As you probably don’t know, I’m working on a car mount for my iPhone. I saw an instructable on how to make one that seemed nice, but I’m not keen on the velcro and I’m not sure I kept the plastic packing piece it requires. I also spied a mounting solution from ProClip that seemed really nice. They sell mounts as two interlocking pieces, one to hold your phone or MP3 player (almost any phone or player) and one to hook into your car (all sorts of cars.) Because they’re two pieces, you can match any car to any player, but they’re pricey. Their Eclipse Spyder solution is pretty much a shim that slips in just under the A/C duct, which I made a mental note of.

I figured that for a much lower price, I can make a similar shim-based solution.

This is, effectively, a single sheet of solid plexiglass and three sheets with an iPhone-shaped hole. As you can see, the shim isn’t mounted yet. You can probably also see the couple of cracks that say “yes, sir, this is my first time working with plexiglass.” You may additionally notice that some of the cuts are not exactly straight. I’m still learning. Total cost of plexiglass and (unpictured) shim: about $6. Fortunately, I already had the tools and other hardware.

Ignore the Dodgeball-to-Brightkite migration hint I posted the other day about checkin notifications. I said to go into your Notifications settings and say “Friends Only” and make the area really, really wide.

It turns out that there is a better way. Go to your list of friends and find the friends you’d like to be kept aware of. Click on “Edit friendship” and a whole slew of detailed options comes up. Click the “SMS” checkbox next to “Checkins” and you’ll be informed of their checkins, no matter where in town that person is. Now might be a good time to revert the change I suggested in that previous post.

Also: my three invite slots have filled again. Let me know if you’d like one.

Pictures!

This is my entry in the ColorWars reverse-caption contest:

It was warm and sunny this afternoon. Everyone was enjoying it.

It’s amazing what a little work and less than $20 worth of supplies from the hardware store can do to get you more organized. This is my “network closet” (you can’t really see the LAN patch panel, off frame to the right) that also holds all my tools. Previously, all of these hanging things were rattling around in the bottom of a toolbox. If I wanted a particular tool, I would have to dig for it in the box and hope I didn’t catch myself on a saw blade.

Brightkite

I am now on Brightkite. I have officially stopped using Dodgeball. I’ve turned off my Dodgeball notifications and will no longer post there. Brightkite is similar to Dodgeball, but different. A few things that might be of interest to Dodgeball-to-Brightkite refugees:

* The “@placename” style checkin only works if you’ve already set up your own personal place names. Otherwise you have to do “?business” to get a listing, then select 1, 2, 3, etc. to choose the specific one. It’s an extra step, but it does ensure that you’re checking in to the correct place. But you really do want to set up “@placenames” for the places you visit most frequently.
* By default, you only get notifications from people very close to you (within about a block), whether or not they’re friends. If you want more of the Dodgeball feel of what your friends are doing around the city, you need to go to “Account Settings: Notifications” and change the radius to “Area (4000 meters)” and the who to “Friends”.
* I’m temporarily sharing my checkins to my Twitter stream, but may not continue to do this long-term.

I have one extra Brightkite invite if you’d like one. I expect to be getting three more soon. (They keep giving me three invites every so often.)

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG)

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game or PMOG is a very interesting diversion and I especially like the steampunk theme it uses. The game itself is played through a toolbar in your web browser as you surf the web. As you visit unique sites (or, at least, unique top level domains), you get datapoints (the form of cash used in the game.) You can then spend that cash on items and equipment. In its simplest form, you can deposit items on pages for other people to pick up or set off. For instance, you can leave a bunch of mines on digg.com and the next person who comes along (that is playing the game) trips those mines and had better have some armor. You can leave a crate of cash and armor. You can also take missions and even create them. In this context, a mission is a path across several web pages with a little bit of narrative text to pull them together. For instance, I made a Sudoku mission last week that took you around to places with rules, strategy, and higher quality daily puzzles. You can think of it as a sort of “user generated content” variant of the good ol’ webring (remember those?), but dynamic and voted upon, so you’ll know which ones are good and which are lame. The missions (and portals, which are like one-website missions) can be sought out and taken–but even nicer is the way you can stumble across a mission. If you visit a web page that is a component of a larger mission, your toolbar will notify you of the mission. I’ve found the mines and armor to be great for shallow surface entertainment, but the serendipitous linkages you get from stumbling across missions is a much more satisfying level of fun. For instance, if I were some player that went to the New York Times daily sudoku puzzle, I’d be informed of a related mission. If I took that mission, I might learn that USA Today also has a decent daily puzzle page, or I might learn about a cool online step-solver (that shows you HOW to arrive at a difficult answer without blatantly jumping you to the final the answer.)

Overall, it’s a fun little diversion. Right now, I’m not actively trying to level-up and earn points and badges. As the game’s name implies, I’m passively playing, and having fun doing so.

If you’re interested, I have several invites.

Veganism?

I know that a number of people reading this are vegetarians. I believe a few are also vegan. My question to you is: why? Why did you go the extra mile from being vegetarian to vegan? As I understand it, for most people, it’s a moral choice–for instance, cows in “factory farms” hooked up to milking machines is arguably not the most humane way to treat them. If this is your reason, though, would you eat milk and cheese from a local farm that you know treats their animals well? Are eggs right out, because they’re going to become baby chickens, or would it be different if they were free-range or if they were from hens you kept yourself?

The Oregon primary ballots are due soon. “Soon?” Yes, for those unfamiliar with our system up here, everything is done by mail or by drop-off. There’s no polling place and polling date, just a mail-in deadline. I think the government might think that the November weather might be too cold, wet, and dreary for people to traverse it to go vote–so we vote by mail, even in the primaries. We’re also not trusted to pump our own gasoline. Anyway, I have a gut feeling about who I’m voting for, but I’d really like to have a bit more rationality behind it.

And now a bit of a sidebar…

In my line of work, the sales and marketing folks use a particular style of comparison called a “feature matrix.” You might have seen these kinds of things before, as they’re not just relegated to the tech sector. You start with a grid or table with labels across the top and sides. One axis is a list of the competing products or services being compared–say a TechMaster SuperWidget 3000, a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain, and a Yoyodyne oscillation overthruster. The other axis is the set of features being compared–power source, number of serial ports, top spacial speed, top temporal speed, etc. The main content of the grid consists of checkmark boxes to say yes, this product has this feature or numbers to convey similar information (the widget has 2 serial ports, but the overthruster has 3.)

When feature matrices are used correctly, they present an impartial and objective comparison between products. When they’ve been giving a marketing department spin, eh… not so much with the fair-and-balanced. Categories–quite often entirely useless ones–might get chosen to make one product appear better and more feature-rich than the others. Oh, look, the overthruster is the only product with polarized filters over the display so that you can read it cleanly outdoors, even under direct sunlight. Wait, what? Who’s going to use any of these products outdoors? But it does give you a feature checkmark for one product that none of the others have. You get enough of those, and at first glance, it looks like one product is much better than others.

…and that’s then end of my sidebar.

So, dear inkernet, I ask you: where can I find a reasonably unbiased feature matrix of the candidates? Ideally, it would have Hillary and Obama (and perhaps others?) along one axis and issues (war, taxes, spending, abortion, death penalty, etc.) across the other. The main content of the table would then be brief descriptions of each candidate’s stance on each issue. Extra special super bonus if references are cited so that inquisitive readers can consult the primary sources of the summarized data.

I have always had mixed feelings about self checkout lines. I first saw them in supermarkets as a sort of super-express-lane. Or more specifically, a quintuplet of super-express-lanes because they usually cram four of them together. At the time, they were only in supermarkets. I was in my mid 20s and thought they were great! …mostly. My typical workday was pretty late and the supermarket was open 24-hours so it was easy to grab a few things for dinner and race through checkout. During the day, it was a little bit annoying because you’d get somebody with a heaping cart full of a week’s worth of groceries trying to use them (ignoring the 15-items-or-fewer signs, with no reprimand by the one overworked employee operating all four stations) or you’d have Grandma in front of you, prodding at the touch screen with an unsure finger and spending entirely too long in trying to find the barcodes on her items, confused by the newfangled computer checkout. Overall, though, for me at that time in my life, it was new and novel and useful.

These days, I find them annoying at best and frustrating at worst. First and foremost, the novelty has worn off and the quirks in the system have become much more visible. For every item you scan, the pressure-sensitive table holding the plastic bags needs a bit more weight. This is true whether it’s a lightweight box of band-aids that’s too small to register weight or a rake that’s too big to put on the table. Virtually every operation seems like it needs an override by the overworked employee who’s minding all four stations. Add to this the moral and philosophical issues dangling over the situation. The small amount of time savings going through self-checkout versus an express lane is a huge cost-savings for the supermarket. To install self-checkout, they’ve removed a few lanes (presumably some of the express lanes), decreasing their cashier staff by a few, and transition the gruntwork from the checkers on to you! The whole thing smells a little too much of corporate greed to me. To top it all off, you usually get zero human interaction during self-checkout. At best you get a nod and a “hey” from the overseer employee. That person rarely even talks to you when doing those aforementioned override operations.

Given all of this, I gravitate away from the self checkout lanes these days. Last night, on my way home from work, I stopped by a big-box hardware store that uses a few of these lanes. I have always avoided them in the past because they offered conventional checkout options, but last night the only open lanes were self-checkout! And the majority of stuff in my cart was large-ish. As I pondered how to best get the barcode end of the edger and stand-up weed puller to the scanner glass without damage to the items or machine, the overseer lady came along with a wireless barcode reader. Because she was rushed (by other customers with other issues), she proceeded to scan stuff directly in the cart without going through that whole routine of removing it from the cart, scanning it, then bagging or tagging it. I carefully watched as she proceeded to scan items. Of course, given this particular methodology, human error came into play. She didn’t double-scan anything, but did miss a few things.

As is customary in self-checkout lanes, nothing more than a few grunt-like words were said to me and I never spoke a single word throughout the whole transaction. Minimal-to-no communication feels like the social contract of this particular kind of transaction choreography. I keep telling myself that I’m not a thief-via-inaction and I’m starting to believe it.

Did you ever play the lava game as a kid? The subject came up again last night as we were steam cleaning the carpet for a houseguest this weekend. It seems like everyone I talk to has played it, or at least some minor variant. Technically, I think the label “game” is less accurate than something like “activity,” but you probably already have recollections of this “game” forming in your head, so you likely know what I mean. The floor of the house is lava. You then jump around between the sofa, loveseat, and various other pieces of furniture, trying to creatively get around without touching the floor. Even if there is a newspaper on the floor, it is somehow stout enough to repel the lava. Just as card games have “house rules,” so does the lava game. Sometimes it is played at home on the furniture. Sometimes it is played by friends at lunch time in the sandbox at school, jumping around between monkeybars, swings, and other playground equipment. Sometimes there is a person acting as a lava monster, trying to pull people into the lava. Regardless of the locale or specific scenario, everyone I encounter has played some form of “the floor is made of lava.”

Last night, it was fun to see the cats leap around, trying not to touch the (wet) floor. To them, it was made of lava.

A few of the more interesting and notable Twitter updates that I have made in the past few weeks:

• Buying shower curtains and duct tape. Concerned someone will think I’m up to evil.
• Today feels like I’m touch-typing with one hand sjifted tp tje rogjt (shifted to the right)
• Watching steamed clams pop open is so fun! It’s like a Venus Flytrap in reverse. I think this is what they watched before TV was invented.
• The inaugural use of the rubber mallet was not for the bathroom floor, but for the buttermilk.
• Just got out of a cosmology lecture. It’s turtles all the way down.
• I get entirely too much entertainment value out of shooting squirrels with water.
• You may say to yourself “that Brian’s wearing the same thing as yesterday” but you’d be wrong. Today, my socks are red.
• My current inventory includes: no tea, no coffee, a friendly device that uses wireless ethernet to access the sum knowledge of the Earth … also: bathrobe
  And then the responses rolled in:
  • substitute: @BrianEnigma drop no tea
  • CoffeeJedi: @BrianEnigma what? no towel?
  • redbanshee: @BrianEnigma and no cheese sandwich??
  • Ariock: @BrianEnigma and no thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is?
  • vpisteve: @BrianEnigma did you check the pockets?
  • 3Ms: @BrianEnigma dont forget your fluff.
• Every table at this sandwich shop has salt, pepper, napkins, and… a bottle of Purell? Are public bottles sanitary enough for some1 w. OCD?

When the lap is occupied by the laptop, Ebenezer is forced to be creative. I think he’s the only cat I know that enjoys being upside-down.

On a related note: in the same situation, I am forced to be a little creative in how I type.

Well, I think I’m taking a huge step that I’ve been contemplating for a long time and finally decided to jump into. Those of you on LiveJournal might notice a new friend request later this weekend. That request will not be from a regular user, but one with a weird little orange “I” next to the name: The name associated with the account is “netninja.com.” This is me taking another step away from LiveJournal. Lots of people complained the last few time LJ f’ed up: when they suspended accounts based on nebulous concepts of “adult” content, when they silently dropped the free-non-ad-supported account level. Lots of people said “I’m closing my account.” I am not aware of anyone that did. There was that laughable “strike” that was about as effective as everyone not buying gas on a particular day, but that was it. I have always thought of myself as an early adopter, so consider this to be me trailblazing a path away from LJ that others can later follow. It’s not a cold-turkey “I quit,” but is a big step away. I joined LiveJournal in 2001. It was pretty cutting-edge back then. The developers had cool ideas and implemented them. Seven years later, LJ just feels stagnant. Decisions are made by an unseen committee inside of a Russian corporation. New and cutting-edge ideas don’t seem to be surfacing. Lots of new themes are available and there are increasingly more ways for someone else to monetize my content, but that’s about all I see. As a result, I’m taking yet another step away from LiveJournal. The first step was to set up my own blog and configure it to cross-post to LJ. This step involves OpenID and dropping that cross-posting.

This OpenID account does not mean that I will stop participating in the LiveJournal community. I can’t write journal posts with OpenID, but in all other regards it acts as a regular free account. I can be friended and unfriended. I can read protected posts. I can write comments. I can even have a handful of user icons. I’m not leaving LiveJournal–I’m just changing how I access it.

LiveJournal users will also notice that my cross-posting to http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/ will cease to function in a few days. While the syndication never actually broke and the code behind it was quite solid, the solution has always seemed a little too “string and sealing wax” to me. The established norm for that sort of cross-posting has always been RSS. You’ll always be able to read entries directly at Netninja, you’ll always be able to subscribe to the RSS, and because an RSS feed is available, you can see those entries directly in LJ by adding brianenigma_rss as a friend.

In Summary

* The BrianEnigma account is being deprecated.
* My new LiveJournal login will be netninja.com. I’ll be reading and commenting.
* My posts will be available on LiveJournal at brianenigma_rss

This is another catch-up post to cover all sorts of topics from the past week.

Dream

Last night, I had an odd dream in which I somehow lost a cadaver. I have no idea why I had one. I might have been a mortician or transporting it or merely keeping an eye on it for someone. (Wait–what? Keeping an eye on it? Why? In case it walks away?!) I also have no idea how one could lose a lifeless body. But I did.

I pretty much have to put the blame on this week’s This American Life: Mistakes Were Made. It was all about a haphazardly run cryogenics company in the 60s that made a bunch of choices that might have seemed good at the time, but looking back were pretty poor.

Extra points to TAL for using NIN’s Ghosts as incidental music.

Too Much Coffee Man

Saturday was the final evening performance of the Too Much Coffee Man Opera. Although I have seen plays and concerts in Portland, I had never actually seen anything in the Performing Arts Center. Presumably, it contains some pretty large halls, but it also holds a number of smaller ones. The show was in a room that could probably seat about 100-150. There were a half-dozen or so tables up front and conventional theater seating in the back.

The opera itself was quite fun. It was campy and low budget, yes, but that’s sort of the point! The adventures of TMCM and Espresso Boy, who both fall in love with the coffee shop barista, but she runs off to be a superhero and marry the leader of the evil Martians (but she convinced him to be good.) In the end, the Earth is destroyed but the coffee is saved.

Imbibe

Kim and I met up with Julian at Imbibe on Sunday (or was it Friday? It was some time over the weekend.) I used to really like Imbibe, but something changed recently. Last October they got sued by the RIAA because a live band played a cover without approval. I don’t know if that’s the reason or if it’s under new management or what. They slimmed down the menu, lowered the quality of the food and raised the prices. My $15 olive and cheese plate (which was formerly $10 or $12) was pretty skimpy (it used to be huge.) The other food our table got wasn’t particularly good for the price, either.

The one good thing I pulled away from that evening was the Gotan Project, which was playing on CD between bands. I believe the genre is called “tango fusion.” Basically, I’m a sucker for a good accordion in a modern song.

Photos

My bus transfers! Let me show you them! (Oh, speaking of this phrase, I got an email newsletter from Nintendo today about some new Pokemon game. The ALT text for the main image was “Let Me Show You Them!”)

That’s the past month or so of bus tickets–at least, the ones that didn’t get thrown away. I ride the bus a lot, but not nearly enough to make a monthly pass worth the cost.

On the right there is the flowchart that was taped to my door today. We’re in a crunch to get something out next week and I kept getting pestered with inconsequential requests this morning. I’d submit it to PassiveAggressiveNotes.com, except I already have something in their queue.

Historic Photos of Portland

I now have a copy of Historic Photos of Portland (sparked off by my “then and now” post), but have yet to really sit down and really give it the time it deserves. Initial impressions are that it’s a high quality book with some great pictures. I’ll talk about it in more detail in the next couple of days. (This weekend was much more busy than expected.)