New Orleans: FAA SW DER Conference

Today through Thursday is the 2007 edition of the FAA’s SW/CEH DER Conference. You can follow the link if you really want to know more about it; basically it’s a technical conference for those of us who work with the FAA to approve aircraft equipment and software. Good times. This year, the conference is in New Orleans, LA. It’s my first time in New Orleans.

The trip was a bit of a pain; my flights were from Cedar Rapids to Dallas/Fort Worth, and then from DFW to New Orleans. The first leg of the flight left about 40 minutes late, but no worries, I had a long-ish layover at DFW. Well, that long-ish layover turned into a very long layover, because my flight to New Orleans, supposed to arrive in NOLA at 9:20 PM, didn’t leave DFW until 10:15 PM. It seems to be a recurring theme when I travel to these conferences; last year I was driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight to find the hotel, this year, through downtown New Orleans.

Day 1 of the conference is always rather boring; it’s a general session where we get updates on the progress of various industry committees and information on what the FAA’s doing. We got 45 minutes this morning on how they’re gonna be using some new tools to do more uniform safety analyses of aircraft programs…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Tomorrow and Thursday are more interesting when there are topical break-out sessions.

I just finished lunch at Ugly Dog Saloon, recommended by Scott as the best BBQ in New Orleans. It was pretty tasty. Now I’m thinking I’m gonna skip the next couple committee updates and go walk through the Riverwalk area across the street. Tonight I’m meeting Scott and Jacob for dinner. Tomorrow night I guess I’ll go hit the French Quarter and try to hear some live music. Should be fun.

Bullet Points on a Friday

  • We had three neighbors over for supper last night. It was quite a good time. And the pork loin that Becky did in the broiler was delicious.
  • The trip for the weekend will be to Lowe’s for some blackjack for the roof and maybe a basin wrench.
  • We got an estimate on our tree in the front yard last night. It’s developed a nasty split and if we don’t do something soon we may lose some or all of it. Sounds like we can get it cabled up and should be able to save most of it.
  • Planning on just spending the weekend with the family. It will be nice to not have much to do.
  • I’m teaching Sunday School and leading worship at church on Sunday. Already have the music planned, but still have to prepare for the class.
  • Note to the FAA: planning a conference in New Orleans in July? Not such a bright idea. Ah well, I’ll sweat along with the rest of them.
  • Got Harry Potter book 2 from the library yesterday. For some reason I got a LARGE PRINT copy. Ouch.
  • Today is my last day in my current position at work - after eight years, it’s time for a change. Hoping it’s a good move.

Drying out

It’s been a bit of a wet week here in eastern Iowa. We had storms starting Monday night through Tuesday, then again Wednesday morning and evening. My neighbor Jim told me yesterday that he measured something like 5 inches after the Monday/Tuesday storm. No big damage; the neighbors lost a small branch from their tree, that’s about it. However, the split in our tree in the front yard is much more noticeable now than it was a couple of weeks ago, so we’re gonna have a tree service come out and look at it to see what our options are. If the south side of the tree splits off, it’ll fall on the house, right on Laura’s room. Not good. So we will see. I’d hate to lose that tree, though.

Yesterday afternoon we worked on outside stuff; I cleaned out the gutters and checked out a couple spots on the roof that I think are leaking a little. I’ll be heading to Lowe’s in the next day or two to check out my options for sealing up the leaks. Oh, and they need to make gutter guard with a solid top; the mesh guards do no good at filtering out the leaves from the locust tree and all the little messes that the oak tree makes.

So that’s my homeowner’s report for the week. Still plenty to do on the house; my list of major things that’ll need done in the next 5 - 7 years is pretty long. But hey, it’s a good house, worth working on. God will provide as we have needs.

It happened again.

Yep. Four in a row now. What are the odds?

Dang, I had to ask that. Now I’m gonna have to calculate them.

Probability of a winner is 1 in 8. So the chances of me getting a winner with my first bottle was, well, 1 in 8, or 0.125.

Probability of a winner each time I get 2 bottles is [1 in 8] * 2, which is 1 in 4, or 0.25.

I’ve now gotten the initial winner plus three more winners in sequence. The odds of that, according to these back-of-the-envelope calculations, are 0.125 * 0.25 * 0.25 * 0.25 = 0.001953125, or to put it another way, 1 in 512.

Cool.

The Challenges and Blessings of Hospitality

Last week Becky and I had a discussion about, well, a bunch of things, but the one thing that came out of it was an agreement that we needed to be inviting people over more. We enjoy having folks over to share a meal, play games, and hang out, but we do it far too rarely. So we discussed for a while what day would work best for us, (if we want to be consistent, we’re gonna have to pick a day and stick to it), and came up with Sunday evenings. We don’t have any Sunday evening church activities, and, we concluded, but 5 PM on Sunday we’re usually bored anyway and looking for something to do, so why not have folks over for supper? Having thus planned, we invited two couples (+ kids) over, and started preparing for Sunday night.

Now, normally for something like this we’d do a lot of meal preparation and house cleaning on Saturday, leaving us time on Sunday to rest and relax before having visitors. (I do love my Sunday afternoons to crash.) But this past Saturday was a softball tournament that went from first thing in the morning until mid-afternoon, and then left us so tired we had no motivation to start cleaning. “We still have tomorrow to get ready” was our motto.

So Sunday afternoon rolled around and it was time to get ready. So we picked up toys, vacuumed, snapped green beans, made lasagna, did the dishes, put the leaves in the table, and next thing you know, it was 5 PM and our guests were arriving. So much for our theory that “we’re bored by 5 PM anyway…”! 5 PM showed up and we hadn’t sat down all afternoon. Well, not quite true. I sat down to rip a few sermon recordings to mp3 for the church website. But that was it.

We had a great time with our guests last night. We ate plenty of good food, finished up with some to-die-for homemade chocolate-mint ice cream, sat around and swapped stories about growing up in small towns, raising kids, and protecting our homes from late-night marauding insects, and laughed hilariously at this video of Ringo Starr visiting the studio as Andrew Peterson is recording his new album. Look for the cameo appearance by Chris Sligh (formerly of American Idol) and Ringo’s quick wit when Chris declares himself “more of a Paul man”. (Andy Gullahorn is a genius, I tell you! A genius!) Time flew by, and by the time folks were leaving to get kids to bed and prepare for the upcoming week, it was nearing 9 PM. It was a wonderful evening.

Now I know that our guests from last night pretty much all read my blog (hi Roy, Bridget, Dave, and Barb!), so I want to say this up front: we had a great time, and practicing hospitality this way is absolutely something we needed to do and to continue to do. However, yeah, it was a challenge. First of all, we need our Sunday rest, and it was pretty well lacking yesterday. I will also admit to being kinda frustrated yesterday when it became apparent about 3:30 that there was no way we were gonna have time to sit and crash before folks came. So we need to make sure that we use our Saturday more effectively next time. Becky and I also need to make sure that we communicate our expectations well; when I’m thinking and working towards one thing and she’s got something different in mind, and then the time crunch hits, well, it has the opportunity to not be a lot of fun. We’re still learning this communication thing after 9 years of marriage.

What I will conclude from the weekend, though:

We need to continue the hospitality. Dinners with friends are a lot of fun. Chocolate-mint ice cream can be really, really good. We need some time for Sunday rest. The Cubs still managed to win without me watching them. Sleep is sweet.

(Oh, and that Andy Gullahorn is a genius.)

It's a trap!

Last week I bought a bottle of Diet Pepsi from a vending machine. I opened it up, and woohoo! The cap was a winner - buy one 20 oz bottle, get one free.

I held onto the cap until Monday, when I was having a bad caffeine craving. So I redeemed it, and when I opened the second bottle, guess what? Another winner.

Fast-forward to today. I turned in that winner and got another two-fer. I opened the second bottle, and guess what? Yep, another winner.

I think it’s a trap.

Evaluating alternative iPod management software

Yesterday SimpleHelp.net posted 10 Alternatives to iTunes for managing your iPod. (They have since been dugg and their website is down. Bummer. You can still see the guts of the article from the Google cache.)

At my work location iTunes is verboten, so I’m all for exploring other ways to manage my iPod, or at least to play the tunes off of it while I’m at work. Here are my basic requirements:

  • It needs to run smoothly. (Duh.)
  • It needs to be Windows-based. (No Macs or Linux boxes here.)
  • It needs to support the AAC audio format. I’ve got a bunch of .m4c files on my iPod.
  • It shouldn’t be a system hog.

Nice to have’s would include portability, support for Last.FM and the ability to copy songs off the iPod back to the PC.

There are 5 alternatives on the SimpleHelp site that are available for the Windows platform. Here are my reviews of them:

Floola

This was the first one, and at first glance was a strong contender. It has support for Last.FM, is portable, and has a pretty nice UI. Once I got it installed, though, I found some issues. Even though it appears to support proxy servers, I never could get it to talk to Last.FM. Secondly, the thing was a system hog - regularly freezing up for 30 - 60 seconds at a time when I tried to do anything. No thanks. And then the kicker: no support for AAC. Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Uninstall.

MediaMonkey

Gave this one a try next. The install was quick, the software came up quickly, and it immediately recognized my iPod. Off to a good start! Didn’t seem to hog the system too much. Tried to play an AAC file… no joy. Skipped three albums in the playlist before it got to one that was .mp3 format. So much for that. Uninstall.

Songbird

When I downloaded this one, it warned me that it was just a developer’s version, that there isn’t an official release of Songbird yet. Well, I’m brave, so I gave it a try. This is definitely the slickest one yet - good graphics all the way around (icons, skins, etc). This one is built on the Mozilla browser platform, so it has way more overhead than a player really should - about 60 MB installed. Then I had to install a plugin to get it to recognize my iPod. Once I got the plugin installed, it found the iPod fine, but then I had to wait for it to load the library. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

It must have taken Songbird about 45 minutes to load the library information from my 25 GB media library. Still, if that was a one-time startup thing, I can live with it. And it appears that it is - though who knows if it’ll have to do a full library re-scan when I change something? No telling. I was about sold on Songbird until I actually started playing music from it. AAC support? Yep. But as I played the songs, it hiccuped my audio on a fairly regular basis - every 15 seconds or so. This wasn’t due to CPU spiking - I had plenty of free CPU left - so there must be some inefficiency in the program itself. Uninstall.

SharePod

The UI on this one appears to be a lot more barebones than some of the other contenders. The sorting options are bad; you can sort only by one field at a time (artist, album, etc), but then it doesn’t sort below that. For instance, I can sort by artist to get all of U2 grouped together… but then there’s no guarantee that the U2 albums will be grouped together. Given that I’m a guy who likes to listen to a whole album at a time, this is no good for me. Still, I should give it a try, right?

So I gave it a whirl with some .mp3-formatted files. The sound was OK, the playback controls simple but marginally adequate. Then I went to AAC. It won’t play AAC. Not only that, it doesn’t give you an error, or skip the tracks, or anything - it just sits there on the file and acts like it wants to play it, but it won’t play it. Unacceptable. Uninstall. Wait, don’t have to uninstall - this one is totally portable. Thank God for small mercies.

YamiPod

I left this one for last because it wasn’t new to me - I’ve been running YamiPod for a few years now, but only for the ability to be able to pull files back off the iPod onto the PC. I’m not real find of the UI, but it works, which is way more than I can say for some of these I’ve evaluated.

I haven’t actually tried to play anything back on it until just now. So let’s give it a try.

Amazing. It won’t play any of the files. What’s going on? Controls seem unresponsive, it’s not playing anything back. Well phooey on that. At least it’s portable, and it’ll copy files off the iPod neatly. I’ll keep it around just for that.

Winamp Winamp hasn’t been allowed on my office network computers for at least 5 years.

Conclusions:

Each of these alternative players has their strong and weak points, but when it comes down do it, none of them were good enough for me to use as a regular player. I will keep waiting for the Windows version of Amarok; right now it’s Linux-only, but there’s a Windows version coming, and Dan swears that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Until then, I’ll keep using Foobar2000. It doesn’t manage my iPod; I have to point it to the Control directory of the iPod and then have it just search for files. But it plays consistently, manages playlists nicely, and has a Last.FM plugin. So, it’s a keeper. And I guess I’ll keep using iTunes at home. It’s a resource hog sometimes, but it does what it needs to.

A little bit sore

Yesterday morning I was awake early so I went to the gym and hit the treadmill and the weight machines. I have been doing at least a bit of running, so the treadmill part wasn’t bad; however, I haven’t hit the weights in two or three months, so this morning I find myself pretty sore. It’s a good kind of soreness, though - feels good to know that I actually did something.

I’ve pretty much been a slacker the last couple of months in going to the gym - time to get it cranked up again. Need to break the weight plateau I’ve been at for the last 4 or 5 months and get to losing some more pounds.

It's Monday again already?!?

Well, it was a busy weekend. The whole family showed up Friday night for one last get together before we head our separate ways this fall. The result was two days of playing cards, music, football, and making at least one obligatory Hubbs shopping trip to Walmart and Sam’s Club. Aaron and Andrew also got haircuts… Andrew opting for the “I wanna look like Chris” haircut. I don’t think he’ll be maintaining his, though, so he should have hair again by the time he gets out out to Oregon.

Hit the gym this morning to run and do a little lifting, and yeah, it feels good to be sore again. I’ve been too much of a slacker the past couple of months. Gotta get back to it. The pounds don’t lose themselves.

Somebody's leaving tracts in the bathroom again...

This morning’s visit to the bathroom here at work revealed that someone has again been leaving tracts on top of the toilet paper holder in the men’s room stalls. Now, the efficacy of leaving tracts at random as opposed to other evangelistic techniques is a discussion for another blog post. But if you’re going to leave a tract in the men’s room, should your first choice really have a pink rose and the words “You’re Special” scripted on the front? *sigh*