The Richter Scale^®

I have observed a number of things the our new Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner does which I think make for good life lessons, so, without further ado, here’s a list of five things my Roomba has taught me:

1) Don’t give up easily. The path to your goal may not be an easy one, and may in fact require lots of false starts and turns, but if you persevere, you’ll get there.

2) When you get worn out or have finished your job, head home, take a breather, and recharge your batteries.

3) Avoid slippery or unsteady situations by planning ahead. There’s nothing worse than spinning your wheels and getting nowhere, and just wearing yourself out doing it.

4) If you’re going to charge forth to change the world, it’s not a bad idea to give a bit of warning to those close to you.

5) When you’re worn out, and just don’t have the energy to do the job right, don’t let people push your buttons. Let them know you need a small break to get your wind back.

Have any additional life lessons courtesy of a Roomba? Post them in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago an early Christmas present my wife and I were giving to ourselves arrived with our latest freight shipment from the U.S. - a brand new bouncing (not in the traditional sense) baby Roomba Scheduler.

For those who have been in a cave for the last year or two, Roomba is the trade name given to a family of robotic vacuum cleaners by iRobot, the company which developed and sells the Roomba products. The Roomba products work on battery, and operate by bouncing (gently) around a room and cleaning in a pattern designed to cover most of, if not all, of a room. They purportedly work great on carpets as well as hard surfaces (we have no carpets, so I cannot attest to that part - but it’s great on the tile floors we have).

Simply said, we are very happy with our new family addition. We have two dogs, a cat, two hamsters (not free roaming though), and a native Bonairean parakeet (called a “Prikichi"), plus two children and dust laden winds, so our floors get pretty gritty in no time - you can feel it on your feet (yes, even in December we walk around on bare feet - take that snow-draped New England!).

I’ve been using the Roomba to clean a room or two a day, and what a difference that makes, especially in contrast to the more time consuming and tedious manual sweeping we had been doing before. And I can now tell my wife I really am doing my share of house work.

The Roomba is smart enough (well, equipped with enought sensor technology anyhow) to not fall down stairs, which is a big plus, and one can create “virtual walls” which the Roomba will “bounce” off of so that you can limite the area in which it should focus its cleaning skills. Plus, it goes under beds and furniture providing there’s about 3 inches or so of clearance. And one of the coolest things is that when it thinks it’s done (or when it’s battery is running low), it finds its docking station and self-parks to charge its battery.

I must say I have been remiss in not even bothering with the scheduling functions of the Roomba, but I find that it’s easy for me to pick up wastebaskets, isolate a room, and pick up floor mats and towels and then just press a button on the Roomba to tell it to clean. Actually having to program it to clean at a particular time seems wasteful when I can just start it up manually and leave the immediate area (and yes, I am a geek, but I try to be practical)

The only things so far that the Roomba seems to have had problems with have been floor towels (e.g. in the bathrooms - it chokes on them and then bleets for help), floor mats (gets stuck on them - half on, half off - and spins in circles, and concrete dust (too fine for it to pick all of it up - haven’t found a vacuum cleaner yet that does, either).

I also have one piece of furniture which the Roomba has gotten wedged under - easily remedied by putting something solid in front of the furniture that the Roomba would bounce off of.

All in all, these are minor things - I am very pleased with the unit, and I have started recommending it to friends here on Bonaire as a great way to deal with dust, dirt, and pet hair/feathers.

I give my Roomba Scheduler a healthy 8.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

(As a footnote, iRobot has also recently started shipping the Scooba - a robotic wet mop. Definitely looking forward to checking that out at some point. If it’s anywhere as good as the Roomba I’ll be happy!)

I introduced a new series of artistic photographic images about a week ago. It’s the “Time For...” series, and it’s an open edition (meaning that it’s not a limited or numbered edition).

Take a look at the series and my motivation behind it in the Gallery section of my art web site.

A couple of the images from the new series are presented here - Time For Christmas I and Time for Dawn I, respectively:

Bonaire, the island I live on, is not a typically Caribbean island - it’s actually rather arid. Our primary native flora are cactii and other thorny plants. The terrain is more reminiscent of Arizona than the lush jungle one typically envisions in conjunction with “Caribbean Island”. We have no real big sandy beaches - it’s mostly iron shore or small bits of coralline rock here.

Part of the reason for the lack of “lush-ness” is the fact that our annual rainfall is only about 20-22 inches a year.

So, when rain falls (our rainy season is typically November and December, spreading outward into October or January on occasion), the parched soil does not absorb the water real well. Nor have the civil engineers who designed roads and other man-made structures taken rain much into account.

This is obvious by the 6-12 inch deep puddles on what we call major roadways here (ones that fit two car side by side with a margin for safety). And the puddles are everywhere after a rain shower.

Now, back in New England or Florida, when it rains, and there are puddles everywhere, what do folks do when driving through them? They make sure their windows are rolled up tight.

Not on Bonaire. This morning, for example, over half the vehicles passing by me heading in the opposite direction, while driving through these deep puddles, had at least their driver side window open. We drive on the “normal” side of the street here, so that puts their driver side window facing the center of the road.

Being trained to drive in New England, I find puddles a delight to drive through, and whenever possible do so at the highest speed I can. On Bonaire this produces rather unhappy results, particular when passing by someone with said open window.

But today, all those people who appear not to have a shred of self-preservation (at least with respect to puddle water) were saved by virtue of the slow vehicles in front of me. As for me, I make sure my windows are alway rolled up when hitting these puddles.

At E3 in May, the big hullabaloo about the Xbox 360 was whether it was going to be backward compatible with the Xbox. There was cheering at the E3 Xbox 360 pre-launch when Peter Moore of Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 would in fact be able to play “leading” Xbox titles.

Now that the Xbox 360 is here, and the list of Xbox games it will play grows (and occasionally shrinks), does it really matter?

The reason I ask is that there’s no easy way to transfer saved game data between the Xbox and Xbox 360. So all the time and effort that I’ve invested in working my way through countless Xbox games is wasted on the Xbox 360, unless I want to redo all my hard labor on that platform. Heck, it’s just easier to keep my Xbox around and play that when I want, knowing that it is in fact 100% Xbox game compatible, than it is to bother playing Xbox games in my Xbox 360. This is one area where Sony got things right on the PS2 - it’s possible to use PSOne/PSX memory cards on the PS2. With the Xbox this is not viable, because the memory cards hold only 8MB, but one might have all sorts of downloaded (and paid for) level maps on the Xbox hard disk which consume a lot more than 8MB, so there’s no way to be portable without hacking the systems. And even then, it’s not clear that would work.

I would guess that where Xbox backward compatibility is important is to those who don’t own an Xbox in the first place, which I suspect rules out pretty much all current Xbox 360 owners, since fanatics and game jockeys are the most likely to have had the forethought or perseverance to have obtained an Xbox 360 at launch on November 22nd.

Time will tell if Microsoft’s backward compatibility effort bought them anything.

Last night we opted to dine out and try a newly opened restaurant here on Bonaire - it goes by the name Bambu and is owned and operated by Joyce, the proprietor of La Guernica, a one year old restaurant about a half mile north of this one.

With a name like Bambu we expected Asian or Asian Fusion fare, but instead found an eclectic blend of original continental fare and some variations on old favorites.

After being greeted with a bit of proscuitto wrapped melon as a welcome treat, my wife opted for the day’s menu, which consisted of a salad featuring warm apples and bacon wrapped goat cheese. The main course was rack of lamb in a yummy roasted garlic sauce with a haricort vert (thin green bean) bunch wrapped with bacon (and sauteed) and cheesy potatoes au gratin. Dessert was a chocolate brownie accompanies by a coffee and a home made chocolate bonbon (filled with a marzipan/coconut filling). Total price was NAF 57,50 (approximately US$32) for this menu. Everything on the menu was excellent (I was given samples of it all), even for someone like myself who does not particularly care for lamb or goat cheese.

My son opted to move straight over to dessert and had the lemon sorbet - two portions of it actually - one for his entree and another for dessert. He enjoyed it, and the small taste I stole was very good.

My daughter and I shared an appetizer of a duo of puff pastry - one filled with shrimp and the other with goat cheese. It was tasty - the goat cheese was mild, but the filo dough crisp. The shrimp filling was okay - more saucy than I expected.

For our entrees, my daughter had seafood fajitas as the bolletin of chicken and orange was sadly not available, while I had marinated tuna with salad from the appetizer part of the menu as my main course. The seafood fajitas were tasty and of decent size (and they made great leftovers too!), and the accompanying guacamole was excellent. Lacking was some sort of tomato salsa or pico de gallo, but in speaking with Joyce she promised to look into adding this to the presentation in the future.

My marinated tuna was marinated in olive oil, rosemary, dill, and perhaps a few other herbs I could not discern by taste. By itself the marinade was just there - but when eaten in conjunction with the so-called accompanying Caribbean salad, it was an excellent combination.

We ended the meal with desserts for all - the aforementioned chocolate brownie for my wife, the second helping of lemon sorbet for my sun, an orange creme brulee for me, and my daughter ended up with a berry laden coupe with vanilla ice cream. Again, all very delicious.

Portion size were just right in all cases - leaving us sated but not gorged. The presentation of all the dishes was artful and inspired - not something you usually see on Bonaire. And outside of the very minor nits I mentioned above, the flavor and taste of each dish was wonderful.

Total cost of the dinner, including several frozen fruit shakes for the kids, and a couple of Barcardi Lemon and Cokes for my wife and I, worked out to a bit over US$100 without tip, which is quite reasonable.

I give Bambu an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. Well worth a visit if you have the time when next visiting Bonaire.

Bambu is located at Kaya C.E.B. Hellmund 17, in the location of where the Mai-Mai restaurant used to be, just south of downtown Kralendijk along the oceanfront promenade towards the Divi Flamingo Resort. Phone +599-7 17-4167.

I love being mindless at the end of the day as much as the next guy, and television or movies are a great way to escape the pressures of daily life, especially as a precursor to sleep. The boob tube slows one’s brain down and gets it away from worrying about reality.

Unfortunately, I find much of prime time TV to be annoying and more mindless than even I can stand. I also don’t like all the incessant commercials - and yes, I understand that the revenue from commercials ultimately supports the production of future episodes of television shows. I also don’t like having to be available at precisely the time the show starts (which becomes even tougher where I live because in the winter when the U.S. is on Standard time, we are an hour ahead - makes for late TV watching - a 10pm EST show is on at 11pm EST here on Bonaire).

You may respond “well, why don’t you just TiVo the shows”?

But that question exhibits a certain ignorance and lack of awareness of the world outside of the U.S.A.

I’m here on the island paradise of Bonaire where there is no zip code to plug into a TiVo box, and a TiVo box can’t dial out to a local number to get the latest program guides for Bonaire (which, face it, is a 110 square mile fly speck surrounded by water, offering a blend of legally and illegally received TV transmissions, by a population of around 12,000).

I have two TV feeds here at my house - cable TV (a hodgepodge of U.S., South American, and Latin America-oriented U.S. originated channels) and TDS - terrestrial digital TV beamed over from neighboring Curacao, offering more of the same. Typically at least one of these is not working. In other words, service and reception are rather unreliable. (A nice way of saying they suck.)

I also have a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed, and I’ve cobbled together a moderately functional program guide for that, but running that system at night requires hundreds of watts of power because without the air conditioner running in the office where the MCE PC is located, it would likely overheat and I would lose my computer to a meltdown.

So, with the exception of our near religious viewing of the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (which we watch regularly mostly because it follows Desperate Housewives), we tended to play TV Russian Roulette - watching the least bad show of what happens to be on when we turn on the TV and hoping we don’t die of inanity overload.

But lately, we, like many others no doubt, have recently discovered the joy of TV shows on DVD - whole seasons of such shows in an affordable collection!

Our current favorite is Roswell - a three season show about attractive teenage aliens and their human friends living in Roswell, New Mexico - home of the mystery shrouded and fabled 1947 crash of a weather ballon / space ship. Great characters, decent plot twists, and not too intellectually “deep”. There’s enough romantic interaction to captivate the female half of a couple, and enough alien power display and alien-guys-trying-to-figure-out-women comedic content to satisfy the needs all but the most action movie jaded guy.

We’re about a third of the way into season 2 of “Roswell” now, and vastly enjoying the ability to not even have to fast forward past commercials, and starting and stopping at any time, on any DVD equipped TV system in the house.

With the kids, we’ve started with Star Trek - The Original Series so we can give them a sense of some of the TV origins of things like Star Wars (one of their obsessions at present).

Next on the list to consider buying are Lost - The First Season, and “24” - the Fourth Season (managed to watch most of the other three seasons on live TV, but just couldn’t manage that with the fourth season.

So hurrah for TV series on DVD!

Over the last few days, I’ve done a bit more in the realm of comparing current generation console output (e.g. PS2 and Xbox) with nexgen Xbox 360 output, and I must say, although in some games it’s subtle, the Xbox 360 does win hands down.

But I think that’s only because I am taking full advantage of the output quality potential of the Xbox 360 on my HD-ready TV, a 62” Samsung DLP.

My Xbox and PS2 are connected to my TV via component video (my GameCube uses S-Video), and are set to be aware of 16:9 format output.

But in planning for the arrival of my Xbox 360 I went and bought an Xbox 360 VGA cable, which outputs analog video at potentially high resolutions via a 15-pin VGA connector to any type of monitor which can support such a connection. I did not use DVI because my Samsung progressive scan DVD player is already connected to the DVI port on my TV, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a DVI switch box. The VGA cable worked great.

After organizing my Xbox 360 into my entertainment center (it sits on top of my PS2) I configured the Xbox 360 to output 1360 x 768, which is higher than the DVI connector to my TV supports. This does produce a very crisp picture compared to what I see on the Xbox or PS2. My wife even commented that the fog and snow effects in Call of Duty 2 looked realistic (high praise from her).

That said, I think a real HD-capable TV or monitor is a necessity to make an Xbox 360 useful. It’s a waste to use an Xbox 360 via composite, S-Video, or even component connections as you are still basically resolution limited, at least in comparison to the resolution potential available via the VGA cable.

But an HD ready TV with PC inputs will run you at least $999, plus another $40 for the VGA cable. Makes the Xbox 360 a pretty pricey toy.

If memory serves, it was ten years ago today, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, no less, that Microsoft woke up to the threat and potential of the Internet, and started its shift towards trying to dominate the Internet in all its incarnations in what has become known as Bill Gates’ “Tidal Wave” speech. It was also the same day Microsoft announced it had licensed Java from Sun Microsystems.

My how things have changed. So, how have they done in those ten years since December 7, 1995?

In my estimation, Microsoft has not done too badly. They went from underdog (a surprising term to use in the context of Microsoft) in the web browser market to pretty much obliterating market leader Netscape. They have made significant inroads in the installed base of web servers using Microsoft operating systems (although I believe Linux still has the majority), and with .NET and web services, look to slowly be steamrolling into dominance in that new market.

But all this connectivity and dominance has come at a price. Dominance creates a target, and in the case of Microsoft’s Internet strategy, the target is system security. Microsoft’s Internet enabled products, and their desire to extend standards with arguably powerful but proprietary features, combined with the sheer amount of programming involved, has led to an incredible number of security holes which nefarious hackers are constantly looking to exploit. So, while Microsoft’s operating system runs on the vast majority of personal computers in use today, so do today’s zombies, malware, spyware, and viruses.

The Apple Mac crowd chortles over this as proof that the Mac is superior to Wintel, but they only have the enviable position of being relatively infestation free because Apple has such small market share. It’s not clear to me whether the Intel-based Apple products due out next year will become a bigger target for writers of nefarious code, however.

The biggest threats to Microsoft’s continued efforts at Internet dominance take many forms, including from small but powerful on-going anti-Microsoft sentiment spurred on by fear of what a true monopoly might impose on its users resulting in people using things like the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client software (both excellent pieces of software, incidentally).

And witness the recent decisions in Massachusetts and elsewhere to go with open standards for office productivity software. Other threats include the proliferation of computer devices with niche focus, such as cell phones and cell/PDAs in which Microsoft is still a bit player. And then there are platform companes such as Google and even eBay (hey - they bought Skype - that’s not a pure-auction house strategy in my book).

It stunned me to read on some blog comment recently (and sorry, I didn’t take a link) where someone was happy that Microsoft was out there to stop Google. Used to be the other way around.

I’ll admit I have no idea what the next 10 years will hold for Microsoft, but 10 years ago I would have never guessed that they would have been so successful in turning around the focus of the entire company either. But back then, Microsoft was the underdog. Now everyone else is…

Being a gamer, it’s not unusual that both my kids are into video games too - I let them play with all my toys. Many an evening we’ll play together before it’s their bed time. Games we frequently play include Champions of Norrath (both versions) on the PS2, Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox)(nice to finally be able to have more than two players - up to 4 in a cooperative mode!), Halo 2 (matches), and some various party games on the GameCube and Xbox.

That said, the Xbox 360 launch titles were a major disappointment.

Most of the games were definitely age inappropriate for 8 and 10 year olds, and I draw the line more liberally than some parents - shooting games are fine if they don’t involve modern age humans shooting each other. Games with bad language are also right out as are really bloody gore-filled games. Under those rules, Halo 2 is in, but any version of GTA, Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake, is out. So are GUN, Condemned: Criminal Minds, and perhaps Perfect Dark (need to play that more to make the call).

And, as my kids and I are not major sports fanatics, the bevy of Xbox 360 sports games at launch was pretty uninteresting (although I still ended up with all of them).

That pretty much leaves Kameo and King Kong. And neither of those allows for more than 2 players, and in Kameo, the cooperative mode is a reward for achieving levels in single player mode, and not a given right as with most other co-op games I’ve played of late.

Again, Microsoft’s proclamations during the Spring of 2005 at GDC and E3 about the Xbox 360 being a system the whole family will enjoy seem to fall flat, at least for now.

Sure, I’ve looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace and seen I can download a bunch of games, but of course, then I’d have to pay for them, and wait for the tedious downloads ("broadband" on Bonaire means “occasionally faster than a dial-up modem” - huge difference to what “broadband” is in the U.S.). And I didn’t get my Xbox 360 to play effectively 2D games with cute graphics, or slightly improved remakes of games I used to play in the arcades a couple of decades ago.

I’m hoping some game developers out there are working towards filling the multiplayer family gaming vacuum for the Xbox 360.