Flowers for Algernon ***** : Another oldie-but-a-goodie that I had never read until now. Great soft scifi.

Harry Potter Book 7 *** : If you've made it this far in the series, then this is a must-read regardless of what any review says. But the joy was gone for me in this overly dark final installment. As one reviewer aptly put it, can you say "deus ex machina?"

The Last Kiss **** : Garden State Part II.

Scoop **** : Quirky Woody Allen movie with Scarlett Johansson.

Pan's Labyrinth ***** : Muy bien! Best movie I've seen in a long time. A great metaphor for Spain under Franco.

Saw III **** : Still dark and twisted, still strangely entertaining.

Flags of Our Fathers *** : A little disjointed and hard to follow; not as good as its partner movie, "Letters From Iwo Jima".

Cool: Presto's Hard Drive Monitor has gone international. It's being featured on Windows Forest, a Japanese online software directory. Can anybody out there provide a translation? :)

A Random Walk Down Wall Street ***** : Let's face it, investing books are not exactly page turners and you definitely don't want to read one when you're sleepy. Nevertheless, this is a must-read for anybody interested in maximizing their investments over the long haul (20+ years). Which should be everybody!

The book pretty much fortifies the investing axioms that I have been following for the past several years, but presents a ton of data to back up the claims, which are:

• The ability to consistently beat the market average is rare.
• The only way to get higher returns is to take higher risks.
• Diversification smooths out the volatility inherent in risky investments.
• The semi-strong efficient market hypothesis is the most credible of all the market theories.
• Your life stage defines your risk tolerance (with younger people able to handle more risk).

For persons under 40, the book recommends the following portfolio:

• 5% cash. Or cash equivalent, interest bearing (of course).
• 20% bonds. Three-quarters comprised of zero coupon treasury or no-load bond funds. The rest inflation-protected (TIPS). Put in tax exempt account if possible, otherwise try and use tax-exempt funds.
• 65% stocks. Two-thirds comprised of total stock market (Wilshire 5000), the rest international and emerging markets.
• 10% real estate. No-load REIT fund.

For persons between 40 and 50, it's basically the same as above, but move 10 percent from stocks to bonds.

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time **** Innovative first-person novel about an autistic 15-year-old who attempts to solve the mystery of the neighbor's dog's death. Provides great insight into the curse and the blessing that is autism.

I've felt for some time now that enterprises of all sizes can benefit by outsourcing many of their information technology needs to Internet-based services. The rise of powerful web-based applications shows that this vision is within the realm of possibility. Using Google as just one example, their mail and calendar applications seem quite capable of meeting the enterprise's needs--at a much reduced cost.

An article from Sun entitled Preparing for the End of IT as We Know It makes the case much more eloquently than I could have: "We at Sun have concluded that the time is fast approaching when competitive enterprises will move to a model where they run secure, network-based services instead of their own applications, datacenters, and networks."

(Thanks to Mathew Eszenyi for the link!)

Even though I had previously recommended FNBO Direct as a good online bank with a great interest rate, I am now officially un-recommending them. They recently put a hold on my account when I transferred some money in, even though I had already done the usual account verification procedure. Then, last week, I got hit with a mistaken email in which they said they were freezing my account again. Bankdeals has a good thread on this topic, as well as several others showing the growing discontent among FNBO customers.

Bottom line: I no longer feel like I can trust my money with FNBO. It's amateur hour over there. Time to get out!

Like the New York Times piece on wealthy Americans, CNN has a great piece on obesity in America. Great use of technology to display raw data in an easy-to-digest and to-the-point manner. Interesting how the south appears to be fattening up faster than the rest of the nation -- too hot to exercise? :-)

I heard about this new Google Maps mashup on NPR the other day: Walk Score. It gives you a score of how walking-friendly your house is. Great idea! I'm going to have to think if there's any potential Trainster tie-ins. Our condo got a score of 72 (out of 100).

I've been playing around with Yahoo's YSlow Firefox add-on. It gives a lot of great insight into factors that make web sites slow. While not all of the suggestions apply to small web sites (such as the suggestion to use a content delivery network), it's a definite must-have for any web developer's toolbox!

Late last year, I released Presto's Hard Drive Monitor, a Vista sidebar gadget that reports the remaining space on hard drives. It's been pretty successful at 30,000 downloads and counting. It initially supported four hard drives, which I thought would be enough. But the user demand for more drives was intense (the live.com page for the gadget shows some of the user coments).

It would have been easy to have just made the gadget box bigger and added more drives. But I wanted to do it more elegantly and have the gadget grow and shrink and only use as much space as necessary. (As a side note, all Vista gadgets have a minimum height of 57 pixels, and it's not possible to shrink them less than that.)

Not having seen many gadgets that automatically change size, my usual method of just looking at how somebody else did it wouldn't work. I had to figure it out for myself. After many hours of experimenting, I finally ended up doing it as follows:

First, I inserted a <g:background> tag into the main body of the gadget:

<g:background id="background" src="images/background-black3.png"/>

The background image background-black3.png needed some work as well. Initially, it had a shadow and transparent border around it, but this caused problems when the image was stretched. To work correctly using this method, the top and bottom of the background image must be opaque.

With this tag in place, the following simple lines of Javascript change the gadget's height:

var heightInPixels = 100 document.body.style.height = heightInPixels background.style.height = heightInPixels

My actual code was a little more complicated in that it used the number of drives to figure out how high the gadget should be. But you get the idea. And you can download the actual gadget and look at the code if you want to learn more.

Clowngirl **** : Very nicely written novel by a Portland author, although it tries too hard at developing some sort of philosophical undertone (existentialism? condemnation of religion?) which never quite gelled for me.

Bontrager has great technical support! I have a carbon stem on my road bike and I wanted to know the maximum tightening torque for the bolts on the stem. Even though this is an essential piece of information needed to avoid cracking the carbon, it strangely is not present anywhere in the documentation. Nor, apparently, anywhere on the web. So I decided to call Bontrager's technical support center, and I was pleasantly surprised. No voice menus. No asking me for my name or any other personal information. A guy simply picked up, I told him my problem, and after a second of thought, he gave me the answer. Which is 60 inch-pounds for anybody else who needs to know (this is for the Race XXX Lite stem).

This week, the first Wireless USB products were announced! I've been working on this project for the last three years. It's very satisfying to see it publicly released! Engadget, c|net, and countless others have lots of info.

The NY Times web site has an awesome piece about the Wealthiest Americans Ever. They present a large amount of data in a lucid format and with an intuitive, fun-to-use user interface.

The Emperor's New Security Indicators is an extremely interesting (and terrifying) journal paper presented at the 2007 IEEE symposium on security and privacy.

Mandatory reading for anybody working on security, and it should prove very interesting for everybody else.

Conclusions from the paper:

• Users will enter their passwords even when HTTPS indicators are absent
• Users will enter their passwords even if their site authentication images are absent
• Site authentication images may cause users to disregard other important security indicators
• Role playing has a significant negative effect on the security vigilance of study participants
• 36% of study participants who were using their own personal banking account chose to login after seeing an explicit warning page saying that the connection was probably insecure

On Dragonwings **** : This is actually three books bound into one: Dragonsdawn, Dragonseye, and Moreta. All part of the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. An interesting blend of scifi and fantasy crossing nearly 2000 years.

As somebody who flew close to 100,000 miles last year, I can definitely sympathize with the poor soul who wrote a letter to Continental Airlines complaining about Seat 29E. Definitely check out the PDF version of the letter so that you can enjoy the hilarious diagrams. (Unfortunately, Snopes prevents direct links, so cut-and-paste this URL to see it: http://www.snopes.com/travel/graphics/seat29e.pdf).

The Million Step Summer starts today. If you are looking for a fun little challenge for the summer, check it out!

Lately, I have been spending a lot of time sprucing up my fitness web site, Trainster.

One of the most unpleasant tasks is making a good-looking, standards-compliant web design that works on all browsers. Far and away, the most annoying browser is Internet Explorer 6. Stuff that works fine on Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even IE7 just does not work on IE6.

I wish I could just say "to hell with IE6" and not support it, but according to Google Analytics, over 70 percent of Trainster users are using IE6. So like it or not, I am stuck with making it work.

Last week, I tried out Trainster on Safari for the first time. Like Opera, Safari is a very strict browser when it comes to interpreting HTML, so it is good for testing out a site. If it works with Opera/Safari, it should work with anything. I found a few problems, further confirmed by the excellent W3C Markup Validation Service.

Thinking that standards compliance would solve all of my problems, I set out to make all of Trainster HTML 4.01 strict. It took a lot of work, especially since there are a lot of little nitpicky things that one needs to do in order to be HTML 4.01 strict. But I slogged through it, and Trainster is now HTML 4.01 strict (yay!). And strict compliance did fix everything... except for IE6. A few hours after pushing the changes live, complaints started to roll in from IE6 users saying that the site was all messed up.

Mind you, it is not that easy for me to test IE6. You can't even run IE6 on Vista, so I had to install Virtual PC 2007 and download a special virtual machine from Microsoft Support that has Windows XP with IE6 on it. And sure enough, once I loaded it up on IE6, the site didn't look right.

Fast forward over two hours of pulling my hair out trying to figure this out, and it turns out I was bitten by the IE6 xml prolog "feature". Any seasoned web developers out there are probably nodding their head in sad agreement at this point... For those who don't know, if you have this one innocent-looking line at the beginning of your HTML page:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

Then IE6 will disregard any specific DOCTYPE instructions that you have otherwise given and render the page however it sees fit (called "quirks mode"). ARGGGHHGGHHHHHH! Luckily this behavior has been removed for IE7. So I removed the line and all is well.

I'm not sure what the point of this blog entry is, other than to vent a little bit and perhaps save some other poor soul from suffering the same fate some day.

While visiting with my relatives in Canada last month, my aunt turned me onto a book from her investing club entitled Get Rich With Options. Despite the unfortunate used-car-salesman-esque title, it was a surprisingly good read.

Here are the book's take-aways so you can get rich and profit. Of course, the usual investing disclaimers apply. If you go broke following this advice, don't blame me. If, on the other hand, you get rich... you can buy me lunch.

'''Sell slightly out-of-the-money covered calls on your long stock positions.''' This is the one that most people already know about. The vast majority of calls expire without being assigned, so most likely you will get to pocket the premium. If your stock does get called away, then you at least got to sell your stock for a decent price.

'''Buy deep-in-the-money calls instead of buying a long position in a stock.''' The call will track the stock's market value, which translates into a higher ROI if the stock rises and less risk if the stock drops.

'''Sell slightly out-of-the-money naked puts on a stock that you want to own.''' You don't care if the put gets executed (you were going to buy the stock anyway). And you get to pocket the premium and get the stock at a slightly lower price. Probably the only time it's safe to sell a naked put. Unfortunately, many brokers (including mine) do not allow selling of puts.

'''Option credit spreads.''' This one is not as straight forward as the other three. It requires a lot more research. With a bull put spread, you are assuming the stock will trend up, so you sell one put with a high strike price and buy another put with a lower strike price. With a bear call spread, you are assuming the stock will trend down, so you sell a call with a low strike price and buy another call with a higher strike price. In either case, the strategy is to limit your profit or loss and take advantage of the decay of time value. Investopedia elaborates.

Letters From Iwo Jima ***** : Beginning of the end of WWII from the Japanese point of view. An anti-war movie along the lines of "Das Boot"

Inside Man *** : Standard bank robbery flick.

Ginger Snaps *** : Teenage angst coming-of-age werewolf flick. Gritty.

Click *** : Adam Sandler does non-Christmas version of "A Christmas Carol".

This is awesome: U.S. States renamed for countries with similar GDP

My Super Ex-Girlfriend **** : This movie:Superman::Galaxy Quest:Star Trek.

Aeon Flux * : The original animated MTV series was delightful. This movie is an abomination.

Ginger Snaps 2 *** : Weird vampire/werewolf type movie!

Blood Diamond **** : Action packed, disturbing, and thought provoking. Great acting by DiCaprio. The implicit moral of the story: The Kimberly Process doesn't work and there's no way to prove that a diamond is conflict free. Better just not to buy diamonds at all!

Long Distance *** : Better than I expected. All the classic suspense tricks and an ending I didn't see coming!

Aladdin **** : Great voice acting and animation, solidly put together.

Adam and Eve * : Barely watchable, and even then only if you fast forward a lot.

Little Miss Sunshine *** : A road trip and beauty pageant heal a dysfunctional family. Crazy movie, fun, well acted.

United 93 **** : Tastefully filmed... and extremely sad.

Devil Wears Prada *** : Standard formula movie, but good acting and a nice soundtrack.

Want to know how to start a Windows XP dial-up connection from the command line? Here's how: Ask Vance: How do you automatically script the start of a dial-up connection in Windows XP?

I have been buying up a storm lately, upgrading and retooling around the condo. It seems like FedEx or UPS is making almost daily stops over here! I thought I would share reviews for some of my more recent purchases:

Weber Q120 Grill: Uses LP. Perfect size for a condo deck. High quality grate, built-in starter. Can cook for up to four people.

Nintedo DS Lite: Aimee got me this for my birthday. I love it. Compact form factor, long battery life, fun games, touch screen, microphone, and a clamshell design that keeps everything protected when not in use. Favorite game so far: Big Brain Academy.

Antec P180B case: Great airflow, tons of space, well built. Expensive though; I would recommend the Sonata II instead (which I also own).

MSI GeForce 7600 video card: Fanless. Whisper quiet. Supports dual DVI monitors. Did I mention quiet? I'm never buying a graphics card with a fan again!

Brother HL2040 laser printer: Inexpensive, compact, fast. Vista and Linux support. Only downside is slight page curling.

I just got a letter from the power company saying that due to a recent court ruling, a monthly power credit that PGE customers used to receive is going away.

You may remember that I had complained a few months ago about no longer receiving that credit because I had switched to wind power. So while I feel bad for all of the other customers who are going to lose this credit, it looks like I'm not going to be affected by the rate increase. Woo hoo!

This rate increase on traditional power also makes the wind option a lot more appealing. Unfortunately for anybody who is now thinking that it might be a good idea to switch, it looks like they are no longer allowing new subscribers since they are already at capacity for their current wind farm. But they are working on two new wind farms to bring more capacity online. Looks like the virtuous cycle may be working...

I've been playing around with Google Maps Street View and I just love it. If you haven't tried it yet, test drive it using this Manhattan map. Amazon A9 had something similar a few years back, but the Google Maps implementation is much nicer with a clean, intuitive user interface and snappy performance. With the recent additions of personalized maps, traffic, and now street-side images, Google Maps just keeps getting better and better!

I wish I could say the same for the Google online applications like spreadsheet and word processing. Lately, sites like Zoho are doing a much better job. Check out how spreadsheets look in Zoho - very impressive!

According to Bankrate.com's top high-yield money market and saving accounts list, FNBO Direct is offering 6.00 percent APY through the end of September. That's a sweet rate! There don't appear to be any strings attached. Open your account today. (Note: Their site doesn't appear to work in Firefox -- not sure why.)

Here are some interesting Google Maps mashups (courtesy of Wired magazine)... they make me want to design one!

• Flood Maps - how the world will look if the sea level rises
• Fast Food Maps - well designed interface
• Mappy Hour - happy hour locater
• Urban Drinks - another happy hour locater (better interface IMHO)
• Safe2Pee - bathroom finder
• Gmaps Pedometer - one of the original mashups, still good!

I upgraded the firmware on my Linksys WRT54GL to X-Wrt over the weekend. The performance, features, and stability of X-wrt are incredible. Especially the traffic shaping/QoS. Highly recommended!

Food for thought... 5 years of exchange rate for the US dollar versus the Chinese Yuan.

Which optical medium is best for long-term data storage? According to "How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media", you should choose DVD+R. Specifically, Taiyo Yuden DVD+R. There's also an interesting discussion in there about the technical differences between DVD+R and DVD-R.

The Hiding Place ***** : Inspirational autobiography of faith and forgiveness in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Third in a series, here is an update on the "atonement phase" of Aimee's and my carbon load:

We just received our most recent power bill. It reflects the switch to 100 percent wind power. While the actual cost per kilowatt-hour is not that much higher, it turns out that due to a deal that PGE has with the government, consumers who use regular electric power get a fairly sizable credit from PGE. This is to compensate for the fact that hydroelectric power comes from dams on the rivers, which are owned ultimately by the people. Unfortunately, if you switch to wind power, the power company doesn't think they should give you that credit any more. This resulted in the loss of about $10 of credits per month.

Getting to the math, the new 100 percent wind power rate is approximately 11.4 cents/kWh including all taxes and fees. The old regular power rate was 8.9 cents/kWh.

Multiplied by our annual usage of 11,074 kWh, that translates into an increase of $284 per year for using 100 percent wind power. A tad more than I wanted to spend, but a small price to pay to help the environment. And, as my friend Brent put it so perfectly in an earlier comment, "dollars prove priorities in a way that businesses understand. Every extra subscriber gets PGE closer to the next volume discount."

Man Behind the Microchip **** : Known as the "Father of the Silicon Valley", I always knew Robert Noyce commanded respect, but I never knew why. This excellent biography lists the many accomplishments of this amazing man. Required reading for anybody in the high-tech industry.

My earlier post on calculating carbon impact definitely spawned a lot of comments and follow-up conversations. These talks made me realize a few things.

First, I've decided that the online calculators that I linked to earlier are not really the best way to calculate carbon load. For example, they focus on the individual, whereas I now believe that one's entire family or household should be considered. For example, the heating and electric bill for my condo is really divided among two people. Further, my girlfriend doesn't own a car, so if we need to drive somewhere, it's in my car. These details are lost unless we consider the household and not the individual.

Second, it's so ridiculously easy to get the actual usage numbers for utilities that everyone should just calculate their actual carbon load rather than using the online estimators.

So, with these two things in mind, I used the following conversion factors to calculate our carbon impact (all information from carboncounter.org):

• 19.36 pounds CO^2 per one gallon gasoline burned
• 0.968 pounds CO^2 per one mile flown
• 1.3925 pounds CO^2 per one kWh electricity used
• 12.0593 pounds CO^2 per one therm natural gas used

I then gathered my actual usage numbers as follows (all figures are for the trailing twelve months ended February 2007):

• Car: Looked at my car emissions certificate from 2 years ago, which lists my mileage at the time, and compared it with my most recent car emissions certificate. [10,000 miles total over 2 years, or 5,000 miles per year]
• Electric: Obtained monthly kWh usage from portlandgeneral.com [11,074 kWh]
• Natural gas: Obtained monthly therm usage from nwnatural.com [139.7 therms]
• Air travel: Obtained actual mileage flown (for personal trips only!) from my frequent flier statements. [12,354 miles each for me and Aimee]

Using the above information, a formula for computing annual household carbon load using actual usage numbers is:

19.36(Car miles driven)/(Car MPG) + 1.3925(kWh electricity used) + 12.0593(therms natural gas used) + 0.968(Air miles flown)

Which, for us, translates to:

19.365000/27.5 + 1.392511074 + 12.0593139.7 + 0.96812354*2

For a grand total of 44,543 pounds of carbon dioxide for both me and Aimee (22,304 pounds each).

This concludes the assessment phase. Next up: Atonement phase :)

I'm pretty upset with Vonage right now.

All I want to do is close my account. Unfortunately, Vonage doesn't allow you to close your account from their web site. They make you call them in order to give one of their silver-tongued customer service representatives a chance to talk you out of your decision. This is annoying in its own right, but they are only open weekdays and only until 6pm Pacific Time. Which, given my schedule, means that they are always closed whenever I try to call them.

Normally in this situation, I find it easier to write a quick letter and mail it. But after spending quite a bit of time on their web site, they seem to be almost purposefully hiding their mailing address from their customers.

At this point, I would recommend staying away from Vonage. Regardless of what you think of their service from a technical or quality perspective, their customer support is terrible. And I'm sure, like me, you don't like being held hostage when you try to cancel your service!

I have been a disciple of the religion of Vi for at least 15 years, but I still have much to learn: Best of VIM tips.

I've always wondered about this, and now I know: UPS and FedEx pay a lot in parking fines!

If you find yourself in need of a Codabar generator, then the Bokai Online Barcode Image Generator is a pretty good free one.

I took Wired magazine's Carbon Quiz today. According to the calculator, my carbon load is 21,198 pounds of carbon dioxide annually, thereby earning me a rank of "fair-weather ecofriend." (The Wired articles on The Resurrection of Al Gore and Rise of the Neo-Greens are also worthwhile reading.)

A big surprise was how little a difference recycling makes: Being a militant recycler only reduced my carbon impact a measly 1 percent! The thing that really killed me was air travel, which added almost 9,000 pounds.

I'm going to take the site's advice and atone for my sins by donating $100 to $200 for carbon credits. A bit of Googling uncovered this Oregon Environmental Council web site which has some suggested charities. The other thing I'm going to do is to switch over to one of the renewable power options available from the power company.

Small steps, yes... but it's a start!

After weeks of struggling, I finally have gmail working on my Blackjack. And it's all thanks to Web Design City's article. It was much harder than it should have been... but at least I'm up and running!

The Number *** : How much money do you need before you can retire? According to this book, $2-20 million. Book starts out great, but gets tiresome about halfway through. Mandatory reading if you've never considered this subject before, otherwise there are probably better books out there.

Eon **** : Hard SF novel written during and heavily influenced by the Cold War. The politics seem dated now, and the writing is sometimes a little awkward, but overall thoroughly enjoyable.

Bridges at Toko-Ri **** : Short Michener novella about the Korean War. Doesn't delve into politics, but instead reads more like a "day in the life" of a naval aviator on a bombing run. Almost a little too short to be satisfying, but it's hard to complain given the minimal time investment to read it.

Elfstones of Shannara ** : Marginally better than "Sword of Shannara". Still mostly a LOTR clone. I suffered through this thing all the way to the end, hoping that it would magically redeem itself in the final pages, but it didn't. Maybe I'm just burned out on fantasy novels. If you really like fantasy and don't mind some storyline recycling, add another star.

I helped produce a video on Wireless USB, the technology I've been working on for the last couple of years. We showed the video at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas. We handed out a bunch of copies to the press and analysts. One of them must have uploaded it to YouTube. Check it out if you're interested in seeing our vision of what Wireless USB will do for your life :)

Continuing the tradition from last year, here's my 2006 in cities (in approximate chronological order):

• Las Vegas
• Seattle *
• Hannover, Germany
• Bellevue, WA *
• Haiku, Maui
• Kihei, Maui
• San Jose, CA *
• Boston
• Manhattan *
• Hunter, NY
• Taipei *
• Pacific Coast Bike Trip cities: Oregon: Tillamook, Lincoln City, Florence, Reedsport, Bandon, Gold Beach California: Klamath, Eureka, Garberville, Mendocino, Stillwater Cove, Inverness
• San Francisco *
• Beijing
• Lakewood, WA

One or more nights spent in each place. Cities marked with * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

I've been running Windows Vista for almost two months now and figured that it was time for a status update. I've already talked about what I like, here are some dislikes that have manifested with daily use:

The security restrictions are very annoying. Many common acts (installing programs, deleting files from flash drives, changing network settings) trigger annoying permission popups. Sometimes a single action can trigger up to three permission prompts! Often the prompts are ridiculous -- such as asking you first if it's ok to prompt you, and then once you click "yes", actually doing the real permission prompt. It's hard to imagine the average user liking this. I am very close to trying to figure out how to disable the popups completely.

The driver support is seriously lacking. Hopefully this will improve greatly by launch time, although it's hard to see it happening in time since there is so much work to do. Most hardware manufacturers don't appear to have any official Vista driver support. A few more have beta drivers. And I'm not talking about obscure companies here. I have two relatively recent video cards (one ATI, the other nVidia) that both had weird quirks under Vista. The most recent drivers from each company don't fix the problems. Luckily, (video drivers aside), the drivers that Microsoft provides with Vista seem to generally be decent, so if they work fine for you, then you won't have any problems.

The semi-transparent "Aero theme" is interesting eye candy at first, but after a while I just disabled it. Often it's a little too translucent, showing too much of the background apps. This makes it difficult at times to read the active window. Sometimes it's hard to even tell which window has the focus! And the borders in Aero mode are really fat and space consuming. If all this isn't bad enough, some applications are incompatible with Aero mode and running them will cause the screen to flicker several times as Vista switches to non-Aero mode to accommodate the app.

Lastly, I have been pulling my hair out trying to get an HP x5400 media center extender working with Vista without success. It finally dawned on me to check the web, whereupon I learned almost immediately that v1 media center extenders aren't supported by Vista! (As a side note, it would have been nice if Vista had given me some sort of message letting me know that the v1 extender was incompatible.) So the millions of people who currently have a v1 extender are getting shafted completely. This is a pretty serious backward incompatibility problem and would be a significant reason not to upgrade to Vista in my opinion, especially if you rely on one of these media extenders. See Jason Tang's blog, Chris Lanier's blog, or this Green Button thread for more information.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but FedEx has been really screwing up lately. Which saddens me greatly as I am a shareholder.

My first major complaint with them is that their delivery software system seems really lacking. Somebody sent me a package recently and didn't include my apartment number. FedEx said they couldn't tell where to deliver it, flagged a "delivery exception", left a voicemail for me, and finally delivered the package 3 days after I called them back and gave them the apartment number.

How come their shipping software didn't automatically flag my street address as one that requires an apartment number when the shipping label was being printed by the sender? And once it was in the system, their software should have been able to check a "delivery address cache" and seen that in the past 5 years, dozens of packges have been delivered to me at my street address, and then used that knowledge to fill in the missing information.

I had a similiar experience a few years back when I sent a package to a P.O. box. I used fedex.com's shipping manager to prepare the label (with barcode). FedEx happily accepted the package, only to tell me 5 days later that there was a "delivery exception", that they don't deliver to P.O. boxes, and that there would be a $5 charge for correcting the address. How come their software didn't simply tell me this when I entered "P.O. Box xxx" on their web site?!

Second major complaint: It seems that they almost always have to come out twice to deliver each package, since I am never here when they try the first time. If you happen to check the tracking web site beforehand, you can see the day that delivery is expected, but it never lists a time. Why can't they give a proactive e-mail/phone call with approximate delivery time range (i.e., early/late morning/afternoon/evening)? This would greatly increase their first-time delivery success rate. Further, I have to imagine that their system already routes trucks along specified delivery routes and thus has to have some approximate estimate of the times.

These seem like two obvious areas that could easily be addressed in software. If FedEx can't roll out simple enhancements like this, I can only deduce that there is some fundamental explanation I'm missing or that their backend software infrastructure is a total mess.

Our Internet access at home has been acting strangely for the past few weeks. Mostly fine, but occasional random slowdowns, and, every so often, complete gridlock. It finally dawned on me to check the logs that I had set up to forward to my Linux box's syslog-ng server. I found these little goodies:

Dec 18 17:06:27 10.0.0.1 kernel: NET: 14 messages suppressed. Dec 18 17:06:27 10.0.0.1 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.

A-ha! Some Google searching led me to this Wiki article on router slowdown.

The Linksys WRT54G/DD-WRT firmware defaults of 512 connections (too low!) and 3600 second timeouts (too high) were obviously causing the problems. I bumped up the connections to 2048 and dropped the timeouts to 1800. Hopefully it'll fix the problem.