The Richter Scale^®

One of the biggest problems I see with press releases and press invitations is that the writer of said missives often presumes the recipient understands obscure acronyms and terminology. Maybe that’s fine when you personally know your target audience, but when you blast out a message to hundreds of media with a broad range of non-overlapping interests it’s plain foolish.

Case in point. An invitation to a press conference at CES 2006 I received yesterday stated

The DECT Forum, the international industry association embracing suppliers and operators of DECT based terminals, announces the availability of DECT6.0 - Interference Free Communication in the United States.

Searching further in the invitation for what “DECT” and “DECT based terminals” might mean, I found this nugget

The DECT Forum is the industry association with global reach, embracing suppliers and operators of DECT based terminals, systems, and networks. The DECT Forum represents the interests of the DECT industry and is located in Bern, Switzerland. Full members of the DECT Forum are currently: Ascom Tateco, Binatone, DSP Group, Infineon, Kirk, Panasonic, Philips, RTX, Siemens, SunCorp and Avaya-Tenovis.

Based on the list of members, I kind of got the sense that “DECT” had something to do with telephones. Nowhere else in the message was there any description or definition of what “DECT” meant. Fortunately the person sending the e-mail included a web link to http://www.dect.org, where, in the second paragraph, I learned that:

DECT stands for “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications” and denotes a radio technology suited for voice data and networking applications with range requirements up to a few 100 m.

Gee. I guess that should have just been obvious. Although, I must admit the obtuse e-mail did actually get me to click on the link, but I feel cheated nonetheless, and as this is not a key technology area I’m following anyway, off the invitation goes into the “Not Interesting” box.

Every year since 1986 we have had a big party at our house, where ever we happened to be living at the time. It started as the “Wing-Ding-A-Thon” (due to my affinity for Buffalo Wings), then evolved into the “Yeah! It’s Summer! Party” (held sometime during the summer), and then into the “Yeah! It Feels Like Summer! Party” here on Bonaire (held on January 1st each year).

The party - whatever it’s called - is a potluck event. We supply the BBQ, a vast number of racks of ribs in my special Indonesian-style BBQ sauce, 30 pounds of marinated BBQ’d chicken, cases of beer and wine, lots of non-alcoholic refreshments, and a place to gather. Our guests provide the rest. And the party is open to one and all - it’s been a great place and time to make new friends and see old friends too.

So, that said, should you find yourself on the island of Bonaire on January 1st of any year, come join us. The potluck BBQ party starts at 3pm and goes until whenever.

Every January, hordes of technophiles swarm to Las Vegas to see the latest consumer electronics - this has been going on for longer than I can remember. My first CES was sometime in the early 1990s, and I went a few time. I went last year as well to do some research for a client, as well as get my feet wet with respect to being a regular journalist once again.

In a couple of weeks I head back out to Vegas and CES 2006 to cover the show for Jon Peddie’s TechWatch and my blog (The Richter Scale).

Being a registered media attendee has some benefits and some drawbacks. The benefits include free attendance, invitations to all sorts of interesting parties and shindigs, and the fact that no matter how boring you look, people in booths on the floor want to talk to you in the hopes of getting some “free ink” (in regular language “get written up via free editorial coverage"). The drawbacks are that you get inundated with e-mail requests to set up meetings and interviews with people offering every possible product under the sun regardless of whether the products being offered are of interest to you (in the hopes of getting some “free ink”, of course), and no matter how bored you look, people in booths on the floor want to talk to you in the hopes of getting some “free ink”.

I’ve held off committing to any interviews so far mainly because I’ve not been organized enough to figure out what my schedule will be during the show. I’ve started doing that now, and find I have over 180 meeting requests to parse through. These are being sorted into “Not Interesting”, “Possibly Interesting” and “Definitely Interesting” categories. “Not Interesting” is winning, but I see a few potential gems in the “Definitely Interesting” pile which I will share here in my blog in the coming days.

My daughter has been playing Kameo on the Xbox 360 for hours (with the occasional cry for help when she gets to a boss she can’t beat by herself).

Today, when she went to play Kameo, she discovered that all her work had apparently been wasted. The Kameo save game had disappeared. 

I don’t know if it was a software glitch, or something accidental her brother might have done when playing Kameo himself, but regardless, the save game for Kameo has gone missing. Poof. And my daughter is rather distraught.

I have Googled to see if anyone else has had this problem with Kameo, and found nothing. So maybe this is an isolated incident. Or maybe I’m the first to publicly post about it. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I guess I need to start instituting an Xbox 360 save game back-up policy. Sad that it has come to this. Yet another thing that potentially limits the market potential of more advanced console devices to tech heads instead of ordinary people.

UPDATE - 12/18/05: I’m glad to report that this is not a game problem. My son admitted at dinner last night he was trying to start the game when he accidentally deleted his sister’s saved game. Now the question is whether or not forcing him to play Kameo until he gets back to where his sister had gotten to is considered punishment or a reward for poor judgement.

I’ll admit right off that my on-line gaming experience on consoles is limited, mostly by choice. Most of the on-line gaming I’ve done has been on the PC (with City of Heroes/City of Villains being particular favorites). I tend to like cooperative play more than things like death matches, and I prefer typing my communications to my team members instead of speaking them (since my experience in voice-enabled console gaming is that many players are pretty crude, never mind I hate having to listen to people coughing, snuffling, and snorting among other things).

However, yesterday I found myself up at 4am for some reason, so after playing a bit of Perfect Dark Zero in solo mission mode, I decided to check out Xbox Live play with that game.

I should point out that I spent a couple of hours a couple of weeks ago doing Call of Duty 2 deathmatch play on the Xbox 360 and found the experience to be pretty horrible when more than 3 or 4 people were in the match. Performance got worse than sluggish and my character’s position kept resetting.

The PDZ Xbox Live deathmatch experience was MUCH better than that in Call of Duty 2, although it took numerous tries to get connected to a game in progress because I kept getting the commonplace “You Have Lost Connection to Match” error message. At one point there were about 18 of us playing a team deatchmatch game. Responsiveness was great, even on my relatively slow connection here on Bonaire.

I even got my headset out. Found that the Brits playing the game were a lot more likely to actually use the headset as a way to coordinate game play. But most people appeared not to use their headsets at all. It did make the game more interesting when the headset was used properly, but things deteriorated when the “cougher” came on-line.

If anyone’s up for some on-line play when I’m on, my gamertag on the Xbox 360 is “BonaireGamer”.

Last night we took advantage of a gift certificate a friend had given me for my birthday, and took the whole family to Bistro de Paris, a restaurant run by Patrice, a French master chef. While we have eaten there before several times, and always enjoyed our a la carte meals, Linda had read recently that Patrice had started offering “grill stone” tableside cooking and thought the kids might like that.

As we expected the meal to be big, we did not order any appetizers, although Linda did order some of Patrice’s excellent French onion soup as her main meal, while the kids and I committed to cooking our own food on the stones.

While we waiting for our meal to come out we were given bread with a sun-dried tomato spread - tasty. Patrice also brought Linda and I each a glass of Kir - a drink made with one part Creme de Cassis liqueur and two parts white wine (a Kir Royal is made with champagne instead of white wine). He explained that Kir is a drink named after the mayor of Dijon, Canon Felix Kir, who mixed his white wine with black currant liqueur to cut down on the wine’s acidity. Always nice to learn a little bit of history over dinner! It was a nice aperitif in any event.

Soon after, three plates loaded with thinly sliced beef, bacon, chicken, and pork as well as slivers of courgettes (small zucchinis), onions, and asparagus were brought out, followed by two alcohol-based burners and two very hot slabs of stone. Looked like granite, but I could not tell for sure. I should note we had to sit outside, as there was concern that smoke from the cooking could cause problems inside.

Patrice liberally sprinkled salt on the hot stones and explained that would prevent the meat from sticking (it did help a bit) and showed us how to best place the meat on the stones to cook. Accompanying the dish was a tray of sauces (a pink sauce similar to Russian dressing but without pickles in it which Patrice called “cocktail sauce”, a yummy garlic sauce, and sour cream) and a bowl of nice little potatoes seasoned with herbs and sun-dried tomatoes.

The stones cooked the meat very quickly, but even so, it took us the better part of an hour to cooking everything we had, and even them we took home ample left overs. The kids enjoyed the meal as well. And Linda polished off her soup too.

As it was getting late and both kids were tired, we skipped dessert, vowing to return to get some at a later date.

Cost for the meal was about $63 before tip, including 5 soft drinks. Very reasonable.

Based on this meal and past ones, I give Bistro de Paris an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Bistro de Paris is located at Kaya Gob. N. Debrot 46 (that’s the road between downtown Kralendijk and the northern resorts). Phone is +599-7 17-7070, and e-mail is info@bistrodeparis.com.

We seem to be eating out a lot (or perhaps I am just writing about it more), but two nights ago, Linda and I were invited by a visiting friend of ours to enjoy a dinner at Capriccio, our favorite fine dining restaurant on Bonaire. Capriccio is run by two Italians with a passion for food and each other - Lola and Andrea (male chef). Both worked in the Los Angeles restaurant scene until about 10 years ago when they moved to Bonaire and started their restaurant here.

Capriccio has won numerous awards for their wine cellar, which has been labeled as one of the best in the entire Caribbean by Wine Spectator magazine, incidentally. I find that the number of wine choices is too great for me, so invariably I have Lola pick a bottle for me. And she never fails to find something interesting and perfect for the meal.

The menu at Capriccio is Italian, featuring a wide range of appetizers and entrees - traditional and non-traditional alike. For those with less adventurous palates a very nice thin crust pizza is available, as well as a variety of home made pastas. For those with broader tastes, a number of special entrees are available, in addition to things like the beef carpaccio appetizer.

My absolute favorite thing at Capriccio (in addition to the warm and personal service and great wine selection) are the desserts, ranging from a delectable tira misu to panne cotta and wonderful homemade ice creams and sorbets.

For our meal, Linda ordered the osso bucco, while I had the duck in a balsamic glaze. Our friend Kitty whose treat dinner was, had a carpaccio appetizer followed by a variant on penne paesana. Linda’s and my entrees came with salad, and we, as we always do, asked Lola to switch our garden salads for Caesar salads with extra anchovies. Hands down, Capriccio has the best Caesar on Bonaire, and anchovies which are just right - flavorful and not mushy in any way.

All of our dishes were excellent, and well presented. With dinner Linda and I enjoyed most of a bottle of a 2003 Morellino di Scansano from the Lohsa vineyard, which Lola explained in great detail to us as a trendy red wine from Tuscany which is made from grapes closely related to the Sanvgiovese grapes used to make Chianti. It was an excellent match to our meal. We took the bottle home with us as we could not finish it all without hurting ourselves.

I should mention that Kitty lived on Bonaire for about two years, and the last meal we had with her and her now ex-husband Marc was at Capriccio the night before they moved back to Holland. Amazingly, Lola remembered what Kitty’s favorite dish was and what she drank (apple juice).

After dinner our children joined us for dessert (a wonderful friend dropped them off after their school Christmas party), and as we were unable to decide what we wanted to have for dessert, Lola made us a “Grand Dessert”, which in this case (and much to our surprise) included one of every dessert on the menu. It was heavenly, but too much for three adults and two tired children. But we did well - there were only a few small portions left on the tray.

I honestly have no idea how much dinner was since it was Kitty’s treat (thanks again Kitty!), but do know that typically Linda and I will spend between $100-120 for the two of us at Capriccio’s for dinner, and feel that it is worth every cent.

On The Richter Scale, I give Capriccio’s a 9.0 out of 10.0. It’s a must when visiting Bonaire, and make sure to tell Lola that Jake sent you.

Capriccio Restaurant is located at Kaya Isla Riba 1 near the water front in downtown Kralendijk. Phone +599-7 17-7230

I had the Media Center Extender running on my original Xbox some months ago, though not soon enough as it took Sony forever to release an update to bring my VAIO desktop (purchased August 2004) up to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. However, I have pretty much never used it since.

And I suspect it may end up being the same with the Media Center Extender on my Xbox 360.

The reasons for this are simple, but I will point out that they may not apply to everyone.

First, I don’t use my PC for much MCE video recording - I generally don’t record the over the air programs or the ones from the TDS (terrestrial digital service - like DirecTV, but land based instead of satellite) because the quality of the signal isn’t great on either, and because I don’t have any easy way for the MCE PC to switch channels on the marginally better TDS system (none of the remote controller set-up options works for the custom Zenith set-top box).

Second, on the rare occasions I have used my PC for recording programs, they are programs I would rather my children didn’t have access to (think HBO or Showtime programming in the 9pm and later time slots and you’ll get the idea). While I know there are parental controls available on the Xbox 360, they do not appear to apply to the programming I’ve recorded from our local TV signal sources. I don’t need my children asking me why all those people on the shows I recorded, like Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! on Showtime, or Entourage on HBO, swear all the time. A similar issue applies to my photos - I don’t want non-family using my Xbox 360 to be able to view all the photos on my network storage - nothing embarrassing there, but there are about 15,000 images from the last three or four years, and some are more personal and private than others.

Third, video over the Xbox 360 wireless connection is poor and unsteady. I know they warn you about it, but the five-port Ethernet switch in my entertainment system is full (Xbox, PS2, GameCube, networked Onkyo receiver, and the network connection), and I didn’t want to bother adding another switch.

Fourth, while the music playback system on the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender is nice, once you get it to recognize and catalog music in locations other than the annoyingly default “My Documents” directory, the free remote (the short one) I got with my Xbox 360 has no apparent way to allow me to enter letters into the search fields for the artists or albums or songs I want, meaning that if I want to listen to Paul Simon’s music in my 400+ CD digitized collection, I have to scroll all the way down - a horribly painful and tedious process. Some letter/number keys on the remote would have been a useful touch. I also had the impression that the MCE remote control I got for the Xbox should work (per the configuration settings in the Xbox 360), but no joy there either. And I really have no desire to buy a more functional remote to make up for it.

And finally, I don’t want to have to keep my computer powered on all the time on the off chance I might want to watch a recorded movie or show, or listen to music. I already have a couple of file servers running 24/7 (main one is a Linux box with RAID-0, and the other is a very old PC running bare bones Windows XP for performing back-ups every night), and that’s enough. And I don’t want to have to boot up my PC just to watch some recorded video. Heck, it’s easier for me to just burn it to a DVD and watch it that way.

So, one of the big reasons Microsoft touts for putting an Xbox 360 in the living room “for the whole family to use” just does not fly in my household. It is nice for playing games though.

Last night, my wife and I had occasion to enjoy a meal at Le Flamboyant - one of our favorite restaurants here on the island of Bonaire. We had not eaten there in many months due to my extensive travels off-island.

At Le Flamboyant one can dine indoors or outdoors in a secluded courtyard. As we seemed to be rain free for the night, we opted to enjoy the open air. Mosquitos (due to our recent rains) were definitely present, but we wore long pants and sock and that thwarted most of them.

We found the menu had changed completely since our last visit, but still with many tantalizing items to choose from, and with a decidedly French flair.  The owners and operators or Le Flamboyant are Govert Strootman and Veronique Badet. Govert is a Dutchman, and Veronique is French, which certainly explains the French influence on the menu.

As we were heading to a friend’s engagement party later that night, we opted to eat lightly - no multiple courses, although it still felt like we had a lot of food. We started with a glass each of a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc (Santa Rita) - inexpensive, but tasty and crisp.

Linda, my wife, opted for the Penne Flamboyant - a tasty pasta dish with chicken and mushrooms, while I selected a salad and soup as my meal.

The tomato soup I ordered was garnished with fresh basil and whipped seasoned butter, and was perfect. Rich without being overbearing, and very flavorful without being overly spiced or salted.

My salad was the Scallop and Parma Ham salad, and featured six small scallops tastefully arranged around a small green salad topped with crispy parma ham - almost like bacon but not so greasy. The scallops were exquisite, and the saltiness of the parma ham provided a nice counterpoint - in flavor and texture. The lettuce and vegetables in the salad provided balance between the scallops and ham.

We did splurge (stomach-wise) for the Petit Grand Dessert to finish the meal with (we did share it though). The Petit Grand Dessert featured a taste of every dessert on the menu, in miniature. There was a scoop of mango sorbet, a sliver of a rich chocolate cake, a piece of cheese cake, and some other chocolate-oriented dessert I could not expressly identify other than to say that it, and the other samples, were gone in a couple of minutes, accompanied by lots of Mmmms! and Aahhhs!

Without tip, the bill ran to approximately US$40.00. Well worth it.

On The Richter Scale, I give Le Flamboyant a 9.0 out of 10.0, and will add that it remains one of our favorites here on Bonaire. We were definitely not let down.

I would like to mention that Le Flamboyant also sports a cute gift shop inside the large interior space with all sorts of ecletic items, including hand made purses, fresh grind spices and seasonings, art work, and a variety of other unique items. So, in addition to a great meal, you can also do a bit of souvenir or gift shopping there.

Le Flamboyant is located at Kaya Grandi 12 - right in the heart of Kralendijk. Phone +599-7 17-3919.

So, after days spent mostly playing my Xbox 360, my son asked me to play Star Wars Battlefront II with him on the Xbox, and after only a few minutes of gameplay it finally hit me how visually spoiled the Xbox 360 has made me. The Xbox connected via component video doesn’t even touch the Xbox 360 connected via the VGA/PC connection on my HDTV system.

Battlefront II in single player mode is okay and pretty playable, but in split screen multi-player mode, pixel chunkiness and coarse graphics (in contrast to the Xbox 360’s detailed high resolution output) really detracts from game play (never mind making it much more difficult to clearly see your enemies and navigate).

Having read recently about some Microsoft Xbox 360 evangelist commenting that the emulation of the Xbox on the 360 actually made Xbox games look better, I decided to give Star Wars Battlefront II a spin in my Xbox 360. Woe was me - the game is not yet support by the latest emulation code from Microsoft (list of what has been certified to work is here).

I am increasingly coming to appreciate the graphics capability and visual acuity the Xbox 360 provides. I guess you don’t know how good you have it until you go back to what you were using before.

I still have regular mini-frag fests with my kids and their friends over SystemLink on my office Xbox and the one in the living room, mostly playing Halo 2, and again, in single player mode (on my system - it’s usual 2, 3, or four of them in the living room on a single screen), that’s fine. Although some might question my gloating when I kick butt against a posse of 8 and 10 year olds (but I should note that sometimes they kick my butt too).

I definitely won’t be getting rid of any of my current generation consoles, but I suspect I will be spending more and more time with the next generation, including the Xbox 360.