Financial: Save those United Miles

So you have mileage plus miles that are expiring. An easy fix, if you have not signed up so far is Mileage Plus Dining. They say they will credit 250 miles, I'll let you know how quickly that happens. As a fall back you can always purchase miles from United, that is only suppose to take 48 hours to be credited. Note purchases from many merchants can take 4-6 weeks, or so they say.

Travel: Products for Travlers

The Targus/iGO power adaptor is on sale at J&R for $40. If you don't need to use it in a car, or already have an inverter this has you pretty much covered. When the Radio Shack near us went out of business I picked up two reconditioned iGOs everywheres (see picture at right). These feature the car cord and thus handle everything. This, plus a tip for my cell phone, video camera, digital camera and I can charge anything anywhere. I need to check the power efficiency. If someone posts a comment telling me to do so, I will give it a check.

Another way cool travel product is this rechargable USB battery. Its available from a variety of sources Radio Shack, Lemar, Proporta. Of interest the Proporta version only comes in white (bummer) but has a much higher 3400mah rating than the other two which are closer to 2100mah. Add to this that Proporta shipping (from the UK) is cheaper than US shipping on either of the other products, they give you tea, and you get a good warantee I say go with Proporta. Oh, did I mention that they don't overcharge you on the adaptor tips! That said I bought the Radio Shack version before I realized that they didn't have the same capacity.

In either case these will recharge anything you have a USB charging cable for (cool). It has saved me a couple of times when my Palm E2 ran out of power.

Another cool product that is waiting for me in Chicago, so I have not tested it yet. Is the Energizer on the left. With 4000mah and the ability to work as an inverter or provide 110 for other devices and two usb charger ports this should be way cool.

Now one concern with all of these is the cost of keeping them charged. My experience with Lion has been pretty positive. I recharge these about once a month and they seem to stay well topped up. However, none of these products is likely to be particularly efficient.

Tech: Jabra BT620s

I've wanted a bluetooth headphone for some time. Before my son steped on my E2 it was continuously pulled off me by the headphone wires. However, despite this compelling need the price for headphones (except when the Motorola headphones were on sale last Thanksgiving for $50) has been too high for my taste.

When I saw that Tiger had Jabra headphones for $30 I had to jump on it (this price was still good when I wrote the post). Note Tiger is a real company and I only have nice things to say about working with them. They don't do electronic rebates (like Stables) but these headphones don't need one.

I did of course check the reviews for example CNET which gave it a mixed rating. I think comfort has a lot to do with head size, or more specifically diameter. My head is tall and narrow and I have found these comfortable to wear for 4-6 hours (limited by available time not comfort). Note these are not light, they might not be very comfortable for jogging or other active endeavors. As to the hiss, at moderate volumes it is not obvious (but I am listening to rock, which tends not to have too many silent passages). The headband does not seem the most robust, I'll keep you updated on that.

One thing you will find is that several people complain of sound quality. You must pair these as stereo headphones. When properly connected for music you should see "Jabra BT620s Stereo-headset" if you connect as "Jabra BT620s Hands-Free unit" then you will get lousy sound. Bluetooth is awesome, I can get pretty far from the computer ~30feet and still have reception. The stream is either there or not, it does not degrade smoothly. Note if you leave a computer playing and get out of range you computer may default to playing with the speaker (potentially embarrassing at work).

On a laptop with an IO gear adapter I get excellent performance (the headphones stay alive even under very heavy CPU utilization). On my home machine they don't work, with exactly the same bluetooth adapter. I'll update with what the problem is when I find it.


Just today I got them paired with my shiny new TX. To do so you need a program, audio gateway from Softick. This appears to be the ONLY A2DP bluetooth profile for Palm OS. The good news is that this worked flawlessly. It also made me a little happier that the E2 was squished because apparently it does not have the horsepower to drive the headphone profile at high quality. The negative is that blutooth sucks the battery down. I got about 4 hours of MP3 time.








An obvious question is how well do these headphones work with a bluetooth phone. Well the sad answer is I currently don't have one. So, until I get one that test will have to wait.


Jabra BT620s
Plusses

• Reasonable price
• Pairs with computer/tx/laptop/phone (sure it will work)
• Simple interface
• Good battery life
• Much cleaner sound than RF style headphones

Deltas

• A little heavy, but I have not tested the Motorolas

Overall, a purchase that was well worth the cost.

Energy Efficiency: Green Roofing

At some point in the near future we are probably going to need to replace our roof. I am a big believer that a little up front cost can make big differences in the long term, think 401ks, high efficiency cars, and possibly a metal roof.

Plusses:

• Life time
• Recyclable
• Light (less weight than asphalt)
• Much cooler in the summer (this is a big plus for us) and not appreciable cooler in the winter.
• Excellent for rain water collection (leaches fewer chemicals)
• Possible increase in resale value (lasts longer) see comment below
  

Deltas

• Initial purchase price
• Rain is suppose to be louder
• Aesthetics
• Possible decrease in resale value (because some people don't like them)

The first disadvantage is definite, but most calculations seem to show them cheaper over the long haul.

The rain question is up in the air, when we get a metal roof I will let you know (see comment below).

Aesthetics, seems to me that with the range of metal roof options this should be a non-issue. We don't have one yet, so I'll let you know. Metal roofs don't have to look like commercial structures see for example

• Interlock this is a 50 year transferable warranty
• Metal Roofing Alliance at http://www.metalroofing.com/

Did I mention that the first picture is not spanish tiles but a metal roof! By the way Spanish tile is also a pretty efficient roofing material but it is very heavy and expensive.

It would also be intersting to see, but I supsect properly installed their failure rate is much lower. Let's say each shingle has a 1/10000 rate of failure, does not take too many shingles to get to an appreciable rate of failure. Most metal roofs are made up of many fewer panels. Just a little quick math with 1000 shingles (about right for our smallish New England house, don't get me started on home prices). The odds of the roof failing are now 1-(9999/10000)^1000 or about 10%. A rough guess is that a metal version would have 20 times less pieces, and probably a lower failure rate. However, even assuming the same failure rate we have a .5% chance of failure. Now, the statistical method is fine but I have no idea if this is a reasonable failure calcualtion for a roof.

You can find a basic article that covers some of this athttp://home-exteriors.suite101.com/article.cfm/shingle_roofs_vs_metal_roofs

Life Hacks: LinkedIn MySpace for the over 40 set?

Am I old? Well I can recall building CP/M machines from Heath Zenith kits. I also recall paying $200 for the privilege of soldering 32k of memory onto my Radio Shack Color Computer. My dad as a professor of chemistry was on the Internet from pretty early on, and I recall the "miracle" of instant mail. I also recall the earliest days of the Internet when it was almost all academics (Al Gore and I invented it you know). Anyway, those days seem as anachronistic as the PC pictured on the right. Yesterday, I picked up a 512MB USB drive free after rebates (512MB is now too small to be considered useful and they are being discontinued).

Recently I started playing more seriously with online services for tracking people. What we are now calling social networking. My goal was part personal part professional. Having just relocated to the Boston area after 10 years in A^2 (Ann Arbor) I felt a little cutoff.

My first stop was LinkedIn. I have had a LinkedIn account for years, Charu made me get one when he went back to India. However, I hadn't touched it in a long while. When I opened it I found a stack of messages some a year old. Guess I hadn't been a very good online citizen.

At the same time I created a MySpace profile. On the surface myspace seemed a better bet. You could list bands/entertainment/hobbies you name it. Myspace was designed for social networking of the social type and LinkedIn was designed for social networking of the professional type. However, in any social network one of the most important things is who is in the network. Both services let you import your contact list. I keep my contacts in Outlook and I sync that to a Palm E2 and Yahoo. Anyway, one quick import later and 20 contacts out of the 200 I had in Outlook were matched to LinkedIn. Same process repeated for myspace yielded one person, one of the few under 30's I know.

So the first round goes to LinkedIn, it is much easier to just link to someone in the network than to badger people you know into networking, thought that didn't stop me from trying to get a select few to join LinkedIn.

Next leaving both accounts at their default settings a couple of people I knew from way back found me (through LinkedIn). Wow, networking with minimal work that is kind of nice. Despite, or possibly because of, listing myself as married with kids and happy the only people on myspace who seemed to find me were people with "pictures too hot for myspace." A quick discussion with my under 30 friend and I corrected my profile so you needed my email to contact me. That ended the annoying offers but nobody legitimate has tried to contact me either.

Putting my work experience into LinkedIn tied me back to even more past colleagues,
Nathaniel who is running his own businesses NGP and Lisa who is running international elections . For those of you who are wondering where the Engineers are yes I have a couple of contacts at Rowan, Virgina Tech, and two universities overseas. So at least for my purposes LinkedIn seems the way to go. I also learned that when my daughter and then son asks for an online profile we will have to be careful. I was also interested that making my LinkedIn profile public somehow got my LinkedIn profile onto the first page of "Justin Shriver" Google hits. Of course the all time leader (that is actually mine) is a trivial utility I wrote once that got incorporated into a very popular (for control systems) web tutorial.

Some other notes about LinkedIn usage. I find it handy to use a personal email as you main contact email for LinkedIn. Part of the value of these services is getting and establishing connections and these days professional addresses are often short lived. I have also found that checking the networks of my friends helped me get back in touch with some people I had fallen out of touch with. I have also found that at least looking at some of the questions asked in my network section is useful, I have met some interesting people that way as well.

Saving Money: Pondering Cable/Internet/Phone Services

Like many people we signed up for an inexpensive promotion for tv/phone/internet. With that promotion expired it was time to look at what was currently available. Fortunately we live in MA, Newton to be precise so we are fortunate to have a variety of providers

• Comcast (http://www.comcast.com/tripleplay/)
  
• RCN (http://www.rcn.com/specialoffers/display.php
• Verizon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS#Telephone

We may be atypical users in that our TV's are definitely low tech. Our biggest TV is a 19" Sony we have had for 20+ years. We have a total of 3 TVs that we need to hook up (4 if you count the PC based tuner (http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_usb2.html).
none are HD (obviously).

Our primary objectives are

• Price
• Reliability
  
• Reasonable internet speed
• Unlimited calling

For a while the RCN was quite cheap, one of those startup packages but over time it crept up in price and we are now around $140 (before taxes). Looks like you could get it now for $75 for a year which would be quite a bargain and would win hands down (but it is a new customer offer).

Pricing

• Comcast $99 (sufficient analog channels to not need additional boxes)
• RCN ~$110 (requires a call to a special department as an existing customer)
  
• Verizon $99 + $4.99*2

Internet

• Verizon 5mbps/2mbps
• RCN 10mbps/768kbps
• Comcast 4mbps/384kbps

TV

• Verizon ~240 channels
• RCN ~140 channels
• Comcast ~70

Phone

• Comcast 12 features some pretty neat
• RCN 4 features all basic
• Verizon (still can't figure it out)
  

If we figure out the phone I think I might go with Verizon. Reliability of FIOS appears to be slightly higher than cable. I know we have had strange outages (thought none impacted the critical phone). Also I can't help but like new technology and the two years of fixed pricing helps close the deal for FIOS.

As to service there seem to be honors and horrors with each service. I have not seen anything that would make me believe that one should be preferred over the other.

Update: Since my main concern was cost I was a little reluctant to get locked into FIOS and required cable boxes. RCN finally came through with the same deal they were offering new users and we have

• Cable (120ish channels most available on any TV!)
• Internet (10/2 claimed) (8/2 measured dslreports)
• Phone (unlimited US)

When RCN came out they were really kind, and even replaced some low quality splitters I had (-15db) with good splitters (-3db). Excellent!