A few weeks ago, when we first saw the apartment Y moved into this weekend, she commented unfavorably on the lack of an elevator in this third-story walk-up. I retorted “you only have to worry about it twice: once when moving in, and again when moving out.”

Man do I regret that. After helping Y move into that third-story walk-up, my body has rebelled. It claims I’ve pushed it too far this time. After the 7.5 mile walk last week, the last thing it needed, it insists, was another strenuous weekend. And yet I compelled it to lift dozens of heavy boxes, beds and bags up and down several flights of stairs for six hours on Saturday, including one particularly cumbersome Ikea sideboard.

In particular, my body is taking its anger out on my lower back, which feels like someone has placed me on a medieval rack and turned the wheel the wrong way, compressing my spine. After rising from a sitting or reclined position, I’m forced to walk in a half-crouch until my body relinquishes its grip around my midsection.

I’m also feeling it in my forearms, which feel like a hot poker was shoved into my wrists. I’m reminded of the exercises I used to do for my stage combat training: I’d take two fencing swords, extend my arms straight out to my sides, to my full wingspan, and describe ever-smaller circles with the tips of the swords. It only took a few minutes to feel the burning sensation. (Don’t believe me? Give it a try with a couple of pens in each arm.)

I’m surprised my legs have been let off the hook. I was expecting my calf muscles have me in throes of agony, but I only feel a mild twinge, and usually only when I’m climbing the stairs. Indeed, I found walking up and down the stairs of the new apartment (as well as the hills of Y’s SF neighborhood) almost refreshing.

Almost.

I’ve already decided: my next move, I’m hiring professionals.

During the damp, dreary darkness of California winter, I looked at buying a new grill. I enjoy grilling, and for most of the year, California has great grilling weather. Buying a grill during the winter is akin to buying a convertible during a rainstorm: salespeople are thrilled to see you and will give you a great deal.

Of course, I never bought that grill.

Now, with Memorial Day and the unofficial start of summer leaping upon us, I find myself again eyeing a new grill. Unfortunately, the one I’m eyeing costs $12,000.

OK, so I’m not really eyeing it so much as ogling it. Only in my wildest dreams (and exorbitant stock prices) could I even consider it. But, oh, it’s so cool.

It’s called the Bread Breaker® Two Dual-Fuel Gourmet Stainless Steel Gas, Charcoal and Wood Combination Grill (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?).

This mofo is huge: a 36″ x 24″ grilling area, 100,00 BTUs on the main burner, a Rotisserie, a side-burner with 22,000 BTUs, ready for wok cooking, a thermometer that goes up to 1,000 degrees, and, as you may have guessed by virtue of its highly descriptive name, it chars your meat with either charcoal or gas (or, oh! both at the same time!). Replace charcoal with chunks of hardwood and you’ve got yourself a mouthwatering smoked barbecue.

Excuse me while I find a mop for my drool.

A few months back at my irregular vision checkup, I learned something that every woman I’ve met has known: I’m color-blind. Not severely, mind you, but enough that I’m unable to distinguish the number in the image to the side.

I believe I’m afflicted by “anomalous trichromacy”, probably “Deuteranomaly”, which, according to Wikipedia, means greens are weak and reds are stronger to my eyes, and affects 6% of men, . While it doesn’t affect me in my everyday life, I found my “deficiency” interesting enough to try operating without the benefit of any color cues.

The easiest way for me to do this was on my computer, where it’s dead-simple to turn off color. I launched System Preferences and opened Universal Access, a preference pane designed to make Mac OS X easier for disabled people to use. You can have your Mac speak the textual interface to you, make the entire screen bigger and reverse colors to white on black.

You can also turn everything grayscale, eliminating all color completely.

I lived without color for weeks (and consistently freaked out people who came into my office), and what I learned is most people have no idea how important color is in communications. Here’s a typical iChat window, but in greyscale.

Can you tell who’s available (green), who’s idle (yellow) and who is away (red)? That’s how many color-blind people see things. Here’s that window again, in color:

Much clearer, isn’t it? (Note, even in color I can’t easily distinguish between green and yellow, and often have to give it a second glance.)

Fortunately, Apple tends to care about the issues of the disabled, and have thoughtfully put options into iChat to use shapes to distinguish state: circles for available, triangles for idle and squares for unavailable.

Not everyone is so considerate. Even Apple’s Server Admin tool uses red and green icons to indicate status. In greyscale, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially with no legend saying “this is what red looks like”.

You’ll find many transgressors in help manuals, where they’ll ask you to, for example, “click the red button to stop recording”.

(I’ve been keeping an eye open for poorly designed applications that use color as a primary interface, and I’m surprised to say I haven’t encountered too many.)

I suggest living in greyscale for a few weeks to see how the other, uh, 6% lives. For the first few days, it’ll feel weird, and you’ll realize how important color is. After a while, switching back to color will either be a huge relief, or you’ll find the color to be garish and bright. (The latter is what happened to me, and I had to get used to color all over again.)

You might also try software that simulates various color-blindness, such as Sim Daltonism or Color Oracle. It can be an eye-opener.

There are many ways of getting a file from your computer to someone else’s computer: you can send it via email, from a web page, or upload it to .Mac’s iDisk. But more basic than any of these is the aptly named File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. FTP is as integral to the internet as the web and for a long time was the primary way files were sent between computers.

Mac OS X provides for downloading from an FTP site (from Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server… and enter the address, e.g. ftp://ftp.apple.com), but surprisingly doesn’t provide for a way of sending files (i.e. writing) to an FTP site. (And the download functionality is awfully slow anyway.) Why, I’ll never understand. “Third-party opportunity,” as they say.

Fortunately, there are many third-party developers filling this opportunity (a search on VersionTracker for “ftp client” returns some 40 applications). My favorite is Panic’s Transmit ($18), though Fetch ($25) continues to be highly regarded, and Captain FTP ($25) has a strong following. If you’d rather not pay that much for an FTP client, CyberDuck is donation-ware (and donate you should).

The problem is if you click a link in your browser, instead of your FTP application of choice launching, Finder tries connecting to the FTP site. This often leads to great pain as Finder chugs through the connection and download, and too bad if you need to upload a file.

No, what you need is for your FTP application of choice (let’s just call it Transmit) to be the default application for all FTP activity.

Here’s how you do that.

First, download and install an FTP application. I use Transmit because it’s fast, well-designed, and I like the company. Installing Transmit is a breeze. Download and open the disk image, and drag the icon to your Applications folder. That’s it. Double-click the application to launch and register it with the system.

Then, you need to be able to change how your system treats FTP links. That means changing your system’s default behavior, and unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to do this. Why, I’ll never understand. “Third party opportunity”. Right.

In this case, that third-party is RCDefaultApp. And its most elementary level, it lets you decide which application opens when you click on, say, a web link, an email link, or, in our case, an FTP link. So download RCDefaultApp, open the downloaded disk image, and install it by double-clicking RCDefaultApp.prefPane

Since it’s a preference pane, System Preferences will launch and ask if you want to install it for this or all users. Choose “Install for this user only” and select “Install“.

Aside: You may get another message saying “The preference pane you are installing is already installed. Do you want to replace the existing preference pane?” Fight your urge to say “OK”, and instead choose “Cancel“. There’s a bug that prevents the preference pane from being installed if you say “OK”. I’ve reported it to the developer.

Once installed, the prefpane shows up as “Default Apps” (look under “Other” if you’re organized by category). Click Default Apps and note the options under “Internet”.

Select FTP, then click the popup under “Default Application” and select your chosen FTP application (in this example, Transmit).

Quit System Preferences, and the next time you click an FTP link, your FTP application should open automatically. Go ahead, try it: ftp://ftp.apple.com.

RDefaultApp isn’t just for FTP applications. It can also be used to enhance security by preventing certain internet URLs, file extensions and file types from opening an application. We’ll talk about that in a future article.

This Friday was Y’s big 3-0, and we celebrated throughout the weekend. On Friday, a small group of friends had dinner in a new Chinese restaurant, followed by Shrek The Third at a new movie theatre. What better way to enter a new decade than with new experiences?

Saturday was the full celebration, with 16 of Y’s friends enjoying dinner at a local Italian restaurant. There was a lot of food, and a lot of leftovers. It was fun pulling together different groups of her friends and watching them enjoy each others’ company. We also enjoyed a few good bottles of wine. I’ll have to get the names.

The weekend culminated in our participation in an annual San Francisco tradition, Bay to Breakers, a 12 kilometer (7.46 miles) footrace that’s been going strong for 96 years. About nine of us took a leisurely stroll through the streets of San Francisco, including a hill with an 11.15% incline, before wandering through Golden Gate Park and ending up in front of the Pacific Ocean. Many of us wore “Over the (Hayes Street) Hill, 2007″ tee-shirts I had printed up for the occasion.

At the top of Hayes Street Hill, we sang Happy Birthday to Y, much to her surprise and chagrin.

The weekend ended much as it had begun, with us eating a late lunch together, this time at a Thai restaurant, before we made our ways home.

The legs of this particular “over the hill” walker are now in some pain, as you might expect of legs which don’t see much physical action anymore. I took a brief hot bath soak in my jetted tub to relieve the tension, and will definitely be applying some Ben Gay or something shortly.

If you’ve never experienced Bay to Breakers, I strongly recommend you do. It’s a one-of-a kind event, with both serious runners and leisurely walkers, and everything in between. There are outrageous costumes and stark nakedness, freely flowing alcohol and staid Jesus-Loves-You/Hates-Gays follies. It’s a genuine microcosm of Life In San Francisco.

On final note, this year Bay to Breakers had a timing chip that gave your start-to-finish time, to the second. Our walking time was 3:21:18. Whoo.

I still own and use Apple’s first iPod Shuffle (the long, white one that holds 240 songs or a gigabyte of data). I find it extremely convenient for shuffling files (not music) between machines, especially if there’s no network available or the data is too big for email. I thought at the time that for $99, they were tantalizingly close to the give-away-the-device price-point, where you would, for example, buy a music album that came on the iPod Shuffle, not on CD.

More interestingly, non-music-playing memory sticks that sold for $30 or $40 a few years ago were likewise almost at the throw-away-device stage: toss some data on it, flip it to the recipient, and walk away. No need to get the device back. But the price would have to drop to under $10 to make that truly viable.

I wouldn’t be writing this if it hadn’t happened.

Sure, you can buy a 1GB Kingston Data Traveler for $11, or the 2GB version for $20, but they’ve been outdone.

A co-worker has been making the rounds, showing off his latest cool gadget: a tiny USB memory stick, capable of storing 2GB of data. The Kingmax Super Stick is literally smaller than a paperclip, consisting of just the USB connector and the memory chip. And it’s only $18.

The 1GB version? $9.

Nine bucks for a gigabyte of data, in a tiny, begging-to-be-tossed-in-the-wash device.

I’ve been enamored of the concept of disposable storage devices ever since I read my first cyberpunk novels some 15-plus years ago, in particular the Shadowrun series of novels (especially the ones by the late Nigel Findley).

The stories were filled with shadowy underground operatives working the Matrix (think body-modded hackers on a future Internet). Payment for services rendered wasn’t cash (that was illegal) or credit cards (that left a data trail), but small, disposable devices keyed with a set amount of money. The recipient plugged the device into a system, punched a few keys, and his bank account grew appropriately.

With these miniscule drives steadily shrinking in size and price for the last few years, I’ve been impatiently waiting for the day when disposable storage devices became a reality, and now that they’re here, I’m breathlessly waiting for someone to create a way for me to “pay” someone by giving them a coded memory stick.

Anyone want to make this a reality?

Note: Good luck finding copies of these books. They’re 15 years old, and an intersection of a sub-genre of a sub-genre of sci-fi and role-playing games. They didn’t have huge sales even in their heyday. If you’d really like to read one or two of these, Amazon sellers have (mostly used) copies. Your local well-stocked library may also do you well. There are also a couple of newer story-lines (e.g. Shadowrun Book #1: Born to Run), sort of a reboot of the series, if you will, but I haven’t read any of them.)

Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com Issue Cease and Desist to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks ¹

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law by President Clinton in 1998 to disseminate and protect the arts in the digital age.

We just heard about this “DMCA” thing today, and thought we’d see if it could make us money.

It makes illegal and prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology that is designed for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure which effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or which protects the rights of copyright owners.

Don’t make stuff that only exists to steal stuff. That’s wrong.

Under the DMCA, mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.

If you don’t stop the crime, we’ll make you do the time.

MRT and BlueBeat have developed a technological measure which effectively controls access to copyrighted material.

Wait a minute! We make “effective” copyright protection solutions. A loophole! A loophole!

That product, the X1 SeCure Recording Control,

We love unNecessary inTercaps.

has been tested by the industry’s standards bodies, the RIAA and IFPI, and has been proven effective against stream ripping, while protecting privacy and limiting infringement liability for users, distributors and academic institutions.

The people who sue children like us. What more can you ask for?

It has been designed for rapid deployment on a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) basis.

Anyone can use it, it’s cheap. Prices so low, we’re practically giving it away.

Therefore, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Real Networks and Apple with respect to the production or sale of such products as the Vista OS, Adobe Flash Player, Real Player, Apple iTunes and iPod.

No one wants to buy our stuff. Maybe legal departments of billion dollar companies are easier to contact than their procurement departments?

MRT asserts Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe have produced billions of these products without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American Intellectual Property owners, actively avoiding the use of MRT’s technologies.

Next up: we’re suing car drivers for using generic gas rather than Chevron with Techron. Don’t you care about protecting your car’s engine?

Failure to comply with this demand could result in a federal court injunction to any of the above named parties to cease production or sale of their products and/or the imposition of statutory damages of at least $200 to $2500 for each product distributed or sold.

Nice business you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

“Together these four companies are responsible for 98 percent of the media players in the marketplace; CNN, NPR, Clear Channel, MySpace Yahoo and YouTube all use these infringing devices to distribute copyrighted works,” states MRT CEO Hank Risan.

We’re not after the gold diggers, we’re after the pick-axe makers. Same reason to rob banks.

“We will hold the responsible parties accountable. The time of suing John Doe is over.”

They don’t have any money anyway.

1. With apologies to John Gruber ↩

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Apple, DMCA, Legal, Media Rights Technologies, Microsoft, PR-Speak

With a title like that, you almost have to click through to read it. I did a few weeks ago when it came across my newsreader, and ended up on the website of Tim Ferris, where he was talking about his forthcoming book The 4-Hour Workweek, subtitled “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.

I ended up spending about 30 minutes trawling through his website, intrigued if suspicious. One of a million people selling “lifestyle redesign”. Work less, make more. Blah blah blah. Heard it all before.

But he had an interesting take on things. He gave an example of “outsourcing” your life to, say, someone in India working as your personal assistant. Bills, research, difficult phone calls to your cable provider. All for maybe $5 an hour.

Perhaps you then choose to live in an inexpensive part of the world, maybe Buenos Aires, and generate income in the U.S. So you’re making American dollars, paying Indian wages and Argentinean expenses. A true “global economy”.

Hey, that sounds kind of fun!

I’ve mentioned this book to a couple of friends in conversation. E thinks it’s hokum; he likes living in the Bay Area, for example, and doesn’t mind spending 20 minutes paying his bills. Others are likewise intrigued but believe it’s just another get-rich-without-trying scheme.

They may be right. I just added the book to my Amazon cart, so I suppose I’ll be finding out myself shortly. I’ll report back….

It’s 6:48pm and I (and my entire complex, and, it seems, much of the area) am without electricity. I have a couple of battery backups, and I have my Airport Extreme and DSL modem plugged into one of them. I’m posting this from my trusty MacBook.

Power has been gone for about 25 minutes now, and PG&E have indicated they “know” about the problem. They expect to have power back “between 6:15pm and 8:30pm”. We shall see….

I lost power twice in the span of twenty minutes, earlier today, each time under a minute. Enough to shut down my TiVos rather rudely. I hope the drives don’t get corrupted.

I have a fair amount of food in the fridge, so I’d rather not be without power for too long. I’m chatting with my friend JS in New York as this happens, and she mentioned that ConEd in NY paid for the loss of her food and any damaged appliances, but I doubt PG&E would do the same. Something to investigate, should it become necessary.

In the mean time, I’ve flipped all the switches in the fuse box to protect my stuff in case of a power surge when electricity finally comes back.

Update, 7:15pm: Power delayed. Automated call from PG&E stating power is estimated to return between 8pm and 10pm. Sigh.

Update, 8:10pm: Power restored. Automated call from P&E informs me power has been restored. Unfortunately, I’m out looking for dinner. I had to hand-open my garage to get my car out. Funny how much stuff around us stops working without electricity.

Update, 8:30pm: Finally back at the house. Lights are on across the complex. Whew. Off to flip the circuit breakers, power on the servers, and post this.

One of the few issues of getting a Nintendo Wii, especially in the early days of our Wiinfatuation, was the constant changing of the remote’s pair of AA batteries. For a while it seemed like we went through a two or three pairs a month. I thought of buying a set of rechargeable AAs, but still didn’t relish the idea of swapping out batteries every few weeks to recharge them.

So I was thrilled when I learned that a company called Nyko was stepping up and making a rechargeable battery pack and charging station. No need to swap batteries, just stand the remotes on the station and boom! automatic recharging.

Unfortunately, when I read about it, the product was still months from being released. When my buddy THW noted a few weeks ago that it was available at Fry’s, I kept an eye out for them, visiting various Fry’s and Best Buys, without success, until last night, when I found myself killing time at the Palo Alto Fry’s.

At only $30 for the ability to charge two remotes, and save untold amounts of money (and landfill space) going through batteries, buying a set was a no-brainer. Most of THW’s points from his report stand for me, except I find the handling of the wrist straps on the remotes to be poorly thought out: if there’s a groove for them, they are not obvious on my system, and having to put them just right to charge the remotes was a tad annoying. Having the lights though does make it less frustrating than it would otherwise be, and no doubt I’ll get used to finessing them.

At four AA batteries per pair, and eight batteries a month, I figure I’m saving close to $100 and 100 batteries a year. A win-win for my wallet and the environment.

My new concern? Running down the battery charge in the middle of a marathon game of Wii tennis, and not having extra batteries….

Technorati Tags: Games, Nyko, Nintendo, Wii