Review: Influenza

 Why read yet another book about Influenza, when I'd already read The Great Influenza? I kinda skipped the history of the so-called Spanish flu, having already gotten all of those details from that other book, but the modern parts of the book were actually interesting.

For instance, I didn't know that the approval of Tamiflu was actually steeped in controversy. It turns out that it reduces your symptoms by one day, but only if you take it right away. But we stockpile it anyway, thanks to some insider's political involvement during the procurement process. Similarly, I didn't know that the British NHS would only vaccinate the very old and the very young with the flu vaccine and basically not recommend flu vaccines for everyone in between. Again, I don't know if that's changed since the COVID pandemic.

In any case, it seems like any kind of treatment/effective vaccine for the influenza is quite some time away, and of course, since the book was published events have over-taken it and we've gotten effective COVID19 vaccines in record time, so maybe if another influenza pandemic kicked off we might be able to do it again.

I thought the book was good, but not as good as The Great Influenza.

Review: Horizon Zero Dawn

 Horizon Zero Dawn came with really good reviews. It is, however, one of those cases where the gaming press preferences run pretty counter to my own. The game's setting is a post-apocalyptic Earth where robot dinosaurs roam the earth and your player character finds a bluetooth headset early on that allows her to augment reality sufficiently to detect weak spots, examine their programs, and eventually gathers the weapons necessary to attack, takeover, or ride them.

I dutifully played the game on normal difficulty for a while, and did actually a large number of quests and got through 2/3rds of the game when for whatever reason I had to put it down for a while. I didn't start playing again until after I'd gotten a PS5, but had forgotten how to play. It was too difficult to play on normal after such a break, so I turned down the difficulty to story mode and just kept plowing through the quests to get to the finish.

What I've discovered is that the game's combat systems are way too intricate: you have only 4 weapon slots but you have more weapons than you can use in those 4 slots. Add to that the game's dinosaurs have a lot of different weaknesses, etc., so you're forever scrounging supplies so you can craft the right ammo to take them down. Even in story mode I'd run out of blaze canisters, until I discovered one day that the rewards from quests were in "treasure chests" sort of like loot boxes that you can open to extract the contents, and those actually have blaze canisters in some of them. Still, I ended up having to find a merchant to get enough so I couldn't run out.

The art for the game is gorgeous, and the story is decent. But the quests are kinda one-note, without the story telling in say, The Witcher 3, with its plot twists and misdirection. By the time I finished the game I understood the story but was not in a hurry to listen to any of the audio clips. I finished the game out of obligation but did not feel obliged the pursue the DLC. I guess I'm not going to be first in line when the sequel comes out later this year.

Review: Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Wi-Fi Enabled Air Purifier

Recently my wife complained that one room in the house was particularly cold. I got out the ancient dish heater, rated at 1000W, and it solved the problem but she complained that the heater was noisy unless it was turned up all the way to the max.

The Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link was on sale and received raved reviews, so we ordered one to try. The item was fairly big and heavy, and came with a remote. Unfortunately, the remote doesn't even have all the functionality required to operate the device: you have to pair it with the app to be able to manually change the fan speed.

The device turns out to have a maximum power consumption of 2100W, but it didn't feel that way. The dish heaters heat intensely in a small area, so they feel warmer than the diffused Dyson. If you turned up the fan, it got noisier, but the amount of heating diffused throughout the room meant that it warmed up slower. It's nice that it rotates and also purifies the air, but air purifiers cost much less than $450, so it wasn't worth it to keep it just for the air purifier.

We ended up returning this and sticking to the older style dish heater.

Review: Amazon Photos

I have a storage array at home that stores 1.8TB of photos. The edited photos go up on Google Photos and Facebook Photos (at the free tier resolutions), but the RAW files have been staying at home, and started getting nervous about off-site backups. I was getting all ready to pay up for SmugMug, but one day Amazon helpfully reminded me that unlimited photo storage (at full native RAW resolution) came along with Amazon Prime, which we were paying for anyway!

I proceeded to download the native Windows app, installed it, and pointed it at all the folders (including some network folders) and it started uploading at my full comcast speed of about 150GB/day. Note that Comcast will give you 2 free months of overage over 1TB, so if you're going to do this, make sure you start at the 1st of a month.

To give you an idea of what it would cost on rival services, Google would charge $10/month for 2TB ($120 per year), and Smugmug would charge $35/year. But seriously? I'm not going to point someone viewing my photos at a site that's starting with smugmug! Since we have a FireTV Cube, we can now see our photos on the big 4K display by talking to Alexa.

To be honest, I'd been looking at cancelling our Prime subscription. Since the kids have pretty much outgrown diapers (for a while the savings from Amazon mom on diapers more than covered the cost of a Prime subscription), 2 day delivery never seemed worth $120/year. But take $40 off that (and for the kids shows that they watch), now Amazon Prime starts to look like a decent deal again.

In any case, if you're an Amazon  Prime member and need off-site photo storage, you might as well use it!

Long Term Report: Fenix 5X

Since I acquired my Fenix 5X, I've taking it on a sailing trip, and finally used it for navigation on a family hike. The device with its sapphire glass is still pristine looking, and I've subjected it to more abuse than most.

During my sailing trip, I tried to use it to find out where I'd dropped my camera. Only then did I realized I should have learned the use of the device better: I could set a marker and use "return to start", but "return to start" had two options, and one of them would try to reproduce the course, which wasn't what you want on the water. You wanted a beeline. So read the manual before trying to use it in anger.

For navigation, surprisingly enough, Garmin Connect is actually a decent website for generating a navigation course and then sync'ing to the Fenix. I like it better than RideWithGPS or Komoot, which was a surprise. Much of it is because neither of those do a good job of sync'ing with the Garmin. Unfortunately, none of these apps as yet have a reasonable mobile version, so it's desktop app only.

As with other Garmin devices, the full array of activities supported is nothing short of astounding: paddleboarding, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking are all the tip of the ice berg. Club riding season will soon be upon us and I'll provide a full report on how that works going forward. And of course, nothing beats real world experience when touring, so look for a report on that. In the mean time, the device is still highly recommended.

Review: Bcozzy Chin Supporting Pillow

I have a tough time sleeping on airplanes. This time, I went on Wirecutter and researched good travel pillows to see if they would help. Their lead pick, the Travelrest Ultimate Memory Foam pillow was so popular that you couldn't buy it for love or money, though it's now available for those who want to try it.

The Bcozzy, however, had good reviews and comes in both adult and kid size, so I  bought one for myself and one for Bowen. I did sleep with the BCozzy: it comfortably support your neck so that even when you nod off your neck doesn't bend forward and then wake you up. It was also very useful for Bowen: while he could sleep anywhere, it's useful to have the pillow supporting him so that his head wasn't directly on a hot spot on my legs, but rather, the pillow would spread his weight out so that his sleeping didn't bother me.

It doesn't look like any other travel pillow, and doesn't compress well. It does come with a clip so you can clip it to the outside of the backpack, so that part is well designed.

Recommended.

Review: T-mobile Cell Spot

I've discovered that my favorite way of making and receiving phone calls is with the SBH-52. This lets me be completely hands-free, enabling me to look up the computer, write a blog post, or investigate something while being on the phone. (Yes, I still make phone calls, sometimes, it's the only way to interact with the healthcare system)

Unfortunately, part of my house is a T-mobile dead-zone. While I do have a land-line, there does not exist any device that can turn my landline into a blue-tooth compatible service (yes, I've looked, the closest is a VTech system that includes a wireless headset that you can use, but still doesn't let me connect my own bluetooth headset to it)

So when T-mobile announced that you could get a cell-spot for free, I jumped on it. The cell spot is basically a small scale T-mobile cell tower. It connects to your internet broadband via a wired ethernet connection (it also provides a pass through in case you're not one of those people with a huge switch in their equipment closets), and then uses that to provide a virtual cell tower inside your house. Using this virtual cell tower still uses your minutes, data, etc., but you effectively get 4 bars of connectivity, which is a huge step up from 0. Of course, if you lose your internet connectivity, you also lose those 4 bars, so this isn't a solution for replacing your landline, but was exactly what I needed.

Acquiring the device is relatively painless. You do have to visit a store and give them an address where the device will be installed. That's because for E911 purposes, they still need to give emergency services a location for this virtual cell tower.

The device comes with a power supply, a device, and a GPS antenna and wire. The idea is that if you move the device to a new address/location, you can install the GPS wire and that'll provide T-mobile with the new location for E911 purposes. I have no intention of moving the device, so I didn't bother connecting the GPS wire. Note that if you do move the device to a new address, you'll get pings and all sorts of reminders about E911, and in the worst case, if you don't respond (all you have to do is to reply to the text message), the device will be disabled after a week.

Once installed the device takes about 2-3 hours to get ready. I don't know what it's doing during this period, but it certainly did show a lot of blinking lights. Once done, I had 4 bars of connectivity. My phone calls now never get dropped, and I can use my cell phone at home to my hearts' content.

If you're a T-mobile customer, and have spotty coverage at your house, there's no reason not to get this device. You pay T-mobile a $25 deposit, and in exchange you get 4 bars whenever you're at home. Highly recommended!

Review: Resogun

My brothers gave me a PS4 on my birthday, so the first thing I did was to download and fire up Resogun. I wasn't able to get into Housemarquee's previous big outing on the PS3, Super Stardust HD, because it was simply too hard. The original asteroids game just wasn't this hard.

Resogun's the spiritual successor to Defender, If you grew up in the 80s as a kid, you'll remember that Defender was amazingly, incredibly hard. The arcade box had 5 buttons and one joystick, and being an arcade game, had only one difficulty level: hard. Like Super Stardust HD, I expected to get my ass handed to me for about an hour and then I'd give up in frustration to try more modern games.

To my surprise, Resogun's easy difficulty level with unlimited continues allowed me to not only complete all 5 stages of the game, but also taught me how to get good enough to finish the game without continues a second time with a second ship. That's a first for me as far as an arcade style game is concerned, and that I continued to play despite finish the game once is a testament to how much fun the game is. Defender was never this much fun! I'm even tempted to bump u the difficulty level another time.

Like the original game, Resogun has you piloting a space ship through a horizontally wrapped world. Unlike the original, you can pilot the ship in one direction while firing in the opposite, though you cannot fire in any axis other than the horizontal. Enemies spawn and come at you almost constantly, though you can clear the board and gain a breather. As opposed to the hyperspace button, you have a "boost" button, which lets you zip around the board at speed. There's also an over-drive button, which puts the game into slow motion and turns your weapon into a solid beam that scorches enemies. Both buttons need to be recharged over time.

Finally, of course, there's the smart bomb, which clears the screen of enemies. There are enough differences from the original to knock you for a loop the first time you hit them. For instance, you can only pick up one human at a time, unlike the original. And rather than just picking it up, you can also deliver the human to an exit point to "save the human". Another interesting point of difference is that the humans rather than being free standing at start, begin by being locked into prisons, and when keepers show up, you have to destroy them to free a human for you to save.

The game is a scintillating cluster of colors, pixels, boxes, and moving pieces that are both retro and modern at the same time. The scrolling display is rendered in a 3D cylindrical view, and the music is as kinetic as you would expect. It takes you a split second at each introduction of a new enemy to figure out what it's doing and how best to attack it, and the same applies to the boss fights. After a single play through, certain events finally get a chance to filter into your consciousness and you start paying attention to them. "Keeper Detected", for instance, is an audio cue to let you know that those new enemies that are showing up have to be destroyed for you to free up a human. Once you've destroyed those, a shooting star animation takes place on the far side of the planet and you have to race there to rescue your newly freed charge. Fortunately, Housemarquee chose not to allow you to accidentally shoot your humans.

One of the best things about video games is that the good ones let you feel like a kid again. And Resogun definitely is one of the good ones. While I wouldn't get a PS4 just for Resogun, it's definitely worth picking up once you have one.

Review: The Wolf Among Us Episodes 1 & 2

If you're an old fogey, you'll remember the old point and click adventure games: you know, you click on a graphical environment and you have dialog, picking up items in your inventory, etc. Well, Telltale games have brought them back on modern machines, including tablets, PS3, PCs, Macs, etc. The twist they have on them is that they release episodes on a regular schedule, and they're more like interactive comic books than they are like adventure games. For one thing, you can't actually affect the outcome of the episodes (unless you die and then you get a game over screen and restart). Secondly, adventure games were long, taking hours and hours to finish, while each Telltale episode's designed to last at most 1-2 hours, about the length of a movie.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the Telltale approach to games. I tried The Walking Dead on my Vita for about an episode and a half, but it's quite obvious that the Telltale games doesn't employ any Silicon Valley engineers (they're in San Rafael). The game loads every 10-15 minutes, and the loading time is pretty long, considering how little content is in each segment of a game. Unlike a video, you can't actually play these games at double speed, which is annoying because in a very slowly paced game like The Walking Dead you get pretty annoyed at having to slowly point and click at everything. I got bored to tears and switched to playing more interesting games.

Well, Sony had The Wolf Among Us for sale at $9 this week, and I decided that this was about the same price as the Fables comic, so if it had about as much content it was a reasonable price. Prior to this sale, I wasn't even aware that there was going to be a Fables game being worked on. This is probably how Telltale's business model works: they don't really sell to people want to play games, as much as they sell to people who are already fans of the licensed property and want more of the comic book or the TV series. I wasn't a fan of the Walking Dead comic or TV series (I actually did read several issues of the comics, and they were so lackluster and filled with cliches about the Zombie apocalypse that I didn't bother reviewing them for this blog), so I couldn't get invested in the game, but Fables? Count me in! I was also hopeful that the PS3 wouldn't suffer the loading time issues involved in the Vita version.

Set prior to the events of the comic book series, you take the viewpoint of Bigby Wolf, who's easily one of the best characters in the series. As sheriff of fable-town, he has to investigate all crimes involving the Fables in New York, and while this case starts innocuously enough, it soon degenerates into a murder mystery. The characters are well depicted, and you do get to meet almost all the characters you've met earlier in the comics. Unlike The Walking Dead on the Vita, The Wolf Among Us on the PS3 with a hybrid 7200rpm SSD actually loads pretty fast. I don't really know whether it's because I'm more invested in the story, or that the game actually has less content, but I went through each episode fairly quickly, and it didn't feel like a burden. Furthermore, "playing" the game at 1080p on a big screen TV is a better way to experience this than on a small screen.

The game does have more action sequences than The Walking Dead, and they come on fast, so you do need some reflexes to be able to "play" this interactive story. The mystery is fair, and I figured out who the murderer was before the reveal, which felt pretty good. The downside is that the game is still fairly glitchy, and froze up once, forcing me to replay a section I'd already played. For $9 for 5 episodes, this is money well spent. I'm not sure I'd pay much more. Nevertheless, if you're a PC or Mac owner, a Steam sale is bound to come up sooner or later and you can snag it at $5 or less than. Recommended, but not at full price. And if you've read this far and haven't read the comics, go buy and read them right now!

Review: The Last of Us

The Last of Us is a weighty game. It lets you know this the moment you start it up, because to even start a new game requires lots of disk churning and whirling. I once timed a game startup at 15 minutes, though after the game got cached onto my hybrid SSD startup became a much more manageable 3-4 minutes. The characters move as though the weight of the world is on their shoulders as well. Joel, the main viewpoint character, grunts and moves slowly, and even on the occasions when you play Ellie, the girl he's supposed to protect, she doesn't quite dance, either.

The first 80% of the game absolutely drove me nuts. Part of it was my own fault, and part of it was the game's. I'd read many reviews saying that this was a game where you could stealth your way past a lot of enemies, and so I set out to do precisely that, only to be frustrated time after time by an exit that required making noise and therefore led to my having to kill every moving object in the arena. This was my fault: I shouldn't have paid any attention to reviews.

And then sometimes I would try to stealth a section and for no apparent reason monsters would descend upon my location and the game would frustrate me no end. I couldn't apparently shoot my way out of the encounter, nor could I find a way to avoid the monsters! This was the game's fault. In many ways, the first 80% of the game felt like the first day you attended an English class that wanted to teach you LITERATURE. Until that day, you enjoyed reading, and you loved stories. What that English class taught you was that LITERATURE means you can't have any fun reading whatsoever. The stories would have to be insipid and boring, like The Merchant of Venice, instead of Flowers for Algernon. You would have to read Things Fall Apart instead of A Wizard of Earthsea. In many ways, The Last of Us does for action games what The Merchant of Venice would do for Shakespeare: make you hate it. Instead of the beautiful state of flow you can achieve in Among Thieves, you got a character, Joel, who plodded instead of ran, couldn't aim a weapon straight, and of course, ran out of ammunition at every opportunity. Even the "realism" rankled, because your enemies would shoot infinite bullets at you, but when you finally killed one you'd try to loot his body and discovered that he'd apparently used his last bullet just before you killed him. The first 80% of The Last of Us felt like I was being made to atone for years of being a rat-bastard DM. And yes, I was playing the game on EASY mode! Nowhere did the word fun enter into the game play. I played the game hoping for a payoff, but watched in despair as the hours racked up on the PS3 without a sign of me becoming actually good at it.

Then in the last 20% of the game everything finally clicked. First, I'd finally upgraded Joel and his weapons to the point where I didn't feel like he was incompetent at everything. He still ran out of ammunition frequently, but I finally learned that nail bombs were for humans and Molotov cocktails were for monsters. The repetition finally drilled everything into me. Then the game switched me over to playing Ellie, the girl he was trying to protect, and her encounter with the enemy David sent chills up my spine, tingling with suspense. That's followed by a gorgeous sequence in Salt Lake City where every cliche would have had Joel running after Ellie as she ran head-long into danger, and instead... we got giraffes in a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic urban setting. Make no mistake, this game is gorgeously rendered. Naughty Dog has managed to motion-capture and program its way past the uncanny valley of character animation and facial expressions. Every nuance of the characters, from body language to little ticks and smiles is rendered in such a way that the game feels very much like a feature film, and I'm not talking about the cut scenes. If this is what Naughty Dog can manage with an 8 year old CPU/GPU combination and 256MB of RAM, I can't wait to see what they do given modern technology and 8GB of RAM.

There are minor glitches in the game, though the most glaring one was the stealth-kill button when you play as Ellie. The game prompts you to push the triangle button, but it really should be the square. This bug cost me no small amount of frustration.

What's more, the game does all the right things in terms of story. For instance, I agree that one of the problems with Tomb Raider was the character called Sam. Naughty Dog could have gone that way, with you having to rescue Ellie all the time, but in fact, didn't. Not only does Ellie rescue herself, but during combat she frequently helps Joel, which is one of the reasons the relationship between Joel and Ellie is believable. By the end of the story, you understand that these two will do anything for each other. On top of that, the story is extremely self-aware: the violence is brutal, and the game doesn't shy away from it, and Ellie gasps when Joel does something particularly nasty. The game does for the zombie game what Unforgiven did for Westerns.

The soundtrack is also well done, full of quiet beauty, and quite unlike anything else you might have heard in video games. I was content to let the ending credits roll and just listen to the music when the game was over, but rather than feel satisfied that I had done something, I just felt relieved that I didn't have to play this game any more.

Thus, I am left with a dilemma. As a technological tour de force, this game is a must play. For the moments of beauty in a post apocalyptic world, it's clear that the teams of artists that worked on this game did not waste their time. With great voice acting and a reasonably decent story (though unfortunately I spotted the plot twists miles away), the characters draw you in and make you believe in Naughty Dog's creation in a way that lesser games struggle to do. But is the game play fun? Not really. It's repetitive, and the amount of work you have to do to gather objects, etc., overshadows the moments of brilliance. And you really just care about the story, you could just watch the entire game on youtube. Nowhere does the game actually let you make substantial choices, so you wouldn't be missing much.

If you haven't played games for awhile, play Among Thieves or Tomb Raider first. Both those games excel at putting you in flow, and being fun. Then when you have had enough fun, and want to eat your vegetables, play The Last of Us. And in this case, it's OK if you never get to your veggies. You won't get constipated if you don't.

A Wealthfront Update

I've recommended Wealthfront in the past on this blog, yet I've not been a customer of them until relatively recently. In part, this is because I have legacy portfolio problems: it would cost me a lot in taxes to unwind my portfolio and move it around, so unless the numbers are compelling, I have no reason to do it. The other thing is, as I mentioned in the above blog post, that you can always use Wealthfront's tool and then mirror your own portfolio after that.

Well, while having a discussion with Andy and the Wealthfront team, we had a discussion about tax-loss harvesting. Disclosure: Some of the features to be discussed came out of our discussion, so I'm naturally biased towards the product.

Here's the deal: most of us do naive, year-end-based tax-loss harvesting. In other words, at the end of the year, we check our balances, and if we see losses, we harvest them and then buy equivalent securities, or just sit in cash for the wash-sale period (31 days) and then buy back the original securities. According to Wealthfront's back-testing, this kind of tax-loss harvesting nets an additional 50 basis points (0.5%).

You can take a more sophisticated approach to this. For instance, Parametric Portfolio Management advocates a strategy where you build an approximate index and then tax-loss harvest individual securities. The biggest problem with that approach is if you eventually end up with no more tax losses to harvest, you're stuck with 500 or so securities in a separately managed account, and you'd find yourself wondering "what the heck do I do now?!" As far as I can tell, that's why few Googlers went with Parametric's approach.

Wealthfront's approach is much less headache inducing. The idea is that instead of just naively tax-loss harvest at the end of the year, you can tax-loss harvest at any time, as long as the cost of taking the losses is lower than the volatility of the asset in question. Now, once you do that, you have to take into account what happens if new money gets added to the account (not a problem), and when to switch back. Wealthfront's back-testing indicates that over the last decade (which has been very volatile), this would have netted an additional 100 basis point (1%) in performance a year!

Before you dismiss this as tiny, think about it this way. If your portfolio averaged 10% gain a year, an additional 1% is a performance improvement of 10%! (It's very hard to get 10% a year, by the way --- most realistic numbers are in the 6-8% range, making an incremental 1% huge) By the way, if your financial adviser has you in actively managed funds, then it's tough for him to do tax loss harvesting for you because it'd be hard to get equivalent funds to trade into. Historically, Wealthfront's approach of continuous tax-loss harvesting was only applied to separately managed accounts.

This new feature makes Wealthfront a compelling option for managing money. The additional 50 basis points gained from continuous tax-loss harvesting more than compensates for Wealthfront's 25 basis point management fee. And of course, if you're the kind of person who doesn't even do the naive tax-loss harvesting the number's even better. Even more importantly, these numbers are derived using existing, historically low tax rates. If tax rates go up in the future, Wealthfront's win will be even bigger. And of course, anyone who's been in the financial markets over the last 10 years knows that we've seen signs of increasing volatility: 2 asset bubbles and at least one Minsky moment. This sort of situation make automated rebalancing and tax-lost harvesting ideal. Wealthfront will give you statements at tax reporting time so that you don't have a reporting nightmare on April 15th. I suggested that they give you reports timed for the IRS estimated tax payment deadlines as well.

After I saw Wealthfront's presentation, I went home and opened a Wealthfront account. I do not foresee moving all my assets there because of the above-described reasons, but I can see myself moving liquid assets there over time. I've endorsed Wealthfront in the past, but this time, I'm actually putting (some of) my money where my mouth is. (Disclosure: Wealthfront waived management fees on my account because my previous product endorsement gave them many new customers --- this fee waiver predated the tax loss harvesting feature, and did not move me to sign up as a customer until I saw the tax loss harvesting presentation)

Review: The Engineer Reconditioned

Neal Asher's Gridlinked was a lot of fun, so I checked outThe Engineer ReConditioned from the library to see if his short stories were up to par.

The opening story, "The Engineer" explores the discovery of a survivor of an extinct civilization. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it was quite predictable what would happen. The clash of causes explored was entertaining, but did not have sufficient time to develop.

Then there came a sequence of "Owner" stories, effectively stories about a super-human intelligence that controls a planet that humans have chosen to settle on. These are much less compelling, as the "Owner" always feels more like a deus ex machina than a proper story hook. These are acceptable. There's also a time travel story that is OK, but not even close to being as good as Palimpsest, still the best time travel story I've read.

Finally, there are two stories about parasites and religion. Asher has a low opinion of religion (as do I), so I'm not sure how well these will go over with anyone who doesn't already agree with those views. Nevertheless, the parasites are at least interesting, though I suspect the source material is more interesting than Asher's stories.

All in all, I can't recommend this book. I think Asher needs novel-length space in order to strut his stuff and ideas. What I particularly dislike is that his ideas are cool but it's also quite clear he's not a scientist and hence can't explain any of the "super-science" he uses and relies on as plot devices, so I would classify him in the "thriller" genre rather than the science fiction genre.

Review: Roku Soundbridge

After the prior disappointment with the Logitech Squeezebox, I decided to give the Roku Soundbridge a try.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much. The vacuum fluorescent display looked cheesy, even on Amazon's web page, and the remote definitely wasn't the snazzy WiFi-compatible one that the Squeezebox had.

The good news is the packaging is very nice. Not nice the way Apple defines it, where unboxing is supposed to be an experience in itself, but nice in the way that I like it --- the plastic box snaps open, pieces aren't wrapped in fancy packaging, and it comes with all the cables I wanted. Even the power plug plays nice with my power strip.

Unlike most dedicated audio systems, there aren't RCA jacks but instead there's just a 3.5mm mini plug. That didn't bother me, since I already had one of those plugged into the receiver for MP3 players, phones, etc. I already had a Firefly server running on my NAS, so I plugged it in and turned it on.

The setup process is intuitive and easy, and really short. Select language, region, time zone, and the wireless network. Then the system reboots itself, and automatically picked up my Firefly server! Sweet! Streaming 320bps VBR MP3s, it sounds great, and I can't complain. It even displays the Japanese song titles on my Miyuki Nakajima tracks!

The downside is I have to create playlists on my Firefly server instead of just importing it from iTunes or Media Monkey. I can live with that. I paid $165 on Amazon's web-site just 2 days ago, but it looks like the price has gone up. Even at $199, though I'll give this little machine an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up. Highly recommended!

Yes, I'm aware that the Soundbridge is an orphaned product, but seriously, if I got 3-5 years out of it, it'll be money well spent. Maybe someone will steal the design and make a clone. Something this good deserves a second chance.
[Update: Greg says you can buy the Soundbridge at Roku's store for $130. At that price, it's a steal.]

Review: Almost Perfect

One of the best things about owning a Kindle is that items that are too long to read entirely online are easily converted to Kindle format and then are indistinguishable from books. Almost Perfect is one such item.

Almost Perfect was written by W. E. Pete Peterson, one of WordPerfect's early employees and CEO in all but name. For those of you who remember the era of desktop software, there's the usual Microsoft story of the evil empire using its formidable influence to tilt the market to its playing field. I was on the sidelines at the time, and my observation was that most Microsoft competitors didn't need Microsoft's help doing themselves in.

In WordPerfect's case, it was clear that they had an incredibly good product for DOS and character-based interfaces. I was an early Wordstar user, and I remember how MicroPro shot itself in the foot with the introduction of Wordstar 2000, destroying all the backwards compatibility the users had come to expect. Frequently, the lack of backwards compatibility was what killed a lot of software companies. (Microsoft's current woes with Vista driver and application compatibility is only the latest such example)

The book is short and well-written, and unremittingly describes WordPerfect's success (listening to the customer, supporting them well, and learning from their mistakes) and mistakes (supporting platforms and programs that didn't make money, never developing in house management talent that could think the way the founders did, and being too optimistic about the resources required to compete in GUI-oriented word processing programs). In this case, the attempt to diversify across product lines extracted a costly toll on the company that it could not afford, since it did not have a monopoly that Microsoft had to sustain as many disparate development efforts as they did.

Ultimately, however, I consider this book a good example of the importance of building an organization that can function along without key people, rather than an organization composed of superheroes. While Pete Peterson was undoubtedly a talented executive (proving once again that business school is no substitute for hard work and common sense), towards the end he was strained past the breaking point by WordPerfect's growth, and could not keep track of all that was essential for success. He wanted to run a flat organization, but the shortage of management talent in the company (and his flailing attempts to remedy it at the last minute) eventually came to roost, and WordPerfect paid the price.

Recommended for its brief, honest appraisal, and a good look at the inside world of desktop, shrink-wrapped software.