Tag Archives: time

i-Fusion

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I buy a new iPod accessory.

It isn’t the iPod that’s costly. It’s the accessories.

Anyway, one of the things I like to do with my iPod is listen to podcasts. The only problem is that I don’t listen to my iPod often enough to keep up with all the podcasts I like to follow.

I decided that a good time to listen to podcasts was in the afternoon, when I got home from work and was doing things around the kitchen. You know: emptying the dishwasher, making dinner, cleaning up after Alex the Bird.

I used to plug the iPod into my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which has a great sound system. But the other day the darn thing just stopped working. (My third Mac hardware problem in 6 months. They say bad things come in threes.) I have to decide whether I want to find someone to fix it or just leave it in the living room as a nonfunctioning conversation piece.

I tried plugging the iPod into my 12″ PowerBook, which spends a lot of time in the kitchen. The PowerBook’s hard drive is too full to keep the podcasts on it. But I couldn’t get the volume up loud enough to hear over Alex the Bird or the water running in the sink.

What I needed, I decided, was a set of portable speaker that I could use in the kitchen or take up to Howard Mesa or bring along on road trips. Something that had decent sound and was very portable.

i-FusionI did some research. I found i-Fusion.

I read the reviews on the Apple Store Web site. Everyone absolutely raved about the sound quality. I was a little skeptical. These speakers were small. I don’t care what the case is made of. They can only be so good. Fortunately, I didn’t need Bose quality sound. I just needed something that would sound okay and not distort if I turned up the volume a bit.

One reviewer whined that there wasn’t a place to store the power adapter. There is, however, a place to store the iPod and the earbuds. (I normally keep both in my purse when I travel.)

The price was a bit higher than I was willing to spend. My budget was about $100. This was $149. But I found it on the Tiger Direct Web site for $129 plus shipping for a total of about $135. And I felt as if I needed a treat, so I bought it.

It came today.

I must be spoiled when it comes to sound quality. Maybe it’s because Mike used to sell stereo systems and he buys good stuff for the house. Not expensive stuff, but good stuff. Stuff that sounds good. Really good.

i-Fusion does not sound really good. It sounds fine, but not really good. Those reviewers at the Apple Store Web site really need to spend some time in a stereo shop’s sound booth. Heck, I have a Sony boom box in my hangar that sounds better than this. But I’m not complaining. It’s certainly listenable and it can be turned up quite loud.

The case seems sturdy, the storage spaces are a bit silly but functional. I agree about the power adapter. It seems that they could have built the DC converter into the box (perhaps where the earbuds are supposed to go?) and made a retractable cord. That would have been a better design decision. But I can certainly imagine taking this little bugger on the road. With its built-in, rechargable litium-ion battery, it’ll be great for Howard Mesa, which doesn’t have electricity (yet).

Happy with my purchase? I think so.

I’ll let you know when I catch up on all those podcasts.

On Mailing Lists

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Talk about junk e-mail!

Whew! I just unsubscribed myself to the last e-mail list I was subscribed to.

An e-mail list, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a topic based mailbox that list subscribers can send messages to. When you send a message to the list, it’s automatically sent in e-mail to everyone on the list. The idea is that you can use a list to get information about a topic from people who might have answers.

The operative word here is “might.” A lot of times, subscribers won’t have an answer but they won’t hestitate to say “I don’t know the answer but wish I did” or “this might be the answer” or “that question is off-topic” or “you should ask that question in this other list, too” or “I just read the answer to that in this other list” or “why the hell do you want to know that?” Then the topic starts expanding in every direction, sprouting more questions and answers, only some of which are vaguely related to the original. Arguments develop with differences of opinion sometimes getting nasty. So one question can generate dozens of e-mail messages that may or may not have any value to the questioner. And if you didn’t ask the question in the first place and don’t care about the answer, it’s even more junk to wade through.

Of course, you can always take a list in “digest” format. That’s when they put a whole day’s worth of messages into one big, fat e-mail. I think it’s worse because you can’t even use a message’s subject line to determine whether it’s something you want to read (or delete).

One of the mail lists I was subscribed to didn’t have a specific topic. It was a strangely quiet list, with no messages for days on end. Once, I thought I’d unsubscribed to it — it was that dead. Then, suddenly, someone would send a message and twenty people would respond to it. Like they were all lurking out there, waiting for someone to make the first move so they could join in the fray.

The really weird thing to me is the amount of time that passes between the original message and the responses. Sometimes it’s as litle as a few minutes! Even in the middle of the night! Like people are sitting at their computer, watching every e-mail delivery, ready to dive in with a response when a message appears. Egads! Get a life!

Another list I belonged to briefly prevented me from posting questions or answers. Even though I was a subscriber, my messages were considered spam. Wow. Hard not to take that personally. I think I lasted about a week. Very frustrating when every time you try to chip in with a little assistance your message gets bounced back at you with a spammer accusation.

Why did I join these lists in the first place? Well, for a while I was feeling a bit isolated. I live in my own little world here in Wickenburg, one that’s very light on high-tech people. Very light. Lighter than the hot air the local “computer experts” spout while they’re pretending to their customers that they know what they’re talking about. I started feeling as if I were missing out on new developments in computer technology. That I lacked a reliable forum for getting answers to computer-related questions. That I had no place to turn to when I needed help.

I heard about a list from a friend and got mildly interested. When one of my editors praised it, I thought I was missing out on something really valuable. I jumped in. With both feet. And the barrage of e-mail began.

I’ve made worse mistakes. But not many lately.

So now I’m off the lists. All of them. My mailboxes are feeling much lighter these days.

I’m back to doing what I’ve been doing for the past few years. When I have a question, I hop on the Web and Google to get the answer.

The Eyes Had It

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I begin to lose my close vision.

It’s inevitable. As a person ages, he loses his close vision. Now, as I approach my 45th birthday, I’m beginning to lose mine.

My far vision has always been bad. I started wearing glasses in 5th grade and I’ve been wearing contact lenses since my college days. Because I seldom wear glasses, however, people assume I have normal vision. I don’t. My vision is very bad. At this point, I wouldn’t trust myself to walk five steps without my contacts or glasses on.

It always makes me laugh when I see the “corrective lenses” restriction on my driver’s license and pilot medical certificate. Do they honestly think I’m crazy enough to drive or fly without some kind of visual aid?

I’m fortunate in that my vision, although bad, is extremely correctable. That means that with my lenses on, I can see just as well — if not better — than most people who don’t have “vision problems.” In my life, I’ve had two friends who weren’t so fortunate. Their vision was not correctable. Both worked with computers for a living. I still remember sitting with one of them at his desk while he stuck his face up against his 21″ monitor — considered very large at the time — reading something onscreen.

(Apple has a software solution for this called Universal Access. I wrote briefly about it in my Tiger book.)

Two years ago, I got an eye exam. My far vision had worsened again. My doctor gave me an option.

“You can keep the prescription you have or go with a stronger prescription. But if you go with the stronger prescription, you might have some problems with your close vision.”

I didn’t believe her and I went with the stronger prescription. After all, I liked being able to see things off in the distance, especially when I flew. The air can be so clear up here, away from the city. Visibility often exceeds 50 miles. I wanted to see those 50 miles as well as I could.

But she was right. After switching to the new prescription, I started noticing a problem with reading small print. At first, it was just a minor problem that could be solved by adding light. But it seemed to get worse and worse. I finally broke down and bought a pair of “cheaters” — you know, those cheap reading glasses you can buy in a drugstore. They were a +1.25 prescription and they really helped.

The trouble with wearing cheaters is that the more you wear them, the more you come to depend on them. I tried hard for a long time to just wear them when I was reading in bed. But it wasn’t long before I found myself needing them other times, like when trying to read package ingredients in the supermarket or drug store. Add more light.

I had an eye exam earlier this year and my far vision prescription has gotten worse again. But I learned my lesson. So far, I haven’t bought contacts in the new prescription. I don’t want my close vision to get any worse.

The doctor told me that with my new prescription, I’d need cheaters with a prescription of +1.5 or +1.75.

Oddly enough, with my contacts and glasses off, my close vision is still incredibly good. I can, for example, read the microprint on newly designed $100 bills. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff is printed in those tiny letters all over our new money! Of course, at the same time, I can’t recognize Mike sitting across the kitchen table from me. Or read the page of a book more than 5 inches from my nose.

I’m not complaining. I still consider myself very fortunate to have vision corrections available to me. So many people have vision problems that can’t be fixed. Many of them are probably grateful for what they have, too.

I saw an episode of Scientific American Frontiers yesterday that featured a man who’d been blind for the past 11 years. They’d given him an implant and a special pair of glasses with a video camera built in, enabling him to see up to 16 blobs of light. (Think of a computer monitor with a resolution of 16 blurry pixels.) He was so grateful to have even that — the ability to see the way the light changed when something moved in front of him, the ability to see something bright nearby. I’m lucky compared to someone like him.

You’re lucky if you don’t have any visual problems.

Right now, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, typing this onto my laptop. I’m having no trouble seeing or reading it. Yet.

But I know what lies ahead. I’m not anxious to go there, but I know I can’t stop time.

Demotivation

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“Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people.”

My friend Ryan sent me a link to Demotivators on the Despair, Inc. Web site.

Demotivators are like that motivational artwork you see advertised in airline shopping magazines — the kind you find in the seat back pocket in front of you. But they have a dark, super-realistic side.

This sums it all up:

AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That’s why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!

They’re not depressing unless you take them seriously. They’re actually hysterically funny. Check them out.

A Penny Saved…

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I put Ben Franklin’s saying to the test.

Not long ago, I wrote a post explaining how someone could take advantage of a credit card introductory offer for a low (or no) interest cash advance, put the money in an ING CD (or some other high-paying, insured savings account), earn interest, and then pay off the credit card balance before the interest jumped up from its introductory rate. I calculated that I could earn about $700 on a $20,000 credit card cash advance.

Well this works both ways. Mike and I have a home equity line of credit, which we used a while back to buy our Howard Mesa property and a few other things. Back when we signed up for it, the interest rate was very low. But today, it’s 7.5%. Not exactly a great deal anymore.

Enter Capital One (for the sixth time in a week). This offer was 0% for purchases and balance transfers for a full year. Best of all, there were no balance transfer fees. According to the offer, I could get up to $30,000 of credit. And the balance transfer option could be applied to a loan.

You might know where this is going.

I did some math. What if I put $25,000 toward the home equity line of credit, thus reducing the balance by that huge amount? Over the course of a year, I’d save $1,875 in interest (that’s simple interest calculation, which is close enough for me). Then, before the credit card interest rates jumped into their double-digits, I’d write a check from the home equity line of credit to Capital One, thus paying off the entire balance before any interest could accrue.

Of course, I would have to make those minimum monthly payments to Capital One. But if I got into a problem with that, I could always use the home equity line of credit to pay that, too. Besides, my payments on the home equity would be reduced — perhaps by the same amount as the Capital One credit card. Wouldn’t that be a kick!

Understand that the net effect of this on my personal debt would be zero — I’m borrowing from Peter to pay Paul (so to speak). I’d just save a bunch of money in interest. And, like Ben Franklin said, a penny saved is a penny earned.

So I applied for the account with the transfer. Let’s see if I get it.

The odd thing is, I’ve been taking advantage of those year-long 0% interest offers for years. I usually have $10,000 to $20,000 floating around in interest-free debt with a credit card company. (I paid the last one off about six months ago, though, and haven’t applied for a new one since.) With all the credit information available to credit card companies these days, they must be able to figure it out. Yet they still offer me free money, I still take it, and I still pay them back in full before they can start the interest clock.

I win, they lose. And they keep coming back for more.

Go figure, huh?