Wife-Like-Units and Motorcycle Waves

In past columns I have jokingly referred to my partner as my wife-like-unit, and several of my readers (more than 2) have enquired about whether or not she minds being called this, and all I can honestly say is that she goes along with it in good humor. However, it made me think about it, and I realize that it isn’t the most flattering of monikers. It was probably a joke that seemed funny at one time, but it doesn’t really cast her in a positive light. So please allow me to start over.

Regina is my hot, sexy, smart, kind, funny, generous Nurturing Loving Partner. How’s that? So from now on she shall be my Nurturing Loving Partner for future stories, or NLP because we computer guys love acronyms. I hope this is an improvement.

I really don’t have a story idea for this week, so I must resort to idle ramblings.

Anybody with a trace of observational ability will have noticed that a lot of guys on motorcycles wave at each other on the highway, even though they don’t know each other. It is so firmly established a tradition that no biker ever questions it, but I think the whole thing needs revision. I have been riding motorcycles for 28 years now, and I guess when I started I thought the wave was pretty cool, and I participated wholeheartedly. Today I am not so sure about the waving thing; there are so many bikers on the roads in summer, and I am not really sure I want to wave at all of them. I mean, what does it really mean? Does it mean, “Hey, I see you ride a bike! Same here! Hi!” or does it mean “Hey I’m a cool motorcycle dude, hang five brother”. A lot of it depends on your status as a biker too. A Harley rider is usually a purist who will only wave at another Harley guy, because if it’s not a Harley it’s not really a bike, that’s the rule with Harley guys. It must be confusing for them these days, with so many “Honda Davidson” and “YamaHarley” clones on the roads. They look the same, sound the same, are more reliable and better built, cost a quarter as much, but hey they are Harley rip-offs and therefore not real bikes. If I accidentally waved to you I didn’t mean to, rice-rocket!

I have always ridden Japanese bikes, mostly classic big bore Suzukis, but for the past five years I have been riding a dual-purpose dirt bike, because it allows me to explore logging roads and get to remote places fast. Oddly, when driving on the highway, this has promoted my status among the Harley guys, I get waves all the time now, but when I had my kickass Suzuki GS1100 tire-burner, I was lucky to get a mere nod. The rice-rockets are just flashy pests, but the dirt-bike seems to get some respect. Strange.

I have noticed a huge increase in the number of female riders on the roads these days. They don’t seem to have the need to wave at each other like guys do – why is this? Is it because the fairer sex are less egotistical and don’t need to do the wave thing? I get the feeling that the secret message among female riders is “hey sister, cool you’re on a bike, but I ain’t waving cuz that’s just a ridiculous ego-prop for boys”.

Anyhow, I am tired of waving, I don’t initiate the wave, and I usually don’t wave back either, although sometimes the automatic wave reflex takes over. Don’t take it personally, great that you ride a motorcycle too, but I don’t think it’s really necessary to continually congratulate ourselves about it.

Taking a Look at Control 4 Home Automation

Home Automation has been an empty promise for many years – either it was too expensive or it was based on X-10, which is really more of a toy than a serious standard. The serious players in the home automation market are companies such as Lutron, which is primarily a lighting control company, and AMX, which manufactures LCD touch panels. These panels allow for control over lighting, audio, security, and other functions such as watering etc. However, if you want to equip your home with high-end home automation products from these established companies, expect to spend a king’s ransom.

There is a new home automation manufacturer that blends state-of-the-art technology with very reasonable pricing, and the company’s name is Control 4. This company has brought together Lighting, Audio, TV and Security into one component that fits right in with your existing home entertainment system. With this system comes a very well-designed remote control that replaces all your other myriad remote controls.

Depending on how fancy you want to get with this system, you can replace all your existing light switches with Control 4 “smart” switches that can be programmed to do just about anything one’s imagination can come up with. For example, let’s say you want to be able to walk into your living room, touch a button on the wall, and with that single action have the TV turn on, the channel set to the news, the fireplace come on, and the lights all dimmed except the one over your reading chair. A little later on perhaps you’d like the ability to touch another single button on the wall, and have all the lights in the entire house shut off after ten minutes, or whatever given period of time (so you have time to get to bed) and have the security system set to armed. These scenarios are a piece of cake for Control 4.

The Control 4 remote is an exceptional design, finally a remote control that is not only easy to understand, but one that will literally do anything you can think of. The only requirement is that the Control 4 base unit be programmed with the functionality that you want. The remote looks similar to other remotes, but with one very important button in the center, the only button that is colored bright red with the logo 4 printed in the center. If none of the other buttons make any sense, just press this button and your confusion evaporates. The red button evokes your TV screen to display a simple menu, with these offerings: Control Lights, Watch TV, Play Music, Watch a Movie, among others. Around the red button on the remote are the familiar directional arrows, and you simply move around the menu on the TV until you have selected what it is you want to do. Even better, the remote does not need to be “aimed” at the central unit, it can be used anywhere within the house.

The base unit comes with a CD-ROM and a hard-drive, allowing you to archive your entire collection of music onto the system. No more lost CD’s or stooping to reload your 5 disk player. Your entire collection is one red button away, and all the Artist/Album information is displayed on your TV.

Taking my Notebook on My Vacation

I just returned from a fabulous 4 day vacation up the Sunshine Coast. My wife-like-unit and I car-camped for 3 of the 4 nights and treated ourselves to a motel room in tiny Egmont on the second night. During the booking process (even campsites need to be booked ahead these days), I noticed that many of the places offered internet hook-up, even the tiny motel in Egmont, so I decided to bring along my laptop.

The internet at the Bathgate Motel turned out to be just a dial-up offering, but not to be deterred, I phoned Telus to find out what my local access number from Egmont would be. I was then given a temporary dial-up account (free, as I am already a Telus subscriber), so my dial-up modem was pushed into duty, something I thought I’d never do, because my laptop has all the latest wireless do-dads built in, and I never use anything but high speed these days. After about half an hour of dial-up access at the Bathgate Motel, I very much doubt if my dial-up modem will ever get used again. I don’t remember dial-up being this agonizingly slow back when that was all we had, but going back to it was like torture. I decided that bringing the laptop was a mistake, and stuffed it back into its bag.

But in the end the laptop proved to be quite useful for this holiday. My wife-like-unit has a very expensive digital camera with a massive zoom lens, but alas, a tiny memory card. I am a bit of a shutter bug, and I take pictures of everything. The 64Mb memory card in her camera was soon full, and I berated myself for not having purchased a bigger card for her camera. However, digging around in my laptop case I found that I had brought along my card-reader. So at the end of each day, I emptied the photos from the card onto my laptop and started each day again with a fresh card. The laptop allowed me to edit and purge right away, and another benefit was that during the course of our camping nights we had made some campsite friends, and at night we gave them a slideshow of our photos taken earlier that day. As all these benefits of the laptop became apparent, I came across a fellow camper who had filled up her card and was now stuck with no room to take pictures for the rest of her vacation. I offered to help her out by burning her photos onto a CD (yes, I actually had a few blank CD’s in my laptop case), and her brother-in-law and husband then insisted on keeping us supplied with beer from that moment on. Further proof that Karma works!

The last two nights we spent camping at the Pender Harbour Resort, a funky little campsite with trailer hook-ups, tenting spots, 3 Yurt huts, several cabins and a dock with boat and kayak rentals. Unbelievably, they also had free wireless internet, and the signal reached our little site without any problem. There was a small meeting room building next to our site, and I found within it an extension chord for recharging my trusty little laptop. Right about this time, my MP3 player battery died; no problem, I just plugged it into my laptop as it was charging up, and charged up my MP3 player at the same time.

Now you might be thinking that I spent the entire holiday staring at my computer – quite the contrary. We hiked, swam, explored, biked, paddled, watched a car show, drank copious amounts of beer with some new friends, and smoked a few cigars. And I took a whole bunch of photos. The laptop was just a handy extra, but I will be sure to bring it for my next vacation. See my vacation blog at: http://sunshinecoastholiday.blogspot.com

A Look at Blogs and Podcasts

Last week we explored the evolution of the internet to Web 2, and this week we’ll explore two more interesting internet developments, the Blog and the the Podcast.

The term Blog is the shortened form of the word Weblog, which is an online diary or journal. Before Blogs became popular, there were Usenet online communities, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s), and Internet Forums. BBS’s have more or less disappeared, and Usenet is a medium generally used by Universities and other intelligentsia, but Internet Forums are alive and well and in widespread public use. For those of you have an area of interest for which you want to share ideas, whether you are a car nut, a musician, a Linux geek, or a gardener, Internet Forums are the place to find answers and share your knowledge; I am a BIG user of Forums to get answers for everything from where to find parts for my Volvo, to how to find information for configuring a wireless card in Linux.

Blogs are online diaries consisting of text, pictures and links to other blogs or web resources. Many are topic specific, giving commentary on subjects such as news, politics, or food, while others are personal journals documenting a blogger’s personal life. Most blogs are chronologically reversed, with the most recent entries at the top, however the blogger is free to choose however he/she wants to display entries. At first I could not understand why anybody would want to air their dirty laundry publicly, but suddenly I found a reason to have my own blog, when last year I had a chance to reconnect with some British buddies I haven’t talked to for twenty five years, in fact not since we had all ridden bicycles together from Antibes, France to Corfu, Greece in 1981. Last year one of these guys went to the trouble of contacting each of us and suddenly we were all re-united by email. I decided that I would put together a blog documenting some of the highlights of my life in Whistler. I discovered that setting up a blog was dead easy with the free blog software provided by Google. Within a few days, I had a blog up and running, which greatly exaggerates my lifestyle, but my pals in England found it entertaining. You can view my blog at www.blixy.blogspot.com. Even my 83 year old dad has a blog, viewable at www.herryallix.blogspot.com. Set up your own blog, it’s free, and it’s fun!

Podcasts go one step further than Blogs, in that they allow anybody to produce their own online audio and/or video broadcasts. It is the modern equivalent of setting up your own private radio or TV station. The word Podcasting is a compound word, blending the words iPod with Broadcasting; the iPod reference is a bit of a misnomer, in that an iPod is not required for producing or hearing a podcast (however, it is possible to store a podcast on an iPod or any type of music player, using podcatcher software such as that offered by iTunes). Though podcasting is a relatively new term, with the first podcasts showing up in 2003, the concept has taken off and podcasts are everywhere. One can find a podcast dealing with any topic, ranging from politics to jokes, and then subscribe to that podcast via an RSS feed. Once subscribed, that podcast is then pushed to the user’s computer each time he runs his web-browser.

There is some fascinating stuff out there in blogland and podcast-land. For a good directory of both mediums, check out www.blogexplosion.com.