01 Sep 2013
Joe Posnanski (probably our preeminent sportswriter right now) tackles choosing a Premier League team. I imagine lots of folks are getting into the Premier League given NBC's stellar coverage (and the fact that it's on in the morning before college or pro football start). It's worth a read.
A couple of years ago, when I got into the Premier League pretty heavy (that's what having access to the Fox Soccer channel will do …), I bounced between teams who were all on the verge of being relegated (Bolton, QPR, West Ham). Relegation has chosen West Ham for me.
From JoePos:
Why you should be a fan: The team’s thrilling history, centered around those three great West Ham players who led England to glory in 1966.
Why you shouldn’t be a fan: Because they’re still talking a lot about 1966.
Yep. Sounds just like a team I would gravitate towards.
01 Sep 2013
Growing up, I listened to the radio a lot. We had this cool old tuner that, every once in a while, would pick up stations from around the country. Turns out, that's is (was?) a hobby for lots of people, but for me it was just cool to hear slices of a random baseball game from some other part of the country.
The radio became my companion for the long, 11ish hour drives from Rutland to Blacksburg and back (Mass Pike West, 84S, 81S). This was the late 90s, so I had sometimes had a Discman that I would plug into the cassette deck to listen to CDs (if they didn't skip too much), or would listen to mix tapes made by me or my friends. But, more often than not, I would spend minutes as I drove scanning up and down the dial for some random radio station in the area. Maybe I'd catch a good radio station and hear some song that I really liked. Today, I'd Shazam it and know exactly what it was. Back then, I'd listen longer, hoping to not lose the signal, and wait for the DJ to tell me what it was. Or worse, try to google the lyrics when I got home, and hope to stumble upon the song.
There was something incredibly interesting to me about hearing advertisements for car dealerships in Harrisburg, PA, or catching part of a church service when driving through West Virginia really early in the morning. The worst was losing a station you'd been listening to for an hour or so, after you'd gone 30 minutes catching nothing but static intermixed with the faintest signal.
Today, I still am endlessly entertained by radio (and TV) in other places. Whenever I travel for business and end up renting a car, I'll find my way to the local rock/indie station, or maybe the local sports station. Listening to people call in and complain about whatever their local team is doing wrong. Arriving at the hotel, I'll often throw on the TV and watch the local news. Living in Boston, I'm spoiled. I get real, HD news, and everything is, at least, remotely professional. Sometimes, in a smaller city, you get a reminder of what things were like a few years ago.
That whole story is a long preamble to what will likely be a short sell. When flipping through some RSS feeds, I came across a review of Radium. It's a nice, small Mac app (with a companion iOS app) that makes it easy to listen to internet radio. I know there's lots of ways to listen to the radio on the internet, but this one just clicked for me. Hit the icon, type in a genre, or more fun, a city, and find a station. When you're listening, if a song comes on, you know what it is and can add it to a list (and then purchase it through iTunes).
In an age of podcasts, massive streaming music libraries, and satellite radio—also covered by Radium, if you've got a subscription—I don't know why I want to listen to the radio. But for at least a few hours a week, I find myself clicking on a radio station (RadioBDC from Boston, KEXP from Seattle, NPR, random sports radio) and listening and feeling a bit like the old days when it was so exciting to pick up a signal from halfway across the country. Throw in the iOS app, and you can drive your car around while picking up a radio station from Texas, or listening to news talk from Maine.
As a postscript, I should mention that both the MLB and NBA apps for iOS are wonderful for the same reason. Listening to the radio broadcast of a random basketball game, while you walk home from watching the Celtics play, has been one of the pure old-timey joys of living in an always on world.
The app links in here are tagged with my iTunes affiliate link. If you buy something, I might get to buy an extra song someday.
19 Aug 2013
When we got back from France, I mentioned, in passing, that Air France had kind of blown it with our luggage. I decided to wait a little bit to tell that story, mostly because a) I didn't want to jeopardize any refund we might get from the airline, and b) I didn't want to fly off the handle still pissed at the world. Enough time has passed that I figured I can relate the story coherently.
Sunday, the last day in Tuscany was a bit hectic. Getting from the villa to the train station wasn't as straight forward as we had hoped, but the train ride was nice and relaxing. We had plenty of time to get from the train station in Florence, via bus, to the Florence airport. My experience with the bus driver should have tipped me off that this would be a challenging trip.
Upon getting on the bus, the bus driver wouldn't give me change (even though he clearly had enough), and wanted an exact fare. Sadly, Katie had used a euro to use the bathroom, and we were one euro short. Thankfully, there was a very nice woman who gave me a euro so that we wouldn't have to get back off the bus, go into the terminal, get change, and then wait for the next bus.
After arriving at the airport, we made it to pick up our tickets, but both self-service terminals for Alitalia were broken, and there was no one at the service desk to give us our tickets. So, we grabbed some lunch. When we came back, there was a little bit of a line, but it moved quickly. The service agent was super nice, but was surprised when I asked her why she only flagged our luggage as heading to Amsterdam, and not to Paris. She replied that she didn't even know that we were booked to Paris. We straightened that out, got our tickets (with both legs being in business class!) and headed to our gate.
We waited at the gate for our flight to board. And waited a bit more. And a bit longer. When we finally got going, it became pretty clear that we were going to have a very tight connection. I started making mental plans for catching the first subsequent flight to Paris. As we landed, I said "Well, if our next flight is leaving from a gate within about 50 feet of this one, we might make it."
We got off the plane. The gate agent told us our flight was just two gates down.
Not bad.
Of course, we didn't have tickets for this flight yet—we had to get them re-issued. I ran around the terminal while Katie waited in line. Finally, we just got up to our gate and explained our situation, and they issued our tickets (once again, we snuck into an upgraded seat). If we made the tight connection, surely our bags did.
After about 30 minutes of waiting in Paris, it was clear that, surely, our bags did not.
Katie spoke enough French and the really nice Air France woman spoke enough English that we were quickly able to explain the situation and get some answers. Our bags were still in Amsterdam, they'd arrive tomorrow morning, and they would have them to us by noon. They provided us some toiletries, explained the reimbursement policy (100 Euros a day, per person, but save the receipts!)
We could wait one day, so we headed to our lodging.
About 3pm the next day, after following along online, I made the first of what would be many calls to the Air France baggage line. They had a lot of missing bags, weren't sure why anyone had told us it would be delivered by noon, and they'd let me know as soon as they found it. It would, most definitely, be soon. No big deal, we'd relaxed all day and could wash up a bit and go grab some dinner.
Late Monday night, they called and emailed to let me know they had our luggage and it was delivered to a courier. The courier would call in the morning and setup a time.
Tuesday morning, sure enough, the phone rang. The courier, who spoke little English told me, who speaks little French, that it would be delivered between 10am and 2pm. I only asked that they call my number, so I could meet them downstairs; we were staying in an apartment and did not have a doorman to collect the package. No problem.
2pm rolled by. At 3:30pm, I called and was told it was "traffic". At 4:30pm, I called again and was told it was "traffic". I told them, "That's funny, because your web site says you tried to deliver it, but I wasn't here. Which is clearly not true, because I've been talking to you all day."
I asked if they could redeliver it. Or if I could pay for the courier to bring it back. Nope. I could have them bring it back to the airport, or wait for the courier.
Now, at this point, I was a bit incredulous, but trying to hold my temper. What was I going to do? Screaming at the poor woman on the phone wouldn't get me anywhere. I asked that they find out how they didn't deliver it, if they could contact the courier, and how we could make sure we would get our luggage.
All told, I probably spent $50 on the phone back and forth with Air France and the courier. I was assured that the luggage would be delivered on Wednesday. I told them they were ruining our vacation.
You might ask, "why didn't you just go buy new clothing?" We did buy some, but spending a bunch of money on new clothes in Paris, in hopes that they'd reimburse me, doesn't sound fun to me. A better policy would simply be cutting me a check, or issuing us some sort of credit. That way, I wouldn't be on the hook for stuff I may not get paid back for. Anyway …
Katie's brother, living in Paris, agreed to hang out at our place, with my phone, and would wait for our luggage while we went and did some sightseeing. We once again got the 10am - 2pm window. These guys make the cable companies look good.
At 1:30ish, they called Katie's brother and delivered our luggage.
When leaving Paris, somehow, we got bumped up to business class again, priority boarding, the whole nine yards. I'm assuming that's due to the issues we had, which at least makes me feel like they were trying to make good. At home, I not only asked to be reimbursed for the clothing and toiletries that we bought, but also for the phone calls I made. Delta (who handle the domestic side for Air France) didn't bat an eyelash; we had the whole amount reimbursed.
I've tried to think about what I would have wanted to go differently, other than not having to deal with losing our luggage at all. I think the answer is really simple:
When you screw up, own it. Don't make it someone else's problem.
But outsourcing the delivery of the luggage and having zero control over the process, a poor delivery service made Air France look completely second rate. It would have cost them $100 to expedite the luggage, I imagine. Once the first delivery had failed, they should have called and had it delivered special. Had they done that, I wouldn't be talking about how bad their service was, I would be talking about how they went above and beyond.
Instead, I've told a number of people about our experience, I'll think twice before flying Air France again, and I will go out of my way to not check a bag through them.
It's not easy to be a big company and empower your service team to do the right thing. This seems like something that, unfortunately, happens often enough that they should have a protocol and empower their team to make it right. Instead, they made it someone else's problem (first, the delivery company; second, mine).
In the end, we still had a pretty great trip, lost luggage or not.
19 Aug 2013
"Editorial changed how I use my iPad: I can now work from my mini without worrying about the apps and features I’d miss from my Mac. I want to work from my iPad, because Editorial is a better, faster, more efficient writing and editing environment than Sublime Text 2 on OS X, even considering all the Markdown-related scripts and macros I have in Keyboard Maestro. As a hub that connects apps and text with workflows and native UI elements, Editorial has reinvented the way I use iOS and third-party apps for writing, researching, taking notes, discovering links, and sharing them with other people. For me, Editorial is more than just a text editor."
(From Federico Viticci's insanely thorough review.)
I don't know if, right now, an app like Editorial could exist in the Android world. It's such a thoughtfully written application, with massive amounts of attention paid to the little bits that iOS doesn't handle well right now (inter-app communication, cloud storage). At $4.99, a price that's considerably less than what comparable destkop apps go for (Sublime Text is $70, Textmate is $54), it's a steal. I optimistically hope that it'll make the developer enough money to continue to fund his insanely good work. He must thing he can; according to most reviews, this app has been in development for nearly a year.
There are, presumably, enough iOS users for whom a powerful text editor is worth $5.
I'm not sure if, even with the growing Android market, there's enough users out there who would pay $5 for a text editor. Certain types of apps (games and system tools) seem to work in the Android market, but I'm not sure a text editor is one of them.
24 Jul 2013
Typhoon is already awesome. This song, "Young Fathers" off of the upcoming White Lighter may be my favorite track of 2013 thus far.
Don't get mislead by the sudden drops in the intro. That's just part of the charms of the song. And, jebus, the last minute of the song -- horns kicking in, the drums pounding, finishing up with at 15 second chorale outro. New album is out August 20th. Get it.
(And, if you want another treat, "Dreams of Cannibalism" isn't too bad, right?)
23 Jul 2013
(When I've got some time, I'm going to write about my very exciting trip to Tuscany and Paris, with lost baggage and steak tartare. Until then …)
Back in the mid-aughts, EA Sports put out a series of baseball games called MVP Baseball. The games were pretty awesome, and introduced some really novel concepts to video game baseball: the pitching and throwing meters where you lost control the harder you threw; the hot/cold batting zones; a home run derby (which was awesomely fun).
The game was pretty great.
But what really sticks out in my mind are the soundtracks for the game. EA, at the time, had this thing called "EA Trax", which was basically product placement from music labels to get music out in front of a very lucrative demographic.
Looking through the soundtracks (the full listing can be found on Wikipedia), it's clear to me why they stick in my brain …
- The Donnas - Who Invited You
- OK Go - Don't Ask Me
- Snow Patrol - Spitting Games
- stellastarr - My Coco
- The Von Bondies - C'mon C'mon
- Dropkick Murphys - Tessie
- Hot Hot Heat - You Owe Me An IOU
- Louis XIV - Finding Out True Love Is Blind
- The Bravery - An Honest Mistake
That's a murderer's row of mid-2k indie and alternative rock.
I think I've still got the Gamecube version around here somewhere. I might have to break it out and play it one of these days.
13 Jul 2013
About a year and a half ago, I added a Crucial M4 SSD to my MacBook Pro. It was a major upgrade, as going from a spinning disk to a solid state one was a massive, massive performance upgrade.
Everything was going swimmingly until Wednesday evening. I was doing some work when, out of nowhere, the whole machine beachballed. I could still do some things that were running, but I couldn't load anything new. Bizarre, but I was able to restart the machine and everything worked happily after that.
Thursday morning rolls around and after a while of using the laptop, the whole thing happens again. Restart, work for a little while, happens again.
This was bizarre.
When it happened the 3rd time Thursday morning, I happened to be in a terminal window. I was able to type commands into the command line, so I thought "Well, let's see what I can see for the underlying device".
I knew my drive was disk0s2, so I tried a very simple command:
ls -al /dev/disk0s2
ls: /dev/disk0s2: No such file or directory
Yikes. Where did my hard drive go?
I rebooted again and decided to look for some tools that might do hard drive diagnosis. I ran Apple's Disk Utility; it found nothing. I installed smartmontools via Homebrew and ran a few tests. The tests didn't find anything wrong, but they did mention something odd about the firmware …
This drive may hang after 5184 hours of power-on time:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware-BSOD,14544.html
See the following web pages for firmware updates:
http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
http://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/client-ssd#software
Well, that's curious.
Checking out the Tom's Hardware link:
Corrects a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive
My first thought was "Ha! That's probably it."
My second thought was "Jebus, how the hell do you ship a drive that flakes out after 5000 hours of use?"
I double-checked my instincts and ran the smartmontools again:
/usr/local/sbin/smartctl -a disk0s2
…….
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 001 Old_age Always - 5673
My drive had been running for well over the 5184 hours and must have eventually tripped that condition.
After a few minutes to burn a CD, reboot (hold option when you're rebooting your Mac to get the screen to choose to boot off the CD), and run a firmware upgrade to the drive, I was back up and running.
An hour later, my hard drive had not disappeared. It was right where it was supposed to be.
ls -al /dev/disk0s2
brw-r----- 1 root operator 1, 2 Jul 11 10:18 /dev/disk0s2
Thanks, Frank and Joe. Great job as always.
09 Jul 2013
Sorry, ladies, I'm off the market.
After waiting too long (no idea why she's still with me), I decided to make an honest woman out of Katie. I proposed before we left for our trip (surprise!). We celebrated accordingly.
09 Jul 2013
Not of the National Lampoon's variety, but instead a trip to Tuscany for a wedding, followed up by nearly a week in Paris. Aside from a couple of challenges (ahem, Air France not delivering our delayed luggage), it was a pretty remarkable 10 days or so.
We stayed in a town called Bibbiano in the Tuscany region of Italy for a wedding, on a little vineyard. It was simply a beautiful location for a wedding (and a vacation). The only downside was a lack of working wifi—it existed, but you head to stand in exactly the right spot to use it.
(Yeah, yeah. I know I shouldn't be on the web while I'm on vacation, but given that my Celtics had the NBA Draft and announced a trade of the remaining members of the Big Three, I'm pretty sure I had every reason to be slurping down those handful of bytes that would get through the slow wireless connection.)
After a train ride from Bibbiano to Florence, we caught a flight (via Amsterdam) to Paris. Our tight connection in Amsterdam meant that our luggage did not make the flight to Paris with us. At some point, when I've had some time to process my anger, I'll relay that story.
We stayed in north eastern Paris, in an apartment we got off of Airbnb. It was very near the Metro and in a sort of hipstery neighborhood. Our first couple of days were spent just walking around a bit, relaxing, and waiting for our luggage. We were able to see Sacré-Cœur and eat lots of good food on our first two days. On Wednesday, we were finally able to really explore the city, and we did our best to hit up every touristy place you might want to see—I've never been to Paris before, so it was an opportunity to see all the big stuff.
On the trip, we ate way too much meat and cheese (well, if there were such a thing as too much cheese), but balanced that off with walking miles each day. Thankfully, Katie knows enough French to help us get around without too much trouble, though Paris is very very easy for an English-speaker to get around (and most folks speak at least a little English).
One of our last dinners in Paris was a great dinner with some friends who'd also attended the wedding in Italy. After dinner at Le Relais de l'Entrecôte (so good), we ventured over to a Canadian bar to have a nightcap. There we met a couple of great people which lead to a few too many beers being downed. (Getting good beer in Paris is hard to do, and I was pretty wined out after spending four days at a vineyard.)
23 Jun 2013
Last Christmas, I took a crate of old photos and photo albums out of my mom's basement, thinking that I would scan them. Having a digital copy (and being able to backup those digital copies) would be a great thing, especially as my brothers and I are getting older. It'd be nice to be able to show my nieces and nephew these pictures, or show them to Katie so she can see what I looked like growing up.
Well, that was a good goal, at least.
It's been a bit more challenging than I anticipated, for a few reasons. First, it was pretty time-consuming just going through the photos: trying to figure out what year the photo was from, sometimes figuring out who it was (my brothers look similar at 1 and 2), and filtering out the duplicates. It took me a few weeks, off and on, to get through all the photos. (And, of course, it took me a few months to get started on that effort, at all.)
I've got a flatbed scanner, which is probably the preferred scanner for scanning photos, but doesn't exactly make for expeditious scanning. Well, not when combined with using Preview or Image Capture. You load a few images on the scanner, choose "Detect Separate Items" so that—ideally—you can easily scan more than one photo at at a time, pick your settings (color, 300 dpi, PNG), and scan away.
Most of the time, it goes fine. But, frequently enough to be annoying, the software doesn't do a great job to detect the photos, so you have to fiddle with bounding box to crop the image right. Then make sure to name the images so you'll recognize what they are (if you plan to put them into categories in some fashion).
It's just not as fast as I'd hoped, but I'm working on scanning a handful of photos every weekend (and when I've got free time), and I expect that I'll be done in a couple of months.
One handy tool I'd recommend that you use is ImageOptim. If you're scanning to PNG (and you should be), it'll do some really smart stuff to the image to remove about 20% of the overall size without impacting the image quality. If you're going to be scanning hundreds (or thousands) of photos, that'll come in handy.
I'm sure someone's got a better workflow. If you do, I'd love to hear it. There are companies out there that'll do this for you, but it seems to be a bit expensive. I figure free with some effort is better than paying a big chunk of money for someone to do it for me. But, I'm betting there's some smart software or tips that will make the process go faster. (Maybe you have one?)