Artificial Cheese

From time to time, I’ll be re-posting things that I wrote a few years ago on the now-defunct funksysteme.org. This will be the first of some. Then there will be more.

Being intelligent and sounding intelligent have nothing to do with each other. This is the reason that so many people can get away with one without the other. I’ve known many intelligent people who don’t get the intellectual credibility that they deserve because they have questionable communication traits. Along the same lines, I’ve seen lesser men and women get great college educations and well paying jobs because they know how to sound professional. This article was not written with the purpose of pointing out pseudointellectuals, but it was written to level the playing field. Before we get to the rules, lets go over some misconceptions…

Misconceptions

A common misconception regarding good communication skills is the requirement of a large vocabulary. This is an easy mistake to make, especially since we’re raised to believe the contrary through the SATs and years of looking up words in dictionary for English class. I’m here to tell you that this is absolutely incorrect. You can talk your way into anything with a small and humble vocabulary. The key is to exercise what you know and use the most appropriate word in your arsenal at every opportunity, and for god’s sake, don’t use words that you don’t know.

But while exploring your vocabulary remember that speaking in a profound tone is generally not required. In most situations it’s viewed as a blantent attempt to impress someone with your ability to sound convoluded. This includes quoting proverbs, greek philosophers, and things that ‘Confucius say’. If you have something to say, simply pick the right words for the job and say it.

The Rules

Be advised that these rules are not written with ease of use in mind. Not even I can practice all of these rules without slipping up frequently. But if you can remember these rules and identify the mistakes as you make them, you’ve already started sounding smarter. The best practice is to use these rules in all situations. If you truely want to sound smarter you can’t switch these rules on and off depending on who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about, keep your speech patterns consistent. Now on with the rules…

“Like…”

This is like, and article about like, sounding intelligent. It looks stupid in writing, doesn’t it? I identified this problem that I had a few years ago. It’s a leftover from high school, where everyone speaks like they’re a Valley Girl regardless of gender or masculinity. It sounds juvenile, and exhibits a disconnect between your brain and your mouth. If you decide that you want to overcome your dependency on this word, make sure you come prepared with patience because it is a giant undertaking.

“They”

Words like “he”, “she”, “they”, and “it” are known as Pronouns. Words like “fire”, “gas” and “fire extinguisher” are known as nouns. When pronouns are used properly they eliminate the redundency of nouns in your sentences. Unfortunately, people have an ugly habit of overusing pronouns. This means that sentences like, “Get the fire extinguisher to put out the fire caused by the gas” come out like, “get the thing to put it out.”

You need to keep in mind that the speaker always knows what they’re talking about. The words coming out of your mouth need to convey the ideas in your head to someone else’s head. Even at the risk of sounding redundant, use nouns and avoid pronouns whenever possible. This practice will make for much more meaningful sentences.

“Umm…”

This is a toughy, and its almost impossible to correct completely. If you observe a good speaker you will notice that every sound they make is a part of a word. Rarely do they use sounds like, “Umm…”, “Err…”, “Uhhh…” and, “AARGHAA!” to fill the silence. To a speaker with the habit to make this sound it’s like a cats purr. It’s comforting and soothing, making their hesitation feel less impactful on the conversation.

To the listener it sounds like you’re preoccupied with a thought of Carmen Electra riding a mechanical bull while sucking on a lollipop. In other words, something more important. Regardless of priorities you should keep your sentences connected and clean. If you need to pause just remain silent between sentences while you gather the words you need to use.

“Basically”

“Basically” can be one of the most infuriating words in the english language if it’s used incorrectly. Before you make this word a part of your involuntary vocabulary, make sure that you know what it means and how to use it.

“Basically” means exactly what it spells. You take an idea and break it down to something more basic. If I say, “Its a nice day outside” and you respond with, “Basically.” then you are dead to me. If I say, “Mitosis is a process of cell division which results in the production of two daughter cells from a single parent cell” and you respond with, “Basically.” then you win a pat on the back.

“Yeah” = “Yes”

Finally, an easy one. This is a quick and easy way to kill your street cred and sound more intelligent at the same time. Every time you have the urge to say “yeah”, say “yes”. In fact, this one is so easy that you can manage to turn it on and off rather than saying “Yes” all of the time. The best time to turn this on is when talking to the police. The word “yeah” is indicitive of guilt, so always respond to police inquiries with “Yes” or no.

Know the difference: Technically, Practically, Literally

These words are not interchangable, and in most cases these words are used incorrectly and haphazardly. Lets start with the most frequently misused word: Literally. There are people who literally use this word wrong all the time. See? I used it wrong right there. This word means, “in a literal or strict sense”. Now if I meant to use that word correctly, I would be saying that there are people who never use the word correctly. While this may be true, its not how the average reader would comprehend the meaning of this sentence. A correct useage of literal is, “When he said that he wants you to eat his shorts, he meant it literally.”

Practically is used when describing something as practial, and never anywhere else. If you say that a club is usually jumpin jumpin, but tonight it’s practically dead, then you are saying that its death is practical. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you go to a club if you consider its death practical? Tell me. Tell me why you’d go to a club if you consider its death practical. You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t go if you thought its death was practical. If you knew what the word “practically” meant maybe you would make more sense.

Sorry. Moving on, we’re left with the word, “Technically”. This word means “with regard to technique” or “in regards to technical capacity”. It is NOT the opposite of the incorrect meaning of “Basically”. If I say, “Its raining outside”, and you respond with “Techincally, yes, but I will still pick up the pizza.” i’ll respond by eating six slices just to spite your lack of respect for the english language.

Take your time, control the pace

The speed of a conversation can have a huge impact on the quality of your reponses. When you’re up against someone who speaks at an above average pace, don’t try to run at the same pace if you’re not prepared. You’ll end up with broken sentences and poorly constructed reponses. Remember what your first girlfriend said? Its not a race, take your ti…

What she was trying to say was “take your time”. There is no need to speak at someone else’s pace, let them slow down for you.

On the other hand, if you’re the fast talker then you should exploit your abilities to the fullest. There is nothing more persuasive than a tightly-packed five words per second. You can get anything you want from a slow talker if you can attack them with speed, but make sure you don’t speak wrecklessly.

Keep it short

Trust me, busy people appreciate short conversations. It may be more comfortable to have a nice, leisurely conversation but it is not appropriate in all situations. When you’re trying to make an impact on someone as an intellectual, you should approach your conversation like a lumberjack would approach a tree. Each word of each sentence should be well-aimed and calculated. Any words that don’t hit the mark are just wasted energy.

“Aaaaand….”

Good writers generally make good speakers. While speaking you should visualize the punctuation that you would use if you were writing. Pause when you hit a comma, scream when you hit an exclaimation point, and please use periods. If you stream your thoughts directly from your mind to your mouth then it will all come out as one long sentence because that is how it exists in your brain.

“I went to the movies aaaaand I saw one of my friends from school soooo…we went to a restaurant aaaaand Frank ordered a steak aaaand John started laughing so I asked why aaaaaannd…” and I just stopped listening. Listening to something without structure, or an ending, is hard on the listener. It also lends an impression that you approach everything in life without consideration or structure.

Conclusion

In today’s world of first impressions and bump-and-run encounters the ability to exude intelligence, however shallow, is very important. But these rules are just a list of good verbal habits, they don’t go over things like good eye contact, good posture, and general body language. If you are interested in more than a superficial impression of intelligence, study professional speakers and politicians. These people are usually trained in all aspects of verbal communciation, and simply watching them can be a very rewarding experience.

One of the joys of airports and train stations is the abundance of people who are begging to be judged and analyzed. I had an hour long delay at Penn Station waiting for the “Vermonter” from Amtrak to take me to Union Station in DC.

For the duration of this wait, I stood in the area between the 8th St. exits that contains the giant board which displays arrivals and departures. There were a few moments when I considered wandering around Penn Station during the delay, but the types of people waiting with me kept me glued to the crowd. It started with the tiny Indian family.

Tiny Indian Family

It was a standard sized Indian family. One mother, one father, one daughter, one son. Each one grabbing their ticket as if it were the key to happiness in their giant imposing world of inadequacy. The father led the pack, with each member of the family following in decending order of dominance. The most distinguishing factor about them was that each member in the family was 4-5 inches shorter than anyone else in the room.

I didn’t even notice them until they were right under my chin. The mother was peering through the trees of people calling out track numbers in Gujrati while the father ignored her, and the elder sister was screaming at the younger brother to keep his hand out of his mouth as the drooly-fisted brother looked up and around in amazement. As they passed by like a tiny little freight train, they were suddenly stopped by a white woman who stepped right in their path while on a cell phone, saying loudly, “If someone died, I wouldn’t want to know. I wouldn’t …even want to know.” The entire family stopped and stared for a brief moment of judgement before they were off again.

Around and under the crowd, I tracked their movements based on the bending of the crowd like dogs in a wheat field. They made their way to the opposite end of the giant room and out through the 8th Ave and 31st St. exit. Judging by my encounter with them, that is not where they wanted to go; but it might have been the best thing for everyone.

The Stud, Captain Obvious, and the Two Confused Blondes

A few minutes after the Indian family cleared the man-maze to freedom, two average slightly overweight New York guys in their early 40s approach and setup a standing camp beside me. The greyer of the two men, Captain Obvious, begins to speak to the Stud.

Persistently, Captain Obvious continues to find something obvious to talk about until the Stud stops answering. At this point, a young blonde woman in front of us, wearing a short skirt, begins to do stretches to loosen up her inner-thigh muscles. Everyone stops talking. Women look angry, men’s mouths are suddenly unable to close, and me thinking how I can make it into a blog entry.

Eventually the stretching stopped and everyone resumed their normal activities. Captain Obvious starts up once again, but this time with an action item.

Captain Obvious leaves behind his verbally battered companion and makes his way through the crowd to the book store. The young streching blonde begins to look back towards the Stud for short moments of time and then stops. Its quite distinct but the Stud doesn’t notice.

A moment later another young blonde begins making her way towards us from about 20 feet away in a crowded room. She must have passed 20-30 people to get to where we were, only to turn to the Stud and ask, “Excuse me, do you know what the ’stand by’ status means next to my train?”

I’m not sure whats going on here. First, she could have asked any one of the people that were more conveniently located near her original position. Seoondly, who doesn’t know what ‘Stand By’ means? It means ‘wait’. As the confused blonde walked away I attempted to draw a conclusion based on her actions, but before I was finished another strange occurance was thrown into the mix.

The stretching blonde turned around as soon as the confused blonde left and asked, “Which train was she talking about?” The Stud, dumbfounded by the sudden attention, said, “Uh…the one that says ‘Stand by’ next to it.” There was only one train with a ‘Stand by’ status. Awkwardly, the young blonde said, “Oh…I thought she was talking about the train I’m supposed to be taking.”

Now I’m really confused. Why would the Stud know which train she was supposed to be taking? Every question asked to this guy was useless. It was like an Axe body spray commercial. The only thing that I could deduce was that he had some pheromone spray like Love Potion No.9 that drew women into him.

Just that moment, Captain Obvious comes back and starts up his obvious talk once again.

I couldn’t take anymore so I decided to take my wheely bag and move to another spot in the room.

Departure

So finally the train arrived, a full hour late. As the travellers congregate around the escalator down to the track, who do I see but the confused blonde. She has two giant bags that she’s wheeling around behind her and hitting everyone in the thighs. I let her pass in front of me as to avoid a thigh smashing, and she settles into the crowd waiting for the escalator to turn on.

On the other side of the crowd, I notice stretchly blonde too. This is an odd turn of events because the only certainty that could have been drawn from their earlier interaction was that the two blondes were NOT on the same train.

The escalator starts up, and the crowd begins to move. Confused blonde hits the escalator first and doesn’t understand the protocol even though she saw the handful of the people in front of her go through the motions. “Ticket Please.” Of course she has it in one of her giant bags. To her credit, she zipped into one of her bags and pulled out the ticket in a split second. Unfortunately she lost all that credit when she tried to take both bags down an escalator side-by-side and didn’t understand the basic concepts of space and matter.

Eventually she got down and the crowd moved along. As I approached the escalator, a familiar group turned up once again. Who other than the Indian drooly-fist crew cuts right along the side of the escalator and takes a sharp turn into the front of the line before heading down the escalator.

I finally make my way into the train with my obscure wait-mates. I realize that people seem to have lost the ability to ’stand by’. Its been lost to the point that people don’t even know what it means anymore. The mere idea of ‘Stand by’ causes people to run around and do all kinds of crazy things to avoid the idea of being in one spot. So the moral of the story is to take a chill pill. I gotta stop writing because my train just arrived at it’s destination.

The combination of reduced time resources and a ill-conceived routine of work and video games has pinched off my contributions to this blog for the past couple of months. In response to this problem, I decided to leave the writing engines on idle and throw together some code.

So if you’re suffering from withdrawal from my writings, visit the Funksysteme Archives (http://fsarchives.cheesefingers.com/) and get your fix! It contains a bunch of work authored between 2004-2006 from funksysteme’s deprecated site, funksysteme.org. The archives don’t contain the robust functionality or the plucky extras from the original site, but the meat is there, so take a look.

Travelling through airports and subways over the past year or so has given me exposure to a new state of people’s time and behavior. I like to call that state “isolated public idleness”. Its that state that people are in while waiting for a plane or standing around for a train. Its an unnatural and awkward state that everyone dreads and requires foresight for most people to deal with properly.

Some people attack the ‘isolated’ portion of the fabricated term by grabbing their cell phone and having (or pretending to have) a conversation with someone who is hopefully in their own state of isolated idleness. Everyone attacks the ‘public’ portion of the term to some extent by distancing themselves away from others, whether its running to a corner of an open space to avoid interaction, fixating their field of view to avoid looking at someone, or tucking in their elbows as to not break the illusion of privacy by making physical contact.

But I want to take a look at the last word in the term. I’ve always taken notice of those who attack the idleness by whatever means necessary. This involves things like reading, opening up the laptop and just clicking around, iPods, staring at the screen on your cell phone as if there is something worthwhile on it. It even spawns spontaneous hunger when flocks of people find masticating as the perfect past time. They’re not hungry, they’re just bored.

As I type this in an airport terminal, a man just walked into the area, found that the flight as been delayed, and as fallen asleep on the ground so he doesn’t even need to face the state of idleness.

I always found myself to be above this fear, and above the need for some sort of sensory stimulation at all times. I used to take these opportunities to sit and stare, and let my thoughts go off however they please. Sometimes they’d lead to great ideas, other times they’d go in circles. Lots of them even lead to blog entries. But I always was proud of the fact that I could sit in one spot; okay with the isolation, okay with the public around me, and okay with the idleness.

Sometime between my months flying to Montreal and my new engagement in Wisconsin, I’ve lost the ability to stand idle without stimulation. I found that I’ve become one of those huddled wired up figures that line the airport hallways, feeding off of power outlets like an insect feeds on the skin of a warm blooded animal. I even looked at a man who interrupted my typing of this blog entry with disdain, as he asked if a coat on an empty chair was mine. It wasn’t mine because I was wearing mine, but I’ve never found answering a question to be a problem.

Tomorrow is the International Day of Awesomeness, so for my awesome feat I’m gonna take the earbuds out of my head, and my eyes off of the screen, and try to return to my isolated public idleness without relying on my physical senses to get me through it.

I’ve been working at National Institutes of Health for a while, and my time there is slowly drawing to a close. I’ve had a lot of good memories and made some friends, but one thing that will stick in my mind is the vending machine that had strange powers over the value of the money in my pocket. Let me start explaining with some facts:

1. The Magic Vending Machine is in a break room with a couple other vending machines.
2. The other vending machines in that room are capable of turning a dollar bill into four quarters.
3. Everything I want in The Magic Vending Machine is either 80 cents or 55 cents.
4. Exact change required.

Seems pretty typical, right? Now I’ll explain my first few experiences with this machine.

Show up at work around 9am, setup my laptop and start to work. At some point, I get hungry for a snack so I walk over to the break room to see what the vending machine has to offer. Pretzels…80 cents, Snack Mix…55 cents, Animal Crackers…80 cents. At this point I start asking people if they can break a dollar bill. After a couple rejections, a veteran of the break room told me that I could insert my bill into an adjacent machine, then hit the coin return button to receive 4 quarters.

Great! So now I have four quarters. I’m almost there; I can use three of the four quarters to add up to 80 cents so I can get my animal crackers! But now how do I get the nickel?

So for the last 4 months, I’ve been approaching random people and asking them if they are willing to trade a nickel for a quarter. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Dev: “Hey, I was wondering if you’d be willing to trade a nickel for this quarter?”
<hold up quarter>
Target: “…”
Dev: “I need some animal crackers.”
Target: “Umm.”

Generally their next statement is along the lines of “Why?” or “What’s the catch?” or “Where’s the camera?”, then I need to tell the tale of the mysterious vending machine that somehow makes nickels more valuable than quarters. Most of them just give me a nickel because I was a good sport and told them a story. Some rare few listen to the story and then explain that they don’t have a nickel. Some people offer me dimes and quarters because they don’t quite understand the predicament. But how can you blame them? This doesn’t make any sense!

What I’ve also found in the past few months that makes matters even worse is that nickels are exceedingly rare due to the way the values of coins are aligned. If you look in your coin repository right now, how does the number of nickels compare to the number of other coins? You have less, right? I thought about it and I concluded that nickels are never really useful when receiving change after purchasing something. Make a list from 1 cent through 99 cents, then think about how many cases would result in a nickel being returned as opposed to other coins. You’ll see that a nickel is only expected in about 15 cases: 5-9 cents, 15-9 cents, 55-59 cents. Everything else is a combination of quarters, dimes, and pennies.

Unfortunately there is no moral to this blog entry. Perhaps a good moral is that if a person comes to you with a seemingly unreasonable request, don’t assume that they have a nickel fetish, or that they’re building a house out of nickels.

I’ll try to keep this post readable, but you need to have at least an intermediate knowledge of computers to follow along. A few years ago, people in the tech world started catching onto the benefits of ‘virtual machines’ to help loosen the link between hardware and software. Virtual machines are entire computers that are implemented through software. In other words, the end result of a virtual machine in Windows is a computer screen in a window on your Windows desktop that is running totally unaware of the fact that its contained within another machine.

For software developers, the benefits are vast. First of all, chicks dig virtual machines. Secondly, you gain the ability to distribute, swap, and create entire machines with the click of a few buttons. These virtual machines run on virtualization software like VMWare, that was once just marketted for testing software easily in different operating systems, but now has become a staple many IT infrasturctures.

Its a great step in the right direction for IT, but what about everyone else? What about the ‘I just check my email and surf the web’ group that wants to boast to their friends about their awesome Virtual Machines. Is there any practical use for the average home user? Unfortunately the benefits generally don’t outweigh the costs of setting up such an environment. The only exceptions are if you want to do it for fun, try to impress your spouse, or have very specific computer usage patterns that fits with the concept of virtual machines.

First I’ll go over the basic steps for setting up a virtual machine. If you’re planning to setup this sort of environment for yourself, find some more detailed instructions. These steps are just to give you an idea of whats involved with setting up the environment:

1. Download virtualization software - There are two solid options here. VMWare’s stuff, and Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007. I will proceed with the assumption that Microsoft’s package was chosen because its free, and its more home user friendly (in my opinion).
2. Setup a Virtual Disk - Not as complicated as it sounds. Just tell Virtual PC that you want to create a virtual disk file on your hard drive. You tell Virtual PC how big you want it to be, and where you want to put it. The end result is one giant file on your hard drive that represents your entire virtual machine’s disk.
3. Setup an operating system on the virtual disk - This is the big step. Since you setup a blank virtual disk and have it running on a virtual machine, you’ve essentially got a brand new (virtual) computer with no software, including no Windows. This is also the step that costs users the most since they need to find a licensed version of Windows laying around in their house. If you’ve got an old version of Windows 2000 or something, then this is the time to dust it off and set it up.

The process takes about 2 hours for the first time around. The end result will be a virtual Windows desktop running on your actual desktop. Great, right? Now what are you supposed to do? In the IT world, we would use this opportunity to install a database for very specific data or possibly a web server that we can use to distribute to different machines. But what about the home user? Just another box to check email and surf the web? Like I said early on, the benefits generally don’t outweigh the costs for the average home user, but maybe some pros and cons will help give you some idea of whats possible:

Benefits

• Truely independent environments - This is a really neat use of virtual machines. In the past, I’ve heard many novice computer users ask me, “how can I let people use my computer, but not be able to see my stuff?” The concept of a “Windows user account” is very weak, because the entire machine is shared between users aside from a small set of settings and a documents folder. Everything else is accessible to all users, and in the home edition of XP and Vista, theres nothing you can do about it.

  Now imagine the question answered with two level of Windows. When you turn your computer on, you get prompted for the shared username and password, the one you give to your spouse and children. After logging in, you have a desktop with one icon per family member. Each icon opens up a virtual computer, and when the virtual computer boots up, you are prompted for your personalized username and password. Now you have an environment that is 100% independent from the environments of the other users in your family.

  In the past, this was a crazy idea because it involves a tremendous amount of hard drive space. But nowadays, a 500gb hard drive costs as much as a modest mouse. Space is no longer a concern. Licensing windows remains an issue so that is where having old copies of operating systems is a good idea.

• Backups - Remember when your hard drive crashed a few years ago and you lost all of your wedding pictures so you had to go to your friends and syphon their pictures to restore your album? What about those terrible 80s songs that you downloaded from Napster? Napster’s gone now, how are you supposed to get them back? For months after the crash you always remembered something else that you lost, and the same thought goes through your head; “I should have done a backup.”

  Do you remember why you didn’t, and still haven’t, done a backup? Because you’ve got no damn idea what a backup is or how to perform one. Your friend told you to 10 years ago to “put it on a CD.” Put what on a CD? You want to put your entire computer on a CD, but you figure out after a while that its not possible for an entire computer to exist on a CD. You can buy software like Norton Ghost, but are you really confident that you’ll know how to restore the backup if your drive crashes?

  With virtual machines, your entire computer exists as a file. A backup of your system only involves one step: copying this file somewhere else, like on an external HD. You can even setup windows scheduler to run the backup every night, just one copy command and you’re done. Heck, keep 5 copies and roll them so you can backup your system to 5 days ago, before you opened that v1@grA cialis email that caused your computer to experience unwanted side effects. Now when you have a hard drive crash, you just restore your main system, install Virtual PC, and get your virtual machine backup from that external HD. You’re up and running again.

• Portability - iPods and notebook computers might have you thinking that the word ‘portable’ means ’small’, but thats not the case. Portable is actually something that can be moved or transported quickly and easily. In this case, we’re talking about virtual machines. The portable nature of a virtual machine lies with the fact that the entire machine is contained within a single binary file. As large as this file may seem, it can be moved around on its own, and loaded up anywhere with a Windows operating system.

  So lets think up a scenerio where this would come in handy. Christmas time is a great example. Its January 22nd, you’ve got a 5 hour drive to the inlaws and your wife is standing at the door with suitcases and trying to get the kids to stop crying while you finish up the big presentation thats due on the 28th. You don’t own a laptop, and you want to bring your work with you so you can get stuff done while your wife talks about your back hair and digestive irregularities to her family besides the christmas tree. So you start unplugging your desktop and asking your wife if her parents have a power strip, which would be completely unnecessary if you were using virtual machines.

  With virtual machines, you simply take your virtual disk file, load it onto your son’s iPod, and load it up on your inlaw’s machine. Its like taking the entire computer with you. Every computer with Windows XP or greater can run Virtual PC. Now when your father-in-law walks in on you looking at porn on his computer and asks, “are you looking at porn on my computer?!” You can respond, “No, I’m looking at porn on my VIRTUAL computer.” before you start looking for hotel rooms on your virtual computer.

Downsides

• Gaming - Well, every silver lining has a dark cloud. If you’re an avid video game player that loves the high quality graphics of recent games, don’t try to run a virtual machine. These machines have strong performance for business applications but sharing video resources with your host machine makes high end games a bit of a nasty experience.
• Licenses - Microsoft isn’t in the charity business, so acquiring licenses for each installation of an Operating System is no trivial matter. If you’re interested in setting up XP or Vista on your virtual machine then you better get ready to pay for it. If you’re not interested in paying, and don’t have old copies of windows lying around, the good thing is that there are free linux based operating systems you could potentially fall back on.

There you have it. I’ve just started experimenting with virtual machines for home use myself, and it really requires a new mindset to fully understand the benefits. I only listed what I could here, I’m sure that there are many more interesting uses for these virtual machines depending on one’s degree of technical abilities.

About three weeks ago, K-Mart released a coupon that granted the user 20% off anything in the store, aside from a few logical exceptions listed in the fine print. A new Playstation 3 was not listed as one of the exceptions. This was a perfect opportunity to buy a PS3.

At the same time, I was knee deep in working on a project that sucked up almost all of my free time. Prior to this coupon, my plan was to buy a PS3 when my schedule thinned out a little bit and I had some time to enjoy the device. Now I was faced with a decision: buy now to save money, or risk buying it later and lose out on the $80 savings.

If you know me, you know that my impulsions always get the best of me when it comes to electronics. So my cousin and I ran out to a K-Mart and luckily picked up the last two 40GB PS3s in the store. When I arrived home with the device, I kept it in the packaging since I did not have any games to play and returned to my work.

The next morning I decided that I should make sure that the PS3 works, just in case I need to return the product. I took the PS3 out of the box, hooked it up, and I was greeted by a loud, rich sound during startup. “That was cool,” I thought to myself.

When the menu was displayed on my television I instinctively starting browsing. As I browsed through the menu I slowly realized that the PS3 is hardly a console, it is a complete media solution. What I was displeased with is that I didn’t know all of the PS3’s capabilities until it was sitting in my house and attached to my television.

I understand that I could have done more research on the PS3 and known all of its capabilities, but the fact of the matter is that I shouldn’t need to do that. If Sony’s product group saw fit to include these features into the PS3, then Sony’s marketting department should take it upon themselves to make those features known to the potential customers. I can’t imagine how many sales are being lost just because every PS3 commercial on television portrays the PS3 as a simple gaming console.

I’ve had the PS3 for 3 weeks now, and I still have not purchased a game. I download from the Sony store, I stream media from my PC using the media server option, and I watch Blu-ray movies. All of this without playing one single game. If the PS3 can functionally exist in this house without a single game, that means it can exist in anyone’s house without a single game. The sooner Sony understands that their marketting strategy needs to expand to a non-gamer demographic, the sooner they’ll see their sales figures rise.

Following up on the wild success of my other blog series ‘Sunday Night Showdown’ and ‘So I Was Wrong’, which I haven’t written in months, I decided to start a new one. Mining Minds will analyze people’s seemingly unpredictable behaviors and reactions. Examples include why people get mad at seemingly irrelevant things, or why people throw subtle and unnecessary insults into normal conversations. I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, nor do I know the difference between the two, but I firmly believe that every time a person reacts unpredictably there is no randomness involved; its an unrelated attribute or event that gets repressed, deflected, and misunderstood into a completely new behavior. These new behaviors create the same unpredictability in others, which perpetuates into a web of seemingly unintelligible web of cause and effect that becomes linear when you step back and take the personal aspect out of the analysis.

The risk here is that people don’t like to be analyzed. People want to think that they are uninfluenced by anything but their conscious, rational thoughts. But thats not the case; people react carelessly on shallow instincts that don’t take the entire situation under consideration. When these people are told that they aren’t seeing the big picture, they immediately take a defensive stance. The defensive stance is, ironically, also one of those behaviors that warrants analysis.

So what better subject to start with than my sister Ila. She’s quite aware of her instinctual behavior and always accepts the fact that she’s being irrational and there is more to a situation than she initally considers.

Case in point, last night at the bowling alley. The Get-Along Gang decided to celebrate my birthday. For those who are unaware, the Get-Along Gang is a spicy asian mix of friends with a raging tetris addiction. We had dinner at Vietnam Palace in Chinatown, Philadelphia. Afterwards we all decided to hit the bowling alley for some adventures in cosmic bowling. We were assigned lane 8, and there were a group of South Indian kids in lane 7. Looking at their scores on their television screen would reveal that the kids elected to use their first names as their identifiers on the scoreboard. Umesh, Raj, etc. The Get-Along Gang don’t roll like that, we use our god given nicknames. Uncle DDD, Boola, Monkey/Stumpy. So our ambiguous tetris-inspired names were proudly displayed on the television screen next to the South Indian kids’ names.

A half hour goes by, and we realized that the South Indian scoreboard changed between games to use their own nicknames. Uninspiring nicknames, like ‘boobs’, but still had some playful charm. The majority of the Get-Along Gang was not affected by the South Indian movement to nicknames. However one member of the gang, the hero of this analysis, was distressed by the change.

“They want to be like us” was Ila’s warcry for the rest of the night. She gave them the old Stumpy-stare; mouth slightly agape, brows slightly furled, feet shoulder width apart to maintain balance if an altercation should occur. Her only respite came in the form of a slurp of drool dripping from her mouth due to enraged concentration.

This is a perfect opportunity to exercise a little restraint. Step back, analyze the situation, and come to the conclusion that no one meant any harm and everyone was just trying to have fun. But as I mentioned before, Ila acts on instincts. She chose to repeat herself for the rest of the night and take her discomfort with her as we left the bowling alley.

The first step that I like to take when thinking through these sorts of problems is to clean it up a bit, clear out the riff-raff so we can isolate the problem. Lets start with what we know to be true. First we can acknowledge that there are two core possibilities. Either those kids changed their display names because of our influence, or they changed their display names because of other influences. You might be wondering, “Why couldn’t they have changed their name without influence?” My answer to that is, things don’t happen without influence. NOTHING happens without being influenced by something.

The sequence of events is also known. South Indian All-Stars set their proper names and started to bowl, Get-Along Gang sets their unusual names and started to bowl, South Indian Gangstas changed their names to be equally unusual to ours. The first two events are isolated from one another. The third event is the one in question.

Lets start with the first possibility and try to identify causes for the three events. This is also Ila’s assumption and will allow us to analyze Ila’s reaction later on.

First, the Sri Lanky Turned Yankees team came in and entered their proper names. I’d like to make the assumption that these were the kids of an IT specialist from India who move over the pond for a new job 5 years ago and braught the kids with them. These names reflected their innocent ‘foreigner in a new land’ mentality of trying to be as unassuming as possible. Second, the Get-Along Gang crashed the scene and dropped some dope nameage on the screen. We did this because we bring the flavor wherever we go, there is no guessing involved here. Now comes the kicker, the Tandoori Furys change their names to be playful. Since we are stuck in the first possibility and are assuming that they changed names because of us, we can easily say that this was also caused by their cautious foreigner mentality. The Dark Warriors of the Asian Subcontinent saw some familiar non-white people expressing themselves freely and became comfortable enough to do the same.

Now lets take the other possiblity and identify causes for each event. When analyzing the second possibility, we must assume that the Get-Along Gang had nothing to do with the mid-game name changes. This won’t help us understand Ila’s anger but will provide an alternate point of view. The first and second events remain the same as they did with the first possibility. So why would they change their names on their own? Up until now, we assumed that the Kerala Impostas were well acquainted and they were all comfortable with each other. What if they weren’t friends, and just awkward bowling partners that weren’t comfortable with each other until the second game? When the second game started, the social process of friendship was far along enough as to expose their creative wills to one another, and thus the more personalized names. That provides an explaination for the third event without factoring in the Get-Along Gang’s influence.

Now that we’ve analyzed the Dravidian Villain League lets turn the microscope on Ila, the other side of the anger equation. The fourth event that was not mentioned above was ‘Ila gets angry’. Ila was convinced that the Get-Along Gang was ‘imitated’. What kind of people get angry when they are imitated? People who value what is being taken, namely their individuality. Ila takes pride in being unique, and she likes when other people acknowledge that, and she even likes it when people imitate that. What she hates is when she doesn’t get credit for being the source of the imitation. If the Dhosa Rolling Bowling Patrol approached Ila and verbally appreciated the use of nicknames before using their own nicknames, I can assure you that Ila would not have been upset.

There we have it. We have thouroughly analyzed Ila’s unexpected annoyance during the adventures in cosmic bowling. In reality, the conclusions that we get when trying to analyze behaviors are all factors of varing degrees. Very rarely does something that requires analysis happen for one reason alone. Hopefully the goal of all this writing has been attained, and we all try to take a step back and analyze situations before getting angry. Rise above the hate, and put yourself in everyone else’s shoes before relying on instincts to judge your position and make sure you use your anger only when necessary.

You can’t blame me, I was a confused young man who lost the only headphones he ever loved. It was a reaction to a situation that I couldn’t handle. But if I could do it all over again, I would have done the same thing.

Two weeks ago I broke my Grado SR60s. They had been with me from my college days. College sweethearts, if you will. When they left me, betrayed me, I wanted nothing to do with them. Sure, they were probably still the best headphones in the price range. Sure, I was satisfied with their performance over the time that I had them. But it was time for me to move on, sow my wild audi-oats.

So I hit the net hard, looking for a worthy replacement. Hours of research turned to days, and my search always led me back to the SR60s. Best value, best sound, best…headphones. Even my friends told me that I had something special and I was crazy to let it go. But what do they know? They’re out with different headphones every other night. The don’t know what real audio love is.

A week later I started to get desperate. I had put my hopes of a lasting relationship aside and just wanted a quick fix. I just needed to feel that pressure on my ears one time to get me through another week. It dawned on me that my dad’s Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones were still in my house. I searched my house like a celebrity out of rehab for that fix and finally found them.

The QuietComforts had been around the block. Everyone had used them at one time or another to fill their needs, and the QuietComforts play for any man who buys them a few batteries. But I was a fool if I thought that I was any different from those people. I took them out of their skimpy black case and wrapped them around my head.

It felt wrong. Partly because they didn’t have that gentle hold of my SR60s, but mostly because there was no sound. I realized that, unlike my SR60s, you had to turn these headphones on. My SR60s were always ready to play. Fortunately, turning them on was just flicking a switch.

I hit the switch and the world around me disappeared. The active noise cancelling kicked in and suddenly it was just me and the QuietComforts. I quickly found an MP3 and fired it up. The sound was loud, bassy, worn. But it was sound. I listened to those headphones all night long. The sound was not even close to the quality of my SR60s, but I didn’t care.

I woke up the next afternoon on my desk with scratches all over my chest and the headphone cord stuck between my teeth. It dawned on me that this couldn’t continue, I needed to find meaning in my headphone relationship. I hit the net with renewed purpose, and a level head. My fingers almost moved on their own as they combed the sites for a replacement. I found one…

Audio-Technica ATH-A900s. The name was a mouthful but the specs were dead sexy. Not only that, but they had sleek padded earpieces and giant cans, cans like you wouldn’t believe. I had to follow up on this possibility. I looked for opinions, looked for feedback, and looked in my own heart. All signs pointed to yes!

I went to work in DC but my mind was still at home. Every meeting, every conference call, every other minute in front of the monitor was saturated with dreams of me and my ATH-A900 romping through computer games together, dancing to MP3s together, watching movies together…dozing off together after a long night of surfing the Internet.

The dream came true when I arrived home the following Thursday. My loyal new headphones were waiting for me in a box. I took them out of the box and held them. They were firm and flexible; gentle when you slide them onto your head.

It was time; the moment was right. I turned off the lights and fired up Guns and Roses, Estranged. It was great, a mind altering experience. We listened to songs and played games for hours, only stopping to eat and stretch. The headphones were light and responsive, the sound was deep and rich.

As the night drew to a close, I couldn’t help but notice my old SR60s lying on the floor with the wire sprawled across the carpet. If they were plugged in, they’d probably be crying. A sight that once inspired hate and anger now inspired something else. I had come to terms with my SR60’s sudden break, and I realized it was my fault that they left me. I stretched the cord too far, and took its flexibility for granted. I also realized that my old friends needed help.

I picked up the phone and called up Grado. I explained my situation and asked if they could help. They said exactly what I wanted to hear, “We can fix them for $25″. It was the right thing to do, and there is no way I could regret fixing them.

The SR60s will be on their way back to the factory Monday morning, and the QuietComforts will probably never find happiness. The ATH-A900s and I have years of good sound together. Once my SR60s get back from the factory, we’ll probably enjoy a coffee together and listen to a few songs. We’ll clear up the air between us…

…Then I’ll sell em on eBay.

I’m psyched. I can’t believe its happening, someone actually decided to revive Knight Rider and make a motion picture about Michael Knight. Up until now, Knight Rider has been a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a movie that does not exist. But that’s gonna change now.

Miramax, a loner moviehouse on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law, has decided to take the rights to the show and make a movie. There is not much known about this movie at this point, other than the fact that David Hasselhoff has tried and failed in his attempt to cast Orlando Bloom as his son, and the star of the film.

Whats also known is that car companies are falling over themselves, trying to get their car in the movie as the new KITT. And why wouldn’t they? If you think of the most well known cars in the last 25 years, you got Doc Brown’s Delorean, and KITT. No one is remaking Back to the Future any time soon.

I’m definately gonna see this movie, and I don’t care if it takes 10 years to make.

I should’ve known that the cord was too short to reach around my new desk and into my PC. I stretched it anyway and sacrificed a little bit of postural luxury for my favorite headphones. But that one fateful night when I forgot they were around my neck, it only took one swing of my chair to snap the wire out of the left ear piece and leave me with half the headphones I once had. Oh SR60s…forgive me! I should have put the wire UNDER the desk.

Oh woe is me,
for my SR60s have ceased to be.
My poor audio-personified amputee
lies crippled on the floor next to me.

I had those headphones for 4 years, and its time to get new ones. I’ve been searching all over the place to find a pair under $150 with good sound quality. The only name that keeps coming up is Grado, and their SR60’s, SR80’s and SR125’s. These headphones were made almost a decade ago and still retain a favorable opinion in the audiophile community even amongst newly released headphones. I’m currently leaning towards purchasing the same headphones, or maybe the upgraded SR125 model. Although I may use this opportunity to go for a different brand even though they may have inferior sound quality, just to get a good idea of how headphones can vary in different areas.

I’m sure you don’t care about my dual minded purchase process, I am writing this to say that the SR-60s are great headphones. They may look like something a 1930s telegraph operator would wear, but the sound quality is excellent. If you are sick of over-bassy and poor quality headphones then definately give Grado a try. I wouldn’t recommend these as a replacement for ear buds if you like to be candid about your headphones, but if you don’t mind a little clunkiness then Grado is the way to go.

A few months ago, Ilamor purchased an LCD television. This television came equipped with VGA input for use as a monitor. Upon hearing this, Ilamor’s mind went wild. For her birthday, Ilamor requested (in lieu of the annual birthday hug) that I turn her television into a computer.

As nebulous as this request sounds, I found the prospect intriguing. My first instinct was to talk her out of the idea. Ilamor said that she wanted it to watch movies, to which I responded, ‘get a dvd player.’ But the movies Ilamor was referencing were those on Netflix’s new Instant Viewing system where a viewer can watch movies streaming over the Internet. For a moment Ilamor’s intentions became clear, but then when I asked, “is that all?”, she responded, “No, I want to use it like a computer”, thus setting us back into the crazy vague request state.

I decided that gathering requirements wasn’t that important. If my job has taught me anything, its that people don’t know what they want. They just want. Once they get something, THEN they’ll tell you want they want. So its my job to give it to them, and wait for feedback. So off I went, gathering parts for the job.

The Computer - Compaq Presario F572US Notebook PC

For this project I needed a cheap, small, unsophisticated computer that has very limited capabilities. The obvious choice would be a Micro ATX PC. Well, there’s an old uncredited saying that goes, “If you chase two rabbits, you’ll lose them both”, obviously in criticism of the whole “two birds with one stone” thing. So I had to choose my proverb and go with it, and I chose the later. Ilamor has been complaining about her old iBook for years and I figured that new laptop would cease the complaints. So I chose the $600 Compaq.

The negatives about this laptop were bad battery life, and it doesn’t matter in this case because it will be plugged in all the time. Another sticking point was 1gb of ram with Windows Vista, which might be a bit low but hopefully it won’t be unbearable. I figured that buying a 2gb laptop would certainly be faster, but it would cost just as much to upgrade the 1gb to 2gb if we needed it, so buying a 1gb laptop gives us the option to upgrade. In any case, this machines does the trick. Its quiet, doesn’t take up much room, and runs smoothly.

The Controls - GO 2.4 Optical Air Mouse and Compact Keyboard Suite

I know how Ilamor thinks. She wouldn’t be content with a simple wireless mouse and keyboard. She wants a device that would give her absolute control and not be restricted to moving it over a flat surface. Its the same principal that attracted her to the Nintendo Wii, so it became clear what I needed to buy. A wand of sorts. But the options are limited. The first device that I came across was the Logitech MX Air.

The Logitech MX Air has the sleek design and a big name, but also came with a $150 price tag for JUST the mouse. This is also the first attempt at an air mouse for Logitech so the product may be more experimental than I would have liked. I decided to look for other options, and I came across a lesser known company called Gyration. This company knows exactly what I needed. They make the product for demonstration purposes but it really fit the need that I had. The mouse itself is very ergonomically designed (one of the flaws of the MX Air is that it wasn’t comfortable), and comes with a cool blue glowing charging cradle. The Gyrotools software gives you a lot of options, more than I could explore, to customize your Gyroperience. I just made that up. It even works great in Vista.

The only drawback of this mouse/keyboard suite is that the keyboard uses standard AAA batteries. So you’re on your own there. It would have been ideal if the keyboard could some with some sort of rechargable docking station. Aside from that, the movement is silky smooth. It does not operate exactly like the Wii, in that the position of your hand is the exact position of the cursor. It operates by simply tracking the movement of the air mouse, and moving the cursor in the appropriate direction. The result is the ability to put your hand anywhere, and in any direction and move the mouse, ideal for lying in bed and moving the mouse without the tedious task of aiming.

The Sound - Sennheiser RS130 Wireless Headphones

Watching movies in a bedroom has a few drawbacks. The biggest of which is the possibility of one person sleeping and another watching a movie. I knew that headphones would be the ideal way to get sound from the laptop to the viewer. So I started my search for wireless headphone solutions.

The first one that I came across was the Sennheiser RS130 headphones. This model has since been replaced with the RS140s but the differences for this project are negligible, aside from price. After reading some glowing reviews, it became obvious that these were the headphones that I should buy. I ordered one full set with the transmitter, and another add-on pair in case two people wanted to enjoy the sound.

After assembling the system, I came to the conclusion that this was the worst hardware choice amongst the three items that I purchased. Its not to say that they are terrible, because the RS130s are good at what they do. The sound quality is not bad, but the connectors provided are not very high quality. In my case, I needed to turn a stereo headphone jack into a L/R component audio. The connector provided needed to be twisted and pushed in order to get both channels working properly. When the connector was secured properly, the hissing went away.

The reason that this was a poor choice was a design issue with the RS130s. The same piece of hardware was used for the charging stand and the transmitter. This is not so bad for a single headphone setup, but when you have two headphones, they must share the same charging stand, or you need to have two transmitters, neither of which is ideal. Also, transmitter is usually next to the television or the device generating the sound. I would like to have the charging stands near the place where the viewing is taking place, like the couch or the bed. Since the two functionalities are placed in the same device, this is not possible.

If this becomes an issue, I will think about finding an alternative solution to the sound. I already have a request to have the sound come out of the television speakers, so I will need to find a solution that will incorporate that. If you plan on buying the RS130s, keep these issues in mind.

The Assembly

The assembly went just as expected, no hitches or surprises.

The first step was to get the laptop up and running. This was a piece of cake, it just required me to plug it in, turn it on, and go through a few simple Vista setup screens. Once it was running, I took my VGA cable and plugged the laptop into the TV. After going into the video options and enabling my extra monitor, I was able to view the desktop on the television. I had to turn the resolution down to 800×600 to make the text easily readable, 1024×768 is bearable but stretching it. Due to the low resolutions, this is not a good solution for much other than watching movies and browsing the web. Now it was time to plug in the other two devices.

The Gyration wireless devices simply needed a small USB adapter plugged into an open USB slot. It looks like a Wireless USB Network adapter. Once this was plugged in, the wireless mouse needed to be charged and it worked perfectly. I was sitting across the room and working on the laptop. Now for the sound.

I had to keep the headphone charging stand right next to the laptop. This was going to be bad, especially if you know the way Ilamor treats their rechargable devices. If the cradle is not easily accessible, the device remains on a desk until it beeps to be charged. The only input provided to the RS130 transmitter is the L/R component audio. The inputs are not directly on the device, but on wires coming out of the device. The headphones come with some adapters, unfortunately they are not very good quality. I had to struggle to get both channels working with the component-to-stereo jack adapter. Once everything was in place, the sound was streaming directly into the headphones, no channel setup required.

Conclusion

Was it worth it? From my point of view, it was certainly worth it. It was a good exercise in finding an alternative to the usual desk/mouse/keyboard that I’ve grown used to. For Ilamor, I’m not sure how long this experiment will last. I’m sure there will come a point where the laptop will be unhooked and used for its portability and never returned to the room. The wireless headphones will be used elsewhere and the Gyration products will sit in a box somewhere. But as far as I’m concerned, its a success.