Ert's Blog

Cleansing time again! Healthy eating, September 7-21

ert — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:40:58 +0000

As we do every harvest season, my wife and I (and anyone else we can convince) will cleanse out our systems by eating uncompromisingly healthfully 24×7 for two weeks, give-or-take.

Our diet pretty much becomes vegetables, tofu, fish and whole grains, with an absolute ban on refined sugars, alcohol, caffeine (except green tea), dairy products, wheat, mammals and birds. (She may tweak it a bit because of the whole breast feeding thing). I’ll also drink all kinds of yucky-tasting herbal solutions purported to help flush the system (generally these ones). By the end of it we always feel a lot better — more energy and less in the way of cravings.

This season we’ll be starting this Tuesday, September 7, and going for two weeks. You’re welcome to join us, either by trying the diet yourself (with or without yucky herbs) or by implementing your own healthy diet and saying “well, at least I can eat more than Ert!” While we do this a couple times a year, the harvest time one is the best because of the availability of fresh produce in these parts.)

If you’re down with the plan, drop me a line.

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Children don’t make your hair grey, but DRMed eBooks do

ert — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:54:39 +0000

So last night I decided that I would finally sit down and successfully borrow an eBook from my local library and read it on my iPhone.

I realized there would be some bumpiness in the process, but noted that having a book show up at my door via Amazon was more streamlined than getting a book from the local public library, but not overwhelmingly so. I figured a similar level of jumping through hoops, probably just finding a blog post somewhere detailing a couple of key apps I needed. My local library belongs to the Minuteman Library Network, which uses the wildly popular Overdrive digital collections management system. Couple that with the cutting edge smartphone of the day (at least for the moment), and I was certain that I’d piece together a way to do it.

A couple of hours and several software downloads later (calibre, OverDrive Media Console mac, OverDrive Media Console iPhone, Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza mac, Stanza iPhone), I lay broken and defeated. At the core, it seems that OverDrive mainly carries DRMed ePub format titles for borrowing. Last year Stanza announced that they would support DRM ePub on the iPhone, but a couple months later they were bought by Amazon and quietly cancelled those plans.

I’m not sure who I should be yelling at. Apple? Amazon? Stanza? The Somerville Public Library? The DMCA? Maybe I’ll throw in Disney for good measure, noting that I have zero problem getting public domain books onto my iPhone but Disney is bound and determined to make sure that nothing published after Mickey Mouse’s debut should ever fall into the public domain. But I’ve already been apoplectic for years over the dearth of 20th century public domain works, and the inability of my library to lend out electronic books for my platform of choice clearly requires a new target of scorn.

Interestingly, audiobooks appear to be much further along. Perhaps I can couple them with some speech recognition software.

I’m going to go make some lunch and read Anne of Green Gables on my Newton.

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New job! New bat-channel, same bat-kendall-square!

ert — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:41:16 +0000

After a good while doing part sabbatical and part working on commercializing my own ideas the time has come for a change. I’ve just signed on with Endeca, starting full time in the middle of August!

So, Endeca. The short version of Endeca is “search software.” The longer version is they have a high performance data storage engine that makes it easy to answer questions about your data when you don’t know enough about your data to know what questions you should be asking. You’ve almost certainly unknowingly (or knowingly) used Endeca’s software on an e-commerce website many times before while searching for products. For the even longer description I point you to a two year old interview with one of the founders.

I’ll still be in Kendall Square, so it’s the same commute I’ve had for years. (A reasonably short bike and public transit commute was a major requirement for me, in fact. I was shocked at the number of people and companies I talked to who consider 30-60 minute car commutes interchangeable with, if not preferable to, commutes where you get to exercise or read at the same time. This is a whole other topic, mind you.)

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“Limitations on … funding prohibit … extending the Green Line beyond College Avenue” No taking the T to Whole Foods :( bit.ly/aAg7pq

ert — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:41:57 +0000

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Electronic airline boarding pass hitting .500

ert — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:47:11 +0000

En route to the Google developer’s conference, I tried an electronic boarding pass (the kind you can show on your phone) for the first time. The TSA kiosk did great, but the AA scanner couldn’t read it, right when dozens of people were behind me trying to board. They ended up typing in my seat manually.

Also, it was actually a little uncomfortable to not have the piece of paper, knowing that my phone needed to (a) not run out of battery and (b) stay on one page in the browser and/or be ready for the tens-of- seconds reload if I want to surf away to some other site and/or app. And having to hand your phone to strangers frankly feels a little bit invasive.

I think I may actually stick with paper for the time being, as cool as not having to worry about it can be.

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Ert’s a dad

ert — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:47:05 +0000

Hey, I’m a new dad to a big, beautiful baby girl!

A tired new dad. More info soon.

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My favourite iTunes playlist

ert — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:01:26 +0000

So I actually rate my songs in iTunes: Assuming that the vast majority of songs I own are in my library for a reason, two stars is my baseline for unremarkable tracks, three stars is a reasonably enjoyable song, four is a really good and memorable song, and five stars is reserved for my all-time favourites. The garbage gets one star.

I have a smart playlist that collects the fifty least recently played four and five star songs — songs that I like a lot but haven’t heard in a while. Then I put that list on shuffle or, even better, start iTunes DJ up, using that playlist as its source material. As songs get played they automatically fall off the list and get replaced by other oldies but goodies.

I also have another, shorter, playlist that collects just the dusty three-star songs, and then a third playlist that merges the first two. So I get a playlist that is mostly songs I really like but also mixes in a bit, yet not too much, stuff that I like to hear now and then but not too often.

This does not stop iTunes from being a bloated non-command-line monstrosity, but it does make me happy.

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The 2010s TV plunge

ert — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:18:58 +0000

We were still getting “Basic” and “Expanded Basic” Cable TV in addition to broadband with our Comcast account. Besides the having-a-baby household budget analysis that brought scrutiny to the cable bill, the Comcast transition over to digital in December introduced a couple of converter boxes into our lives — boxes that are still sitting unpacked in the baby’s room a couple of months after all the analog Expanded Basic channels went away and we failed to notice their absence.

Far from my near-daily consumption of The Daily Show that the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign saw, this sole cable show that had once argued for a $400+/yr cable package can now be bought for $125/yr on iTunes, assuming I was watching every episode, not to mention simply watched piecemeal on the Comedy Central site. Dollhouse we were watching on Hulu last autumn in a vain attempt to help get the show renewed, and pretty much everything else is Netflix nowadays. The radio shows are almost all podcasts now. And my recent media-unifying installation of Plex on the living room computer was really the nail in the coffin.

So, there it is. I just cancelled everything but Basic cable (and would’ve cancelled that, too, if they didn’t demand you pay them for it with the broadband regardless of whether or not you use it). They’re sending someone physically out to the house with some wire cutters or a hacksaw in a couple of days.

It seems to me the FCC is totally on the right track with the broadband-centric plan. Maybe we’ll even be able to unsubscribe from Basic cable one day.

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Strangely charmed

ert — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:30:48 +0000

A visit to a nuclear power plant while in my teens originally introduced me to the idea of substituting the periodicity in the periodic table of the elements with neutron count to give a sense of the known isotopes for each element. But, while previously aware of strangeness, my periodic dips into 21st century particle physics had not previously acquainted me with the existence of a three-dimensional non-periodic table of the elements, splaying nuclides out according to their atomic number and neutron count and then stacking them up the more strange they got.

The discovery this month of an antihypernucleus, strange antimatter with an antistrange quark, started building this table down instead of up, adding stuff in the opposite direction from the stuff that is perpendicularly arranged from all the stuff that I have in my house.

I, for one, applaud the terrestrial creation of hydrogen that is measurably less strange than everything else I’ve ever owned. It even appears to be colour-coded magenta so I can easily identify it when I encounter it.

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The cost of a book in Boston

ert — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:24:02 +0000

My wife and I have a lot of books. About a thousand, in fact. Not as many as some, but more than many others. So many books we have, in fact, that we’re making a baby to help shoulder the load of reading them all.

The baby apparently comes with needs beyond books, though, and we’re currently rearranging the house to make room for those needs that take up material space. Baby clothes, for example. And that’s forcing us to come to grips with exactly how many books we’re housing, and that line of thinking led me to wonder exactly how much we’re paying to store the books (nevermind purchase them).

So. We have a three bedroom flat in the greater Boston area. Wandering over to Craigslist and grabbing the first 1000 listings, I find the average asking price for a three bedroom apartment in the Boston area. $2,913.88, as it happens.

Then I do the same for an average four bedroom. $3,325.29 as of the moment.

So if we were renting an average three bedroom in the Boston area and found ourselves so bursting at the seams with books we needed a bigger place, we could move to a place with an extra room for an extra $400 a month or so. Sounds about right.

Let’s say it’s an average-sized room, perhaps 10′ x 11′, so 110′ of wall, less about 11′ for a door, couple of windows, and (ha!) a closet. So 100 linear feet of wall space.

Counting up a few shelves of books around the house, I find that each book averages about 1″ of shelf space, give-or-take. And our bookshelves are six shelves high.

So that extra $400 a month, assuming we use all the wall space for bookshelves and stick a work table or something in the middle of the room, gets us space for another 7200 books. That’s about 5.5¢ per book per month, or 67¢ per book per year.

So a decade of storing a paperback costs us as much as the original book cost.

Hm. Time to get sliding library shelves. Or a more compact baby.

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