rob’s next move

technology adoption

24Jun09

Click image to watch video

This is a fascinating little segment about consumer technology adoption that compares quality and cost. The subject at hand is Compact Fluorescent Lighting, but his thinking is applicable to a lot of consumer technology adoption challenges.

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sign of the times

14Jun09

I thought this was curious. At Corte Madera, an upscale mall in Marin, one of the storefronts was empty and a cash-for-gold store was happily taking people’s jewelry.

I overheard a few people who were pleasantly surprised how much they got for their unwanted jewelry.

I’m fully expecting gold to go through a spectacular bull market bubble over the next few years. When the cash-for-gold operations close down and are replaced by similar gold-for-cash operations, we’ll know the top is near. But for now, I want to be a buyer of gold, not a seller.

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traffic barrel monster

13Jun09

The city should be thinking of reasons to hire this guy, not arrest him.

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schwarzenegger

12Jun09

I saw this quote in an Reuters article about California’s financial disaster:

Schwarzenegger also urged Democrats to ignore lobbying by their union allies against sharply lower spending levels to help balance the state’s books.

“Do they want to protect the workers that provide the services, or do they want to protect the people that get those services? The choice is up to them,” he said.

Let’s give a round of applause to Schwarzenegger for saying this.

Every time I turn on the radio or TV I hear state workers bitching and moaning about proposed cuts to their already generous salary and benefits. NEWS FLASH: YOUR EMPLOYER IS BANKRUPT.

The idea that an employee is in a position to make salary and benefit demands from an employer that is bankrupt is just preposterous. I have absolutely no sympathy for these people. None.

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lastpass

10Jun09

I found this amazing utility called lastpass. It is a browser-based password management utility that syncs across all your computers.

I’ve tried password managers in the past and have never been particularly enamored of them. Either they didn’t work or seemed like giant security holes.

This one is different. The architecture is solid and it works really, really well. Unless you have password caching disabled in your browser, it is also a step forward in security.

Give it a try: https://lastpass.com/

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macbook pro 17″ + vista 64 (update)

10Jun09

A quick follow-up to my previous post about buying a macbook pro primarily to run windows. I’m happy to say that after a week of intense frustration at repeated crashes, I now have an extremely stable system. Installation issues aside, this is unquestionably the best Windows laptop I’ve ever used:

The apple keyboard is great, even if it is missing a number of keys. It feels nice. It’s lighted. It’s quiet.
The LED-backlit screen is amazing. It’s as bright as a desktop monitor. It is so bright, in fact, that I have to turn it down to avoid eyestrain. Even sitting with my back to a window–as I am right now in a tea bar–it is easy to read at the middle brightness setting.
The battery life is amazing.
Going from sleep-to-wake by opening the lid is nearly instantaneous.

It is just a shame that Apple doesn’t do more to improve the Windows installation experience.

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street view is useful!

09Jun09

I think Google Street View is interesting, but I’ve never really found much practical use for it. Not anymore.

I have a sewer pipe that has backed up…again. It needs to be dug out and replaced. Instead of paying a plumber a pile of money to do the digging, I’m planning to hire a day laborer. But where to find this person?

Google Street View has the answer!

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oversight, what oversight?

09Jun09

$30k lent to financial institutions for every man, woman and child in the United States, and we have this.

Many careers ought to be terminated over this madness. We might as well start with this woman.

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macbook pro + vista 64

03Jun09

vistamac

My laptop was growing long in the tooth, so I decided to get a new one.

I wanted a 17″ display and a bright LED backlight that won’t grow dim over time. That narrows the field pretty quickly. I’ve had an imac running Windows Vista for almost a year with no problems at all, so I felt reasonably comfortable purchasing an Mac to run Windows.

Unfortunately the BootCamp drivers that Apple ships with the 17″ MacBook Pro are completely defective. I was able to load Windows Vista 64 onto the machine without any trouble, but the machine started to crash soon after I loaded the Apple-supplied drivers. At intervals of 1-5 hours, the screen would freeze and the system would become completely non-responsive. The only way to recover was to power-cycle the laptop.

I tried updating all of my drivers using DriverAgent but nothing was working. The friendly folks at Apple tech support said: call Microsoft. Gee, thanks. I understand that Apple isn’t in the business of supporting Windows, but come on…

After a few days of this, I boxed up my new MacBook and was ready to take it back to the Apple store for a refund. I looked at it one last time and thought “I really want this to work. I’m not going to be as happy with a Dell…“ So I took it back out of the box, re-installed OS X and Vista, and tried to fix what I thought was the most plausible cause of the problem.

The problem seems to be that theNVidia 9600GT M graphics processor tries to dynamically throttle itself based on changes in usage. Apparently there is a hardware/driver issue that can trigger a failure when this happens. Doing something relatively simple like scrolling though a blog with mixed media in Firefox can trigger this behavior. Interestingly, there were few, if any, reports on the internet of crashing occurring during heavy 3D graphics usage (i.e. games). This makes sense, though, because the heaving graphics utilization would not give the hardware an opportunity to throttle itself down.

So there is a simple solution. Download a graphics card tuning utility called Rivatuner and force the graphics card into one of 3 modes: Standard 2D, Low Power 3D, or Performance 3D. Voila: problem solved.

Here is a screenshot of the Rivatuner setting: