Does Nobody Else Want Details?

I like Vista.

I am being driven berzerk by the open-file dialog box.
Actually it's the "Small Icons" view.
Actually it's the open-file dialog box's refusal to open in anything but the "Small Icons" view.

Who uses this view?
What good is it?
I'll tell you what good it isn't!
It isn't any good at not looking like a "Details" view with missing files!

Seriously. It has columns, but they are columns of files.
It has column headers!! But it doesn't arrange the files in columns!!! NO!!! It arranges them in ROWS! They just happen to fall into columns!!!!!



But you click on the column headers to change the sort order

Double-U Tee Eff??!!

Every time I want to open a file I look down the list (I think I'm looking down the list) and say, "that file's missing? No wonder nothing works!!"

The Plan was to Take Photos On The Way

I just got back from dinner at T.G.I. Friday's. Yes I'm in Brazil; but it was close to my hotel and the other direction from where I usually go (i.e. toward the client's office).

I decided that I would skip the "afternoon" conference session and take advantage of "the magic hour". My plan went awry in several ways. First, there weren't many interesting photos on the way. It was just another two blocks down a road with which I was already familiar (Av. Santo Amaro). Second, the real magic hour hadn't started yet. Third, Friday's was much closer than I had anticipated.

Surprised at seeing the restaurant so soon, I went in. (This happens to me a lot; I get surprised and then forget my cool plan.) They sat me upstairs by a window, so I had the whole meal to watch the light get more interesting. Luckily, it didn't look like I missed anything too spectacular. Then again, the definition of "missing something" is not seeing it -- so who knows what I missed.

Oh well. If I weren't up in the restaurant, I wouldn't have had this view of the intersection below.

Too Many Doughnuts

I went to the big mall here in São Paulo: Shopping Ibirapuera. Mostly I wanted some quick food, but being a mall rat I decided to check things out a little before I ate.

I saw suits that ranged from R$399 to R$1599.
A new base-model MacBook was R$3k
PSP Games that are $15 at Target were R$49, PS3 games were R$230

I saw a little kiosk in the middle called "Happy Donuts". I decided then that I should get some before I leave Shopping Ibirapuera.

For dinner I had some gnocchi. They kept asking me what else I wanted on it... all I wanted was some good cheese and sauce... I guess they didn't have that so they made up for it with bacon and onions and stuff. I think I was paying for 8 toppings or something, because at one point I said, "that's all" and pantomimed the best I could, but the guy said, "two more".

It was fine.

After I finished that I searched for the Happy Donuts that I had seen but lost. Eventually I found them.

I couldn't believe how hard it was to order doughnuts in another language. I think the little girl was trying to get me to buy a dozen... Any way, I ended up with almost a dozen mini filled doughnuts and two big ones. Let me tell you: Bavarian cream at Happy Donut makes me very happy. I can't wait to try the Bavarian lemon cream!

Oh, right... the point. Besides being too many doughnuts to eat comfortably, I was R$2 short of cab-fare back to the hotel. I think the guy understood when I explained that I had more money in my hotel room, because he took me back. I got some more cash and gave him a good tip.

The End

(Nothing But) Flowers

Recently I purchased The Best of the Talking Heads from iTunes. On it was the song (Nothing But) Flowers.

I like the song: the melody, the vocals, whatever it is that makes one like a Talking Heads song. I listened to it a couple times the last couple days and started noticing lyrics like "There was a factory, now there are mountains and rivers" and "There was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with Daisies." Pretty standard "return to Eden"-type sentiments.

Then I noticed "if this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower" and at the end "Don't leave me stranded here, I can't get used to this lifestyle." This added an interesting layer to the ideas presented by the song.

Let me tell you the three layers that I see in the order that I thought of them. First, the hippie, environmentalist, return-to-Eden view where things were better when they were simpler. Second is recognizing the fact that we might not enjoy things if we "went back". Recognizing that it would be hard to "get used to this lifestyle." My third interpretation is some kind of sophisticated hippie who thinks that while it would be hard to get used to living without Pizza Hut and 7 Eleven, it would still be better. This sophisticated Luddite makes fun of the whining portrayed in the song.

Unless we talk to the David Byrne, we can't know what he was thinking. Even if we did talk to him, he may not have an answer for us.

Why Would You Want a Police Scanner?

I recently purchased a new police scanner. (I say "police scanner" because most people think of (flat-bed) image scanners when I just say "scanner"… I guess I could say "scanning multi-band radio receiver"… anyway.) I had it delivered to the place where I work so I wouldn't have to stay home to sign for it or go pick it up at the shipping company when nobody was at my house to sign for it.

I explained to everyone before the package arrived that it was "a toy" and nothing business related. Of course, everyone asked what toy it was. I was surprised by how many of the geeks here at this high-tech company barely understood what a police scanner was, let alone why I would want one.

By way of explaining the fun of scanning and radio-hobbies in general, I offer part of my story.

Awe

When I was 15 (maybe I had just turned 16) my friend Kris's dad, Bob, managed the local office of Pac*Tel paging. They were moving offices and he had enlisted Kris and me to move some back-up batteries for the big "paging terminal". Kris and I had recently watched Weird Al's movie: UHF.

We were talking about how much fun it would be to run our own UHF TV station. Bob overheard us and mentioned that they broadcast UHF there at the pager company. I don't know how Kris felt but I was astonished. Bob then punched up their frequency on a scanner in the engineer's office. Bee-oww wooooooooong brchzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzh shshsh chachachachack… He explained that the paging signal was basically data modulating an FM signal that the pager decoded. At that moment I learned that RF was RF. AM, FM, TV, two-way radios, pagers…

Scanner

After I got my first job selling pagers for this same outfit at the mall, I saved up the dough for a hand-held scanner from Radio Shack. After a few days of searching around and wondering what all these frequencies were I bought Police Call. This had information on FCC radio licenses in my area. I'd look up an agency in the book and program all of the frequencies listed in the guide for that agency. Then I'd scan around these frequencies to see what I could hear.

At least one evening I remember logging everything I heard. Scanner channel, frequency, and what was said. I quickly learned how to recognize dispatch channels, request channels, car-to-car channels etc. I noticed that the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office had more than one channel that sounded like a dispatch channel. It turns out that the valley was divided into geographic areas and each had its own dispatch channel.

Given enough time my buddies and I could have figured out which channel was which area of the valley, but some intelligence was obtained (somehow) that described which channel was for which area. Combine that with some of the other geographically-defined agencies around the valley and we could tune in "areas" instead of just listening to… whatever.

If I was headed to work at, say, Valley Fair Mall I'd tune in the Sheriff's Office West Patrol, West Jordan PD, Salt Lake Community College, Valley Fair Mall. I'd listen to these agencies before I left the house and on the drive over. By the time I got there I already knew that the two police cars across the street from the mall was just one cop on a traffic stop and another one driving by offered assistance.

Which I think is cool.

Maybe next time I'll tell you about how this led to my exciting adventures in Ham Radio.