Author Archives: Alan V

Christmas, tech ranting, and Greyhound poop

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It seems all I ever write anymore is rants about technology gone wrong. This won’t be any exception.

I’ve already ranted about how Facebook logs your search history and when you untag yourself (despite already making it really difficult to do so). This combined with the inability to actually see things you’re tagged in now (recent change?) means I’m once again contemplating deactivating Facebook. I would probably just leave it inactive until I need to contact someone, at which point I would pop on, grab the email address (or I guess send a message?) and deactivate again. Argh blargh why is Facebook so bad?

But the thing that has been bothering me lately is the new version of iTunes, especially since I took my personal laptop (running iTunes 11) for the holidays and was very unhappy with its interface.

Here is iTunes 10.

Along the left side, under “Library”, there are various filters for your library. You can view all of your music, shows, etc. You can also filter down by playlist, or things like recently added or recently played. You can sort the music in the usual way (clicking one of the named headers in the music view). This makes sense.

Here is new iTunes 11.

The sorting of your media type (music, shows, etc) has moved into a drop down, which is reasonable. However, all of the sorting options have moved into the top bar (but you can still sort the old way by selecting “Songs”), where they are somehow treated the same as playlists. These seem like fundamentally different things to me… sorting all files is different from filtering down on files via playlists. Apple, why did you do this? This non-intuitive sorting also means iTunes needs all sorts of special tricks like temporarily showing the playlist list when you start to drag a music file (so you can actually add it to a playlist).
There’s also a bunch of changes that don’t make any sense to me. Previously, shuffle/repeat were specific to a playlist. Now, it seems to be a global state. That means, for example, you can’t just click from a playlist (that was shuffled) back to your full library, since you’ll be shuffling songs in your full library as well. (This was useful when you purchased a new album and wanted to listen to it straight through, but your usual playlists shuffle.)
They have also, for some bizarre reason, decided to treat music in iCloud the same as local music. That is, in your library, you’ll see greyed-out music appear that indicates it’s not downloaded. Which would make some sense except it shows EVERY song in iCloud, even ones you have already downloaded, resulting in many being shown twice. (Yes, you can disable this functionality, but you have to unintuitively go to the “Store” tab in preferences.)

I guess this, in particular, bothers me because Apple is known for being extremely user-friendly. The changes to iTunes don’t seem to make much sense to me.

In any case, this has been 500 words of rant, so I should perhaps talk about nicer things.

I had a Christmas. It was nice. Greg got me a copy of the Wheel of Fortune expansion for Carcassonne. This is awesome since it means we’ll now have super Carcassonne with 15 meeples per person and close to twice the number of tiles (and, most importantly, a larger start tile that starts with 3 separate fields). Woo. He also got me a copy of Thurns and Taxis for my birthday, but let me open it early. Awesome game.

I also received an iTunes gift card that I used to buy some new iPad games. Plague, Inc is very similar to the Pandemic II flash game, and just as difficult. Cytus and Groove Coaster Zero are music games, which I generally like. Surviving High School and Cause of Death are “visual novel” type games, although SHS also has some minigames inside it.
I’ve also been playing Sake Visual’s visual novels since I had lots of free time over the last week. They’re really, really well done (even the free ones). Highly recommended.

Also received an Amazon gift card that I used on their $1.99 albums sale to pick up Red River Blue and Red. I actually haven’t listened to the latter yet, but if it’s anything like the singles she’s put out, I won’t like it. Seriously, why did Taylor Swift veer so sharply into pop? (“I Knew You Were Trouble” is closer to R&B than Country, but it’s definetly pop.)

As for getting home, the Greyhound yesterday was miserable. My bus was scheduled to leave at 12:10. We didn’t leave until after 3 when two buses came and went because they were full (with passengers from Cleveland). Seriously, Greyhound, you know how many tickets you’ve sold. Why is it so hard to get enough buses with enough capacity? The part that really bothers me is that their ticket explicitly states, “Seating is first-come, first-served. In case of insufficient seating capacity, passengers will be placed on succeeding schedules that have available seats.” So they don’t even have to take responsibility if they planned poorly and don’t have enough buses… they just have to push you to the next one (which might not and, in my case, didn’t have enough room).
Never again. I think I’d rather pay to fly home than deal with such a mess again. At least, with airlines, they have to compensate you if they bump you due to capacity (and they have ways to check whether your flight has been cancelled or delayed other than showing up at the airport and waiting).

Yay life. Yay games. Yay music. Boo Greyhound.

Edit: Facebook deactivated again. Good riddance. I really wish people still blogged or used email, because I dislike being unable to contact some people. But Facebook is not worth it.

New phone, new lens, same old Facebook

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I still exist. Things have happened, but I’ve been less interested in writing about them and more interested in just doing them. However, my photojournal has been updated through today and photos has a couple new galleries, so you can hit them for all the details.

The last few days have involved new toys. Last Wednesday, work upgraded my old Blackberry (bleh) to an iPhone 5 (meh?). This was a decent thing, except I quickly found that the iPhone fails at its namesake… that is, it’s a pretty terrible phone. My first day of using it involved lots of “huh?” and “what?” comments from both ends of the conversation, whereas I’d never really had issues with my Blackberry. I suppose the iPhone is better for things like GPS (but not maps? well, at least it has maps…) and apps, but that’s not what I use my work phone for. Both of my primary usages of the phone (email, which was better with a physical keyboard, and the phone itself) have actually been downgraded. As such, that “upgrade” has been a large disappointment.

However, I was recently convinced by Greg to (finally) purchase the 35mm f/1.8 lens I’ve been wanting for several years. It arrived just before Thursday games, which gave it a perfect opportunity to be broken in, and it worked pretty awesomely (for low-light, indoor photography), and continued to be useful every day since (as there have been events every day since). In fact, since I took my first photo with the lens at 5 PM on Thursday, I have taken 1050 photos with it. It’s super fast, it’s super light, it’s wider angle than my 50mm f/1.8, and it’s also super quiet (since it’s a SWM lens).
My only real problem with is not an issue with the lens but with how I use my camera… I always shoot in single-area focus mode, and I tend to leave the selected area in the center and reframe rather than moving the focus point. As a result, when I’m shooting wide enough to get more than peoples’ faces, I tend to focus on the person’s torso rather than their face. Which worked fine with my old (f/3.5 and up) lenses, but fails with my f/1.8 lens since the depth of field is often too narrow to get their face and torso both in focus. (This wasn’t an issue with my 50mm f/1.8 because I can’t frame much more than someone’s face with it.)
So, overall, I’m extremely happy with my new lens. It literally has not left my camera since I first mounted it (even when I had taken my 18-200mm lens along as a backup).

Besides that, as I mentioned in my last post, I reactivated my Facebook account with the goal of using it as a contact directory (and not actually updating it or checking it), and it’s actually working out well for that purpose. However, in even the brief time I spend on it to click through to someone’s profile, I discovered that Facebook now logs (and shows in your history) every search you make (including click-throughs to profiles where applicable). On the one hand, I’m sure they kept this information before, so at least they’re showing it now. But on the other hand, WTF, guys. I’m tempted to once again deactivate my account, but instead I’ve been wiping all information from my wall (“Timeline”), removing all uploaded content, leaving all groups, and wiping my messages inbox. If I’m going to be forced to use you to be able to contact certain people, you’re going to get as little information as possible from me.

Anyway, boo walls of text, so here are some photos with my sexy new lens.





Edit: Okay, Facebook, what the hell?! It’s bad enough that it’s difficult to untag yourself (has to be from the activity log and not from the original post item), but you track when you untag yourself too?! I swear, you’re logging every single click I make *somewhere* and you’re going to regurgitate that information at some point in the worst way possible. :\
Also I can’t find any way to untag myself from recent tags (like in photo album descriptions).
Time to deactivate again? The creepiness of Facebook is seriously overwhelming its usefulness as a contact information directory for me.

Election, Facebook, RPG Get, and internets

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There was an election on Tuesday. It was my first time using a no-paper-trail electronic voting machine, and that made me more nervous that it should have. I then spent the entire day worrying about the results. In the end, it turns out my worry was for nothing, but it was still not a great experience.

To be clear: I am not a Democrat, and don’t (and didn’t) vote along party lines. That said, I think Romney is a terrible candidate (since his campaign decided they would just ignore facts and say whatever they wanted), the Republicans as a whole are an unreasonable party taken over by the far right (like in the general party denial of science, desire to increase military spending while cutting everything else, and goals of cutting taxes for the ultra-rich). It wouldn’t have been the end of the world had Romney won, but I think we would have been set back many years and would come out the other end worse off for it.

I don’t know. I think this article does a reasonable job of summarizing my views on Republicans. I often feel like, had I been born 20 years earlier, I would be a Republican. As it stands now, it seems I identify more with the Green party (90% agreement with Jill Stein) and Libertarian party (80-ish% agreement with Gary Johnson).

I think the lack of an ability to contact friends is getting to me enough that I’m going to reactivate Facebook (probably tomorrow). That said, I still plan to keep it blocked like it is now to prevent it from doing horrible tracking across the web on me, and I don’t plan to actually use it since I still disagree with the short blurb style of modern social media. I just think it would be useful to make sure I always have a means of contacting friends. Stupid Facebook.

Progress continues (slowly) on RPG Get. I have a text-only test deck created, so I should soon be able to see if the mechanics work at all. If so, I can tweak and refine them. I’ve also been feeling the Photoshop itch lately, so I might start designing card templates. We shall see.

I went through today and cleaned up my legacy online presence, which mostly means I went through and deleted old pages from Angelfire. I remembered I had http://www.angelfire.com/dc/alan, but it surprised me when the password reset indicated my email address was also associated with http://www.angelfire.com/pro/gildershadow. It’s kind of interesting to look at the old version of the Shadow and Gilder Shrine. It kind of makes me miss video games. At some point, I should bring my Gamecube (or Dreamcast) back and play more Skies of Arcadia.

Speaking of Angelfire, it’s become rather terrible, but I guess that’s the norm for free hosting sites these days. Its interface is super cartoony, its password reset functionality doesn’t even really work (it errored out on me every time, but apparently the password had been properly reset?), its control panel is super sketchy (throwing errors pretty regularly for things like deleting files), and you can’t change any account information (more errors). It makes me glad I have my own domain now.

I’m bored, so have some quick and horrible Photoshops.

Life in general goes.

Königs-Pittsburgh walk success (mostly)

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The Königsberg bridge problem is an (unsolvable) problem where you want to cross each bridge in Königsberg exactly once and end up on the landmass you started from.

The Königs-Pittsburgh walk, similarly, is a 39-mile walk that crosses each pedestrian-accessible trans-river bridge with at least one endpoint in Pittsburgh exactly once and ends at its starting point. (Thanks to the exploded nature of the 31st Street bridge, this is possible and you can end on the same node you started from.)
Today we attempted this walk with mostly success. (With thanks to Greg for planning the route, organizing the trip, and jotting down the timing information that I have used below.)

Keith, Dan, Ben, Greg, and I started the walk this morning around 5:30 in Friendship, then first crossed the Highland Park bridge around 6:30.

Next up were the 62nd street bridge at 7:23,

the 40th street bridge at 8:14,

and the 16th street bridge at 9:25 putting us in the Strip District where we met up with Owen and had a small ~30 minute stop for snacks (bread, pastries, hot dogs, chow mein).

Next we crossed (in quick succession) the 9th street bridge (where we also picked up a cbuckey) at 10:27,

the 7th street bridge at 10:31 (followed by a quick stop for camera batteries, as Greg’s point-and-shoot was sad),

and the 6th street bridge at 10:54,

putting us in the North Side where we had a long detour up to the McKees Rock bridge, crossing it at 12:22. We had an hour-long detour afterward for lunch (at a Subway). After lunch, it unfortunately started raining, and didn’t let up for the rest of the trip.

Crossed back over the West End bridge at 3:07

followed by the Fort Duquesne bridge at 3:39, putting us at the Point.

At this point, we lost an Owen and cbuckey, took a 20-minute break, and then crossed the Ft. Pitt bridge at 4:10 to the South Side.

Next were the Smithfield Street bridge at 4:34,

the Liberty bridge at 4:50,

and the 10th street bridge at 5:26, after which we lost a Keith.

We crossed the Birmingham bridge into South Side around 6, where we stopped for a 70-minute dinner at OTB Bicycle Cafe.

Next up was the Hot Metal bridge, leaving South Side around 7:42.

About 15 minutes before the Glenwood bridge, we lost a Dan. We crossed that bridge around 8:48, followed by a 15-minute break in West Homestead.

We crossed our final bridge, the Homestead Grays bridge, at 9:54, finishing around 10:05.

Despite my feet still being fine, and over Greg’s desire to “properly” complete the hike, we decided to stop it there (due to the cold and rain and time) and caught a 64 bus home, for a total trip of just over 35 miles. (Hence the “mostly” success of the trip.)

Overall though, the trip went very well. Learning from the Ohio walk earlier this summer, I bought some cloth tape and taped my toes (for padding), then taped them together (so they wouldn’t rub into each other and blister). This worked far better than anticipated, resulting in my feet feeling completely fine up until around the 10th Street bridge, and even then it was more of a “my feet are getting tired” feeling than a “my feet and legs hurt” feeling. (I suspect blisters make me start walking strangely, which makes my feet and legs hurt because they’re not used to it… so normal walking throughout means my legs and feet don’t really hurt.)
After sitting down over dinner, I had fully recovered and they felt perfectly fine through the end of the walk. Even now, I don’t feel any real pain in my feet or legs… they definitely feel overused, but they’re not complaining like they usually do after a walk of more than 20 miles.

Blister-wise I came out great also. I ended up with only one blister (in the weirdest place; on the very tip of my toe, where I guess I hadn’t covered it with tape and so the sock rubbed against it).

More photos can be found at my photos page.

So mission success. Congratulations to everyone that walked, and particular congratulations to Dan for making it more than 32 miles (including his 2-mile walk from home to the starting point) on his first long-walk experience.

In other, non-bridge related things, I went PIUing with Max and Yubin again this past Wednesday, and Thursday was the usual board games night. Yesterday, all four of the other house inhabitants had a pumpkin-carving party on the porch, and it was kind of awesome. It’s been a good week. :) Photos of games and the pumpkins will be on photos tomorrow, since it is now late and I would like to sleep.

Edit: Board game photos are here and pumpkin carving photos are here.