MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

So, it’s winter in Indiana, and cold is to be expected. Cold and snow. It happens every year. No one should be surprised. But, one thing that you learn growing up in this environment is that the cold makes ordinary things very difficult. 

Example number one: my furnace went out on Wednesday, around noon. I didn’t notice until about 2, though I was luckily at home that day. It was pretty cold outside, but not terribly cold. Probably around 15 degrees or so. The house had already gone down to 55 and was losing a degree every 15 minutes or so. After messing with the furnace controls for about an hour, I realized from the diagnostic readout that the pressure switch was stuck open. According to people online, all you have to do is remove the panel and clear the debris from the pressure switch hose from the air intake. Remembering the last time that I invoked the home warranty that I have, where my attempt to fix it caused them to claim that they could not touch it, I did nothing aside from take the panel off to get the serial number and then closed everything back up. 

After that, I started the oven at around 400 degrees and then opened it, and started a space heater in the basement. With the help of the oven, the main floor heated up to around 60. I cycled it on and off throughout the day, keeping it around 55 most of the time. After a little research, I heard that keeping the faucets running was a good way to keep the pipes from freezing. that night, we went and got another space heater, and Leah brought the one from school home, bringing our total to 3. We ran 2 in the basement, and one on the main floor, running the oven every now and then. We were able to keep it around 60 with this method. I was still afraid that the pipes would burst once we went to bed. With all the faucets slowly running, we went to bed, with a space heater and electric blanket. 

I got up around 7, after not sleeping very well, and went out of the room to check the temperature. A solid wall of cold met me at the door. It was probably nearly 70 in the room with the little space heater, and the thermostat on the main level read 48. Yikes! Pipe freeze alarms go off at 45, so I had to start running the oven again. After 2 hours of oven, it finally rose to 50. 

The furnace guy that I had called the day before was supposed to arrive between 9 and 12, and I was desperately hoping that he would arrive and fix it, because the next evening was to supposed to get very cold (and it did!). He arrived, did some quick diagnostics, pulled off the tube from the pressure switch, cleaned it, restarted it and it kicked on. I could’ve easily fixed it myself, if only I hadn’t been afraid of voiding the warranty. At any rate, it was working again, and the house began a slow rise from 51 to 64 over the next 12 hours. 

Leah and I were both home from work that day. It was Leah’s 2nd snow day that week, as Laporte had gotten quite a bit more snow than we had, and we already had about 12-15 inches. Around dinner time, after reading horror stories about ice dams on your roof causing flooding when the snow melts, I went outside with the dog for about 3 minutes, then went to the front and shoveled off as much of the roof as I could. Then, I shoveled the walk in front of our house and the neighbor’s house. I guess that I had forgotten to check just how cold it was, because after about 10-15 minutes of being outside, I realized that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. Remembering that this was an early sign of frostbite, I quickly went inside to warm up, and after getting on my computer, realized that the outside temperature was -10, with a windchill of -35! After a couple of hours of tingly toes, I was relived to know that they would be fine.

As we were watching TV last night, a plow truck from the city badly negiotiated a turn and hit a control box on the corner across from our house. About 10 seconds later, the light started flashing red, and I got very upset. This same thing happened about a year ago, and it took the city literally 3 months to fix. A flashing light at a semi-busy street in front of your house makes it nearly impossible to get out in the morning, and furthermore, makes it quite dangerous for drivers on that road to queue up and quickly stop. 

Now, I’m home from work again (though, with a computer and an Internet connection, I find myself still very able to produce work), because it’s -17 outside with a windchill of around -30. With cold like this, you have to be very careful. If you don’t stop and get gas and run out, you might freeze to death before the police or family comes to your aid. If you are shoveling snow or doing something outside and feel warm on the inside, you could get frostbite on your nose, ears, fingers or toes. It’s so cold, that even simple mistakes become terrible mistakes. It truly does complicate things.

The South Bend area has received somewhere between 6-9 inches of snow in the last 2 days. I typically allow these sorts of situations to pass, but today I unwillingly trudged out to the driveway to shovel out a path for our vehicles. After nearly 1.5 hours of shoveling, I grew extremely agitated with the negative progress induced by the rapidly passing snowplows on my street. I thought it amusingly ironic that our street (which is moderately busy) is often bypassed by plows on other days, but that in the 1.5 hours that I shoveled, a plow drove past 8 times, sometimes in teams of 2. 

At any rate, my driveway is now mostly clear, and my back is very sore. I am simply not in the kind of shape to allow me to just go out and shovel 80 feet of driveway. The lack of a viable exercise program, combined with zero exercise effort at work, leaves me very much a glorified vegetable. I wil limp now upstairs to crawl in bed with a hot pad, and hope that I am able to perform normal functions in the morning, without the aid of additional heat or excessive painkillers. 

To those of you that live in other, milder climates, please take this time to praise your choices and reminisce about similar situations you may have experienced in the past. For those of you that still living in the area, I wish you a hot cup of coffee, a good shovel and a strong back. Or, at the very least, a enterprising young lad from the neighborhood looking to work for cheap. 

Well, everyone typically has resolutions sometime around the beginning of a new year. As a sidenote, I find it interesting that in our continually more insulated society, we still find newness at the turn of the year. Sure, it marks some changes that are evident in everyday life. Writing 2009 instead of 2008 on your documents. Rolling over taxes, wages, spending to another year. But in all truth, it is just another day. Sure, it’s a day marked out clearly by heavenly events (spring, summer, fall, winter) and we continually adjust our schedules and time-sense to make it clear to us when it’s happened. But we choose to make the day different. We could go on about the day, thinking no difference about it than any other. But I digress…

My resolutions this year will be a bit different than ones in years past. For one, some of them are joined with my wife. And also, I intend to actually accomplish a few of them, rather than pie-in-the-sky ruminations. Some of them, I started the first day of the New Year. 

The holidays can be a time for reflection, among other things. Relatives that you don’t see very often come into town, and you reflect on how wonderful it was to see them, and reflect on how much you wish that it could be more often. Logical constructs appear randomly to remind you of the circumstances dictating the current situations, and defeat is accepted. You speak frankly with those whom you love, barriers of feelings and space broken down by limited time and chosen words, chosen actions. But ultimately, time passes quickly for both parties, and you are separated and left still in a state of reflection.

My goals this year are motivated by many aspects of humanity: the physical, the professional, the emotional. But I will jump straight into the goals and leave you with the details as follows.

Health

1. Immediate and total cessation of soda drinking. My wife will be joining me on this goal. Basically, our soda consumption had reached epic levels, and reflection upon the vast amount of daily liquid calories grossed by soda consumption realized a goal of simply stopping. This cessation will leave us heavily addicted to both major properties of soda: sugar and caffeine. Being that the sugar is the major proponent for change, I will seek out caffeine elsewhere to curb that addiction. But the sugar will lapse with time.
2. Get to a more healthy weight. I typically weigh somewhere between 220 and 225. This translates to a BMI that approaches obesity (28.2-28.9). After the holiday food rush (massive food intake coupled with entire lapsation of exercise) my weight spiked towards 230, dangerously close to obesity. To get within the parameters of a “healthy weight” as dictated by BMI, my goal weight would be 195 (BMI of 25, the very high end of healthiness). That is a 30 pound differential of my average weight. Based upon the amount of pop that I was drinking before (average of about 3 cans per day == 450 calories), if I did nothing else besides ceasing pop consumption and not replacing it with other calories (tea, coffee), I would drop 49 pounds (in a reality unaffected by descending exponential caloric need with weight loss). More realistically, with some caloric replacement by coffee and teas, (still in an unaffected virtual reality) I would still lose 36 pounds! Obviously, this reality is not entirely the case, as already stated. But with proper exercise and improvement in diet in areas other than liquids, it is most certainly possible.

Personal/Professional Skills

1. Implement source control. Utilizing SVN or Git or other methods of source control has proven to be extremely valuable and effective for programmers the world round. I can think of many circumstances within the last year where enforced source control (checking in/out code) would’ve solved problems, especially with our larger sites/projects where multiple persons are developing. This is also a valuable skill when marketing yourself in the future, since source control is such an essential mechanism for production in a team or project environment.
2. Further develop .NET skills (C#/VB.NET). Despite my qualms about transitioning to an entirely different paradigm, it’s prevalence in the marketplace neccesitates my at least minimum proficiency in utilizing it. I have some experience with ASP, which functions in a normal GET/POST environment like most other languages, but ASP.NET functions inside the Windows Forms control mechanism with Viewstates and other specialized controls. As I mentioned before, I am not particularly a fan of this procedure, but it seems to work for others, and I’m always interested in learning a new skill, particulary if it will be useful in the future.

Personal

I (most generously) received a Blackberry Storm through a work plan just before Christmas. For those of you who haven’t seen the pervasive TV ads and CDMA hype, the Blackberry Storm is the first touch-screen Blackberry. What’s different about it is the haptic feedback built inherently into the device. The screen clicks as you interact with it, letting you know the difference between your selection and your actual mechanism of motion. Sweet, right? I know that I was elated to get one, and my wife was supremely jealous. But what I’ve found is that, like many first generation products, there are some flaws. Some even serious ones. 

The main selling of the phone over the iPhone and over phones is that it’s a Blackberry. There is already an army of Blackberry users out there, mostly corporate warriors, who are in the field constantly checking and sending email. A touch screen device that utilizes all of it’s beautiful 4″ screen and still allows them to use the time tested tools that RIM and the Blackberry provide make it a home run to the established crowd. 

I, however, am in with the Joes who have never used an iPhone or a Blackberry. My experience with the device thus far has been mixed, but positive. My screen is still responding to clicks from my fingers, unlike my co-worker, who has had to send for a replacement after just 2 weeks. His is a common problem, one that the community is rapidly coming up with fixes for, but still irritating for a launched product. I found the typing to be a little aggravating at times, the letters being selected from the screen a little differently than I had imagined them to be. I found the SureType keyboard ( a virtual software keyboard laid out like the original Blackberry keyboard) to be much more useful at typing anything but extremely precise names or URLs. 

Verizon’s network thus far has been pretty good. I have gotten reasonably good service in some locations that I had terrible or no service with T-Mobile, always a plus. The speed of my phone, especially in the office and around the house, is quite good as well. The same cannot always be said of the phone itself. It doesn’t automatically close programs and gets quite bogged down if you leave more than a couple of applications open, causing you to have to (somewhat laboriously) manually select and close running programs. 

Another problem with the phone that I’ve had is with the media playback. I looked up some of the codecs available for the audio and video, but even after conforming to those, had some issues playing anything but the most basic files. I had to get a special converter to wrap my videos in a 3GP wrapper (MP4 core) to get them to play right on my phone. Even the videos that the video recorder on the phone took won’t play, which is especially weird and irritating. 

On to the camera….two words: it sucks. It really does. It’s 3.2 MP, which caused excitement at first. It even has a nifty LED flash. But…it takes forever to focus, the flash is blindingly bright and off-color, it’s focus is easily disturbed by motion and light change…it just overall sucks. It is not useful for pretty much anything except taking pictures of non moving objects in well lit areas. Really. And how often does that situation present itself, when you aren’t already taking a picture of something?

Everything else has been pretty fun. the IM clients for MSN and AIM work well. The email app is a slam dunk (no surprises there). RIMs servers have been beating my POP server every 45 seconds looking for new emails and in heavy traffic, my phone beeps a lot. But that’s OK…somewhat to be expected, even. It’s pretty easy to retrieve and open attachments, view them, respond to emails, etc. It’s nice to be so connected in some ways. 

The GPS issue is somewhat troublesome. Verizon wants you to pay for and use their VZ Navigator software, which costs $7/month. They did enable GPS to work with BlackBerry Maps, but that software kinda stinks. I installed Google Maps, which works wonderfully with cell tower triangulation of your location (within 3000 meters or so), but it doesn’t offer turn by turn directions or real-time, precise GPS locations. It still works pretty well without it, but kinda annoying that Verizon disabled access to the GPS chip.

My last gripe (and not really even a gripe) is the lack of applications. There are probably 20-30 applications out there for the Storm, and quite a few of them are just re-revved apps from the past Blackberry lines. But, the product just launched and i’m certain that Verizon will try to take advantage of the App Store concept that has worked so well with the iPhone. I’m anxious to get my feet wet developing my own apps for the phone. I would love to make some apps for my homegrown budget software and maybe replicate (with much less pinache) some of the cooler apps that I’ve seen for the iPhone. 

Overall, a great phone, works well for what it’s intended for. I’ll agree in general with critics that it was rushed to market, but as long as BB keeps updating their firmware, and the apps keeping growing, I’ll be more of a convert all the time….until my phone screen stops clicking, that is.