All things tech

Well, I’ve been using the Colemak keyboard layout for 2.5 weeks now. Colemak is a keyboard layout alternative (as opposed to qwerty). Here’s what it looks like:

As you may know, the keys on qwerty keyboards are the way they are for historical reasons–on typewriters, qwerty keyboards minimized the amount of jamming that occurred with the heads. But since computers don’t have the same limitation, the qwerty layout is impractical. Alternative layouts like Dvorak and Colemak seek to minimize the work required to move your fingers. The benefits of this are increased typing speed and decreased risk of things like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Dvorak seems to be the most popular. So why did I choose Colemak? Mostly because it doesn’t move the z, x, c, and v keys, which are the keys you use for undo, cut, copy, and paste. That would have driven me crazy.

When I decided to change, I decided that I wouldn’t wimp out by toggling back to qwerty. That’s key to picking it up fast. I had some helpful encouragement from friends via Facebook (Thanks Jay, Moriah, and Donald!). At times it was really tough to be IMing somebody and not be able to articulate what I want to say. “What do you think of [insert topic]?” Me: “good”.

So where has this gotten me? After one week of nonstop usage, I had all the keys memorized. And now after 2.5 weeks, I feel pretty comfortable. I never had wrist and finger problems before, but now that I’m using Colemak, my fingers feel a lot more relaxed. I just took a typing test and got 41 WPM with 100% accuracy (my best on qwerty was 60 WPM). I know, that’s not better than my qwerty speed, but I think I’ll get there after being on it for another week. Would I recommend it? Yes!

I spent this entire week in court on a jury panel. It was my first time serving in a jury and I really enjoyed it. The whole process has really convinced me [more than before] of the fairness of our system.

For our case, they brought in about 40 potential jurors and had us introduce ourselves. After telling us the type of case it would be, the judge asked a bunch of questions like if we’ve been on a jury before and if we have any special circumstances that would make it hard to serve on a jury. Some time later, the judge released people who were clearly biased or legitimately could not be there. I think that process was very fair to those who had special circumstances.

Following that, the lawyers asked us a bunch of questions, sometimes picking on people to answer. After that was done, the lawyers had seven chances each to remove jurors from the panel that they felt would be unfairly biased, non-objective, emotional, or otherwise not helpful to the case. This is actually a really good system because the jurors that remain on the panel tend to be the most objective and fair. There were 12 remaining jurors with an alternate in case of emergency.

We listened to the case. The victim didn’t testify, but a first-hand witness did. What he said would end up causing us lot of discussion during deliberations.

We spent all day Friday deliberating (9am-3pm). We found out later that this was a long time for this sort of case. When we started, we took a poll of where everybody stood on the issue and we were pretty much evenly divided between guilty and not guilty.

I thought it was interesting that at the beginning, the three jurors who were most certain that the defendant was guilty were the oldest (in the 40’s and 50’s) and that the three jurors who were convinced that there was enough doubt to judge not guilty were the youngest in the room (20-25 years old). In the end, we unanimously decided that the defendant was guilty. It would be interesting to me to find out why the initial opinions were like that, whether it’s that the older people were wiser, opinionated on the issue, influenced by generational views, or something else.

I was happy with the jurors that were on the panel–they were all very rational, logical, and open-minded. Each juror was very fair and seemed to truly want to make the most correct decision. Which was only possible because of the way our court system is set up.

Anyways, we spent a long time debating the credibility of witnesses and their statements and how much weight each piece of evidence has. Like I said, we reached a guilty verdict. I feel that each juror is convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that he is guilty.

After the trial was over, we had the chance to talk with and ask questions of the judge and the lawyers. They were all very eager to talk with us and explain why they did certain things and chose to keep or remove particular jurors. Now I know exactly what to say and do to be excused from jury duty. But I’m not going to list them here–I think ethically, you shouldn’t do anything just to escape your responsibility as a US citizen. Besides, I’m sure you could easily just Google it.

I’ve gained a lot of insights from this whole experience. I’m now more confident in the justice of our legal system. I’m also happy that there are such good people who want the most fair judgments.

Saw this on Craigslist:

i need a job wear i dont haf to do anything but play all the time or do wahtever i want to. i am 34 and a hi scool dropout but my dad is trying to get me kick out of the hous. i hav nevr had a job so i don have any espearyense. i no how to play all kinds a computer games tho.

My first hint that there was something seriously popular going around was yesterday when I got several emails telling me about KFC’s free 2-piece grilled chicken promotional.  I checked the top Google keywords and found that it was ridiculously popular.  From the top 100 queries, 24 of them dealt with the KFC promotional.  Check the screenshot.

I saw a Subaru commerical the other day that caught my interest.  In it, they showed several boys in uniforms competing in what appeared to be a Pinewood Derby.  Since I was a Cub Scout for several years and have fond memories of building Pinewood Derby cars, I wanted to see what their message was.  But I was distracted because at the end they show the boys in their “uniforms,” which are really just vests–not button-up shirts like I’m used to.  Doing some research, I found out that these boys were actually wearing Girl Scout uniforms.  According to a commenter on motherproof.com, the Boy Scouts of America would not allow them to use their trademarks.

Note: I couldn’t find a video of this commercial online.  If anybody could post it in the comments, that would be great!

Two things about RyanAir, an Irish airline, came out on the news this week that are particularly appalling.  Both their rude response to a blogger and a potential new pay to pee policy tell me that RyanAir hates their customers.

RyanAir’s and the blogger

Jason Roe wrote in his blog about what he thinks is a bug in RyanAir’s website.  Some RyanAir employees saw it and left some pretty rude (IMHO) comments.  Among them are:

• “…you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!…what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway ND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!”
• “If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things…”

The response of RyanAir PR is equally rude.  I would have expected them to refute (if necessary) and apologize for the event.  Here’s what they said:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

Pay to pee

I saw on the news that RyanAir CEO Michael O’Leary announced “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound (about $1.43) to spend a penny in future.”

For the 1234567890 countdown, I celebrated by watching coolepochcountdown.  It was pretty exciting.  When it was time, the screen flashed and fireworks were shot and music was played!  Here’s a screenshot.

On January 15, 2008 a US Airways plane (flight 1549) made a crash landing in the Hudson River.  Luckily, there was not a single fatality.  Before they leave to pick up their loved ones, many people check the flight status to make sure it’s on time.  So I wondered: does it tell them that the flight crashed (certainly, that would cause panic)?  or does it tell them the flight arrived or is delayed (that would likely cause confusion)?

When flight 1549 crashed, I decided to observe how they handled it.  I found that various websites handled it differently.  Several websites listed that it had already arrived at the destination.  Flightstats.com showed that the flight had landed, but was 19 minutes late (screenshot shown to the right).  True, they had landed…but not at the destination. When I went to USAirways.com, their site was bogged down for a couple hours because of all the traffic.

I finally managed to reach their flight status page after several tries.  Rather than display a status, the website instructed the user to call the airline (screenshot shown below).  Which is smart, when you think about it.  It’s a more service-oriented and accurate way of handling the situation.  And then they can give those concerned more information as it comes out.  Well executed!

Over the holidays, we took a trip through Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California.  When we were booking our Los Angeles-Seattle flight, we found that Virgin America was the cheapest flight at $80 per seat.  The next cheapest was about $110 on Southwest.  For almost all the cases that I’ve checked, Virgin has cheaper rates than any other airline.  I hadn’t really heard anything about them other than that they were fairly new, so I was pretty eager to see how they fared.

Parts of the flight impressed me while other parts disappointed.  When we first got to the LAX airport, we found that there were three agents checking people in.  Luckily, nobody was in line when we checked in.  Checkin wasn’t particularly painful other than the less-than-eager attitude of the agents.  I felt like the process took a lot longer than it should.  A few minutes after we checked in, the line had developed to about 30 people and the throughput seemed to be really slow.

The plane felt a bit newer and cleaner than others I’ve been on.  I know that doesn’t really matter to most people, but it’s something I notice.  Legroom felt like it was an inch more than normal.  This isn’t to say that it’s spacious–just that it was less uncomfortable than normal.

I was impressed that all the seats have a touchscreen display built into them and the armrests have a builtin remote control.  The screen was pretty intuitive, but the large number of options might confuse people.  Among others, there are options to watch TV, watch movies, and play games.  The games are free but some of the shows cost money.  BTW I didn’t buy headphones because they charge $2 for them and I’m cheap.  I think that if you brought your own, they’d work.  There were many features that you could click on, but it would just tell you that that feature hasn’t been developed.  One of these was the ability to instant message other people on the plane.  That would be the coolest (IMHO) feature of all!  I don’t know when or how they’ll implement that, but I look forward to seeing it.

I recognized the games as ones made for Linux, so I assume that their systems are powered by Linux.  The remote control pops out of the armrest so you can use it as a game controller or type.  My guess is that in the future, they’ll let you browse the internet on those displays.

The flight attendants came around midflight as most do and offerred the standard drinks.  However, they didn’t offer us anything to eat with the drinks.  I don’t like drinking without eating.  I wanted my 10 cent peanuts at least.  When Southwest Airlines gives me two or three packages of peanuts, that makes my entire flight a good experience.

After the novelty of the touchscreen displays wore off, I tried to get some sleep.  The plane was lit up with some really annoying blue lights.  I think it was supposed to make the plane feel trendy and space age, which it was effective at.  However, those lights were the same brightness when we were in the air as they were when we were on the ground.  It made it really hard for sleeping.  They should really just turn those off.  I don’t need to feel cool while we’re flying.

Would I fly them again?  Definitely.  The low fares and cool entertainment is really attractive.  Just remember to bring your headphones.

I’d say I’m a casual eBay seller.  But somehow, everything I list ends up selling for more than the average comparable product.  My friend asked me how I do this.  Here are my tips:

• Set your initial price low.  That gets people interested.  If you set it at the price that you want, nobody will even add it to their watchlist.
• List the auction to end on Saturday or Sunday night sometime between 6pm and 11pm.  When somebody bids on it, the item gets added to their watchlist.  Saturday and Sunday nights are when people have time to watch the auction and make last minute impulse bids.
• Set the auction to go 7 days.  I’m not sure this is the best tactic, but I think it is.  This gives enough time for a lot of people to see the item and to bid but it isn’t so long that potential bidders might get disinterested.
• Make sure you have all the specifications listed.  I usually go to the product’s website and copy that.
• Be honest in what you say.  Describe the scratches and blemishes but reassure them of the functionality and quality of the product.
• Make sure you include a picture of the actual product (Not one copied off the internet).  This gives the user more comfort that they know what they’re getting.
• Make sure you answer questions quickly.  That gives potential bidders more time to bid.
• This is one of the most important things: you want the customer to have a good experience, which is why you should be completely honest in your description of what you post, ship it off promptly, and send them a congratulations/thanks email when you’ve shipped it so they know when it’ll be there.  Good reviews mean people will be a lot more willing to trust you in the future and therefore are more willing to bid.