Personal

LCD Screen Drawings

Mark Treadwell — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:59:35 GMT

My children's artwork adorns the walls of my house in several locations. It is regularly replaced with the most recent efforts, since the preschools seem to excel at a multitude of different craft projects. At home, we favor crayons and washable markers, but we keep close control of them.

This evening my three-year-old decided to climb up Daddy's chair and get onto my desk. A ball point pen beckoned from a pen holder placed far from a child-accessible edge. The canvas -- two 19-inch LCD screens. She seemed pleased with her art work when I came in, but I certainly was not.

I tried several cleaners unsuccessfully, but then had great success using full-strength isopropyl rubbing alcohol. I have been meaning to clean them for awhile. I just did not want to get around to it for this particular reason.

Technorati Tags: LCD, cleaning

Our First Zune

Mark Treadwell — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:29:02 GMT

My wife and I were talking by phone while I was at a store when she mentioned that she wanted an MP3 player for use around the house. Easy in-car use was also a requirement. I went to the music player display case to see what was offered. A full 80% of the boxes were various flavors of iPods. The rest were Zunes with a couple of Samsung units.

Since I have a bad opinion of Apple DRM and iTunes lock-in, I bought her a 4GB pink Zune and brought it home. My wife loved opening the box and playing with all the bits. We both agreed that the out-of-the-box experience was great. She went off to do some grocery shopping while I handled the task of installing the software and getting the thing running.

The great hardware happiness died an ugly death during the software installation. The process was agonizingly slow. The software prepared the computer for installation three times. The Zune software appeared to get installed three or four times, although I knew those were small support programs, then ... reboot! What? What does a simple music player need to restart the entire computer for? While writing this blog post, the software also automatically ran Microsoft Update without my permission and contrary to my Microsoft Update system settings. Very rude!

The total length of the install seemed like I was installing Microsoft Office and Visual Studio at the same time. It took nearly a half an hour on a computer with nothing else running and no other load on the broadband modem. I can only assume the 33MB of dedicated files are supported by numerous other changes -- and all this on a fully updated Windows XP system. I actually ended up with multiple restarts for multiple updates. I was disappointed the install process was so miserable, but grateful it went forward with no errors.

Happily, my wife saw none of this and was soon listening to a few of our CDs I had ripped previously. She dutifully listened to the music that came with the player, then spent some time learning the Zune software deleting it all. She judged it all to be crap. The only artist she recognized of the bunch was Bare Naked Ladies and that was only because they sang a song for Disney's movie Chicken Little.

She loves the size, feel, and interface of the Zune. That part of the experience was great. The car kit just worked with no problems. She is happy, and that was a primary goal of the purchase.

Technorati Tags: Zune

Merry Christmas

Mark Treadwell — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:02:17 GMT

... to everyone at GeeksWithBlogs and those elsewhere reading. Enjoy the season with your own traditions and religion, whether you celebrate the birth of Christ or not. Enjoy!

Our Christmas Toy Experience

Mark Treadwell — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:40:51 GMT

Technorati Tags: Christmas

As I noted previously, I have now retired from military active duty. I am taking the Christmas season off to relax before going back to work for my new career out there in the Real World©®. That means I have gotten the opportunity to spend much more time with the wife and kids.

Thursday morning, while the girls were in school and the little one was napping, my wife and I took the time to open and assemble all the kids toys for Christmas. We did this early to avoid a late night on Christmas Eve, or the crisis rush on Christmas morning. It took us much longer than we anticipated due to the nature of this year's toy packaging adventures.

We intentionally avoided the infamous clamshell death plastic this year. The closest we came were with a pair of nicely packaged GE headsets for use with our cordless phone system. They had a paperboard back that was easy to cut open -- no plastic cutting required. The toy boxes took much longer than anticipated to open since the manufacturers seem to have substituted complex folded cardboard secured with miles of cellophane tape to replace the hated plastic clamshells.

The full-view packaging designers win the raspberry award this year for their use of wire twist ties suitable for towing. These things were so thick that our Fiskars scissors, normally a match for any consumer packaging, failed miserably. I had to resort to my Craftsman wire cutters, though I wondered if I might need something bigger. The stiff, machine-tightened wires were impossible to undo by hand even when we had full access to them behind their nefariously complex packaging. Be ready with your own heavy-duty implements of destruction in the coming days.

We have been buying stuff over the last 6-8 months, as items became available. We have found many of the things we chose are now not available, or available on Amazon or EBay at astronomical markups over what we paid just months ago (a $40 toy was selling for $175).

Our son emerged from his nap and demanded to do some preliminary play testing of things his sisters would be getting. He gave a double thumbs up to a few items, but his clear favorite was Pat Pat Rocket. Since he is just on the verge of walking, we feel he will not spill the beans before Tuesday.

Post-Christmas Update

The Pat Pat Rocket was a hit with all the kids, but we found that little hands could not pry open the top to play with the figures inside. I remedied that with a sticky tape tab they could grip, but a better design would be appreciated by parents. It also falls into the category of toys which are too loud.

GeoTrax Rail and Road System Grand Central Station by Fisher-Price: Recommended; another big hit. We left this one in the box and assembled it on a bedroom floor while the girls were busy elsewhere. It is a big hit on available floor space, so we had to be careful where we put it. The assembly was pretty easy, but I see the engine will be chewing through lots of AAA batteries.

vtech ABC Food Fun: Not recommended. It is too loud, comes on randomly even after it is supposedly powered off automatically, the door is hard to open, it is too easy to accidentally hit a mode button, and the magnet pieces are hard for kids to align correctly to make it work. Other than that, it briefly held the attention of a three-year-old.

Strange Amazon Connection

Mark Treadwell — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:33:41 GMT

We got a very strange recommendation from Amazon for our four-year-old.

We do not understand it either.

Migration Reconstruction

Mark Treadwell — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:56:36 GMT

My apologies to anyone cruising through who finds the code snippets disrupted. I still need to get things updated after the GWB migration to SubText. The new skin will take some adjustment!

NASA's Rocket Ship

Mark Treadwell — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:00:00 GMT

As the parent of a three-year-old, I have to thank NASA for resuming space shuttle flights. I understand the safety issues and complexities involved, but my daughter was thoroughly entranced watching the "rocket ship" blast off two weeks ago. We watched out our back window and on TV when Discovery's launch turned the night into day. She immediately wanted her "rocket ship" to take off again.

This evening, we watched on TV as Discovery landed. We opened the patio slider to let the sonic boom rustle the vertical blinds and let the sound startle the kids. Free simple entertainment. Now my daughter is waiting to see her "rocket ship" again.

Next launch is the Orbiter Atlantis in mid-March.

Merry Christmas: Santa's Goin' To Kokomo

Mark Treadwell — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:27:00 GMT

Merry Christmas!

Mike Love's Santa's Goin' To Kokomo

New Dell Computer Crapware

Mark Treadwell — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 01:12:00 GMT

Today I got to unpack and set up my new toy. After over five years of existing with the same old 1.1GHz P3, I finally got my brand new Dell XPS 400 -- Pentium D Dual Core 3GHz Processor 930, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM, 256MB nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX, and other toys -- Sweet! I plugged in two 19-inch LCD monitors that I had ready, fired it up, and promptly got deluged with the Dell advertising crapware.

I had to read the startup configuration screen very closely to make sure I was not agreeing to AOL Broadband or NetZero dial-up. I wanted to use my existing ISP. Not to worry, I still had to view the AOL Broadband ad anyway since I chose to intentionally bypass the install.

Overall, not too bad, but lots more than past computers. I especially dislike anything AOL. I killed it off and uninstalled it as fast as I could. In typical AOL fashion, they left an install link on the Start menu along with an install package directory that I had to delete manually.

Update: I also pulled some stuff out of the registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

What do I end up with on my new desktop?

Windows stuff (Recycle Bin, IE, Media Center, Windows Media Player)
Dell Documentation and Support; Games, Music, and Photos
Crap: AOL Free 6 Months, Internet Service Offers, NetZero - First Month Free!

Start Menu Crap:

MSN (twice)
America Online 9.0 (and subfolder)
Install Netscape Internet Service
NetZero - First Month Free!
InstallShield Update Service (it only updates itself and Corel Photo Album 6)
RealPlayer
WordPerfect Office 12

Background Process Crap:

AOL connectivity service (System level! Why would this ever need to be running in the background on every new PC?)

IE Shortcut Crap:

Real (3 links)
Dell (4 links)
MSN

Control Panel - Add or Remove Programs Crap

America Online
AOL Coach Version 1.0
AOL Connectivity Services
EarthLink Setup Files
ESPNMotion
Dell Get High Speed Internet!
Dell Internet Service Offers Launcher
NetZeroInstallers
RealPlayer
WordPerfect Office 12

I uninstalled all this since I never wanted it, will never use it, and feel much better with it gone. Interestingly, Dell is shipping old versions of Sun Java (1.4.2_03 vice the current 1.5.0_06-b05) and Adobe Acrobat Reader (6.0.2 vice 7.0.8). No Flash or Shockwave included either. Who knows what else I will find strange about this new machine.

Visiting Memory Lane

Mark Treadwell — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:55:00 GMT

Today I did some long delayed work and started cleaning out our garage. I needed to free-up space, so I went about straightening up the scattered lumber and tossing out the old and broken things that I held on to for very good reasons -- I just cannot recall what they are now.

One stack of boxes held all the old bits of computers that I have bought over the past 21 years. Some things brought a smile to my face. Here are some of the bits I came across. Remember these?

CD caddy - These were how we used to put CDs into computers. That was back in the time before burners when we were convinced that a CD was a fragile thing to be protected. For those too young to remember, a caddy is plastic container that holds a CD or DVD disc for added protection. The bare disc is placed in the caddy, and the caddy is inserted into the drive. A caddy is not a jewel case or a sleeve. A jewel case protects the disc for transportation. A caddy protects the disc while it is in the drive.

Bernoulli Disk - The ones I found are 44MB discs. They were huge amounts of storage at the time. Now they may hold only a single MP3 file -- and let you get to it very slowly. Advertised as allowing infinite storage, they came with 5 year warranties and were individually serialized.

SCSI terminator - A SCSI bus used to be the only way you could get a large number of drives hooked onto a computer. Initially, getting SCSI to work was a black art. It greatly depended on the cable, the drives, the controller and the terminator used. Still used today, things are much more automated and less painful. I am still mentally scarred by my long-ago pain of getting a SCSI scanner to work.

PS/2 Model 80 - This was my second computer after owning one of the original IBM PCs. I bought it at literally a fire sale after a warehouse got a little smoky. The machine ran fine despite its microchannel bus - a great technology that went nowhere. This machine was very heavy and you really needed that sturdy fold up handle.

This stuff is now heading for the recycler and into computer oblivion.