• Koss SB49 computer headset (headphones + microphone): The microphone died.  Well, it doesn’t seem fully dead but on many devices it is so quiet that it’s basically useless.  Fortunately, Koss has a lifetime “no questions asked” repair or replacement warranty.  You ship it to them on your own dime and include $6 for return shipping.  They take care of the rest.  Hopefully, this will go out today and I’ll get it back sometime early in the new year.

• Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB hard drive: After the hassles I had with Windows 7 on my new Lenovo PC, I wasn’t expecting any further trouble for a while.  Unfortunately, one night last week my wife and I head a high pitched, very grating noise.  I finally tracked it down to my computer.  I hoped it was a fan but it wasn’t – it was the hard drive.  I shut down the machine and when I tried rebooting, it wouldn’t boot back into Windows.  So, the drive is shot.  I contacted Lenovo about it and they’re sending me a new drive, which should arrive tomorrow.  I’m always nervous about single drives being shipped.  Hopefully, it’ll work as intended.  I really don’t want to spend any more time fiddling with this computer.

• Verilux 26W compact fluorescent light bulbs. These are great.  I ordered them over the summer.  They’re 26W, which, in terms of light output, is approximately equivalent to 150W incandescent bulbs.  However, rather than being a sickly yellow color, these are very clean white light – 6500K to be exact.  While the bulbs themselves are great, I’ve had a bunch of problems with the delivery.
  When I first ordered them, one of the 2 bulbs in the double pack arrived broken.  The company sent me a replacement, which arrived intact.  However, one of my original bulbs just burned out, well shy of the 10,000 hours they’re supposed to last.  So, I contacted the company about it and they sent me a replacement but it had the wrong connection type.  So, they sent me a double pack (very nice) of the correct connection.  However, when these arrived, they were both broken.
  The customer service rep I’ve been dealing with has been great – very helpful and very apologetic about the various problems that have occurred.  After I received the broken bulbs she said she would send me two packs of bulbs (that’s 4 bulbs) because of the all the hassle I’ve gone through and that she would personally package them herself to make sure they arrived intact.  A lot of companies would probably have just stopped responding to my emails but Verilux obviously puts a strong emphasis on customer service and it shows.

Update (12/23/09): I just received the bulbs.  None of them were broken.  Sweet.  I am all stocked up on these bulbs for a while.

My wife took the headphones to the post office, so they’re on their way back to Koss.

Update (12/24/09): I received the hard drive today from Lenovo.  I don’t think I’ll have time to deal with it for a few days, though.

Update (12/26/09): According to USPS delivery confirmation, my headphones were delivered to Koss today.  I wonder how long it’ll take for them to come back to me.

Update (01/05/10): I received the new hard drive on Christmas Eve but didn’t have time to deal with it until December 28th or so.  The new hard drive was partitioned but not formatted.  Since there wasn’t already a Windows installation on it, my upgrade version of Win 7 wouldn’t let me activate it.  So, I did the old double install trick.  I just shut the machine off and ran the installer again.  It detected the Windows installation I had just installed and let me activate it using my key for the upgrade media.  This only added like 20 minutes to the whole operation.

With the OS installed, I set up my awesome dual SATA HDD dock to copy data over from the hard drives that I pulled from our old machine.  So far, I’ve only copied over the really important stuff: photos, videos, and music.  Our documents and other stuff will come later.

Last night, I started preparing to send the defunct drive back to Lenovo.  I used Eraser to securely delete all the files on the data partition.  We basically only had family photos and music on there but they don’t need to see all that stuff.  Interestingly, the drive behaved itself and didn’t produce any grinding noises.  However, when I tried to delete things off the OS partition, it acted strangely, sometimes taking an extraordinarily long period of time to delete a single file.  So, I’m confident that the drive is not healthy and needs to be replaced.

Today, I boxed up the drive and stuck on the shipping label they sent me.  Now I just need to get it to Fed Ex or have them come and pick it up.

Update (01/11/10): I sent off the hard drive on the 5th or 6th.  I’m still waiting for my headphones.  In the meantime, I’ve gone back to using my old Sony MDR-D11 headphones.  They’re very compact for closed circumaural headphones, they sound pretty good, and they’re pretty comfortable.  They’re a little muddier than the Koss model I’m getting repaired and, of course, they don’t have a microphone.  Hopefully, I’ll get the Koss phones back soon – I’ve missed being able to use them for Skype conversations.

Update (01/11/10 #2): I received the headphones this afternoon.  As it turns out, they didn’t repair my old headphones; they simply sent me new ones.  This isn’t surprising at all to me.  In any case, it looks like I’m back in business.  The headphones sound good and the microphone works again.  I’m not thrilled that it cost me about $12 to get $30 headphones replaced, but it’s better than having to buy a brand new pair, so I can’t complain too much.

So, (knock on wood) it looks like I’ve got everything resolved.  My headset was replaced, my hard drive was replaced, and my light bulbs were replaced.  Hopefully, it will be a while before I have to deal with any further customer service people.  I can’t complain about any of the interactions with customer service reps or about the outcome of those interactions.  Everyone was pleasant and helpful but dealing with this stuff takes time and mental energy, not to mention the period of down time during which you’re without the item you bought and have grown to rely upon.

• I’m actually happy with the theme (that is, the layout and color scheme)
• I installed a Lightroom plug-in which allows me to export images from Lightroom directly into PixelPost without having to save a temporary file on my local computer.
• I’m starting to understand how to use Lightroom, which should help me to actually use it, which, in turn, will lead to more photos posted.
• Now that I have this set up, I have more motivation to process my backlog of RAW photos, albeit in manageable, postable chunks.

I posted 5 pictures today to kick things off.  I hope I’ll be able to follow through and continue posting with reasonable regularity.

In addition to adding photos, I hope to continue tweaking the site.  I made a number of changes today to the information that’s displayed when you click on “Info & Comments”.  By default, the theme only gives you the date/time the photo was added and the photo description.  I added in all the EXIF data, the categories, and I reordered things a bit. I was surprised at how easy it was, given that I know nothing about PHP or CSS.

Since I found editing the theme to be pretty easy, I’m toying with the idea of installing this add-on, which enables visitors to see where photos were taken on a Google Map.  I was interested in adding GPS coordinates to the rest of the EXIF data.  Unfortunately, PixelPost doesn’t seem to natively support GPS-related EXIF data, so an add-on is necessary.

In any case, I hope you enjoy my new photoblog.

What I found was the web page of Thomas Fink, who, at the time, was a physicist at the University of Cambridge in England. He and a co-author wrote two scholarly journal articles (here and here) examining the topology of tie knots. In these papers they enumerate all the possible “moves” that go into tying a tie. There are 2 ways to begin a tie knot, 6 ways to continue, and 2 ways to end a knot. By exhaustively examining each possible combination of moves, they enumerated 85 distinct ways to tie a tie (involving as many as 9 total moves not including the termination move, denoted “T”).

In addition to simply enumerating the possible tie knots, they came up with a scheme to rate how aesthetically pleasing a knot is, based on its symmetry and balance. This enabled them to identify the subset of all possible knots that people would probably actually want to use. Not surprisingly, this subset of aesthetically pleasing ties includes all the commonly tied knots, like the four-in-hand and Windsor. However, it also included some very nice knots that weren’t already in wide use. To my eye, the nicest of the bunch is known as the Hanover. It is huge but perfectly symmetrical.

If you are interested in putting this research into use for yourself, I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia page about Fink’s book, The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie. For an exhaustive list of all possible ties, take a look at this page. I have used this page repeatedly over the years because I don’t tie ties often enough to memorize any particular knot, so each time I need to tie a tie, I have to look up the steps. I hope you will find this all as interesting and useful as I have.

1. The Pirates won again tonight (2nd in a row) after losing 6 straight, including being swept again by the Cubs. Matt Morris and Adam LaRoche are officially terrible. Nate McLouth, Xavier Nady, and Ryan Doumit are awesome.
2. I had thought about starting a new segment on my blog where I post a line from a song to see if people can figure out what song it’s from. Then, I realized that, in the age of the internet, that task is trivially easy. I had planned on using the line “Who put the shield around the ‘k’?”, from “K for Karnival” by Nothing Painted Blue but just typing the line into Google gives you the answer. Curse you, internet.
3. I also thought about introducing a repeating segment in which I would post a picture as a RAW file and have people submit their take on it. I may still do this if people are interested.
4. On Patriot’s Day our family had an outing to see the Boston Marathon. On our way home, I saw this:

    

   

   That’s right, a “Wii Sports” jacket. Now, I like my Wii as much as the next guy, but I’m not about to wear something like this.  That said, the “Wii Sports” jacket is a step above the bowling pin costume I saw the same day:

   

   Alright.  I think that’s enough for now.  I’ll post more when the mood strikes.

1. “Zack!” (Interjection) This was used often by my coworkers as a sort of onomatopoeia when something happened quickly or unexpectedly, not unlike “Boom!” My German dictionary translates it as “just like that” or “before you knew it”, but “Zack!” is much succinct and expressive, so I like it much better.
2. “Ratzfatz” (Adverb) This word is used to denote that something is or should be done quickly. I like the fact that its two syllables rhyme.
3. “Schwuppdiwupp!” (also just “Schwupp”) (interjection) This is similar to “Zack!”, although it carries with it more of sense of the unexpected or out of control. So, while I could say “… and then I punched him in the face. Zack!”, “Schwuppdiwupp” would not be appropriate here. Instead, it could be used like this: “I stepped out the door and schwuppdiwupp, I was on the ground thanks to the ice on the step.”
4. “Dingsbums” (noun) This roughly means “thingamajiggy” or “doodad”. It’s a word you use when you can’t think of the correct name for something. This word is becoming less popular in polite society because of the “bums” part, which is reminiscent of the verb “bumsen” which literally means “to bump”, but which has become a vulgar slang word for sex. In order to get past this problem, people often use “Dingsda” instead.

Fellow German speakers, what are you favorite German words?

1) I bought Adobe Lightroom with money I got for my birthday. I’m trying to learn how to use it. Has anyone used it and/or can anyone recommend useful books or web resources about how to use it effectively. It seems like most books on the subject are already outdated (i.e. pertain to version 1.0; I have 1.2) or are not good.

2) Pinhole photography. I’m interested in trying this out. I asked for a couple of extra body caps for Christmas so I might try my hand at making a pinhole “lens” or two. Are there practical considerations regarding the construction of a pinhole “lens”? Is it worth buying a set of different diameter pinholes, like this?  What about practical considerations when taking a picture using a pinhole camera?

• Andrew Bird “Armchair Apocrypha”
• The National “Boxer”
• Portastatic “Summer of the Shark”
• Unwed Sailor “The White Ox”

Andrew Bird came on recommendation from a number of people, most recently Liz.  I got The National on recommendation from Adrian.  I’m not a big fan of the guy’s voice, but otherwise, it seems good.  I’m a Portastatic fan from way back and I think “Summer of the Shark” is the only full-length that I didn’t already have, so I remedied that.  Finally, Unwed Sailor is another instrumental rock/post-rock outfit that produces music good for listening to at work.  This is their latest, so I thought I would pick it up.  Maybe, once I get a chance to listen to these carefully, I’ll share my thoughts on them.  Or not.

I met Liz over Christmas break. She is a friend of my friend Adrian, who is Rad (and also on my blogroll). She enjoys skipping and apparently rides horses with skill and enthusiasm.

I have never met Sarah Louise, author of Many Pink Sneakers; I found her blog through the infamous Urban Saddle (also on my blogroll). So, she has the distinction of being the only person on my blogroll whom I have never met. Congratulations, Sarah Louise! As a male, I am not generally drawn to pink (though I do like orange); however, I have found her posts encouraging, edifying, and entertaining, so she’s wound up on the shortlist of blogs I read.

Anyway, I encourage my readers to check out all the blogs on my blogroll. There’s something for everyone.

Bad news: My computer took longer to get running than I had anticipated because the fan on my graphics card died after I cleaned all the dust out. I looked for a replacement at a local store and was told by an employee that I would have to order it online and it would cost $25. This would be on top of the $90 I had already spent on the new hard drive I bought.
Good news: I finally got the computer up and running. Instead of trying to repair my graphics card, I got a new one for $35. I still haven’t transferred all our old data over, but most of the core functionality has been restored. In the end, I spent more on this project than I had intended, but I also upgraded the hardware substantially, so it shouldn’t need any further work or upgrades for a while.

Bad news: Last night, Elizabeth slipped in the kitchen and bashed her face on the floor. She cut her lower lip and blood got all over the place, including her clothes, my clothes, the floor, the phone, and the ice tray.
Good news: She handled the situation really well. We took her to urgent care and the doctor said he thought it was pretty minor and didn’t require any stitches. She should be all healed in a couple of days.

Good news: It’s almost the weekend.
Bad news: I haven’t accomplished very much at work this week.

Good news: I have new-found motivation to work on the computer I’m trying to set up to run MythTV. I also have some new sources of information (thanks, andyl) on how to get it working, which will hopefully make the process easier and less frustrating than last time I worked on it.
Bad news: If, for some reason, I can’t get it all working quickly and easily, I’ll probably wind up wasting a number of hours of my life in frustration and bitterness.

1. Creative Zen Nano Plus (MP3 Player)
2. My old National City ATM card (Elizabeth likes to play with it)
3. My old AOK Krankenkasse (HMO) card from Germany (see above)
4. “Klear Kloth” Lint-free polishing cloth (in wrapper)
5. A plastic ball (Elizabeth’s)
6. A soft cloth ball that looks like a hacky-sack (ditto)
7. A plastic donut (ditto)
8. A rock Elizabeth brought in from the playground
9. A penny
10. Another penny
11. A third penny
12. A guitar slide
13. A small barret
14. A small container of Playdoh
15. A huge Crayola marker
16. A yellow highlighter
17. A large Crayola crayon
18. A small piece of a broken large Crayola crayon
19. A hexagonal crayon of unknown origin
20. A SD card holder
21. A UConn Huskies baby bottle (missing lid)
22. One stale teddy graham
23. The lid to a marker of unknown whereabouts
24. A card showing Noah’s ark (part of a children’s game)

While it was great to find all these things, I now have the onerous task of finding their correct locations. And, I still haven’t figured out exactly where that noise is coming from.