The Richter Scale^®

It used to be that people would excuse themselves from a conversation, a meal, or other gathering to sneak out for a quick smoke, but make up some other sort of excuse because they either were ashamed of their addiction, or because they didn’t want others to know they smoked or found smoking more important than staying put.

My old friend Gina (a former Good Morning America technology trend reporter, among many other things) comes to mind. She used to sneak out for smokes during meals so that her husband Henry wouldn’t know that she was still smoking. But Gina, if you’re reading this, Henry knew.

That sort of sneakiness still happens with smoking, but less so. The new addiction and habit of many (myself included) is portable e-mail in the form of a BlackBerry, Treo, or other wireless device (my e-mail device is a T-Mobile Sidekick III).

While some folks are blatant in their public use of portable e-mail devices, others are a bit more circumspect, especially when in the company of spouses who abhor the glazed-over look that comes into an e-mail addict’s eyes which start to reflect the miniature text on the screen of their devices, while their thumbs fly across tiny keyboards.

Once an e-mail addict gets sucked into a message exchange, all hopes of meaningful verbal communications are shot (which is why the spouses object, no doubt).

So, those of us aware of our addictions, but unable to completely wean ourselves from our devices (there’s no Nicorette for BlackBerrys), have resorted to the old smoker’s “sneak”. We excuse ourselves under some pretense, such as needing to visit the restroom (which may be a real need) to mask the fact that as soon as we’re out of sight, out comes the BlackBerry or Sidekick, and we’re on-line, checking mail, reading and responding to the latest missives. And just as my friend Gina did, we delude ourselves that our friends and spouses don’t know what we’re doing.

So, how can you spot a closet e-mail addict?

First, they twitch a little every so often - usually on the right side of their body. That comes from when their portable e-mail device has buzzed them in vibrate mode to indicate that a message has arrived.

Second, shortly after “The Twitch”, they excuse themselves from your company.

Third, they spend more time away than is anticipated.

And lastly, when they return, they seem distracted, because they are still thinking about the e-mails they exchanged.

In closing, and in defense of e-mail addicts everywhere, at least we don’t return smelling like an ashtray (that’s how Henry knew, Gina), nor are our habits aurally invasive (unlike the chronic cell phone users who feel they need to share their ring-tones and voiced opinions with all around them).
Or at least that’s how I rationalize my e-mail addiction. And I continue to hope I’m fooling my wife.

We (my wife and I) were recently invited to participate in a juried art exhibition on Bonaire, featuring Bonaire’s artists. The jurying took place a few weeks ago, and the exhibition is slated to happen during the early part of November, with the possibility that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands will officiate.

I created three very different pieces to enter into the jurying process:

Planet Bonaire

Rincon Rhythm

Shades of Growth

All of these are based on my photographs, and all involve some level of various digital painting or manipulation. Of the three images, two were selected to be exhibited in November - a pleasant surprise. The only image not selected was “Shades of Growth” - not surprising as the judges indicated that they were looking at color as well as content.

More information on all three of these images can be found on the Jake Richter Art Site. All three images are available in a very limited closed edition and are available for purchase at Caribbean Art.

Back in April, I reviewed the Otterbox iPod Video here as a nice way to protect one’s iPod from the elements and even take it swimming. But my biggest issue with it was that I was unable to find waterproof headphones that would allow me to use the Otterbox properly while in the water.

The folks at Otterbox heard my complaint and a short while later announced that they had come up with a solution - they would offer waterproof headphones from a company called H2O Audio (MSRP $39.95). H2O Audio is a company I first encountered at a diving trade show several years back in Las Vegas, and they have since expanded into more consumer electronics, these headphones among them.

Otterbox sent me a set to review some weeks ago, and I finally got to put them to the test.

The new waterproof headphones are a little unusual, as they use a conical ear piece to create a seal with one’s ear canal - sound travels well through air, but not water, so in order to listen to music underwater, you need to ensure that air remains in the ear canals between the ear drums and the miniature speakers in the head phones. The headphones come with instructions on trimming the cones to ensure the best possible seal (which I followed). They also include a spare set of cones (probably in case you mess up the trimming the first time).

The headphones also attach to your head from behind (see photo). That’s actually a good thing for swimmers, because it means the cord does not get in your way at all.

So how do they actually sound? Well - both bad and good, depending on the environment. Out of the water the sound quality is poor - the cheap plane earbud headphones that I get on my American Airlines flights sound better, and that’s not a compliment. But as soon as you get your head underwater (even just at the surface), the headphones are a delight. The sound is clear and crisp and full bodied. I suspect the difference is that as soon as you submerge, water pressure (and the general sound damping of water itself) makes the seal of the ear plugs complete, shutting out any outside noises. The result is wonderful.

However, as soon as you get your head out of water and the water seal dribbles away, or if you dive down more than a couple of feet and the seal breaks letting water into the ear, the sound quality diminishes or just goes away. For this latter problem, it is possible that I did not do a good enough job with trimming the ear plugs, or that my head is a bit larger than average, but either way, I needed to keep my head within a foot or so of the surface of the water to get the full benefit of the headphones.

That makes these new headphones ideal for snorkeling (when your ears are submerged but near the surface where there’s not too much pressure) or when swimming for sport with one of those cool front-of-the-face snorkels.

But for regular swimming, where your head goes in and out of the water, the benefit is questionable.

In order to make sure that my testing was not just the result of a single-person’s use of the new headphones, I rounded up two other volunteers (my wife and my daughter), and both, independently gave me the same feedback after using the new headphones.

What this appears to mean is that you really need two types of headphones to use the Otterbox iPod Video (and other submersible MP3 player systems) - a weatherproof set for the occasional splash of water when your head is mostly above water, and these new H2O Audio headphones for snorkeling and submerged activity. That’s not an ideal solution, but certainly better than what was available before.

I had originally given the Otterbox iPod Video an 8.0 out of 10.0 on my Richter Scale, and promised that if Otterbox themselves offered waterproof headphones, I would consider raising that score. As I have indicated, the headphones are great for a particular aquatic use - snorkeling - but still fall short of being a decent universally usable waterproof headset. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have a universal headphone for such drastic changes in environment either. If it were, someone would probably already have come up with it.

That said, I’m bumping up my previous rating for the Otterbox iPod Video to 8.5 out of 10.0.

As for the headphones - they get a dual rating on the Richter Scale - a 2.5 for above water use, and a 9.0 out of 10.0 for snorkeling.

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks with my latest project - a news blog called Bonaire Insider. The idea for Bonaire Insider came about over a month ago when my business partner in NetTech N.V., Susan Davis, and I decided we wanted to get fresher news on the home page of the Bonaire tourism information web site, InfoBonaire, which we own and operate.

It took some intense programming, as well as a lot of exploratory work with the same blogging software which I use for this blog (Expression Engine from pMachine), but two days ago we launched Bonaire Insider.

Among the cool features are the ability for people to sign up to get automatic copies of new posts to the Bonaire Insider news blog, integration of the RSS news feed from the site on the InfoBonaire home page, and integration with Google for running context sensitive ads (to help at least partially offset the costs of running the new site).

We’re still working on generating our internal style guide for news items, but it seems to be coming along well - we’ve had over 10,000 page views in just the first couple of days. Not a bad start for a small site about a small Caribbean island.

I celebrated my 42nd birthday yesterday by not working (and yes, I usually do work on Sundays, so this was unusual). Instead, I sat on my couch and played video games with my children for most of the day (Tomb Raider on the Xbox 360 with me at the controls and my kids helping me figure out how to get past the variety of interesting puzzles).

I don’t feel particularly old, and in fact I feel more alert and alive in some ways than I did (or think I did) a decade ago. Sure, my eyesight is slowly deteriorating from the 20/15 vision I used to have, and my hair is grayer (or whiter) than it used to be, but those changes are minor. It’s what’s inside that determines youth, or at least so I think.

And my wife today sent me a quote attributed to General Douglas MacArthur which I think beautifully underscores that:

Youth is not a time of life--it is a state of mind.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years;
people grow old by deserting their ideals.
Years may wrinkle your skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles your soul.
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts;
as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear;
as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

In the central place of your heart there is a recording chamber;
so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage
--so long are you young.

When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snow
of pessimism and the ice of cynicism,
then--and only then--are you grown old.

Douglas MacArthur

I don’t know if MacArthur penned those words, but they certainly are poignant. I’ve already asked my wife to smack me around to shock me back to common sense and reality should I ever lose my enthusiasm for life and learning. I, for one, would prefer not to have a wrinkled soul.

Microsoft this morning announced that they will be launching Texas Hold’em Poker for the Xbox 360 as an Xbox Live Arcade game on August 23rd, at 8:00 GMT (4:00am EDT/1:00am PDT), and that for the first 48 hours, it will be a free download to all comers. After the 48 hours expire, it will cost 800 Microsoft Points (US$10) to download and own Texas Hold’em Poker.

Considering the on-going efforts by the U.S. Congress to criminalize on-line gambling (because they can’t figure out an equitable way to tax such gambling and fill the Treasury’s coffers), Microsoft needs to ensure that in no way can their new game be used as an on-line gambling tool - it has to be purely for entertainment.

“Designed to simulate the risk-reward of real poker gameplay, keep gamers honest, and discourage opponents from betting too recklessly, Texas Hold em has an innovative new feature called Persistent Bankroll. Your virtual bankroll is tied to your Xbox Live Gamertag and keeps a running tally of your chip count. If you lose all of your chips in a poker game, you ll have to play lower stakes buy-in games to make back your stack and earn your way to the big tables.” - Microsoft Press Release, August 16, 2006

The new Texas Hold’em title, developed by TikGames, supports up to eight players. There are three modes of game play - standard, scenarios, and tournaments, and as with all Xbox Live Arcade games, statistics and achievements are tracked on-line.

I’ve already put a note in my calendar to download the game to my two Xbox 360s.

Some details on the game can be found here.

A friend of mine in the U.S. is a professional amateur jellyfishologist (as best I can describe him), and for some years he has been trying to track down a particularly rare type of box jellyfish which he believes has not yet actually been properly IDed and classified. And I’ve been trying to help him here on Bonaire. It started with a promotional video someone here on Bonaire shot some years ago, that just happened to have a scene where the videographer was swimming with the particular box (cubazoid) jellyfish my friend Bud was looking for.

That was several years ago. Since then, there have been a few rare sightings of this critter - identified by four long tentacles which are brown/white banded - similar to a sea wasp, but a lot more toxic. But in recent weeks there have been several reports of people seeing this box jelly.

And on Sunday, a teen aged girl a few minute walk from my house was unfortunate enough to have found out how dangerous the sting could be. She’s apparently doing well now, but did end up going to the hospital. Through a combination of efforts described on a thread on the BonaireTalk web site, I ended up with the jellyfish in question, and in the image above you can see my wife Linda holding the still live jellyfish down with her finger in a rubber glove so I could take a picture to send to Bud for him to forward to the various scientists he works with.

More pictures can be found here, along with information on how the pictures were taken.

The next step will be to get the jellyfish - which I now have preserved in formalin - a watered down version of formaldehyde (that nasty smelling carcinogenic liquid you may recall from biology class, as it was what the frogs we had to dissect were stored in) - to the U.S. for DNA analysis.

I just returned from five weeks of travels last week, just a few before the latest air security madness originating out of England. However, as I am a frequent traveler, I monitor the latest “trends” in travel, and this morning stumbled across the latest TSA Requirement - namely shoes absolutely must be removed before going through security screening.

Mind you, shoe removal was something most folks already did at the request of TSA staff, but in the past flip-flops and thin shoes were more or less exempt. Not any more.

This, by itself, is not a big deal, but its just the latest trend in the on-going encroachment of our personal items and space by a bureaucracy that does not properly train its staff for accuracy, consistency, and efficiency. It’s all just a big charade to give people the sense of security.

In the meantime we cannot bring any liquids not already in our bodies through security, and then any we buy in a presumably secure (sterile) area need to be consumed before boarding. I can’t wait to see how long the bathroom line will be on my next flight from all the people guzzling their 32 oz. Super Sized Cokes before they boarded. I also wonder how much more responsive flight attendants will be when it comes to providing extra hydration for folks who normally travel with their own spare bottles of water (like myself).

And the poor people flying in or out of the U.K.! Having to give up their reading material, electronic gadgets, and just about everything else. I’m not sure what I would do with myself on a 6+ hour flight without anything to read, work on, or play on. I would need counseling after such mental deprivation. And, ironically, the TSA tells people not to check lap-top computers and electronics in their luggage, putting them in contradiction to the U.K. rules unless one is not to travel with their electronics any more. Goodbye business travel, and hello teleconferencing.

Worse yet is that some airports - and San Juan, Puerto Rico comes immediately to mind - have such poor baggage control that luggage-handling thieves regularly abscond with sizable amounts of electronics and photographical loot. This loot then appears on eBay, indicating the thieves got it out of a secure area. If they can get it out, can’t they also get stuff into such areas? If the TSA cannot ensure the sanctity of our bags once they are screened, what good are all these other security measures other than feel-good fluff?

I’m pretty convinced things will only get worse for U.S. air travel, and it will be little things - but lots of them. Shoes now, then anything with metal buttons or zippers, writing supplies (pens have ink, and that’s a liquid, right?), and ultimately clothes. Welcome to Naked Airways.

By the way, for a humorous take on the contraband liquids issue, take a look here.

Imagine my surprise when I open this morning’s e-mail to find a note from Microsoft telling me that Chris Satchell, general manager of Microsoft’s Game Developer Group, yesterday announced that anyone with a Windows XP-based PC will be able to develop game content for the Xbox 360 in the not too distant future ("this holiday season").

The announcement was made at Gamefest 2006, a game developer event being hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, and involves the release of XNA Game Studio Express - a new set of tools based on the XNA Platform which Microsoft announced during the 2005 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

XNA Game Studio Express itself will be free, but there will be an annual $99 subscription fee to something called the “creators club”.

Apparently Microsoft has also lined up at least 10 universities to include XNA Game Studio Express in their future course offerings.

This could cause quite an explosion in Xbox 360 content next year, and appears to be Microsoft’s effort to open the proprietary Xbox 360 platform as a counter to Sony’s hints that its use of open (or at least collaborative) standards like OpenGL and COLLADA would leave the PS3 open to general development as well. Of course, the Xbox 360 is here now, and has a significant installed base (over 5 million units world wide), and the PS3 is but a mere promise for mid-November delivery, with an installed base of zero, at the moment.

Link to Microsoft Press Release

While I am getting fonder of Expression Engine, the software which drives this blog, the RSS/ATOM feeds the software generates leave a lot to be desired. I have therefore taken the bold plunge to syndicate The Richter Scale Blog and The Richter Scale Articles via FeedBurner.

If you are looking at my site right now, scroll down and you’ll see a much expanded list of blog readers and aggregators now supported at the end of the column on the left side of the web page.

The other thing that FeedBurner offers is the ability to subscribe to a blog via e-mail - that feature too can be found at left. Not sure how well it works, but as I post here in bursts, that might be a good way for casual blog readers to keep up with the latest posts.

Links to my blogs at FeedBurner can be found at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRichterScale (this blog)

and

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRichterScaleArticles (my articles)