Creative's Vado Video Recorder

I never owned a camcorder. When I considered how infrequently I'd have any use for one, I just couldn't justify the price. Yes, I am a product of generations of Yankee thrift.

I did buy a Flip Ultra Video a few months back because it was only $150.00 and I thought I would use it enough to justify that.. but as it turned out, I really didn't.

Earlier this week I was given a Vado Pocket Video Cam and although I expected this to sit unused on my shelf with the Flip Video, I've actually been carrying this with me and using it.

The Vado is significantly smaller than the Flip. It's 3.9" x 2.2" x 0.6" vs. Flip's 4.17" x 2.16" x 1.25" (Flip does have a newer 'Mino" model that's similar in size to this but is priced at $179.99 vs. the Vado's $99.00 list price). That shrinking makes the difference between carrying something in your pocket but being constantly aware of it and carrying something and forgetting you have it. That's why I almost always have this with me now and why I have used it more often.

One major difference from the Flip Ultra is the Vado's battery. The Flip uses AA's, this has an internal (replaceable) unit that recharges from its USB port. That has advantages and disadvantages: it's great not to have to use the AA's, but if you are far from a computer this could be a problem.

Both units can record 60 minutes of high quality or 120 minutes of standard quality video.

The Flip unit came with a cloth carrying bag, this did not. Obviously not a big deal, but still a little annoying to have to find something to protect the lense and viewport from scratches.

Sound pickup isn't very good.. if you are talking, that's fine, but anyone else you are recording would need to be shouting. I find the on-off switch a little stiff, but that also prevents you from turning it off accidentally. If you leave it unattended a few minutes, it will power down by itself.

I'm also a bit unsure about the USB connector. The Flip unit is solid, this is on a flexible cord. On the one hand that makes it easier to make connections when other stuff is in the way, but I'm afraid it may wear out and break..

I've used this quite a few times over the past week just taking short clips here and there.. it's nice to have something so small and easy to use. My camera can take movies, but that's much larger and clumsier - this is quick and simple.

What am I doing here?

I was waiting in the small lobby for someone to come down to fetch me. I had arrived early as I usually do, so I wasn't upset about waiting. I wouldn't have been upset anyway - I get paid by the hour whether I'm looking at pictures in the lobby or pecking away at a keyboard. I'm happy enough to wait and have enough random junk running around my brain to keep myself amused for hours after the pictures and magazines become old.

I wondered why I was there. I don't mean in an existential sense, and I don't mean that I hadn't been given some clue as to why I had been summoned, but that had been a little vague.. some specifics, but mostly nebulous. I really didn't know what to expect.

Of course I didn't know what I'd be doing, either. In a big flow chart sort of way, sure: customers presents problem. If I have an immediate solution, I present or deploy that. If not, I'll study the problem and then either fix it or suggest a work around. At the ten thousand foot level, that's what I do. Lather, rinse, repeat. Examine, dissect, fix.

The funny thing about it is that in many ways it doesn't really matter what the problem is. Server out of space, make this talk to that, this used to talk to that but it stopped, this is slow, that's broken.. shrug.. different day, different stuff.

A few minutes later my contact came down and led me into the building to look at his problems. Five hours later I left, having fixed one problem, suggested a better way to do another, and finding the last temporarily intractable and needing more information.

Just another day. Why am I here?

On-Line Poker for Cash Prizes

As many regular readers here know, I love playing poker, and particularly No Limit Hold'Em. I've played at most of the big name on-line poker sites and don't like any of them.. usually because there are too many "all-in all the time" players.

I don't play at the cash sites for two reasons: the first being that I'm not that good a player and the second being that the U.S. has made on-line gambling illegal, and although poker is really much more a game of skill than it is gambling, the guardians of our morals don't see it that way.

I started playing at http://www.fleetstreetgames.com last night. This is a membership site ($9.95 a week, cheaper if you sign up for longer periods), so you don't get the ridiculous play you see at the free sites. Also, they are paying cash prizes for winning tournaments - not much, but if you are playing for fun, it certainly doesn't hurt to win a little cash with it.

For example, I played in a tournament last night and won $7.50 for taking 12th place in a field of 86. First place paid $100, but as it took almost five hours to get there, that's a pretty poor hourly wage.

But that's not the point. If you love to play poker, you'll play for nickels or pennies as long as it's fun. But usually playing for pennies or nickels isn't fun, because nobody ever folds and it just becomes a pretty stupid game of luck, right? That doesn't happen here: the competition is serious and people are playing very hard to win.

If you like NLHE poker, give this a try.

Know your customer

While food shopping last week, we came across a cart full of discontinued items. Prominent among them were a large number of boxes of Peace Cereal "Organic Hearty Raisin Bran with Crunchy Oat Clusters". My first thought was "Why are they discontinuing these and why haven't they sold?".

A quick look at the ingredients gave me a clue: "Milled Cane Sugar" came right after the raisins and was followed by Barley Malt Syrup and then by the Whole Rolled Oats: this stuff was probably too sweet. We bought a couple of boxes anyway and when I tried it later that day my suspicion was confirmed: way too much sweetness.

That's OK - we're cereal mixers. If we mix a small amount of this in with a small amount of each of the other cereals we buy, the result is fine. We can bypass the problem.

Who buys organic foods? People concerned about our global environment, sure. Peace Cereal does fine there and even donates 10% of its profits to humanitarian causes. Great, but what other reasons are there for buying organic?

We buy organic (when we can and when we can afford it) because we are selfishly concerned about our own health. That's our primary motivation: not to save the planet, not to help struggling small farmers in third world countries.. those are wonderful things, but we eat healthily because we want to be healthy.

We don't want unnecessary sugar (or salt!) added to our foods. If we ever thought something needed a little sweetening, we have sugar and honey on our pantry shelves - we don't need the manufacturer to add it.

I bet I know exactly what happened here. They probably test marketed this stuff to ordinary consumers who don't care about healthy eating and probably every one of them said "needs sugar". But the people who actually buy organic foods would never say that, and that's probably why the supermarket got stuck with unsold cases: people bought it once, didn't like it, and will never buy it again.

Think about who your customer is and what they really want.

Power Hold'em Strategy

Index by Subject

• Daniel Negreaunu
• Cardoza Publishing
• 978-1-5084-2204-8

I had pre-ordered this a long, long time ago and had almost given up on it when I got the the email that it was being shipped. I had actually lost a little interest in poker (particularly on-line) in the past year, but this book revived me. Why? Because it taught me something important and the funny thing was that the most important thing I learned wasn't in the book at all..

First things first: this really isn't a book for beginners. There is an introductory chapter by Evelyn Ng that lays out a strategy for beginners, but that's not the main thrust of the book. This is about power tournament no limit poker and it's the absolute best book I've read yet.

There are several other chapters by important players: Brunsen, Lindgren, Ng, Williams and Wasicka all contributed material. Frankly, they could have left all of that out and I would have been just as happy. I don't mean that those are bad chapters, but for me the meat of this book is Daniel's.

And those few pages (less than 200) are definitely the best I've ever read. There are several reasons I say that: for one thing, with many other poker books you sometimes can't tell what game they are talking about: pot limit, limit, cash games? The strategies for all of those are much, much different than those for tournament NL so the lessons learned can be very harmful. Daniel makes it very clear what he is talking about, and mostly that's Tournament NLHE.

Here's another thing: most poker books aren't really written well. The authors aren't writers, and it shows. Daniel Negreanu writes very, very well and that makes a big difference. I really appreciated that. Sure, you can get across the same ideas with bad grammar and clumsy sentences, but it's a lot more pleasant to read someone who actually can write.

So what's that most important thing I learned here? Simply, that I was right. That is, over the few years that I've been playing, I have slowly come to the same place that Daniel outlines: "small ball" is the path to winning tourneys. But every time I'd express any opinion along those lines, the old-style Doyle Brunsen high-aggression players would insist that I was wrong. Well, if I'm wrong, so is Daniel and I don't think many are in a position where they have any claim to question his play.

Not that I'm in Daniel's league, of course. I'm not; I'm a middling good player only. But so much of what he said caused me to say "Yeah!" and feel vindicated and of course the rest helped me refine and improve the things I have been thinking about. That's what made this book so valuable for me.

The thing about poker is that if "everyone" started playing small ball, the old style Doyle Brunsen aggression would once again be the best play. You always have to remember that primarily you have to "play the player" and be ready to switch your style as circumstances dictate. However, right now a lot of the lesser wannabees still know nothing about small ball so the few that really apply these lessons will benefit greatly.

Highly, highly recommended if you play Tournament NLHE.

Order (or just read more about) Power Hold'em Strategy  from Amazon.com

Hypermiling

A Google search for "hypermiling" will turn up a lot of links about saving gasoline by changing your driving habits. Most of them are just common sense: accelerate slowly, try to avoid stopping completely (slow down if a light ahead is red to give it a chance to be green when you get there), use your speed control..

Some of the suggestions cause great arguments. Windows down or A/C? Most everyone agrees that it depends on your speed; windows down is best at low speed, use A/C on the highway. But "low speed" of course depends on the aerodynamics of the vehicle, so the arguments about how much fuel is saved or wasted ensue.

Another controversial subject is coasting in neutral. Aside from possibly being illegal, some sites argue that this can damage an automatic transmission. Other sites say that with some vehicles, it's smarter just to coast in gear as the fuel injectors will actually shut off in that circumstance but will stay on idling if coasting in neutral.

Even more controversial methods have you coasting with the engine key shut off! That's definitely tricky and dangerous..

Our 2007 Subaru Outback was averaging a little more than 25 miles per gallon when gas prices started creeping up. I changed my driving habits immediately but had a harder time getting my wife to consider fuel economy. It wasn't that she didn't want to save gas, but that she felt that she was annoying people behind her by driving and accelerating slowly.

What changed my wife's mind was the MPG displays. Our car can show both current fuel consumption and average MPG over either of the trip odometers. When I'd take the car, I could boost the mileage up over 30 MPG, but her driving would drive it back down into the twenties almost immediately. Pointing that out aroused her competitive nature and she changed her mind and her driving habits. We now compete for the best mileage - I have managed to push it to 31.6 now and then, but she doesn't do quite as well so we hover around a 30.9 average now.. pretty strong improvement!

But her objections are true: people get ticked off if you creep away from a stop sign or drive less than 70 on the highway. I received more than my share of one finger salutes until I found the compromises that let me save gasoline without annoying people too much.

Accelerating slowly

This is probably the thing that will tick off a following driver the most. My compromise is to try to average it out. When there is no one behind me, I really creep, being extremely gentle with the gas pedal and taking my own sweet, fuel saving economical time getting up to speed. When there is someone behind me, I don't push it to that extreme - I don't make a jack rabbit start, but I don't creep along as I would if no one were behind. I figure my extreme economy measures at other times let me be a little bit wasteful here (though in a smarter world everyone would be driving gently and it wouldn't matter).

Avoiding stops

To anticipate and avoid stops, you need a big following distance. Staying far behind the cars ahead of you gives you the time you need to slow down so that you ran still be rolling when they start up again. Around town, that's not much of a problem: trailing cars don't get annoyed by my large following distance and don't usually get annoyed by my slowing down when a light turns red or people stop for a temporary obstruction and so on. The highways are a different story: when you leave a large following gap, somebody from another lane will usually fill it, forcing you to slow down more to get the gap back where you want it. This was one of my wife's objections: constantly slowing down to maintain the distance. She's gotten over that because of our mileage contest. After all, we're never in a hurry; why do we need to be driving fast?

Driving slowly

Because other people get very upset if you don't. There's nothing like driving the speed limit to attract a long line of tailgaters off the highway and to get people flashing their lights and waving their hands on the interstate. You can almost hear them screaming "Pull over, idiot!".

So we do. Saving gas isn't worth having some angry fool riding your tail lights. Around town, we'll pull right over and let them go by the moment they start crowding our rear bumper.. unless..

Unless there's someone in front doing the same thing. That doesn't happen often off-highway, but it's getting easier and easier to find other fuel conserving drivers on the highway. When you find them, fall into line. Maybe they are driving a little slower or just a tad faster than I would have, but that's OK. If the speed limit is 65 and I can fall into a line of people doing 62, I'm saving gas. I'd rather find a group doing 60, but this is OK for now, and because there is a line of us, nobody behind gets upset.

Other tips

The issue I had some difficulty with is removing unnecessary weight from the car. I like to have stuff I might need with me - tools, mostly, and of course these add weight; every extra pound being dragged along costs gasoline. I had to ask myself the tough questions: how many screwdrivers do you really need? Are you really going to need that cable testing kit today? How about that jug of windshield washing fluid?

We also just plain drive less. We plan our trips carefully - no more casually running out to pick something up. We wait until we have other reasons to head in that direction, and even get into detailed discussions of prices as opposed to the cost of gas: that gallon of milk is twenty cents more if I buy it here, but otherwise I have to go seven miles out of my way.. so buy it here.

Within our community, we use our golf cart or walk when we need to run down to the mail or the gym. Of course I had to do the math on that: the cart costs about 7 cents per mile for raw electricity, and about 75 cents per mile overall (maintenance, battery replacement). That's not necessarily better than using the car, but as gas prices continue upward, that stays fairly stable as the electricity cost is very small.

As to walking, I figure my base fuel cost is about 10 cents per mile and around 50 cents per mile over all. Of course my idling cost isn't a lot less and while there are several ways to cut consumption to zero, none of them are very attractive and some lack any ability to restart. The cost of walking should be balanced by its health benefits too, so I do that when I can.

I'm happy with the improvements we've made. We actually cut our gasoline costs by almost one third since we started - that's significant.

It's OK to use your brain when I'm talking to you

This is a support situation from this week. It's real, though I've obfuscated some names to protect the innocent.

Customer called saying that program foobar32 would not run, complaining of missing library foolib32.so. Given the naming of the library, I suggested that foobar32 probably needed to be reinstalled and she agreed.

The nice thing about foobar32 is that you can do that. Download a binary from their website, run it, and it will update itself without overwriting any of your data. All programs should be written like that; unfortunately not all are. I think the most frustrating are the ones that will do it but only if you are installing a new version.. well, anyway, foobar32 does it right.

So I talked her through ftping to foobar's site, locating her foobarinst32.elf program, and downloading it. The last thing I said was "Now type quit", but I heard a lot more keys a-clicking and then she said "Nope, still doesn't work."

That surprised me a little. After all, she knew that the missing library was named foolib32.so, so why would she think downloading foobarinst32.elf would magically fix that? I don't know, but my suspicion is that she was tired (it was after hours) and perhaps frustrated, so I'll give that a pass. I explained that we had a few more steps to do first, and I started out by telling her to type "chmod 755 foobarinst32.elf". She immediately responded with "It says 'chmod: foobarinst32.elf: No such file or directory'".

Huh? We just downloaded that. It has to be there. But then I remembered all those clickety keys. "Did you cd somewhere else after we downloaded that?", I asked. Why yes, she had.

"Do you know where you were when you downloaded it?".

No, she didn't.

"I'll do a 'find'", she offered. See, she's not a helpless, 'I don't know Unix at all' type of person. Not at all. I waited, and a minute later she said "Got it. I was in /root".

Good. I had her cd to /root and try the "chmod 755 foobarinst32.elf" again. No complaints this time. OK, now we'll execute it. "Type dot slash foobarinst32.elf", I said.

"Dot slash foo what?", she asked.

Aaargh. I know she's tired, I know she wants to go home. But sheesh, it's OK to be involved and engaged. It doesn't have to be passive robot time, type whatever the voices say. We downloaded foobarinst32.elf with the intention of running it, we chmod'ed foobarinst32.elf so that we could run it. Arrgh. I repeated it: "Dot slash foobarinst32.elf".

And then.. nothing. A few clickety clacks, a couple of pauses between more clicketys, and she said "OK, that's done". And that, frankly, surprised me, because foobarinst32.elf does ask a few questions that she might not know the answers to, but apparently she did. And then she tried "foobar32" and pronounced it working correctly once again.

Actually, this customer is one of the easy ones. She does know her way around, at least a little bit, and she's anything but stupid. Probably that's why it surprised me that she hadn't followed the chain of what we were doing. Had it been a totally clueless customer, the kind that has to be led through every single keystroke over and over again, that wouldn't have surprised me.

Oh well. She was tired. She wanted to go home. No harm done.