Reviews

In-Store Inventories Suck

After seeing CompUSA’s site numerous times, and then heading into the store, I’ve discovered that companies severely misrepresent their in-store inventories that they display online. In general, stores like CompUSA have terrible selections behind the bricks.

I wanted to buy a 25 foot Ethernet cable for a little project of mine. CompUSA’s web site does have them, and they’re even on the store shelves. Difference: the Web price was a meager $5, but in store the tag read a massive 30 dollars.

In the past I have been disappointed with the pricing and selection of CompUSA. I desperately needed a PCI-slot type fan for my severely under-cooled computer. Newegg.com had (and still has) awesome prices, but I didn’t have the patience to wait for them to deliver. CompUSA had but one of the products Newegg offered, but also with a nice premium. In fact, A CompUSA rep who I complained to had suggested that I look take a look at Newegg (I gave him back a strange look) to buy what I wanted. How’s that for customer service?

Online shopping sites are still the best way to go, which is embarrassing to brick-and-mortar places like CompUSA and Circuit City. The prices are significantly higher (with very little valid reasoning behind it), and the selection is pathetic. Now I realize what the Web is useful for – finding out where not to shop.

House: Combining Drama and Medicine

Since this past November, I’ve been trying to keep up with the thrilling House series. The show highlights various human emotions and the marvels of modern medicine. The main character, Dr. House (acted by Hugh Laurie) is an evil genius, annoying his colleagues while saving people’s lives. From the House section of Fox.com:

From executive producers Katie Jacobs, David Shore, Paul Attanasio and Bryan Singer, HOUSE, an innovative take on the medical drama, solves mysteries where the villain is a medical malady and the hero is an irreverent, controversial doctor who trusts no one, least of all his patients.

DR. GREGORY HOUSE (Hugh Laurie) is devoid of anything resembling bedside manner and wouldn’t even talk to his patients if he could get away with it. Dealing with his own constant physical pain, he uses a cane that seems to punctuate his acerbic, brutally honest demeanor. While his behavior can border on antisocial, House is a brilliant diagnostician whose unconventional thinking and flawless instincts afford him widespread respect.

Dr. House seems to like torturing people’s emotions in his own process to finding cures. He has a wonderful sense of sarcasm, and a vast knowledge of medical treatments.

His assistants, Drs. Cameron, Chase, Cuddy, Foreman, and Wilson, all admire his mixed personality. They believe that he has the knowledge to make things go, even if it takes more than one try, which is often the case. Never knowing what a patient is telling the team (or not telling them), they work extremely hard to resolve their cases.

House airs on Tuesday nights from 9:00 to 10:00 PM ET. Schedules can be found on the Fox Web site.

Windows Vista: The "Wow" Starts When?

I couldn’t get my hands on a machine with Vista Ultimate at CompUSA today, but I did manage to find one with Home Premium or Basic. Despite all the hype I talked about earlier, there isn’t much that significantly improves your compter. And it’s kind of hard to believe, but Windows Photo Gallery actually crashed on me.

This is not to say that I hate or dislike Vista in any way. I was trying out Vista for the first time today. If it was my computer, maybe I would have gotten a little further with the experimentation. I guess I have to wait for my next computer (which may actually be a Mac) to get the full Vista experience.

Notes for members of the Cult of Mac: I took a slightly deeper look at the Macs, and I liked what I saw even more so than previous examinations. Earlier, I have looked at Macs (all types) that have Boot Camp and Windows XP on them, and all seems swell. Perhaps a MacBook or MacBook Pro is in order?

Windows Vista: Love It, Hate It, Or Just Forget About It

It’s hard to believe that the news hasn’t made it over to this corner of the blogosphere, but let it be known: Windows Vista has been officially released as of Tuesday, January 30. From what I here and see, Vista is the biggest and baddest Microsoft ever put churned out, with millions of lines of code. There are a number of new features and improvements in Windows Vista, some purely fluff in many people’s opinions, and some deep under the hood.

Slightly unrelated, but worth mentioning:

How much more astonishing, then, is what Microsoft has accomplished. Apple had it easy: it kept its PC box closed, maintaining control over the hardware so it would perfectly suit its software. But Microsoft faced hundreds of thousands of boards, drives and chips like those I had spread out before me a few weeks ago, all of differing technological vintages, made by hundreds of companies with wildly different goals. Microsoft has taken these objects, along with the many thousands of PC programs now sold, and tried to create a system that would overlook their dizzying differences, bind them to a coherent vision and force them, in all their variety, to leave techne behind for the uncharted possibilities of magic.

Quoted from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/arts/design/07conn.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=4ad77c80c0fb9cb9&ex=1171515600&emc=eta1

Vista unlocks a new user interface, officially dubbed Aero Glass, which showcases of the power of your graphics hardware with transparent window frames and title bars and other special effects. In PC World’s feature article from the January 2007 issue, the author says a lot about how eye candy makes his day. Readers wrote back arguing against that, saying that a nice look isn’t the only thing that he should be proud of.

A number of new applications are included in Vista. They somewhat mimic Mac OS X with the new photo organization tool, a DVD-authoring program, and a calendaring app. Unfortunately for some, the Vista version of WordPad has dropped support for the Microsoft Word format, most probably in a push for users to but the new Office 2007. Most of the new apps are crude but effective for novice to intermediate PC users.

Aside from Aero, the desktop in general has gotten a few enhancements. The new Sidebar functionality is similar to OS X Widgets. The Sidebar gadgets can place hooks into the OS, providing system-level information to the user. Also, upon mousing over a taskbar button, the user is shown a small preview of the window’s contents, and can even display live content. Last in my (non-fully inclusive) list of features is Flip 3D, a replacement for the Windows + Tab keystroke that allows the user to switch windows in style. It shows the windows in a slanted stack.

Once you get past the surface, there are some under the hood (in one case, more over the hood than under) improvements in the areas of security and performance. The new user Account Control nags at the user for even seemingly non-administrative tasks, but helps protect the user from attacks and their own mistakes. Vista includes Internet Explorer 7, which is also available for Windows XP, and includes some of the much wanted features from today’s other browsers (like tabs and feed-reading capabilities). Also up are new graphics and programming frameworks for building richer applications and games.

Most of the notable enhancements that Windows Vista shows at this point are more eye candy than useful additions. However, as time goes on (and hardware compatibility rises), more of the monstrosity’s features will be put to use, giving users more reasons to enjoy the new OS. However, if you feel that windows XP is sufficient, stick with it, and wait for your next computer to get Vista.

Beta Syndrome Hits Gravatar 2.0

A few days ago, I gained interest in Gravatar, which I had come across before in my early blogging career. At first I didn’t really understand what it was all about, and to this day, some of its features are still unclear to me. I understood the basic concept – showing a single avatar next to your comments on any site set up to display Gravatar avatars (the name explains it: Globally Recognized Avatars.

So anyway, back to my original topic. For some time, Gravatar was closed. They recently re-opened up their service on a public basis. Of course, I registered. But after trying to upload my favorite avatar (featuring a picture of the front of an Orion VII Hybrid bus), I got a very generic looking error from the site saying that something went wrond, and that it has been logged for further investigation.

Sounds like beta to me!

While on the topic, I have recently put Educated into beta. I think it’s the way to go, because I don’t need to worry if my site suddenly fails, do I? (I am pretty confident it won’t go downhill anytime soon – ComputingHost is doing a very nice job so far).

The LIRR Experience

As a native New York City resident, I haven’t had that many opportunities to ride the Long Island Rail Road throughout my life. The last time I took the LIRR, I noticed the difference between the city and the (so-called) Island, but more specifically, the subway and railroad. After riding the train today, I wondered why the MTA doesn’t focus its attention on the city as much. Maybe someone will get up one day and say “Why can’t we join in the crowd?”

Before even getting to Jamaica, I realized that the railroads are more expensive than the ticket price. You have to pay to get to your station, whether it be gas for your car or a MetroCard for the bus or subway. Also, those who drive in suffer the agonizing task of finding parking, which, unless they get out at the crack of dawn (or earlier), will spend a long time doing.

One of the first things that I noticed after arriving at Jamaica Station was the Ticket Lobby down at street level. I went in there to buy my ticket, and ended up heading back in while waiting for my train. It was relatively warm in there, and felt like a comfortable place to be in. Also, on the tracks above, there is a waiting room on each platform. By comparison, NYC subways don’t have waiting times like the railroad’s, so there is no need for any type of waiting room.

On the train, there was very little noise. Although the train did go pretty fast in a few areas, there was no sounds indicating so. There were relatively comfortable seats within the car. However, the combination of being able to see where the train is going (unlike the dark subway tunnels), combined with sitting a rear-facing seat, made me slightly nauseous throughout the ride.

One annoying thing about the railroad is the constant automated announcements. They consist of a ding-type noise (ding, second or two, dong), and then the message, which was usually something that was said many times before. I think that contributed to the nausea.

Overall, I like the railroad. Quiet trains and a comfortable ride made my Wednesday. But for city-boys like me, it’s a bit expensive to ride the LIRR.

Flickr: The Perfect Web 2.0 Site

I started using Flickr last week, and I must say that it is very impressive. The site is smooth, simple and functional. Flickr follows many of the Web 2.0 themes, including tags and widgets of sorts.

Upon first seeing the site, I was impressed at the Web 2.0 feel of it. The navigation bar at the top of the pages are smart – they allow quick access to common features. Searching through the large community’s photos is easy too: you can search your photos, everyone’s photos, or Flickr groups from one search box.

I found that uploading photos is extremely easy with one of several Flickr Uploadr programs, which can be found for most of the popular operating systems. The Windows version is really a snap. You can drag pictures into the window or ad them with a browse dialog box. You can add tags to all the pictures you are uploading (although all of the pictures will share the same set of tags, which is not always desirable) and place them in a set before the upload process begins.

Flickr’s site has many tools for working with your photos, not all of which I have experimented with yet. A kind of useful one is the mapping, which lets you tag a photo with coordinates from a Yahoo-powered map. Privacy advocates should be careful and remember not to tag pictures with, say, the location of your house. I also like tagging, although thinking of the best ones (not just for photos, but also for blog posts and the like) can be challenging.

Flickr beats Kodak EasyShare Gallery (formerly Ofoto) hands down. Even though I have used Kodak’s service for a while, the features that Flickr give you are way more comprehensive, and experienced users will find much to like in the Web 2.0-oriented product.

Invision Power Board

Perhaps one of the best bulletin board (aka forum) packages available is Invision Power Service’s Invision Power Board (now officially called IP.Board). It has many powerful features and a growing community of users and developers.

IPB’s newly updated administration panel provides about half of the board’s power. The interface is somewhat logically laid out, with big top navbar buttons for managing the categories, users and other content related features; the look and feel of the forum; settings; and third party extensions. There is somewhat useful help within the interface for quick reference, and the latest version’s color scheme looks pretty. I have two main complaints about the Admin CP, however. Within the Components section, the list all of the modifications installed and their respective management pages are in a rather long sidebar on the left, slowing down access to options located further down when many components are installed. Also, the permissions system isn’t very fine grained, giving you very few permissions to work with for each user group and forum category (in comparison, Simple Machines Forum has about two dozen permissions just for a category).

When it comes to front-end options, IPB has it all. The Personal Message system works pretty well, the topic controls are unparalleled, and post authoring is very intuitive. My favorite feature in IPB is the announcements, which will place a topic-styled post in a separate area above topic listings (screenshots below). The post notification system leaves something to be desired, however, since every email sent by it has the same title. This causes every single post’s notification to be grouped into one thread when viewed in Gmail. After a while of just archiving the messages, you will have many messages stacked up in the conversation, and you’ll soon discover the usefulness of Gmail’s relatively new Delete button.

Overall, I would highly recommend IPB as an excellent commercial product (the price tag at press time is $149.99 for the standard edition, $299.99 for the Business license), but for the beginner to online communities, Simple Machines Forum is a more cost-effective alternative.