momusradar’s journal

I decided, for a change of pace, to move over to WordPress. On that note, I’m done posting here for the time being.

If you would like to do so, visit me at WordPress or add my feed to your aggregator.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us/politics/06ballot.html

California is now officially a shithole, as well as Arizona & Florida.

I voted this morning; I had ballot no. 0067.

Jamie got me the new 15" MacBook Pro for my birthday. I've been relishing it for a week and a day now; it is truly a joy to use—the multi-touch trackpad is, in my opinion, the feature that makes it so great. I can honestly say that I doubt I will ever buy a desktop again.

How long could you survive chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor?

I recently inherited an iPod (30 GB dock connector). It was the top-end model released the day after I purchased my venerable touch wheel. It was given to me by a friend who received an iPod touch as a free gift for purchasing a new iMac.

What a difference a day makes.

Saw the new Hulk movie on Thursday. I don’t think it was as great as Iron Man, but it was really good. I was pleasantly surprised as to how good it was. But I must admit, Liv Tyler was the weakest character through out he film. Her bit during the taxi cab scene was pretty funny though.

I see a great franchise in Marvel Studio’s future.

My electricity was finally restored this Friday around 10:40pm. It turns out that the transformer on the electrical pole just outside my house had a circuit breaker that tripped during the electrical storm on Tuesday.

I learned this bit of info from talking with my neighbors earlier this evening. They all noted that during the last three days, the PSE&G employees who had visited our block during the outage have been either customer service reps or electrical engineers. Apparently neither had the authority to reset the breaker, but did have the authority to state that a service crew was eventually coming to do so.

So I called the utility’s costumer service number for the umpteenth time and pressed two for the option to report trouble with a utility pole, as opposed to pressing three for reporting a power outage. Five minutes later, I spoke with a human being who, aside from being pleasant, took my info regarding the location of the pole and informed me that a crew should be here within an hour to work on it. That was about 10:30pm.

At about 10:40, a service crew arrived. Literally a minute afterwards, the power was back on. And just as quickly as they restored the power, the crews’ truck pulled away.

In short, we and ten other households had to endure three days & four nights with out electricity. We all had to discard the contents of our refrigerators and freezers. Not because a tree fell and pulled down a power line like thousands of other households in northern New Jersey, or because there was a fire at a local substation, but because a circuit breaker tripped.

A circuit breaker. An actual rocker switch. Three days. Four nights. All of our perishable foods. All because no-one could reset a switch.

There will be letters sent to PSE&G and they will be nasty.

Our power went out last night during a spectacular lightning storm. The power utility, PSE&G, estimates it will be restored by 6 PM on Friday. The thirteenth. Three days after later.

Take a look at this photo posted at MacNN; it’s of a banner recently hung in Moscone Center for the WWDC 08.

It appears Apple is rebranding the operating system by completely dropping Mac from the moniker.

addendum: better photo here.

We attended another free screening this evening; this time it was Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull.

Awful. Just awful.

The story line is trite, as are the countless vintage 1980s Spielbergian camera sweeps. Ford looked tired from the get go & is stiff through the entire film. The classic theme music is idiotically replayed at five minute intervals forcing it to loose all the qualities that once made it triumphant.

Comprising mostly of Disney Hollywood Studio’s Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular-grade car chases and interspersed with rehashed scenes from Looney Toons, Scooby-Doo, The Mummy, Tomb-Raider, Pirates of the Caribbean, The X-Files & Stargate, it is the cinematic equivalent of floor-space covered with carpet remnants.

I strongly suggest that you don’t waste your money to see it. If for some reason you feel you must, be prepared to jeer at it as opposed to cheering with it.

Just awful.

I am three days late on noting that I’ve had the same iPod for five years now & it is still—still—being powered by its original battery.

Jamie and I just returned from a free screening of Iron Man. I have to say, for a comicbook/superhero movie, it is really good. With an updated retelling of the 1970-80s storyline—sans the main character being paralytic and an alcoholic—it holds up very well. Also, the Iron Man suits are quite kick-ass.

As the first film release for Marvel Studios, it is truly a winner; a definite 180º from the dreck that was Spider-Man 3.

While the main characters are only eight pixels high by eight pixels wide and game play lasts just five minutes, Jason Rohrer’s Passage is quite possibly the finest video game I have had the fortune of playing to date.

As he so eloquently notes on the download page, “If you don’t get the point at first, please keep playing.”

I “got it” about three minutes in. It is simply touching.

We were driving up Eisenhower Parkway, returning from the Trader Joes in East Hanover, when we saw all the cars ahead of us slow down abruptly. As we slowed and approached the area where all the cars were we saw a deer leave the roadway and enter the adjacent woods. Its hind legs were bent the wrong way. I'm certain the animal was just struck from behind by one of the cars ahead of us.

The site of the severely injured animal upset Jamie and understandably so (I’ll admit the image of it is still clear in my minds eye and I can only hope it didn’t suffer long and expired quickly); she asked me to research deer alert whistles for our automobiles.

I found that Sav-A-Life makes the SAV-A-LIFE Deer Alert®. The manufacturer claims “As the vehicle reaches a speed above 30 mph, air rushing through the cylinder emits an ultrasonic signal (between 16,000 and 20,000 Hertz), up to a quarter mile away (the length of 4 football fields), literally stopping animals in their tracks.”

It sounded like a promising device until I also found this PDF titled Evaluation of Strategies Designed to Reduce Deer-Vehicle Collisions at The University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. This evaluation notes on page 68:

Risenhoover, K. L., J. F. Hunter, R. A. Jacobson, and G. W. Stout. Year Unknown. Hearing range in white-tailed deer. Abstract for The Wildlife Society Texas Chapter Meeting.

Risenhoover et al. determined audiogram hearing thresholds for five sedated white-tailed deer by recording brainstem evoked potentials in response to stimuli consisting of 45-millisecond pure-tone pips delivered using headphones held against the ears. They recorded evoked potentials at intensity levels up to 85 dB in a frequency range of 0.5 to 16 kHz. At intensity levels of 95 dB a response was obtained up to 16 kHz. The range of greatest hearing sensitivity was between 1-8 kHz with a marked peak at 4 kHz.

The SAV-A-LIFE Deer Alert® operates at frequencies at least 8 kHz higher than a white-tail deer’s best range of hearing. Arguably this could mean the animal may not hear the whistle from the device very well or at all.

On page 69:

Romin, L. A., and L. B. Dalton. 1992. Lack of response by mule deer to wildlife whistles. Wildlife Society Bulletin 20:382-384.

Romin and Dalton tested two models of deer warning whistles, Game Tracker’s Game Saver and the Sav-a-life Deer Alert. They separately tested each device on free-ranging mule deer along a dirt road at a wildlife management area in Carbon County, Utah, on which 0.28 deer-vehicle collisions/km occurred annually. Testing was done in two passes with the research vehicle traveling at 65 km/hour. In the first pass, they recorded distance of deer from the road and deer reaction to the passing vehicle without activating the whistles. Immediately following, they traveled greater than or equal to 0.8 km past the deer group, activated the whistles, turned the vehicle around and passed the group again to record their distance and reaction. In observations of 150 deer groups that were within 100 m of the road, they recorded 152 responses and detected no difference between responses with or without either type of whistle.

Even if the mule deer heard the whistle, they didn’t seem to care enough to flee the oncoming vehicle.

From page 73:

Currently there is no simple, low-cost solution for reducing the incidence of deer-vehicle collisions. Like fencing, other devices, including wildlife warning reflectors and motorist warning systems, are used where deer regularly cross roads. Only instituting collision reduction techniques at select areas or “hotspots” will not guard against non-habitual deer road crossings, which typically occur during the peak seasons for deer-vehicle collisions (breeding and fawning). To guard against these collisions and to provide the most effective system for minimizing deer-vehicle collisions, we have three general conclusions and recommendations:

(1) Vehicle-mounted deer warning systems may have the best potential for minimizing deer-vehicle collisions; however, to date none of these systems has been designed in accordance with the senses of deer. Therefore, future research and development of vehicle-mounted deer warning systems must be based on detailed knowledge of deer vision, hearing, and behavior.
(2) Every year, motorist awareness of the danger of deer-vehicle collisions can decline over time. Therefore, agencies should develop and routinely implement education programs and/or highway warnings to enhance motorist awareness prior to and during the seasons of greatest danger for deer-vehicle collisions (breeding and fawning).
(3) Deer overabundance can increase the potential for deer-vehicle collisions. Therefore, agencies and municipalities should implement proper deer herd management programs designed to control deer abundance.

Try as we may, deer will continue to get around and eventually one will cross your automobile’s path. Clearly the best thing one can do is drive cautiously and be aware that deer may appear just about anywhere.

I’ll get the whistles anyway as they will help comfort Jamie’s mind. And $25 is a reasonably minor premium I’d be willing to pay to potentially prevent harm to us, our passengers, our vehicles and especially our neighboring wildlife.

I’m finally driving again.

This past weekend I parted ways with the troublesome Maxima. It has been replaced with a delightful ’04 5-speed Corolla.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed having a clutch until now. I had a blast driving to & from work today and I’m eagerly awaiting to do so again tomorrow.

Also, I’m happier now that I’ve fulfilled my desire to get a greener car.

Dear Apple,

Please stop crippling things for us “older” users just because we don’t have your latest hardware. You could have simply made a statement saying all Macs released prior to January 2007 are EOL. Instead you chose to make QuickTime 7.2 available to us and allow it to wreak havoc on our CFM apps putting the screws to many longtime MS Office and Adobe CS users, not to mention rendering my HP scanner software useless.

It’s not as if you don’t know how to go about closing the door on our faces; you’ve already made some of your products, like the iPhone and Safari 3, only play with 10.4 users even though 10.3 users like me might have wanted to give it them a try. Why not just be honest, go the extra step and say what you mean. I for one would have preferred being informed that QT 7.2 was only for Intel users who no longer use PPC based applications, rather than experiencing the joys of Archive and Install as I will be doing shortly.

Cheers,
Alex

We saw Ratatouille this past weekend; it is a very delightful tale.

Also caught the last half of The Mormons on PBS. Wow. Just wow.

Having just watched Pixar’s teaser for WALL•E, the french rat movie doesn’t seem as intriguing.