technology

From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

We’re running a Belkin Wireless G router in my office. I had to rummage in my garage for a few old wireless USB dongles, but it’s much nicer than having to string CAT-5 all over the place. (I hate cables.) Some of us were suffering deadly latency and frequently-dropped connections, which was annoying as hell. I flashed the firmware and tweaked every setting on the thing, but the problem persisted.

Then I had lunch with a friend this week and he suggested that I switch the router from Channel 11, which I had thought was the best, to Channel 6, which is actually the strongest. Blam-o! Now we all have a much stronger signal and no drops. Brilliant.

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

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A week or so ago I found a link to the Griffin Mirrored Chrome Finish iPod case on Dan’s site. Anything that beautiful must be mine. I ordered one immediately and it arrived last night. The previous case I had — Agent18’s video-shield — was awesome, to be sure. After a year and a quarter, though, it had seen better days. It’s a testament to Agent18’s quality that my iPod doesn’t have a scratch on it. But my new chrome one is just rockin’ cool. Sweet.

The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.

In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.

Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.

I’ve often wondered how Alexa manages to get its data. Their stats never seem to synch with mine. It turns out there’s a fly in the ointment over there.

The first thing I did after crossing the marathon finish line was call my girlfriend so she could come get me. It was the last call I would make with my trusty RAZR. My hands were slick with sweat and the phone was coated with the salt and grime that had evaporated from my body during the 26.2 mile run. When it smashed to the ground it shattered as if it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The stomping feet of dozens of runners crushed what was left of it into the asphalt. I would have laughed if I’d had the strength. Instead I just sort of stared at it and made a sort of grunted smirk.

On Monday morning I went to the Cingular store near my office and bought a new RAZR. I got the same model for $100 (with a $50 mail-in rebate). It took me a few minutes of trudging through the Motorola site, but eventually I found the instructions to pair my Bluetooth headset to the phone.

Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts

1. CTRL-W (Firefox)
   Closes an open tab.
2. CTRL-S (almost every Microsoft product)
   Saves.
3. CTRL-SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT-END, & SHIFT-HOME (almost every text editor)
   Highlights (selects) a word and / or line of text.
4. ALT-F4 (Windows)
   Closes the current window.
5. ALT-SPACEBAR-X (Windows)
   Maximizes the current window.

When the future finally arrives, I think one of the things I’m going to appreciate the most is the digital shower. (Does anyone make one now?) I think being able to simply digitally set the water temperature will revolutionize my morning ablutions beyond belief. Fumbling the faucets for five minutes trying to achieve the perfect shower combination of hot and cold water is so old school. I imagine a world in which I can use a fog-resistant touch-screen to find NPR or ESPNRadio, alert me when I’ve been in there too long, and deliver the exact temperature to make me happy.

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I added my house to Hotspotr. If you are desperate for free WiFi in Los Angeles, feel free to sit in my driveway and use some of my bandwidth. I have had a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router with no password for years and I’m also broadcasting with the free FON wireless access point I got a few days ago. I’m glad to see LA ranked #8 on the list at Hotspotr. Wireless internet access should be free.