dennis yang dot com

I’ve got 4 days left until my big race. Yikes.. I hope I’ve done enough training. According to my records, I’ve swam 23.18 miles, biked 271.04 miles, and ran 113.52 miles… which probably isn’t anywhere near enough… but, I guess there’s nothing I can really do about it now.. eep.

I’m excited and nervous about the whole thing — in particular the 1.5 mile swim from Alcatraz to the city… Hopefully it will be calm and glassy. The weather forecast for Sunday is partly cloudy with a high of 61… Anyway, Sunday morning, I’ll be boarding the ferry to Alcatraz at 4:15am, and at 7am, I’ll be joining 1,600 racers as we all jump into the bay..

So, here’s a cool thing — if you want to track my progress during Sunday’s race, Accenture (the main sponsor) has set up a site where you can get alerts (either via email or text or voice call..) whenever I finish the swim, bike, and run.. Neat. I’m aiming for 1:00 swim, 1:00 bike, 1:30 run.. but we’ll see… I’m gonna be super happy just to finish..

Andy and Mer got me the Nike+iPod integration stuff for christmas, and it’s pretty damn cool.. They also got me a gift cert to get the Nike shoes that are designed for the sensor, but, thanks to the Marware Sportsuit Sensor (Thanks Carlo), I could just attach the sensor to my existing shoes, which is cool cuz I really like my shoes right now (and now I can get some other Nike gear that I need too)..

The accuracy is so-so, it seems to work mainly on a “step-meter” type methodology, so when I switch into “chi running” mode, it definitely thinks I’m going a lot faster than I actually am.. I’ll try and calibrate it some at the track, but I suspect that no matter what, it won’t ever be super-duper accurate.

That said, it’s pretty damn cool to have my runs logged on the iPod — my run data is only available to me if I log in (or if I screencap it here), so it doesn’t seem very “2.0″.. Although, there were some privacy concerns about being able to track people using their nike+ sensors..

Anyway — if any of you out there are also using the Nike+ system, let me know… I’ve challenged Carlo to a 100 mile race starting 2/1, so if you want to join in, I’ll add you for sure…

A few months ago, a friend of mine that used to work with me at CNET, John Roberts, left to join a startup called OpenDNS. DNS? Really? The last cool DNS project I heard about was EasyDNS (correction.. EveryDNS — thanks Mark!), back when I was frantically trying to find someone to be my authoritative name server. Coincidentally, the EasyDNS dude went on to found OpenDNS.

Anyway, I think get how the Internets kind of works, and while speeding up DNS lookup really would in theory make the general experience better.. But I always assumed that DNS lookups were cached like crazy in just about every spot that used them, so I was frankly a little doubtful as to how noticeable a faster DNS would be..

Well.. I’m now convinced. It’s faster with OpenDNS.

Upon immediate installation of OpenDNS… all of a sudden, everything sped up.. Installation is slighty techy — you have to go and configure the DNS settings in your router.. but they provide easy step-by-step instructions, and after installation, I had to hard reboot my router after a harrowing 10 minutes *GASP* without an internet connection.

I was starting to get accustomed to the laaaaaag of certain sites when you first type them into the browser, but I had always assumed that it was the slowness of web servers that I was accessing.. I guess I was wrong.

Not convinced? If you like charts and numbers, this dude measured the speed difference with OpenDNS and published the results. (ok, no charts, just numbers.)

OpenDNS also claims to help make the Internet safer by blocking out domains to phishing sites and such… but I haven’t seen how that’s going to work just yet… I wonder if another revenue source for them would be to block out adult sites and such (for parents watching over their kids’ surfing and such)..

But for now, I’m using it mainly because it makes my Internets faster (cuz, you know.. the Internet is a series of tubes [thanks Audris!])..

Props to John and the OpenDNS folks..

Grrr…

So I’ve outgrown my external backup HD… I have an 80gb Maxtor USB that has trustily served as my backup drive for the past few years… And, now it’s getting painfully full, so I really need a new external hard drive. I know what I want.. about 200 gb, USB2.0 (I don’t have firewire), reliable and cheap.

Now, I realize fully that reliable and cheap are sliders that don’t really work in concert, so I’m willing to weigh the options when making my decision in buying something.

But.. in looking around for these stinkin’ things, I realize that even though we live in the new era of information, and all of this product review data is out there, and that we have a read/write web, blah blah blah blah… it’s still an immense PITA (pain in the arse) to actually compile and find all of this data and make an educated buying decision. Grrr.

A quick search for USB drives comes up with a PCWorld article from last year (yay).. and at CNET, I find a review of a bunch of Firewire drives with this comment.. “The fastest, best-looking external hard drive we’ve tested to date.” — Um.. ok, last I checked, I was looking for a BACKUP hard drive.. Shouldn’t reliability trump speed and good-looking-ness? Jeez. Ok, I’m getting annoyed now.

So, I do what I usually do when I look to buy stuff, and go to the actual merchant site to see what’s actually being featured, with the intention of going back and then looking for reviews on the featured stuff to see if it’s just a load of crap. So, at Buy.com their most popular drive is this LaCie 250GB drive for like $139.95.. Damn, that’s not a bad price. I remember back in the day I bought a 300mb hard drive for like $300.. I was so excited. I was like.. whoa.. 300 megs? I’m NEVER gonna need another hard drive! This is awesome! It was a western digital caviar drive, man.. caviar.. what a good name for a hard drive.

Anyway.. so seems like a good deal, right? So I go around the net, looking for reviews about this hard drive, and surprise, surprise.. they’re mixed.. Well.. in the case that the hard drive worked, people are ecstatic, giving it a high rating.. in the case that the hard drive crashed, people are pissed, giving it a low rating. Well.. duh, I coulda told you that. This is the type of product where, frankly, subjective user opinions really don’t add very much to the mix.

(really nerdy paragraph ahead…)
What I really need is some sort of quantitative failure rate of these hard drives in the field, and then I can weigh for myself the relative reliability of the product. I try and look around for user reviews for other hard drives, and yes, there are a few with better aggregate ratings, but since the sample sizes are so small relative to the number of hard drives sold, I don’t know what good it actually does.. But, is anyone going to actually do that work? I kind of doubt it.

Not to mention the fact that if someone’s happy with their external hard drive, how many people are gonna write about that… if it crashes, sure, tell the world.

Argh.. so I’m back to square one, really.. I just want a 250gb external USB 2.0 hard drive.

So, what am I going to do? I’m probably going to buy that LaCie 250gb hard drive from Buy.com — why? not because the reviews are good.. not because I’ve done all of this research. but, because that drive seems like a good deal and it was “featured” on the Buy.com hard drive page. baa.. baaa…

And now, since I complained, this drive will most likely crash at some inopportune moment and I will lose years and years of my digital pictures and I’ll be really really pissed.

Oooo.. the hard drive is designed by Porsche though. That means that I can show it off to chicks and they’ll be impressed, right?

Upcoming.org is awesome… I’ve been using it for awhile now, and I keep track all of my events there (as well as find out about cool upcoming events)…

They’ve just been acquired by Yahoo! — Congrats to the upcoming.org folks!

That’s two of my favorite sites (Flickr was the other one) that Yahoo! has acquired this year… Yahoo!

I’ve had the Akimbo now for one month, and so far so good…

Content continues to improve, they’ve added the BBC now, so that’s pretty cool. The main thing I watch regularly is the music videos — it’s weird that there’s no cable channel that plays music videos anymore (or at least one that I get — yah, I know there’s M2, but I don’t get that). I’m hoping that they’ll continue to add more channels, since access to content is really what they’re selling here. As the number of subscribers continues to grow, they’ll have more pull with the content providers; which is why it’s great to see that Akimbo is looking for beta testers for Windows Media Center… So.. if you’ve got MCE, go sign up and check it out!

What’s the best tech news site? Not that it should sway your vote, but I think it’s techdirt.

So, for awhile now, I’ve been playing this game, Out Of The Park Baseball… It’s a baseball simulation (as opposed to fantasy) game. You get to manage everything from your team’s lineups to who gets called up from the minor leagues, to how much you charge for tickets — it’s pretty fun (albeit admittedly geeky). Masnick had been playing in one of the online leagues, and got me to join up..

I manage the Milwaukee Brewers in our league. I had a pretty decent season, going 93-69, winning the wildcard spot for the playoffs.

So anyway — today, the chronicle wrote up quite a great article about OOTP, where I was interviewed and featured in a photo.. Note the photo credit — Andy took that.. Now he’s an officially published photographer, I guess, eh?

In real life, I’ve started playing on yet another softball team — this time here in San Francisco.. We play tonight at 7:35pm at the Jackson fields in Portero Hill, so swing by and cheer us on… We’re 1-4 right now. Last week we lost 32-7 (ouch.) Yes, that’s a softball score, not a football score.

Ok.. Om started a little meme this week by listing his 10 favorite mac apps, carlo followed suit… and now I wanna play, but I’m not a mac guy, so I’m just going to list my 10 favorite windows apps in the same vein… c’mon, just cuz I don’t have a mac, does that mean I’m not as cool? Anyway.. on to the list.. these are my 10 favorite apps.. When setting up a new computer, these are the apps that I make sure are installed before I start to do anything…

• TextPad is my text editor of choice — much, much better than Notepad, which is just awful. For editting HTML, config files, SQL, or anything text-y, it’s awesome.
• ACDSee is what I use as my default image viewer. It’s super-fast, lite, does lossless JPG rotation, and even opens PhotoShop files.. The publisher now has a new, fancy version, but I still install the “Classic” version since it’s got exactly what I need and nothing more.
• PuTTY has won out over SecureCRT (which I used to use and love) only because I’m a cheap bastard and PuTTY is free.
• Konfabulator rocks. Apple Dashboard basically stole the whole idea, so I think that’s why they ported the whole thing to Windows since Apple kind of screwed them. Yahoo! just recently bought Konfabulator, so I hope they don’t F it up. I run a whole suite of widgets that run the gamut from clocks to wifi indicators to MLB scores to earthquake monitors.
• Yahoo! Messenger. I run five instant messaging clients. In order of personal preference, they are YIM, Skype, AIM, MSN and Gtalk. I’ve been using YIM the longest, but I do prefer its interface, overall feel, features and.. yes, smileys. I tried using meta-clients like trillian, but I hate them. And the reason I run so many IMs? Different people are on different IMs, so until interop actually happens, I’m stuck.

Hmm.. that’s only five. But that’s really it for me… Sure, I could list Firefox, Outlook, iTunes, and Excel but now we’re getting out of the realm of “apps” and moving into full on applications, which I think is out of scope for this little bite sized meme.. So that’s it.. If you have any suggestions of any other apps I could use, please let me know…

So.. my new akimbo player arrived yesterday.. The Akimbo is a set top box that downloads video content from the Internet.. whoohoo!

The akimbo looks at home in my stack of gear underneath the tv.. It matches almost perfectly with my dvd player and Sony TiVo (which I got over the philips TiVo way back when because it was prettier). It’s as if all of these set top box designers went to the same sleek silver design school or something. The TiVo remote and the Akimbo remote seemed like they’re related… funny. The Akimbo currently hooks up with S-Video — no component video or HD yet, but that’s coming soon.. It would be awesome to have more HD content right now, since I’m getting sick of watching “Beavers” over and over and over again on INHD. That’s beavers of the animal variety, you pervs.

Upon setup, I did run into a vexing problem with my Netgear router.. For some reason, the router interfered with my access to the akimbo site, and I switch to a different router… Supposedly a firmware upgrade will fix that problem, but it seems strange that it would affect access to the servers at all, when other sites worked fine…

Anyway, once I solved my network problems, setup was a breeze.. I started adding content to the download queue.. whoohoo! Akimbo has a bunch of channels that you’d typically recognize… the History Channel, National Geographic, etc.. as well as a bunch of channels that I’ve never heard of, but look interesting.. Just last week, they’ve signed a deal with MLB to get compressed games, so that’ll be cool when that starts showing up on the Akimbo.. You’re able to add downloads to your queue really easily through their web interface, so that’s pretty cool to be able to control the box that way… I sure do wish there was some way to load my own video content on to the Akimbo though..

So far so good.. I’ll report more as I use the Akimbo more, but so far it looks pretty sweet…