GLOBADOM

Seriously. One of you 20 readers out there must be a Mario Kart DS player. For the rest of you, ignore this meaningless post. For that one other, my friend code is 163284591673. Send your friend codes to the usual address.

In other “I need a friend” news, I was downtown today. I parked my New Beetle, left my Nintendo DS in my backpack, ordered an iced coffee at a cafe, and wrote a few blog posts on their free WiFi connection.

But I had enough of a sense of shame to feel bad doing it. and I didn’t manage to take any photos with my phonecam, so that’s progress.

And one more note: the photo I wish I had taken was of the 20-something man in a sidewalk scooter. I’m not dumb enough to assume his use of the scooter was illegitimate. I did, however, note that he had added blue neon under-lights to the bottom of his scooter.

Neon low-rider scooter dude, I salute you!

From the Roomba website:

Can it pick up pet hair?
Will it startle my pet?
Roomba is great for keeping up pet hair; its counter-rotating brushes actually pull the hair out of rugs and off your hard floor. Everyone’s pet is different, but most tend to react with curiousity at first, then soon after get used to it. Say goodbye to pet-hair tumbleweeds.

Well, they were right about the pet hair, though. One pass through the house, and the Roomba has bumbled its way into a job cleaning the house.

Because I’m a big nerd, I bought The Lovely One the model with the self-charging home base. Watching this thing work is more fun than standard-def television. Except for the dog.

It’s gonna be a long weekend, and for me, I’m only halfway through it. First a hint: Woody Allen’s Scoop is the funniest serial-killer murder-mystery comedy ever. Yes, that’s a genre

It’s also the sixth anniversary of our marriage. TLO, my lovely bride, bought me a Nintendo DS. I now have Super Mario Kart DS installed, so if you don’t hear for me for the next six months, well, you know why now.

Me? I got her a robot vacuum cleaner. She loved it. We had a thoroughly disappointing meal at The Pear Tree, and a fun time at the Richmond night market.

Because my youngest brother needs something to read on Friday, I’m putting this post up. I found some time management tips at a blog I read regularly. Don’t ask me why I suddenly started reading multiple economics blogs, it just is that way.

The rest of this post will be personal and discursive. Those of you coming for bike stuff or nerd stuff: I won’t be offended if you surf elsewhere. regular nerd-thinking will resume another day. For the rest of you, here’s the rest of the post:

I’m going to bed now.

A co-worker of mine claims to have coined the term “Ryanate,” yes, in reference to me. Typical usage: “dude, you totally Ryanated that guy. I haven’t seen Ryanation like that since Cousineau drank two cups of coffee in an hour.”

He also claims that he has no definition for the word yet.

I think it is more usual for neologisms to come after their meanings.

In other news, I will not be sharing other news with you today. I am looking forward to a very long bike ride on Saturday, ideally one with a lot of pain in it. I forsee another trip up Cypress in the near future.

As I put it to club-mates at yesterday’s race, the difference between this year and last year is that I am carrying the equivalent of a UCI-legal bicycle’s worth of extra weight somewhere on my body (where? Midsection. This isn’t a hard question if you see me with my shirt off. Sorry. That was probably too much information. I assure you: no photos).

I write only to mention that I have written a mid-sized essay on the metblog about a strange case where gender issues and mountain biking have collided in a messy fashion.

Apropos of nothing, another crosspost from the metblog, my first YouTube video:

.

You can now subscribe to a Ryan-Cousineau-only feed of my metblog posts, too. More on that, and some other stuff soon, I hope. The final goal is a combined metblog/wiredcola/flickr feed that I have taken to calling “OmniRyan” because it’s stupid.

What fun; it seems I’ve been upgrading my entire life. After the fog light incident, I did some manic rearranging of my A/V system.

I don’t even know if the details are interesting. I don’t have enough hi-def inputs on the HDTV (as I mentioned previously), so I finally spent the $60 on a simple but effective 4-1 component video switch. Then I finally put the progressive scan DVD player in the main room, freeing up the PlayStation 2 from its DVD playback duties (by current standards, it did them very badly in several ways: no progressive scan, and no comprehension of how to work with wide-o-vision).

Nothing a couple of hours on the floor rerouting audio and video cables couldn’t take care of. Seriously: I can do this stuff, but how do non-nerds handle this stuff? I fear there’s a lot of non-technical types with HDTVs who have either hired someone to take care of the wiring, or they’re not really watching an HD signal.

It should be said that I make things harder on myself by running equipment which I, er, know how to make work. The approved method of getting a really simple hi-def wire-up these days is to buy a really expensive HDMI-switching and upconverting receiver (and, erm, attach it to an HDCP-capable TV) and throw everything through it, but even then it’s a fair bit of wiring.

I’m now up to five sources which have to be routed into the receiver, and that’s hardly anything special. Heck, I could add one or two more video game consoles from my pile. It’s a lot of stuff to move.

But that was only one of the projects, and I think it almost qualifies as a system that comes by its complexity honestly.

My other upgrade project was my iBook’s hard drive. Over the last few months, the system has gone from warnings like “your hard drive is low on space” to “your hard drive is REALLY low on space” to “No, seriously, I don’t have any place to put this stuff.”

Fortunately the cost of an 80 GB laptop hard drive is about a hundred bucks, so upgrade ahoy, and let’s see what having 50 more GB will be like. I stopped by iLync in Burnaby and picked up a new hard drive (offered the choice of a Samsung or a Toshiba, with the Toshiba costing a few dollars more, I told the clerk “Korean is good enough”) and found a USB 2.0 laptop drive housing for a very reasonable $10. Sold.

Carbon Copy Cloner eventually succeeded in moving my data from old drive to new after a few tries. I suspect the super-cheap drive enclosure.

Then I went to Faqintosh and followed the 57-part directions on getting to the drive.

For some reason, the ridiculously elaborate process didn’t drive me nuts. I can’t decide if it was because of expectations (I wasn’t surprised that getting to the drive in a laptop was a pain; I was very surprised that getting to a fog light was), or because it was slightly less painful, or because I could do the whole job on my living room table.

It was about two hours from open to close for the drive. I expect more from Apple. But it just didn’t drive me over the edge like the fog light did.

Edit: this post seems to be fairly popular with people looking for info on replacing these Volkswagen New Beetle fog lights and headlights. I have become an accidental specialist on the subject, so if you have any questions or suggestions, please comment or email me. As a bonus, here’s a VWvortex thread on the subject of removing the front bodywork.

When we bought the New Beetle about a year ago, the driver’s side fog lamp had a cracked lens:

For her birthday, The Lovely One wished for it to be replaced with a new lens. Therein lies a tale.

Step 1: remove front wheels and headlights

The lens is not available separately from the entire fog lamp assembly. It’s a small unit that sits in the low-mounted grille, under the bumper. The bulb is easily changed with no difficulty, but the assembly is attached to the grille with three Phillips-head screws.

The New Beetle is a tightly packaged car. In various places around the vehicle, you’ll find packaging decisions that to my mind indicate either an engineering team that surrendered to the constraints of squeezing everything into this car’s odd shapes and spaces, or one that was simply rushed by a rather quick development schedule. It cannot have helped that the New Beetle is an adaptation of the VW Golf platform, which means that the car is in some ways an attempt to put a round shape over a formerly boxy car.

The two screws on on the top side of the light are blocked by the bumper structure: they cannot be accessed from above. I don’t think they can be accessed from the back, either. Let us consult Mr. Haynes: hm. All we have to do is remove the front clip to access those screws. What is this front clip they speak of?

Step 2: unplug turn signal and fog light connectors, then remove front clip
It’s every piece of bodywork in front of the windshield, except for the hood. And the hood will block some of the screws, too.

A quick web search confirms that indeed, that’s the normal procedure on a 1998 New Beetle. The standard Volkswagen shop schedule is 3 hours for this job.

Technically, only the bumper cover (which on the Beetle is a single piece of plastic bodywork covering the entire nose of the car: everything below the hood and between the fenders) needs to be removed, but it is attached to the two fenders by screws that are nearly as blocked as the fog lamp screws. With some patience and a few special tools, you might be able to release it without removing the fenders, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and the Haynes manual doesn’t recommend it.

Getting to all of the bolts holding the fenders in place requires you to first remove the front wheel, and then the inner fender liner, another piece of plastic held on by about ten screws.

With the fender liner removed, you can get some idea of what I meant by tightly packaged:

This is the area in the front left corner of the car, just below the headlight.

Another view. Volkswagen has managed to tuck the fresh air intake, the horns, and some coils of rigid hydraulic tubing (brake lines? Oil lines?) into this corner of the car.

Once you remove the screws and bolts attaching the fender from the inside of the fenderwell (and don’t forget the piece of load-bearing foam rubber tucked inside the fender) you get to deal with this little row of screws on the top side. You’re not out of the woods yet, oh no: one or two of those screws near the windshield will be inaccessible via a normal screwdriver because the hood blocks the way. This is one of the places I had to switch to a bit held in a 1/4″ socket in my ratchet driver, but at one point that was too tall, and I had to use a bit held in the jaws of my adjustable wrench. That was just stupid. Pay no attention to the warning on the battery cover, by the way: that’s just the dealership trying to scare you away from plugging into the OBD-II/VAG-COM port or something.

Don’t forget to remove the headlights, too. And you have to do this whole procedure (wheels, fender liners, headlights, fender bolts) on both sides of the car.

This is a little bit less than all the bolts from one side of the car. So the total number of bolts removed and replaced was about twice this. My little Skil driver (thanks, Mom & Dad!) held up through it all. Good tool.

With TLO’s help, the front clip was gently removed, allowing for the kind of spontaneous cute-dog shot you only get one chance to take:

Step 3: undo three screws holding old fog lamp assembly to grille, replace with new one

See? It’s easy!

Here’s a shot of where the fog light was:

I’ve put some notes on the flickr photo that might give you an idea of what’s going on here.

At this point, you have a new fog light in the right place in the grille, and your car looks like this:

Time for a much-needed drink break. Because, you know, this is the halfway point of the job.

As the saying goes, installation is the reverse of removal. There were some exciting moments while I tried to reinstall the passenger-side headlight, but I think I broke much less structural plastic on this project than I usually break.

And thanks to this repair running on so long, I got a big sunburn and I missed my Tuesday night bike race. Thanks, Volkswagen!

No, it’s not just me.

The New Beetle has had a broken fog lamp lens since we bought it. No serious problem, except cosmetically. I bought The Lovely One a new fog lamp (you pretty much have to buy the whole assembly, the lens doesn’t seem to be available on its own from most suppliers).

Joke’s on me: the procedure for replacing the fog lamp involves removing the front fender and at least some part of the bumper assembly. It’s billed as a three-hour job in the standard repair book. And I refuse to pay a shop to do this job, no matter how insane it is. Indeed, this is just body-panel removal monkey-work, the kind of thing that requires no diagnostic skill, no practiced technique, and no special tools. I’d feel incapable if I didn’t do it. But still.

I don’t even have words to express what I’m feeling right now. But I feel like when I try to assess the “total cost of ownership” of this vehicle, this fog light and the previous door-falling-off incident will be large figures in my mental accounting.

Hum. I wonder if I can get all of this phone-stuff out of my system all at once in one conclusive post.

Probably not. But I dare to try!

Gord (who is faster than me) points out in a comment on my previous post that I could just get Nokia’s wireless keyboard. Well yeah, if I wasn’t really cheap!

But he’s got a point, and I think it illuminates where I see phones going.

The magic of a modern mobile phone is that it has to do so much just to be a credible phone these days, that it verges on being able to take over what I’ll coin “the pocket.”

No really, I’m using it as a term of art. The “pocketspace” if you prefer, but I’m talking about both a literal and metaphorical pocket at the same time.

The Typical Nerd/Geek/Power-user/Hacker/Hipster Pocket
There’s four small electronic devices that a nerd like me might want to carry around:

Phone
PDA
Camera
MP3 player
(and maybe a portable game machine, but I’ll discuss that separately)

Every seriously wired nut will have a different priority set (I hardly care about the MP3 part, but I care VERY MUCH about the quality of the camera), but for a fifth device you’re pretty much into rather less common devices like portable GPS receivers, heart rate monitors, or similar electronic oddities.

There’s also a lot of minor functions that are done reasonably well by several of these devices: lots of phones, PDAs, and MP3 players can also act as audio recording devices. They might not replace a Minidisc recorder attached to a decent microphone, but they could take over from a typical digital audio recorder. Lots of phones, PDAs, and MP3 players include some sort of electronic stopwatch function. And thanks to the widespread use of embedded clocks, carrying a wristwatch is now entirely a fashion statement.

Of these four converging devices, the PDA has most obviously been consumed by the others. I haven’t seen any digital cameras take a serious shot at becoming an electronic day-timer, but virtually every major phone now makes some pretense at calendaring, and even the iPod can pull your calendar and carry it with you. The big players in the market know this, and both Palm and Microsoft have pushed heavily into the Phone/PDA OS field. Indeed, Nokia runs the Symbian (Series 60) OS on all its niftier phones, and I can assure you that Nokia started out as a phone maker, its PDA features seem competitive. I can say that since in the last three months I’ve used Palm Treos, a Windows Smartphone, a Blackberry, and now this Series-60-powered 6682.

Seriously, I’ve been spending way too much time with phones and PDAs lately.

I don’t see a way forward for non-phone PDAs. The LifeDrive is Palm’s answer: put a small hard drive in a WiFi-and-Bluetooth-equipped thing, adding up to some sort of wacky do-everything unit. I don’t think it represents the future. I think a Danger Hiptop (or Blackberry, or any device like that) is a more likely future concept for storage: save it on the server. Fortunately for Palm, their Treos are much loved as both PDAs and phones.

The camera is probably the device that is the least-cannibalized of these four. Sure, every phone you can buy these days comes with a camera, not to mention a lot of PDAs, but most of those cameras are really bad, and only a few very new phones are even getting close to being good cameras. Ironically, Dan’s interesting article on digicam resolution trends claims that anything much over 2 megapixels is a waste of data, as long as the lens is up to the challenge.

And while I’m at it, I just insist that any recent small camera should be an acceptable video camera. I can live with somewhat sketchy live sound, but the video should be better than bad.

The MP3 player I consider a nearly-solved problem. But then I would: it’s the gadget I care about the least. The archetypal MP3 player is the iPod Nano, and it’s just a superb user interface in front of some solid sound-pushing electronics and 1-4 GB (and probably 8 GB soon) of memory, wrapped in great industrial design.

Phones already should be good at pushing sound out through headphones, and sweating the user interface is just a design exercise. As for the memory capacity, recent phones often come with memory card slots, and the price of memory keeps falling. Give it 12 months, and my 6682 will have a super-cheap 1 or 2 GB MicroSD card inside, plenty for all the music I can handle. People who want 60 GB iPods will continue to buy those, just as people buy digital SLRs. But we’re talking about a go-everywhere gadget.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why I don’t think camera-makers will start building cellular phones into their cameras.

If a phone could do all four of those functions with some competence (and I think the phone I have in my house right now can do a good three of those things fairly well) then the only question for me would be “why not just take notes on this thing and leave my laptop at home?”

Well, yes. Thus the Bluetooth keyboard. Seriously: I’m mostly a write stuff and read stuff guy, so pushing stuff around an Excel spreadsheet is not a vital need for me (but many p. hones and phone/PDAs can do that…). A phone and a folding keyboard could get me pretty far in the outside world.

As I see it, there are three stumbling blocks between me and my dream device, a mostly-phone with a camera, PDA, and MP3 player rolled into it:

1) moving data to and from the device has to get better
2) the camera part has to get better
3) the data plans around here have to get better

The first point is possibly one that mostly affects me: as a filthy Mac user, none of Nokia’s very clever PC sync software works with my personal laptop. and iSync doesn’t seem to like moving photos and MP3 files. So I usually pull the phone’s memory card and plug it into a card reader I have. I’m also experimenting with syncing up to some of the PCs I have access to. Maybe the Nokia Lifeblog software is really good; I wouldn’t know yet.

The second part I’ve covered, so on to the third part: in the Vancouver area, mobile phone data plans are pretty expensive and fairly bad. The worst comedy is provided by the several “unlimited” plans available, many of which have hard limits on the amount of data you can move, and all of which are really expensive: an unlimited data plan will at least double your phone bill, and some carriers charge $100/month for the maxed-out service.

The cheap data plans range from ridiculous “$5 for enough data capacity to send two pictures” to Fido’s remarkably cheap $20/month unlimited data plan, whose only catch is that you have to use it with a Danger Hiptop 2. Reasonably nice device with a lousy phone, minimal MP3 capabilities, and a $200 price tag. But it’s a super duper little communications device.

So here I am, unwilling to use my phones as intended: no email or web surfing from my toy, no sending blog updates from my phone (which I would definitely do if it had a keyboard and a data plan), and no MMS-ing my photos to people.

I have to assume that there are business reasons why the local mobile operators have priced me out of the market, but I don’t have to like it. Mobile data access is something I am tracking the cost of, and when it gets into a more impulsive price range (or I need one to make money) I will jump. Maybe I’ll pony up and buy that keyboard, too.