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With a little luck, I’ll be this cool when I’m all old and stuff:

Filed under: Uncategorized |

I moved the other day. I was a Comcast cable TV and high-speed Internet subscriber at the old place. I moved several hundred yards, into a new place. I didn’t add or remove any services. I brought my own CableCARD (which was on file on my old account) and my own cable modem (also on file).

It’s about the easiest move you can possibly do. And so far I’ve spent more than an hour on the phone and have spoken with 4 different reps, 3 about HSI, and one about cable TV. That’s not including the chat session I had to initiate the move. Elapsed time on the phone or in chat: one hour and 30 minutes.

As of tonight I have Internet and all my standard def TV channels, but the only high def I have is ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox. The other high def channels show as grays screens. The channels I do get are crystal clear.

Their solution is to roll a truck.

Awesome.

Filed under: Everyday, Household |

Everything’s here. The garage is full, there are boxes everywhere, but:

• The baby’s room is all set up, including crib, change table, white noise generator, and baby monitors
• Kitchen is usable. Spices are unpacked, pots & pans are accessible.
• Wine is accessible.
• Our bed is set up and made. We can sleep.
• We have access to the Internets.
• TiVo HD is online and ready for action. No shows will be missed.

Tomorrow I spend a lot of time building out my office, including a probable scouting trip to Ikea for an extension piece to my Galant desk and some bookshelves. Perhaps meatballs & mash, too.

p.s. My employer’s office will be closed tomorrow because of 18″ of snow predicted. Ha ha.

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The house is ours. 80% of our stuff (by weight) is over there now, with furniture and whatnot waiting until tomorrow. I’m a mixture of exhausted and relieved, and the unpacking hasn’t even started. Ugh.

We’ll crank the operation back up tomorrow morning and try to finish up before 1 or so… there’s a chance of rain.

This would be unpleasant in the summer.

Filed under: Household |

In 12 short hours, if all goes well, we shall be homeowners once more.

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By this time next week, our move will be done and we’ll have spent our first night in our new house.

The closing is all set for Monday morning at 8:30am, so by 9:15 or so we’ll be homeowners once more. We’ve received the final HUD-1 — approved by our lender — and will venture to the Bank of America tomorrow for a large-ish bank check.

None of it seems real, since it’s been six-and-a-half months since we made our offer. We haven’t packed the first thing, though I’ve been responsible enough to arrange for electricity, cable, and Internet at the new place, plus a truck to move there with. It’s not quite as large a move as our last one. When we moved from Pennsylvania, we were condensing four bedroom plus a cluttered basement into a 3 bedroom plus garage. This time we’re going from 3 bedroom to 3 bedroom (but with 400 more square feet), and since we’re not using a van line, we can be sloppier about how we pack. For example, on Monday we can throw a bunch of kitchen stuff in the car and take it right over there. It’s only ~7 houses away, after all, so this may be the easiest moves I’ve done.

Some pictures:

Filed under: Household, Pictures |

One of my Epcot receipts from a few weeks back.

My body is a temple.

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How much time do you spend every day walking your PC through the steps necessary to turn your intentions into actions?

Let me give you an example. I want to copy a file from my PC to a remote UNIX server. I know where the file is on my PC and the server name & directory I want to copy it to. There are a few ways to do this, and faster ways if I’m willing to do it via the command line and have my auth keys all squared away, but hear me out:

1. Double-click on My Computer.
2. Choose the drive the file is on.
3. Browse to the folder it’s in, leave that window up.
4. Start WinSCP.
5. Enter the server name or IP and my user name.
6. Enter the password when prompted.
7. In WinSCP, browse to the target folder.
8. Drag the file from my local folder over to WinSCP.
9. Close WinSCP.
10. Close the local folder.

Done! It’s taken 10 steps to copy a file from one machine to another. Your brain knew immediately what needed to be done as soon as you decided you wanted to copy a file, but it then took… what… 30 seconds or so to turn that intent (”Copy blah.txt from here to there”) into the action (file is copied). There are countless other examples of how we have to slow ourselves down so that the computer can keep up, and so far none of the user interface motifs I’ve seen make the problem any better. Keyboard/mouse, multi-touch, gestures, and so on all seem to be strafing the problem instead of attacking it.

Interestingly, I had one of my best human-computer interaction (HCI) experiences two weeks ago at Disney. The wife and I have annual passes for Epcot, so we headed over there after work one day and poked around the Innoventions pavilions. There we stumbled across an attraction that let you ride a Segway. Granted, it’s in a very controlled environment, but it’s still a decent intro to the Segway. What makes it a terrific HCI experience is that there’s not a lot of translation between intent and action. You want to go forward, you lean forward; backwards, lean back. Given the interface, I could envision a time in the future where, if I owned a Segway and rode it a lot, it would become almost an extension of my body. It wouldn’t occur to me that I’m riding on some sort of conveyance… intent and action would become one.

Admittedly, a Segway is a complex device with a simple function, and computers are complex devices with complex functions, so comparing them apples-to-apples isn’t really appropriate. But it does give us a sense of what’s possible… the ideal we should be striving for. The year is 2010: what’s needed for truly brilliant human-computer interaction moving forward?

Filed under: Uncategorized |

This is a draft I wrote on June 18, 2009, that I never got around to finishing and publishing.

I’m an uncle again! My brother’s family added a beautiful baby girl, Blythe Emerson, Wednesday afternoon. By 6pm she had already been on TV! This is the third child for hermano and his wife. They’re old pros at this child rearin’ thing now.

And then there’s me. My wife has a natural level of comfort around little people. Me, not so much. I’ve met a few — I’ve even been one — but I have no idea how to relate to them, what their needs are, etc. But I’m going to learn in a hurry, aren’t I. Baby stuff keeps appearing at the house: stroller, play-and-pack thing, a bunch of clothes… and we even walked over a few blocks to check out a Pottery Barn crib for sale.

We start Childbirth 101 classes next month, with the last one (breastfeeding) mere days before the anticipated due date. Cutting it a little close, sure, but we’re old… too soon and we’ll forget everything.

Everyone says you can never really plan how your life will change once the first one comes. This has a calming effect on me… no need working myself up for nothing.

Yep, life has changed! One thing that strikes me is that our strategy for learning about having a child was all wrong. We spent a LOT of time with the child birth process, and very little time with everything that happens AFTER that. It’s silly, since the nurses and doctors walk you through most everything, anyway. Four weeks of childbirth, and an hour to show you how to swaddle, change diapers, give baths, and so on. *shrug*

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Had a great day today (for a few hours anyway), just the wife and me. Sherri has some relatives who “snowbird” (yes, I’m making it a verb) in Zephyrhills, FL, about an hour from here. They graciously offered to watch Rowan for a few hours so we could have some “sane time”.

What did we do on our mid-day date? Japanese lunch at Seito in Celebration, followed by an amazing hour of just sitting in a rocking chair and doing jack squat. It was heaven. We love our little boy more than I ever thought it was possible, but we both desperately needed to recharge our batteries by having time on our own, and soaking up some Florida sun.

The little guy did swell with his great-aunt Eunice and great-uncle Ian, and Sher and I even had a little time left over for some Celebration geocaching (50% success rate).

They’ve offered to babysit for us every week, but that was before they did the chore today. We’re awaiting their phone call, but we’ll see how it goes.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Filed under: Pictures |