Terminally Incoherent

I keep noticing a recurring trope in mainstream TV and movies which really bothers me. Maybe you noticed it too. Next time you watch a random sitcom, or some crappy a movie on some cable channel look for the way it portrays smart people. More often than not, the main protagonist will be an average Joe (or Jane) who is good looking but usually not terribly smart. Whenever the hero needs to tackle some scientific/technology related problem he/she will call on the token geek, almost invariably portrayed as a socially inept, reclusive eccentric with taped up glasses and a pocket protector.

Medical doctors are exception to this rule. They can be portrayed as highly intelligent, well adjusted characters with multi-faceted personalities and are allowed to be role models for the audience. But only if they are holding and MD. Anyone who has a PHD or any other doctoral degree automatically becomes an walking plot device or comic relief.

Even when the writers decide to skip the traditional nerd attire, the smart characters are almost always depicted as outsiders. They are never as a member of the inner circle of protagonists, and once they fulfill their role (hack into the main computer, identify someones DNA, explain a difficult subject to the audience and etc…) they are promptly discarded.

Sure, there are shows and movies where the protagonist is a highly educated scientist - but more often than not, these suffer from what I call the Gordon Freeman syndrome. Just like the hero of the Half Life series these characters spend most of their time shooting bad guys, and saving the world using bullets and brute force. Their education and experience only comes into play when they need to overload the flux combibulator to disable the shields on the alien mothership or something like that. And whenever they do apply science in this way, they need to explain themselves to their sidekicks almost apologizing for doing something clever.

This bothers me. How come being ignorant of science and technology is almost always portrayed in such a positive way? How come education and intelligence of a character must always be offset by his social ineptitude, or condescending attitude toward his “techno babble?” How come being above the average in some area is so often portrayed as some sort of socially undesirable eccentricity?

It would be nice to see some dynamic flipped around more often. Why not portray intelligent, educated and insightful characters in positive light, while relegating the ignorant brutes to the role of comic relief. There are shows and movies that try to do that, but many of them do it the wrong way. For example picking a bunch of socially backwards, stereotypical nerds as your protagonists, and then spending most of the time poking fun at their silly habits, hobbies and behavior is just the same kind of anti-intellectual comedy. People keep telling me about the IT Crowd but after watching few episodes, it seems almost as bad as the classic Revenge of the Nerds movies.

Let’s make a smart educated character play the straight man for a change. Instead of caricaturing geeky interests into some monstrous proportion lets elevate them into normalcy. Lets lift the stigma from science - and also science fiction while we are at it. How come characters on a show can never discuss a work of SF or Fantasy without the whole thing turning into a big joke.

How about characters have intelligent and insightful discussions on geeky topics, without making fun of them. For example, take the famous Star Wars conversation from Clerks. There you have two characters who are not stereotypical nerds, discussing a Science Fiction show, making interesting observations without turning the whole thing into a big joke about unhealthy SW obsession. I thought it was brilliant - smart, insightful, and hilarious at the same time.

We need more of that kind of stuff. Let’s make geek or scientist play the straight man for a change - make them be the “normal” character that the audience identifies with.

What do you think? Am I off the mark here? Perhaps I’m watching the wrong shows and movies. Do you think this sad state of affairs is a deeper social issue, or just a side effect of TV and movie makers pandering to the lowest common denominator?

After some deliberation, I decided to pick up a nicer keyboard to replace a very old Compaq piece of junk I was using as my external keyboard at work. That thing has been at the company longer than me, and likely changed hands several times before it became mine. It was time to retire it, so I picked up the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite.

Everyone keeps saying how awesome these things are so I decided to try one out. My first impression? Holy crap - this thing is really high. With the retractable legs up, the back of my keyboard lifts up about 2 inches from the surface of the table. That is really high for a keyboard. If you usually keep your keyboard under the desk on one of those retractable shelf things it might not fit! It really takes more space than a regular keyboard - especially since it has a big, built in palm rest that is not detachable. That said, once you get used to the height it’s actually quite comfortable.

Typing the first sentence on this keyboard was kinda odd, but by the third one I was going with my normal speed again. The split really doesn’t bother me at all now. What does bother me is the odd layout of the arrow keys and the block that holds Home, End, Delete and etc.. The arrow keys are arranged in a + sign formation instead of the normal inverted T. The keys are also smaller than regular ones which totally throws me off. I typically hit right arrow instead of down now. Why the hell would they do that:

The edit button block is also messed up. Instead of 3×2 formation they made it into 2×3 to save horizontal space. First column contains Home, End and Delete while the second one has Page Up, Page Down and Insert. It’s confusing since I’m very used to quickly hitting nearly all of these buttons (save for Insert). This will take some getting used to. In fact, these changes will be harder to get used to than the split.

Here is a tip for keyboard designers - do not change the relative position of any keys - even the purely functional ones. We know where they are supposed to be, and if you switch around the key order it messes us up.

The keyboard is PS/2 but it ships with a PS2 to USB converter. You don’t see many of those around these days. I keep seeing those little green USB to PS/2 plugs all over the place, but not the other way around. Despite not being native USB device Dapper flawlessly recognized it as soon as I plugged it into the USB hub.

All in all, it’s a good keyboard. Its big, and sturdy so I don’t see it breaking any time soon. And I don not have an urge to go back to the standard layout yet. I think I will stick with this one for a while. I mean, typing in the split layout is not some mind shattering experience or anything. Once you get used to the size and hight of this thing, it turns out to be very comfortable. Oh, and it looks cool on my desk. Too bad they decided to mess with the arrow keys and the home/delete block. If they left it alone, it would be almost perfect. Then again, this would actually make the already big and bulky keyboard one or two inches longer. I guess this design choice was somewhat justified but that doesn’t make it any less annoying or inconvenient.

My boss had a tad unusual request the other day. Like me he is also living a double life of working at this company by day, and teaching at a university by night. It turns out that for some reason he can’t connect to the internet in the lecture but he wanted use some nice resource/tutorial site in class.

Seemed like an easy solution - mirror the site locally with wget, use it in the presentation and then give the students the URL for the real thing. So I went back to my desk and did:

wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links -v http://example.com

If you are unfamiliar with wget, let me go over the options really quickly:

–mirror tells wget to recurse through the linked documents creating a local mirror.

-p forces wget to download all the additional files such like images, css, js, sounds and etc.

–html-extension since our website was dynamically generated, a lot of URL’s looked like this:

http://example.com/?p=1337

This parameter will ensure that these URL’s will be cached locally, and the files will be given names ending in .html:

http://example.com/?p=1337.html

This way you can easily browse them locally without worrying about browsers not recognizing the file type or something like that.

–convert-links this is the parameter that will actually make it possible to browse the site locally by converting all the absolute links that include the websites domain, into relative ones.

-v is of course a purely optional parameter that forces verbose output.

You can pretty much use this trick on just about any website out there. Might be useful if you are going to be on a plane for several hours without internet access. You can easily mirror some of the resource sites you often use. Then again, it’s probably not the best idea to mirror Wikipedia or something like that.

But there is a catch. If you are indexing a dynamic website that has the ? in a lot of URL’s you need to be careful. I ran wget on my Ubuntu box, where ? is a perfectly character for filenames. Then I moved the files over to a mounted Windows network share so that my boss could get them… And it stopped working. Why?

The question mark is illegal file name character under windows. So all the URL’s above became something like:

http://example.com/@p=1337.html

Of course the links (converted, relative links) pointed to the original file names that included the ? character. How to solve this? You need to tell wget to use Windows mode:

wget --mirror -p --restrict-file-names=windows --html-extension --convert-links -v http://example.com

The –restrict-file-names=windows parameter will tell wget to properly escape illegal windows characters such as \, │, /, :, ?, “, *, < and >. Of course if you use wget compiled for windows, this will be the default behavior.

I really want to play portal. I have yet to meet a person who played this game, and did not love it. I may need to reinstall Steam and see if they have it available as a standalone download. Last time I looked it was only available in the Orange box bundle. I mean, OB is a great deal if you don’t own any HL titles already. If you do however, it seems kinda wasteful, even if you also get Team Fortress with it. Valve should really just offer it as stand-alone title for like $20 bucks or something (since the game is really short). If they do offer that, let me know - I don’t have Steam on my machine right now.

In the meantime, I found this:

click on the image to play the game

Now this simple 2d flash game does not even capture half of Portal awesomeness. Still, it’s incredibly fun. I literally spent several hours playing it and I loved every second. Now add 3rd dimension, and the unique humor and atmosphere and image how much fun the original game could be.

Caution - the flash game will really, really make you want to play Portal. Playing it might be hazardous to your wallet or your bandwidth (if you choose to obtain the game in a less than legal way).

Holy fucking shit! I found a new one!

As far as I was concerned there were currently only two shows on TV worth my attention. They were Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Sadly, both of them are currently in between seasons. So I have been searching for another show that would entertain me in the meantime. And since there seemed to be a lot of buzz about Heroes lately I decided to check it out.

I know what you are thinking - isn’t this that show about the kids with super powers? How good can it be? I mean, they didn’t even license any superheroes from Marvel or DC - they are all, like generic and shit. I know, this is the same thing I was thinking. I mean, I don’t hate the super-hero genre. I go to see every single Marvel and DC licensed Hollywood movie out there. And I cry tears of bitter disappointment almost every single time. Sometimes, they get things right - sometimes they fail miserably. But it’s always exciting to see your favorite comic book heroes on the big screen.

But generic super hero show? Can’t be good… Just can’t. Right? Wrong, my friend! Abso-fucking-lutely wrong!

Yes, Heroes is a show about people with super powers. But it’s far from being a campy comic book romp that I expected it to be. It is a really a great show. I decided to watch just the pilot episode, and next thing I knew it was 3am in the morning, and I was on episode 5, contemplating if I should catch few hours of sleep before work, or watch another one. Last time something like this happened to me was when I started watching Lost.

If you are not watching Heroes, you need to go and get the pilot episode right now. Rent it, Netflicks-it or download it - whatever. Yes, go pirate it! By the time you watch it, you will be ordering the Season 1 boxed set anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.

Ok, stop reading this how. Do Ctrl+T, type in the address of your favorite Torrent site, hit Search and then type in “Heroes S01E01″. Go! I’ll wait. You really want to have it downloading in the background while you are reading the rest of this post.

What are the things that make great TV? There are several things that rank highly with me, and Heroes has it all. Good writing, mystery, suspense, exceptional acting and compelling characters that you actually care about. And surprisingly enough, despite the premise (let’s face it - super hero stories have been done to death), the show remains fresh and original.

It’s not about some super powered team a la X-men. The show is about ordinary people who discover strange, sometimes scary powers and are forced to deal with them. Some embrace them, some resent them, and some have their lives ruined. At the start none of the characters know each other but it seems that their destinies are intertwined, and they are all connected in some way. Add in a shadowy, anonymous serial killer targeting “heroes”, a mysterious organization that seems to track and kidnap powered people for unknown reasons, a cataclysmic doomsday scenario looming in the future and you kinda get what the show is all about. And there is plenty of suspense - in fact almost every episode ends in a mini-cliffhanger that keeps you guessing and wanting to see more.

Oh, and there is also Hayden:

Save the cheerleader, save the world! That’s how we roll.

Yes, I’m excited about this show. It’s one of the very few things on TV right now that I like. I still have long way to go before I’m all caught up. I’m currently around 12 episodes into the series, so please no spoilers in the comments.

If you post spoilers, I will find out where you live and kill you in your sleep!

If you look at all the mice and keyboards I owned over the years, you will see a trend: simplicity. All my keyboards are simple, generic 104 key devices that came with the machine. If I buy a mouse I usually get an optical, 2 button, scroll wheel, wired Logitech or Microsoft. I don’t think I ever bought a mouse that cost more than $30-35. The $20 mice I use work just fine, and they last forever.

But, there is a huge market for premium mice and keyboards so obviously some people out there buy them. Hell, some people swear by these things. But I always wonder: do I really need a $70 Sidewinder or a $90 G9? Does it really make that much difference?

I heard people claiming that accuracy, smoothness of the scroll wheel, reconfigurability and buttons are often well worth the higher price. But I’m not entirely convinced. So here is a question for you, the reader.

Do you use a fancy, expensive mouse? If you do, why? Do you feel it really makes the difference? What is your favorite mouse? Do you think that spending $100 on a mouse would change my life for the better? Same goes for the keyboard. I really want to know. Maybe I’m missing out, using low end products when I should really treat myself to something more luxurious. And I do spend most of my time in front of my computer. In fact, chances are that if I’m awake and not in the car there is either a desktop or a laptop somewhere within my reach. So if I was to invest something that would improve my everyday experience, I would be utilizing it to the fullest.

Dear Googel!

Where is my fucking IMAP access? Seriously! I’ve been a loyal fanboi for years. I use Gmail, Gtalk, Google Desktop, Adsense Ads, Google Analytics, Google Docs and your search engine on a daily basis. Now that I think about it, it’s actually kinda scary how many Google aps I actually use. And yet, despite all of that, to date I haven’t seen that coveted IMAP option in my settings. WTF Google? Am I not worthy? What else do you want!

Everyone on the internets now is like “ooh, look I got Gmail IMAP access!” So I’m asking - where is mine? I need you to like, get on it and get it done! I better have it by Monday.

okthxbai

And now for something completely different:

Faux Luddite (n) - one who vocally expresses their hatred of technology, especially computers, usually via their Live Journal or MySpace blog. Also known as tech-hypocrite.

Faux Luddites can be often found congregating around areas frequented by technology professionals, trying to solicit for free tech support. Giving into their demands is not recommended, as it is really an enabling behavior. When confronted by a Faux Luddite, it is recommended to kill it with fire.

Can you tell that this type of attitude annoys me? Just to clarify, I don’t think there is anything wrong with hating technology per se. If you are a real Luddite, you don’t use a computer and live in a forest with wild beasts and lumberjacks that’s fine by me. I will probably never meet you because I don’t visit forests that often. And of course you won’t be reading my blog, or asking me for free tech support, so really I have nothing against you.

There is also nothing wrong with being clueless, as long as you make at least a little bit of effort to learn. Some people just don’t use computers that often, and some just have a hard time figuring them out. It’s ok to struggle as long as your long term goal is to one day be proficient enough to get by without a lot of help.

Simply deciding that you hate computers and then using them for everything is not acceptable. It’s like saying you hate the beach and then buying a beach house. It’s an attitude problem that requires adjustment. You are going to tell me that you fucking hate technology while updating your myspace on your laptop, talking on your iPhone while watching a movie on your plasma in HD? Fuck off! You sir are a hypocrite and you need to die. Don’t even fucking dare to ask me for help if any of that shit breaks.

I’m horrified by how many people do not even consider backing up their data on a regular basis as something they could do. Someone begs me for free tech support almost every day and I get asked about all kinds of crazy things. I don’t think that anyone has ever asked me to help them develop some sort of backup plan or strategy for them. Even after they lose all their stuff in some catastrophic HD failure, most people are reluctant to even talk about backup. The most common excuse is:

“Well… I don’t really have anything that important on this computer”

Bullshit! This is a blatant lie, and you know it. If it’s not, then don’t come crying to me next time your computer fails to boot. There was nothing important there, right? I’ll just boot Ghost and restore it from the image then - the system should be ready in 20 minutes.

But anyone who ever did tech support for clueless relatives or friends knows that there is always that sad story of stuff they really don’t want to lose. You always have to listen to whimpering, and sobbing about the precious vacation pictures, that video of uncle Bob that was taken 3 days before he passed away, all the irreplaceable emails and chat logs, that huge mp3 collection, all the saved games, the unfinished novel and etc. All of a sudden the unimportant shit, becomes very, very dear to your heart.

It seems that most people assume that backup is something that only paranoid geeks do. After all, if their computer fails, they can always bring it to the “computer guy” who will more often than not be able to recover all that unimportant shit. Try to convince them to set up some kind of a backup, and they look at you like you are crazy. After all it’s your job to do that - now you are just being fucking lazy, trying to make them do work now, so that you don’t have to do it next time their computer fails. Sigh…

It’s really sad. Especially when less than $200 for an external hard drive and 15-20 minutes of setup can buy you a piece of mind, and allow you to preserve all your unimportant garbage even if your primary hard drive dies a horrible death.

I’m not saying everyone should be running RAID-1 array, and have at least 2 external backup drives, and always keep one of them off site. That’s indeed an overkill for home use. But a single external drive of the same size as the one in your system, and a weekly backup script is not. That’s something that everyone should invest into.

Let me clear this once and for all: having a backup strategy doesn’t make you a geek. Reading this blog however, does. So now that you have read this post, and you are officially a geek, go and get that backup situation worked out. What may seem unimportant to you now, will become extremely important once you loose it.

Every time I call Dell (and I do call them quite often) about a problematic laptop I feel like they follow a call flowchart that looks something like this:

If the machine doesn’t boot, they will give you a new mobo. If the HD is not bootable, they will replace that. In any other case, unless their automated diagnostics produce an error code, or you can make a very convincing argument for hardware issue, they will claim it’s a software problem.

And there are two ways that Dell deal with software issues:

1. Uninstall Offending Stuff
2. Reinstall Windows

They do this little trick where they make you un-check everything in msconfig, and if your issue doesn’t resurface immediately they will claim one of the 3rd party applications is causing it and tell you to uninstall everything - including all your AV software. If you call back after that, they will just suggest choice #2.

Seriously - I can’t tell you just how many times Dell told me to re-install windows. And at least half of the time it turned out to be a hardware issue in the end. The problems ranged from a obviously faulty Wifi card (but of course Dell does not have diagnostics for it), to a failing DIMM socket (which would either cause the diagnostics to pass or freeze while trying). In each case it took a lot of effort on my part, and escalation to 2nd or 3rd tier to actually get the problem fixed.

An average Dell user probably does not have enough know how, time and/or patience to go through all of that. In fact, most users are terrified by the concept of reinstalling the OS, and confused about backing up their data. It’s also not a valid troubleshooting step - it’s a last resort. And yet it’s the very first trick that Dell techs are instructed to use when faced with an odd issue that can’t be easily classified as either hardware or PEBKAC.

Unfortunately reinstalling windows is not really a magical panacea for all problems. It’s a huge pain in the ass, which won’t solve anything and leave the average user with an unpatched, unstable system with missing drivers. Imaging done on the newer Dell machines helps here, but guess what happens if your problem resurfaces after you rolled the OS back from the factory ghost image on your HD? Yep, dell will tell you to format the drive and install Windows from scratch killing the nifty imaging functionality.

How pissed would you be if you had to do all of that, and in the end find out that it was for example a shitty internal Wifi card that you can actually purchase on their website replace yourself bypassing all this bullshit? But hey, that’s Dell for you.

Please post your rants about shitty tech support by major computer vendors in the comments. What are your experiences with Dell, HP, Lenovo and etc? Who has the worst tech support? Who has the best one? Let me know!