Posts

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Blogging, a year later

I’ve now been blogging for just over a year. In that time, I’ve written about many random topics from politics to technology. The most popular article, by far, has been my review of the Garmin Forerunner 305. This article has been quite valuable, it appears to many looking at the device. All my other posts seem to be for my own entertainment, which is fine by me.

Have I learned anything over the last year about blogging? Well, I’ve learned how to make the site prettier and that by writing in a hournal type environment, I can put my feelings down and stop bugging my wife.

All in all, I’m glad that I started this blog.

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Franchise Tax Board is incompetent

Several months ago, I blogged about the Franchise Tax Board somehow losing my tax payment. For the last 2+ months, I’ve been calling them to find out the story and was promised a call back a number of times. No one ever called me back and I called them again today. This time, I got a different story…I had to make the payment AND the interest and penalty. So the $68.81 penalty and interest has now gone up to $92.31 because they’d been jerking me around for 2 months. This is not to mention the $20 stop payment fee I have to pay the bank so that the original payment doesn’t get cashed. I’m going to send the damn payment today by certified mail (or registered letter) to ensure that they get it and I can put this behind me. I can’t believe I have to pay an additional $23.50 due to their incompetence. My future tax payments are going to be sent certified or registered. I don’t have the time or patience to deal with their stupidity.

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TiVo came back to life!

The tip I received indicating that my TiVo’s hard drive might be dying could just have been my problem. We’ve gone 2 days on the new drive and it seems a bit faster and programs recorded after I replaced the drive haven’t skipped! We watched Saved without interruptions today whereas the last few episodes, it got blocky and almost unwatchable a few times. I offer my apology to TiVo for saying that they needed to fix their update. Too bad there isn’t a way to tell an end user without knowledge that the device is failing.

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The TiVo got emergency surgery

I complained previously about the sluggish response of our TiVo after the latest upgrade and how it was almost impossible to watch some shows due to choppiness of the playback. I was unable to get a real answer out of TiVo, so I did some detective work and found that one of my connections on LinkedIn knew someone that is currently an engineer at TiVo. So I asked if he’d put me in touch and he graciously did. The engineer, to my delight, responded and provided some valuable information and offered to have my TiVo logs examined to see what they said. The first part is that TiVo has said publicly that they’re investigating the sluggishness of the menus. The second part is that he as well as some other engineers suspect that the hard drive is failing. That seemed a bit coincidental as the problems started happening after the latest update. Well, he said that after the update, TiVo switches to a different partition. This gives credibility to the dying hard drive theory. The TiVo has been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2 years (2 years minus 1 week to be precise). I happened to have an extra 200 GB IDE drive lying around and I have the skills to replace the drive. I found instructions for doing the upgrade and proceeded to get things going. After a few false starts (BIOS issues with my PC), I managed to get my TiVo upgraded; unfortunately it took about 10 hours to copy all the info over (the instructions said 1-4 normally, up to 8…my PC must have been dog slow or the old drive was failing such that it kept having to re-read sectors).

Knock on metal, the TiVo seems to be working. We’ll know on Tuesday if the drive was the problem as one show we like, Saved, has had the most problems lately. If this was the solution to part of my problem, three cheers out to TiVo; however, the menus appear to be a bit slower than before the upgrade.

(I’ve felt kind of helpless without TiVo for the day even though I don’t watch TV during the day. My wife was bored and watched TV; I kept seeing her make motions like she was fast forwarding through the commercials!)

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A trip to the stadium

A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided to see a Padres baseball game in the “new” stadium that our tax dollars helped fund. While I was skeptical at first that the location of the stadium downtown was a good idea, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a downtown location makes the stadium convenient and isn’t the traffic nightmare that many had suspected. It amazes me that after paying to get into the stadium, we were bombarded by advertisements all over the stadium; on every part of the scoreboard from fixed signs to electronic signs, to sponsorships of this and that (including a sponsorship for each strike out), and of course, to the name of the stadium, Petco Park.

If I’m subjected to so much advertising, the least they could do is lower the ticket prices as I felt like we weren’t going to a ballgame, but to an advertising event. I’m sure some would argue that the ticket prices are lower because of all the advertising, but I think the advertising has gotten a bit out of hand.

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A GUI isn’t all that it is cracked up to be

This past week, I started learning about OS X server. The interface really confused me at first as there are lots of different options buried in lots of different places. After a few hours of playing around, I started making headway on figuring out what stuff did, but it wasn’t pretty. I then tried to use the GUI to turn on some other features and found out that it hung the system; I had to use the command line to kill off what I tried. Furthermore, I made a mistake and deleted an SSL certificate; when I went to add it back, it kept failing. The log gave a cryptic error message and after some searching, I found a reference to the keychain. So I used Apple Remote Desktop to connect to the server and look at the keychain (the keychain can’t be access using the server admin software), removed some pieces from the keychain and then I had no problem importing the certificate again. While Apple did an OK job (I’m not impressed with the UI) integrating UNIX tools into OS X, I’m not convinced that the GUI on OS X server is all that useful if I keep having to fight it to get stuff working.

On Tuesday, a friend of mine is going to teach me about OS X server; maybe it will change my view on it, especially if I can get everything working.

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Beef, it’s what’s for dinner

I’m a meat eater and proud of it. While I don’t eat meat (beef) all that often, when I do, I really enjoy it. My mom used to make London Broil when I was a kid and despite our best efforts at reproducing it, my wife and I haven’t managed to succeed, until yesterday! For a family barbecue (my in-laws were in town and my family came over), I went to Costco and bought flank steak. I know very little about steak, but it looked like there was little fat and it wasn’t too thick (a bit hard to tell as each piece was rolled up). My wife marinated the steak in teriyaki sauce all day and then I put the steak on the grill; at first, I thought I had bought way too much steak, but I cooked it up anyway. It was such a big hit that I thought people were going to fight for the last pieces. Mmmmm….beef!

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Apple Remote Desktop vs VNC

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work between my multiple computers and since I like having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse shared amongst them, I’ve been using VNC to control then. A friend of mine has told me that Apple Remote Desktop is faster, so I decided to spend the money and order a copy. I received my copy this morning and I have to say that I’m blown away. My network is no slouch (gigabit ethernet) so it wasn’t the bandwidth that was the problem in the sluggishness of VNC. Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is not only faster, but easier to use. If I want to move a file to another machine, I just drag it to the window. It does lots of other stuff, but just being able to control machines (share the screen) makes ARD worth it.

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Completed another race

Today I completed the America’s Finest City Half Marathon. I’m still not sure what my motivation is for continuing to run, but I figured I was already in shape from June’s marathon, so I might as well do a half marathon. This race was a completely different experience from the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon. This was significantly smaller than the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon with a limit of 6000 half marathon runners (it sold out) compared to over 20,000. The budget was much smaller as noticed with the race expo being held in the basement (basically) of a local hotel instead of the convention center. One of the biggest issues I saw with the race, due to its start location, is that we had to board buses to be driven about 25 minutes to the start line instead of basically driving right up to it. So I had to get up at 4:30 am for the 7 am start. Also, the race numbers were given out alphabetically instead of by estimated finish time and then everyone regardless of estimated finish time, started all bunched up. It took me over 2 miles of zig zagging before I was able to maintain my pace.

I did quite well and beat my goal of 2 hours (just over a 9 minute mile) by coming in at 1:49:29 for a pace of an 8 minute, 22 second mile. Not bad, in my opinion.

So, next year, I’ve decided to just run the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon (I’ve already signed up) and spend other times with activities like mountain biking and I know my wife wants to go kayaking, so maybe we can do that.

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Is programming really engineering?

In a recent blog post that I read, the author said that he had just finished reading To Engineer is Human and said that programming is not engineering. While that may be true in the pure sense of programming, but to say that all programmers don’t do engineering is absolutely incorrect in my opinion. I read the book mentioned during my 4 years of engineering school to earn a BS in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College and find it hard to believe that I don’t use some of that education in my career as a software engineer (a term that the blog post author doesn’t believe in). I do a significant amount of design work in my day to day work and have to problem solve which I consider engineering. Pure programming, in my opinion, is the stuff that is being outsourced to countries like Russia and India (not to say that those countries don’t have engineers). Anyone can write code according to specification, but it takes thinking to design software, analyze risks (in most cases not physical risks), and do cost/benefit analysis; skills that I learned in my training as an engineer.

This will probably be an ongoing debate that will never have an agreement, but it saddens me to see people lump together people that have an engineering background with people that just decided to write code as a hobby (some of those people are good enough, in my opinion, to be engineers).