I’ve had my current mobile phone (a Samsung Blackjack) for nearly three years, and while it has served me reasonably well, I’m overdue for an upgrade.

Here are some of the things I want in my next phone that would improve upon my current experience:

1. Not taking two or more minutes from the time I turn the phone on until it’s actually useful.
2. Not freezing on startup (occasionally more than once per day), requiring me to remove the battery and restart.
3. Not being unable to connect to the network after startup (also occasionally more than once per day and usually associated with a stuck ATU_NITZ and/or clocknot process), requiring me to turn the phone off and turn it on again.
4. A battery that lasts long enough that I’m not always carrying around a spare battery.
5. The ability to be charged via its USB connection even if the battery is completely drained.
6. A Bluetooth stack that is compatible with Microsoft Voice Command.
7. A web browser whose default home page is accessible.
8. A web browser that can view rich web pages reasonably well.
9. A higher quality camera.
10. Built-in GPS.

After years of resisting, I finally broke down and bought a TiVo.

I started with ReplayTV in late 2000 and added Windows Media Center in 2006.  Early on I preferred ReplayTV to TiVo because, as my friend Paul put it, “TiVo makes it easier to find what you want to watch but ReplayTV makes it easier to watch it once you’ve found it.”  Moving to Windows Media Center was about being able to have a DVR solution where a noisy fan wasn’t running 24x7 in a room where people sleep (a mistake I made briefly with an early Comcast HD DVR) plus other advanced features like music and photo sharing.  I much preferred the feature set of Windows Media Center; unfortunately, I experienced repeated flaky behavior, probably due in part to running it on my main desktop PC.

What ultimately forced the issue was Comcast’s plan to stop transmitting their Expanded Basic lineup (including CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, and Comedy Central) in analog signals, thus requiring a digital adapter to view these channels.  Their solution for legacy DVRs – use IR blasters and pray – didn’t seem satisfactory.

Short of cancelling Comcast service and moving to a different provider – not a better option at the moment – I was left with the choice of getting a new DVR that supported digital cable natively.  I could buy a new Digital Cable Ready Media Center PC or get a TiVo HD.  I explored the former option but found that the major PC manufacturers have made it extremely difficult to find such models on their web sites, and buying a Media Center with two digital tuners is significantly more expensive than TiVo even considering the cost of TiVo service.

There were two issues with getting a TiVo:  The aforementioned noise concern and the fact that doing multi-room streaming requires multiple TiVo boxes (vs. Media Center Extenders).  The latter issue concerned me in theory, but in practice my DVR use has effectively been limited to a single TV for the past year, even with DVRs on two different TVs.  For the noise issue, I would just have to try it and see.  So I did.

After an initial hiccough with getting the CableCard working, requiring a Comcast service call to replace what turned out to be a defective card, I now have dual-tuner digital HD service on the TiVo.  Incidentally, all of the Comcast personnel with whom I dealt where highly service-oriented and helpful, which makes me slightly less angry at the company for making me go to considerable time and expense to replace DVRs that were working perfectly fine in order to preserve features that I’ve had for years.

So what are my initial impressions of TiVo after years using the competition?  The initial setup menus were very easy and nicely done; clearly they have invested a lot of effort here.  The TiVo remote control is fine but I don’t know what the big fuss is about.  Overall, the TiVo user interface seems frozen in time, a circa 2004 UI; the Windows Media Center UI is far better, even on Vista, and I hear that Windows 7 is an even bigger improvement.  Most significantly, the TiVo is pretty quiet, so noise is not an issue; I hope that this will not change as the unit ages.

I was not expecting to like the automatic suggestions feature, but it has turned out to be handy; through it I learned that Top Gear (and BBC America in general) is now available to me.  I appreciate that TiVo supports streaming for Netflix customers and I find the YouTube support interesting and clever.  I am pretty unhappy with TiVo’s support for recurring programs, however, most notably The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Even though I told TiVo to record only first-run programs, it insists on recording each of the four daily occurrences that Comedy Central broadcasts.  The suggested workaround is to set a manual recurring program for 11 PM nightly, but TiVo doesn’t give me the option to record only Monday through Thursday (The Daily Show is not broadcast on Friday) so I get a spurious recording every Friday for it (and The Colbert Report as well).  I suppose I could set up four recurring weekly programs for each of Monday through Thursday, but why the hassle for something that TiVo’s competitors have always handled better?

My medium-term plan is still to return to Windows Media Center, but now I’m going to wait to see if they integrate it with Windows Home Server, which will enable me to have one dedicated, high-storage, high-availability server at home.  In the meantime TiVo appears to fit the bill nicely, though I wouldn’t mind a software upgrade that modernizes the UI and fixes the recurring program issues.  I’m still looking forward to the day when everything I want to watch is available via IP streaming and I can drop my separate cable TV subscription; I suspect Comcast will work hard to prevent this from happening.

I recently read two non-fiction books that read like extended blogs and have somewhat crankily come to the conclusion that bloggers shouldn’t write books.

The problem isn’t with the authors themselves; it’s with using the writing style of a blog in a book-length piece.  Most blogs are written in a casual, informal style (with plenty of attempts at cute, parenthetical asides) that work well when consumed in small amounts but become cloying and tiresome in a longer work.  I suspect that the author can get away with it when the book is a collection of independent essays anchored on a common theme, but as part of a single narrative it makes me want to stop and scream “Enough already!”  I’m tempted to blame the editors for not being sufficiently ruthless in looking at each word and deciding if it adds to the book’s thesis.

The first book – Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt – is a well-researched and interesting book that is undermined by its turgid style.  The second book – Do you matter? by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery – is simply dreadful, and in so many ways that I feel compelled to catalog them as you might repeatedly brush your teeth in an attempt to remove a bad taste from your mouth.

With “Do You Matter?”, some of the trouble is simply bad editing, the most glaring example being misspelling John Sculley’s name inside the book when his name is correctly spelled in the blurb he provides on the book’s back cover.  And this in the book’s second printing!  There are also numerous examples of the type of parenthetical excess I describe above, and a repeated lack of understanding of the proper use of “capitalization” and Quotation Marks.

But even if you can get past the poor editing, there is so much more that is wrong.

You would not be mistaken in viewing the book as an extended advertisement for Apple; the book refers to the company so much as its icon (no pun intended) that by the end of the book even the authors are apologizing for it.  And they undermine their case for making design an intrinsic part of the corporate culture at Apple by stressing how important Steve Jobs’ role is in the design process there, causing you to question whether Apple’s success in this area could (or can) be sustained without this one individual at the top of the organization.

When discussing design, the book focuses on high-end brands; not just Apple, but BMW and W Hotels, and criticizes Wal-Mart, but doesn’t acknowledge its choice of brands that rely on exclusivity as part of their appeal.  There are logical flaws as well:  In holding BMW up as a design leader because the company pays attention to the sound its cars’ doors make when they close, it neglects to mention the critical drubbing the company has received for the design of its iDrive controller.

The book takes the risk of presenting anecdotes in second person, e.g. in describing the ownership experience of a Lexus RX 400h.  Writing stories in the second person is risky because the writer needs to connect quickly with the readers so that the readers buy into the premise and allow the writer to plant thoughts in their heads.  When done well, it is devastatingly effective, but here it simply feels manipulative, that one of the authors has had a bad experience and wants to force the readers to see it through his own eyes.  Had the anecdotes been presented in the first person, as in “here’s something that happened to me/us that illustrates this point,” or in the third person, as in “let me tell you about John Smith’s experience”, the readers could have accepted the premise gradually instead of being told how to think.

The only quantifiable data the book presents to support its case is the companies’ market capitalization, which seems like a dubious way to measure a company’s success in design.  It does mention various awards that products and companies have won, but doesn’t provide any way to determine if those awards are recognized as meaningful within their respective industries.

Ultimately the biggest failure of the book is that its central premise – emblazoned on the cover as “How great design will make people love your company” – is undermined by the contents of the book.  Because the book’s real (and excellent) point is that the way to make people love your company and succeed as a result is to create a customer-focused corporate culture.  Great design is an important part of doing this but is far from the only part.

After nearly two mostly uneventful years, our Xbox 360 appears to have succumbed to the red ring of death.  Fortunately we still have our ReplayTV to function as a backup DVR, but our ability to rock has been curtailed. 

We'll see how long it takes to get it fixed.  I will say that the self-service repair request web site was pretty easy to use, which is encouraging.

About a year ago I predicted that I'd have an HDTV system in 2007 and specifically that I'd watch Super Bowl XLII in high-def.  I didn't quite make it, but I am finally getting close.

For most people this would be as simple as buying a high-def television and plugging in a cable TV feed via coax.  But for me it is not, and not only because I need to agonize for months about which specific TV to buy.  The key is that I've become dependent on DVR functionality, and forced to choose between DVR and SD or non-DVR and HD, I opt without hesitation for the former.  Not only that, but I want a DVR head unit that isn't noisy when it's not in use (most have a hard disk fan that runs 24x7).  I also have a strong preference for a server-based recording system (as opposed to each unit recording separately) and don't want to deal with a satellite dish-based system.

With all of these constraints, the plan worked out roughly as follows:

1. Start with a Windows Media Center PC and an Xbox 360 (to serve as the Media Center Extender).
2. Upgrade the home network equipment to Windows Vista-compatible hardware.
3. Upgrade the Media Center PC to Vista Ultimate.
4. Install a Vista-compatible OCUR HD tuner card in the Media Center PC.
5. Get a CableCARD for the tuner from my cable provider.
6. Buy an HDTV and connect it to the Xbox 360.

As is turns out, the big flaw in this plan is that, even though I had deliberately bought a Vista-ready PC in late 2006 to prepare for this, OCUR is supported only on PCs that are "Windows Vista Digital Cable compatible".  This designation requires special rights-management support on the motherboard, so I'd have to buy a fairly expensive PC to support this, even though I have a nearly new PC bought expressly for this purpose.  On principle alone I don't want to do this.

Another factor is that I'm now running Windows Home Server on my old home computer and have been very satisfied by it.  I've also had occasional annoyances with my Media Center PC, most of which revolve around the need to restart my computer while a program is recording or being watched.  Put these two together and conclude that I want to have one server computer that runs 24x7, has loads of disk space and the network bandwidth to serve up its content, and almost never needs to be restarted due to application issues.  So barring unforeseen circumstances I'd rather wait until there's a Home Server product that can also record and share TV programs and then invest in one new computer to do both.

So for now I need a plan B.  That plan is now based on a product called HDHomeRun, which will enable me to record unencrypted HD broadcasts (QAM) on my Media Center PC.  The new plan is:

1. Start with a Windows Media Center PC and an Xbox 360 (to serve as the Media Center Extender).
2. Upgrade the home network equipment to Windows Vista-compatible hardware.
3. Upgrade the Media Center PC to Vista Ultimate.
4. Buy an HDTV with a QAM tuner and confirm that my cable provider transmits unencrypted HD signals for at least the local TV channels.
5. Buy and install an HDHomeRun.

Step 1 was completed in 2006. Step 2 was completed last summer.  Step 4 was completed last weekend.  I've been putting off step 3 for months but may get a chance to do it this weekend.  I don't have a specific schedule for step 5 but it's a safe bet it will happen before next football season starts.

This week I took a further step into the depths of geekdom:  I became a Wikipedia editor and edited some entries related to a specific topic.  To paraphrase Robert Klein, it's too boring to tell you what the topic is.

The most common way that people I don't know reach this blog is via a Google query for "Netflix sucks".  For a while I was the top search result for this query; now I've fallen to number two.  Not that I particularly care, but it has made me aware of simmering vein of Netflix resentment.

It turns out that my Netflix gripes (which, if you read the posting, you'll see have been largely resolved, and by the way Wal-Mart giving up its competitive business to partner with Netflix suggests that the threat has abated, at least for now) are pretty different from most others'.  The top two complaints of most of the "NS" crowd are 1) poor quality disks (which I personally chalk up to the surfeit of sub-$75 DVD players) and 2) Netflix's apparently widely-known if surreptitious policy of deliberately delaying processing of disks from its heaviest users, so as to limit the number of disks rented by these users.  Apparently Netflix has even acknowledged that they optimize the processing of disks returned by their lowest volume users; I don't know why but I'd guess that they probably figure that these are the least loyal users and thus most important to bend over backwards to keep happy.

I'd never experienced this phenomenon, but last week something suspicious happened.  We've been renting a larger number of movies lately -- broadcast TV is in reruns, the Seattle rainy season is still here, and we've rented some kids' movies, which get watched faster -- and last Monday I returned two disks.  Normally when I return a disk on Monday, it gets received on Tuesday and I get a new disk back on Wednesday.  But this time they only acknowledged receiving one disk on Tuesday and didn't acknowledge receiving the other until Wednesday; furthermore, I didn't receive the replacement for the Wednesday disk until Friday.  The disks I returned on Monday were mailed at the same time, though in separate envelopes; from now on when I return two disks at the same time I'll be sure to put them in a single envelope and see if that makes a difference.

Coincidence or conspiracy?  You be the judge.

Will real-time traffic data be the killer app for in-car satellite service?

While my Smartphone can apparently be used to make voice calls, and I do in fact use it that way, it is currently most useful for me as a real-time traffic monitor for my commute.  I routinely make last-minute decisions on which way to drive home from work based on what it tells me.  And twice in the last month it has saved me at least half an hour by showing me that going home from southern King County by taking I-5 North instead I-405 North would avoid a big traffic jam.

The real-time traffic monitor software that I use is not publicly available (it's a research project funded by my employer), but there are publicly available alternatives.

It makes me wonder if -- more than a wide variety of digital music -- the thing that will drive adoption of satellite service in cars will be real-time traffic-based trip routing built into navigation systems, which is just starting to be offered by auto manufacturers.  It's certainly something I'll consider the next time I'm in the market for a new car (which I hope is at least five years from now).

Of course, what I'd really like is to be able to buy a single subscription that gets me network bandwidth everywhere I want it:  home broadband, mobile phones, WiFi hotspots (inc. in-flight), and in-car audio and data.  Right now I would have to pay for and manage all four of these separately.

Last week I took a brief real vacation to Arizona.  A real vacation, by my definition, is one where I don't use a computer.  Now that I have a Smartphone I also have to disable email connectivity on it so that there's no temptation to peek.  (Even then, the phone spent most of the time powered off in the room's safe.)

While the bellman was giving us the initial tour of our casita, he pointed out the room's A/V system with multiple sets of speakers and mentioned that its DVD player could also be used to play any CDs we'd brought along.  On previous trips I would have been happy to hear that, but on this one I thought immediately of the Dell Pocket DJ sitting in my bag, which I had spent some time the night before filling with music.  I didn't say anything at the time but shortly thereafter I called the bell desk to ask if they had any cables on hand to connect a digital music player (actually, I translated that phrase to "iPod") to the room's sound system.  He said they didn't, but that someone else had recently asked the same question.

Not being content to let matters lie and not wanted to waste the room's nice sound system, I pulled out the mediocre FM transmitter I had brought along.  It worked reasonably well, but after an hour or so I'd drained the batteries.  So I dragged my wife to Circuit City on the way to a prearranged dinner to pick up a mini-headphone to stereo RCA cable.  Later that night, with a bit of fiddling, I got it to work through the front input jacks on the DVD/VCR combination unit, and that was our music source for the rest of the trip.

My wife, who is not a techophile and up to that point had had no interest in the music player, started playing with it and found it pretty easy to use.  Score one for their UI, at least for playback.  She had also two prescient questions:  1) How do you hook it up to work in your car? and 2) Why isn't it just a feature of your cellphone?

Still not remaining content, upon checking out I made a point of showing the bellman (not the same one as on check-in) the cable and how to use it to play music through the room's sound system.  He was polite if not entirely interested, but he conceded that this would be an increasingly common request in the future.

It's Friday morning.  I have to take my car for service in Capitol Hill; it's going to take around an hour and a half.  I want something to eat and an Internet connection while I'm waiting.

I use my favorite search UI to look for "free wifi 'capitol hill' seattle".  This leads me to seattle.wifimug.org and its Search Nearby feature.  With this I discover that Caffe Vita is just a couple of blocks away.

Less than ten minutes after dropping my car off, I have chai, a croissant, and Internet access.  Late era Beatles as background music.  I work until my cell phone rings telling me that my car is ready.

The simple pleasures.

For years I've dealt with ever-expanding piles of paper reading material: Stacks of newspapers, magazines and books on my nightstand and several bookcases throughout the house.  I frequently get part way through one and then lose track after a new one comes along, or worse, start reading one only to find that I've already read it (most common when sharing it with my wife).  And for some years I've dreamed of an eBook solution that would let me eliminate all of that paper and help me more effectively track what I've read.  With the rise of web-based syndication, it feels like we've taken a big step closer to realizing that dream.

Here's what I want:

• A Tablet PC that's durable enough to survive being dropped on the bathroom floor.  Lightweight with long battery life.  WiFi is required, but a keyboard is not.  The display must be large enough to display at least an 8.5" x 11" image, and display high-resolution photos (for when I read car porn) crisply enough that I don't miss the paper versions.
• An RSS reader that remembers not only which articles I've read, but how far I've read in each article.  And lets me sort based on last-read date.
• Full-fidelity RSS feeds for all of my content: Books, magazines, and newspapers.  And I'm not looking to change the content rules; I'm happy to continuing paying subscription fees for all of the magazines, paying for the books, and having my access to a library book expire after a predetermined interval.

I'm not sure how far away we are from this.  The display size I cite above works out to a 13.9" diagonal, so there are at least a few models that meet this bar.  With all of the RSS readers available, I'm sure that there's one that provides the above functionality or is pretty close to doing so.  The biggest challenge will be getting all of the content available in a format that's got the necessary digital rights management support to make publishers comfortable, and getting my local library to support this broadly.  (In fact, they already have support for a limited number of eBooks but I have yet to try it.) 

I'm guessing this is at least three years away and probably closer to five.  But when it happens, I expect to see the top of my nightstand again.

Last summer I had a hard disk failure scare from which I was able to recover without data loss.  Once I got past the event itself, my first step was to set up a backup solution better than the burn-files-to-CD-R-when-convenient solution that I had been employing.

My solution was to use the backup application that ships as part of Windows XP to create a weekly backup of my data files.  The backup file itself gets stored on an external hard disk, so I'm protected from hard disk failure though not from fire, theft, or any other event that would cause both disks to fail concurrently.  This job seemed to work fine for what I needed.  What I didn't realize until relatively recently, when I decided to defragment the hard drive, is that the default is to append the backup to the previous contents of the file.  The net result was that I had created a single 25+ GB and growing file on my hard disk.

I decided to get a little fancier and create four separate backup jobs.  Two are for larger files that change relatively infrequently, primarily photos; a full backup monthly and a differential backup weekly.  Two are for smaller data files that can change more often (e.g. Office documents); a full backup weekly and a differential backup nightly.  To address the continual growth problem, I set the backup to replace rather than append to the file contents.  This level of configuration isn't as easy as it ought to be via the Backup UI, but I was able to make it do what I wanted.

The issue I have now is that I don't really want append or replace.  I don't want append because I don't want the file to grow without bounds, but I don't replace because I want to keep more than one copy of the backed up data around.  In theory I could have a problem now where a hard disk failure would prevent the backup from completing successfully, but not until after the previous good backup had been erased.  Rather than having to backup to a hard-coded file name, what I really want is a backup tool that generates a unique file name for each backup -- based on the date, for example -- and keeps the N most recent files around.  I'm pretty sure this isn't supported by the included backup solution, though I might be able to get close with a bit more manual effort.

Of course, what I really really want is an automated backup system that securely backs up my files to a different location over the Internet, but I'm probably not prepared to pay what that costs.  Perhaps I can increase the fault tolerance more easily by putting another external hard disk in a completely different part of the house.

After whinging last night about the lack of USB support in consumer CD jukeboxes, I decided to do another online search to see what kind of options exist out there.  A couple of interesting ones stuck out:

Wintrack JukeBox - Apparently has a custom connection between the S-Link port on the jukebox and the printer port on the PC, and it's relatively inexpensive.  The downside is that it's not only supported on Windows XP.

StreetFire RBX 1600 - A dedicated hardware solution that again uses the S-Link port.  The big downside here is that it's $750.

And both of these seem to require their own software applications to manage the music, i.e. no apparent Windows Media Player integration.  Just what I need -- yet another piece of music management software with its own database.

Use one of these.  Even when I get good reception through my car stereo, which is hit and miss, I hear crackling and popping between tracks and during quiet passages.  Ah, it takes me back to the early 80's.

This means that I still don't have a convenient way to listen to my new Dell Pocket DJ.  But now that I'm hooked on the concept, I'm toying with the idea of getting an auxiliary jack for my car stereo.  It doesn't have one built into the head unit, but you can buy third-party connectors that work off the car's trunk-mounted CD changer port.

Of course, the more I play with digital music, the greedier I get.  What I want now is this:

1) A way to play my CDs and purchased digital music on any of my music playback systems (including in cars) without having to carry around CDs or manually synchronize to the playback devices.  Now that almost all of my music is ripped to my home computer's hard disk, this is at least theoretically possible.  I just need an Internet-enabled device which can stream or download directly from my home computer over the Internet.  My mobile phone, with Windows Media Player 10, a 512 MB flash card, and an unlimited data plan, ought to be able to handle this nicely.

2) A reasonably-priced CD jukebox with a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection that lets me drive it from my computer.  It bugs me to no end that companies like Sony make cheap CD several-hundred-disk changers but haven't created a way to access them from one's computer.  If I could do this, I'd never have to rip a CD, at least as long as my CD collection is smaller than the collective capacity of my changers.  I'd just stick all of the CDs in the changers and have the computer play directly from the changer; for extra credit it could use the hard disk as a cache for the most frequently-played tracks.  OK, it would require some software changes to Windows Media Player to handle this scenario, but nothing dramatic.

I don't know whether Sony and similar companies haven't done this because they think there's no demand with the move to digital music or if they're worried about piracy, but with the continual innovation in this space (e.g. Sony's 400-disk DVD player) it seems like something they're going out of their way to not support.

Two blogs I stumbled across today.

Courtesy of John Ludwig, Mark Cuban's blog.  Say what you will about Mark Cuban, he's not only prolific and opinionated but unlike most bloviators he's got the will and the resources to walk the walk.  I haven't added his blog to my short list yet, but it looks promising.

I had a sneaking suspicion that one of my younger cousins, now a freshman in college (she was born a few months before I graduated college, to everything there is a season) was writing a blog, but I hadn't bothered to look for it.  It took several search attempts to locate it, but here it is.  To protect her identity, all I will say about it right now is that it's age appropriate.

I got official notification from Netflix today about their new Friends feature.  We'll see how it works.

They also appears to have added another feature that I've wanted:  Multiple profiles, including separate queues, within an account.  We'll see how it all works.