March 2009 Archives

Mary and I watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica this weekend, and I feel like I've run a marathon. At least, I do as much as anyone who watches The Sci Fi Channel will ever know what running a marathon feels like.

The most interesting thing I got out of the final show was that God must exist in the BSG universe. There was always a lot of religion in the show, of course, but religion exists independently of God's existence. In her final scene, Kara was either an angel or a very fast sprinter. I'll accept either possibility as sufficient proof of divine intervention. If angels exist, then God exists. I now need to rethink the words and actions of Head Six and Head Baltar, because they were probably real, rather than hallucinations.

My mom had an iPhone. One day the speaker went mute. Apple Store people show her a pink strip in the earphone jack, which apparently voids the warranty because the strip is a water detector. Unknown how this happened, but she's a grandmother with a 2-year old living in her home, and there is at least one toilet in the house.

Anyway, I borrowed the phone because the display still worked, and I was thinking of writing an application for it. The other day I dropped the phone onto a rug from about waist height, and what do you know: the sound works again.

For you pink-jackers out there: give it a try. What do you have to lose?

One of my all-time favorite electronics purchases is my Infrant ReadyNAS. It's a file server that's barely bigger than the four SATA drives it contains. We keep all 100+ GB of our family photos on it. (With periodic offsite backups, of course.)

The other day I walked into my home office and smelled burning electronics. I wish I could say this were a rare occurrence in the Tsao household, but that's the price a tinkerer pays to lead an adventurous life. Fortunately, this time it wasn't my fault: the ReadyNAS was dead, almost certainly because of a popped capacitor. After a few online searches I determined that mine was likely within a range of recalled units that had a flaky power supply.

So on a grim Saturday night I called an 800 number. I promptly got an answer. I explained my problem exactly once; I gave my name and shipping address exactly once; I provided a credit card number exactly once as security to allow cross-shipping of the good and defective parts. No apologies for hold times, no transferring to supervisors, no hassle. A few days later I received a box with a new power supply in it and a prepaid shipping label for the return. My file server was back in business!

I admit that I was worried when Netgear purchased Infrant a couple years ago, but if it means it's cost-effective for them to hire competent, courteous phone people even on a weekend night, I'll accept it.

Over the past few nights I read Watchmen. This was my first time reading it; in fact, until the movie hype began, I hadn't even heard of the book. (Yes, I understand that my geek credentials will be revoked because of these admissions.)

Not only was this my first read, but it was also my first graphic novel, except maybe for those Chick booklets that warped my mind when I was a kid. I found the storyline incredibly evocative because of the format. I didn't need to spend a lot of mental energy trying to remember which character was which, because their faces were right there in front of me. I wouldn't say it was any faster to read than pure text, because I spent quite a bit of time poring over the pictures even after I'd sopped up all the dialog. I like the compromise between the precision of prose and the convenience of film; like prose, it pushes you in the direction the writers want you to go, and like film, it leaves enough to your interpretation that your experience might be quite different from someone else's, but not so much so that you leave the theater/book saying "huh?," as so often can happen with artsy films.

I appreciate The Incredibles even more now; I can see that it also started with the idea of the everyday lives of superheroes and took it in a totally different direction.

But after watching a trailer of the movie and recognizing nearly every scene from the book, I have to wonder: why make a Watchmen movie at all? Won't it just be a tweened version of the book? I'm sure I'll still see it even if it is. Unfortunately, it's rated R, so that won't happen any time soon unless I can find a sitter for the kids.

This is a followup to my previous post about my crown.

During the second visit, my dentist pulled off the temporary crown and then glued on the permanent one. We discovered that one small part of the porcelain touched the opposite tooth, making my bite uncomfortable. By the time that part was ground away, the metal beneath the porcelain was showing. My dentist offered to redo it, but I declined. The blemished crown looks like a tooth with a small filling in it, which in fact makes it less noticeable because the tooth next to it also has a (real) filling in it.

To me, the crown looks like somebody else's tooth hanging out in my mouth, but otherwise it has fulfilled its two responsibilities of chewing food and not hurting. Money well spent.