Ever wish you could sit nearer the lavatory on an airplane? Or further away? Have you been given the opportunity to choose a seat number, but didn't know how many seats across your scheduled aircraft had?
A really cool site called SeatGuru has cabin layouts of the specific aircraft any given airline flies, so you can make informed decisions about seats. SeatGuru also lists galley locations, "undesirable" seats, and in-seat power availability, among other attributes. I found it very handy.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Telepresence
This summer I traveled across the country to stay with my mom as she recovered from hip-replacement surgery. My wife - a college professor - was mid-semester, so we planned to video chat often to stay in touch. What actually happened in the first few days was, for me, a revelation/revolution in the human communication experience...
THE FUTURE WAS THEN...
During a visit with my father in 1967, we attended Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal, Canada. One of my few enduring memories of the trip was talking to my father on an AT&T Picturephone inside a glass-enclosed pavillion, next to a full-sized mock-up of NASA's Apollo Lunar Excursion Module on a simulated moonscape. My father was only about 50 feet away on another Picturephone, and it was only black & white (hey, my family didn't own a color television until 1979), but the promise was that some day, we all could not only hear but see our friends and family over great distances.
Forty years(!) later, we still don't have Picturephones. There are a lot of reasons, possibly the best reason being that much of the time we just don't want to be seen in whatever state we're in when the phone rings. We've gotten used to the paradigm of speaking to a disembodied voice injected directly into one ear - we've been doing so for well over a century.
Of course, there have been solutions for getting that past-future Picturephone into the home. I the past decade and more, there have been expensive consumer devices that connected to a user's phone line and provided choppy video and gravely audio by digitally compressing them to pass through the same "pipe" intended for only audio.
Today, of course, personal computer users can use inexpensive cameras (which may already be incorporated into their computers) in concert with a broadband Internet connection in their home or business to "video chat" or even "video conference" (with more than two people concurrently) with others anywhere in the world. Video quality can be quite good, depending upon the speed of one's Internet connection, and audio is excellent.
Like many, I have been regularly using video chat on personal computers since 2003, when Apple Computer introduced the "AV" version of their "iChat" text- and voice-chat client application. Starting in the early 1990s, I'd periodically played with Internet telephony, but with disappointing results. Attempting to establish test conversations with other geeky friends always resulted in burning up hours in futile troubleshooting, often with one party hearing the other but not vice versa - sometimes with audio skipping most of the words, and sometimes humorously spitting out 10 seconds of speech in a 2-second Chipmunks-style burst. When Apple introduced iChatAV for their Macintosh operating system, they presented a mature and relatively stable technology for easy audio and video communication over the Internet.
This maturation of teleconferencing was possible too because of the increasing penetration of "broadband" Internet access. Increasingly, consumers around the world subscribe to various methods of delivering 24/7 Internet access at data speeds many times greater than those achievable through the half-century old paradigm of the telephone modem.
TOGETHERNESSWhen preparing for my trip to North Carolina, I discovered that the hospital where my mom was having her orthopaedic surgery had free WiFi in some parts of most buildings, but was still in the process of extending coverage campus-wide. I had no idea how much time I'd spend in the hospital, but I prepared for the worst, including acquisition of a WiFi range-extending solution. While in the surgical waiting room, I was delighted to discover that I did indeed have WiFi access in our wing of the hospital.
As soon as my mom was out of surgery and post-op ICU, she was moved to her room. I blogged her status for family and friends, and phoned the less tech-savvy. As soon as I was settled in her room, I set up my laptop and its video camera and discovered my wife online (very early in California). We started a video chat, and I updated her on my mom's status. My wife re-met a friend of my mother's who had stayed with me through the surgery. The laptop was on the rolling hospital bed table, and I showed my wife my mother sleeping off her anesthetic. In these critical first post-op hours, hospital staff popped in every 10-15 minutes, so I'd introduce my wife and each staff member to each other. In every case, the staff seemed delighted and surprised. When my mom first regained consciousness, she was very enthusiastic, if groggy, to be able to speak to her daughter-in-law before she again fell asleep.
The day of surgery was a Friday, and my wife was grading student projects on her computer at home all day, so we just left the cameras going. Staff would come and go and exchange pleasantries with my wife. When the nursing shift changed, new staff would be introduced. Later in the day, I walked my wife around the hospital floor (with her full face on the laptop screen facing forward) and introduced her to the nurses at their station.
After several hours, I was quite hungry, having never left the room. At my wife's encouragement, I went down to the cafeteria, leaving her to watch my mom with the plan that if anything needing my attention happened, she would call my cell phone. I took a break, confident that my wife was "watching" over my mom.
When I returned from the basement cafeteria 20 minutes later with my tray of food, I pushed open the door to my mom's room, and this is when I had an experience:
...the door opened to reveal the contents of the room and in that moment, when I actually saw the mostly-empty room around my mother's sleeping form - there was an expectation, a mental prediction, a mind's-eye image of my wife in the room - that vanished like an unremembered dream upon waking. For that moment, I believed that my wife was in the room. But she wasn't - and she was.
In all the years I've used telephones and Internet-based audio- and video-chat, it was always an "event." You call, you talk. You finish talking, you hang up. The difference here was that for 10 straight hours, my wife was virtually "in the room." For most of the time, we didn't talk. She was doing school work, and I was tending to my mom. When things happened in the room, visitors arriving, staff checking vitals, she interacted with them in the same way that a person physically in the room would, making conversation. I was just as meaningful when she'd go off to get a snack that we could see the empty chair in our office in California, as though that room were now just adjacent to the North Carolina hospital room. It wasn't a communications "event," it was just being there. "Telepresence" comes to mind. Usually referring to technologies that bring more sensory information than the familiar video and audio of our media world, it seems most appropriate here to describe this committed emotional congregation made possible through technological infrastructure more typically utilized for terse bursts of pure information.
Upon further reflection, I remember that in my youth, I did on several occasions watch television while not talking to friends during a phone call - for hours. We were watching the same show, and not really talking but for an occasional "you still there?" In truth, that's kind of the same thing - emotionally, psychically sharing a common, if virtual, mental space. And in the same way, it's similar to my hospital/video-chat experience because of the intent, or lack thereof, to actively use the communications technology for interaction. It wasn't about what we said - it was about spending time with someone.
The tech geek, futurist and creative thinker in me were all caught unawares by the powerful but unobvious meaning of this only recent possibility for mankind. It's something I think others would find similarly satisfying, particularly in the context of being able to provide long-distance emotional support for something like a hospital stay.
EPILOGUE
My mom's hip replacement went spectacularly well. She was completely off her walker and cane in seven weeks, and has more physical stamina than she's had in years. Most impressively, she's talking about having the other hip done.
Our laptop will be there.
THE FUTURE WAS THEN...
During a visit with my father in 1967, we attended Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal, Canada. One of my few enduring memories of the trip was talking to my father on an AT&T Picturephone inside a glass-enclosed pavillion, next to a full-sized mock-up of NASA's Apollo Lunar Excursion Module on a simulated moonscape. My father was only about 50 feet away on another Picturephone, and it was only black & white (hey, my family didn't own a color television until 1979), but the promise was that some day, we all could not only hear but see our friends and family over great distances.
Forty years(!) later, we still don't have Picturephones. There are a lot of reasons, possibly the best reason being that much of the time we just don't want to be seen in whatever state we're in when the phone rings. We've gotten used to the paradigm of speaking to a disembodied voice injected directly into one ear - we've been doing so for well over a century.
Of course, there have been solutions for getting that past-future Picturephone into the home. I the past decade and more, there have been expensive consumer devices that connected to a user's phone line and provided choppy video and gravely audio by digitally compressing them to pass through the same "pipe" intended for only audio.
Today, of course, personal computer users can use inexpensive cameras (which may already be incorporated into their computers) in concert with a broadband Internet connection in their home or business to "video chat" or even "video conference" (with more than two people concurrently) with others anywhere in the world. Video quality can be quite good, depending upon the speed of one's Internet connection, and audio is excellent.
Like many, I have been regularly using video chat on personal computers since 2003, when Apple Computer introduced the "AV" version of their "iChat" text- and voice-chat client application. Starting in the early 1990s, I'd periodically played with Internet telephony, but with disappointing results. Attempting to establish test conversations with other geeky friends always resulted in burning up hours in futile troubleshooting, often with one party hearing the other but not vice versa - sometimes with audio skipping most of the words, and sometimes humorously spitting out 10 seconds of speech in a 2-second Chipmunks-style burst. When Apple introduced iChatAV for their Macintosh operating system, they presented a mature and relatively stable technology for easy audio and video communication over the Internet.
This maturation of teleconferencing was possible too because of the increasing penetration of "broadband" Internet access. Increasingly, consumers around the world subscribe to various methods of delivering 24/7 Internet access at data speeds many times greater than those achievable through the half-century old paradigm of the telephone modem.
TOGETHERNESSWhen preparing for my trip to North Carolina, I discovered that the hospital where my mom was having her orthopaedic surgery had free WiFi in some parts of most buildings, but was still in the process of extending coverage campus-wide. I had no idea how much time I'd spend in the hospital, but I prepared for the worst, including acquisition of a WiFi range-extending solution. While in the surgical waiting room, I was delighted to discover that I did indeed have WiFi access in our wing of the hospital.
As soon as my mom was out of surgery and post-op ICU, she was moved to her room. I blogged her status for family and friends, and phoned the less tech-savvy. As soon as I was settled in her room, I set up my laptop and its video camera and discovered my wife online (very early in California). We started a video chat, and I updated her on my mom's status. My wife re-met a friend of my mother's who had stayed with me through the surgery. The laptop was on the rolling hospital bed table, and I showed my wife my mother sleeping off her anesthetic. In these critical first post-op hours, hospital staff popped in every 10-15 minutes, so I'd introduce my wife and each staff member to each other. In every case, the staff seemed delighted and surprised. When my mom first regained consciousness, she was very enthusiastic, if groggy, to be able to speak to her daughter-in-law before she again fell asleep.
The day of surgery was a Friday, and my wife was grading student projects on her computer at home all day, so we just left the cameras going. Staff would come and go and exchange pleasantries with my wife. When the nursing shift changed, new staff would be introduced. Later in the day, I walked my wife around the hospital floor (with her full face on the laptop screen facing forward) and introduced her to the nurses at their station.
After several hours, I was quite hungry, having never left the room. At my wife's encouragement, I went down to the cafeteria, leaving her to watch my mom with the plan that if anything needing my attention happened, she would call my cell phone. I took a break, confident that my wife was "watching" over my mom.
When I returned from the basement cafeteria 20 minutes later with my tray of food, I pushed open the door to my mom's room, and this is when I had an experience:
...the door opened to reveal the contents of the room and in that moment, when I actually saw the mostly-empty room around my mother's sleeping form - there was an expectation, a mental prediction, a mind's-eye image of my wife in the room - that vanished like an unremembered dream upon waking. For that moment, I believed that my wife was in the room. But she wasn't - and she was.
In all the years I've used telephones and Internet-based audio- and video-chat, it was always an "event." You call, you talk. You finish talking, you hang up. The difference here was that for 10 straight hours, my wife was virtually "in the room." For most of the time, we didn't talk. She was doing school work, and I was tending to my mom. When things happened in the room, visitors arriving, staff checking vitals, she interacted with them in the same way that a person physically in the room would, making conversation. I was just as meaningful when she'd go off to get a snack that we could see the empty chair in our office in California, as though that room were now just adjacent to the North Carolina hospital room. It wasn't a communications "event," it was just being there. "Telepresence" comes to mind. Usually referring to technologies that bring more sensory information than the familiar video and audio of our media world, it seems most appropriate here to describe this committed emotional congregation made possible through technological infrastructure more typically utilized for terse bursts of pure information.
Upon further reflection, I remember that in my youth, I did on several occasions watch television while not talking to friends during a phone call - for hours. We were watching the same show, and not really talking but for an occasional "you still there?" In truth, that's kind of the same thing - emotionally, psychically sharing a common, if virtual, mental space. And in the same way, it's similar to my hospital/video-chat experience because of the intent, or lack thereof, to actively use the communications technology for interaction. It wasn't about what we said - it was about spending time with someone.
The tech geek, futurist and creative thinker in me were all caught unawares by the powerful but unobvious meaning of this only recent possibility for mankind. It's something I think others would find similarly satisfying, particularly in the context of being able to provide long-distance emotional support for something like a hospital stay.
EPILOGUE
My mom's hip replacement went spectacularly well. She was completely off her walker and cane in seven weeks, and has more physical stamina than she's had in years. Most impressively, she's talking about having the other hip done.
Our laptop will be there.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Surge Suppressor Causes Temporary Cursor Freezing
--A Fantastic Tale of Solving the Unsolvable--
If I hadn't witnessed this myself, I wouldn't have believed it. This is a computer diagnostician's horror story.
Not long afterward, the friend reported a problem: the cursor would intermittently freeze. Curiously, he discovered that in an unpredictable period of time (from minutes to hours), user control sometimes eventually returned. The symptoms appeared while he was running a variety of applications. The circumstances under which they appeared had no apparent commonality.
My friend's comment about this previous paragraph: "This caused incredible frustration with the iMac, even causing me to put it away and not touch it for about 3 months when I first tried to learn how to use it. It was my first Mac and after experience with bullet-proof DOS machines, a real disappointment until the problem was discovered."Some known issues of the time exacerbated our inability to solve his problem. For instance, Apple had identified a problem with slot-loading CD drives which caused system freezing and had released a firmware upgrade for the CD drive. This produced no helpful results.
Many diagnostic experiments were performed attempting to solve this problem:
- keyboard & mouse replacement
- RAM replacement
- formatted drive
- installed OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.1, 10.2
- firmware update per Apple
A couple of years passed, and this was always nagging at me: the problem I never solved; the friend's Mac that I couldn't fix; the friend's Mac I'd convinced him to buy and approved for his purchase.
Eventually, after formatting the iMac's internal drive and installing OS 10.2, the symptoms persisted. I gave up, assuming that the problem was hardware-related. Perhaps it was USB-circuit related - a motherboard swap as the likely fix.
Instead of replacing the motherboard (a decidedly unprofitable move, in the face of the changing state-of-the-art - and what would have been a disastrously unsuccessful move, given the final outcome), he decided to buy a new computer. I suggested an eMac. After some deliberation, he bought a brand-new eMac 700MHz.
Two weeks later, my phone rang.
Friend: "You'll never guess what's happening with my new eMac."We apparently didn't resolve the problem in that call. A few days later, when the friend experienced the problem again, he experimentally removed the surge suppressor from his computer, plugging directly into the wall outlet. He experienced NO further problems.
Me: "No way."
Friend: "Yep."
Me: "Are you using the new keyboard and mouse?"
Friend: "I'm using the keyboard and mouse that came with the new eMac."
Ever.
Not only did he never see the problem again, but he fired up the old iMac and never saw the problem there again either. Re-installing the surge suppressor re-introduced the Temporary Frozen Cursor symptom. After running both machines for weeks with no symptoms, his conscience was clear enough that the iMac was completely fine that he eventually sold it for not much less than he purchased it two or three years earlier.
(NOTE: Surge suppressor model: “Surge2+”, model 30022, UL listed, bought at a Home Depot for about $10, with “$5000 equipment damage guarantee.” I don't recommend it.)If he hadn't purchased another brand-new computer which was identically vulnerable to whatever characteristic was introduced by the surge suppressor, we'd never have had a solution. I've told this tale within my circle of technically-adept friends, and not one of them would ever have suspected this possibility.
Having said that, I hope never to suspect a surge suppressor again. It's just too strange. I can't believe it's even possible. In all my years as a computer hobbyist and professional (since 1981), I've never seen anything like this. Especially that whatever the mechanism of failure was, it caused a 1999 iMac and a 2002 eMac (which probably have completely unrelated power-supply circuits) to temporarily stop responding to the USB bus, only to completely return to normal functionality in time - without crashing the computer.
I've posted this, not with the expectation that it will actually be the solution to anyone's symptoms (but by all means let me know if you encounter this), but because this was also a painful learning experience. I had been thorough in my diagnostics of his iMac. None of the hardware or software infrastructure which I was able to test on his computer were at fault. But my mind was closed to the possibility that something _past the plug on the AC power cord_ could be suspect. When you're a diagnostician, you tend to adopt a process of elimination. Mistakenly eliminating a part of a system without can lead down a an inappropriate logic path - and I know that. I will frequently review the eliminations I've already made, to check for careless logic errors. And yet, I never even included the AC power source in my mental logic tree.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Send Larger Files with YouSendIt
If you've ever tried sending a friend a file larger than 10MB or so, you may have discovered that your email service prohibits such large file attachments.
A Web service called YouSendIt allows you to send files up to 100MB for no cost by allowing you to upload to their servers, from which your recipients can then download from any Web browser. With the free service, your recipients will be exposed to advertising when they pick up your file. Several tiers of paid service eliminate advertising and raise maximum files sizes (up to 2GB) and monthly data limits (up to 200GB/mo).
A Web service called YouSendIt allows you to send files up to 100MB for no cost by allowing you to upload to their servers, from which your recipients can then download from any Web browser. With the free service, your recipients will be exposed to advertising when they pick up your file. Several tiers of paid service eliminate advertising and raise maximum files sizes (up to 2GB) and monthly data limits (up to 200GB/mo).
Sunday, April 15, 2007
CompUSA Stores Closing List
In February 2007, CompUSA announced that it would close 126 stores - more than half. Sadly, our closest store (Burbank, CA) is one of those stores - it's half-empty now. Not that CompUSA was the greatest store, but the resource was remarkable - to be able to visit their website and tell anyone I know whether an item they needed was reported to be in-stock in a nearby store is fantastic (you can see retail location in-stock estimates with Radio Shack and Best Buy, among others).
Here is CompUSA's list of all the stores which are closing. The closing stores are currently selling merchandise at discounts of 10 to 40 per cent (more of the former) - I've been in two, and they're pretty picked-over at this point.
Here is CompUSA's list of all the stores which are closing. The closing stores are currently selling merchandise at discounts of 10 to 40 per cent (more of the former) - I've been in two, and they're pretty picked-over at this point.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Apple to Sell Non-DRM Music
In February 2007, Steve Jobs presented a treatise titled "Thoughts on Music" in which he wrote that Apple would be more than willing to sell music without restrictive and invasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) - citing that it was music companies that demanded this technological restriction.
On April 2, Apple announced that it will offer EMI Music's entire digital catalog DRM-free beginning in May. At $1.29, the EMI songs will be somewhat more expensive than the rest of the iTunes Store catalog (typically $0.99 per song), plus the songs will be encoded as 256Kbps AAC files - twice the sampling rate of DRM-encrypted iTunes offerings. EMI and iTunes will allow customers who previously purchased DRM-protected EMI titles to upgrade to DRM-free versions for 30 cents per title.
The non-DRM songs will be playable on any number of devices, as opposed to the Apple's original (but generous) limitations - 5 computers, unlimited iPods and unlimited (personal use only) CDs - though these have somewhat less fidelity than a commercial CD.
Apple and EMI may have really started something. Let's hope the music industry gets it.
On April 2, Apple announced that it will offer EMI Music's entire digital catalog DRM-free beginning in May. At $1.29, the EMI songs will be somewhat more expensive than the rest of the iTunes Store catalog (typically $0.99 per song), plus the songs will be encoded as 256Kbps AAC files - twice the sampling rate of DRM-encrypted iTunes offerings. EMI and iTunes will allow customers who previously purchased DRM-protected EMI titles to upgrade to DRM-free versions for 30 cents per title.
The non-DRM songs will be playable on any number of devices, as opposed to the Apple's original (but generous) limitations - 5 computers, unlimited iPods and unlimited (personal use only) CDs - though these have somewhat less fidelity than a commercial CD.
Apple and EMI may have really started something. Let's hope the music industry gets it.
Prepare for Hard Drive Failure
Anyone who knows me has heard me say, "Hard drives will fail," and yet we will all be caught out eventually by a hard drive failure. The question is how much you're willing to lose when that failure eventually happens.
Hard drives, or hard disk drives, are the magnetic storage devices in your personal computer that perform long-term storage tasks. That is, anything you'd like to keep after turning the computer off. (Short-term storage is done on memory chips, which are hundreds of times faster and more expensive than hard disks, but which lose all their stored information when the computer is turned off.) All your programs and every piece of data you create and save are stored on this device. The operating system which makes your computer a computer is also stored as information on the hard drive.
But hard drives are mechanical devices, with not only a motor spinning a metal disk at thousands of revolutions per minute whenever the computer is on, but a delicate mechanism which moves a tiny magnetic "head" back and forth across a radius of the disk (remember vinyl record players? rhis is just like a tonearm), oscillating at rates which make the arm appear as a blur. It's one of the only mission-critical mechanical parts in a modern computer, and unfortunately, it's where all our stuff is (to quote George Carlin).
Internet giant Google published a paper in February 2007 to share the results of a study they did on hard drive reliability. They are certainly one of the larger users of hard drives, and the study was based on 100,000 of their drives (which may or may not represent a majority of the drives in their "server farms" - I suspect that information is "classified"). You can download a PDF file of the report here. Somewhat disturbingly, the failure rates they observed (without repsect to manufacturer) exceed 8 per cent in the second year of operation. As a household with (currently) 10 hard drives in daily use (including our TiVos, which run 24/7), that pretty much means we'll lose a hard drive every two years - and we do.
That said, I say again: hard drives will fail. Everything on your computer may go away forever.
Truthfully, you may be able to salvage the data on a hard drive after it fails. If you're lucky, the drive will act strangely enough to alarm you (i.e., the computer doesn't boot), but will work the following attempt. But it might not. There are data recovery services available - companies like Drive Savers who charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to recover data by means as elaborate as you can afford, including clean-room disassembly of hard drives and re-mounting the "platters" (which contain the data) in new drive mechanisms.
So establish a backup plan. If something you do on your computer takes effort (including just having a running computer), then it's worth effort to put the data in another place. Among the possible backup solutions:
Hard drives, or hard disk drives, are the magnetic storage devices in your personal computer that perform long-term storage tasks. That is, anything you'd like to keep after turning the computer off. (Short-term storage is done on memory chips, which are hundreds of times faster and more expensive than hard disks, but which lose all their stored information when the computer is turned off.) All your programs and every piece of data you create and save are stored on this device. The operating system which makes your computer a computer is also stored as information on the hard drive.
But hard drives are mechanical devices, with not only a motor spinning a metal disk at thousands of revolutions per minute whenever the computer is on, but a delicate mechanism which moves a tiny magnetic "head" back and forth across a radius of the disk (remember vinyl record players? rhis is just like a tonearm), oscillating at rates which make the arm appear as a blur. It's one of the only mission-critical mechanical parts in a modern computer, and unfortunately, it's where all our stuff is (to quote George Carlin).
Internet giant Google published a paper in February 2007 to share the results of a study they did on hard drive reliability. They are certainly one of the larger users of hard drives, and the study was based on 100,000 of their drives (which may or may not represent a majority of the drives in their "server farms" - I suspect that information is "classified"). You can download a PDF file of the report here. Somewhat disturbingly, the failure rates they observed (without repsect to manufacturer) exceed 8 per cent in the second year of operation. As a household with (currently) 10 hard drives in daily use (including our TiVos, which run 24/7), that pretty much means we'll lose a hard drive every two years - and we do.
That said, I say again: hard drives will fail. Everything on your computer may go away forever.
Truthfully, you may be able to salvage the data on a hard drive after it fails. If you're lucky, the drive will act strangely enough to alarm you (i.e., the computer doesn't boot), but will work the following attempt. But it might not. There are data recovery services available - companies like Drive Savers who charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to recover data by means as elaborate as you can afford, including clean-room disassembly of hard drives and re-mounting the "platters" (which contain the data) in new drive mechanisms.
So establish a backup plan. If something you do on your computer takes effort (including just having a running computer), then it's worth effort to put the data in another place. Among the possible backup solutions:
- burn data to CD or DVD
- multiple copies, and some off-site in case of fire or theft
- copy data to an external hard drive
- USB or FireWire connected
- copy data to an online data service (some free, some paid)
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