Joe Zawodny

This post was motivated by a recent experience at a local grocery store, although the experience can be had at just about any large store. Every store I have been to has either numbered or lettered checkout lanes. Some stores also have a set of lanes dedicated to self-checkout. If you visit a store frequently, you probably already know which checkout clerks to avoid, but wouldn’t it be great if problem customers could be avoided also? In order achieve this I propose that stores replace the simple number/letter labels on their checkout lanes with descriptive labels. Here is my list …

“Ultra Express Lane” for the Self-Important Terminal Type-A Personalities: This lane is for people who are obviously more important than you or I and who do not deserve to wait in line with common folk. This lane exists but is never open. Its sole purpose is to attract these customers to the store in the hope that the lane might be open. If it were open, it would only allow one customer at a time - no line allowed. The light at the register indicating whether the lane is open or not would be turned on until one of THEM approached the register. The light would then be turned out until the transaction was completed and the customer has left.

“I Do Not Begin to Write a Check Until I See the Total” Lane: At least this is the abbreviated title which has a subtitle “and then balance my checkbook before I hand the check to the clerk”. These folks often add to the misery of those behind them because they do not get their personal identification out of the bottom of their purse/wallet until asked to do so. For whatever reason, they will not fill out anything on the check beforehand - the store name, date, or signature. I can spot these types pretty accurately, I’ve developed a stereotype that generates some false positives, but never traps me behind a false negative. The mere existence of the personalities gives rise to the following lane.

“I Frequently Jump to Between Checkouts Hoping the New One Will Move Faster” Lane: These folks are never happy, but are not as full of themselves as those in the Ultra Express lane. They will jump from lane to lane on a whim. They also tend not to actually enter the physical lane between the magazines, candy, and junk-toy displays that leads to the register in the hopes that a new register might open that they could pounce on. They also tend not to put their items on the conveyor belt until they begin checking out.

Lane for the “Technically Challenged”: These folks always seem to have trouble making payment. They never use cash and pay with credit or debit cards which never seem to work. They know all of the tricks, rubbing the stripe on the back with their finger or piece of clothing, wrapping the card in a plastic shopping bag, changing the speed of the swipe, etc. If they make it past the swipe stage, they probably need to find a piece of paper in their purse/wallet that has their pin number on it which they either can’t quickly find or invariably mis-key the first try at the keypad.

The “I Always Question the Price of at Least One Item” Lane: There is just something about these folks that cause scanners to misread the bar-code or the store product price databases to become corrupt. If those failures don’t occur, they seem to bring along out of date store ads or expired coupons - just in case. These folks usually cause the entire lane of customers behind them to become, at least temporarily, one of the other types of customer.

The “People on Cell Phones” Lane: They start out in line talking, for all to hear, about things that should be kept private. At the register, the clerk must guide them through every step of making payment via hand signals or semaphore flags. It is as though they have never bought anything before - the part of their brain still functioning in our reality probably hasn’t the capacity to remember how transactions work.

“I’m Actually Making Multiple Separate Purchases” Lane: I get burned by this one too often. At first it looks like they are going to by 10 items, but you soon find out that will be achieved through at least 3 separate transactions: one for themselves, one for mom, and one for some other relative or neighbor. They  do mean well, but they need their own lane.

The “I Can’t Count” Express Lane: These lanes always have an item limit of 10, 20, or sometimes 30. Some folks simply can’t count, have inventive ways to group several items into one abstract (I was going to say logical but …) item, or they are really Type-A’s who’ve found the Ultra Express lane closed again. Quite simply, these folks should be spanked - HARD.

I’ve probably missed a few, but this should be a good start.

Just a quick note on replacing the 7200RPM HD in my Wind with an OCZ SSD. Again the backup/restore using Acronis True Image Home 2009 went quickly and flawlessly. Formatting the 120GB SSD with NTFS took 140 seconds. Boot time of the Wind using a fast Scorpion drive took exactly 30 seconds, 10 of which were spent while the BIOS did its thing. Booting with the OCZ Vertex SSD took 23 seconds. When I first booted with the SSD, I thought something horrible had gone wrong. The fan came on and then the entire system went completely silent. Nary a peep nor hum. Only when the login screen appeared moments later did I realize that this total silence was now normal. Very nice.

Fit-PC2 Front

After using my MSI Wind to run the observatory for a while I found out about this tiny little 1.6GHz Atom-based Windows PC. Doing a little research into its size and other specs, I bought one. The reasons? It will fit inside my AP 900GTO mount, it has 6 USB 2.0 ports, and is fast enough to run the mount, autoguide, manage a filter wheel, and operate my camera. My hope is to monitor observatory ops from inside the house during those cold winter or bug-ridden summer nights. Placing the computer so close to the equipment will significantly reduce the usual tangle of cables associated with digital astrophotography.

Fit-PC2 Rear

One challenge I face is to get Remote Desktop Server running on this system. It came with Window$ XP Home SP3. I have a spare XP Pro license, but I can’t upgrade directly from SP3 (Thanks Micro$oft). So, I’m going to fake it and force RDP to run on Home - or at least try before taking the normal path. I have not tested a headless boot of the Fit-PC2, sans KVM, yet as RDP is required. I do have a fall back position where I put a Keyboard, Video, & Mouse in the observatory at the end of long cable runs.

Since the temperature extremes out in the observatory can be more than you might want to expose a computer to, I plan to swap out the 160GB HD in the Fit-PC2 for a 30GB SSD. 30GB should be plenty for everything I do except for planetary and lunar imaging. For that I have a Sager NP9850 laptop on order with three 320GB 7200 RPM HDs in a RAID-0 configuration, but that is a topic for a future post. I’ll have a fair amount of testing to do, the wireless network throughput out into the middle of my back yard in particular.

Fit-PC2 Top with 2.5" SSD

For those considering the Fit-PC2, here are a couple of initial impressions. It IS small. Build quality seems quite good. I did manage to crash the system once and that will be something I will monitor closely and followup with a more detailed review. You can hear the HD (it was sitting right in front of me during testing, however). The HDMI to DVI adapter cable terminates in a female DVI, so you need a regular male-to-male DVI cable to hook it up to a monitor. Personally, I would have liked a short cable that I could use to directly connect the Fit to monitor, at least initially. I suppose there will be those that can make good use of the supplied cable - folks who intend to use this as a media center. If I need to use a monitor in the observatory, the supplied adapter cable will be replaced by a long HDMI to DVI cable. The power supply brick is small and the cables are pretty short - outlet to Fit is just a hair over 6′ with the brick 2′ from the outlet. It is a standard cable going from the outlet to the brick, so you probably already have a longer cable in your possession.

I have an 80GB music library accessible/shared through my iMac. I’d like to use an iPod Touch to control the library and stream it via AirTunes to my stereo system out by the pool. As ‘with it’ as as Apple seems to be, why is this not a default capability of the iPod Touch?

I’ve been trying to use the computational “search” engine WolframAlpha for several days now. The short version is that the overwhelming majority of my “requests” and inquiries come back with the dreaded “I do not know what to do” response. Alpha is not ready for prime time. It does know how to turn 0.06V*e/(h-bar) into 91.2THz, but that ain’t gonna cut it. It was supposed to be so much more. It does know how to answer all sorts of cutesy questions like “what are you?”, but try to use it for real work and you will be disappointed.

Let me know when WolframBeta is ready to test.

I’ve recently read a couple of stories on the web that had a common element to them. This one from John Feehery CNN is one I’d like to comment on. Not knowing just how long CNN will keep this link live, I’ll summarize his points here. The title of the piece is “Commentary: What’s driving the U.S. over a cliff?”. In it he addresses 4 questions which he claims are relevant. With one underlying theme being that most people want the government to spend less on everyone and everything other than the benefits they personally rely on. (well Duh! Welcome to America - home of Created Equal, as long as I’m first.)

First, why do we let people retire too early and then expect them to live so long without working? He points out that long ago, before real antibiotics, most people simply died before they retired. They died on average around the age of 52 and those that made it to 72 typically retired. Nowadays, people retire 10 years earlier and live significantly longer. So, how is it that people have come to expect that they should retire so early only to be carried by the government entitlement programs?

This is a very sensitive subject. Quite frankly I think 30 years of service is enough. I’m not talking about the 40 quarters spread over 30 years that qualifies folks for Social Security either - 30 years of work. If you put in 30 years I believe you are tired of working and entitled to retirement. The real rub comes in when you talk about inflation, especially in the cost of medicine, and the fact that folks will continue to live longer and longer. Right now we (the US) live 3 months longer for every year that goes by. Soon, we will be seeing life extension that exceeds 1 year per year. When that happens, a whole lot of people are not going to die except by accident. Tinkering with the Social Security taxes, ages, and benefits will not be able to handle that problem. There needs to be a different solution altogether.

Second, why do most Americans spend so much of their health care expenditures in the last three months of their life? His statistics show that 27% percent of medicare costs are incurred by people in the last 3 months of life. Rightly, he equates this to services that do not work. Medical treatment that does not change the outcome.

What he did not say is that in the old days people simply died rather than do everything within their (or the government’s program’s) means to get a little more time. At what level of quality? Is this linked to the decline in morals - which are certainly linked to the decreased importance of religion and the associated increase in the fear of death? We certainly need to have an open discussion/debate of how much effort/expense is appropriate, but once again it is not really the effort, just the expense.

Third, why do so many people pay nothing in federal income taxes? The numbers are pretty shocking. A third of the people in the US pay no federal taxes - at all. The new tax changes working their way through congress could potentially raise that to nearly 50%! This indicates one of two things: either we have a lot of very poor people or some folks aren’t pulling any weight (I won’t get into a discussion of what “their fair share” might mean - you’ll find some of that over at Hooda Thunkit although I’m not quite clear where he stands on the issue).

I think the income and inheritance taxes, both personal and corporate should be scrapped - completely. In its place I would propose a Value Added Tax (VAT). This VAT would also include the costs to government for things like infrastructure (roads & bridges) and other uncovered costs (tobacco and alcohol taxes as well as a carbon tax - not a cap and trade system) so, it would have different VAT levels depending upon the product. This assures that those who spend support the system and those that save/invest provide the growth. Things will and should cost more in many cases - we’ve been living a false sense of wealth or a false low rate of inflation for too long. If you think the projections are bad now, just consider the fact that these same non-tax-paying demographic groups are also those that rely heavily on entitlements and are proliferating more quickly than those that pay the taxes. They vote too so, any change had better come pretty quickly.

Fourth, why is it more profitable to work in the government than to work in the private sector? His fourth and last point is that the statistics show that the average wage/compensation of a public worker is much higher than that found in the private sector. He concludes that public servants are simply over paid.

Show me how many public servants work in fast food restaurants, wash cars, clean houses, or answer phones for a living. Otherwise, make your case for why police, fire, military workers are on the same level and should be paid the minimum wage. Let’s also take the salaries of the president and those in other leadership positions in government and compare them to the CEOs of major corporations. You guessed it. This is simply a case of comparing apples to oranges. No firm conclusion can be drawn from those averages he sites and draws his outrageous conclusion from.

Since I agree with the basic premise of the title of the article - that we are indeed driving off of a cliff - what is the real problem and is there a solution? In my biased view, the problem is that we have shipped a lot of the work out of the country. It has taken a good 20 years to do so, but we have stopped being a producer and become simply the market for the goods of others. The theory that supported this switch was that we needed to send our money overseas so that those folks could raise their standard of living and buy more of our stuff. The problem is that they don’t want our stuff. If you doubt that just look at the trade deficit for the past 20 years. A lot of that money just never makes it down to the average person, but they also do not have the same style of living that we do. They aren’t going to buy a CD or rent a movie or get on a plane built in the US and take a vacation in Las Vegas. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Instead of raising their standard of living we are and have been lowering ours. Some of that is in hidden inflation, but as we are now beginning to see a lot of that will simply be realized through decreased valuations of property (of all types) and a loss of jobs -  for good. The cliff we are driving off of is built out of high expectations. We are not entitled to very much let alone living so well at the expense of others. I had a discussion at lunch recently with a renowned economist, Jeffery Sachs. I had just asked him whether inflation was required to keep the economy functioning - basically whether it was just a giant ponzi scheme. He dodged the question I asked, but said that it was much easier for folks to accept inflation than it was for the system to absorb rapid decreases in prices. I read between the lines of his reply to my unanswerable question and saw that I may have hit the nail on the head. The cost of a lot of things is going to have to come down. Whether this is by inflation or deflation does not matter. The result is that the value in producing those things will require that wages in those related industries to come down or jobs be completely eliminated through automation.

It is a tangled web especially when you, for example, look at the intertwined industries of medicine, insurance, and lawyers. Who could possibly put a price on life? The balance of a market economy is not relevant in this instance. Looking at the long-term budget of the US, the cost of entitlements and their growth is dominated by the growth in medical costs. I seriously doubt whether congress can come up with and pass a plan that will solve this problem. It is our problem only, because we expect too much from the system. We need to change, personally, and not push the problem over to Washington for congress to solve. We must accept the fact that we are spoiled and expect too much.

Except for me that is. (and so it continues)

The computer I built for my In-Laws died this week and I no longer had the parts to repair it. The trusty old Windows 2000 computer that had served so well for so long was toast. They needed a windows computer to run their genealogy software (otherwise I would have bought them an iMac) so, I went shopping in search of a replacement. Dell had a 2 week wait on a system that I thought would fit the bill, but 2 weeks was too long to wait. Best Buy does not sell just a computer - they want to sell you a monitor with it. The same goes for Costco. I did find a nice little computer, sans monitor, at Walmart made by eMachines and bought it.

I have now had my first taste of Micro$oft Vista - What a joke! They have added transparency to all of those annoying, pop-up, ‘Are you really sure you want to do this?’, click-happy confirmation dialogs and they have artfully moved all of the the tools and configuration GUIs to places where they are hard to find. Oh, and they now dim the rest of the screen so you can tell what little pop up you need to pay attention to. There appears to be more wide spread use of pop ups and they have restricted what I am allowed to do  - even though I am a frackin’ administrator! All of the ‘power tools’ I need to quickly configure/fix things are now either completely hidden or hard to get to. They have been replaced with wizards that perform inanely simple tasks. Micro$oft must think we are all idiots! Aside from the rearranging of the locations of the tools, there is really very little  - other than eye-candy & fluff - to Vista. I was really happy that I could make almost everything appear in ‘Classic’ form so as not to shock the In-Laws with the new computer. That alone tells me that Micro$oft knows that nothing in Vista is really that different from Windoze 2000 - other than fluff. Those stupid Wizards aren’t that helpful either. I had copied all of the user stuff from the old system over to the new one’s D: drive. Importing the email settings, address book, and mailboxes was a real pain. Apparently, you need to import things in a particular order. Once I imported the address book, I could then import the mailboxes - not the other way around. I never did figure out how to import the Favorites in Internet Explorer - it appeared to want to import them one link at a time(!!!) - so, I just copied them over to the proper location - which had not changed in Vista. I still have no idea where the email mailboxes are hiding though.

I just hope that damned Genealogy software runs under Vista.

Well that took longer than it should have, but I managed to upgrade the memory and hard drive in my MSI Wind. The memory was easy - open the case and insert the SIMM - Done. The hard drive was a bit more difficult primarily because I wanted to clone the existing drive with all of the software I had already installed on it and had to do so without the aid of an external CD/DVD drive. I tried a lot of things and this is what ended up working for me. Planning for this upgrade I did buy a Thermaltake BlacX SATA to USB “adapter” which made this process easier since the drives just plug into the top of the BlacX. My target drive is a WD Scorpion 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive that uses slightly less power than the original 5400RPM 160GB Fujitsu. I partitioned the new drive with 3 partitions using my iMac and the OS X disk utility. The partitioning scheme was MBR. First partition was 39.5GB, slightly larger than the Wind’s C: drive. The second is an 80GB HFS+ for OS X - eventually. The third partition is a 200GB FAT32 partition I’ll share with whatever OS is booted. I moved the disk over to my XP notebook and (re)formatted the first partition. I had to do this after trying several other ways to clone the drive. I then downloaded Acronis True Image Home 2009 which has a fully functional 15-day trial. It is nice software and is reasonably priced at $50 - although it did not quite do everything it needed to do as you will see. I put the original Wind HD in the BlacX and made a full backup (including MBR) to an image on my notebook HD. This was a pretty fast process. I then swapped out that drive for the new Scorpion and restored the image to the first partition and replaced the MBR. OK good to go now, right? Wrong. After reassembling the Wind with the new drive I got a little bit further than I had previously using other tools, but came to an abrupt stop with a “Non-System Disk” error during boot. After a little reading I had concluded that the problem was probably the assigned drive letter (D: instead of C:) that True Image gave the clone (you can’t have 2 C: drives on a system). It appeared that there was no way around this. Just for fun, I decided to have a look at the disk using XP’s Disk Manager. So for the umpteenth time I disassembled the Wind and hung the HD on my note book. Naturally I could not change the drive letter to C, but I did notice that the third partition on the drive was marked active. Could it be that simple? I marked the first partition as the active one and reinstalled the disk in the Wind, again. It Booted! … and the drive letter of the boot partition was now C: -  just like I had hoped. So my Wind now has 2GB of RAM and a fast 320GB HD - it is also overclocked to 1.8GHz and is stable. For those who may wonder, it is just as quiet as the original. Oh, and it boots in under 30 seconds.

I hope this is of help to someone out there.

One of the reasons I purchased the MSI Wind was for use in my observatory. Tonight I ran a successful auto-guiding test. The guiding setup consists of an Orion Star Shoot Auto-Guider (SSAG) on a William Optics Zenith Star 66 (focal length 388mm). The SSAG has a guide port that I connected directly to the auto-guider port on my AstroPhysics 900GTO mount. Despite its name, the SSAG is not a stand alone auto-guider and it requires a connection to a computer. The guiding software that came with the SSAG is PHD Guiding. It is a very simple, very effective, and free piece of software. PHD Guiding worked for me right away, no fiddling with parameters, no involved calibrations. You select the camera and the mount, click on a star, and it calibrates itself in a minute or so, and that is it. It is guiding from that point forward. The Wind was not struggling at all and the image downloads from the camera were very fast. It looks like this is going to be an excellent machine to run the mount. Next, I need to get ASCOM set up so I can test out Maxim DL and PEMpro. Then I can redo my periodic error correction and dial in the polar alignment of the mount.

Hopefully within the next week I’ll have a new Netbook in my possession. This device is compatible with the hardware requirements of Apple’s OS X. I purchased the 5-pack license for Leopard for my two iMacs and still have 3 unused licenses so I am considering installing OS X and dual booting the netbook. In doing some advanced research on the process of installing OS X on non-Apple hardware, it has become obvious that this is a trivial process. I wonder what implications this has for Apple and the way they enforce their licensing for the OS.

The Netbook I selected is the MSI Wind (U100-432US) 10″ system. I’ll be adding 1GB of memory and upgrading the HD to a 320GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Scorpion 2.5″ SATA HD. My goal is to have a tiny computer to run my observatory - freeing my other notebook to run the camera and deal with the high data rate processes. I do not need OS X to run the observatory, but I would also like to have a small netbook for other reasons. I only run windows when I am required to and prefer OS X for “normal” computing, hence the desire for dual boot.

Does Apple’s financial future require that they artificially tie OS X to their Hardware? If so, are they doomed?