I love Apple

Several weeks ago I decided to buy a BluRay player. The prices had fallen dramatically, and even continue to fall. The player I bought for $229 now sells for $199. Oh well, that's technology. The Samsung player I bought came with NetFlix and Pandora access built in. I was very familiar with NetFlix instant movies as we own a Roku box on one set used for instant movies. Pandora was new to me, so I ventured to the Internet to find out what it was.

For someone who likes to listen, Pandora is fantastic. The site allows you to tailor a music "station" to the kind of music you favor. Skeptical at first, I set up a free account and started my own Internet radio station by selecting artists or songs that I like. I then added additional artists to expand the range of music that my custom station would play. I then found that I could give a thumbs up or down to individual songs as they played. This feedback to Pandora is used to further refine the type of music I like.

It's all part of the Music Genome project, that classifies every artist and song using criteria such as genre, harmony, instruments, key tonality, aesthetics, prominent musical components, and such. As I provide feedback to Pandora, the site bases future music selections to those that match what I have indicated I enjoy. I can also exclude what I do not like. The result is a station that plays the music I like with only an occasional brief commercial. I'm in!

One problem. I could only listen to Pandora from a PC, or the sound system attached to my BluRay player. That is kind of limiting. After all, I also have a Bose 3.2.1. system upstairs that I would love to use to play Pandora. So I set out looking for a solution. I expected to find a third party black box for Pandora, such as the Roku box is for NetFlix. I was willing to spend up to $100 for such a solution. No luck. In fact, all I found on the Internet was a lot of other people asking for the same solution. I did find several extremely expensive solutions that allow audio and video streaming from a PC to any audio or video component in your house. All were several hundred dollars and far too complex for what was trying to do.

Several months ago I replaced my iPOD-mini with a new iPOD Touch. I have never been an Apple disciple. I think Apple makes good, but not great stuff. In an effort to avoid converting my music library from the iPOD to MP3 or some other format, I stuck with Apple and bought the Touch. At the time I was not aware the Touch also allows access to the Apple App store over WiFi. It was this discovery that led to my Pandora solution.

Over the past weekend, I found a Pandora app on the Apple App store. It was free. I quickly set up my iPOD Touch to play my Pandora stations. That was great, but still did not solve getting Internet radio to my Bose 3.2.1. I then learned that my Touch was smart enough to determine if the headphone connection had headphones or an audio component connected to it. That was the final piece of the Pandora solution. Off to Nebraska Furniture Mart for a $14 cable that allowed me to connect my iPOD Touch to my Bose 3.2.1 auxiliary input connection. And it works great!

I have always been a PC guy. Not really by choice. It was just what I learned first and was the hardware and applications provided by the companies I have worked for. I am a creature of habit, so I use and buy what I know. iPODs are the only Apple products I have have owned. I have never used an Apple computer, but have played with an iPhone. I do admit that Apple is the best at developing user interfaces and making their loyal followers believe they are getting the best money can buy.

My experience over the past weekend leads me to believe that Apple deserves the reputation they have. They are brilliant marketers, and make the most usable electronics on the market. Apple lost big in the early days of the Personal Computer. IBM and Microsoft cleaned Apple's clock by discounting operating systems, and pre-installing them on the hardware. They also flooded the market with great applications that a single company (Apple) could not compete with. From that, Apple learned their lesson and have now turned the tables. The iPhone is a great piece of hardware chained to a crappy network (AT&T). Yet, Apple and the iPhone dominate the smart phone market. Why? Because they have the applications and made them easy to acquire. Guess who does not have a Pandora application for their handset? I cannot get a Pandora app for my Sprint HTC handset running Windows Mobile 6.0! It is the exact opposite of the early PC days.

Apple also has a seamless, comprehensive, and effective end-to-end business model that has been successfully executed over and over. I know that I was mentally willing to pay $100 for a specific solution, but because of the iPOD Touch capabilities and the Apple business model that led to a robust app store, I solved the problem for $14. I love Apple.

Project Update

It has been a couple weeks since I blogged about my common area restoration project, so I thought I would update you on the progress. As you can see from the pictures below, it is getting greener. The seed has germinated. I am now getting to a critical time.

Remember that I said my plan was to not water the area, but live with what Mother Nature provided? This September has been very dry compared to average. If I don't get some rain soon, I will need to start watering, or give up on the $80 of seed I put down.

For now I am keeping my fingers crossed. When the new grass starts to dry up, I may change my mind.

Audience Participation

I despise it. When I go anywhere to be entertained, the last thing I want is an expectation that I must help produce the entertainment. Sometimes the audience is asked to participate, while at other events they willfully volunteer. A good example of the audience volunteering their participation is music concerts.

A few years ago, Terri and I finished off a North Carolina vacation with a Keith Urban concert held in Myrtle Beach. The venue was simply the worst ever designed for music shows - The House of Blues. I have several beefs with HOB. First, only the first 10 or so patrons can sit and watch the show. The next 20 or so can see the show, but not sit. The next several hundred can wander a bar-like setting and hear a muffled version of the live show. I would never pay to darken a HOB door, even for a Beatles reunion show.

The HOB setting worsens with audience participation. I found a comfortable corner of the bar to listen to Keith Urban, but found myself surrounded by dozens of teenage girls belting out the lyrics to every song. I heard them just fine, but had difficulty hearing the act I paid to hear. Keith did not elicit the participation. No, portions of the youthful audience volunteered to participate. I have seen other acts turn their microphone to the crowd, an obvious and overt request for them to sing along. Those are usually only for short stints in a song - maybe just the chorus. The audience's voluntary participation will usually span the entire event.

Anyone who has plopped down hard earn dollars to see Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede show knows how audience participation can become irritating and aggravating. Their version is nothing short of obnoxious. When you arrive at a Dixie Stampede show, you are treated to an opening act in the mezzanine. Enjoy it, because it only gets worse from there. Once seated in the main auditorium, the emcee arbitrarily divides the audience into 2 or 3 teams. In order for your team to "win" something, they must scream louder and longer that other teams. It is their clever way to artificially generate excitement where none would otherwise exist.

Can you imagine getting excited over your team's pig racing against another? Or even better, cheering your cowboy riding an ostrich over the other team's? From the first moments, I felt an extreme hokeyness overcome me. I did not want to participate. Getting my team's food served before an other's did nothing to motivate me to cheer for my team's cowboy, pig or ostrich. I might have participated if the winning team had their price of admission refunded.

There was one show I experienced over 32 years ago, that I enjoyed the audience participation aspect. It was called "King Henry's Feast". The setting was King Henry's court where wenches did the serving while the lords were served. I was a lord. Terri was a wench and had to go beg for salt for her lord. I liked that.

Handy

I have always been fairly handy around the house. I don't see a reason to pay someone else to do what I can do for myself. They don't teach "handy" at school. So I started wondering how I got my degree in "handy". I have concluded the degree was earned by spending time with my father and grandfather. Both were professors of handy.

My grandfather likely begun his training when he bought an old house from an old Cherokee Indian Chief sometime in the 1920's. That old house only had 3 original rooms, a living room and 2 bedrooms - no bathroom or kitchen. As was the custom of the time, when you needed more room in your house, you built on. The old house had at least 2 additions, probably done nearly single handed by my grandfather. He also converted a detached garage on the same property into an apartment for his sister.

To my knowledge, he was never a carpenter by trade. He did work at various dairy farms in the area and could tell you what farm once owned the land a new shopping center or housing development was built on. He finished his full time working life as a salesman for Great Western Paints. I am sure that he had no formal training that prepared him for foundations, framing, plumbing, electrical, and trim carpentry, but he did them all. His principal for a well built house was to use 5 nails when 1 might do.

He passed his knowledge on to my father by doing much of the work required to build a large addition on my childhood home. There were only 2 tasks I can remember were completed by another person. They hired a mason to lay the foundation blocks and build the fireplace and chimney. Everything else was completed by my father's and grandfather's hand, with a little help from a couple of uncles. I still remember them digging out the crawlspace and foundation by hand - something no modern craftsmen would consider doing.

My father repaid his help by lending a hand when my grandfather built an entire house in the Avondale area of North Kansas City. The 3 bedroom, 2 story home was built on family property and served as a rental home providing a second income to my grandfather until years later he offered it to Terri and I for $10,000. We considered the generous offer, but declined due to the location and the routine flooding in that neighborhood. A small creek running in the back of the property would suddenly rise during heavy rains, sometimes enter the home. It was the same creek I fished for bullhead one summer while the home was being built.

These were the large projects the two men tackled. They always handled smaller projects themselves, and it was extremely rare they would pay someone else. Both men re-roofed their own home when approaching 60 years old. Plumbing and electrical work was always performed themselves. I was with them for both the home addition and the build of the Avondale home. I watched and learned. On occasion, I would help when directed. I became an apprentice in handy.

Since those childhood experiences, I continued to develop my handy skills. I initiated small carpentry projects even as a teenager. During my days as a house painter, I witnessed the different trades required to build a house. This was also instrumental in my training. Once Terri and I bought our own home, many opportunities have presented themselves for continued development. All were successful, but many were painful.

One particularly painful project was the replacement of a sliding patio door at our first home. We had bought a new French door. The process seemed simple - remove the trim, disassemble the old door, set the new door, a replace the trim. Once the old door was removed, I found that it had leaked water onto the sub floor which had rotted. I pulled the old carpet back and cut out a section of sub floor. That uncovered water damaged floor joists under the sub floor. That damage was caused by my deck building skills that had trapped water against the floor joist, so I dissembled a portion of the deck.

After replacing sections of floor joist, re-working deck attachments and deck boards, a section of sub floor, reattaching carpet, re-trimming the door, paint, stain and finish, I was done. A weekend project took nearly a month but finished product was great. The lesson learned was best said by Harry Callahan; "A man's got to know his limitations". I now do quite a bit of handy work around my house and my daughter's homes, but I have become selective on what I will do. If I see a big downside, I hire it out. My paternal ancestry is no doubt shedding a tear over my wasteful ways.

Automation

I did not know it then, but 25 years ago I began a career path in automation. I had worked for the local cable TV company for several years and became very good at resolving technical issues with the cable TV system. I also became interested in programming PCs. I quickly found that I could use this combined knowledge to make my job easier. My first few projects were text based utilities that would go to a piece of equipment, check something, determine if the result was okay, and if not print out the result on a computer. A technician (me) still needed to check the printer and investigate anything that had printed out.

Then came Microsoft Windows and Visual Basic. That enabled much prettier and sophisticated software development. My first major application was to communicate with a couple hundred smart devices distributed throughout the cable TV network. These devices would report back their status and a few basic measurements. This was information that normally would be retrieved by driving a truck to the location, climbing a pole with test gear, opening up a weather tight housing, making the measurements and returning to the truck.

The communications application provided by the hardware vendor was text based, and very difficult to use when troubleshooting the network. My version was much prettier. It started with a map window that would adequately depict the location of each smart device. A hierarchy was established so that the system knew what devices fed the next. With this hierarchy set, I could draw the paths to each device and determine the most significant device in a series of failed devices (root cause).

So my first automation system consisted of a map with devices color coded by their current status, placed at the proper location and connected in the proper order. This enabled alarming when certain situations were identified. I started to look for a series of 2 or more devices in failure condition as this would indicate a branch of the network was not working. Audible messages were passed to the technical dispatchers to catch their attention and inform them of what was identified as significant network event.

The system could only detect problems but could not resolve them. A technician still needed to roll to the location and begin troubleshooting. The process was much easier since they would already know what devices were not functioning, and which were okay. This avoided much of the isolation time needed in troubleshooting. Technicians could roll straight to the problem, or at least get very close.

I did not realize it then, but this project was foundational to future career assignments. Flash forward 20 years. The alarming systems used by telecommunications companies are very mature. Tens of thousands of alarms or conditions are collected each day from thousands of network elements. Some alarms indicate a significant network failure, while others are merely informational. Collecting and displaying this information is handled well, but there are far too few people to review the number of alarms generated. What has never been done well is creating systematic reactions to each alarm that avoids the necessity for human action whenever possible. That's what I now do.

Our first application listens for a specific alarm that indicates a electronic card at a cellular telephone site has failed. The failure results in dropped call or the inability to initiate a call by our customers. There are thousands of cell sites in the network and many of these cards at each site. It is really a problem begging for a solution.

The application initiates an automated routine that first checks to ensure the card is really out of service. If so, it attempts to reset (think reboot) the card. If that is successful, everything is great so we count the success and move on. If the card cannot be reset, a ticket is created and dispatched to the appropriate field technician so they can replace the card. The application also creates a ticket if the same card continues to fail even if the failures are resolved by resetting them.

That is an elegant solution. One alarm condition down, thousands to go. The goal is to get to a "dark NOC" or using different words, an unmanned operations center. In reality, there would always be personnel monitoring the automation systems, but the heavy lifting would be done by machines. There is also no avoiding the field technician. While we can decrease their workload, there will always be a need for eyes, arms and legs at the location to replace equipment that cannot be remotely repaired.

We all have seen science fiction stories where machines do the work of men. We are getting very close, but you cannot see how close until you step back and see just how far we have come in a few years. Thank you, HAL.

Why, you are very welcome Frank.

Liar?

On Wednesday evening, Barrack Obama laid out his plan for National health care. During his speech to Congress, Representative Joe Wilson committed a serious breach of decorum by calling the President a liar. He apologized immediately after the speech. While the apology was needed, it was not an acknowledgement that the President told the truth. Interestingly, neither Obama or Wilson can make their case on truth or lies. THERE IS NO BILL! Not even a written plan.

Obama cannot claim that a bill not yet written excludes illegal aliens. Wilson cannot make the claim that an unwritten bill covers illegal aliens. The same can be said regarding federally funded abortions. Nobody knows yet. So we really need to look at past actions to get an indication of future actions. If you look fairly on Obama's previous policies and actions, you must side with Representative Wilson's view. The only bill presented to the House of Representatives did not explicitly cover illegal aliens, but neither did it provide adequate checks to identify illegals. Any bill that gets the President's nod will cover payment for abortion. It is in his record - the man will not make abortions harder to get or he risks his constituents.

Regardless, Representative Wilson was way out of line in calling the President a liar during a joint session of Congress. While he and I share our disrespect for the man, we must respect the office. To do otherwise would be acting as the liberal Democrats have for the past 6 years. I am glad he apologized, but would rather he never made the comment.

But is our President a liar? If you believe the President is pushing his plan so that all Americans will have health care, you have been deceived, and deceivers are liars. This is all about power, and the consolidation of power in Washington. Obama is managing this initiative as he has prior initiatives - get it enacted before the details see the light of day.

I was sent an article written my Thomas Sowell that really makes the case. I encourage you to give this short read a few minutes of your time.

Eagle Eye

Everyone probably could identify their best friend when growing up. Mine was legally blind. We met in the church nursery. I don't remember the meeting, but I am sure at some point he was in the crib next to me. I probably commented to him on his rotten luck. His mother had become ill when pregnant with him, and a high fever was credited as the cause of his blindness.

Our parents met picking up their kids from the church nursery. A hallway conversation between them led to a family friendship that endures. We spent many an evening over dinner and conversation. Instead of ghost stories, we would tell tornado stories. I remember falling asleep at their house and being awakened to go home.

My blind friend's name was John. John went to the Kansas School for the Blind. He was not completely blind. His vision was very poor, described as looking through a pinhole in a sheet of paper. The doctors believed that he would eventually go completely blind, so he was sent to the Blind School to learn Braille. John's father would pick me up at my public school and take me to John's wrestling matches at the Blind School. John would always win. It was not that he was a gifted wrestler. His partial sight was a significant advantage over his completely blind foes. I always thought he had an unfair advantage, but as a friend I would cheer him on to the tainted victory.

John loved baseball as did I. We would recreate game situations in the backyard. Sometimes I would bat, but other times he would. I had to throw accurate pitches because his field of vision was so small. Missing my target by a foot or two would mean that John could not find the ball. Missing by more than that meant that he would end up with seam marks on his forehead. It happened often. Yet, he continued to play.

Over our childhood, John heard all the names used on blink kids. He wore the pop bottle glasses that invited the name calling. He was probably called 4-eyes more times that you could count. I did not call him that. I called him Eagle Eye. Since we were best friends, he never seemed to mind too much.

John and I were in cub scouts and boy scouts together. During one family dinner, John smuggled a bottle of baby aspirin from his parent's medicine cabinet. We ate several apiece, enjoying their orange fruity flavor. We were discovered, prompting a late night call to the doctor's to see if our stomach should be pumped. We were spared that since the doctor claimed that if we had consumed too many, we would be dead before they got the tube down our throats.

Since we lived a couple blocks apart, we saw a lot of each other. We slept out in his parents camper, an old refrigerator box, or under the stars. When possible, those camp outs were enhanced with pilfered cigarettes or a bottle of Strawberry Hill wine. Sometimes we would just be mischievous by setting off cherry bombs in the nearby apartments, or using a slingshot and rocks to nail passing cars. When I moved on from my paper route, I gave it to him. My first paying job was at Red Lobster. As soon as John turned 16, I got him a job there too. When I went 120 mph in my 1969 GTO, John was in the back seat. After calling me from his handheld CB radio to pick him up from work, we were pulled over by most of the Shawnee Police Force who thought we were burglarizing a business. John did not let his disability keep him from doing what sighted friends would do. He owned a mini-bike that he would drive in his back yard, and later a larger dirt bike that he would drive on the back roads near his mother's rural home. When working for Red Lobster, he would park customer's cars. They never knew he was blind, and even offered him tips.

John was a groomsman at my wedding (above). Just before I was married, John took a different path. He moved to Willow Springs, Missouri to live with his mother and go to college. He also committed his life to God and the ministry. I had a small part in that. After a wild evening drinking at my apartment, John woke up the next morning with dried Frito's on his chest. He did not remember the night before, eating Frito's or barfing them back up, so he decided to clean up his act.

Our meetings since that decision have been rare. John flew to KC for my wedding, Terri and I travelled to Covington, Louisiana once for a visit, and John occasionally makes contact when in KC to visit his father who died earlier this year. Future visits could even be rarer.

John has always been a surprising person. He endeavoured not to use his disability as an excuse, or a hindrance in life. He did most everything a sighted person does. He married up, and fathered a son. Both surprised me :-). He has a career as a mental health counselor for the state of Louisiana. Our childhood friendship will always be a pleasant memory.