Here’s how my search is working out so far.

Since OneCare is to be no more, Windows 7 beta and Windows 7 RC not only had no provision for it, those releases were actually hostile to OneCare.  So on Quadro7 I have been going through trials of other Antivirus products, partly to determine a good candidate to be installed uniformly on all of the systems here.  None of the products tried so far seem to integrate well with Windows 7, which has apparently changed the rules enough that AV producers are having some difficulty.  In particular, I have not found an AV product (even the Windows 7 directed beta releases) where Windows 7 reports that it is protected and the Windows Home Server concurs in reporting that my systems are protected. 

Having tired of Symantec (and enjoying the liberation that OneCare provided), I haven’t gone back.  My latest experience with McAfee was on WHS and that led me to prefer no AV there instead.   (That experience also led me to be more cautious about the judgment of folks at Hewlett-Packard and the trial installations they chose to push to WHS.)

Meanwhile, on Quadro 7 I have gone through one trial of Kapersky and another of Trend Micro.  I actually bought a retail copy of Trend Micro but Windows 7 chokes on that.  Instead, I now possess an useless license since the Trend Micro beta for Windows 7 won’t accept the older-product registration code except when it installs as an update, and that doesn’t work on Windows 7.  I’m moving on to F-Secure’s beta for Windows 7 right now and the trial lasts out past August.  With luck, I might have a consistent Microsoft solution to deploy across all of the computers here.  And if not, I will need to find a product that has an affordable multiple-machine license (as Trend does) and that doesn’t require me to use a web site to know my status (as McAfee Total Protection does). 

There are clearly interoperability issues here, and the level of coherent integration is a challenge.  It is a challenge for Microsoft too, but as one might expect, OneCare integrates more cleanly and, apart from an apparently-inescapable level of Microsoft paternalism, works most consistently and coherently than anything else I have attempted to use in its place.

Update 2009-06-15-04:06Z Correcting an expiration date for Microsoft Money.

Labels: computers and internet, Golden Geek, software usability, system incoherence, trustworthiness

Just a Little Bit Facebooked

When I said “I will Facebook no more Forever” in December 2007, I meant it.  I really meant it.

On the other hand, I knew that Facebook actually maintained my account and all I needed to do was log back into it to have it operating again.  There is evidently a full nuclear destruction available, but I didn’t go that option.  I also didn’t discard my Facebook account password. 

I recall being given a similar reassurance by an AOL telephone representative as I was cancelling my long-standing CompuServe account, the first place “orcmid” was ever seen in public.  (The AOL-ized webified CompuServe was not the CompuServe that I devoted so much time to at the end of the 70s.  It seems I am constantly ending up in the demographic that is no longer the one of a long-time vendor’s keen interest.)

At 10:00 this morning, I was noticing all of the folks on Twitter going on about having gotten their user-friendly Facebook name, or about someone else getting it first. 

Oh oh, “What about Orcmid?” I say to myself at least ten hours after the name-claiming frenzy began.  Well of course “orcmid” was available.  I now have it. 

I am not back on Facebook.  Yes, my account is active again, but I am not back.

All this means is that when others talk about their Facebook page, or photos on Facebook, or anything-else Facebook, I can go look, because I have an account.

I am not attending to my Facebook page, I am not posting on folk’s walls, I am not friending anyone and I am ignoring mail that comes in saying so-and-so has friended me. 

This is entirely an account of convenience.  I am only a little bit Facebooked.  Honest.  I caught it from a toilet seat.

Labels: Golden Geek, social networking

 
Comments:

 
To a slightly lesser degree, I've had the same Facebook experience. I went from daily updates in 2007 to less than one per month the last few months. I got on Friday evening to grab dmahugh, and I've received a couple of emails along the lines of "great to see you back online."

Apparently there's a whole hive of activity over there these days, but I must admit I have a hard time caring very much. Flickr, Twitter, and work-related blogging are more than enough social media for me these days.

# posted by  Doug: 14 June, 2009 20:34

 

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By Your Start Bars Shall Ye Be Known

Wouter van Vugt and Jesper Lund Stocholm have unwittingly (?) started a new geek Friday pastime: Comparing computer Start Bars (or their equivalent among non-Windows users).  Well, let’s see how many personality revelations I make here:

Scampo (main desktop)	Quadro7 (Tablet PC)	Compagno (web site dev host)

Senator, I have to the best of my recollection never opened Getting Started, Calculator, Sticky Notes, Snipping Tool, and Paint on Windows 7.  That must have been someone else.  (This must show how little my start bar has been auto-customized yet, and I have been using other applications.  Hmm, gremlins perhaps?)

Now, the Start Bar is not the whole story.  As you can see, what I might or might not have arranged in my Quick Launch area of the Task Bar is also revealing. 

And, if you don’t find enough tea leaves to read into my psychological profile from the above clips, there is always the system tray for delving deep into the geek psyche:

Scampo:
Quadro7:
Compagno:

Excluding Vicki’s office desktop system, there is still one more machine in the Centrale workgroup.  The fact that I actually had to learn how to use Remote Desktop reveals how much my arrangement is a maverick with respect to Windows Home Server design assumptions.  I didn’t want to be a network systems administrator, but now I am one. 

Well, that was boring.  What can we come up with next week I wonder?

Labels: Golden Geek

Golden Geek: Sibling Memories Revisited

In the 2009-02-02 post, Golden Geek: Sibling Memories, I suggested that the next time the three of us got together, we should restage the 1951 group portrait.  Luckily, youngest sister Carol is vacationing in the Pacific Northwest this year.  On May 23, we all met at Judy’s and recreated the photograph as we are now, 58 years later.   Vicki, our superb photographer assistant, made it possible.  Here we are in the same order: Carol, Dennis, and Judy.  Carol is now taller than Judy and this is apparently a matter of sibling banter between the two of them.

Carol and Judy provided additional recollections on the original staging.  It was dad who arranged for us to sit for this picture.  We think it was around Spring 1951, when we were in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th grades, all in Horace Mann school in Tacoma, Washington.  This was the last time that all three of us would be in the same school together.

The photo portrait was hand retouched, and that is evident on the black-and-white print I am holding.   The version that was presented to mom, and hung prominently in our home, was hand-colored.

Carol remembers that dad did not like obligatory occasions and preferred to operate spontaneously.  We think the portrait was a surprise gift not associated with any particular occasion.  I recall being that way as well.  Living in New York State and Pennsylvania, I would arrive for holiday visits unannounced, meeting dad at his work and then riding home with him.  The only problem with that is mom knew I might do such a thing and was left in anticipation whether I was coming or not.  When dad warned me about that, I made my intentions known in advance from then on.  I also learned to shop for occasions, even in advance rather than immediately before, after observing an acquaintance do that and seeing how much enjoyment she got out of it.  I don’t resist an opportunity for a good surprise, but these days the simpler pleasures are available more consistently.

Concerning photo-realism, I believe that I was already wearing glasses in 1951.  However, I was near-sighted and often did not wear glasses indoors.   (That was true until around 1980 when I needed my first bifocals.)  These days, we all wear glasses and some of us cannot see very far in front of our face without them.

Labels: friends and family, Golden Geek

Monday Morning NaN: Confirmable Experience with my Coffee

Darren Rowse tweeted about Threaded Tweets, and I went for a look.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a NaN delivered up by a web page, and this may be a first.  I’m not sure whether 14996 replies is a very successful number, but I guess any thread that lives that long deserves some respect [;<).

There are three interdependent themes that I see around the development and sustenance of dependable systems: system coherence, confirmable experience, and trustworthiness.  These and dependability itself are not independent notions.

I think this one is about confirmable experience

Something odd is happening.  Thanks to screen-capture software, I can show you (and the producers of ThreadedTweets) what happened.  In fact, I will tweet about this and if the cycle of learning and improvement is operating, the Threaded Tweets folk will pick up on it, if they aren’t aware of the glitch already.

It would be fun to create a threaded tweet about this as well, but I am not about to provide my Twitter credentials to ThreadedTweets in order to do that (and you can see the reason for distrustfulness here even though they claim to be using OAuth to protect me, yes?).

There is a part of the confirmable-experience cycle that figure in trustworthiness that I can’t account for.  I have no idea how to the tweet threading folks are able to identify the specific difficulty, although it appears to be a stand-out no-brainer, so long as they can see the data on which the failed time-lapse calculation is being done.  Smells like there is a division by zero or a failed data conversion in there somewhere too.

But as an end-user, I don’t know about any of that and my speculation is not the same as having visibility on the process for confirming what is happening, as opposed to confirming how users experience it.  That’s the part I provide.  Also, I notice that the NaN message has disappeared in the past few minutes, possibly because the defect has been noticed, possibly because it is transient and difficult to find.

The tie-in to trustworthiness

ThreadedTweets has a feedback and a support link that I could use to communicate what I noticed to them.   Now that it the NaN is gone, I’m not sure whether that will help.  They want an e-mail to the support address.  I’ll send them a link to this post.

The tie-in to trustworthiness has to do with the demonstration of care for the adopters (a.k.a. users) by the producers of ThreadedTweets.  In this case, it is how friction is removed from the ability of adopters to communicate their experience to the producers.  The back half is how the producers demonstrate remedies or other solutions in a reliable way. 

Since I am very much into identification of confirmable experiences and occasions where system incoherence show up, I have a screen capture utility at the ready at all times.  This is necessary but not ordinary behavior required to to demonstrate what my experience is. 

An interesting problem for an organization that wants to be trustworthy in delivering a dependable web-based service is this: what can be done that would allow ordinary, casual adopters to convey their experience to the producers in a way that is confirmable?  That’s the question to consider.

And your assignment, if you choose to accept it …

That’s the bigger point of this tiny object lesson.   Look for more to come.  Notice ones in your own experience.  Collect the full set.  Entertain your friends. 

Most of all, begin to notice those little moments of truth where your experience of products raises “uh oh” and “ick” experiences for you.  What do you do about them? 

This is not a trick question.  I don’t do much about many that I experience.  It is valuable to notice and even question that, though.  What is it you are putting up with?

I arose at 5:30 am to be prepared for the 7:00 am Monday morning conference call of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) TC.  The cancellation notice went out about 2:00 am, my time, from Germany, and I had the opportunity to crawl back in bed after a poor night’s sleep or start my day early.  Oh wait, I can post on my much-neglected blog.   Aren’t you the lucky ones.

Labels: confirmable experience, system incoherence, trustworthiness