Andy Lee’s weblog

A coworker showed me his iPhone this morning and I loved it. I had been thinking I’d wait before buying one (there are plenty of reasons to do so), but the reviews and the enthusiastic demo from my coworker pushed me over the edge. He insisted that we walk the three blocks from our office to the Soho Apple Store during lunch break. I thought I’d seen online that the Soho store was out of iPhones, but my coworker insisted we go.

So we went, along with another coworker, and I saw the usual long line at the cash register, but nobody holding an iPhone. I asked a store employee whether they had any phones, expecting “No.” When he said “Sure,” I was like, “Oh well, I’ll come back lat– huh??” He asked whether I wanted 4GB or 8GB (I wanted the latter), then he went in the back and came out with one in like two minutes. The box was smaller than I expected, very cute. Another two minutes for him to take my payment with a wireless credit card gadget — no standing in line — and I was done. An incredibly pleasant experience. No need even for a paper receipt. I opted to receive my receipt by email.

Back at the office, activating the phone was very easy and pleasant. It’s done through iTunes. I plugged the phone into my laptop, and iTunes was automatically launched with a message prompting me to activate the phone. I typed in a small amount of information, clicked a few buttons, and within minutes my existing AT&T account was transferred to the new phone. (I was lucky — I’ve heard that non-AT&T people trying to transfer their accounts have had delays of hours or days.)

For best Internet speed, I connected to my office’s WiFi network. I watched a couple of YouTube videos and they were super-sharp. I exchanged SMS messages with my coworker, who as an experienced iPhone user was very helpful in getting me set up with a minimum of fuss. iTunes transferred all my address book data from my laptop to the phone, in a jiffy.

Overall, this gadget is a delight to use. There are so many little things they thought of to make it not only easy but fun. One thing I haven’t done is actually make a phone call. I’ll do that later when I call my Mom to tell her I’m coming over for dinner.

This morning I finished what I started yesterday and played along with the finals of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’m pooped and slightly bummed.

I did fine on the final competition puzzle, which I solved with no errors in 17 minutes.

I didn’t do nearly so well on the just-for-fun puzzle that was used to end the tournament. We had a choice of three sets of clues for the same puzzle: easiest, less easy, and hardest. I chose the hardest, and boy was it hard. The suggested time limit was 15 minutes. Instead of finishing in under half the time, like I did for all seven previous puzzles, I needed one hour of solid head-scratching — from a minute after noon to a couple of minutes after 1:00 — and there were times I thought I might never solve it. And when I was done, even after checking my answers, I had one incorrect square.

There was one nice pitfall in that puzzle that had me going in circles for a large amount of the time, but that wasn’t where I made the mistake. My mistake was in a square where the Across clue was a fact I just plain didn’t know, so I had to guess based on the Down clue. Unfortunately there were two reasonable guesses for the Down clue, and I chose the wrong one. The right one never even occurred to me.

That puzzle is why I’m pooped, but it’s not why I’m bummed. The thing I’m bummed about is an error in the tournament data. For some reason the web site shows I have a 0 score for yesterday’s second puzzle, and that drops me significantly in the rankings. I sent an email about it, but knowing how these things are, I make no assumptions that the data can ever be recovered.

Anyway, the whole thing was great fun and I have high hopes that I’ll attend the tournament in person, finally, next year.

I’ve been a New York Times crossword puzzle addict for as long as I can remember — at least since high school, and maybe before that. For the past few years, I’ve been tempted to enter the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, CT, which you might know from last year’s movie Word Play. Not that I’m a competitive puzzler; it would just be fun to be around other crossword nerds. It would have been especially fun this year to see faces I knew from the movie, and to watch the finals in person.

I didn’t have time to go to Stamford this year, but for the first time I am playing informally online. I entered in the “rookie” category, which is for people who have never participated in person. For twenty bucks you get access to the same puzzles as the real participants, at the same time they do, which today was six puzzles, once an hour. You solve the puzzles in your web browser, and it tells you your score based on how quickly and accurately you filled out the puzzle.

Here’s how I did:

My times ranged from 7 to 15 minutes. I solved each puzzle perfectly until the last one, in which I made one mistake. I’m kicking myself, because I knew the answer. I had simply mistyped one letter.

From what I saw in the movie, conventional wisdom is that you should check every letter of every answer. One year, one of the top contenders blew his chance at a victory because he missed a square. I knew this, but I was too lazy to take the extra five minutes to be that thorough. All I did was skim each puzzle to make sure I hadn’t left any blank squares.

The finals will be tomorrow, Sunday. I’m looking forward to playing along with the finalists. After the final competitive round, there will be a just-for-fun round that everybody can play in. That strikes me as a very nice way to end the tournament.

I came across this thing at MyHeritage.com that tries to match your face with photos of celebrities. They require registration, and though they promise to protect your privacy I have no idea how trustworthy they really are. Still, I couldn’t resist.

For my first attempt, I used a photo from a year or so ago:

I guess I just have that Asian-babe/supermodel look.

Next I used Photo Booth and the camera in my MacBook to take shots of myself at my desk. These were much less flattering, but I figured I’d get better matches with photos that were larger, more forward-facing, more up-to-date hair-wise, and without glasses. Here’s what I thought was the most interesting of those results:

If you want to try this yourself, don’t use Safari. They say they’re working on Safari compatibility, but it isn’t there yet. I used Firefox.

On the one hand, I hate being reminded about the upgrade process for Adobe Reader, because it is so stunningly stupid that just thinking about it sends my blood pressure through the roof. On the other hand, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in noticing the stupidity. Derek K. Miller writes:

Why, if I want to install Adobe Reader […], should I download a program that runs an installer to install some software to download an updater than downloads more files to run an installer that installs software that is way too big and slow to start…

…which then wants to update itself and asks me to quit all my web browsers while it downloads three separate files of between 15 and 32 megabytes in order to go from version 7.0.5 to version 7.0.8?

From personal experience, I can attest that this is not an exaggeration. It’s really that bad (at least on the Mac; I haven’t tried it on a PC).

The saying goes that I should assume stupidity rather than malice. But in this case, for the sake of my sanity, I have to assume malice. My brain cannot accept the premise that someone thought this was a good way to upgrade software. I have to believe that someone at Adobe is deliberately yanking our chains, sort of like the famous Bastard Operator From Hell, except in the Release Management department rather than System Administration.

Quentin at Rogue Amoeba points out a bit of brilliance in the updater for Adobe Creative Suite:

I got a much-needed chuckle out of that.

Like Anca, I saw Little Miss Sunshine yesterday, loved it, and found it a sweet antidote for the depression brought on by a movie I’d seen earlier. (In my case, that earlier movie was Grain in Ear.)

Sunshine’s six main characters, the Hoover family, are introduced in quick succession at the beginning of the movie. There’s the dreamy little girl, the sullen teenage brother, the depressive uncle, the well-meaning suburban parents, and the colorful live-in grandpa. In the space of a few minutes, I liked all six individuals, and felt I knew something about their relationships, and yet I didn’t feel like I’d been fed a laundry list of clichés. Very efficient storytelling, and they made it look effortless.

Some reviews have described the family as dysfunctional, but to me that word connotes a level of toxicity that I never felt among the Hoovers. They have problems and peculiarities, but they manage to communicate pretty well, and it’s always clear they love each other. Kind of like the Simpsons in this respect.

Sunshine is full of touching moments, but it never pats itself on the back for them. By the end, the movie has earned the right to indulge in a relatively over-the-top climactic moment.

I didn’t expect to like Sunshine as much as I did. In this respect it was like another movie about a wacky family, The Royal Tenenbaums. I had a real green-eggs-and-ham thing about that movie. Without having seen it, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it, but after hearing how great it was I finally saw it and liked it. I barely remember it except for Gene Hackman snidely calling Danny Glover “Coltrane.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it as much as I liked Little Miss Sunshine.

Two weeks ago I got a pair of Bose QuietComfort noise-cancelling headphones, and I’m debating whether to return them.

My first comment would be on truth in packaging. Look what it says on the side of the package:

After several days of light use, I can report with absolute certainty that these headphones aren’t assy at all.

More seriously, the issues at hand are comfort, effectiveness, and cost.

Comfort. The first big plus is that the QuietComfort is extremely comfortable. The reviews on Amazon consistently commented on this, and when I tried on a pair in the Apple Store I was immediately impressed. I’ve had mine for two weeks, and I’ve found that after wearing them for a couple of hours, I don’t get the headaches or ear soreness that I can get with other cup-style headphones. No complaints in this department.

Effectiveness. The Bose headphones cut down a significant chunk of the white noise in my office. But the noise is so loud that what gets past the headphones is still enough to bother me a little.

Cost. Cost was an issue to some extent, though comfort and effectiveness were by far my main criteria. The noise of roaring computer fans gets on my nerves, especially when I’m tired, so I don’t totally mind paying $300 for something that’s going to protect my sanity every day I’m at the office. But it’s still a lot of money.

In the end, I’ll probably keep the headphones, out of inertia.

Three weeks ago I saw this issue of Pink magazine in a store window on my way home from work. I feel bad for any woman who appears on the cover — in this case, Hillary Clinton — because from certain angles the name of the magazine seems to be “Oink.”

I meant to post this when the story was fresh, but better late than never.

I hereby apologize to every woman I’ve ever tried this lame move on:

Boy does it look pathetic.

I recently made small changes to two applications that I frequently use. As a result, the hours I spend at my computer every day will be a bit more pleasant.

Emacs keys in Firefox

One of the apps I tweaked was Firefox. Out of the box, Firefox does not support emacs key bindings, which has been a constant inconvenience to me. The basic emacs keybindings are ingrained in my muscle memory. I use them constantly in Xcode, Terminal, Eclipse, Mail, and so on. It’s distracting to have to remember to turn off that muscle memory when I’m using Firefox. One option has been to switch to Safari when I need to edit a bunch of text on a web page, but it’s annoying to use more than one browser. I want fewer tools, not more tools that mostly duplicate each other.

Today I found instructions for adding basic emacs keybindings to Firefox. The instructions were simple and worked like a charm. I’m using emacs keybindings right now as I type.

Border around Terminal windows

The other application I tweaked was Terminal.

I decided to use white-on-black Terminal windows instead of the default black-on-white. This was partly free choice, and partly because one of the shell scripts we use at work forces a black background, and if I stick with black text I won’t be able to read it.

I’d experimented with white-on-black before, thinking it might reduce eyestrain and make syntax highlighting easier to see. The problem was that Terminal windows have no border along the left and bottom edges, so overlapping windows look like this:

The black on black is confusing to the eye.

To fix this, I edited Term.nib in the Terminal app bundle. I selected the view called TermSubview and changed its dimensions by one pixel, from this…

…to this:

I tried altering the dimensions by more than one pixel, but this resulted in a small display error at the top of the window. (Putting on my programmer hat, I suspect the Terminal code is using window coordinates somewhere it should be using view coordinates.) Fortunately, a one-pixel border is visible enough, and while the display error is still there, it is negligible. Overlapping windows now look like this:

I’ve submitted a feature request to Apple asking that they add the border. Writing the request was a little easier, by the way, thanks to my new emacs keybindings.