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Why I fear for Western civilization

I really wish I could just drop our cable T V service altogether.  I am beginning to think that just having the cable signal inside the house is lowering our IQ.

With crap like The Bachelor and the rest of the voyeuristic garbage on network TV, and the horde of brainless bullshit on the cable networks…  what have we become?  A nation in which Honey Boo Boo (and her circus sideshow of a family) can become cultural icons scares the hell out of me.  We’ve got pageants where toddlers and young girls are made up like street hookers and paraded in front of the crowd.  We can’t forget Dance Moms and now its growing horde of imitators.  And the phalanx of wedding dress micro-dramas.  And I see now Kate is back, minus spouse, but having picked up a few aides-de-camp along the way.  I can think of no more certain way to remain a single mom than to demonstrate on TV just how much of a train wreck you are.  So-called “Gypsy” clans, and the most ridiculous attempts at exploiting Amish culture that I can imagine – oh, to be Amish and have no electricity!  Then you wouldn’t ever see the fake “survival” shows, the fake “moonshine” shows, and the fake everything else shows.  I could go on and on and on. 

Honestly…  if I were of dating age and raised with a TV in the house I’d probably enter a monastery.  :shudder:  The fact that such shows find enough viewers to make them financially viable makes me question our collective futures.

 

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Why am I such a tightwad?

Yesterday in the mail I got a really nice invitation to contribute to an organization whose goals I support.  They even sent me a nice little pocket sized copy of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.  And these guys are good; I really do like the work they do.  And I won’t send them any money.

Why?  Because it means that they will immediately add me to their list of people to harass constantly and incessantly for more, more, more.  I have had this happen with any organization to whom I give a dime.  I donated a couple of times to the Wounded Warrior Project, with a letter asking them very plainly to not waste their money (the money I donated, in other words) sending me crap in the mail begging for more.  I know who you are, I told them; I know where to find you and if I decide to donate more, I will do so without their prompting.  Furthermore, I told them, if they did decide to waste the money I donated on mailers and phone solicitations to try and get more from me, I would cut them off.

Unfortunately, since then they have wasted much of the money I donated on mailing me crap every week or two begging for more.  Sorry, screw ’em.  Not another penny, since they seem to be more focused on soliciting money than anything else.  I won’t donate to organizations that will simply waste the money.

I told the NRA the same thing.  After I joined I was inundated with junk mail begging for donations.  I wrote them a nice letter telling them that if they continued wasting my dues on sending me junk mail, I wouldn’t renew.  The junk mail stopped, and I’ve been a member ever since.

Most of the solicitations I get, though, go unanswered.  It seems that too many organizations are no longer charitable or activist or whatever their nominal purpose is — they are focused on fundraising, apparently for the sake of fundraising.  If I could kick in a few bucks and be left in peace, maybe I would.  But I hate paying for more junk mail.  Sorry if that makes me a tightwad.

 

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Small business shipping made easy

This may at some point begin to sound like a commercial, but it really isn’t.  I promise.  I receive nothing from anyone in return for writing this kind of stuff; I do it just to hopefully help out fellow small business owners.

I know (and know of) a lot of owners of small businesses who regularly ship packages all over the US and worldwide.  Most of them expend a lot of time and effort on shipping.  I suspect this level of hassle is the norm for small businesses; I have talked to several large dealers and distributors who offer to be my exclusive distributor and relieve me of the crushing burden of shipping and order fulfillment.  The truth is, order fulfillment and shipping take up a very small amount of the total time I spend running my business.

I know people who pack up each order, write the recipient’s name and address on the package (or print a label), drive to the post office and stand in line to have packages weighed and postage added.  Ugh.  Incredible.  I used to do that too, but it was years ago.  And filling out Customs forms for overseas shipments?  Torture!  At one time I seriously considered just NOT accepting any orders from outside the USA – -including APO/FPO addresses.

Others use on line tools like USPS’ Click-n-Ship to prepare labels.  It’s a lot better, but the user interface is clunky, and you either spend time cutting and taping paper to packages, or pay through the nose for expensive labels.  I looked into it, I even used it a few times.  It’s only marginally better than the trip to the post office.

If you ship more than a few packages per week, you owe it to yourself to go with a postage supplier.  I use Endicia, a choice I made after looking at them, Stamps.com and one or two others.  Pitney Bowes was at the bottom of the list by a wide margin.  I don’t remember the specific disadvantages of Stamps.com, but Endicia was the best suited for my needs.  With any of these services, you pay for postage on line, print your labels with postage included, and drop your packages off or have them picked up.

So why Endicia instead of Click-n-Ship?  With Endicia, I get a slight discount on postage and free delivery confirmation/package tracking.  Their software is installed on my PC, and can communicate with a USB postal scale to automatically weight each package.  I don’t use one simply because I know what 90% or more of my packages weigh, but when I see a good enough deal on a scale I’m buying one.

I use 4×6″ thermal labels.  They’re available for very little money, since they’re produced in vast numbers for UPS, Fedex and others.  I buy cases of 400-label rolls.  They go into the used Zebra LP2844 printer I picked up for under a hundred bucks on eBay.  In its former life it was used in a UPS store, and it’s given me three years of trouble-free service so far.  The really nice part?  I can print ANY kind of postage.  First class parcel, Priority Mail, Express, and international — INCLUDING the Customs form.  It’s SO nice to never have to fill out that stupid non-printer-friendly green form again!  Some forms, like an Express International package, can’t be done on a 4×6″ label.  For those I have the regular printer and USPS-supplied stick-on document sleeves.  Endicia prints all the required forms with postage, ready to go.

For $15.95 per month I get the ability to print labels without the postage amount shown…  so I don’t have to explain over and over to customers why I charged them $2.50 for shipping when the postage was only $1.93 (boxes, labels, printer paper and ink for the packing slip, packing material and gasoline are not free). I can get a refund on labels I don’t use; I can print return labels when a customer needs to return something.  In short — my shipping is as close to effortless as it can be.  And the post office employees love it when I drop off a tub full of packages WITH a USPS scan form so they don’t have to scan each package, just the form that puts each one into the system for tracking and delivery confirmation.

If you’re still writing out shipping labels, or if heaven forbid you’ve got a postage meter, you really owe it to yourself to check out Endicia.  They’ll usually give you a free trial period, and you don’t need anything special to get started — you can use your existing printer and plain paper or a box of Avery labels form Office Depot while you try it out.  Then you can develop your own process and streamline your shipping to take up less of your time and energy.

 

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Various stuff…

First of all, sue me…  I’m loving the iPhone.  I never thought I would.  There are a few little annoyances, but overall it’s a great little widget.

Went to the Ak ARC flea market Saturday.  I had a table to sell kits, but I don’t know why I bothered.  I did (just barely, maybe) cover my breakfast, the table and my gas to drive there and back, so I guess it was OK.  Honestly, I think most of the stuff for sale was the same crap I’d seen last year.  There was, however, a table set up by the Omaha Maker group, and separately a ham had a 3D printer running printing out something or other, I never did figure out what.  So why did I go?  It was good to see and talk to some of the hams I only see once in a while.  Jack WA0SAQ was there, Dave WJ0Z and some others I seem to only see once every year or five.

I did some CNC engraving on the end panels for a new flavor of PicoKeyer.  I think it turned out pretty well.  It will be a little extra work — OK, a lot of extra work, but I think it will be worth it.  This will also probably be the motivation I need to finally break down and make a better fixture for the end panels I use for the boxes.  Maybe something I don’t have to stand there and hold each one in place.  It would be a worth a lot to me to be able to not stand there the whole time the mill is running, holding parts and trying to avoid getting an end mill through a thumbnail.  McMaster, here comes an order!

And…  some days I miss not having something that looks like airplane parts in the garage.  In a couple of weeks, though, I should have a “canoe” going and by Spring it should be looking airplane-y again.

That is all.

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Technical stupidity.

It baffles me how people let their stuff get so messed up, and how companies will go so far out of their way to NOT be there for customers.

I got a phishing scam email supposedly from First National, where we used to have accounts.  Being the nice guy that I am, I figured I’d let them know the specifics.  After all, some people are dumb enough to fall for stuff like this.  A fake “IRS agent” almost managed to convince my 88-year-old mother to wire a few thousand dollars to avoid going to jail — never mind that she doesn’t owe the IRS a penny, never has and has never tried to cheat on her taxes.

Well, of course the only way to contact FNBO or FNNI is via a web form.  So I spend several minutes sending detailed information to them — the target web link, the email header, etc.  Then I hit the “Submit” button…

And got an error message.

Screw ’em.

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Into the dark side. Or whatever.

apple-logoMy Droid 3 has been giving me fits for a while.  The phone itself is fine…  there doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem.  A couple of months ago, though, it started nagging me daily to install a slew of app updates, including “Google Play Services”.  Half the apps I use regularly finally refused to run at all until I installed Google Play, which I resisted because it wanted access to everything on my phone.  All data, all history, location, email, everything.  I finally had no choice but to dump the phone or install the damn thing, so I installed it (and the subsequent dozen or so other app updates).  Since that time the phone has been plagued with odd behavior.  It will periodically freeze up, require reboots, not be able to place a call for several minutes after a restart, and I’ve had to pull the back off and remove the battery a couple of times when it froze up and started getting uncomfortably hot.

My employer offers me the option of having a corporate owned cell phone.  We’ve currently got a choice between Blackberry and iPhone.  I can understand their refusal to allow Android phones to connect to the corporate network — the ease with which an Android can be rooted and bent to the owner’s will is great for experimenters, developer and hackers (a term used in the proper, good sense here) – but it also removes any surety that an app can actually be trusted.  Anyway, the Blackberry phones are locked down tight and everything (web, email, etc) goes through the corporate proxies.  The iPhone situation is different; there’s a secure VPN app that handles all the corporate traffic, but outside of that app web browsing and email don’t pass through company servers.

I opted for the iPhone, so as of yesterday afternoon I have a shiny new iPhone 5S.  It is, I believe, the first Apple product I have ever owned, aside from a garage full of Lisas that passed through my hands back in the late 1990s. I have not used any Apple products for more than a few minutes since the Apple ][e.  No iPod, iPad, iPhone, Macs, iMacs, nuthin’ more than a passing familiarity.

So far I’m impressed.  The phone itself is a thing of beauty, which is to be expected of any new cell phone.  The Samsung Galaxy S III that Lisa carries (and the IV and V, I assume) are nice too.  So no big surprise there.  The thing is quite responsive, and almost everything is simple and intuitive.  I especially like being able to uninstall an app without having to wade through setup menus to do it, and the ability to effortlessly pull up the flashlight, timer, camera and calculator without even unlocking the phone — very nice.  It will even show me text messages and the first couple lines of new emails without unlocking the screen.

There are several areas in which iOS seems to really outshine Android OS.  The email client is a bit nicer than any I have used on the Droid.  iBooks has far and away the best PDF reader I have used on any platform.  The voicemail management is so well integrated with Verizon voicemail that I honestly didn’t realize it was there at first.  I see that there is a built-in flashlight app (lacking on the Droids) and timer/stopwatch.  The camera and its app is much better than anything I have seen on a phone before.  Overall, the UI seems a little smoother, a little quicker, a little more intuitive.  I can see why people rave about their iThingies.  And Siri works pretty well.  I even like the Lightning connector, though the cable they included could have stood to be about a foot longer — easily and cheaply remedied on Fleabay.  And while more of a hardware thing, the fingerprint scanning button is slick as all hell.

A few areas could use improvement.  For one, I do miss the “back” button.  I really do.  I get the whole single-button idea, but I’m constantly reaching for the back button.  A nightstand/dock mode like my Droid has would be awfully nice (maybe I just haven’t found it yet).  And for the love of all that’s good in the world, why can’t I just drag and drop files from my PC??  Using iTunes to copy PDFs to the phone is just plain stupid.

Anyway, the message here is really twofold.  First, kudos to Apple — the iPhone is really, really nice.  I don’t know that I would ever have bought one if I had to spend my own money on it, but it’s nice.  Second, shame on Google.  It took a lot to drive me away from Android, a platform I loved for what it was and what it represented.  They just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  They have managed to make it so intrusive and so inhospitable that even I had to walk away in disgust.

Now, about that Macbook Air…  hmmm.

 

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Seoul Burger

If you like things a little spicy but not too wild, try this…

Your favorite burger patty — home made, or the nice 1/3 lb. Angus patties from Costco
Your favorite bun
Drop on a layer of medium-hot kimchi
Optional: Add a fried egg (which makes any burger better)

I’d post a picture, but mine was very short-lived.  🙂  Simply flippin’ awesome.  For those of us limiting red meat and fat intake due to clogged up arteries, you want to make the most of that rare burger experience.  Even if you’re not a big kimchi fan — and it can be something of an acquired taste — kimchi as a relish on hamburgers or hot dogs is amazingly good.

 

 

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Parker’s Smokehouse

Lisa and I finally got out on the Harley last night and took a ride out to Parker’s Smokehouse.  We hadn’t been there in a while.  The weather was perfect, a glorious night for a motorcycle ride.

Since it was a Monday night, we were able to get a booth without waiting.  We decided to split their sampler platter (an appetizer, but enough to feed two easily) and a couple of side salads.  I have to say, the food has actually improved – and that is no mean feat.  The salads were a couple of notches better than we had had there before; a nice bed of Romaine lettuce, nice toasty croutons, well presented.  We were off to a good start!

I had always liked their ribs.  They have always been very good, but maybe not the most tender I’d had.  Last night they were much more tender and a little smokier than we’d had there before, and seemed to have a little more sweet BBQ flavor as well.  Not overpowering or trying to hide the flavor of the meat, but really good.  We also noticed that there was more meat on the ribs.  I’d say they are some of the best ribs we’ve had in a restaurant anywhere.  The rib tips were also superb, very smoky.  The chicken was very tender and juicy, and the catfish fingers were done to perfection.

We’ve seen a lot of restaurants start out great and gradually decline (like Colton’s, for example, or Millard Road House).  Parker’s seems to be getting even better than they were, which means someone is working hard.

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Halt and Catch Fire premier

Last night I watched the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire on AMC.  I wanted to love it, was tempted to hate it, and in the end opted for neither one.

For those of you who don’t know me, I lived through the period in question, and in the same industry…  although not working for TI, or a fictitious Texas OS vendor, or even directly in the PC end of things.  Still, those were some pretty exciting times.  I was fixing mainframes for a living, but lived and breathed microcomputers every day.  When micros first came on the scene (we didn’t call them “PCs” until well into the 80s), it was like the Wild West, in all the good ways.  There was opportunity around every corner.  I would be hard pressed to count the number of companies making computers in the pre-IBM days; some very cool things were being done by a lot of gifted and smart people.  I remember one in particular, a machine made by Ohio Scientific that had multiple processors (6800, 6502 and Z-80 if I remember right) and could boot different operating systems depending on your mood.

Anyway, the first bit of bad news came during the opening scene — a typed-text description of the “HALT AND CATCH FIRE” machine instruction.  It’s a simple concept, easy to explain and even a little humorous.  And they got it completely wrong.  Stupidly wrong, in fact.  I felt like a doctor watching Gray’s Anatomy or a cop watching Blue Bloods.  Sigh…

It got a little better from there, but there was some really stupid technical nonsense thrown in for no good reason.  Something real and believable would have been just as dramatic, or maybe even better.  You can’t cut a soda can in half with a pencil soldering iron  – and why would you need to to fix a Speak & Spell?  I especially loved the scene where he’s tediously de-soldering connections on the back of the circuit board — then triumphantly extracts the chip FROM ITS SOCKET.  And then of course there is the biggest non sequitur: ALL of the IBM Personal Computer’s schematics as well as the complete assembler listings for the BIOS were readily available from IBM, in the IBM Model 5150 Personal Computer maintenance manuals that anyone could buy.

So building a clone of the IBM PC was really pretty trivial from an engineering standpoint, and other manufacturers jumped in early and often.  Most tried to build better machines that ran their own version of MS-DOS, and most used the same bus so that expansion cards were interchangeable.  It took a while for the tyranny of the marketplace to grind everyone into making exact clones of the IBM machine, other than some speed improvements and of course much lower prices.

The list of ridiculously stupid technical gaffes is pretty impressive.  The scene where they start reading out the BIOS?  Well, first off, there were no white LEDs in 1983.  You could have any color of LED you wanted as long as it was red, green or yellow.  And binary 1101 is a hexidecimal D, not B.  PC motherboards don’t arc and spark, and if one did it would be dead, dead, dead.  His oscilloscope was displaying a stupidly Hollywood-ized pattern, and why would they need to use one  anyway?  Could they not read the pinout from a common EPROM data sheet?  He’d just finished explaining how all the parts were off the shelf common stuff.  And why would such a hotshot engineer not rig up an interface to his TRS-80 to read out the BIOS chip?  For that matter…  why not just type in a few lines of BASIC program to read out the BIOS and save it to disk, print it or display it on screen?

From a technical standpoint the show is senselessly over-dramatized in ways that really spoil a lot of the “geek appeal”.  If you know much at all about the technical matter at hand you’ll spend half your time shaking your head and saying, “Wha??  No…”  They did, however, seem to do a fairly decent job of catching the general tone of the period, and the story line (other than the glaring issue of the whole made-up BIOS thing) has potential.  I just wish they’d have hired an actual technical consultant, or listened to him if they did hire one.

 

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Improving the Neato vacuum

If you have a Neato XV series robotic vacuum, and you don’t already have one, you need to switch to the curved/spiral brush.  This is the one Neato ships with the “pet” versions of the vacuum.  It’s far quieter than the one with the parallel straight rubber blades.  The sound of the vacuum is reduced from a dull roar to a far less intrusive sound.  I can barely hear it when the vacuum is running downstairs and I’m in my office.  I’ve also noticed that it also seems to pick up a lot more dust and debris.  Overall it’s a huge improvement.

I ordered mine from Crucial Vacuum, part number 945-0002.  Best 25 bucks you can spend on your little robot friend.