BKeeney Briefs

I’ve been a science fiction fan since…forever.  The first scifi series that I can remember reading was Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Star series in fourth grade.  I think I’ve read everything from Robert Heinlein, James P Hogan, Peter F Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds and Orson Scott Card ever published.  I peruse the Baen website just so I can get decent scifi on my eReader.

Science Fiction on television and in the movies has generally been pretty awful and campy.  I enjoyed all of the various Star Treks and liked Babylon 5 and various others, but none of them compared to the updated Battlestar Galactica.  BSG was raw.  It was gritty.  It was in your face.  People died (regularly).   There were no win-win situations – just ones less bad than others.

Some people criticize BSG for having a major religious overtone throughout the series.  I think that’s part of what makes it so special.  Scifi often takes two approaches to religion.  It’s either non-existent or it’s a zen-like universal force (as in The Force in Star Wars).  BSG took it to the next level because one of its central themes is that the two sides are fighting about whether which god or gods is the true one(s).

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is.  Scifi is often one of the few philosophical avenues we can explore subjects and not be considered bigoted by a judgmental society so bent on taking offense at talking about our differences.  Instead of talking about Christians vs Muslims BSG talks about the human gods versus the Cylon’s one god and how they go to war over that idea.  It’s an ugly war.  Humans and Cylons do awful things to each other and perhaps worse, to their own side.  Throw in Cylon resurrection (and subsequent loss of it) and you get some interesting stories.

Scifi also has a tendency to gloss over politics as well.  BSG in its gritty way lets us explore our cannibalistic and dysfunctional ways of dealing with extreme situations.  Take 50,000 people (at the beginning of the series) and make them run for their lives.  Throw in shortages of everything.  Crowded living conditions.  And then throw in every mix of life from the military to refugees to convicts and see what happens as they fight (but mostly run) for their lives.  I don’t think I saw a final count on survivors at the end of the series but it’s around 20,000 (?).  Along the way we have dirty politics (trying to throw an election), a military coup,, trials and executions, and unification with former enemies.

It’s kind of funny because few TV shows (much less scifi stories) talk about sex, drinking or even bathroom habits.  BSG takes it to the extreme by having the ship crewed by a mixed crew of men and women in close quarters.  Not having been in the military I can only guess how far off this vision from current reality is but I thought it made for a good juxtaposition of our reality.  You put men and women together in stressful situations and you’ll get the sex, drugs and rock and roll (All Along the Watchtower?  Who the F picked that song?  Not that I’m complaining but it seemed an odd mix.  Jimmy H was a science fiction fan, if you didn’t know).  I don’t remember any gay characters in BSG but it’s hard to explore everything in a series.

The characters in BSG are incredibly complex.  You get to know even the ancillary characters in a way that makes you know them feel for them.  I think the whole series should be subtitled “The Redemption of Gaius Baltar” because of his incredible journey from traitor of humanity to puppet politician to narcissistic prophet and finally to selfless human.  It’s quite the journey.

Some say the ending was bad.  I disagree.  It’s rare for a TV series to have an ending at all and I thought it was awful to end at finding a radioactive Earth (from what we thought was the end of the series last year).  I’m glad they were able to do the final episodes because it gave us some closure.  There is no possibility of movie sequels because they gave it an ending worthy of the series.  In case you haven’t seen the ending I won’t spoil it.  (I guess there are some spinoffs from BSG but I don’t give them much of a chance to live past a couple of seasons.)

If BSG wasn’t the best scifi television series ever (to date at least), what was it?  What was your take on the series?  Was it good, bad or meh?

What more could you ask for in a championship game?  Lead changes.  Dramatic drives.  Interceptions going for 100 yards.  A Safety.  Calls be challenged and overturned.  A great ending.  Add in some questionable refereeing (arguably) and you have something to talk about until next football season.

The commercials didn’t do much for our little crowd.  Most seemed pretty subdued but here are our favorites:

•    Doritios:  Power of the Crunch
•    Doritios:  Crystal Ball
•    Cheetos:  Chester the Cheetah
•    Firestone:  Taters

Honorable Mention:  PepSuber.  My guess is that most people didn’t get it unless they’ve seen the MacGruber skits on Saturday Night Live.

The one’s we absolutely hated (which I guess means they succeeded in getting attention):
•    Any of the GoDaddy commercials (let’s just piss off half the audience – but my guess is they had a lot of traffic)
•    CareerBuilder.com (and why would I want to use this website now?)

Meh (just seemed like a waste of money to us):
•    The Budweiser ads
•    The Sobe ads

So what did you think of the game?  Commercials you loved/hated?

Oh, and the buzz around Kansas City is that Todd Haley (the Arizona Offensive Coordinator) is the top choice for the Chiefs head coaching job.  Seems he has multiple connections to our new General Manager Scott Pioli.

By far my favorite new feature in iPhoto is the face recognition.  It’s pretty good too for an inexpensive application.  It makes me wonder how good the government software is. 

My son is now 8 and we have a lot of pictures of him as a baby.  I picked out a few pictures and told iPhoto who it was and it went to town.  The more photos you confirm/deny identification on the better it gets.

A couple of times it picked out ‘faces’ that weren’t theirs, but for the most part it’s been pretty flawless.  One thing that gives it a little problem is my wife’s family.  She comes from a family of 6 kids and you know what?  They all have similar facial characteristics.  iPhoto, for a while, kept marking my wife’s siblings as her but after 10 minutes it was right nearly 100% of the time.

I don’t review my photos very often.  This has been an excellent excuse to waste some time and think about old friends and events.  Perhaps this a stop and smell the roses event.

“Yes Man” is the story of a man who discovers that he’s not living the way he’d like and after chance meeting with a man on a bus he decides to change his life.  He makes a compact with himself that he’ll say yes to everything – no matter what.  Living in London, he gets asked a lot of questions that he’s forced to say yes to.  This included beggars, people selling things on the streets as well as emails that are obviously scams and the myriad of advertisements he gets exposed to.

He spends a lot of money along the way on things he doesn’t need.  He gets credit cards he can’t afford.  He meets tons of strange and wonderfully bizarre people.  He travels to some exotic places because he can’t say no!  Saying Yes to everything at work leads him into an entirely new career that’s fun, interesting and exciting.  In general, his life turns around and he’s happy – truly, generally, happy.

Looking back on my life (not that I’m old I’m just being philosophical here) I can say I’ve had (and continue to have) some of the best times of my life by saying yes.  Here are some of the memorable highlights:

Want to play football in high school?
Want to go to college in Chicago?
Do you want to use this thing called a Mac?
Do you want to go skydiving this weekend?
Want to join our computer social group?
Do you want to do a big engineering project in Hong Kong?
Want to help teach a kids aikido class?
Do you want to have kids?
Want to stay how with your child?
Do you really want to start a business?
Want to start a professional developers association?

Here’s the money quote for me:
Maybe there’s no such thing as destiny.  There’s just a series of choices we create ourselves.  I guess it’s only when we look at how a No could have changed our lives for the worse that we realize the value of the tiny Yeses that fly at us each day.

I think, for me at least, regret is harder to deal with than failure.  To use a Mythbusters quote:  “Failure is always an option.”  Not that I haven’t had some regrets along the way and would love to go back a few times and say Yes a bit more and No a few times I said Yes, but that’s life.  Life is as good as you let it be.

I probably won’t see the movie.  I can’t see how they can do justice to the book without simply being silly.  And besides, I’m not much of a Jim Carrey fan.

When we got the Wii for the kids last summer we bought it because my (then) 7 year old gave a pretty convincing argument for it:  It was fun.  We hemmed and hawed for a while but after playing it for a while at my cousins house we were convinced and bought the system.

Since then, my interest in boxing and bowling has waned a bit.  I purchased the Legend of Zelda and after an hour of playing decided that I’d rather program for fun.  I guess I’m not into those types of games.  My teenager has since solved it after spending several weekends on it.

So when my youngest asked for the Wii Fit I was interested.  The Wii breaks the mould of video gaming as I’ve known them (I was a teenager when Asteroids and Space Invaders was the rage at the arcade and I owned an Intellivision) and no longer are you relegated to sitting in one spot getting sore thumbs.

The Wii Fit comes with a Balance Board that measures weight and balance and responds to your body movement when you’re on it.  The ‘game’ comes with 4 main sections:  Yoga, Strength, Aerobics and Balance.  Starting out, your Mii (pronounced me) is weighed and you can do a baseline balance test.  It adjusts your Mii’s onscreen appearance to match your Body Mass Index (BMI) so if you weren’t truthful in the creation of your Mii it’ll be ‘adjusted’ accordingly.

The yoga portion is interesting.  You start with a basic breathing exercise and can quickly graduate to the “Warrior” pose.  When performing each pose the balance board tracks your balance and you get a score based on your balance.  The better your balance the more points you get.  Onscreen, a helpful male or female instructor (your choice) shows you how to do the pose and gives instructions.  During the pose there is feedback indicating how well your balance is working.  I’ve since unlocked 5 others poses and I guess my decade doing Aikido has helped a bit there.

The aerobics portion starts with a hula hoop simulation.  As someone who’s never mastered the art of hula hooping in the real world, this is a much better version.  It will get your heart pumping and is sort of fun (for adults – the kids love it) and points are awarded based on how many hoops you’ve hula hooped.  The next game is a beginning step program where you step on and off the board to music while the screens shows you when and where to step. Points are awarded on how accurate you are with the music.  The next game is running which is running in place where an animated pacer runs in front of you.  Running is simple, but very good exercise.

The balance portion starts with a simple soccer goalie game where you shift your weight left and right on the board to hit the balls kicked at you and dodge the occasional shoe.  Next is the downhill skiing which is tough as you have to lean forward (trying to hit a very small blue dot to gain speed) and shift your weight left and right to turn and go between the gates.  This is probably the toughest one I’ve done so far as it requires multiple things happening at once.  It is also probably my favorite.  My second favorite is the ski jump where you have to balance properly to hit yet another really small blue dot to get speed and then straighten your legs at just the right time and then balance evenly for the flight.

Since I regularly go to the gym for weights I haven’t done any of the strength training exercises.  I’m sure it would make me work in a few areas I’m not doing now.  When I get bored I’ll think about trying it out.

As you continue to play, I mean do the exercises, it tracks how much time you spent doing it.  At about the 45 minute mark it will recommend that you stop and get a drink of water.  It’s pretty good at giving verbal feedback and telling you how to do things better.  Some of the games are more interesting to kids but there’s enough there for the adults to like as well.

All-in-all, Santa made a pretty smart decision.  My kid likes it.  My wife likes it. I like it.  I have no idea if it will keep my interest long term but it’s been an interesting diversion while the weather has been less than stellar in Kansas City (well, it’s been alternating between miserable and gorgeous about every 24 hours).  If your New Years Resolution is get in better shape for 2009 and you’d like to have a little fun along the way then I’d recommend the Wii Fit.

My wife has done work for the Kansas City Symphony, Ballet, and Opera for years.  We’ve been to the Symphony a lot and enjoy it enough to be regular donor’s.  Carol has been to the Opera and the Ballet a few times but I’ve not a big fan of either.  This weekend, however, the Kansas City Ballet did some interesting performances.  They did a comedy, The Concert, where the performers purposely did things the wrong way and out of sync with each other.  My guess is that very few ballet concertgoers have ever laughed that hard but it was fun in that they didn’t take themselves too seriously.  The middle performance was a more traditional ballet movement called The Naughty Boy and the final piece was Rodeo which features the Aaron Copeland Hoedown.  If you don’t know what Hoedown is it’s the “Beef:  It’s What’s For Dinner” song.  In fact, I had a hankering for steak afterwards.  I am always amazed at professional athletes (and don’t forget for a second that doing ballet is an athletic performance) and how they make hard things look really, really easy.

Sunday we took the kids to the final weekend of the Kansas City Renaissance Festival.  This was the 32nd year of the festival.  While I’m not into the medieval period I know a lot of people are or at least use it as a good excuse to dress up.  When I lived in St. Louis I knew some folks that went every year all dressed up (which isn’t saying much since they also get dressed up as Klingons to go to the scifi conventions).  It was perfect weather for their last day of this years season so the crowds were large but not exceptionally obnoxious as I’ve seen in the past.

My point to this whole post is that while I had a ton of stuff to do, I feel refreshed and I’ve been pretty productive so far this week.  Sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses.  And while neither event is something that I’d like to do every weekend it was enjoyable to do something different and recharge.

The other good news from the weekend is that the Kansas City Chiefs didn’t lose.  They didn’t play either. 

For years when I went to the gym I would take a book along and while on whatever middle-aged torture device (i.e. aerobic machines) and read.  Since I’m an avid reader it was sort of cool but since books vary in size (think paperback vs. hardback) and in typeface size it wasn’t always practical (and finding one of the plastic trays to hold a book was sometimes a problem as well).  Plus, getting sweat in the pages and breaking the bindings were not favorable to the health of the books either.

With the advent of the iPod I had even less incentive to take a book to the gym.  Unfortunately, having very little space on my iPhone left me in a quandry because I absolutely hate to watch the televisions at the gym and be forced to read the subtitles (if they happened to be on) and since the iPhone doesn’t have a FM receiver I couldn’t listen to it anyway.  Oh heck, I hate television so it’s no great loss.  The problem is that my motivation for staying on the turture devices was, shall we say, lacking.

All that is over now.  In fact, I may be over-doing the torture machines now.  Why?  It’s simple really.  The eReader fits on the tiny ledge of the machines that wouldn’t hold a regular book and I can jack the typeface up to it’s largest size so that I don’t get eyestrain while moving all around.

So 20 minutes is no longer an issue.  Heck, I did 60 the other day and was pissed that I didn’t finish the chapter.  I guess I can’t complain if I’m exercising my imagination and my body at the same time.  It’s been the first time in years that I look forward to the gym so I can read.  Amazing how odd life can be sometimes.

A couple of weeks back I started a new series called Dread Empire’s Fall:  The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams.  I sometimes dread starting a new series so I never buy more than the first book just in case it’s not to my liking.  I loved it and wanted to start the next book in the series NOW!

But alas, since it was a Sunday evening after the book stored closed I started thinking about the new electronic books.  In the past I pooh-poohed them for a variety of reasons but it starts to make sense.  I hate moving books and my wife hates my ‘library’ the consumes a large portion of storage.  Rarely do I re-read a book, or if I do it’s a decade later.  In today’s conservation kick it makes sense not to cut down trees if I don’t have to.  Perhaps the biggest reason that sold me is that the ebooks are a couple of dollars cheaper so you read enough and it’ll eventually pay for itself.

So I did some research on my options by calling my cousin.  Everyone needs to have a cousin like mine.  He KNOWS gadgets.  So not only did his wife have a Kindle, but he had a Sony e-Reader and he had an opinion (he always does).  He swore by the e-Reader and he swore AT the Kindle for their interfaces.  Then he said to go check out the authors I wanted to read on both the Sony site and the Kindle site and see which one was better.  For me, Sony won.

So now I have a Sony e-Reader.  It’s not the newest model (same cousin sold his existing one for a new one with a bit better display and interface) but it does the job well.  I’m impressed.  Very impressed and I don’t say that very often.

It takes a little while to get used to the delay on the E-INK screen but after a while you live with it.  The book I’m currently reading has large white text on black background chapter headers and switching to the next page always leaves an afterimage of the block, but again it’s not a big deal.

The e-Reader lets you switch from vertical to horizontal reading and also lets you adjust the size of the typeface.  After playing with the settings I prefer vertical at a large size.  You can view the screen at all angles and there’s not much glare to contend with.

The controls are minimal.  There’s a size button that let’s you change the size of the text on the screen, two separate sets of dedicated page up/down buttons that don’t seem to be in the right spot for me, a mark page button, a menu joystick and allows you to navigate on the screen and a set of 1 through 0 buttons that let you quickly navigate items on the menu’s.  The controls are a little sluggish but I don’t know if it’s from the screen or an underpowered processor.

Compared to the Kindle, the e-Reader seems sparse on the controls, but I think a book reader SHOULD be simple.  You’re replacing a paperback, not a laptop.

The Sony e-Reader plays MP3’s.  I have an iPhone and don’t travel much anymore so this isn’t a selling point and I honestly have no idea on how well it works.

The Sony unit requires a computer to transfer books unlike the Kindle that can do this wirelessly.  Again, since I don’t travel and when I do I generally have my laptop.

What is a problem however is the stupid Windows only software.  Come on, Sony!  Wake up and smell those Mac users you’re pissing off by forcing us to boot up into Parallels or VMWare.  The Windows only software works well enough for me to purchase, download and transfer books but I don’t have to like doing it that way.  (Sony, call me, I’m a developer.)  Books are transferred via a USB cable which is also how you recharge the unit.

I also found http://www.webscription.net/.  There you can find an excellent selection of science fiction authors with a large selection of free books.  Did I say free?

If you read a lot I’d recommend it.  If you travel a lot I’d recommend it.  If you read and travel a lot then you should definitely look into it.  I would have saved a lot of money in airports if I had had this device.

Comments?

I listen to music all day long while I’m working. It’s a habit (good or bad) that I developed in college while studying for hours on end and have kept up since. Heck, I became a DJ at the college radio station (WOUI – pumping out an amazing 10,000 milliWatts!) to listen to a lot of different music and did a study marathon one finals week because it was the ‘quietest’ place on campus. I love music and it’s one of the reasons why I have such a large music collection and why I fell in love with iTunes and my first iPod.
So even though I have 31 days of continuous music in my iTunes library I’m always looking for something new to listen to.  Rock, alternative, pop, blues, jazz, R & B, classical and even the occasional country song can often be heard in my office.  I think I found an excellent new source of music that thinks the way I do and is an excellent example of a good web app.

I’m talking about TheSixtyOne at www.thesixtyone.com.  It’s sort of Digg for music.  Using a simple system, people can ‘bump’ music they like that’s been uploaded by musicians to the site.  The drawback is that it costs you points to bump a song so it’s not in your best interests to bump everything.  You, in turn, earn points for songs that other people bump and for listening to more songs.

All songs are streamed to your computer in their entirety – not like iTunes where you get a 30 second clip – and there is no limit to the number of times you can listen to a song.  You can add songs to your own playlist and follow other people on the site and view the music that they’ve been listening to and bumping.  All in all it’s a very fun site.

The site was created as a ‘music discovery game’ by two USC students who have long since quit their jobs.  They’ve done an excellent job of it, in my opinion.  You can navigate the site without having your music stream interrupted.  There are numerous places like comments and bump lists that smoothly expand and collapse without stopping the music.  It’s very easy to navigate the site and discover music.  It’s very easy to browse by music category, new music, best music (music bumped the most) and follow and subscribe to other people’s activity.

An example of why you might want to subscribe to someone else’s activity is if you find yourself always bumping music that was already bumped by someone else you might want to follow them on a regular basis.  It’s sort of like the Amazon book rating service of ‘those who bought this book also bought this…”  It’s very handy and convenient and naturally you get more points if people subscribe to your activity.

I should point out that some tracks are available for download and some are available for purchase through the Amazon MP3 store.  The iTunes store will sometimes have the artists but I’ve found that it’s somewhat spotty.  Regardless, I’ve found that The Sixty One is fun if you like listening to ‘undiscovered’ music and artists are uploading new music every day.

Some of the music is incredibly bad and I wonder if the ‘artists’ upload music on a dare or a whim.  Others, though, are impressive in the quality and depth of their sound and it makes you wonder how many wonderful musicians never ‘made it’ because they couldn’t get their music to the masses.  I was already not listening to the radio because of commercials and repetition.  I don’t every see myself listening to commercial radio again.

Oh, and if you’re so inclined, I’m at thesixtyone.com/griffin.  Griffin?  That’s a story for a different day. 

I know there are some other sites out there that do similar things.  What are they?  Other thoughts?

It’s been quite a project.  I was first brought in to write reports using Crystal Reports and do miscellaneous things in their VB6 project.  Back then, we were still waiting on a lot of the things to get coded so they had me work on preferences.  Then user security.  Then MapPoint integration.  Then flat file imports.  Then payroll.  Wait.  Did I say payroll?  Did I know anything about payroll?  Nope.  Not a thing.  I now know way more than I’d like to about payroll in the United States.

I finished coding payroll and we were STILL waiting on our resident ‘genius’ (an MBA with Microsoft certifications up the ying yang) who still didn’t have the general journal done after months worth of promising it was ‘just about done.’  I was tasked with getting budgets up and running and account balances were taking forever (15+ minutes to get 300 account balances).  Because our self imposed release was quickly approaching we couldn’t wait anymore so I created the General Journal tables and code to deal with populating it based on all our various accounting transactions.  Now, 300 account balances take just a fraction of a second (as it should).

We released it to the public and we won some awards.  And then we discovered why using Microsoft Access/Jet as an accounting database was a horrible idea.  Database corruptions were commonplace because client networks were so bad that Jet couldn’t fix itself.  We start stashing copies of the database ‘just because’ and gave warnings that users should compact and repair their database on a regular basis.  It was at that point the owner allowed me to look into using SQL Server instead of Access.  Did I know anything about SQL Server and VB6?  Barely.

Going from almost zero knowledge, we got SQL Server up and running in about six months (while still releasing new features).  Since we had long since figured out how to minimize corrupted databases (but never completely eliminated the problem) the client naturally decided that SQL Server wasn’t important to his long term growth.  So SQL Server was (mostly) abandoned.

Along the way we refactored payroll to speed it up by a factor of 10.  We rewrote sales tax to accommodate the crazy schemes the politicians come up with to get money.  We were able to convert QuickBooks into our package with roughly 99% historical accuracy.  We investigated many things to see how long and how hard it would be to implement such as report designers and integrated charting and even releasing to foreign countries.  We rewrote large sections of code and changed out controls in Visual Basic that were better than the existing controls.

I mentioned that we mostly abandoned SQL Server.  That’s not really true.  The one full-time developer on their staff and I kept developing as if we were using Access and SQL Server which was a great idea because eventually they sold copies of the product to some very big companies.  And naturally Access/Jet choked and died a miserable death in those high data environments.  Our forethought saved our collective bacon when we were able to switch them over to SQL Server with minimal effort.  Jet errors vanished nearly overnight.

As a company, my client won some local awards as a great place to work in the Kansas City metro area.  They treated me as an employee (for better and worse) which meant that I was invited to their Christmas parties and got dragged into profit sharing meetings.  I knew the employees as well as I’ve known anyone I’ve ever worked with.

But as with all projects, this one is now mature and stable.  Sure, we have a huge laundry list of things we’d like to change, but we’re no longer in that startup mode where every day is about coding something new or where every day is an emergency because we (or a customer) found an issue that has to be changed RIGHT NOW.  I feel as if the really exciting part of the project is over.

So when an opportunity came along to work on an even bigger project for a very large company I couldn’t pass it down.  So starting Monday, I start working on a big project for a Fortune 100 using agile development methodology.  It’s a big deal and it has some risk but the potential rewards are huge.  I get to learn about being part of ‘scrum’ and to be part of a team where we have code reviews and formalized coding standards.  These are, frankly, something I’ve wanted to implement for a long time.

Doing a quick check on Friday revealed that the accounting project has around 975,000 lines of code in 700 project items with 200 reports.  How many of those reports did I create?  Maybe 10.  How’s that as a switch-a-roo from when I started?  As I left the building on Friday I told the client (really my friend at this point) that I appreciated him letting me play in his sandbox for five and half years and that it’s not really goodbye.  I’m sure there’s some more things to build and another couple hundred thousand lines of code to write.