I know I know — picking on radio is not a difficult task. Like kicking a tree (easy target, since we don’t talk about kicking people when they’re down anymore.) Radio has its faults but I still enjoy it, and its vague sense of community and spirit.

I imagine most (or a significant portion of) radio listening is during rush-hour .. the morning and evening commuter cycle. Further, I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) that most people tune into the radio for some music. It may be that people tune in for entertainment of any kind but at least for me – some days I might enjoy a good raunchy morning show, while others I just want some good music. And since I’m commuting while chauffeuring around my beautiful baby girl I’d like to be able to find fun simple family or rock, and have the option to fine The Heavy for my return trip from the sitters.

The trouble is — during the morning commute, there is _only_ talk radio. Roll through a dozen stations and you get only talk or commercials, never music, for an hour or more there. I don’t get it. So the radio is simply not an option .. my little one is not interested in listening to people gab, she wants some Rafi or some Reggae (no joke.)

Sillyness. So either everyone else really wants talk radio or….. wtf?

The rocking horse said..

“When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you’ve become Real.”

I’ve generally been a pretty low stress sort of fella.. things come at me and I’ve rolled with them, or just gotten my head down and survived hard or tedious things without freaking out. Its one of my super powers – Everyone has a super power, just that most people’s power is being an idiot :) Alas, more often the last couple of years I’ve had my stress-outs – which is just not my style – but such is life right now. Hopefully I can return to form this year .. lose a bit of weight and if not relax, at least be cool.

My wife, bless her heart, allowed me persuade her to get us an Xbox for my birthday. (“Don’t worry about my birthday this year.. we’re too busy and I have pretty much all that I want”, “You can get an Xbox” “Oh, this birthday is very important, we absolutely must get something.. Xbox you say?” ) She’s not much of a gamer (though does adore her DS on occasion), so this is more a gift of compassion.. help for my ailing creeky old soul maybe more than its technical merits (rent movies direct to it, etc). She knows I’ve been a bit of a wreck of late, and this might help.

Also she knows I’m not one for relaxing too too much — I love a lot of things, but I tend to just ‘work’ instead or even when into entertainments, I’ll try to over-do them — with free time so tight, trying to max what you get done in your moments is just a new way of stressing. I’ve often joked the ultimate gaming is software development itself since I enjoy it so much — the fact of it is that I barely know how to relax, since my ‘entertainment’ is really a form of work. I guess its the same as people bringing their work home. I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and digging into writing a new game or handheld app.. wtf?! More though — we all know the distractions the Net can offer, so when I’m working away on some code for this or that when I should be relaxing, its easy to just waste away the time.. so maybe with an Xbox I can learn to relax a bit, kick back with a rum and coke and play a game while sitting on the couch. Or maybe watch a show or DVD or movie without alt-tabbing to email every 10 seconds. Cool. Awesome. (In the evenings.. during the day if I get a moment, I’m going to sit on the back porch, damnit!)

So with all of these and many more over-thought factors, I’ve wanted an Xbox despite having a capable enough PC, despite half the XBox 360’s library being available on PC, and despitehalf the 360’s games being arguable better on the PC. (Games that are better played with a mouse, such as an FPS shooter, say.) Well, that and pure gadget lust of course.. the 360 can drive an HD TV, and its a new toy!

The Cons to the gadget-lust of course are the price of the machines — not cheap, especially during this economy, and the apparent risk in the production values. And the fact that the games are so utterly good looking that they’re destroying my interest in building games .. no way I can keep up with those production values! Anyway, if you listen to those on the Net you’d assume that its on the order of 50-100% of them failing within a month of purchase. Of course, most of us just realize this is the usual Net BS — the grit in the system is most felt.

But it turns out, the production issues of the 360 and the bitching online is much deserved! But despite the scratched disks, the red-ring of deaths and other curious failures, people come back. The content is that compelling.

The purchase and install: So I went to a local store with a relatively easy return policy (a little wary at this point, but not much) and picked up the current 2-game bundle. Got it home, set it up and ignored it for a day until it was my turn for a ‘night off’ and set to playing. Noticed some curious sparklies in the TV display (and took a couple pictures for proof), and got pissed as hell. (I mean, we got this machine for the de-stress right?) Still, as a good friend of mine in IRC instructed, there was no need to get so PO’d and the store was quick to swap me another machine. (I read later that the issue was likely related to the 1080p resolution I was having it drive – I’ve a pretty respectible TV so I bloody well wanted 1080p. Apparently there are a number of issues that many 360’s can’t handle well at 1080p, but were I to drive it at a lower bandwidth output I’d not have had _that_ issue. But no way I’m laying down that amount of cash with a defective unit day zero, right?) This was an “older model” unit – I learned later about the many various internal improvements Microsoft has done over time, and how to pick them out in the field. The older ones run hot and have louder DVD drives, and tend to fail a lot more…. so just as well I had it fail first hour, rather than blow up in another more serious way down the road and get me into the refurbish cycle of hell.

Anyway, upon returning to the point of purchase the next day I found it highly odd that the EBGames (a variant of Gamestop for Canada) fellow gave me a naked 360 unit as my ‘new replacement.’ “The box is pretty beat it, I just picked it out for you.” I mean, if the box was so badly beaten up then may I don’t want that one for my replacement unit, but more to point .. with GameStop’s well known ’switcheroo’ issues, I don’t want a naked unit. But whatever, by this time I was resigned to expecting it to also be bad and I was ready to come back for XBox #3. By this time I was mighty good at hooking the unit up and trying various cables to test, so it took only moments for me to hook up and find out Xbox #2 was flaky in a similar way — it would not even do 1080p at all, just blank out in that mode. Peachy! Perhaps I could’ve settled with 720p like perhaps most users are, but again.. no way I wanted to settle on sub-par on a brand new purchase.

I did find out one could go to a different EBGames outlet with returns so headed to a more convenient location that was bursting at the seams with fresh new units.. and by new I mean in sealed boxes without damage and the latest system revision (running quieter and cooler I’m told, and with better overall reliability.) XBox #3 turned out to be the one, and has worked perfectly for a week or so now.

The lads I spoke with did suggest they’d seen a very high (30% or more) return rate on some models of the XBox, so the Net moaning is quite possibly well deserved. Or maybe I had been getting screwed by GameStop trickery, them playing the odds I would be happy with a used or screwy unit and didn’t have a 1080p TV? *shrug* Who knows. (I do like EBGames .. usually a pleasant experience, as far as game stores go.)

The Content — so, with all that really really annoying shenanigans out of the way, that I’d not have put up with normally — the XBox 360 is amazing kit, if a little loud when the drive is spinning. (You can copy games to the hard drive if you have one, to make that moot. And to mitigate the risk of scratching your disks, that people talk about.. *sigh*)

XBox Live Marketplace, where you can get free or rental or purchase video, previews, games and downloadable content is fantastic. As usual we Canadians get the shaft so theres not much in the way of Hollywood movies up, but theres some. Still, theres a fair assortment of indie video (The Guild, *laugh*) and a huge variety of Xbox Live Arcade games, including demos and ‘downloadable content updates’ for games, free to nab. Pick a game, queue up a download, and go play or watch or something and it’ll happily suck down the queue in background. Theres retro titles and redone retro (Pacman and new competitive Pacman, for instance) and quite a pile of great quality new games. *Really* impressive for gamer noobs like me.

The actual on-disc purchased games.. again, while existing in overlap with PC gaming, there is still quite a bit of really good stuff. I’m playing with Fable 2 now.. simply gorgeous and pretty cool.

I do find it very odd that a couple of games I’ve looked into have weird “family bullshit”, that I can’t help assume is poached from Sims or some shit. I used to be a bit of a hardcore gamer (more a hardcore gamer wannabee as I went back to my compiler), and I just can’t take this stuff seriously. When I found out in Fable 2 you could get your character and go pick of game characters (NPCs, not real humans) for dates, sex, etc, have kids, buy a house or rent them out, and that you should ‘go to work’ (minigames) to get cash .. I was more than a little W-T-F. I go to work and have a family in RL, I don’t need that stress in-game, thanks :) But fine you can mostly ignore this stuff without losing some pieces of the game.. but _seriously._

A few days later, I found out you can do similar stuff in GTA IV, which is really just about loose driving around a city and causing mayhem. Getting on your in-game cellphone to call people and arrange dates… …. …..

I’m told again that perhaps this is just in these two games, two very high profile Xbox 360 games, but still. *BLEH*

In summary — all told, I’m pretty damned impressed. Wireless controllers with remote on/off is way cool for flopping on the couch. It seems a capable machine graphicly, and the library of both Live Arcade and real store purchases seems fantastic. Accessory options seem good — with a baby sleeping upstairs I was curious if there was a wireless headphone set (not a headset for gabbing with 12 year olds) and sure enough, and even pretty cheap. So now I can nerd out on the couch with my wireless headphones and controllers and chill a little bit without disturbing anyone. Cool bones.

Aside — For a long long time I’ve been saying that things will get to be ‘good enough’ for the average consumer soon. Its been a long time coming for video card technology, but audio seems to be a much simpler thing. We got “good enough” in the Sound Blaster 16 days imho, so nowadays a good enough audio solution in a computer is pennies. Video is still expensive as heck (couple hundred for a ‘good’ video card for a PC), but we’re getting there. With the current console generation (PS3 and 360) we’ve got HD consoles in the home, and the graphics are pretty damned good. Maybe this generatoin or next will be ‘good enough’ that people will not need to upgrade much.. except of course for the artificial stuff, when the company retires its machines and makes new content only for the new one. I just hope the XBox 360 lasts another 5 years… we’re not buying another console for quite awhile.

On occasion I install cygwin on a Windows box so I can do some text processing with perl or other mundane tasks. (Usually I keep a VM with a full Unix distribution, be it Linux or FreeBSD on a USB keychain or on the disk.. but Cygwin can be handy, not to mention they’ve got an XServer and other crazy stuff working very nicely in Windows :)

One thing that always gets on my nerves is that regular Emacs doesn’t seem to work quite eight .. more to point, I can’t seem to quit it using the usual Emacs sequence of C-x C-c. Instead I’ve been using Xemacs, and being careful to launch it to background so it doesn’t mucker things up. Rather annoying, if the tinest of things.

Turns out you can just add a Windows env var “CYGWIN” with value “tty” to clue Cygwin into working correctly; Emacs can be exited and works as expected. Apparently the issue is Windows is capturing C-x and buggering things up.

(Perhaps this is a well known thing to the Cygwin hardcore, but I don’t frequent the message boards or mailing lists for it.)

.. in mistreating these fellows. I used to just be nice to them as people are hard up and need work. But after they so often crossed the line or border-lined on harassment I’ve started to treat them as they deserve – Nothing in the decent persons code of conduct 2009 requires support of their broken business model or to condone their lack of ethics. The more we answer and deal with these people, the more we validate the mode of operation. (The actual guy on the phone, I know, you get your paycheque; but the guy who runs the company, how do you sleep at night? And how do you treat the telemusketeers who call your house?) Anyway, todays ever so slight amusement has provided a specific indulgence.

You see, they play in the gray area where you assume they’re lieing, but you rarely really have solid proof. But we have recently moved, so we very much do have proof, and there in lies the guilty joy of the catch.

Bastard: “We’ve drawn a coupon here in our very office; a coupon you filled out last year. Do you remember it? It has been a long time.. back July of last year sir? It has your address and name! ”

(like an address and name are some sort of secret thing? I’m not so quick to cleverness on my feat so I really should prepare a statement for such situations, but thankfully I am not _that_ anal :)

Nonetheless, it is a great thing to inform them that I know they’re lieing this time, that they’re out to scam me of something, and that I now have their phone number (since they didn’t block it), and furthermore can look it up online or call it back, or set a fax to call it all day and night for the next year. I almost wish I had one of those trap programs that picks up the phone and plays receptive-sounding messages at them to keep them on the line all day..

Lieing bastards.

It is an odd world where you want to buy, but you simply cannot; or worse, that after you do buy something the entity may just pull the plug on it and you’re out of luck. Its an odd world when your newly purchased full price car only works at 10 miles an hour except on certain entity friendly roads, or when you can only buy entity-branded seat covers. Or you are driving down the road, and yet violate some new term in the Terms and Ungreements that was just added, and they shut you down. Fun times indeed!

I think I have blogged often (or if not, should have, as this topic is close to my heart.) about the horror of DRM (or ‘dieing rights movement’) — now, as a content producer myself I certainly don’t have a problem with restricting content movement in ways I see fit, but as a consumer it sure makes me mad that I simply cannoy buy anything. The DRM is used to supposedly prevent piracy by the casual user, and to enforce region locking and so forth.. and I must admit in this day and age, region locking does seem a bit silly. As a Canadian I’m forever lamenting that these companies are turning my business away or generally making my life annoying as a consumer, which certainly seems backwards. Go talk to anyone, and they always ask me ‘why do you even try so hard? just go download..’ — but its because I am a content producer, and if I want peopel to buy my stuff, it certainly makes sense for me to buy their stuff. And its the right thing to do. But gorramned, ‘they’ make it hard!

I know we’ve been burnt a few times by DRM .. buying a book and it later becomes ‘unfunctional’, or buying music only to have it vanish and be not-downloadable again by the company you bought from, or stop working when the company pulls the plug on that license or service (haha!) or disconnects your account , or be stuck with lower quality encoding value and thus need to rebuy, or any number of issues. I can grin and bear those issues for I’ve a fairly rigourous backup regime so I tend not to lose my files and I nowadays steer clear of software or platofrm lock-in DRM (ie; I simply will not buy ebooks in a form that ties you to one specific platform, since there is too much risk that platform will go under or be instructed to stop supporting you, or not be carried forward to your new platforms over time. These are not mythical but very real scenarios that _have occurred_, forcing people to lose their media collections. And of course, buying DRM-laden music from iTunes so you can only biuy iPods in the future just seems silly to me..) If you buy all Kindle books, you’re stuck with Amazon in the future. If What if you want to buy from 5 different stores (god forbid!), are you supposed to buy 5 players for the media, and carry them all with you? No way. Shouldn’t the industries create a common DRM, so people can buy whatever player they _prefer_ and then buy content as they see fit? I mean, you used to be able to buy a ghetto blaster stereo from Radio Shack or Sears or whatever, and it would play any tape casette or CD you bought at any store. Not now.

Anyway, the reason I post today is after reading some news about eReader turning on (or turning more carefully on) region locking, and even more content becoming unavailable to me to buy. ie: As time goes on, my options as a Canadian get less and less.. not more. w-t-f?!

This is really DRM-aside, but comes up in the same breath really. Now we all know there are a fair number of people pirating media out there (and it is a complex topic, where downloading music is entirely legal in Canada, if morally wrong. Thank our government for allowing things to go so wrong :/), but here I and so many people are — ready to spend real hard won dollars on music, TV, video and ebooks.. and we simply cannot. We can’t buy physical Kindle’s here, despite the fact you can load your own media onto them. We can’t buy the Kindle iphone software here either, nor use the Kindle books/newspapers, etc. We can’t buy mp3s at the Amazon music store. We can’t get shit-for-all movies on Xbox Live or iTunes Movie Store due to the old school contracts not permitting those outlets to sell. We can’t buy books from hardly anywhere. So in Canada we can barely buy music, or books, or TV shows, or video. We can’t use Netflix (US only). Seriously, is Canada so irrelevent? And the UK? Its only slightly better to the USians — they _can_ buy, but of course they’re DRM’ed all to hell, so we just pray their media keeps working down the road. People don’t want to buy anymore, they want ease of rental and access .. but at least when you ‘buy’ a DVD, it shoudl keep working for a long long time.

It annoys the heck out of me, but it annoys me more to find over time the restrictions are only getting worse. In this enlightened day and age, and in the face of a bad economy.. you would think they want our money, they want the wider option of distribution. But alas, instead they’re stickng to old models, to old agreements and trying to put back the ever popular region lock and enforce ’scarcity’ and control on the digital world. They may win, I don’t kow.. but whatever. I just want the option to buy something. As a content producer, I have sold my software anywhere that would take it, and given it away when I couldn’t. The important thing is having my work, my art, my tools be out there, and I’d like a few bucks when I can. It doesn’t make sense for me not to sell it to those with money, does it?

I hope they do not wonder why people are driven to piracy; sure, there are those who do it for various reasons, but I am sure a large base in there do it for there being no other choice. People want to consume, and if your model makes it impossible or impractical or a terrible experience, they will find some other way to do it. If you can go download something with 2 minutes of clickng, most will.

This is the part of the programme where I bag on a TV show. The following is all spoilers (insomuch as I can spoil what they have already spoiled… zing!)

Now, before I get into it I must admit that I’ve greatly enjoyed much of the show the last few years; its has generally pretty tight writing, and they managed to even make you think they’d plotted a lot of the action out in advance. I will accept (though loathe) that the studio made them write in a bunch of filler, and I will accept that like a lot of this new style of show the last few years that are mystery, character and high drama driven (Lost, Desparate Housewives, etc and so on) that pacing is a difficult thing. All in all, an excellent and gritty science fiction show that I’d recommend to others. I will miss it, but I’m glad its over so I can have a piece of free time back :)

It is hard to end a dark show since you naturally want to end on a light foot; it is hard to end a show that has primarily been based in ‘mystery’ and fear of the unknown, since its a big switch to suddenly start revealing things without it just looking like you could stitch the first and last episode together and ignore the rest. You don’t play a chess match for 19 hours and then switch it to checkers at the end .. the transition is tough. But mostly I think the writers got very good, got into the flow, of writing dark and gritty and when it finally came to spinning a happy thread at the end.. they just didn’t know how to keep the gravity. To keep that tense and tight writing. They opened the door into fairy land and well through it. They admitted by their lack of tight finish to “we didn’t plan it so much ahead, we’re just going to cap off as much as we can and hope for the best!”

Spoilers!

I can sort of deal with the explanation that the two ‘ghost’ characters were just that – angels from god or some really advanced speces or whatever. Seems like a biiiig set up with a cop out ending, but okay. Seems like they were a little too personally motivated or felt (perhaps assumed by the watcher?) to be on one side or another, but .. okay, I can deal with that hand.

I’m not really sure I can accept that these little dreams and visions that characters have been having the whole show, that have been built up into something large, that really they just were planted by God or whatever to help the characters do a 20 foot walk at the end. Thats it? Find the girl, walk her through a door, you’re done. Great, thanks, glad you set that upf ro 5 years. OKay, sure, maybe all this ghost and vision business was to guide Baltar to stick around and give a speach at the end.. but weak sauce. Course, Cavil decided it was all a trick at the end, so the speach was for nothing, and thus the whole multi-year plotline was basicly for naight. Yay! Seems the writers sure didn’t know how big a part these visions were to play in the end, but they did know how it would play out.. so write it big, and then.. fizzle.

After battling for several years for the very survival of the species, they all decide to just give up all technology and rough it with some primitivies. A romantic idea for sure, especially after the hardships endured… but realistic? Ignoring for now the fact that bad guys were left out in space (and the Centurians were trusted to not come back and exterminate everyone), you’re a society fighting for survival who just says ‘hell, shit, lets destroy our ships and gear, and see if we can survive the first winter and guess which berries are safe to eat.’ Seriously? We’re supposed to believe that would happen? And that everyone goes along with it? Sounds like they wanted to write another half season about this, but just rushed it into a 5 minute sequence at the end since they didn’t plan their timing out many episodes in advance. Maybe the military could handle hunting, but we’d love to see how Baltar’s cult fairs alongside the other startups. Take those used to high tech living and let them scrounge for food.. good odds! (Queue up playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, however.)

Now, as Lee put it, this could be a way to break the cycle; by starting from scratch and basicly ignoring the entire history of both species so that no one learns anything.. just a random shot in the dark, and thats the future. As opposed to perhaps taking this new situation of Hera, and the two allied species, and trying to make a go of it together, say. Of course, this whole show was a set up for how Hera was the agent for survival for both species ….. and so what, are they saying all the other humans die out from starvation, disease, war with the natives, childbirth, etc, and only Hera’s children survive long term? Thats pretty bleak, but it sure didn’t seem that was suggested. It really just seemed like hera was….. fizzle. Another fizzle. The other humans have babies, too, yeehaw.

I can accept that Kara was some short term ghost, unlike the long termed head-vision ghosts. But with all that writing that she was going to carry both species to their doom.. and really it was she was going to lead them to their happy place. Fizzle.

But okay, all this is fine because they’re safe now? A dead Racetrack accidentally launches nukes into the Colony; maybe the hand of god, or maybe Racetrack wasn’t fully dead then.. whatever. Colony dead, or crashed into the black hole as later commentary suggested (they over-snipped the footage.. more proof of rushing it?) What is not explained is what the pile (a few? dozens? hundreds?) of Evil Cylon Basestars are up to for these thousands of years after the humans go all native on us. Do they just wander aimlessly in the big sky trying to find new Earth and die of old age? (Remembering that we don’t know if the human-like Cylons age, but certainly the pure-machine ones do not.) Certainly, all those Cylons that took over the twelve colonies and New Caprica, they’re still around. This pretty much seems a hard counter to the fealing of “we’re safe now, lets burn our only defences.”

Anyway, a great show with a pretty exciting ending. The show tried to feal realistic and consistent, and suddenly went implausible in the end. An okay ending, but just not where I’d hoped it would go.

Or maybe, as the SyFy (!!) channel likes to jerk with its customers and introduce filler and long delays between seasons, maybe this was deliberately a weighted copout, to leave room for the next two hour movie in the fall (”The Plan” from the Cylon perspective) or to lead into the new TV series (”Caprica”, about birthing of the Cylons.)

In the middle of last year we went out and picked up our first bicycle seat for our little girl. If you’re up early on a weekend or have time before/after dinner and want to burn some calories for yourself and have a blast with the little one, biking is a great option. It was still alien for me to be out the door at 7am to the park, but it was a fun way to pass the time and we ended up going out probably 4 or more days a week every week. Awesome.

That was this post should you care.

Now that winter is coming to close we’re all very sick of being couped up inside – Play-doh is good, and colouring is great, but she just needs to get out and run and dig and climb.. she’s sick of her toys and its getting harder to invent ways to entertain her :) So I plugged her into the old bike seat and with her new found words she exclaimed ‘too tight!’ and ‘too big!’ so it was time to retire that awesome little device — at least we got a few months out of it!

After reviewing options at Zellers ($89.95) and Walmart (I forget) and Canadian Tire ($89.95) I checked out Toys-R-Us again, just like last time. Usually not an inexpensive place (and always a challenge to get a small child away from after a shopping run) they nevertheless, just like last time, had a pretty good price on the “Wallaroo” sized bicycle seat. $59.95 CDN seems pretty good for a device we’ll work over all summer and likely have to discard next spring..

The Toys-R-Us page is here

After our first outing last night I thought I would offer a few comments; let me break it down into positioning and balance, size, cost and construction.

Position/Balance

The Wee-Ride we had last year was front-mount, by which I mean the chair is in front of you (between your arms when driving the bike.) This is convenient and clever for a lot of reasons — you can see the child (and any mittens they may toss aside) and they have an unobstructed view. As she got older she also learned to hole the handlebars and attack the brakes and gear-shift, which was cute after the first surprise braking :) The new device is rear-mount which makes me a little paranoid since I cannot see her, but at least she can see me. I worry that she will tire of staring at my back, but hopefully the landscape whizzing by will entertain.

For what its worth in last nights first trip out, she was crying out ‘Weeeee!’ a lot, so I think she enjoyed it :)

With both mount-positions it was trivial to get used to the different weight and balance, and as a guy it was still easy to mount the bike. (Most guys I know swing their leg over the back tire to mount, but now I have to go bent-knee’d in front of the seat due to the large throne out back.)

Momentum is a little funny though with the new arrangement; if you’re parallel to a curb and then jog-left to go up onto the ramp to the sidewalk you may feel this seat jiggle and sway as you do the sharp turn, say. When going off a curb or doing any quick turns or drops, you wil feel the resistance as the seat swings around back, since its pretty heavy (30 pound child) and big (tall!) — it wasn’t a problem, but it did surprise me a few times to feel that ‘drag.’ See below.

Size

The previous seat was a great size; small, comfortable for the child, and had a little padded play area out front (I assume should the child get whipped forward its to cushion the blow.) The new seat is more like a small throne, very large and high-backed. I’ve seen smaller rear-mount seats around so thought this one seemed large, but it does seem very comfortable – I had my daughter sit in it at the store – and lets her sit back, or lean into the chair at the sides. The foot compartments are pretty deep and adjustable for a growing child. Overall the chair seems well made.

Really, the goal (aside from carrying) of these seats is to keep the feet out of the spokes, and this chair should be fine; the legs naturally dangle into the approproiate compartments, and the plastic is molded around to cup the child at all points so she’d have to go out of her way to get into anything .. just dawdling or kicking will not be a problem.

The chair can be removed from the bike pretty easily, as the previous younger-child model can be.

Construction

The chair is a strong plastic and seems fine for its purposes; a large lock-screw is used to hold the seat to the mounting bracket, so that it can be moved forward or back as the child needs, and can be removed alltogether. There is a safety strap fixing the chair to the bike, presumably for use if the bracket slides down the post .. seems dubious to me.

The main curiosity is the design — it uses a U-fork that plugs its tines into a bracket mounted on the main post under the real bike seat. The bent part of the U then sticks up and back over the wheel and the seat mounts onto it. Pretty clever in a way, as its a free shock absorber — drop off a curb and the chair just bounces an inch, no biggy. It strikes me they could pretty easily have run a bar down to the wheelmount axle to make it much stronger, but maybe they would have had to pad the chair heavily or otherwise provide shocks… still, as long as the bracket on the post holds it should be fine. If it slides down then at worst the wheel will start to rub on the seat bottom which should present no danger beyond your deceleration.

Cost

The cost seems good — $59.95 for a bike mount seat seems fine to me. $100 was starting to cross my line of interest, but I imagine thats where you get shock absorbers and such in the kits, but this seems a well built and inexpensive solution.

We loved the previous front mounted seat so much it gave me some trust in the brand, as foolish as that may seam.

I’m sure I’ve ranted recently about the cost of media in pure dollars (as opposed to in terms of entertainment guilt when you don’t have time to consume all that you’d like.)

DVDs are the prime offender really; it used to be that Star Trek: The Next Generation seasonal sets were some $100 or more (Canadian), which was truly offensive. Now, I know that some series come in seasons of 10 while big ticket American shows are often in batches of 20 or 25 a year, so theres a cost increase there. And for geek material like ST:TNG the consumers are _perhaps_ more affluent or will grumble and pay up anyway.

Either way, it annoys me to find some very fine shows at $50ish per season, with others being far too high at $80ish, and some even more. It also annoys me that BBC labeled items are always in the $80ish area due to some supposed importing fee rubbish.

Anyway, when The Wire box set recently was on sale at Amazon.ca I put my money where my mouth is – the entire show (5 seasons, each comprised of 10 or so full hour long (not 40 min!) episodes) for some $100 dollars, that seems pretty fair, so I figure I can sort out some numbers for myself.

5 seasons * 10 episodes * 1 hour per episode (ignoring DVD extras which are nice too) .. so a good 50 hours for $100, or $2/hour of entertainment. OKay, that seems to be my number. The aforementioned ST:TNG season would be 26 episodes (guessing) * 40mins per episode (guessing) or 17 hours of entertainment for $100 (now about $60) .. or in excess of $5/hour, so thats way off my charts. Nowadays ST:TNG is $60 so thats about $3 and change per hour. Being ST:TNG it’s near to my young heart, so I’d probably go for it.

I guess I’m willing to spend $2-$3 per hour on good solid entertainment, and will simply steer clear of high cost items outright .. I’m just not going to look $200 in the eye. (Consider Dr. Who .. how many decades of that is there? I just can’t imagine buying much of it.. but if they made it cheap enough, they would get some money out of me. Theres a lesson there for the industry..)

Last night while browsing some ebooks and reviewing their usual rape-style DRM rules, I had a brainfart:

Base line: $2-$3 / hour of entertainment against video products (DVD)

250 page average novel, at say 90 seconds per page is approximately 6 hours, at $9.99 per book. That’d be a little over $1.50 per hour of entertainment, but pretty near the base line ballpark.

A video game used to be rated in the 50-60 hour range, but just as often nowadays a game is expected/designed to be sequal generating and so are broken up into smaller chunks of higher impact entertainment. Consider $60 for 30 hours as an average.. again, the magic $2 per hour spot.

Lastly, lets examine music; a typical CD might be say $16.99 for an hours entertainment. Ouch, thats why off the normal scale, but you do listen to music over and over and over more than re-reading a book. So maybe. I imagine if music was half that price it’d sell a lot more.. so ask Apple about that. (Note that if Apple is selling an album for $10US, they’re pretty much establishing a cost to print and distribute and store physical media.. I wonder how well it stacks up against reality eh?) Is this $2/hour number a well known quanity, or vary wildly per individual? I’m in a rush now or I could throw some more values into the functions and figure it out.. but pass.

So there you go, now we have some concrete proof I’m a two dollar kind of whore.

People have often been asking how applications and firmware will be packaged for the Pandora, and other variations — how will apt-get work on the device when there are SD cards present, and so on. Now while the information that we’re letting out is still subject very much to change, I did reply in a thread on the forums and I thought the discussion might be of interest to folks.. so I thought I’d repost it here.

See thread here

The main post I made, warts and all, is reproduced here. Many follow-up questions and answers by various team members are posted. Also see a discussion on the Unofficial Pandora Blog for some extra flames and discussion.

You can of course do anything you want; your box, open source evreything, make it do what you like wink.gif But let me discuss a bit from a normal user perspective (ie: not hacking in knee deep.)