As usual, my first stop is always Amazon. They seem to have pretty solid, just-under-retail pricing scheme. They’ve been my number one online source for online purchases for the last five years. In this case, the price seemed incredibly high: $211!! That’s just over $40 dollars per season, which was more than what I would expect any  individual season to cost. I’m not buying diamonds, people.

To verify this I added all of the individual seasons together, again priced at Amazon.   The result? $202.  This was disheartening. You could basically get a 5% discount by buying each item individually, but it’s not impressive enough to be anything more than  a blip. Something is wrong at Amazon, and I don’t like it. While I love Babylon 5, there’s got to be a better way.

At this point I checked eBay and put in a few bids. Most sets seemed to be going for anywhere between $90 and $140. This is 50% cheaper than the Amazon prices, but you’ve got to take your chances with the unknown sellers of the massive, online-sales supergiant.  I was further restricted from this option by my terrible bidding skills;  I kept losing every bid.

Returning to the world I love of higher prices with no bidding skill required, I decided to check Buy.com to see what they had in store for me.  I’ve been using this site on and off when Amazon’s prices border on the insane. The full series of Babylon 5 is available for $153 with shipping!!! How can this be? This price is 25% lower than the Amazon options.  At $30 per season we’re almost in business. It’s still quite the investment, but we’re talking about one of the best sci-fi shows of all time.

The last test was to see if the blip in Amazon’s pricing also applied to here.  Individual pricing of the seasons was $20 per season resulting in a flat $100 for all 5 seasons of B5. This cost is less than 50% of the Amazon prices, and 30% less than Buy.com complete set. The best news is how comparable the Buy.com price is to eBay listings without any of the hassle or dangers of bidding sales. If you haven’t noticed, I hate bidding on things. It makes me feel so…..dirty.

BONUS:

The Amazon Video Store is asking $2 per episode with discounts bringing the 20-something-episode seasons down to between $36 and $38. This puts their Video on Demand price for the full series at about $185. I’m a big fan of streaming video (Hulu, Netflix, and the Roku), but this price seems outrageous to me.  The distribution costs of the electronic versions are drastically lower than physical discs. While there will be continuing maintenance/bandwidth costs for electronic distribution, it’s completely absurd to think that this market will be successful without drastically reduced prices. I think Amazon is basing their VoD pricing on iTunes’ Store and Amazon’s own cloud services. It doesn’t make any sense to the end consumer right now to be spending this much on intangible product. Even if they see profit margin reduction in these early days it seems like they couldn’t afford the long term cost of losing any potential consumer base to Netflix, Blockbuster, and other video services.

I’ve been telling people for a while that “Maryland is my second-least favorite state, right after Texas”. Now, that’s a bit inflammatory, especially for me, but it got me to thinking about how I really do think about our great union.

The following list is an list our United States of America, ranked in an arbitrary order based on my preference.  I suppose the ranking comes from personal experience and marvel that I’ve built up over my few years on this planet.  It’s probably not even that accurate, it’s just my first pass.

1. Minnesota
2. Michigan
3. Colorado
4. Washington
5. Montana
6. Maine
7. Alaska
8. Idaho
9. New York
10. Georgia
11. Vermont
12. Virginia
13. Pennsylvania
14. Massachussets
15. California
16. New Mexico
17. Ohio
18. Arkansas
19. Oregon
20. Conneticut
21. Oklahoma
22. North Dakota
23. Kansas
24. Utah
25. Wisconsin
26. New Hampshire
27. Illinois
28. Indiana
29. North Carolina
30. Arizona
31. Iowa
32. West Virginia
33. Rhode Island
34. Wyoming
35. Nebraska
36. Tennessee
37. New Jersey
38. Delaware
39. Missouri
40. South Dakota
41. Kentucky
42. Hawaii
43. South Carolina
44. Louisiana
45. Nevada
46. Florida
47. Maryland
48. Mississippi
49. Alabama
50. Texas

Well, it turns out I was wrong about Maryland, and I’m definitely not sure about 1 and 50.  I’ll let you know if it changes, maybe it’ll be a series on this blog (under the category ’state preference’).

What I’ve learned from all of this is that I don’t really dislike any state in this union. I’m a big fan of our country, and our planet too.  I used to be very bombastic about this kind of thing, but I think I’ve mellowed out. Let me know if you think I’m waaaay off, and I’m sure you do, but I’d really love to see your ordered list of the states.

Thanksgiving Break is a beautiful thing, but not perfect. I think there’s a very accurate expression “If you need something done, ask the busiest person.” This comes with the corollary: “A person with much to do will always sabotage themselves when confronted with plenty of time to do it.”  Well, we’re coming up on finals week with plenty of projects to work on…soooo.

First was a simple mix of potatoes, onions, corn, and ground round. I mixed a bit with rice for the first go-around, then cooked it overnight in beef broth. The result of which I showed in the picture.

Second, thrice cooked chicken (boiled, grilled, and pan fried[olive oil and lots of minced garlic]) in rigatoni. I overcooked the noodles a bit, as you can see in the picture, but it was truly delicious with plenty of basil, grape tomatoes, parsley, and Parmesan cheese.

I’d love to hear/see about easy dishes that you guys like to whip up.  For now I’ll put my nose to the grindstone and hope to improve my productivity.

I’ve been running silent lately. Most of this is due to the fact that I’m stretched a little too far. What I have had lately is a lot more time to be in my apartment (working or otherwise) to enjoy the joys of cooking. While I usually just throw together sandwiches or spartan pastas, now and again I get to cook up something fun. Usually this involves the NuWave Oven that I reviewed a while back (thanks again S & H).  I threw together a gallery of the ones I remembered to photograph.

The first and second was some chicken I made for my first attempt at a Chicken Tikka Masala. The chicken was rubbed in butter, onions, cayenne and ginger.  The dish went over fairly well with my parents, but it was pretty far from any Masala’s I’ve had.  Next time I’ll remember to buy the right ingredients and follow a recipe. Oh, the third picture was the same sauce and chicken (lots of leftovers) over rice.

The fourth and fifth pictures are Parmesan Potatoes (I guess that’s the best name I could come up with). Three potatoes spiced with parsley, rosemary, thyme and basil and cooked in butter and olive oil. Near the end of the cooking I threw on some grated Parmesan cheese I had sitting around.

The last pictures are from today’s lunch/dinner: HabaHoneyBQ Chicken (they’re getting worse). I had some Habanero Honey left from my trip to Colorado (courtesy of a little candy shop in Monument) which I mixed with barbecue sauce to coat the chicken. I baked for about 15 minutes on one side and 10 on the other.  The result was a deliciously charred, sweet taste.  Unfortunately  some of it was a bit tough, the reason for which I finally realized: using partially frozen chicken breasts. Unless you chop all of the chicken into similarly sized pieces the NuWave tends to overcook the smaller ones.  From now on I get uniform cuts or, preferably, allow my chicken plenty of time to thaw.

Anyways, the dish was partnered with some rice pilaf with corn and dusted with cilantro.  It’s been very tasty, but I’m not a master yet. I’ll stay vigilant and keep you updated. I’m excited to graduate and settle into a real apartment with a decent kitchen. I promise my posts will improve.

Happy Saturday.

Maybe you science people can help me figure this out. The Daily Mail recently posted a news story titled “Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for the first time”. My question is: what the hell does that mean?

How can something be “one million times smaller” than anything? Is small a measurement?  What is twice as small as I am? Or twelve times as small as a planet? Is it a redneck term for mass? Are they saying it is a percentage of another object? As far as I know, small is a descriptive and relational term that has zero scientific meaning.  Maybe I’ve gone crazy, but it just doesn’t make any sense.

At this time I would like to say that I’m 3.6 times smaller than Darth Vader, but I smell twice as nice.

I got a few photos of a rather beautiful “sunset afterglow”. The sunset was more beautiful than the images, however. I don’t know whose fault that is.

Shutter: 4 Seconds, Aperture: F/5.7, ISO: 64

Shutter: 4 Seconds, Aperture: F/6.8 ISO: 64

Rejoining the workforce, if only temporarily, has reminded me of what it’s like to be productive. That’s not to say that my education is unproductive, but you do get a sense of accomplishment when you come home every night from a 9-5. You also feel some daily pains when it comes to things like team spaces, both physical and virtual. This is especially true if you’re joining an established team with idiosyncrasies to which you haven’t yet grown entirely comfortable.

I made a reference list of rules to obey when using a team Exchange server or other tool supplying a calendar service. While some of the following rules may seem like common sense to you, I challenge you to check yourself against these rules and see if you aren’t violating at least one of them. Actually, in writing these rules I picked things that I do too, but I won’t tell you which ones.

Raymond’s Rules for Team Calendars (Outlook, Google Calendar)

1. All teammates must agree to use the calendar service as their primary method for personal appointment management and the collaborative scheduling tool. *
2. Each member of the team is accountable for their own calendar.
3. Calendars must be shared with openly with all teammates.
4. All calendars must be up to date to provide for efficient meeting scheduling and accountability.
5. All employees are in one of three states at any given time and their calendars should reflect this:
   • Free/Open – No scheduled events or appointments labeled as “Free” to show they do not require direct physical attention.
   • Busy – Unavailable or occupied during the time of this event.
   • Out of the Office – Time period when the employee is not located on campus. (Includes telework, alternate duty locations, vacation, personal days)
     In the event of an unexpected scheduling change the team member should make alterations to reflect that change as soon as feasibly possible.**
6. Tentative appointments should be firmly changed to “Accepted” or “Declined” as soon as meeting attendance is most likely ensured. ***
7. Exceptions are allowed in the form of incalculably, but necessary, overlapping appointments.
8. It is reasonable to accept an event meeting and cancel in the event of an unexpected change.
9. Do not add/save items on your calendar that do not serve a purpose in scheduling your day. Extraneous meetings and unrelated events that a team member does not effect the workday should be removed.
10. Notes/Changes/Modifications to events made on calendars should be performed and tracked through the calendar service to preserve process continuity and centralized storage for meeting related data on changes or additions.
11. Members who plan to actively attend meetings (i.e. offer input, act on authority, plan to ask questions) should be added by the meeting manager to the official roster and be notified of changes like other participants.

*If this a team cannot agree to dedicated use of the system then the team must agree to live in chaos.
**Enabling permissions for a second office-mate to modify a calendar would allow for support for meeting organization and last minute changes.
***All plans are tentative by nature so labeling events as “tentative” implies a further uncertainty than is experienced daily by mortal beings of this universe.

Casual Tips:

• Any foreseeable blocks of work time in which a teammate prefers to be uninterrupted should be labeled on their calendar.
• Further use of color coding to specify certain complex cases may be used, but it should be thoroughly enforced. For example, teleworking means an out of the office status but you are available for phone calls and will be responding to email just as you would if you were in the office, so a color code or tag may apply to this situation to help coworkers.

As with anything, you may disagree or agree, but I hope you’ll communicate with me either way. If I’ve forgotten something that you think belongs on this list, I’d love to hear it. This is only version one, and there will be other rules to come.

Try printing this off and sharing it with your teammates at your next meeting.

(Please note that time speeds up and slows down in this article I started writing on the 18th of April)

As I sit in The Greene Turtle at BWI, I realize that the moderately sporty theme and full bar may give me an interesting possibility for introspection. So, with great resolve I start in on a fairly tasty, avocado burger and ponder the recent events of my life.

(Well, that was as far as I got before I was tempted with a piece of Macademia Nut Cheesecake, but that’s how writing works. At this point I’ve finished off my tasty meal and traveled a few hundred miles to find myself suspended in the air somewhere over Missouri.)

The most taxing part of my life, lately, has been the quest to get an internship for this summer. Being a grad student is apparently not difficult task enough to satisfy the gods, I also have to fill out loads of paperwork and fly to the east coast a few times.

I don’t like to complain too much, and the reality of the matter is that I’ve really benefited from the experience. Through interviewing with several different government agencies on more than one occasion I now feel a sense of immunity to the stinging barbs of the interviewing panel. It’s not that there are any shattered glass ceilings (for the 20-something, white male in America), but after your 20th interview in 6 months you start to place less and less stake in each one. I think half the battle is just realizing that you are wanted in this big ol’ world. Nearly everyone has the right to feel that way, but I think I didn’t let myself do it for a long time.

I’ve also become more comfortable in saying no to people. There are, literally, hundreds of places that are easily accessible to a person in computer science right now: everything from application development to taking a hammer to a hard drive. Personally, I’m just not the kind of guy that likes to track down criminals, plug small boxes into other boxes, or build robots. After everything I’ve been through I now can tell those employers that we just don’t have any chemistry and not fee. Once you realize that you’re wanted somewhere, it becomes a lot easier to do this. If I were to give any advice to a person nearing graduation at any level it would be to not accept offers just because you got them.

I’ve started to focus my knowledge of core computer organization and process flow into the field of information management and data visualization across systems. Most of my closer friends know what it’s like when I get a “topic-crush”, and right now its for data collection and aggregation. I’ll buy the drinks if you want to chat about this topic.[I'll probably leave your part of the tip for some older crushes like telecommuting, web development education, economics, or the possible existence of a Bizarro-Groucho Marx]

This new passion is partially enforced by my current research on network-based intrusion detection systems. Part of my groups task has been to create a testable out of band network for managing and sniffing traffic across large, distributed networks.

My biggest contribution thus far has been a redesign of the processing server and the way data is being handled in the short and long term. This sort of architecture really got me excited about my career because of the way I could see my knowledge and input change the process. I wasn’t always right in the choices I made, but the team was able to correct the misinterpretations or detect flaws in the design fairly quickly.

All-in-all, the solution we arrived at was fairly satisfactory, and I’m already seeing ways of improving our model. Additionally, I was also able to create a web-based GUI for accessing the new information and rendering a rather crude network visualization graph. It’s a non-trivial problem for two weeks time, especially since I still struggle with graph theory.

(This has been forgotten on my phone for over a month and a half, and now the author finds himself sitting on the couch. Feeling the red-afterglow of a Netflix-hosted episode of Outer Limits…I journey forth.)

This summer…well, I guess I don’t know what my goals are. I think I might stay cool on the personal technology side of life. I’m living with two good friends within minutes one of the most fascinating cities in the world. I think that the next 3 months will be devoted to seeing, smelling, and tasting as much of the East coast as possible. As friends may attest, I seem to have a lot more time for things “next month” than I do “this month”.

I’ve been meaning to get into podcasts for a while now as a way to expand my sources and let me pick up more stuff while on the road.  Also, it’s a little more fun, which is one of the biggest biggest advantages I see to podcasting: the presentation of valuable information in a manner that’s a little more social and palatable than black-on-white. (Read on…)

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Sometimes it’s good to have a moment of reflection and take stock of your position in life. I’ve heard that it is when you are at your busiest moments when you need to stop, if only for a moment, and consider all the things in your life. Well, I’m busy. Too busy, in fact, to look at all the things in my life, so I’ll just hit a few of recent technology moves that I’ve made. (Read on…)

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