The weather improved for the post-Christmas pre-New Year’s interlude, and we managed to get outside a few times.  Pictures here.

Long after anyone but me cares, Ebi finally found his way home, a distant last place in the Great Sushi Race!  Ebi is a Travel Bug launched in Yokohama in November 2005 with instructions to willing souls to move him even closer to our neighborhood cache.

On his journey, he traveled 8060 miles over 416 days, visited 15 caches in three countries (Japan, South Korea, USA), but despite this feat, failed to earn his doting owner a sushi dinner.

I’m hoping reigning champion FutoMaki will be up for a rematch in 2007!  Keep your eye out for Great Sushi Race - the Sequel!

This picture I made of the Gold Country Fair got picked up on the Placer Valley Tourism web site, after they asked my permission to use it.  Cool!

My Microsoft career left me a heavy user of Internet Explorer rather than Firefox or one of the other browsers.  But not surprisingly Firefox seems to be the preferred browser among the open source community, and at times I need to use it to test or debug content on.  One would think these two products would be pretty similar, especially given the anti-IE campaign waged by some Firefox users.  I was prepared to abandon IE for a better alternative if that’s what Firefox proved to be.

But I found there are substantial differences in the user experience between the two products.  Here’s my initial reaction to the strengths and failings of each of the products:

1. Cleartype rocks.  The antialiasing, especially on small fonts, makes reading content in Internet Explorer a far better experience than in Firefox.  Especially if you switch between the two, you get an unpleasant shock at the jaggies in Firefox, and breathe a sign of relief returning to comfort of IE.  Score 1 for IE.
2. Incremental find rocks.  IE7’s find (searching for text within a web page) is sluggish to bring up and primitive.  I often type control-F, start typing the search term, and then have to wait around for the find dialog to come up - and retype my search term that has fallen into the gap.  By contrast, Firefox’s find is snappy, unobtrusive, doesn’t obscure the page (it’s a toolbar on the page bottom), and the incremental behavior means it usually finds things before you even finish typing the phrase - like it’s mind-reading!  Again, it’s a hard jolt returning to IE after using this capability.  Firefox wins round 2 handily.
3. XML browsing support.  For most users browsing XML is a secondary or tertiary feature.  For me, it’s a crucial development tool.  And although I’ve been somewhat disappointed in IE for not advancing the state of the art there since what we shipped in IE5 way back in 1999, I’m even more disappointed that Firefox is still significantly behind.  For instance, IE does a much better job of displaying a raw XML file using the default stylesheet I wrote for it.  Firefox’s rather sluggish XSLT implementation doesn’t support namespace nodes and thus namespace declarations aren’t there, stylesheets that manipulate QNames in content fail, and so forth.  Imagine my surprise that Microsoft’s "proprietary" product supports open standards better than the "open" product!  This makes Firefox completely unusable as an XML development tool.  IE wins round 3 handily.
4. Integrated favorites and typeahead.  IE has a really convenient feature I use all the time.  When you add a page as a favorite (bookmark), it will appear in the typeahead list in the address bar.  This is my main navigational metaphor for my favorites, since once you get beyond 20 or 30 the menu approach breaks down.  One nit though - only top-level favorites work - ones grouped into folders don’t appear.  So you do have to choose between maintaining a navigable hierarchy and having a flat list with typeahead.  Firefox probably has it’s own navigational metaphors, but for my money IE wins round 4.

Many people love the extensibility features of Firefox, but although I installed GreaseMonkey, I haven’t taken advantage of it much to date, so I can’t give Firefox any props for that.  I’m going to have to leave the totally subjective score at:

IE 3 - Firefox 1

So for now I’m not planning to switch.  And I’m not going to give as much credence to those who badmouth IE as a an inferior product until there’s one that exceeds it for my personal productivity.

For our Christmas night treat we watched the last installment of The Lost Room, a six-hour three-part miniseries which debuted on the SciFi channel earlier this month.  Highly recommended!

The premise: an unknown supernatural event occurred in a motel room in New Mexico in 1961, tearing at the fabric of reality and giving all the mundane Objects collected in the room at the time special powers.  For instance, the Key appears to be an ordinary motel room key, but has the extraordinary the power to open any door with a keyhole, and by passing through a door thus opened, you end up directly in room #10, which no longer resides next to rooom #9 but in alternate reality of some sort.  When you leave the room, you emerge from any door in the world that you choose.  A handy way to travel!

Such Objects have different powers - some subtle and often undiscovered, others dangerous or deadly, and yet others quite silly.  The power of these strange Objects has spawned collectors, brokers and economies, secret societies of the good, evil, and simply misguided types - all searching, and sometimes killing, for the powers the Objects bring, and their beliefs about the transcendent reality they imply.

Detective Joe Miller stumbles across the key during an unearthly murder investigation, and plunges into the underground society of those aware of the Objects, meeting a whole cast of unique and intriguing characters and having a constant set of adventures along the way.

I don’t see a repeat coming up soon on the SciFi channel, but there are versions floating around in BitTorrent (I devoted a few nights of Internet bandwidth to downloading the last episode which didn’t record directly.)

Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me!  Catch it if you can!

As far as I can tell, the solstice happened about an hour ago - placing it on either Thursday the 21st or Friday the 22nd depending upon your time zone.  These short days are pretty unpleasant, and I always look forward to lengthening days this time of year.  So the solstice is both a symbol of gloom, and a symbol of hope that it will all look brighter from here on.

Fitting with the gloom theme, the shortest day of the year was a cloudy, then drizzly, then outright gray and rainy day here in Auburn.  That adds up to the perfect opportunity to see what the bottom end of my solar panels performance is!  So as it grew dark I checked and found that in the worst imaginable conditions, I only generated 1.546 kWh - a far cry from our 40kWh average daily consumption, and probably just enough to power my laptop and monitor during the workday.  Depressing!

But true to the theme of hope, I updated my solar cost savings spreadsheet found that despite the lack of substantial solar output in these horrible conditions, during the first four months of operation I have still saved just shy of $1000.  Right on plan!  Even if electricity prices stay constant, inflation drops miraculously to zero, and for some reason the expected tax breaks don’t materialize, I’ll still break even in about 14 years; averaging about a 7% annual return on my investment.  I’m willing to accept that as the worst possible case!

By the spring solstice, I’m expecting much better news - the calculation (not just the forecast) of the value of this year’s tax breaks, longer and sunnier days, and probably some unavoidable electricity rate increases.  All adding up to a payback of under 10 years.  At least, that’s my solstice hope!

From Paul, a geography quiz that humbled me.  Even if you’ve heard of Burkina Faso, can you point it out on a map with a clock ticking?  Which of "Democratic People’s Republic of Korea" and "Republic of Korea" are North or South?

Took me three attempts to get an easy enough set of questions to squeek past Paul’s score ;-).  Thank goodness I got a string of South American countries instead of African!

The game is especially humbling in that it doesn’t give you the right answer when you fail, leaving you aware of your geographic failings.

Also check out Stained Glass, a fun little color puzzle on the same site (the side of each tile needs to match the color of the tile next to it.)