Here is an example, but first some background.

I recently picked up a Kill-a-Watt and have been measuring different devices in the house while on standby.   I want to get a handle on how much vampire power is being wasted.

It turns out that around 60 watts is bleeding from our main home entertainment system when on standby.  That is about 60 watts * 8760 hours = 525 kWH per year.

Aside from a classic power strip with a switch, there are solutions now that supply controlled outlets that only make power available when some master component is on.  One solution is the Zuni Digital smart powerstrip.  Another is the is the Belkin Conserve, though the latter doesn’t have enough outlets (disclosure: those our Amazon links).

So what am I on about?  If you look at the Belkin information, they present a very similar scenario as mine and conclude that the Conserve power strip can save up to $67 / year!  Unfortunately, they are using the wrong price:

Dollar figure based on US Department of Energy average retail price for residential electricity of $0.1132 per killowatt-hour.

Residential electricity rates are often more complex than that, though, and here in the PG&E territory, such a low rate only applies to your baseline usage.  The rates go up based on your usage.  The top rate is actually $0.40352.

If you are a consumer making a decision on saving 525 kWH per year, you should be looking at your top rate — i.e., the top rate you are actually paying to your utilty based on your circumstances.  Because if you shave off kWH, you are saving the money on the top rate, not on the bottom rate.   I’m embarassed to admit it, but our rate is 40-cents.  If I save 526 kWH that saves me $212.    (Of course, if your energy savings drop you to a lower rate, the calculation changs).

The Zuni sells for $39 — that pays for itself in just over two months.  Now, granted, our entertainment system is actually used sometimes, but I estimate it is unused 94% of the year, so that still nets nearly $200.

So, what is the marginal rate you pay?

On the name:

• I hope this “codename Windows 8″ stuff is just a joke.  Just call it Windows 8.  Every other OS that I can think of has first and foremost a number associated with it.  In fact, I think this must just be a joke, because Microsoft is more and more coming around to the “Windows” name as the brand.  Calling it Windows Flambe or Windows Azule or Windows Enchilada doesn’t help with the brand.  8.
• Now, of course, this ignores the fact that Windows 7 is a name, not a version.  So implicit in my plea for Windows 8 is that it actually be version 8, not just named 8.  Sorry if that is confusing, but I’m not the one who decided that Windows version 6.1 would be called Windows 7.

On the new interface:

• Looks kind of interesting, but I’m concerned about the “one interface to rule them all” approach.  Remind anyone of the original Windows Mobile?  Just a small form-factor Windows machine with Start menu.  That seemed logical, but it turned out that it was nearly unusable.  The Windows Phone 7 Metro UI is pretty cool for a phone.  It would work well for a tablet.  It seems wierd for a desktop/laptop, but maybe not.
• The bigger problem is that I hope Microsoft gets that standard Windows applications don’t become productive tablet applications with the addition of touch.  I have a convertible laptop.  It would be interesting to have Metro on it, but that will only solve one piece of what makes it nearly unusable in tablet form.

On Silverlight:

• So, unlike Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 won’t use Silverlight for the Metro UI.  This isn’t surprising.  Microsoft has eschewed .NET for core Windows development from day 1.  OK, from day 2, because on day 1 they said .NET would be the new Windows API.  It never happened.  And this is just another indication that it never will.
• That said, I think it makes total sense for them to use HTML 5 and not Silverlight for Windows.
• This begs the question: if HTML 5 and JavaScript are good for Windows 8, then how long until these replace Silverlight for Windows Phone?
• Which begs another (future) question: what will Silverlight be good for then?

A little snarky, but I’m feeling snarky today.

Update: I’m filling in for Rizwaan at the CAISO on another panel. This time I’ll be speaking about ISO perspectives on DR.

If you are at that conference, look me up. Also, they provided a discount code. Email me at robert at rwandering dot net, and I’ll give you the code.

It seems like many people have had some form of this problem: When the zune software reboots the phone before the update, the phone gets stuck with the “connect your phone” picture.

Some people seem to get errors of some kind or a timeout, but on my machine I never got any error. It just didn’t work. I went through all of the troubleshooters I could find but just couldn’t get it to work.

The solution turned out to be to perform the update on a different computer. I did this with the February and March updates.

Note that I tried to update on the original computer after the February update, hoping the problem was gone, but no luck. I had to do both updates on the second machine. Who knows, maybe when the next update comes it will work on the original machine (or maybe Microsoft will fix this with Windows Update or a Zune software update).

Ray Ozzie was sorely missed in the keynote.  I can’t help but wonder if this PDC was put on just to show that Microsoft is still developer focused even with Mr. Ozzie’s departure.  Ballmer did a fine job this morning, but without Bill Gates and now no Ozzie, it doesn’t feel the same.

Anyway, in terms of the announcements (i.e., the “reveals”), not too much and nothing I would say is truly big.

There are lots of announcements though, but mostly they are incremental additions to existing products (e.g., all the new Azure enhancements) or the completion of initiatives that have been in process for years (e.g., Dallas).

All together the announcements show terrific strides for the Azure platform making it all the more compelling.

Windows Mobile 7 is also pretty cool.  I don’t know I’ll every use it, but I can see why a lot of people will.  I think they’ll have a homerun here.

Here is a live view on my PDC10 tweets:

I mostly agree with what he says, except I think his underlying premise is wrong:

It’s good for entrepreneurs and good for users to have angel investors caught in hell. When they feel they have to spend more money to stay in the game, that’s good for all of the rest of us (press, users, entrepreneurs).

First, there really is a place for the classic angel – that is, the Ron Conway kind that is in it to help entrepreneurs succeed.  I don’t think it helps anybody if these angels are “in hell.”  The angels that Robert talks about are really VC in my book and frankly I don’t think they belong “in hell” either.  Now some do, of course . . .

Second, more money thrown at entrepreneurs is not in and of itself a good thing. On some level it gets more people building companies, but does it really get more people innovating?  Before the “dot bomb” hit, the same thing was happening in VC.  Everyone and their brother formed a venture company and all sorts of things were funded that were patently ridiculous.  That was a part of why the crash happened.

24 hours later and my GAFD account worked as a logon – and more importantly, my account was integrated – with just about everything.  14 hours after that and I even have my Google Voice account and phone number ported into my GAFD account.

Awesome.

A couple of points:

1. Once you migrate your accounts, it will appear that you need separate browsers for your accounts.  You don’t, you just need to read the following and do what it says for each of your accounts:  http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=182343
2. If you want to move your Google Voice account, fill out this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.  They say it could take two weeks, but for me it was 14 hours.

GAFD being more integrated is actually a great help because I’m now managing one fewer contact list.  Now I’m just hoping for a Google desktop app that can take calls.

I did go back to Chrome after some time as I became more embroiled in the different Google Apps services, but I have always found it irritating that speech recognition wasn’t supported.

Every once in awhile I try it again and found today an important improvement.

WSR does work in GMail now, albeit just with the “dictation scratchpad”, but that is a big improvement.  It doesn’t quite work in Google Docs, but I’m hopeful they’ll get that working soon.

Thanks, Google!

BTW: I actually don’t know if this is Google’s doing or the result of a Windows patch . . . I hope it is the former, otherwise this is likely the end-state.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Nothing in the release mentions the browser.  In fact the part that says “apps do not download any code” seems to imply not allowing RIA at all.  This part is a bigger pain point for users.

But if the Silverlight runtime (full .NET?) or Flash can be used to built full applications, that is pretty cool.

904 days ago I posted Counting the days till Silverlight announced for iPhone.  That sure was more than I expected, but how many more days now?

Mike Arrington says Google Voice Is A Hot Mess Right Now:

About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt.

He goes on to say that sources tell him there won’t be a quick fix to the problem.  Like I said, I’m not having any of these problems, but Google has sold me on the value of such a service – I would even pay for it!

So if this becomes a problem, I’ll probably jump over to Ribbit.  They actually are a telephone company.

Anyway, this new Google feature was enabled on my account yesterday.  While it holds some promise for me once GV is moved into GAFD, it has too many caveats today.  Why?

Because the in-browser VOIP phone is a flawed premise for receiving calls:

• Hunting for the incoming call dialog within a browser tab is a terrible user experience.  Perhaps they can fix this through an extension that allows a non-modal, “always on top” popup for notification of incoming calls. 
• What if your browser stops working, is restarted, etc?  You don’t get your phone call.  Of course, you can say the same thing for the Skype client (i.e., if it isn’t running you don’t get your call), but I restart my browsers several times a day.  And browsers crash a lot more than Skype (or Google Talk), for that matter. 

Google really should resuscitate the Google Talk client – or the Google Voice Desktop App – and enable the same functionality there.  In fact, I’ll go further and say that they will have to release a native Windows client if they want enterprise adoption of GV / VOIP.

Granted, the in-browser premise is great for the casual user, making outgoing calls, or as a backup when away from your actual work environment, but it just doesn’t work as a Skype replacement.

Does anyone know if the the GV Desktop App is actually dead?  The last reference I find to it is the Arrington post: Google Voice Desktop App Launch Delayed, May Be Scrapped.

I was never particularly interested in doing it.  Even though I have been frustrated with the unnecessary limitations of the iPhone imposed by Apple/Jobs.  I know this surprises people who know me – they’ve told me so.  Why haven’t I?  Because over time I have transformed form a gadget-happy tinkerer to someone who just wants these tools to work.

This is in-part due to my experiences with a particular kind of tool: the smart phone.  On Windows Mobile and BB smart phones, I would try 3rd-party software and then quickly delete after crashes and negative battery performance.  I’ve had few similar experiences like that with the iPhone.  The 3rd-party tools add significant utility to the phone but generally don’t break it.  This change in my thinking isn’t just for phones:  I’m shipping back my PopBox today.  Lots of promise, but it just doesn’t work for me with my video formats, and my NAS. 

But I digress.

There are a few things that have bothered me about the iPhone.  None of these are hardware problems, just things I think it should be possible to do with a non-jailbroken phone:

• I don’t want to unlock my phone to see if I have any email. 
• I want notification profile support like on the Blackberry.  I loved the feature where you can put your phone into the silent profile and have exceptions.  Travelling and don’t want your phone to wake you up, but want to accept calls from your family in case of emergency?  No problem.
• I don’t want to navigate around to change a simple setting (like turning off Bluetooth or WiFi).
• I want to use a Google Voice native app.  The mobile Web app is quite good, but it takes too many steps to make a call – and too much time waiting for the page to load. 

Long story short, I now can do all of these things and I am much happier about my phone. 

The full story, though is that I jailbroke before a week of vacation during which I had no way of restoring my phone.  As a result, I kind of screwed it up and didn’t feel like risking uninstalling some apps without a failsafe.  I got home and fixed it (without the failsafe).  All good, but it does leave me feeling that jailbreaking really isn’t for everyone.  As easy as the jailbreakme.com site is, it certainly makes the phone more complex.  I’m OK with the increased complexity – I’m still a gadget-happy tinkerer deep down – but I couldn’t imagine a non-techie dealing with it.

1. The entire event we will be about how users are wrong – that is, there is no problem if you just hold the phone correctly.
2. A dizzying array of evidence will be presented concluding that the iPhone 4 has the best antenna of anything ever.  And that users are wrong.
3. There will be a direct attack on Consumer Reports for their apparent flip-flop and the validity of their tests will be questioned.  After all, the Consumer Reports testers are users and, well users are wrong.  
4. Apple will provide a free bumper to those who request one, but it will be clear that only quitters and the non-worthy actually need one.
5. No recall will be issued; however, a design change is certainly in the works and that won’t be mentioned at all.

I can sum this up as follows:

The Apple response will be that there is no actual problem aside from user error.  Or as I’ve said to a few people, the real problem is that some iPhone users have left hands and they insist on using them.

I was helping my Dad with a piece of hardware that just doesn’t work with Windows 7.  The manufacturer’s instructions say that it will work if you turn of UAC, but it doesn’t.  I had just about given up, and then remembered that Virtual PC is supposed to have better USB support.  I really didn’t believe it would work, but had nothing to lose.  After much downloading, installing, a little rebooting, and more installing, I was able to attach this USB device to an XP Mode VM.  The corresponding software also launches correctly on the Windows 7 x64 desktop. 

It even performs well.  All cool.

The only annoying part of it is that I can’t figure out how to stop the running VM instance without opening the VM and then closing it.  The VM gets started automatically when running the XP Mode application, but there is no simple way to stop it.  I suppose that XP mode is designed for people who run it all the time, but really, no clean way to stop it?

It is markedly slower than Virtual PC 2007. And startup times are six to ten times worse.  Same host, same VHD.  Painfully slow.

I have witnessed this on three different host machines.  I’ve seen other complaints of this online, but all of the suggestions of help completely miss the point.

There are some threads that suggest that it is caused by aggressive CPU throttling.  In a comment on a post, Virtual PC guy suggested that installing SETI@Home might solve the problem.  Seriously?

Virtual PC 2007 didn’t suffer from this problem, so I’m not going to bother with that.  It would be great if I could find confirmation that either:

• Microsoft decided that Windows Virtual PC needn’t support laptops.
• There is a new bug or major flaw in Windows Virtual PC that is going to be fixed.

I have rolled back to Virtual PC 2007.  I shouldn’t really care, except that I prefer the integration in Windows Virtual PC.  I suppose I should move onto VMWare, but I really don’t want to hassle with this anymore.  It works well enough for now.

Microsoft, are you acknowledging the problem?  Perhaps you can blame it on the laptop vendors, but the customer experience is just terrible.

BTW: I recorded a video of starting a Windows 7 guest using Windows Virtual PC, but a 3 minute video of a crawling progress bar seemed intolerable.

• 1% battery life.  If Apple is willing to cripple the phone with no background applications to save battery, then I can believe that disallowing Flash supports this same cause.
• 1% of this is that Flash is “lame” or proprietary or any of that nonsense.
• 98% of this about the App store.  Apps delivered through the browser can’t be monetized (and to a lesser extent controlled) through the App store.  If Flash was enabled on the iPhone anybody could write apps for the iPhone without Apple’s permission. 

That’s it.

The iPhone is as open as is useful to Apple.  I’ll bet that if they could get away with shutting off Javascript on the iPhone they would do that too.  Of course, that would also cause an enormous uproar, so they won’t.  Javascript in the browser is the leak in the App store.  Their only defense is to make their browser lame (or be slow to adopt new standards). 

One thing that backs up my point about the App store is that neither the Flash nor Silverlight runtime is actually banned from the iPhone.  You just have to build it into an iPhone application for the App store and you are in business.  Miguel de Icaza and his excellent team proved that last year (with Mono anyway) as has Adobe with Flash.

What do I think about this?  I find it irksome to say the least, but I didn’t buy the iPhone thinking it was anything but a closed platform, controlled by someone who thinks they know best.  I’m OK with that for now – the phone works pretty well.  Eventually something will work just as well without the restrictions. 

And then I’ll jump ship.

• Hosting HTML
• Context menus
• WCF and REST enhancements
• Support for RIA Services
• Drag & Drop
• Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
• Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4

Lot of other things too.  I’m excited to start using this.  Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.

Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.

He did announce they are giving away laptops to all attendees, though, so I suppose it was worth it. 

I’m going to PDC 2009 November 17th – 19th. 

Aside from releasing Azure, I expect it will be mostly about VS 2010.  I’m sure there will be a “reveal” or two to get excited about too.  At least I hope so.

The best part of conferences is meeting new people and catching up with friends and colleagues.

If you are going too and want to meet up, let me know. 

email me: robert at rwandering dot net.

First some background.  There are two Beatles box sets (i.e., The Beatles Stereo Box Set and The Beatles Mono Box Set).  One contains the stereo mixes, and the other the mono.  Several people have asked me why I would want the mono recordings.  The mono mixes are interesting because they were the top priority back when these recordings were originally released.  Great care was taken to get these mono mixes right.  The stereo mixes took a backseat.  They got less attention, and the Beatles / George Martin weren’t always directly involved.  So does this only matter to audiophiles?  I don’t think so.  In many cases, the stereo mixes involve different source tracks – e.g., the vocal or guitar are just different.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the mono set is way nicer than the stereo one.  Remember though, these are non-audio opinions – I’ll post those later. 

Stereo Set

I first opened the stereo set and was struck by a few things:

1. The whole box is inside of a paper sleeve that looks just like the box.  My first thought was “am I supposed to put it back in that sleeve or throw the sleeve in the recycling?”  I’d rather there were no sleeve.
2. Inside the box, the discs are stacked in two piles.  You can’t get any but the top one out without pulling out the whole stack.  Kind of lame.
3. Each disc is in its own shrink-wrap.  Why?
4. The covers have a white stripe and the Apple / The Beatles logo on them.
5. No extra book, though there is a documentary disc.
6. No Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet (though included as a page in the booklet).

All in all, I’m thinking they should have done better. 

Mono Set

1. The sleeve is sturdy cardboard and slides off of the inner box.
2. Once the sleeve is off, all of the discs’ spines are available to pull out the one you want.
3. Each disc is in its own resealable wrapper. 
4. The covers are replicas of the original releases.  No superfluous Apple logos on pre-Apple records.
5. A nice book that talks about the mono recordings and goes into details on the “Mono Masters” disc that is included.
6. The Sgt. Pepper cutout sheet.

Simple, yes, but much nicer than the Stereo.

Instead of going to the IIW yesterday, I got pulled into a meeting to help work through some client issues.  The actual problems were completely tangential to my role on the project, but given my background I was happy to help. 

That morning meeting became contentious.  After the fifth time of hearing the same inadequate solution with a dose of attitude . . . well . . . I don’t cotton to that.

Kind of a mess, really.  I wouldn’t have done it at all except that I was helping out a friend.

And now, off to the IIW 2009A, day 2.

I’ll post more on this later . . . as time permits.

I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.

The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.

I am making this statement for completeness.