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Dear Reader,

I am such a pretentious bastard. So much so that I had to have my blog running on my own site and it had to be running Typo (powered by Rails and written in Ruby). Thus it has moved. Gaze upon it’s new shininess!

blog.erik.rainey.name

This site, along with my previous blog at LiveJournal, (and my much eariler iPaq blog) will remain where they are, slowly gathering digital cobwebs and nano-dustmites as the ages move past us. So update your RSS feed already.

I can’t believe I actually wrote this up. All the movies I’ve seen since I’ve lived in Dallas.

Over the last week I’ve been reorganizing my home office. Last weekend I went to IKEA and picked out a GALANT Desk, after I played around with their IKEA Office Planner. Having this tool is completely invaluable! I got the explicit list of components I needed from the tool once I settled on the layout of the office. I printed out the list, went to IKEA, walked up to the cashier and paid for the list, then went over to the stock area and got the stuff after waiting about 30 minutes (it was jam-packed busy because of their recent 20th anniversary). I’ve been posting photos my progress on my Flickr page. I’ll post a before and after when I complete my metamorphosis. So far the IKEA desk had been put together without a hitch and is, in my opinion, top quality. I received 2 redundant sets of instructions, with all the components I bought, so I have plenty of help in putting it together, which I don’t think I really needed, since it was actually quite easy to put together.

Technorati Tags: IKEA, ikea, ikea rules

You’ll find 2 new t-shirts in my pixel tee’s store. Ruby Life and Workout Shirt (that one’s for working out). These are in addition to the normal stock of fine nerd-related t-shirts, such as Katamari Damacii. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: pixeltees

… you just got served. I find it delicious irony that his visage is sold within a capitalist society on practically everything. You’d think he was a real proponent of the system instead of it’s pretty-boy nemesis.

Technorati Tags: capitalism

I discovered Backpackit.com a while ago but I never really used it. Today I started writing a lot of things down that I’d like to do over the next week and I realized that I desperately need it. So I went full boar and fleshed-out my free account. Check out my “Games to Play” list here.

Technorati Tags: backpackit

Well I’ve had the mighty mouse for about a month now and I have to say that it’s got problems. First I’d like to mention the good stuff:

• Slick Overall Design - typical Apple.
• Innovative use of pressure buttons.
• In theory the squirrel ball is a good idea.
• Touch sensitive button diferentiation is clever.

Overall a neat concept, but as I am about to elaborate, not a good implementation.

Now the problems:

• Short Cord. I’m talking like a foot and a half here. What were you thinking Apple? Was this supposed to plug into the right hand of some keyboard? How about an extension cable?
• Very very small squirrel ball. Needs to be about 1.5x to 2x as big. This problem is compounded by Apple’s weak acceleration models. Scrolling through a long page or document is utterly distasteful. I ended up downloading USB Overdrive and tweaking the accelerations so that it behaved more “normally” (read: more like Windows).
• Button differentiation is weak, and sometimes does not work. I have to mentally remind myself to lift my other fingers when I right/middle click. This is further compounded by clicks on the squirrel ball taking an inordinate amount of time to complete (invokes Dashboard). And it’s even further compounded by having a slower machine (Mini 1.25Ghz).
• Design is not ergonomic. Apple, look at Logitech’s mice. Learn. A mouse, much like my hand, is not and should not be symmetric. I constantly feel like I’m holding it wrong. I’m never just comfortable with it. I have to move my grip around so that I can activate the pressure buttons and I have grip it with another hand-stance to get the “slow” right clicks off. These occur when the machine is busy access disk. Everything is more lethargic when this occurs, including getting the context menu. In these conditions, I’m not sure if it’s the machine or the mouse which dropped the “right” part of the context.
• The optical sensor is a bit behind the times. When I use it without a bad on a wood desk with a light color and grain pattern, it gets easily lost and when it does, it zips to the bottom left hand corner (which irritatingly activates my screensaver). There’s much higher resolution technologies that can help alleviate that problem. Again, refer to Logitech.

In the end, it would have been better for me not to get one. This is obviously a first version prototype, that somehow got past their faulty product sensors and got to market. Though based on their previous designs, I think Apple has a staff of lilliputians with crab hands doing their mouse design.

Technorati Tags: apple, mighty mouse

Did you know…

Originally uploaded by emrainey.

…that flickr can blog your mobile phone pictures? This is a shot from the bridge to the entrance to the Benihana’s near TI on Forest Lane. We went there for Keith’s birthday which was a while ago. The landscaping at this place is really well done and must be very expensive. Plus they have real fish in their pond, possibly Coy but I can’t identify fish species.
- Erik

    I’m glad to be back in Dallas, and I’m looking forward to the weekend. We got to our major milestone today at work, so I can rest easy over the weekend.

    Last night I received my Logitech Harmony 880 Remote in the mail from OnSale.com and I am impressed. I’ve never had a stateful remote, which remembers the current state of the various electronic components and it is also able to operate at an “activity” level rather than the “fancy macro” level I’ve been slumming at with my current remote, the Home Theater Master MX500. My new remote even has a sleek recharging station and the software works on MacOSX. The only problem I had with the software was that it’s suppose to detect when a new config file has been downloaded, but this feature never seems to work. I’m pretty sure there’s a “Find Last Change” sort of API in MacOSX (Win32 had one). Anyway, I just double clicked the files and the programmer launched and took care of entering the data into the remote via USB.

    On the gaming front, I’ve been renting Gran Turismo 4 from Gamefly. I know it’s supposed to be a *real* driving simulator, but, and maybe I’ve not been paying attention to my driving since I was 15, it doesn’t seem right. I’ve found it very difficult to pull off drifting (which is probably very hard in actuality) on the normal tracks. I also have found that it’s quite hard to just do a 180. Realistically if you are going down the road at 80 mph and cut hard and hit the parking brake, you’ll flip or break something on your car. In a video game I would expect that doing this manuveur would result in at least an uncontrolled spin. Neither happens. Instead of a spin or flip, the car just turns to the direction of the cut (but only up to about 100 off forward) begins sliding forward (slightly askew), and slowly rights itself back into the forward direction, though not completely. Maybe I’m playing with some safety mode on. If I continue to play these racing games on my plasma, I think I may invest in a driving wheel, since driving with a controller in most of these games is a little “wonky”.

I’m back in Dallas now and I’m fine mom. I missed my 7:25am flight in Nice because the ticketing counter in Nice for Swiss Air insisted they couldn’t issue my ticket again since it was originally for a BA/AA ticket, which AA said they could. So I instead went to the BA counter and found out that the BA flights to Gatwick were full so I’d have to go on standby. After about 10 minutes of typing at his console, the associate was able to confirm a seat for me on the 10:35am to Gatwick. I was also confirmed on the flight from Gatwick to Dallas. So I spent a couple hours in Gatwick poking around. I had lunch at this crazy automated Sushi bar called Yo!Sushi. Each of the plates on a conveyor belt are color coded to their price. One of unqiue dishes they had was a roll called “Spicy Chicken Katsu” and can be found on the menu. On the flight back, I sat next to a really old lady from LA who thought I had a New England accent. I don’t know what to make of that.