Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

Haven’t written anything in a while, so it’s probably time that I did something just to let folks know that I’m still alive and kicking.

The iPaq saga continues. Thus far I haven’t run into any major issues with the iPaq. I work with Excel files frequently and have run into a couple of annoyances, though. First off, whatever you do, do not transfer files to Windows Mobile until you have unfrozen the panes in any spreasheets you are sharing between desktop and handheld. The silly thing absolutely will not scroll past the freeze point on the handheld. Using the auto-filter feature isn’t quite as bad. On the handheld, it treats everything as hidden rows and columns. Unhiding isn’t that big of a task, but I cannot count the number of times that I have forgotten to unfreeze, sync’d with the handheld and then been unable to work with the sheet on the handheld. So it’s back to the laptop, unfreeze, resync and then I’m good to go.

Oh, yeah. Don’t be surprised when your fonts change. Excel’s default font is Arial, but that’s not what the Excel Mobile uses. Generally not an issue except in those cases where you have changed the background color of a cell. In that case, selecting all and changing the font will not change the font in the colored cells. You’ll have to do those one color at a time.

The handwriting recognition on the iPaq is no good in my book. Of course I’ve often been told that I should apply to a medical school to teach a handwriting course to aspiring doctors, too. So I use the on-screen keyboard a lot. Not a big deal since I’m a decent touch-typist in the first place and don’t have to hunt for keys. The only complaint I have in this department is that I keep missing the spacebar and closing the keyboard by mistake. The autocomplete feature (that’s where you type in the first few letters and it offers you a suggestion for the rest of the word) is sometimes helpful, often not.

Calendar, tasks and notes seem to sync up pretty well in Outlook. I definitely don’t like the fact that you can’t use the Outlook Journal on the handheld, though. I keep track of a lot of conversations, meetings, phone calls, letters, email and whatnot through the Journal on my laptop (very convenient). But there is no Journal feature on the handheld. Anything that I want to do in that department either has to be entered as a note or as an appointment. After I sync, I have to open up whatever I created on the handheld and then copy/paste it into a new Journal entry. Major pain in the patootie.

I had a serious issue with battery life for a while after starting to use the iPaq. Silly thing drained down to nothing in the course of a few hours to a day, so I was constantly having to plug it into the charger. A bit of digging around in HP’s support site and a couple of chats with the techs eventually got me to a firmware update that resolved that issue. My battery now lasts for the better part of a week. At the same time, I upgraded the ActiveSync software to the latest version (4.2 as of this writing) and haven’t had a lick of troube since.

One caution on upgrading the ActiveSync and firmware, though. Make sure that all of your synchronized files are current and backed up before you do any upgrade. Once you upgrade, your desktop will see your handheld as being a new device and it will no longer see your previous synchronization settings or files.

The WMP has been an absolute god-send from my perspective. Once I resolved the issue of synching the music files, I just plugged my speakers into the headphone jack and hit “Play”. Oh, yeah. We be jammin’.

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Saturday, 16 September 2006 by marstinson.

Moved into the Big Leagues, sort of, with my recent graduation from a Palm Zire 31 to an iPaq Pocket PC. Just as an aside, the PPC seems to prove the corollaries to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that processor power doubles about every 18 months. Moore actually said that the number of transistors on a processor seems to be doubling about every 18 months (and it was only an observation, not a rule), but it has essentially the same effect. That  being the case and all other things remaining equal, the corollaries to Moore’s Law say that you should be able to buy the same product at half the price in eighteen months, the same product at half the size in eighteen months, or twice the product at the same price in eighteen months. So after unpacking it and checking out what was there, it seems that it packs about the same punch (with multiple times the memory) as the 386 machine that I had sitting on my desk about 10 or 12 years ago.

I purchased it as a factory refurbished unit on eBay and ended up with the same product and a 3-year warranty at $100 less (including shipping) than I would have paid at my local CompUSA. So, all in all, I’m thinking that I got a decent deal on it.

After unboxing it and doing and requisite amount of drooling and “wooooooo!” on my new purchase, I sat down to set it up. A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. First off, much to my dismay, it will only sync through its cradle, unlike my Zire, which sync’d through a standard USB. I got a little attachment that let me recharge it without the cradle, but nothing else as far as sync’ing. I found that to be a bit disheartening because it means carrying around more cables and junk, which is definitely not something that I need. The other thing that hit me was the almost complete lack of documentation. I’m not saying that I didn’t get manuals with it, because I did. But the manuals only dealt with the initial setup and hardware end of things; nothing on Windows Mobile or the applications that came preinstalled. If anyone else finds themselves in the same boat, Microsoft was kind enough to make their documentation available online.

To give HP and Microsoft credit where it’s due, the initial setup was a snap. I installed the battery and hooked it up to the charger (it came about 98% charged). After a little while, the charging light stopped flashing, so I dropped in the CD and installed the drivers and ActiveSync (I didn’t need any of the other bundled software), rebooted and plugged the cradle into a USB port. DIY-ers TAKE HEED: as a general rule for any HP product, install the drivers before you hook anything else up. Plug-n-Play detected the new device, installed the appropriate drivers and began to sync up immediately. No fuss, no muss, no bother. And on an even brighter note, unlike my Palm device, the iPaq will sync with multiple PCs. The only restriction is that you can only sync your Outlook email on one machine. No biggie (I’ll probably change my tune on that in a few weeks, but it’s no biggie today).

 The acid test (and the reason I went with an iPaq rather than with a fancier Palm) was sync’ing Windows Media Player. After all of the hassle that I’ve gone through over the past few weeks to whip my jams into some semblance of order, I decided that not listening to them would be a crime. So the prime requirements were that whatever device I ended up with had to be able to deal with Office files in their native formats, had to be able to sync with Windows Media Player and had to use SD cards for storage expansion. Just about everything else was negotiable. As it turned out, the iPaq met the requirements at a price that didn’t make me do much more than wince a bit.

The first order of business was going to be to set the thing up to use my home wireless network. This is where I first noticed the almost complete lack of decent documentation. Had I not known a bit about configuring wireless devices, I’d have been in a world of hurt as far as setting it up. And to make matters worse, finding my handheld’s MAC address was a good two-hour task. Most laptops have a nice little bar-coded sticker somewhere in or near the battery compartment that has the MAC address of the wireless card for that unit (PC cards have a sticker on the back of the card itself). But not the iPaq. No stickers and nothing in the documentation. And since I’m pretty clueless on Windows Mobile (this is my first device with that OS), I spent the better part of two hours tapping this, that and the other, hoping to kind of blindly stumble onto the information that I needed.

See, my home wireless network uses MAC address filtering as one of its security meausures. Not only to you have to know the SSID of the network (which is not broadcast) and have the proper key, the device’s MAC address also has to be on the “approved” list or it’s not connecting. Period.

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t getting anywhere and hopped online to HP’s technical support site, hoping to get a little joy from that end. Boy, was I sadly mistaken. After being told that someone would be with me in about 5 minutes (automatically generated chat message), I sat down to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait. After close to 30 minutes, I gave it up as a lost cause and went back to my “tap and hope” scheme. It eventually paid off and I found the MAC address, which just goes to show that even a blind hog finds the occasional acorn. With that in hand, I set up my access point and everything was off and running.

Web access was decently speedy, and all of the web pages that I went to loaded and worked relatively well. Except for Microsoft, the web designers didn’t take handheld displays into account, so everything was a bit cramped, but otherwise functional. I was not able to get into my Hotmail account initially, but was able to get in a day or so later. Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe there was a problem with rendering. Who knows? But it worked eventually, which was all I wanted in the first place.

Anyway, as I said earlier, the acid test was Windows Media Player. One of the first things that I tried to do was to sync my SD card with my laptop. It was pretty much a situation of drag the song that I wanted to the sync list (or right-click and tell it ”add to the sync list”) and then click “Start Sync”. Worked just fine except for one itty-bitty problem: it took two to three minutes to synchronize each song and wouldn’t do more than 15 or 20 songs at a time before generating errors. On a song-at-a-time basis this is probably not that big of a deal. But when you’re trying to fill a 1GB flash card, that’s a couple of days of waiting for the sync to finish. And that was also unacceptable.

So, my next idea was to try to use the SD card as a simple storage device. It sync’d up just fine with WMP and only took a second or two per song. But anything that was DRM-protected (which is most of my library on the laptop) refused to play on the hand-held. Anything that was non-DRM-protected (like my ripped CDs) played just fine. Hmmmm. There has to be a better way of doing things.

HP’s technical support was about useless on this issue. And while an answer to my questions about the time it takes to sync might eventually appear on the Microsoft Newsgroups, I’ve seen nothing in 24 hours. So it appears that if I want to synchronize my music on the iPaq, my only viable options are to make sure that everything gets converted into non-DRM-protected .mp3 files and then transfer those to the SD card by treating it as an extrnal storage device. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Beyond that issue, though, the iPaq is a neat little device. Again, I’m rather disappointed to find that it cannot be sync’d except through its cradle. But as another bright issue, battery power seems to be lasting a lot longer than my Palm. I went to do some shopping this morning, jamming the whole way. It took a couple of hours and had drained less than 10% of my battery. In comparison, a couple of hours of jams would have knocked about 50% of the battery off of my Palm.

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Saturday, 9 September 2006 by marstinson.

On their “Free Speech” segment, the CBS Evening News ran an item on the  Congress being out on vacation again and how everyone should get to take as many days of vacation time as they do. More power to ‘em, I say. Think about it - if they aren’t sitting there holding useless hearing, making speeches, and generally making nuiscances out of themselves, they’re raising your taxes, eroding your civil liberties and generally making your life miserable.

Bah! Let ‘em stay on vacation. Think we could maybe pay them to NOT work? It would probably be cheaper in the long run.

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Monday, 4 September 2006 by marstinson.

Many years ago, my parents gave me some old books that had been laying around the house and no one had read in years. For the most part, they were books containing important pieces by various philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century and were not the sort of thing that a young buck would find terribly interesting. But I’d dig into them from time to time just to give the synapses a workout. Among these philosophical writings was “The Manual” by Epictetus, sometimes called the “spokesman” of the Stoic philosophers. At the beginning of “The Manual,” Epictetus first introduced me to the concept of binary thinking.

For the non-geeks out there, binary only contains two states: 1 and 0. Something is either on or off, true or false, black or white, greater than or not greater than, etc. There isn’t any middle ground because the number system doesn’t permit anything other than one thing or its opposite. Here, then, is the introduction to “The Manual”:

Of all existing things some are in our power, and other are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everyhing which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, eveyrhing whcih is not our own doing. Thing in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammelled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hinderance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imatching that what is naturally slavis is free, and what is naturally another’s is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you thing that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another’s is indeed another’s, no one will ever put compulsion or hinderance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

Essentially, everything that happens falls into one of two categories: it’s either something you can control or it’s something that you can’t control. In many ways, it’s the serenity prayer: “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To put it in modern terms, Epictetus is essentially saying that everything comes down to what you choose it to be. Think about it — if there’s a meteor hurtling toward your home at this very red-hot moment, there isn’t anything you can do to change that. The meteor will do what it will do and all you can control is whether you and your stuff are going to be there when it hits. If the company is looking at downsizing, you can’t control the decision on whether you’ll have a job tomorrow or not. All you can do is influence the choices of the person making that decision: is keeping you on the payroll more beneficial than not keeping you on the payroll? But in the final analysis, that decision is completely out of your control. “Mandatory” meetings? Same thing. You don’t have to go. But is the bit of extra free time you gain worth the job you may lose? “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” (Personally, I think you’re hosed either way.)

This is something that my students have a hard time getting their heads around: “Mister, do we have to do the assignment?” Answer: “No, of course not. The only thing you have to do is be born and die; everything else is optional and comes down to choosing the consequence that you prefer.”

So, all of this begs the question. If we are what we choose to be, where does this leave non-protected speech? If I choose to phrase something in a particular way and you choose to take offense, is that my problem or is it yours? Granted, if my words are calculated to get a rise out of you and I get a punch in the nose for my efforts, then I suppose that I got what I wanted. But if I tell a joke that you find offensive, is it not your choice to be offended rather than to see the humor that was intended? Why am I, then, responsible for your choice?

 So rather than, “You have insulted me,” should you not be saying, “I choose to give you power over how I feel”? Or, perhaps more precisely, “I choose to be insulted/offended because in this way I do not have to expend any effort to control myself or understand why I feel as I do.” It is a heady feeling to know that I, a simple techno-geek, can have such power over others. But it must also be true that I have that power because someone gave it to me.

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Thursday, 24 August 2006 by marstinson.

I mentioned Tchaikovsky’s Festival Overture: 1812 in my other post today. I feel that I should point out for the record that the piece, even though played on the 4th of July, has nothing whatsoever to do with American history. It celebrates the defeat/retreat of the Napoleon’s Grand Armee at Moscow, which was (arguably) the turning point of the Napoleonic Wars.

I should also note that Tchaikovsky indulged in a bit of artistic license with the piece. Napoleon was not defeated by the Russian military at Moscow. It was the arrival of the Russian winter, not a hail of Russian bullets that defeated Napoleon. Also, neither La Marsailles nor God Save the Tsar would have been in use in 1812. Nevertheless, as a festival piece, composed on commission, Tchaikovsky would have been obligated to put the best face on the event and would have undoubtedly drawn upon themes with which his audience would have been familiar. Historical nit-picking aside, it is an undeniably powerful and enduring piece.

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Thursday, 24 August 2006 by marstinson.

The 100 Greatest Songs list got me to thinking and doing a little looking around. Rolling Stone, for example, recently compiled its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. So what, exactly, makes a great song? I think there are a few approaches that you could take, but I don’t think there is any criteria that everyone would agree on.

Before I go any farther, I should point out that I’m very eclectic in my musical tastes. You don’t have to dig very far into my library to run into baroque, classical, romantic, modern, rock, jazz, punk, funk, metal, opera, impressionist, country, pop, folk, gospel, New Age, etc. About the only things I’d almost guarantee that you wouldn’t find are rap and hip-hop. To my mind, it’s arguable whether those would even qualify as “music.” It might be because I’m just an old fogey or don’t understand the genres, but those styles just don’t do anything for me and generally turn me off. Doesn’t mean that they’re bad, though. It simply means that I don’t care for ‘em. So, that being said, let’s get on with it.

I guess one of the first criteria you could use to identify a “great” song is longevity. Is the song still being played? The idea behind this criteria is fairly simple: Mozart was a great composer because his music is still being played more than 300 years after he died. While the idea has some merit, it does have a few drawbacks. On the exclusionary side of the problem (songs that would not make the cut), what about a really great song that first appeared last week? That hardly qualifies as long-lived. On the inclusionary side of the idea (songs that make the list), does the song get played because it’s great or for some other reason?

Having worked in the radio business for a few years, I can tell you that it works pretty much like any other business. Whether you know it or not, radio’s business is actually selling airtime to advertisers. A station can charge x-dollars for a 30-second spot because a ratings service (Arbitron, for example) tells an advertiser that a 30-second spot aired during a particular time on a particular station will most likely be heard by a certain number of listeners. The more listeners that a station can deliver, the more they can charge the advertisers. By being able to charge more for the airtime, the station has more money available to attract more listeners through promotions, better air-talent (”air-talent”? I always tell people that I used to work as a “disc jockey”). But because the public is fickle, stations have to continue to deliver what the public wants to hear if they want to stay in the game.

For example, the “oldies” station out this way used to play stuff running from the mid-50’s to about the mid-70’s. They have recently changed their format somewhat and an “oldie” is now running from the late 60’s into the mid- to late-80’s (which makes me a real “oldie,” I guess, because I used to play some of that stuff when it was still on the charts). There is almost nothing earlier than about ‘66 or ‘67 that gets any airtime and most of what they play is in the ‘75 to ‘85 timeframe. Also, the music is now more on the “edgy” side. Not necessarily metal, but no Manilow, for example. Why? Because that’s what the listeners want to hear and if they don’t hear it, they change the channel.

So that kind of shoots a big hole in longevity as a major criterion. Half or more of the first 25 of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest are pre-1970. While people of my generation would remember them, lack of air-play kind of defeats the idea of a long-lived song. Now, granted, I don’t live in a major market and I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on what gets airtime in places like New York, Chicago, Washington, Houston, etc. But on the other hand, this isn’t Podunkville, Iowa, where both stations are mom-and-pop operations, either. But still, doesn’t that change the criteria from “still getting airtime” to something like “still getting airtime in the top radio markets”? Or, more to the point, does longevity have more to do with popularity than anything else?

And what, exactly, is popularity? I’m one of those folks that really liked Frank Zappa’s music (’course Al Gore said that he’s a Zappa fan, too, so take that for what it’s worth). But Zappa only cracked the Top 40 once (”Valley Girl” peaked at #32 in 1982). Does that mean that his music wasn’t great? This is a guy that should be ranked right up there with Hendrix, Page, Santana and Van Halen for the sounds that he could get from a guitar and his compositions run the gammut of musical styles. Or how about the Grateful Dead? (To my knowledge) One decent hit - “Touch of Grey,” which topped out at #6 in 1987. Very dedicated fan following, although not huge like the Beatles or Rolling Stones. But eighteen of their 55 albums went Gold or better. To be fair, 16 or so of those 55 were released after Jerry Garcia’s death and the band released a lot of compilations and retrospectives, so it’s not 55 albums of completely original content, but it’s still a very prolific showing. I think the work of Zappa and The Dead would definitely qualify in the “popularity” department, but nothing in Rolling Stone’s top 500 and I’d still argue in favor of calling them “great” even though I’m nowhere close to being a Dead Head.

So if we can’t judge “great” by longevity or popularity, then what else? I suppose we could always “follow the money” and look at profits (which might also be a “popularity” factor). After all, there’s a tidy chunk of change tied up in Elvis’ estate or in the Beatles’ Apple catalog. But only 6 of Elvis’ more than 125 Top 40 hits (US - I didn’t include UK hits) made the cut for the 500 Greatest (something like 20 or 25 of The Beatles’ songs made the cut). But, honestly, how much did Chuck Berry actually make off of “Johnny B. Goode” (number 7 of the top 500) or did the Isley Brothers make off of “Shout”? I’m not disputing their being included, but considering the treatment of Black artists at the time, I’d be very surprised if they were paid more than a pittance for their work. And is a profitability criterion adjusted for inflation? A million-seller in 1955 must have certainly been something much bigger than a million-seller in 1995.

OK, if not profitability, how about musical impact? What I mean by that is influence upon other composers and musicians. All musicians and composers draw upon what others have done. While not necessarily copying, they are nevertheless drawing inspiration from or trying a different take on an earlier theme. But if that’s the case, aren’t all of these songs influenced by the “classical” composers (by “classical,” I mean “symphonic” - “Classical” has a very definite meaning, referring to compositions of late-18th and early-19th century composers) and in that sense, all of the top 500 are derivative works of other composers. Shouldn’t those other composers receive their due as well?

No, I think “greatness” is more subjective than objective. What is great to one person may very well be noise to someone else. Music is, perhaps, the most pervasive and consequently the most subjective of the arts. That and the desire to visually express oneself permeate the human experience from the dawn of time. Music touches something inside of each of us. What it touches and how it touches are going to vary from person to person.

I’m not a terribly emotional person (overtly, anyway). But Tchaikovsky’s Festival Overture: 1812, Op. 49, can usually pull a tear from my eye, especially when a chorus is used for the chants and folk dances rather than being played by the strings, as Tchaikovsky wrote it. But most people find that the piece evokes a sense of excitement when they hear it (I mean, really, tears on the 4th of July?). Are they wrong? Of course not. It’s just that the piece touches something different in them, and that’s perfectly cool.

My list of the top 500 songs of all time would not have included Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which came in at #1 (wonder why? Consider the source), but would have included Mozart, Beethoven, Dizzy Gillespe, Louis Armstrong, both Gershwins and a host of others that the average reader of Rolling Stone would probably never consider (or maybe even have heard of). ‘Course I’d also have to go back and look at what a “song” is before making that list, but that’s another issue entirely.

So I guess that the short version of all of this is that if you think a song is “great,” if it somehow touches something in you (for better or worse), then it’s a great song and you should revel in it and to hell with what Rolling Stone or John Sandford or I may think about it. Rock on!

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Sunday, 20 August 2006 by marstinson.

My father passed along a book, “Broken Prey,” by John Sandford (available from amazon.com or bn.com - no, I’m not plugging their sites). The book itself was nothing special - a police-hunt-down-the-serial-killer kind of thing. All in all, a decent read, but nothing to get terribly excited over. Except for one item - the protagonist is compiling a list of the 100 greatest songs of the rock era. The creation of his list is a kind of subplot running through the whole book and the end result was kind of interesting, especially for the conspicuous absence of anything by the Beatles. So, for what it’s worth, here’s John Sandford’s take on the best songs of the rock era:

1. Sharp-Dressed Man (ZZ Top)
2. Legs (ZZ Top)
3. Mustang Sally (Wilson Pickett)
4. Superman’s Song (Crash Test Dummies)
5. Rock On (David Essex)
6. Radar Love (Golden Earring)
7. Heart of Glass (Blondie)
8. White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
9. Somebody to Love (Jefferson Airplane)
10. Layla (Derek and the Dominoes)
11. Roadhouse Blues (The Doors)
12. House of the Rising Sun (The Animals)
13. Sweet Emotion (Aerosmith)
14. Dude (Looks Like a Lady) (Aerosmith)
15. Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen)
16. Born To Run (Bruce Springsteen)
17. Thunder Road (Bruce Springsteen)
18. Every Breath You Take (The Police)
19. Heart of Saturday Night (Tom Waits)
20. Hot For Teacher (Van Halen)
21. Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who)
22. Hotel California (Gipsy Kings)
23. Give Me One Reason (Tracy Chapman)
24. Down On The Corner (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
25. Lyin’ Eyes (The Eagles)
26. Life In The Fast Lane (The Eagles)
27. Skateaway (Roller Girl) (Dire Straits)
28. Mary Jane’s Last Dance (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)
29. Me and Bobby McGee (Janis Joplin)
30. Black Water (The Doobie Brothers)
31. I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (Joan Jett and the Blackhearts)
32. Jack and Diane (John Mellencamp)
33. Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) (Pink Floyd)
34. Money (Pink Floyd)
35. Piano Man (Billy Joel)
36. After Midnight (Eric Clapton)
37. Lay Down Sally (Eric Clapton)
38. You Shook Me All Night Long (AC/DC)
39. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (AC/DC)
40. Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress) (The Hollies)
41. Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan)
42. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (Bob Dylan)
43. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bob Dylan)
44. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (The Rolling Stones)
45. Brown Sugar (The Rolling Stones)
46. Sympathy for the Devil (The Rolling Stones)
47. Anarchy in the UK (Sex Pistols)
48. Sugar Magnolia (Grateful Dead)
49. Slow Hand (Pointer Sisters)
50. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (Eurythmics)
51. Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley)
52. Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)
53. Night Moves (Bob Seger)
54. Bye Bye Love (The Everly Brothers)
55. Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix)
56. Lola (The Kinks)
57. Tender Is The Night (Jackson Browne)
58. Louie, Louie (The Kingsmen)
59. Bad to the Bone (George Thorogood and the Destroyers)
60. Turn the Page (Metallica)
61. Sweet Home Alabama (Lynryd Skynryd)
62. We Will Rock You (Queen)
63. Ramblin’ Man (The Allman Brothers Band)
64. Rock and Roll (Led Zepplin)
65. What’s Love Got to Do with It (Tina Turner)
66. Born to be Wild (Steppenwolf)
67. With or Without You (U2)
68. Paranoid (Black Sabbath)
69. Blue Morning, Blue Day (Foeigner)
70. White Wedding (Billy Idol)
71. Sweet Child o’ Mind (Guns N’ Roses)
72. Paradise City (Guns N’ Roses)
73. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Guns N’ Roses)
74. Walk on the Wild Side (Lou Reed)
75. Feel Like Makin’ Love (Bad Company)
76. Rock of Ages (Def Leppard)
77. Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
78. Devil with a Blue Dress On (Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels)
79. Respect (Aretha Franklin)
80. I’m In the Mood (John Lee Hooker and Bonnie Raitt)
81. I Got You (I Feel Good) (James Brown)
82. Unchained Melody (The Righteous Brothers)
83. Little Red Corvette (Prince)
84. Roll Over Beethoven (Chuck Berry)
85. Mr. Tambourine Man (The Byrds)
86. Ohio (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)
87. Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly)
88. Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
89. Oh, Pretty Woman (Roy Orbison)
90. Runaway (Del Shannon)
91. Walk This Way (Run-DMC)
92. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay (Otis Redding)
93. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
94. Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul Simon)
95. Who Do You Love? (Bo Diddley)
96. One Toke Over the Line (Brewer and Shipley)
97. I Wanna Be Sedated (The Ramones)
98. Should I Stay or Should I Go (The Clash)
99. Burning Down the House (Talking Heads)
100. Jazz Suite No. 2: Waltz 2 (Dmitri Shostakovich)

While most of the songs would definitely qualify as rock, the list is not songs of a particular genre, but of the time period from about the mid-50’s to the mid-80s. I was surprised to find that I have about a third to half of them either on CD, cassette or vinyl. There are a few that I haven’t heard (the Gipsy Kings cover of “Hotel California,” for example). But I was surprised to find that almost all of them are available through one or more of the various online music services. One that does not seem to be is Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”, which appears to only be available on CD. Why? I have no idea - just about everything else she’s done is available, but not that album. Royalty or copyright issues, maybe?

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Saturday, 12 August 2006 by marstinson.

Today was the first real opportunity that I had to take this puppy out for a spin in a full-blown production environment. It’s one thing to piddle around with software at home or in the office and another thing to have to do your daily grind with it. Some interesting problems cropped up.

The first problem almost fried my laptop (literally). I was running a couple of minutes late getting out of the house this morning, so I didn’t take time to shut down the laptop. Instead, I just closed the lid, packed it up and left. Normally this will put the machine into stand-by mode or whatever you specified when you set up the OS. Like XP, Vista offers a variety of choices of what to do when you close the lid, press the power button, etc. As it turned out, none-of-the-above was the result. Got to work, sat through a couple of short meetings and then pulled out my laptop for the normal workday thing.

Turns out that closing the lid did absolutely nothing except hide the fact that nothing happened. Net result: battery power drained to almost zip. If I’d gone 5 or 10 more minutes, it would have been completely drained. Temperature inside my laptop bag? “Slow oven” comes to mind, and then there was that unmistakable smell of overheated processor. Far as I can tell, no permanent damage was done, although the overheating may have contributed to later problems. We’ll just have to see. Anyway, off to the races.

Network connectivity proved to be very problematic. Initially everything appeared to be be more or less normal. Vista recognizes when you change networks. I use a private IP addressing scheme on my home network and the school uses a different one. No wireless connectivity yet, but I’m told that it’s coming. Anyway, as soon as I plugged in the patch cable, Vista acquired its IP address and went to town. I was able to access my email, use IE for browsing, remote in to other machines, and so forth. Vista’s network discovery protocols seem to work a bit more efficiently than the old NetBIOS stack did, which was a pleasant surprise. Everything appeared to be working to or in excess of expectations.

By lunchtime, however, the situation started to deteriorate. I lost access to email first. I had not yet had an opportunity to set up Outlook to connect to our servers (we use Novell GroupWise), so was relying on web access rather than POP/SMTP connections. The first thing to disappear was my access to the login page through my “Favorites” shortcut. Hmmm. OK, fine. If the shortcut won’t work, there’s always the link on the intranet homepage. Homepage loads fine, but clicking the link does nothing. Puzzling. Well, perhaps it’s IE? I normally run three browsers: IE, Firefox and Opera. It’s not that I’m a rabid anti-IE guy or anything, though. Because I do a bit of web development, I want to make sure that whatever I do will render properly regardless of the browser being used. Firefox behaves in pretty much the same way that Netscape does, so anything rendering well in Firefox will do the same in Netscape. Got to admit, though, that I do like the way that Opera has implemented the W3C standards, but I digress.

Installing the other browsers was something that I had overlooked when setting up my laptop, so it’s off to Mozilla.com to get the Firefox installer. Firefox was one of the apps that continued to work well when I tried the upgrade a couple of months back, so I wasn’t worried about compatibility. In it goes and I’ve got email access again. Well, sort of. I had email access for about 5 minutes. Then the bookmarked shortcut stopped working and the link on the intranet homepage died. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice. Unfortunately, the only thing that I had time to do was to verify with our IT department that the servers were working properly - eveyone else still had email access.

Then I can’t even load the homepage. And not just the homepage - I can’t load anything on another system, whether on the intranet or internet. That sound you hear is my molars turning into powder because I’ve got people who need some files that I’ve been working on and I can’t use the district’s email or any of my personal email accounts to send them. So when everything else fails, it’s “sneakernet” time and I spend the rest of the day running around with my flash drive in hand - “did you need a copy of (whatever)?”

While all of this is going on, I also have a crying need to get into a few .pdfs and the Acrobat Reader is another application that I had forgotten to load. But I also know that there were some hiccups with it a while back, especially a compatibility issue with Vista. Fortunately this cropped up while the browsers were still working (sort of).  I found a couple of blog threads that seemed pretty clear that the 7.0.8 version of Reader would work on Vista, but it apparently creates issues for Outlook 2007. Well, Outlook isn’t high on my radar at the moment, so I’ll risk the issue in favor of being able to get to the data that I need and get to it now.

Only one problem - Adobe’s website doesn’t let me in with either IE or Firefox. I can understand not letting me in with IE. I’ve run into the IE7 compatibility issue before at Symantec’s site. But Firefox? I mean really. Everyone works well with Firefox. This just cannot be. But in this case it is. I can’t get the installer from Adobe. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. And willpower is about all I have at this point. A Google search turns up a few sites that host the 7.0.8 installer and I’m able to get it put on and get the data that I need.

Then the next problem - “Yo! Mark! What’s with those Word files you brought me? I can open your template just fine, but all I get with the example file is gobbledegook. Did you drop a corrupted file on my drive or something?” Hmmm. I don’t think so, but who knows? Let me bring you a clean copy. Clean copy is junk, too. Office 2007 backwards compatibility issue? Dunno. OK, work-around time. Since the problem is just the example file, let’s try Office’s new “save as a .pdf” feature. Problem solved, sort of. Still can’t use the example file in .doc format on an Office 2003 installation. Because I was aware of the potential for this problem, I’m defaulted to the Office 97-2003 “Compatibility Mode” when creating files, but “compatibility” doesn’t seem to mean the same thing that it did a few years back.

The rest of the day ran pretty much like that. I can pretty much do whatever I need to do as long as I’m working locally. But no network access after about lunchtime. I still don’t know if all of this is a hiccup in Vista or whether it’s just the fallout from the overheated processor issue at the beginning of the day. Rebooting didn’t resolve any of these problems during the day. But after a complete shutdown and letting the machine sit for a few hours after returning home, network access seems to have been restored. I mean I’m sitting here typing this, after all.

But it does raise the question - with a couple of hundred “eager young minds” due on my doorstep on Monday, do I keep trying to run with Vista or do I fall back on the XP that does what I need done? Microsoft was quite correct in their warning that Vista should not be run on a production machine, especially one that contains critical data. But do I dare to keep trying? The last thing that I need is to create lessons that depend upon network access and then not be able to deliver the lesson due to technical problems. It’s something to think long and hard on, but Monday’s coming and I’ve got to go one way or the other by then.

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Thursday, 10 August 2006 by marstinson.

First off, this is not a bitch session. Vista is still in beta testing and the whole purpose of beta testing is to identify as many problems as possible (and fix them _before_ sending the product out to an unsuspecting public). Considering the number of problem reports that I get from my system, only one has an identified solution - it will be fixed in RC1. The remainder are still showing “no solution found”.

One scary problem is that a corrupted CD-R causes Windows Explorer to crash. In and of itself, this is not such a big deal. Unlike Win9x, Explorer in the more recent NT systems just relaunches itself after a FDGB (faw-down-go-BOOM). The surprising thing is that this issue has now been around for more than 10 years and does appear to be any closer to a solution than under Win95. OK, when Explorer explodes, it doesn’t take the whole OS down with it. This is a step in the right direction. But why, after 10 years of tinkering, does Explorer encountering a corrupted file not just generate a simple “oops! Sorry, dude, but that file is, like, hozed. Have a nice day.” and just keep on trucking?

A couple of notable problem areas that are almost certain to disappear by later this year: incompatible applications and scarce drivers. The vast majority of apps that were written for XP continue to function under Vista. But there are a few that will not run, even in compatibility mode; most annoyingly, the Palm Hotsync Manager. Users have been asking about this problem on Microsoft’s Vista forums for about two months now and not a peep from the good folks at Redmond. In my case, the HotSync manager believes it’s working over the COM1 serial port. I don’t know whether the fault for this lies with Vista or with Palm, but I strongly suspect the OS since the application correctly recognizes its USB connection under XP.

Antivirus is another concern. At the moment only Trend Micro’s PC-cillin works with Vista, though the other vendors are undoubtedly ramping up and will undoubtedly have a compatible product by the time Vista hits the shelves. I’m hoping that proves to be the case because Trend Micro’s product is a beta, too, and will expire at the end of October. With nothing else on the horizon, that means running without AV protection - a scary proposition at best these days.

One area where Microsoft has made a significant change is with system security. The Administrator account is gone. Instead, the first user account created during a clean install has administrator privileges and can then grant or withhold those privileges for later user accounts. To make matters better, all accounts run with reduced privileges unless something requires higher ones. At that point, a dialog box opens letting you know that something needs privileges and offering you the opportunity to provide the appropriate credential. I see this as a good thing and a bad thing at the moment.

This is good because you know what’s running (or trying to run) on your system. It’s a bad thing, though, because of the incessant number of these pop-ups. It’s a royal pain when you’re trying to get something done and have to stop every few seconds to provide credentials to a known-good app. But, in keeping with my earlier comment, the number of these interruptions should decrease as applications that don’t need higher privileges make their way onto the shelves.

The big question is whether businesses with a lot of capital invested in existing applications are going to want to spring for the newer apps just to get away from the disruption. Or will they turn to a different OS as a more efficient way of eliminating the problem? I don’t see Mac as a serious contender for this solution due to the expense of having to replace hardware AND apps, not to mention having to install the guilty OS. But there are some very good Linux distros out there and I can’t think of any good Linux apps that require root privileges to run. Here is one area where the good folks at Redmond could learn a thing or three from the open-source community.

Along these same lines, applications that you want to run at startup require authorization before they are permitted to launch. The bad thing is that Vista can’t seem to recall that you’ve said “OK” the past fifty times any particular app tries to launch; it continues to ask. Hopefully this issue will be resolved before anything hits the shelves.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Vista looks to be a vast improvement over previous OSs and it IS in beta, where these things are supposed to be identified. But I think I’m going to join with the folks who believe Microsoft needs a Beta 3 before going the RC route.

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Thursday, 10 August 2006 by marstinson.

Time finally permitted, so I decided to take another stab at installing and running Vista on my laptop. This go around, I decided to do a completely clean install (blow partitions, format and install from scratch) rather than upgrade XP. My system is an IBM ThinkPad G40 with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB HDD.

 Vista installed much faster as a clean install than it did as an upgrade. The whole installation took about a bit more than an hour. As expected, it did not recognize my wireless card, so I made sure that I had the CD handy in order to install the driver (I know from my upgrade experience that the XP driver works under Vista). Since I was not going to be able to retain my applications, I decided to scale back to just the necessities: Palm Desktop, Macromedia MX 2004 Suite, and the Office 2007 Beta 2. Anything else can be handled on an as-needed basis, but those apps are critical to what I do.

Rather than hunt for the CD, I decided download the lastest Palm Desktop after I got my wireless working. I had the install CDs handy for the others.

My wireless NIC ran into problems right off the bat. When you choose to install the D-Link drivers from the CD, you also get the configuration utility (whether you want it or not). The configuration utility would not launch properly. I finally just pointed Vista to the appropriate .inf file on the CD and let it install the card drivers on its own. This proved to be a much simpler solution and worked quite well. I know that there was an updated driver for XP on Microsoft Update as early as mid-December of 2005, but there was no sign of it when I ran Update after installing Vista.

With a working internet connection, I downloaded the latest Palm Desktop for my Zire 31. The package installed quite nicely and ran like a charm, but absolutely refused to sync with the Palm device. For some reason it thinks it’s connected via a serial cable to COM1, which is not the case. I do not see any settings that can be changed to get it recognize that it’s connected through a USB port, so the Palm device is just dead weight at this point as far as my laptop is concerned. I’m either going to have to live without it or start synching with my desktop machine. I’ll probably opt for the latter - a fix from Microsoft and Palm do not appear to be in the immediate future and the Vista forums only report the existence of the problem with no solution provided.

Macromedia MX 2004 Suite installed cleanly and runs just as well as it did under XP. I was able to restore my sites from a backup copy on an external drive and it was just a matter of setting up the remote server connection to pick up exactly where I had left off earlier today.

Office 2007 Beta 2 also installed cleanly and ran like a charm. I was unable to locate the converter packs for Office 2003 and earlier, but perhaps this was just because I didn’t have an earlier version installed.

 One issue that cropped up early on was my USB optical mouse. Vista recognized the device and installed a PnP driver with no problem. However the mouse configuration utility that it also installed (ico.exe) immediately pegged the processor to 100% usage and refused to come down. Lowering the process’s priority only served to allow other applications to have first dibs on the processor cycles, but usage remained at 100%. As soon as I killed the process, processor usage dropped to 1% to 2% and I did not find any change in the mouse’s functionality.

I’m still waiting on my own copy of Vista to appear from the good folks at Redmond (it’s only been close to 9 weeks since I ordered it). In the interim, I’m using a friend’s CD (the beta license allows installation on 10 computers, so I’m legal as far as I know) and everything else seems to be working quite well. Since school starts up on Monday, it’s going to get quite a workout over the next few weeks.

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