Tom Moertel's Weblog: Category reviews

Netflix vs. Amazon Unbox: Netflix still wins

Tom Moertel — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 12:20:00 -0400

When Amazon.com announced its its Unbox video-download service, I was skeptical. Compared to the reigning champion – the DVD – Unbox looked like a loser:

Unbox burdened its customers with DRM and the annoyances that come with DRM
Unbox required the use of a Windows-only player application
Unbox movies lacked “standard” DVD features such as surround sound, alternative audio tracks, commentaries, and bloopers

The first two points were deal-breakers, so I wrote off Unbox and did my best to ignore it.

And then Amazon hooked up with TiVo. Beaming movies directly into my TiVo box eliminates the need to deal with DRM and Windows annoyances. My two big concerns sidestepped, I decided to give Unbox another look. I still wouldn’t want to buy Unbox-to-TiVo movies because they lack the typical DVD extras and would tie up storage space on my TiVo, but Unbox might be a decent way to rent the occasional movie – if the price were right.

Is the price right?

That depends on how the price of Unbox compares with the price of my current rental option of choice, Netflix. Both services offer immediate access to good movies: Unbox by on-demand downloads, Netflix by ensuring that I almost always have a DVD or two in the house.

To compare Unbox with Netflix, I had to figure out how much a rental costs me with each service. With Unbox the figuring was easy because each rental has its own price tag, typically $3.99.

With Netflix, it’s a bit trickier because the rental price depends upon how many DVDs I rent in a month. I pay a monthly fee of $17.99 and can rent as many DVDs as I want, at least until the infamous Netflix rate throttle kicks in. To determine how many DVDs I rent during the typical month, I had to download my rental history. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can get your history from the Returned Rentals page.) After downloading my history, massaging it into the desired form, and loading it into R, I generated a stem-and-leaf plot to visualize the number of DVDs I have rented during each of the 76 months I have been a Netflix subscriber:

> stem(monthly.rental.counts, scale=2)

  The decimal point is at the |

   1 | 0
   2 | 000
   3 | 0000000
   4 | 00000000000
   5 | 000000000000
   6 | 000000000000000
   7 | 0000
   8 | 000000
   9 | 00000
  10 | 0000
  11 | 0
  12 | 00
  13 | 00
  14 | 00
  15 | 0

It looks like I have rented as few as one and as many as fifteen DVDs in a month. Most months, however, I rent between three and ten DVDs. On average, I rent about 6.4 DVDs per month:

> summary(monthly.rental.counts)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
  1.000   4.000   6.000   6.408   8.000  15.000

Thus my average rental price is about $2.80 per DVD:

> 17.99 / 6.4
[1] 2.810937

Now I can make my Unbox-vs-Netflix price comparison. For me, it looks like Unbox is about 40 percent more expensive than Netflix:

> 3.99 / 2.81
[1] 1.419929

So the price of Unbox is not right, at least for me.

Testing Unbox-to-TiVo rentals

Because Amazon is offering free $15 credits to TiVo owners, I decided to give Unbox a test drive. My test rental was The Illusionist. Renting the movie was easy (just one click), and shortly thereafter Unbox automatically downloaded the movie to my TiVo box. When I played the movie, however, I was disappointed with the video quality. I easily noticed banding artifacts, which were distracting at times. On the whole, the viewing experience was inferior to watching a DVD.

Netflix still beats Unbox

For me, then, Unbox is still a loser. It costs more and delivers less than DVD rentals via Netflix.

A note to my friends at Amazon.com

I would be happy to give you my business, but right now you’re not earning it. If you want me as an Unbox customer, here is the recipe for winning me over:

Let me easily download movie rentals to my TiVo. (Check.)
Offer true DVD quality or better. (You’re not there yet.)
Sell the rentals for less than $2.80. (You’re not there yet.)

Until then, I’ll have to give my money to Netflix.

Cheers,
Tom

Update: edits for clarity; added tags.

Baker's percentages and how not to explain them

Tom Moertel — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 02:11:00 -0400

I like to bake, and I work in a professional kitchen from time to time, so I picked up The Baker’s Manual, 5th ed., hoping to carry it in my kitchen bag as a quick reference for large-scale recipes.

Before going further, you need to know two things about professional bakers. First, they measure dry ingredients not by volume, the way home bakers do, but by weight, which is both faster and more precise for the large quantities frequently used in professional kitchens. Second, when the pros write bread recipes, they express quantities in relative terms called “baker’s percentages.” Each ingredient’s quantity is given as a percentage of the recipe’s total flour weight. For example, the book provides the following recipe, referred to as a “formula,” in the section on baker’s percentages:

80.0% bread flour

20.0% whole wheat flour

66.0% water

2.0% salt

1.2% yeast

As you would expect, the percentages for bread flour and whole wheat flour add to 100 percent.

Now, here’s where the book goes down in flames. It attempts to explain how baker’s percentages let you easily scale recipes to any desired batch size, but it fails. Utterly. Here’s the book’s explanation for how to scale the above recipe to 300 pounds:

[T]o calculate the weight of each ingredient in the [300-pound] recipe, you add up all of the percentages in the above formula. This total percentage value is 169.2. Divide this number by the desired dough weight, 300 pounds, to get .564. Round this number up to get .6. Then multiply the percentage amount for each ingredient in the above recipe by .6 to obtain the larger weight required by the larger recipe. (Emphasis mine.)

When I read that explanation, I thought, Multiply? That’s the exact opposite of what you ought to do. And, sure enough, the book went on to prove its own explanation completely wrong:

80% bread flour * .6 = 48 pounds

20% whole wheat flour * .6 = 12 pounds

66% water * .6 = 39.6 pounds

2% salt * .6 = 1.2 pounds

1.2% yeast * .6 = .7 pound

Note: the above is quoted verbatim from the book.

Does the “scaled-up” recipe yield 300 pounds? Nope. Add up the resulting weights and you get 101.5 pounds. Oops.

Is it really that hard to see that the correct method is simply to multiply each percentage by desired batch size and then divide by the sum of percentages? In the case of the book’s 300-pound example, we would multiply each percentage in the recipe by the following factor:

300 pounds / 169 percent = 177.5 pounds

Let’s try it out:

80% bread flour * 177.5 pounds = 142 pounds

20% whole wheat flour * 177.5 pounds = 35.5 pounds

66% water * 177.5 pounds = 117.2 pounds

2% salt * 177.5 pounds = 3.55 pounds

1.2% yeast * 177.5 pounds = 2.13 pounds

Now if you add up the resulting weights, you get the desired total of 300 pounds.

That the book not only gets the scaling method completely backward but then goes on to prove itself wrong is amazing. Didn’t anybody at John Wiley & Sons proofread the math?

Not exactly a confidence-builder for the rest of the book.

Some recent reviews of distributed source-code-management systems

Tom Moertel — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:50:00 -0400

John Goerzen recently compared a bunch of distributed source-code-management systems in Whose Distributed VCS Is The Most Distributed? His comparison includes all of the major contenders except for SVK and monotone. He ends up favoring Darcs, which I also prefer and use to manage my projects’ code. If you’re looking for a quick overview of distributed SCM options, check out John’s comparison.

Also check out Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox-O’Hearn’s Quick Reference Guide to Free Software Decentralized Revision Control Systems, which is updated regularly. (He also likes Darcs.)

Update: fixed small typo.

Amazon Grocery: an upbeat mini-review

Tom Moertel — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 01:34:00 -0400

Amazon.com recently launched Amazon Grocery by offering a $10 discount on purchases of $49 or more. I took the bait.

Amazon’s plan

Judging from Amazon’s initial grocery offerings, I suspect their plan goes something like this:

offer only goods that can be warehoused (no perishables)
undercut traditional retailers on high-margin goods such as organics, naturals, and upscale brands (e.g., Annie’s Homegrown, Bob’s Red Mill, Newman’s Own, and Tom’s of Maine)
offer a greater breadth of products than traditional retailers can stock (the long-tail play)
offer customers free “super-saver” shipping to eliminate shipping as a customer concern
sell products in bulk-quantity packs to reduce Amazon’s internal shipping costs

Prices and bulk packs

For pricing perspective, I grabbed the receipt from my most-recent trip to Giant Eagle, the local grocery store. Generally, when both Amazon and Giant Eagle offered the same product, Giant Eagle priced it significantly higher, in one case more than twice as high. For example, here are four items from the receipt:

Product	Amazon	Giant Eagle	G.E. Markup
Annie’s Homegrown Shells & Wisconsin Cheddar Mac & Cheese	$1.23	$2.99(a)	143%
Garden of Eatin’ Red Hot Blues	$1.76	$2.50(b)	42%
Back to Nature Crispy Wheats	$1.91	$2.29	20%
Cascadian Farms Cereal Multigrain Squares	$3.30	$3.79	15%
a = sale price when purchased with customer-loyalty card, normally $3.49
b = sale price when purchased with customer-loyalty card, normally $2.95

Amazon sells the first three products in packs of 12; the last product, in packs of 6. For the Mac & Cheese and Red Hot Blues chips, I don’t mind the bulk packaging at all: my family goes through this stuff quickly. The last two items, however, I probably won’t buy from Amazon. We don’t eat them fast enough to make storage practical.

Test run reveals flaws

Tempted by the $10 discount offer, I placed an order with Amazon Grocery. Here are the products I ordered:

Bob’s Red Mill Large Flake Nutritional Food Yeast, 8-Ounce Packages, Pack of 4 – Yes, I actually like this stuff.
Coomb’s Maple Syrup, Premium Grade B, Organic, 32-Ounce Jug – Grade B refers to darkness, not quality, and Grade B rules: its mightier maple flavor blows away the comparatively wimpy Grade A. (Amazon’s price was $13 per quarter-gallon, which is actually a better deal than the $28.55 I paid for a half gallon of organic Grade B when I last ordered from an online supplier.)
Annie’s Homegrown Organic Shells with White Cheddar Mac & Cheese, 6-Ounce Boxes, Pack of 12 – My wife loves this mac & cheese, and the boxes are small, so a 12 pack is just about perfect.

Today, the order arrived.

There was one mistake. Amazon sent me the whole-wheat version of the mac & cheese, when I had ordered the regular version. Oops.

It was easy to see how the mix-up happened. The box that contained the 12 pack was clearly labeled by the manufacturer as “organic whole wheat shells & cheddar.” Here’s a photo:

But somebody at Amazon had applied the wrong bar code to the box:

(The & that escaped from the Land Of XML is a nice touch, too.)

Mislabeled as it was, the whole-wheat 12 pack was just waiting to cause problems for a customer like me.

Is Amazon taking Grocery seriously?

When I called Amazon about the order mix-up, I was curious about how they would handle it. Amazon Grocery is a complex new offering, and there were bound to be mistakes. The only question was whether Amazon was prepared to correct the mistakes in a way that made me feel confident in getting what I ordered if I were to purchase groceries from them again.

In this case, they did. When I told the customer representative that I had been shipped the wrong box, he said that he would put in a “reorder” for the correct mac & cheese and send it to me via next-day shipping. As a bonus I could keep the 12-pack of whole-wheat mac & cheese that had been mistakenly sent to me. I doubt a typical grocery store would be so willing to eat the cost of its mistakes.

When I told the rep that the box I had received had been mislabeled at the warehouse and cautioned him against repeating the mix-up by sending me another mislabeled box, he said he would make a note of my concern. He also said – and I found this very interesting – that Amazon’s policy is not to take action until they receive two complaints about an item being mislabeled. (I hope there is some math behind that policy.)

Will I receive another mislabeled box? Time will tell.

Update 2006-08-04: As promised, Amazon sent me a replacement package, which arrived the next day and contained the correct product.

Cautious optimism

All in all, I’m upbeat about Amazon Grocery. Amazon stocks many products I can’t find at the local grocery store, and where there is product overlap, Amazon seems to offer a compelling price advantage. No, Amazon won’t replace regular trips to the grocery store, but it probably will change my buying habits for the products that grocery stores routinely mark-up through the roof. I can’t see that as anything but good.

A coder's guide to usage guides (and why you ought to use one)

Tom Moertel — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 12:55:00 -0400

Note for coders: If you’re one of the fine folks who reads my blog for the coding content, I’ll be up-front with you: this article represents about 2,500 words of non-coding text. Nevertheless, you ought to read it because I am writing about something that’s important to you.

We coders, if you stop to think about it, spend our lives doing some insanely complex and seemingly bizarre stuff. If we want the rest of humanity to understand us and what we do, we must be prepared to explain our world to them; they are not going to figure us out on their own.

Thus the burden of making our world understandable and relevant to others rests upon our own shoulders. To carry the burden, we must be able to communicate complex ideas, share the full depth and beauty of our creations, and help others see that the things we devote our lives to are worthy and fascinating. In sum, we need to invest in our writing skills. Writing is still the most effective, scalable means we humans have for capturing and sharing complex knowledge. If we want to reach the rest of the world, we must become good writers.

Unfortunately, writing well is difficult. Like programming, writing is a struggle. If you want to improve, you must struggle often. (That’s why I blog.) And while I cannot struggle for you, I can tell you about an unappreciated writing tool that has become my go-to reference when writing. It has made my struggles a bit less difficult and a bit more fun. That reference is not the ever-popular dictionary.¹ Rather, it is the usage guide.

Usage guides are designed to explain the finer points of using our language and, if they’re good, they offer sensible advice. Have you ever wondered whether to use affect or effect, compliment or complement, farther or further, compose or comprise, less or fewer, precede or proceed? Do you know why you shouldn’t confuse enormity for enormousness, masterful for masterly, or purposely for purposefully? How should you approach who and whom? And how should you address the thorny issue of sexist language? These are the kinds of questions that usage guides were created to answer.

A good usage guide isn’t afraid to prescribe advice. Some more-recent guides, however, are less prescriptive and more descriptive, following the lead of modern dictionaries. Instead of offering advice on tricky writing issues, these guides describe the many viewpoints in play and let you choose among them. I think this weakens a guide, and so my recommendations below are biased toward prescriptive guides.

Unlike dictionaries, usage guides are not plentifully stocked in book stores. On a recent visit to my local Barnes & Noble, for example, I was surprised to learn that the reference section contained no usage guides at all. For this reason, I will provide Amazon links to the guides I like.

Let us begin our tour of usage guides at the beginning, with Fowler.

Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage

Of the authors of usage guides, no one is more revered than Henry Watson Fowler. He and his brother Francis wrote The King’s English, a reference published in 1906 that provided lengthy advice on issues of style and grammar. Afterward, the brothers Fowler collaborated on their next major work, but in 1918, after eight years of planning, Francis died, leaving Henry alone with the daunting task of writing the book, which ultimately required another eight years. Published in 1926, this book was to become the influential masterwork, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, most often called Fowler’s Modern English Usage or simply Fowler.

Since its publication, Fowler has become the quintessential prescriptive guide to English usage and is still beloved among picky writers. One can’t help but respect the author, who doesn’t cower behind dry, academic language but instead throws himself vividly onto every page and seems to go out of his way to fight pedantry.

The followers of Fowler prize his precision but love him for his quirky voice. When you read Fowler, you get Fowler. Consider the first edition’s entry on superiority (remember, this was written almost a century ago):

Superiority. Surprise a person of the class that is supposed to keep servants cleaning his own boots, & either he will go on with the job while he talks to you, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, or else he will explain that the bootboy or scullery-maid is ill & give you to understand that he is, despite appearances, superior to boot-cleaning. If he takes the second course, you conclude that he is not superior to it; if the first, that perhaps he is. So it is with the various apologies (to use an expressive colloquialism – if we may adopt the current slang – . . . ) to which recourse is had by writers who wish to safeguard their dignity & yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch & not be defiled. They should make up their minds whether their reputation or their style is such as to allow of their dismounting from the high horse now & again without compromising themselves; if they can do that at all, they can dispense with apologies; if the apology is needed, the thing apologized for would be better anyway. . . . (Fowler, 1st ed., 1926.)

The editors of Fowler’s later editions, to the disappointment of Fowlerians everywhere, have muted Fowler’s voice while undertaking the necessary work of making the reference more accessible to contemporary readers and writers. For example, the superiority entry from the 2nd edition, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, reads as follows:

Superiority. Much misplaced ingenuity in finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled. Among them are: To use and expressive colloquialism – in the vernacular phrase – . . . . (Fowler, 2nd ed., 1965)

Most writers consider Gowers’s stewardship of Fowler completely respectable. The second edition still speaks with Fowler’s voice, and Gowers’s revisions make the work more practical for modern writers. The second edition is seen in much the same light as the screenplay adaption of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: the original was changed, but the changes were understandably necessary and, most important, the integrity of the original was largely preserved.

The third edition of Fowler, however, is the subject of controversy. Edited by Robert W. Burchfield and published in 1996, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage differs from the previous editions in two important respects. First, it no longer speaks with a distinctly Fowlerian voice. Second, Burchfield allows descriptivism to creep into the celebratedly prescriptive reference.

Nevertheless, it is a useful reference work. Even the third edition’s detractors admit that it is a perfectly respectable, modern usage guide. Their main complaint is that the work is no longer Fowler, and I am inclined to agree. Burchfield distances himself from Fowler, as the third edition’s entry on superiority demonstrates:

Superiority. Fowler’s term for the use of a slang expression or a socially divisive remark preceded by a distancing or defensive comment implying that in normal circumstances the speaker would not deign to use such an expression himself or herself. Such distancing remarks include as they say; if the word may be permitted; . . . . (Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)

Burchfield writes that superiority is “Fowler’s term,” putting Fowler in the third person instead of adopting Fowler’s voice. Instead of recommending a position – taking a stand – he tells you what positions others have taken (in this case Fowler himself). He observes and describes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but in a usage guide, I prefer to know what the author himself thinks.

I suspect that many of the third edition’s critics would have welcomed the book had the Oxford University Press not used Fowler’s name in its title. But the OUP did call it Fowler, and the reviewers judged it accordingly. Nevertheless, the third edition is a worthy reference, and I use it second only to Garner, which I will get to in a moment.

Because all three editions of Fowler have their proponents, all three editions are still available today. The first edition was out of print for some time (I found my copy, the original 1926 letterpress edition, at a book sale), but the third edition’s awakening of the Fowlerian hordes led to renewed interest in republishing the earlier versions. Now all three are readily available:

Which version is for you? If you want an up-to-date, practical reference, get the 3rd edition (or, better yet, get Garner, discussed next). If you want less descriptivism and more of the original Fowler flavor, get the 2nd edition instead. You probably should not get the first edition unless you are fascinated by the English language or want to experience the unadulterated, original Fowler, in which case you are the kind of person who probably has all three editions already.

Garner’s Modern American Usage

My favorite book on usage is Garner’s Modern American Usage. Bryan Garner, a pragmatic prescriptivist, has crafted an excellent usage guide of a distinctly Fowlerian flavor. (That he also founded the H.W. Fowler Society ought to tell you something about the way he approaches usage.)

In Garner, the detractors of the third edition of Fowler have found a successor to Fowler in spirit. Where Burchfield describes, Garner prescribes. Consider how the authors approach the subject of sexist language. Burchfield writes:

sexist language. 1. As indicated in numerous articles in this book . . ., feminists and others sympathetic to their views, from about the 1970s onwards, have attacked what they take to be male-favouring terminology of every kind and have scoured the language for suitable evidence and for gender-free substitutes. Their argument hinges on the belief that many traditional uses of the language discriminate against women or render them ‘invisible’ and for these reasons are unacceptable. The various types of alleged linguistic discrimination need not be repeated here. Perhaps the most obvious reference works on the subject are . . . . 2. Some landmarks. As rough indicators of the development of feministic views on gender-free language it might be useful to set down in chronological order details of some decisions and discussions that have taken place in various English-speaking countries since 1988: . . . . (Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)

Burchfield then devotes the next two subsections (3 and 4), representing the balance of the full-page entry, to examples from both sides of the debate and to describing the academic viewpoint on the subject.

In contrast, Garner distills the problem to its essence and offers practical advice:

SEXISM. A. Generally. If you start with the pragmatic premise that you want to avoid misleading or distracting your readers, then you’ll almost certainly conclude that it’s best to avoid sexist language. Regardless of your political persuasion, that conclusion seems inevitable – if you’re a pragmatist.

But does avoiding sexism mean resorting to awkward devices such as he/she? Surely not, because that too would distract many readers. What you should strive for instead – if you want readers to focus on your ideas and not on the political subtext – is a style that doesn’t even hint at the issue. So unless you’re involved in a debate about sexism, you’ll probably want a style, on the one hand, that no reasonable person could call sexist, and on the other hand, that never suggests you’re contorting your language to be nonsexist.

(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)

Garner then goes on to provide two pages of practical suggestions:

B. The Pronoun Problem. . . .
C. Words with man- and -man. . . .
D. Differentiated Feminine Forms. . . .
E. Equivalences. . . .
F. Statute of Limitations. . . .

(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)

Garner also provides a bibliography (subsection G) should you wish “to inquire further into this interesting subject.”

Most of the differences between Garner and Fowler 3 are not so pronounced. Either reference would serve the needs of most writers. Nevertheless, I find myself reaching for Garner first and then, if I want a second opinion, for Fowler 3. So my top choice is Garner.

This ends my brief tour of usage guides. I have overlooked many useful guides, such as Merriam Webster’s, but I don’t find them as useful as Garner or Fowler. If you happen to be in a good library, prowl the reference section and draw your own conclusions.

My advice: if you don’t have a usage guide, get one and use it

If you care about writing enough to own and use a dictionary, you probably ought to have a good usage guide, too. While there are many usage guides available, if you can have only one, my recommendation would be for Garner’s Modern American Usage. If you are the kind of person who likes the luxury of a second opinion, complement Garner with The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. (Paperback) (or 3rd revised ed. in Hardcover). Finally, if you want to experience Fowler unaltered, pick up a copy of the first edition of Fowler. If you find it at a book sale, you might be able to score a copy of the original 1926 printing.

Even if you don’t want to buy a usage guide, you ought to sign up for Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day. Every day you’ll receive an emailed tip from Garner and maybe a quotation or two on writing. Sign up at the OUP’s email-subscription page.

I prefer printed reference books, but if you would rather get your usage information online, here are a couple of starting points:

There you have it: the usage guide – my favorite writing tool. If I haven’t convinced you to add one to your own writing toolkit, at least flip through Garner or Fowler the next time you’re in the library. Maybe then you’ll reconsider. For me, usage guides are a no-brainer: anything that makes writing a bit more fun and a bit less of a struggle is worth having on my bookshelf.

Because dictionary publishers have made the dictionary-and-thesaurus duo a part of every college freshman’s standard gear, I will assume that you already have a good dictionary and so focus my attention exclusively on usage guides. If I’m wrong about this, I can recommend my favorite dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary. (Please do not bother to inform me that the NOAD is inferior to The Shorter OED because if that’s the way you roll, you clearly don’t need my advice.) Another good choice is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.

Mini-review of CafePress's direct-printed t-shirts

Tom Moertel — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:48:00 -0400

As you may recall from a previous post, I set up a CafePress store to sell LectroTest Robot–branded stuff such as t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, magnets, and so on. CafePress does a good job of making their products appear to be of the highest quality, but I am naturally skeptical about such claims.

In particular, I wondered about their t-shirts. The results of their heat-transfer printing process – previously the only option – did not make me happy. Images with transparent areas revealed the transfer background, which over time yellowed and made the image seem to float on a sea of urine.

So when I set up The LectroTest Emporium, I specified the use of CafePress’s newer “direct-printing” process for t-shirts, hats, and every other product for which it was offered. Still, I wondered about the quality.

So I ordered up a LectroTest Robot t-shirt and put it to the test.

Test one: the eyeball and the scanner

When the t-shirt arrived, my initial impression was that it looked pretty darn good. The Robot came out perfectly, and even the pointy parts of the LectroTest lightning rendered without problems. The colors were true, if a little less saturated than I would have preferred.

Compared to silkscreen, the direct-printing process seems to produce results that are a bit less saturated and a bit less crisp. It’s like an airbrush artist rendered the Robot onto a billboard-sized shirt that was carefully shrunken to normal size.

Next, I threw the t-shirt on a flatbed scanner. The results are below. The first image is an overall view of the Robot logo. The second is a 300-dpi close-up of the lettering, where you can see the air-brush effect.

Test two: the iron

To check for color offsetting, I turned the shirt inside out and ironed it on a full-steam, cotton setting. Throughout the ironing, the face of the front-side image was pressed into the white cotton of the back side of the shirt. Nevertheless, none of the ink migrated. The pure white remained pure white.

Test three: the washer

For the final test, I washed the shirt on a normal warm/cold cycle with a small load of other clothes. I then dried the clothing on a medium cycle. (CafePress recommends washing in cold water and drying on low, but nobody pampers their t-shirts like that, and so I tested under more typical conditions.)

When I took the shirt from the dryer, I didn’t see any signs of shrinkage or fading. To double-check, I ironed the shirt and threw it back on the flatbed scanner.

Doing a before-and-after comparison of the scans in the Gimp, I was able to see some shrinkage and fading (see image below). Top to bottom, the shirt shrank by about 4.5 percent; left to right, the shirt actually grew by about 1.8 percent. Minor fading was apparent, especially in the solid black areas. Neither the shrinkage nor the fading were concerning, however; both are typical for t-shirts, especially on the initial washing. The bottom line is that the shirt’s coolness was untarnished.

Summary

It’s a good t-shirt. It looked cool out of the box and fully captured the metallic fierceness of the beloved LectroTest Robot. The shirt handled a hot-steam ironing without any ink offsetting. It shrank and faded a bit on its initial wash, but neither change detracted meaningfully from the shirt. In sum, CafePress’s direct-printed t-shirts seem like the real deal: they look good and stand up to typical wear and washing.

Verizon FiOS fiber-optic Internet service: a first look

Tom Moertel — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:23:00 -0500

Recently I had Verizon’s fiber-optic service “FiOS” installed at my home. The installation process took about a half day and involved placing the following boxes around my house:

optical network terminal (ONT, installed outside of house)
battery backup unit (BBU, installed in basement)
power adapter (plugged into household electrical outlet)

The ONT was installed next to my old POTS junction box:

The ONT acts like a miniature central office. To my house it provides four POTS lines for voice service and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for data service. The ONT accepts a single fiber-optic cable that connects all of these services back to Verizon’s central office.

As part of the installation process, Verizon moved my POTS lines from copper over to the ONT’s POTS interfaces. Verizon wanted to remove my copper-based service altogether, but I forbade them from doing so because I have non-Verizon business lines that I want to keep on copper, which competitive carriers can use to offer me service. (Verizon is not required to share its fiber cables with competitive carriers.)

If you look closely at the ONT, you’ll see that it also is capable of handling video service:

(At present Pennsylvania’s cable-franchise laws prevent Verizon from offering video service, but I’m sure Verizon’s lobbyists are working to change that situation.)

Unlike copper wires, fiber-optic cables do not carry power. The ONT, therefore, must be powered from my home’s electrical service. If the power goes out, the battery backup unit (BBU) will supply power for the ONT’s voice services for about four hours.

VoIP users beware: When the household power fails, the ONT’s data services will be dropped immediately in order to conserve the BBU’s battery. This seems pretty lame to me, but Verizon confirmed this behavior when I called them to ask about it. If you need data service during a power failure, make sure your ONT is powered via a UPS under your control.

To provide data service to my house, the installer ran a CAT-5 cable from the ONT’s 10/100 Ethernet port into my house, where it plugs into a D-Link 4-port “Ethernet Broadband Router,” provided by Verizon for free. Although the provided router has NAT and firewall features, I placed a Linux-based firewall between it and the rest of my home network as an added precaution.

I have been using the service for several days now, and here is my verdict:

It’s just broadband.

Practically speaking, I can’t tell any difference between FiOS and my Adelphia cable-modem service. I ordered 5-Mbps service from both providers, and both services provide about 5 Mbps down, which is faster than fast enough for me. The FiOS service has slightly lower latency – I can ping www.google.com in about 9 ms – and that’s a nice plus.

The big benefit of FiOS is competition: Verizon’s price is about $10/month less than Adelphia’s. When I called Adelphia to cancel my service, their representative attempted to change my mind by offering me a 3-month promotional discount and trying to sell me extra television channels.

I passed.

Good stuff: Foyle's War

Tom Moertel — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:20:00 -0400

“Reality” shows have plunged mainstream television into an entirely new depth of stupidity – and for television, that’s saying something. Fortunately for us, some programs defy the downward trend, and Masterpiece Theatre’s Foyle’s War is one of the best.

Foyle’s War follows Christopher Foyle during World War II in England. Germany occupies mainland Europe, and invasion seems imminent. Ordinary people carry on as best they can, but an undercurrent of desperation pulls at them, and some give in to terrible urges, including murder.

Foyle, the Detective Chief Superintendent of the Hastings police department, sees the worst of it. Denied by his superiors the right to join the armed forces, Foyle fights a different war, one that claws away at his home town. Hastings, on the south coast of England, is a likely invasion site, and its citizens must live with barbed wire, road blocks, anti-invasion exercises, and increasingly dire rumors. As crime becomes more frequent and more brutal, Foyle and his his small staff – Detective Sergeant Paul Milner and his driver Samantha “Sam” Stewart – struggle against what threatens to become anarchy.

As you may have guessed, Foyle’s War is of the mystery genre. I am not one of those “mystery persons,” but Foyle’s is so far beyond what is typical of the genre that I classify it simply as Good Stuff. This is not Murder, She Wrote. The writing is great. The acting is subtle – Michael Kitchen conveys more meaning with a single nod than most actors do with their dialog. The sets, camera work, and directing collaborate to draw the helpless viewer into WWII-era England. The result is fun television that need not be considered a guilty pleasure.

So far, four series of feature-length Foyle’s War episodes have been filmed. The first two are out on DVD now in the USA (see links below). If you have Netflix, you know what to do. The third will be released on DVD in November, but its episodes will be airing Sundays on PBS’s “Mystery!”, 11 September – 2 October. (Check your local listings to make sure you don’t miss it.) The fourth series is still in production.

If you are sick of reality television, you now know the cure.

Amazon Links

[If you buy something via one of those links, Amazon will give me a small referral fee, approximately one zillionth of what I could have earned had I been working instead of playing around on my blog. Let that be a lesson to me.]

80.0%	bread flour
20.0%	whole wheat flour
66.0%	water
2.0%	salt
1.2%	yeast

80% bread flour * .6	= 48 pounds
20% whole wheat flour * .6	= 12 pounds
66% water * .6	= 39.6 pounds
2% salt * .6	= 1.2 pounds
1.2% yeast * .6	= .7 pound

80% bread flour * 177.5 pounds	= 142 pounds
20% whole wheat flour * 177.5 pounds	= 35.5 pounds
66% water * 177.5 pounds	= 117.2 pounds
2% salt * 177.5 pounds	= 3.55 pounds
1.2% yeast * 177.5 pounds	= 2.13 pounds