Aren Cambre – Page 64 – Aren Cambre's Blog

Web Email Programs

I want to switch to a web email program. It would be handy to have instant access to all my email no matter where I am. I wouldn’t be tied to a specific computer to get my “full” email experience.

I use Outlook 2003 for email. It’s great: fast email searches (with Google Desktop), uses Word as the email creator (so I get all of Word’s strengths), great sorting capabilities, messages can be grouped by conversation (great for seeing replies), built-in image handling (you can crop, resize, and resample images from within the email creation process), and so on. But when I download my email, it permanently stays on my home computer. I can’t get to the downloaded emails again until I am back on that machine.

The current web email programs aren’t up to the task yet.

Hotmail, like most of Microsoft’s online services, is a joke. It lags far behind Google and Yahoo, and it’s not worth any more column space. I don’t understand how a company capable of innovative products, like Windows Vista, Office, the .NET Framework and C#, and Visual Studio, can suck so badly at online services. What gives?

Google’s Gmail is a strong contender, and it has come a long way. It still has serious shortcomings, one of which is no way to mark all messages as read. This is a problem when your Google inbox has 12,157 unread messages piling up (here’s an explanation—note that it is about 10 months after that post). While innovative, Google has a history of arrogance when deciding on user features. Also, when you log into Gmail, you stay logged into Google when you do searches. Do I want Google tracking my searches like that?

Yahoo Mail may be my best bet. Yahoo’s current online mail program is far better than Hotmail (what isn’t?), but it still lags behind Gmail. Yahoo’s revolutionary, next generation online email client should be awesome—taking all of Gmail’s advantages and working them into a much better interface. Once this comes out, I may ditch Outlook and go full-time with an online mail reader.

DSL on the fritz!

UPDATE (11:10 AM): The technician thinks he fixed the problem by changing “pairs” at SBC’s neighborhood phone box. I think this means that my line was punched down to a defective location in the box. Anyway, the bandwidth problem should now be fixed.

UPDATE (10:03 AM): This morning, my full 1.5 Mb/s downstream bandwidth returned. The tech is getting bad readings even behind the house. He said the problem is so bad that he was surprised we are getting any DSL signal at all. He is checking further downstream to see what is going on. Fortunately, because the readings behind the house were bad, it’s very likely they won’t bill me for this.

Original article:

If I had blog software where you rate your current mental state, it would be “annoyed.” This afternoon, I noticed that my internet connection dramatically slowed down. SBC’s speed check site shows my download speeds are running between 5% and 10% of the normal 1.5 Mb/s, but upload speeds are 100% of the normal 384 Kb/s. Huh?

I checked several things but couldn’t fix it. I even swapped DSL modems with a neighbor’s. SBC tech support was no help. So tomorrow, an SBC line technician is coming to my house to check things out. This guy comes with the ominous provision that if they determine the problem is my fault, I get billed. What is the actual problem? How much does an SBC technician cost? Those unanswered questions are driving me up the wall.

I strongly feel that SBC is at fault. I don’t understand how I could do anything that could hose downloads but not affect upload speeds. If my equipment was faulty, it seems that both upload and download speeds would be affected.

Oh, well, I’ll find out more tomorrow!

Joys of Pet Ownership

Gentle readers, be forewarned: this story is rated PG-13 because of coarse language and fecal matter.

Amelia the nasty cat.

Background: Jennifer and I went on a date tonight. Our church occasionally has a Parents’ Night Out event where we can drop off the kid for 4 hours of babysitting while we paint the town red, Aren-style. (Big excitement: Dinner and a movie. Then we get to go home and go to sleep.)

We got home. I scooped the kitty litter. While scooping, I noticed that a cat (probably Amelia) peed all over a litter-catching platform in front of the litter box. Great. I scrubbed the area, cursing the stupid cat under my breath. HOW DO YOU MISS THE WHOLE LITTER BOX, STUPID FISH-BREATH CAT?

My darling wife, meanwhile, was complaining of cat poop smell in the kitchen. While lecturing her on her psychosis (I couldn’t smell it), I walked around the kitchen and adjacent rooms and looked for poo. I couldn’t find any. Returning to the kitchen, I saw a leaf and dirt clod, probably tracked in from outside. As I threw away the dirt clod, I noticed it was squishy and cool, meaning…

I had a piece of cat poop in my hands!

Eww!

I threw away the little turd and cleaned up the area and my hands.

My lovely wife still complained of poop smell. So we looked more. On closer inspection, we noticed a little poop smeared on the chair and her jeans. Yuck! It doesn’t take much cat poop to make a lot of smell.

We quickly rectified both problems. The situation invited disturbing questions: Is there more poop? Did the cat poop on the kitchen table? Does she now poop on chairs?

I figured out what happened. Amelia is a Himalayan. Because she is a good breed specimen, she has long, fine hair. This hair is sometimes a great turd catcher. That is, when she oinks turds into her litter box, most turds stay in the box. But an occasional turd catches in her plush baby soft ass hairs. I think that is what happened. Kitty brought an attached turd into the kitchen, and it got left on a chair. Nobody noticed it until after it was squished.

Kitty’s turd catching properties rise exponentially with ass hair length. This is why I occasionally give my cat ass haircuts. Maybe it’s time for another ass haircut?

My cat is nasty.

The Future of IT

I found this Dallas Morning News article about the future of IT especially salient. (If prompted to login, get a username and password from www.bugmenot.com.) In a nutshell, Gartner says IT workers must broadly diversify skills or get steamrolled. Gartner further predicts major IT upheaval by 2010.

I had a similar revelation shortly after getting my BS in Computer Science in 1999. Even back then–the middle of the tech boom–skills taught just ten years ago were already becoming irrelevant or commoditized. In plain terms, that means it can become cheaper for your employer to purchase what you do from another firm than to keep you employed. Before my undergrad days, I lived near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and I saw how people with dinosaur skill sets were often the first to be laid off. They were also the last to find a comparable replacement job.

These revelations are part of what led me to pursue my MS in Computer Science, and they continue to push me towards my in-progress Engineering Management degree.

These revelations are also a motivation (not the motivation) behind my involvement in community organizations. And by involvement, I am not just talking about essentials like pounding nails and folding newsletters. These are important jobs, and I help with them, but I go beyond that and work within the system to motivate others to pound nails and fold newsletters even better. When I help out in this way with Boy Scouts or with my neighborhood association, I am honing life and career skills. This is part of my education. I think that few people realize the immense value one gets from the lessons learned from going that extra mile in community service. Such involvement benefits you as much as it benefits the community.

These revelations also why I try to diversify my skill set beyond what I can get in a classroom. The above-mentioned community service gives me opportunity to test management skills learned in my degree program. My praxis topic allows me to deeply explore a controversial aspect traffic engineering that also has implications for politics, ethics, and economics.

All IT workers should ask themselves three questions:

Are my skills only the basic skills for 2006?
Do I have knowledge that somehow goes beyond the bachelors-level? Can I do many things that freshly-minted graduates cannot do?
Are my skills a “one hit wonder”? Is my overall skill set highly specialized?

An IT worker who answer yes to any of these questions should be gravely concerned. To survive in this industry, they must fix the problem or quickly plan an exit strategy.

The writing is not only on the wall, it’s etched on the stone outside and tattooed on your forehead. In the IT field, those who get ahead are those who learn and adapt. Many of those who don’t will not have gainful IT employment in as soon a a few years.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Pay Off Handsomely

Typical compact
fluorescent bulb.

Over the past two years, I have gradually replaced most my light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Many claim these bulbs save a ton of money, but they cost a lot. Try $8 for a new compact fluorescent bulb that is equivalent to a $0.50 100W incandescent. Do they really pay off?

Here’s the math:

Bulb Type	Incandescent	Compact Fluorescent
Wattage	100	27
Bulb lifetime	1500	10000
Initial cost	$0.50	$8
Cost per hour of usage	$0.00874	$0.00080
Cost per year of typical usage	$25.53	$2.34

Two assumptions using this math:

Electricity costs $0.0841 per kWh, which is the 1998-2003 average according to the US Department of Energy (link).
“typical usage” is 8 hours a day: 2 hours in the morning and 6 hours at night.

Regardless of one’s typical usage, it is abundantly clear that, even after accounting for the initial cost, compact fluorescent bulbs overall cost about a tenth to run as traditional bulbs. Most of this is due to their lower energy usage, but part is due to their dramatically increased life span.

90% of the energy consumed by incandescent bulbs are kicked off as heat. This calculation does not catch two things related to that:

If you live in a warm climate, you run the A/C far more than you run the heater. If you create more heat in the house, guess what happens to your electricity bills? They go up because you have to use the A/C even more.
Even if you live in a cold climate–where you run the heat far more than A/C–you are still better off running compact fluorescents unless you have a house exclusively heated by electricity. Gas/propane/oil heating cheaper than electric heat, so while the incandescent bulbs could slightly reduce central heater utilization, you are effectively supplementing a “cheaper to operate” heater with a more expensive one.

CF bulbs have even more advantages. By reducing demand, they can extend the usable life of lower capacity electrical systems that are common in older houses. Thanks to lower heat output, they are safer, especially in lamps or in older houses where certain exposed light fixtures are installed in locations where they wouldn’t be allowed today.

Compact fluorescent bulbs definitely pay off!