Last Sunday, while shopping at our local grocery store, I wandered back into the sale section. This is the section where the fruit is almost spoiled, the bread is stale, and really random things that won’t sell appear. Sunday, nestled close to mostly dead flowers, I found several Proscan 7″ tablets for $10 each.

I picked it up thinking I must be misreading the box somehow. Maybe it was only a case? Nope, it claimed to have Android Jelly Bean installed. I read the box specs very carefully. The biggest downside seemed that it only had 4 GB of space. However, it claimed to be expandable an additional 32 GB via a microSD card. I pulled out my phone and looked it up on Amazon. I had just time to see it got a full 2 1/2 stars before my phone died. I debated with myself how bad a tablet would have to be to not be worth $10. I had been considering getting a tablet for a while for trips so that Calvin could play his videos on it while I could use the iPad for other things. After too much waffling, I decided to buy it and see what happened.

I got it home, pulled it out, and was pleasantly surprised by the case and keyboard it came with. The keyboard is cramped and itsy-bitsy but feels pretty nice. Of course, it also makes the tablet at least twice as thick. The tablet itself is obviously very cheap. I have named it Cosmo Lavish because it’s an extremely cheap imitation of the Google Nexus.

After I confirmed there really was a tablet inside the box, our family took an outing where I picked up a 32 GB micro SD card. This micro SD card cost about three times what the tablet did. On the other hand, it came with an adapter so if this came to naught, I could probably re-purpose it for something else.

The next day, after the tablet was fully charged, I loaded the SD Card with most of Calvin’s movies/TV shows. The video player works fine though the resolution is terrifying (800×480). Fortunately, Calvin has not yet inherited his father’s high standards when it comes to video display. However, the biggest downside I noticed was the battery was draining at an alarming rate. The box claimed it had 4 hours of video playing time. Naturally, I took this with a grain of salt. However, I managed to go from a claimed 100% to 75% battery in 15 minutes. This was moderately worrying.

My first real-life test of the tablet occurred on Tuesday. Since I started working on Mondays, I no longer was able to get my hair cut while Calvin was in preschool. So, I took Calvin to the salon with me and handed him Cosmo to play movies on. The interface is moderately different from the iPad so Calvin had to fiddle a bit to figure out how to make the video do what he wanted¹. However, about 30 minutes in, the battery managed to die completely, cutting Calvin off mid-video. Fortunately, my haircut was almost over so I didn’t have to figure out how to entertain him for the rest of the time.

So, Cosmo failed his first test. I was unclear whether that was because the battery was pathetic or if it was also power hungry. Once home, I hooked it up to one of my portable batteries to see how long movies could run on that. I ran out of time that night to wear it down, but I got it to play 4 hrs of video without getting a third of the way through the external battery. So, I think it’s just the battery itself that is substandard. As a result, I think I can still use this for travel since I have two portable batteries. With the battery, it’ll play video longer than any of my laptops.

I would have felt ripped off if I had paid $75 for Cosmo. However, at only $10, I think it was a reasonable deal. If nothing else, it has a pretty standard Android interface so I can decide whether or not I like the OS enough to consider a Nexus later on.

As an aside, the Proscan manual has an amazing amount of exemplary Engrish in it. Excerpts on the first page:

• Do not drop or crash the device to prevent the violent impacting between the display and the capacitive touch screen. Or the customers have to take the consequence by themselves.
• Please choose the suitable volume and never make the too loud volume .If you feel uncomfortable please turn down the volume or stop to use the device soon.
• Do not disconnect the device while formatting, downloading or uploading, or it may make the error.
• Please operate the device according to the user manual rightly and backup the important data in time².
• Do not use this device while walking and driving, avoiding traffic accident.

When Calvin was born I went from working 40 hrs/week at the library to working 20 hrs/week from home. It seemed a good decision at the time. Working from home definitely allowed me more flexibility when Calvin was sick as well as an easy way to do off-hour server maintenance. However, this coming November we will be migrating to a new Integrated Library System (the catalog et al.). The selection process was hard enough to do at 20 hrs/week and both my manager and I agreed that the actual migration would be impossible.

So, this last Monday I upped my hours from 20 hrs/week to 32 hrs/ week. I also shifted from working a Sunday, Tuesday-Friday schedule to a straight Monday-Friday schedule. I planned several months ago to try to work most of the additional hours either during Calvin’s existing preschool time or early in the morning. However, I wasn’t sure if this plan would survive contact with the reality. So far though, it’s working out. I’ve been getting up at 5:40 each morning, showering and running downstairs to work for an hour and a half¹. Then, I take a break to eat, get Calvin ready, and drop him off at preschool. Then work from 9:30-2:30. I don’t have much flex time before picking up Calvin at 3:00 but so far I’ve really enjoyed being able to work more. I’m not nearly so stressed at all the things I’m not getting done :) As a bonus, I’m also walking about 4-6 miles everyday on the treadmill.

When I became pregnant (5 years ago!), I knew that I didn’t want to work full-time. However, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work part-time or just quit. I decided to ask if I could start working from home and go down to 20 hrs/week. My manager is amazing and made this happen. Since then, I have been working 20 hrs/week from home and my employer has been very understanding about letting me work flexible hours.

However, in 2014 we’re planning to migrate to a new ILS¹ This is going to be a BIG DEAL. These last couple of years have been maintenance years so I haven’t been overwhelmed trying to get all essential tasks done during my official work hours. However, 20 hrs/week is not going to be enough time to navigate a migration. So, started in January, I’ll be increasing my work time to 32 hrs/week²³. My tentative plan is to stop working Sunday mornings and instead work a straight Monday-Friday schedule. I’m hoping to get up at 6am and work a couple of hours before taking a break to drop Calvin off at PreK/daycare. Then continue working the rest of my hours before picking him up.

Unfortunately, 6am is currently when I try to get up and exercise. Since Calvin has been born I’ve only been exercising sporadically. I’ll just have figured out how to exercise and something, usually Calvin’s routine, changes and I have to figure out where to gouge out time again⁴. It’s not a good idea for me to get no exercise because I like food way too much.

I’ve been rolling this quandary in my head for several months now trying to figure out options. Gradually, I started wondering if a treadmill desk might be the answer. I’ve seen all sorts of articles about the benefits of standing desks and treadmill desks as well as a couple concerns. Up to this point, I’ve been a bit dubious. I’ve been fortunate in that at the moment I have no problems typing at a regular desk⁵. So, there hasn’t been a great need for me to investigate any variation of standing desks.

As I said, the idea of a treadmill desk was rolling in the back of my head. Then, we got to the part in our ILS process where I needed to starting reading the manuals of our contenders. I love reading manuals, you find out such useful things. However, even I have trouble staying awake reading manuals for hours on end while sitting down. So, I loaded them on my ipad and started pacing down stairs in the living room. It mostly worked but also made me consider the idea of the treadmill desk more seriously.

I know Craigslist always has someone listing a treadmill. I decided it would make sense to start looking for one now rather than in January when people, apocryphally anyway, decide to lose their December weight gain. I found several good candidates, one that was even only $25. However, the problem is we don’t have a car big enough to cart a treadmill home. So, eventually I decided to go and buy a cheap new treadmill. I found a ProForm 6.0 RT Treadmill on sale for $400 at Sports Authority. I bought it and was thankful to see that in the original box, it was able to fit in Motoko for me to cart home. Let’s be clear, this is a cheap treadmill. It’s a little bit on the quirky side but I bought it as a proof of concept. When I actually increase my hours and start making more money, I might end up upgrading.

I put it down in the basement because we don’t have room anywhere else. I wanted it by the window for the natural light. In order to make it fit, I had to move the bed, one of the bookcases, and the loveseat sectional. The pictures, that use to be centered above the bed, are now off-kilter and I’m not sure if it would look strange to re-center them above the bed or not.

So, I had the treadmill, but I still needed someway to use my laptop. I looked at several options. The cheapest option was SurfShelf. However, I’m not particularly tall and I was worried that it wouldn’t be adjustable enough for my needs. There are very nice looking treadmill desks or even fancier treadmill/desk combos but I was looking for a very cheap proof of concept option. I had no idea if I could work while walking and didn’t want to waste tons of money if it didn’t work out for me.

So, this is what I ended up with.

Yes, the picture lighting is very bad. I don’t have good options in the basement.

I bought a 48″ shelving board from Home Depot (under $10) and then used existing metal shelving that use to be in Calvin’s room. We had removed it from Calvin’s room because it was not sturdy enough to handle Calvin climbing on it. However, it seems relatively stable for the purposes of a prototype treadmill desk.

Last Thursday I worked at my treadmill desk for a couple of hours and everything seemed fine. Friday, I got up at 6am and worked an hour and afterwards my left arm was aching. My first guess was I had the laptop set at the wrong height which was doing bad things to my left arm. Though, I found it a bit confusing it was only my left arm. I decided not to work on the treadmill any further until Jaeger could watch what I was doing and see if the angles were all wrong.

On Sunday, Jaeger watched me typing and told me he thought the desk was too low, I nededed to raise it. After looking at a couple of free options around the house, I discovered the best height was achieved by sticking The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion on one end and the corresponding King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking on the other. Yes, it’s kludgy but it works for now. However, other than double checking the height was good, I didn’t work at the desk because I wanted to give my arm time to recover.

Monday I went up to Greeley to pick up a printer for work. I had just been using our personal printer but given the amount of paperwork I’m going to have to go through for the ILS migration, I decided I should actually get a printer from work so I wasn’t wasting our personal toner. Calvin has no preschool for the entire week so I loaded up the iPad with storybook movies and carted him up to Greeley. Many of my co-workers at the district support building had seen Calvin when he was a newborn but not recently so they oohed and ahhed. Calvin was not excited by all this attention so I ended up carrying him in my left arm all around the building for about an hour. He was very grateful when I decided I had done enough socializing and left with a Laserjet 3600 DN in my car.

It fits, really.

Tuesday I got up at 6am with the hope of getting as much work as possible done before Calvin woke up. However, I had shooting pains in my arm the moment I started typing. I was bemused. My arm hadn’t been nearly this bad Friday morning and I hadn’t tried working while walking since then. Then, I realized the problem wasn’t the treadmill, it was carrying Calvin. Apparently carrying a 35+ lb child in one arm is a bad idea. I’ve been carrying him like this for the past 4 years so his weight just gradually increased and, until now, I haven’t had a huge problem with it. However, it’s probably time he learn to walk. So far, Calvin hasn’t been impressed with my refusal to carrying him various places, such as when we go in to the grocery store.

My arm settled down by Tuesday afternoon and I was able to work about 3 hours while walking both today and yesterday. I’ve settled on a 2 mph walking pace. It’s pretty slow but I can do it without thinking. Plus, 2 mph/hr for 2-3 hours is still a reasonable amount of exercise, better than sitting anyway. 3 mph will probably be doable once I get more use to it and/or get a better desk.

Jaeger has been wanting room in the upstairs study. Technically it’s “the study” but it kind of migrated to being “my study” because I used it significantly more than he did. However, he was getting annoyed at the amount of clutter I have which left him no room for his late-night India conference calls. So, I’ve decided to migrate my working desk downstairs completely. I’ve setup the little cubicle desk to be my workplace for the hours I don’t walk while working. I’m also hoping that having my sitting desk so close to the treadmill will make it easy to go back and forth.

I also decided that if I was going to be next to the window well so much, I really should spiff it up a bit. So, it’s been weeded and new weed barrier and mulch have been put down. In addition, I splurged for some hanging baskets to add a little color. One day in and they haven’t died yet!

What I have now is definitely kludgy. At a minimum, I’ll probably upgrade to a real desk once I start working 32 hrs/week. I probably will also want to do something about the screen. Right now I have to look down, instead of straight ahead, to type and that’s not the best position. I could probably mount/dock the laptop in front of the treadmill and then use a wireless mouse/keyboard at the desk itself. It’s a work in progress.

While Jaeger was gone with Calvin to NYC Anna, my kitchen computer, started rebooting randomly. The first couple times I thought it was coincidence. Then it started doing it multiple times per day.

Given that Anna is located in the kitchen next to my mixer, I thought it was possible she was just clogged up with cat hair, flour, and grease. So once Jaeger returned he took her apart. There was definitely dust but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I expected. Unfortunately, that left the most likely problem as the hard drive. I did some testing and verified that the hard drive was beginning to fail.

I briefly contemplated whether or not it made sense to just replace Anna. At this point, I think tablets are to the point where they’d meet most of my kitchen computer needs. Unfortunately, that’d leave me without a handy Windows computer to sync my iPod and iPad¹. Weighing the pros and cons I decided it was probably best to just replace the hard drive and hope the rest of her lasts until we move overseas².

I decided fairly quickly that I wanted an SSD. I figured the fewer moving parts the better. After a couple weeks of lazy researching, I decided to get a Samsung 500 GB SSD. I ordered from Amazon because I currently have a trial prime membership³ and I could get it delivered in two business days. Jaeger left for San Diego Monday evening but handed over an external hard drive I could use to back up the important parts of Anna.

Tuesday my shiny new SSD arrived. I was ready to have my computer back and already had everything taken apart by the time UPS showed up. Calvin was really excited because I didn’t want him anywhere near the disassembled computer so he got to watch TV. I knew it would be small but I didn’t visualize how small it would be. The SSD is on the bottom right, next to my iPhone. The original drive is in the upper left corner.

I had also purchased a 3.5″ to 2.5″ converter bay and merrily set to screwing everything together. Then I realized I had a problem. Anna’s hard drive cable was just long enough to hook into the large older hard drive. The new drive, when screwed into it’s bay, was about an inch further away. The cable could not reach. I sat and stared at the cable and the hard drive and the converter bay. I reconfigured things multiple times knowing that it was no good but hoping I could come up with a kludge that would work. No luck.

So, I started looking around for a physical store that would carry a 22 pin SATA power and data cable extension. Apparently they don’t exist. I was under this naive belief that just because I didn’t go out and buy hard drive cables at physical stores every day didn’t mean they weren’t available. I looked on all the local stores’ websites without success. Then I called Best Buy hoping it was one of those small items they just didn’t bother to list. The sales associate I talked to didn’t seem particularly well versed in cables. He kept writing down that I wanted a 22 inch cable, rather than a 22 pin cable. In the end, he confirmed they didn’t have it. The next store I called I kept it simple and asked if they carried hard drive cables. The answer was no. So, I went back to Amazon and ordered a 12″ extension cable. I was nervous that 12″ would be too much but there weren’t a lot of other options. It arrived on Thursday.

Nowhere near as cocky as I had been Tuesday, I started trying to put things together again. The converter bay I bought was made so you could put two SSDs in, if desired. Originally, I had put my SSD in the lower position. However, the two ends of the cable were too close together and I couldn’t make it fit. I changed the SSD to the upper position and tried again. It still didn’t really fit but it was close enough that I hoped it would work.

In the picture above you can see how little room I had to work with. The original hard drive cable comes out underneath where the optical drive bay is and there’s no where except on top of the optical drive bay for the excess extension cable to go. It was a tight fit and I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to get the back cover on. Nor was I convinced the connections would be good enough it would all actually work. I’m not sure if you can tell from the picture but the cable is entering the SSD at a slight angle. When I originally decided to buy an all-in-one computer I hadn’t been thinking of scenarios like this . . .

Anyway, I crammed everything in, crammed the back cover on and held it down while I screwed everything back together. To my surprise, and relief, the computer did turn on. Even better, the BIOS saw the drive and the Windows DVD seemed perfectly happy to install to it.

I decided to do a clean install instead of trying to migrate my data directly. My old drive was only 320 GB so size wasn’t a problem but Anna had never had a clean Windows install. I had gotten rid of most of the gunk Windows computers ship with but she’d been three years with the same install and I figured it would be a good idea to start from scratch.

Once I had the cover back on, everything else went really, really well. All her old programs appear to have transferred over fine and I think I’ve got all my files over also (though I keep thinking I must be missing something . . . ). She obviously is running a lot faster at the moment. She’s slow for an SSD, I think, but still much faster than she was⁴.

Anyway, hopefully Anna stops being so dramatic and can now go back to being my convenient kitchen computer again.

After ignoring the back-end of my blog for way too long I finally decided to migrate off Serendipity. I installed Serendipity back in 2005 when there were many interesting choices for blogging platforms. However, I didn’t keep up with the updates and the comment spam was out of control.

Long story short, I’m now on WordPress. At this point, I don’t have any URL redirection for links to old entries. I manually updated the ones within my own posts and I think the only other person who ever links to me is Jaeger. So, Jaeger may end up writing something for his own convenience.

Anyway, I’m still not convinced WordPress is the best option but it’s working well enough now that I think I can ignore it for another couple of years.

Now, if you want the longer story . . .

My initial plan was to migrate my blog to a hosted option where updates were nicely taken care of for me. I started researching blog hosting options and was surprised by the lack of options. I was leaning toward using Blogger since it would fit most of my needs. However, I was stumped over how to import my entries from Serendipity into Blogger. Serendipity provided me with a nice RSS feed of all my entries but there didn’t appear to be an obvious way to take those entries and import them into Blogger.

I spent several hours poking and grumbling out loud at which point Jaeger started suggesting that I should try out wordpress.org ¹. I was resistant because I really wanted a hosted option. However, after several more hours, I decided I didn’t care that much and was willing to give WordPress a try. At the very least, it’s such a popular platform that presumably there are many anti-spam widget options available.

Jaeger started the famous 5-minute install which turned out to be more than 5 minutes but, all things considered, wasn’t too bad. Importing my entries was fairly trivial. Importing the comments was a lot trickier since there didn’t appear to be an easy tool to do that.

Eventually, I dumped all my comments out of Serendipity, importanted them into gnumeric, ordered them by date and, using the date, attempted to match them up to the new IDs in WordPress. This worked reasonably well but wasn’t perfect since the dates seemed to be subtly different, even when adjusting for timezones. However, I only had a couple hundred entries so it wasn’t too painful to sanity check the date ordering.

Once I got the IDs matched up, I figured out what columns were equivalent between Serendipity and WordPress and then put fake values in the new columns. Then I exported the data with a | as the field separator.

My next task was to try to bulk import these values into the WordPress database. After some fumbling, I discovered that I had to be root to do this (why?). After some fiddling with the mysqlimport options, everything finally seemed to import into the database correctly. “Approving” the comments on the database side didn’t seem to make them show on the web side so I went through and bulk unapproved and then reapproved the comments through WordPress’ web interface.

The last bit was figuring out what template to use and which widgets to install. I stuck with the default template. However, I felt the header image was a bit too large ² and in an odd place so I made it smaller and moved it between the blog title and menu sections.

For plugins, I installed a spam plugin ³, a URL checker, footnotes, and then one that let me add javascript to my sidebare so I could add my LibraryThing widget.

Several months ago Calvin lost my iPod Nano. I’m not sure how but it’s gone and he was the last person seen with it. I have a work iPhone that I’ve been using to listen to podcasts and library audio books. However, I really need to get my own. I’ve always been annoyed with how rigid Apple can be and as time goes by, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed. So, I decided to try replacing my iPod with something else. I mainly used my iPod for podcasts and audio books. The audio books are library subscriptions from Overdrive so they needed the ability to do WMA DRM. I don’t need a huge amount of space because I don’t keep the podcasts or audio books indefinitely so 4 -8 GB seemed like a reasonable choice. Plus, I prefer smaller players.

After researching a bit, I decided either the Sandisk Sansa Clip or the Sony Walkman would fulfill my needs. I was leaning toward the Sansa Clip but wanted to touch it in person so Jaeger, Calvin, and I took a field trip to Best Buy. In person, the Sansa Clip screen looked too small. So I instead started comparing the Sansa Fuze+ with the Sony Walkman. I was pretty sure the Sansa was Overdrive compatible but wasn’t as sure about the Sony player so I went with that.

I bought the Sansa Fuze+ but when I got it home, I saw that I had gotten the “+” version which had significantly worse reviews that just the plain Fuze. Most of the users seemed to complain about the touch interface which I had some concerns about in the store. I hadn’t opened the package yet so the user reviews convinced me to return it and get the Sony Walkman instead.

Well, the Sony Walkman was a disaster. In many ways, I like it. I think the interface is reasonable and Overdrive transfers audio books to it beautifully. However, even though it’s supposedly Windows 7 compatible, I couldn’t get it to work right on my computer. I spent at least 6 hours trying to get it to work correctly. The only way I could get it to work was by telling Windows it was a USB drive. This kind of worked but it was cludgy and the (minimal) software that came with it didn’t recognize it as a valid device. Windows Media Player did but I discovered, to my surprise, that WMP does not have podcast capabilities. Eventually, I got it mostly working using Winamp. However, then I realized that the Walkman didn’t have bookmarking capabilities. That is, if I paused an audio book to listen to a podcast and then went back to the audio book, it’d make me start at the very beginning of what is usually a 60-90 min segment and I’d have to painfully fast forward until I reached the spot where I left off. I spent 12 hrs (8 of them asleep) convincing myself that I could live with this. However, by mid-day today, I had regained my sanity. To my surprise, but delight, Best Buy took back the Sony Walkman and didn’t even charge me a restocking fee in spite of the package obviously being opened.

I’ve mostly resigned myself to getting another iPod Nano. I did look for other mp3 players that had bookmarking capabilities but the reviews were pretty lackluster. However, I’d really rather not get one of the new Nanos. My main complaints are 1) they’re too small and 2) I don’t like touch screens. My iPhone’s touchscreen I tolerate because work pays for it but it’s not my favorite way to interact with devices. So, I’m considering buying a used Nano instead. Still not sure . . .

On a completely different topic, I think I’ve run out of useful books to read about selling houses. (You may recall from previous posts that we’re seriously thinking of selling our house in a year to 18 months.) I’ve now read around 8 books on the subject and they’re starting to repeat each other so I’m going to quit for now and just read a refresher course when the time gets nearer. My favorite books on house selling that I’ve read are:

• Seven Steps to Sold by Donna and Shannon Freeman – Nice general overview written in a friendly tone.
• Home Staging that Works by Starr C. Osborne – Discusses all aspects of how to make your house look it’s best to buyers.
• How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Real Estate Market by William Bronchick – This book had more detailed steps than the Freeman book. It would probably be especially useful for “For Sale by Owner” info. He offers info such as it takes 100 people walking through your home to get 10 serious buyers to get 1 buyer in a position to make an offer (i.e. marketing is very important). He also provides tips for various aspects of marketing such as when taking pictures of the front of the house you want it to be at a 20 degree angle instead of straight-on.

Calvin Moment

• Today when I took Calvin to the park another child was filling my hands with bark chips and telling me it was “banana pie.” Calvin overheard this and picked some of the chips from my hand and pretended to eat them. I think this is the first time I’ve seen such abstract pretending from him. Normally, he will use our cell phones and pretend to talk on the phone or pretend to be driving a truck. However, the prop always is intended to represent what he doing.