If you buy an expensive piece of electronics (or an expensive anything, really), you should be happy with that choice. Like everything else, it should function as you'd expect, without the artificial limits or constraints that companies sometimes apply in order to keep people safe from themselves. If you happen to believe that making concessions to the lowest common demonimator is putting artificial barriers between you and satisfaction with your purchase, then you have one of two options:

1. Find another product without the limitations
2. Figure out how to get around the limitations endemic to the product of your choice

I don't know about anyone else, but I tend to go on features, and figure work-arounds as need be. I recently came across such a situation when I bought a Pioneer AVIC-Z1. It has almost every single feature I want in an in-dash nav system (I wish it would show you raw GPS info). Except that lawyers have obviously gotten to the designers before the product got out the door, and so some of those features don't always work when you'd expect them to. This annoys me.

Tracy and I take road trips occasionally. Wouldn't you know, the Z1 plays DVDs -- in Dolby/DTS stereo no less. And even though the screen is only like 7 inches, it looks pretty good. Except for that little issue of how the DVD function only works if the car is in park and the parking brake is on. Uh... if I want to watch a DVD while my car is in "park", I'll go inside and look at my TV. What? Am I supposed to want to watch DVDs at rest stops or something? I figure that Tess might like to watch a movie while we're on the road. And I figure that I'm responsible enough not to be saying "Durrr... that's a good movie..." right before we crash.

Likewise, I'd like to be able to set a new destination while underway. Say that you think you need to go to a certain Point-of-Interest (POI in Z1-speak) but on the way there realize that your needs have changed, or that you'd like to go somewhere else. Well, you need to find a place to park, stop the car, put it in park, set the e-brake, then change your route to include the new POI. Why can't my passenger do that for me if one is available? The seat has a pressure sensor in it. Why isn't it smart enough to know that if I have a passenger, some features aren't at all dangerous and are in fact very desireable? The thing already understands natural human speech, why can't it figure that simple thing out? It's a binary decision!

Well, the Z1 has many nice features. And you get access to all of them. When parked. I would ike to access them maybe while not in park. Not competing product has the same featureset or interface, and many have similar restrictions anyway. So I'm faced with choice #2 above.

Lo and behold, other folks felt as I did. Someone discovered that before starting the car, you can disengage the e-brake and then flash the headlights three times right after the car is started. The Z1 thinks it's in some demo/diagnostic mode and every menu option works. And while this is a handy feature, it's just a little too Rain Man for me.

Luckily, someone with more electronics skill than I has developed a tiny electronics package that simulates this flashing by oscillating the power to the wire which senses if the headlights are on. And they sell this circuit to folks willing to cut and crimp a few wires in order to get more convenience out of their purchasing decision. How cool is that!?

I'm in the process of ordering my flasher circuit now. I've already got the crimpers and heatshrink tubing, so all is well. Soon, I will not have to be faced with decisions spawned by fears of litigious idiots. Huzzah!

Dear Mr. BizDev Guy in Cube Across the Hall:

I'm really curious if you are a double amputee or not. Because I just can't figure out why you always have to use your speakerphone on ultra-loud volume all day. I mean, you must not be able to lift the receiver to your ear, right? And have you heard of a headset? I'd think even a guy with a pair of hooks for hands could manage to wrangle one of those on in the morning (I mean, if you know you're going to be on the phone all day, why not get set up early?). They give headsets out for free at the tech stop. You might even be able to flag down some flunkie to make the 150 yard walk for you. Why don't you avail yourself of one instead of using your speakerphone. See, because nobody uses their speakerphone. Because it's rude!

Do you want to the rest of the office to know you're a mover and shaker? Probably. Is it your over-inflated sense of self-importance? Almost certainly that's part of it. But when you can can be heard waaaaaay over in the bathroom (easily 100 feet away) then you have a problem. It's called a lack of concern for the well-being of others, jackass. You work in a shared office for fuck's sake! Have a sense of responsibility for the comfort of the 200 other people who have to work near you!

Nobody cares who it is you're talking to. I've talked to people at big-shot companies too. Nobody cares that you're "going to have to put this under NDA before we move forward". I've signed more NDAs than I can remember. Nobody cares about synnergy, taking it to the next level, bringing [insert group name here] in the loop, or any other horseshit marketer-dronespeak that comes out of your filthy hole at the top of your voice. Everyone just wants you to shut the fuck up and use your phone like everyone else.

You want to swagger aroud the cube while being Important with a capital I? Fine, nothing wrong with that, Mr. Always Be Closing. Just get a headset and long cord. Don't continue to foist your conversation on everyone else. You already foist your goddam cologne on us (what do you do every morning, bathe in that shit?). What other senses can you assualt us with? No, I mean it: you touch me and you're in trouble.

Signed:

A guy who has to put up with your shit while actually trying to get the work done which you converse about with so much bravado.

P.S. If I once more have to hear you check voice mail more than 6 times an hour, I'm going to leap over the cube wall and stab you in the neck with my scissors. There's a fucking light on the phone which tells you if you have voicemail, you nitwit! Are you really too stupid to look for the flashing red light on the phone, or are you hot for the sound of the voicemail lady's voice? You just like pressing your PIN and the pound key a lot? You like to be reassured that you can press zero for more options?!? What is it? Why, damn you, WHY?

And here's today's bonus image:

Just thought I'd share:

Hey! It's Sunday, isn't it? Hows about that?

There are some pretty cool images on the Pictures That Could Be Superheroes Machines page. The Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer is a particular favorite. I dig the MG42 up on top...

Here's me:

Your Linguistic Profile:

70% General American English

15% Upper Midwestern

10% Yankee

0% Dixie

0% Midwestern

I guess that's about right, considering my folks are from Ohio and West Virginia, but I grew up in Arizona (which has no accent to speak of).

My new favorite band is Ok Go. A couple years ago, that song "Get Over It" was big on the radio, and I figured I'd look into getting the rest of that album, but forgot. So I'm sitting home today with a cold, and that song pops into my head. I head over to the Ruskies and three bucks later I have two CD's worth of mpeggery stored away.

I'm giving the latest album a listen, and I like it. Their music reminds me of The Stranglers a little. It's sort of low-tech in a way that I like. Has an infectous beat, which is always good. It sounds like music that could have been made 25 years ago.

Tracy pointed out that for the song "Here It Goes Again" is worth a look, and indeed it is. Those treadmills look fun.

Anyway, I wound up going to their web site and buying a t-shirt. They'll get more off that sale than if I bought their CDs in the store. If they end up playing locally, I'll go see them for sure.

Tracy and I picked up a Series3 Tivo Saturday. I'm not normally given to high-tech gadget lust, but this was a compelling buy. When I was in Phoenix, I went to Fry's with my mom and brother, and they had the new Tivos there. It sure looked nice, but it was too expensive. My mon's been pining for one. She's saddled with the Cox DVRs now, and hates them. But they can record one channel while you're watching another. Well now, here's a Tivo that can do that as well -- and it has all the regular features like wishlists, upcoming episode searchin, season passes and such that the Cox DVR lacks.

After I got back home, I started thinking about it some more. We've had our current Tivo for 4 years, and we got the lifetime subscription on it. I like that I don't have to pay every month, and that $250 lifetime fee would have cost $600 if we were paying monthly. The Tivo only cost $300, so we're fifty bucks into the black. If I could get the same lifetime subscription on the new Tivo, the price goes down if we have it for a few years. (Of course, the older Tivo's price goes farther into the negative cost end of the scale over those same years, but that's beside the point.)

Our Tivo has been making some odd noises; I think a fan is going. And it has a nasty habit of thinking that it's out of space, when there are plenty of yellow-flagged shows to get rid of (Tracy's lost a few episodes of Lost that way). The menus are slow, and the little IR emotters that shine into the cable box's front are constantly getting knocked around. And another nail in the Series2 coffin: Not only did we pay a little extra for an HD-capable TV, we pay extra every month for an HD cable box -- and we never watch HD channels since the Tivo can't record them! That's kind of a waste.

So I'm at Fry's looking at the new box and it seems like a good deal. It has two HD tuners in it, and so all you need to do is get Comcast to come over and bring the decoder cards that slide into the back. Then we can stop paying $18/month for an HD cable box. Being able to record one channel and watch another is a big plus. But the biggest thing is that it occurs to me that if we want to watch an HD program, we just change the channel! There's no more need to find the TV remote, change the source, find the cable box remote, change the channel to an HD one, turn on the stereo, adjust the volume, and settle in... only to have Tivo change the channel halfway through on the other input, since it think it wants to record something for us.

Being able to ditch the cable box and its fee, plus being able to watch a set of channels that we pay extra for is a big plus. I've heard rumors that there might be a Comcast-branded Tivo coming out soon, and that was sort of what I was angling for. But will the interface be the same? Will it have two tuners? What will it cost per month? I'm pretty certain that there won't be any way to transfer the lifetime subscription over to that box. And what if we move to a place that doesn't have Comcast? We've already taken our Tivo to a different cable company, and it's a couple minute's setup to change it over. No way will Comcast let us take the cobranded box with us, even if it would work someplace else. Why pay rent on something when owning something else means that it gets free-er the longer you have it?

So we bought the new Tivo and called it Christmas.

I have it all hooked up, and I'm waiting on the Comcast guy now. It works as is, but only gets the non-digital channels (up to like channel 70 or something). We already got to see the dual-tuner feature in action, too. It's going to come in very handy. We were watching a channel, and had paused a little, so we were into the buffer. I was fiddling with the remote and accidentally changed the channel. Normally, that means the buffer is lost on the old channel and you have to pick it back up in real-time; anything you missed is gone. But this time, I clicked the last channel button, and there was our buffered show. Cool!

Something I like but hadn't thought about before seeing it is that the whole interface is bigger. The channel guide stretches out so that you can see more on the menus. This is because you can set the Tivo such that it will always show stuff at 1080p (ie, 16:9). This means more area for menus. But for normal viewing, it will draw letterbox bars where it needs to. Changing a channel to an HD one means those bars go away and suddenly your watching HD. Flip back to normal TV channels and it's 4:3 with bars again. It's very nice. (And snappy! No more IR emitter lag!)

Another bonus was that it supports HDMI. So I can lose the five AV cables coming out of the old Tivo. I wish my amp had HDMI inputs. Then I could lose another 8 cables. I really like not having that rat's nest back there. Birthday might come early this year...

Been playing EVE Online since May. I started out doing low-level missions, mining, stuff like that. I started training up combat skills early on, and I guess it paid off. I had 4 ships on me and I killed 3 of them, with a friend. Here are the stats of my third battle.

My first battle, I died horribly: never got a shot off in fact. I was 2 weeks old. My second battle was last night. I was in a cruiser and got a battlecruiser to run away after a long fight. Tonight I saw a guy in a frigate dock at the station I was docking at. I called in a corp friend and we waited for like an hour.

After a while I left the station, figuring he'd forgot about me. Turns out he got 3 friends to dock in the meantime. I go to redock, and 4 of them pop out, all spewing drones. My corp friend was elsewhere, looking for the guy we were waiting for.

I killed one guy fast. I think he was in a frigate. The other three were one frig and two cruisers. I yelled for my friend, started shooting one cruiser. Friend showed up, the cruiser died. Friend trapped the other cruiser, we killed him. The last frigate ran off.

Turns out I have pretty good missile skills, and not a bad tank. I was wondering about that.

It was some of the best online gaming I've ever experienced. I was scared to death. In a online gaming way, I mean. In EVE, if you lose something, you lose it. You don't respawn with the same ship. You're dead. So it's a little different than games I'm used to playing.

Here's the corporate chat of the event:

Aggravated > i love the rupture best cruiser thier is imo
Sidiion > rup is nice rax is 2nd
Ico Seduvaar > I killed a rax tonight.  with my caracal. :-)
Sidiion > my rax is not a newb rax thou
Ico Seduvaar > I bet
Ico Seduvaar > in the end, skills are what matters
Sidiion > 5 t2 small nuetrals
Sidiion > big tank =)
Aggravated > ico like insta popped a rax, rifter and a celestial
Ico Seduvaar > I've been training a little bit.  but need more pvp time
Sidiion > plp must not have had any armor or resists on
Sidiion > rof only bonus i see diffrent really between rax/rupture
Aggravated > well the celestial had a t2 med rep dunno what else
Ico Seduvaar > he died pretty quick.  but I have no other real battles to compare 
against.  except that brutix last night.  he ran off

I've been training PvP skills for 3 months, not knowing how they play into the fabric of the game, just guessing that "this might be good to have". Then I get a decent run one night by accident -- and I got cred with the corp, too! Been there a month, haven't done shit with them. Having a corp-fellow say I do well is nice. And now, I want to go full pirate. Y'arr!

I have a sneaky suspicion that I'll start seeing a lot more enemies around that system I was in. And I'm sure I'll get killed before to long (it's inevitable, really). But it was cool that my first real battle worked out in my favor.

I ran across this today and had to share:

I wish I could find the wall-sized prints. Awesome indeed.

Google had a halloween party yesterday. It was a big event. I vaguely recall it being a large to-do last year. I went down to see what the fuss was all about, but then went back upstairs and got back to work. We worked a lot last fall. Most of October and all of November, in fact.

I only got a few photos, but coworkers snapped more than a couple. One in particular got a large set. She put them up on . They even got some with people I recognize.

She got . Last time I saw her she was a couple weeks old.

Nobody managed to get my coworker Scott, even though he had lots of people take his pic. He and his wife Dana had . (Dana was "a grandmother", by the way.)

There were kids all over. The looked happy. Some pretty darn good costumes all around. The iPod guy was good. was a favorite. was very nice -- and he stayed in character! The guy who had a real, live bird was good. My favorite has to be . Just... wow. I don't think anyone but him could carry that off.

And finally is the 82nd representing in the background, yo.

It was a pretty good time. I had a few folks take my photo, and only one negative comment (which I didn't expect at all). A lady came up to me and said "You've got the scariest costume here". "How so?", I asked. She explained that there were "too many of you soldiers in the world today". I replied that there was almost not enough running around during WWII, and that without them and the sacrifices they made a lot of the people in this world would be leading fairly unhappy lives right now. The Dutch in particular, I said, didn't seem to think there was a shortage of soldiers in Fall of 1944. In fact, they're still happy there were so many back then. And then I went on to explain that my grandfather was in the 82nd Airborne and wore a uniform identical to what I had on. I said that I wanted to wear it to get a connection with what those folks went through, and that I'd like to think that there's some small part of me that has a little of what those guys had, to do what they did. She paused for a bit and then said "Well, ok I guess. So how does it feel to wear your grandfather's uniform?" And I told her that it was constricting and hot, but I was really happy I was wearing it.

Why do some people feel like they need to go up to complete strangers and be nasty like that? She was dressed as a witch. Would she be open to J. Random Holy Roller running some "You're setting a bad example for the kids here, with that witchcraft thing" nonsense past her, completely unsolicited like? I'm sure she'd have an open mind about that person's viewpoints and they would engage in meaningful dialog.

Lastly, I would like to comment on the ban on "weapons or weapon-like objects" as part of costumes. didn't get that memo. I even took my leg knife off. Hmmph