How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body. Crazy story.
In Las Vegas
After a near-miss and frantic rush this morning the American West flight to Las Vegas was great, the pilot did a small deteour after leaving SFO that took us around the coast of San Francisco and over Fisherman’s Wharf right as the sun was coming up, it was one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen in my life. San Francisco is just one of those magical places and I’m grateful for every day I spend there. Now I’m in Las Vegas and it’s surprisingly nippy, I might end up getting one of those awful tourist sweatshirts to stave away the chills. Wifi in McCarran airport is free and fast.
SxSW Day 2
A hamburger place for lunch, the 16-bit party, and a human-powered cab home.
T-Mobile Ripoff
Oh my goodness! I’ve had a pre-pay T-Mobile account because Starbuck’s are so ubiquitous, but when I tried to log in right now it said my account has expired, even though I know I’ve hardly used it. Not that big a deal though, I can just refill it, check my email, post, and go along my merry way. So I start the refill process, and it wants $50. WTF? Let’s take a look at each of their plans to see what a ripoff it is:
- Unlimited National — $29.99 a month. This looks like the best deal until you notice that it requires a 12-month contract, and has a $200 early termination fee. What a rip.
- Unlimited National — $39.99 a month. This actually is the best deal, which is sad because this is how much I pay for my cell phone. They need to have something cheaper.
- Prepay 300 — $50. This is the plan they wanted me to refill to. What a rip! Those three hundred minutes expire in 120 days if you don’t use them and the minimum session time is 10 minutes, so at most you could get on this thirty times before you’re out.
- Pay as you go — 10 cents a minute. Okay finally we have something reasonable here, right? I can pop in and out, probably using under a dollar worth of minutes. Plus if I did end up using 300 minutes it would still be cheaper than their stupid prepay plan. But wait, it looks like there is a 60 minute minimum per session, which means every time you log on you would be paying $6.
These plans are ridiculous, and I’m going to take my WiFi card elsewhere. Or maybe I’ll stop in and try some of their very reasonably priced coffee. I feel strange saying this, but McDonald’s has the right idea. I would be happy to get a meal and some WiFi, or pay a reasonable $3 for an hour of access. Plus I assume that cash is an option, which is a plus. Of course there are some very good independent coffee houses around which I frequent, but unfortunately none of them are convenient to my next appointment, so I’m stuck without access. I guess it’s time to go war-driving and find some good nodes in the Montrose area.
I’m not trying to say that the above plans are wrong for everyone, just that for my planned usage of quick, infrequent stops here and there is no plan which I won’t pay out the nose for. I have come to the conclusion that T-Mobile is the devil though. Now I’m just going to head to my haircut, and then to the long-anticipated mid-term.
Focusing on Market Share
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”
Technorati
WordPress now has 4623 inbound sources and 10232 inbound links, which according to my watchlist page ranks it at #7 in the technoratisphere. This site is #129. WP isn’t on the Technorati 100 because they filter out weblogging tools and other non-blog sites.
Hong Kong Morning
The upside of jet lag, like Om discovering the streets of Paris, are enjoying parts of the day you might not normally be awake for, like a beautiful sun rise. Here’s a time lapse I made of the Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong taken from the incredible view I have in my room.
Get Into Google Blog Search
Want to get into Google’s new blog search? “The easiest way to do this is via pingomatic, which can ping more than a dozen popular pingservers, according to Goldman.” Thanks Jason! Read more…
Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance can only help the well-prepared mind. I also think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my mode of paying attention: I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard, or looked at the article that my uncle gave me because he was not interested.
via Edge: THE FATHER OF LONG TAILS — Interview with Benoît Mandelbrot by Hans Ulrich Obrist. For extra credit and an exercise in brevity and clarity, link or write in the comments the simplest definition of “fractal” as used by Mandelbrot and Obrist in the interview.
Artisanal Water
Many of my friends know how obsessed I am with different types of water, from Badoit to Hint Water (yum) to De L’aubier. This definitely hit close to home.
Linux for the Masses
It’s not there yet. I’m being totally unfair, because comparing Windows or OS X to the Linux distribution I’m using (Gentoo) is like apples and oranges. Gentoo is meant for people who are comfortable with the command-line and want to experiment. (It’d be fairer to compare Windows to Suse.) But I just want to bridge a connection between an ethernet card and a wireless USB device. Is that too much to ask? When I did this in Windows I just highlighted the two connections, right-clicked, and chose “Bridge Connections.” It spun for a little bit and then it was done. End of story.
The work started yesterday, when I figured out that the reason nothing would emerge is that there were bad GCC flags in my make.conf file. How they got there, I’ll never know. Bad ebuild I guess. So I got that fixed, synced, and updated world. 85 packages! The next day I compiled a new kernel (2.6.7-rc2) but forgot to load the Tulip module required for my ethernet card. Recompile, reboot. Runs great, and I tell myself everything is running faster. Right now I’m bridging my desk LAN to the main router through the Windows desktop, and since I just moved the linux box on a new UPS I’d like to move the wireless connection there too. I was feeling lucky, so I tried just plugging it in to see what happened. dmesg, device not recognized. Search search search the excellent Gentoo forums, find out that to get my MA101 working I shouldn’t use the drivers from Sourceforge, but rather the at76c503a Atmel drivers for wireless USB devices. Download, compile against current kernel sources, install. Reboot. Don’t have any wireless tools. emerge wireless-utilities. Twiddle for 45 minutes to see why it won’t see any networks. Forgot to enable “Wireless radio (non-HAM)” support in the kernel. Recompile. Reboot. iwscan shows my network, iwconfig wlan0 works as expected. The instructions that tell me to put in ad-hoc mode are wrong. (Hour later.) Put it in Managed mode. Cycle the device and run dhcpd wlan0. Ping Yahoo. Online! Track down documentation on bridging. Emerge bridging program. Appears to run fine, but gives a funky error and doesn’t seem to do anything. Add “802.11d bridging” support to kernel. Recompile. Remount /boot. Copy kernel. Reboot… Computer loads everything through Gnome, then mouse and keyboard freezes. Switch back to laptop, write blog entry to let off steam. Reboot again, just to see if it’ll work. Loads, run brctl.So far so good. brctl addbr mattlan returns br_add_bridge: Package not installed, which seems to indicate that the proper kernel module isn’t installed. Would check the .config, but the computer just froze again.
I need some rest.
The Software is Wrong, Not the People by Joe Flood about the DC meetup the other day.
HiMD
Sony’s HiMD player stores 45 hours of music per disc, and allows uploading. The lack of digital uploading was the biggest gripe I had about my (now stolen) MD player/recorder. Lack of recording is the number one reason I’m probably not going to get an iPod.
GBase and Wikipedia
I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.
Thanksgiving Travel Tip
Just a tip for people traveling this week: get there early! I got there when I normally would (45-60 minutes before) and didn’t make it, thanks mostly to standing in the wrong line twice. Airports are in need of a usability designer far more than any software I’ve used in the past year. I generally fly a few times a month, so I’m not exactly a novice, but this is the first time I’ve been in the middle of the Thanksgiving rush.
I was wondering the other day how many miles of road were in every state, and guessed that Texas must be the highest. It turns out it is, according to this list of the road mileage of every state. It’s about 70% more than the runner-up, California. After TX and CA, it’s Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
2.0 Bingo
Web 2.0 bingo, play it on your next conference call.
Best Headphones Spring 2015 Edition
Since my last headphone post I’ve been trying out lots of different models, and have settled on two new ones as my daily drivers: the PowerBeats 2 and the Sennheiser Momentum 2 Wireless.
I’ll talk about the Beats first because it’s easy: before I used a Plantronics set for exercise, but the battery life wasn’t great and they would often fall out when running. The Powerbeats 2 are light, have great battery life (they claim 6 hours, that feels about right), stay in place even when running in the Houston heat, charge fast, and as a bonus they look cool. (Beats has always been great about that.) The sound? They’re bad, but good at it. There’s basically no isolation so you can hear traffic and things around you at lower volumes, which is actually a bonus, and if you turn up the volume they get loud enough to drown other stuff out. Buy these for the function, not the sound quality, and you can pick them up from any Best Buy kiosk in the airport or Apple Store if you lose or forget them, so they’re pretty ubiquitous.
I heard about the Sennheisers from Carl Hancock who tried them and gave them a high recommendation. I had trouble finding them but there was a pair local to me at B&H in New York so I got them delivered and I was immediately impressed with them. They’re better than my previous wireless over-ear recommendation the Samsung Level Over in every way: sound, size, compatibility, aesthetics, usability, noise canceling.
The sound is the best I’ve heard from wireless headphones so far. Just the right balance. The noise canceling apparently uses 4 different mics and I’ve found it more than sufficient on dozens of plane rides, including passing the noisy baby test. My only complaint is they don’t “grip” my ears as much, so some sound leaks in that way. They fold up to be pretty small, and I just toss them in my backpack. 
The battery goes forever, or as they claim 22 hours. You really forget to charge these things for a while and they still have plenty of juice. The volume and other controls actually work with the iPhone, and bluetooth calls have sounded great and people can actually hear me. Only downside is they have basically a proprietary connection for their 1/8th inch cable, so you have ta carry that around, but they charge with standard micro-USB. The only possible challenger I can think to these are the BeoPlay H8s, which I haven’t tried yet.
tl; dr: If you want to exercise and get sweaty, get the Powerbeats 2 in your favorite color. For traveling, listening to music, talking, and generally enjoying amazing sound without worrying about wires, try out the Sennheiser Momentum Wireless.
I think it’s interesting that both of these recommendations are version 2.0 of a product, it’s good to see companies iterating and improving on products even if they’ve already been successful in the marketplace.