The IOC Can Sod Off
24-Feb, 2010
Several stories worthy of the WTF? files have confirmed that the IOC is arguably a bunch of greedy bastards who simply use the athletes as pawns for monetary gain. Unfortunately, over the years it seems the athletes are becoming moving billboards and the spirit of the games are being overshadowed by corporate greed, “proud” sponsors, and intellectual property bullshit. This is why people boycott the Olympics.
I Think You’re in My Seat
29-Oct, 2009
My lady friend and I went on a trip down to the “lower-48.” FYI, the lower-48 is what we Alaskans call the contiguous United States. When you travel from Alaska to anywhere, you tend to ride on a few planes. Being a fan of accessibility, usability and good design I started to notice how the seat numbers were presented to the passenger of each flight. Here’s four examples, from horribly crappy to excellent, of airplane seat number signs.
This is just god awful. The font is OK. The row number is the biggest, visible character, although it would help if the letters and numbers WERE ENTIRELY VISIBLE! This silliness prompted me to ask the flight attendant if there was, in fact, a row 9 and 3/4. Her response was nothing more than a purse-lipped smile. This row was not the only row with missing information. Grade: D.
The letters and numbers were actually legible here, but some moron (or team of morons) didn’t realize that the seat information would not be visible if the overhead compartment was closed shut; brilliant. Even more of the information is obscured if you’re standing straight up, walking down the aisle. Grade: C-.
This information is presented fairly well—the row number is nice and big and it’s fairly obvious (at a quick glance) where each seat is relative to the person walking down the aisle. The lack of letters and words actually makes this more effective. The only thing that might make this better is the angle of the sign. Notice that the sign is angled downward, towards the floor…useful if you’re sitting down or a horse jockey, but Yao Ming may have to hunch down to confirm his seat. Grade B+.
We have a winner! This example has a nice big, white number with a dark, contrasting background and the only sign that used perspective to subtly inform the passenger of the seat location relative to the passerby. The information is clearly visible when walking down the aisle and when sitting. The only thing that would have made this an “A+” would be a larger window icon (right image). Grade: A.
Tweaking Your Cable Signal Strength
11-Sep, 2009
I’ve been up to my eyeballs in home projects this summer: replaced two toilets, installed track lighting in the kitchen, planted three trees, replaced the heating element in the dish washer, replaced the WiFi card in our Mac mini [stay tuned] and made our internet cable connection more efficient. Huh?
Many moons ago, I listened to Mac Geek Gab episode #207 in which Dave and John discussed simple ways to make your cable, internet connection more efficient, ergo increasing your cable modem signal strength. What does that mean, exactly? The gents go into all the details in the podcast, but in short they said “Your life will not be [as] happy” if you’re not within the decibel ranges they gave on the show. In short, you may decrease dropped packets and connection timeouts and speed up initial connections and DNS look-ups with two, little cable add-ons; an F Coupler and a terminating resistor.
Total Cost: $2.49
If you type http://192.168.100.1/ into your favorite web browser, it should bring up the DOCSIS cable diagnostics for your network. The two items that you should be concerned about are the Received Signal Strength and the Power Level. In general, the Signal Strength should be less than +10 dBmV and greater than -10 dBmV, whereas the Power Level should be less than or equal to 50 dBmV.
Wanting to decrease the Power Level resistance, I switched the internet cable from the -7 dBmV side of the splitter to the -3.5 side (photo left). I then put a terminating resistor on the unused -7 dBmV side of the main splitter.
Further down the line (stapled to the outside of the house), the internet cable is split again to two other rooms inside the house. We don’t need cable in one of the rooms, so I replaced the cable splitter with an F Coupler (connects two “male,” cable ends, photo right).
As a result, I shaved off 7 dBmV from the Power Level and increased the Received Signal Strength from -9 to +5.4 dBmV.
Bottom line…I have reduced the number of internet connection timeouts to zero! Woohoo!
