I recently decided that I'd investigate getting a new keyboard for home and work. Up until then I'd been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for a few years and had quite enjoyed it. For any touch-typist, it makes things easier and reduces strain on your wrists - but I suspected that there were still better keyboards out there.

I decided to get a Freestyle w/VIP accessory from Kinesis. They have another model, the Advantage Pro, which might end up being even better, but it also has a learning curve of several weeks and I wanted something that I could just start typing on right away.

In addition to the keyboard, I got an Evoluent VerticalMouse, which is like a regular mouse except turned 90 degrees so that you're "shaking hands" with it rather than holding it with your palm down. This is a much more natural position for your hand and arm to be in, so it relieves stress that way too.

Of course, I got a set of these for home and work. It didn't make sense for them to be in one spot but not the other. I got Michelle one of the mice for her to have at work too, but not the keyboard as she wasn't too sure of that one right away. (If she gets used to it at home, I will see about getting another one for her at work.)

So far I quite like both of them. I'm not able to control the new mouse quite as well as a regular mouse, but I'm getting better at it. I'm also able to type on the new keyboard just about as well as the old one, and I think it will improve a bit as time goes on.

After months of work again, on and off, I've got the new server online. For all that I wish I hadn't lost it all earlier, I actually did learn some new things rebuilding it from scratch once more.

In the process, I also had a look at the latest Horde / Imp for a Web-based email alternative to SquirrelMail (which I've liked using, but I thought it was time for a change). I was surprised that the interface was still not tightly integrated and that a changing message count was not properly reflected in the UI elements. A curt and non-helpful response told me to use Dimp for that instead. I took at a look at it, but it had its own problems. I'd used it once before, had a problem, and, back then, had also run into non-helpful responses from the developer and its membership. I finally gave up with it, and that's what led me to SquirrelMail.

I finally scrapped Imp - again. This time, I decided to try RoundCube. It's still in early development stages (although I gather it's been around for a while) - but they're doing it right. While it's basic at the moment, the interface seems spot on from the beginning. It seems to me as if that's the correct approach - don't throw all sorts of things together until you can get the basic framework looking good and working well.

I can recall a time in my past when I didn't mind using phones. After over 5 years in a support position, however, where my regular routine has been to sit waiting to pick up phone calls, I hate the things with a passion.

Not only do I despise having to use the instruments, if I hear a phone ringing it immediately fills me with a flight or fight response. I get tense and start to feel stressed. I've turned the ringer on my phone at work off. If I'm sitting at my desk, I'll see the light flashing instead. So I'm aware that somebody's trying to contact me - but at least I don't have to put up with the sound that now reminds me of an emergency alarm and some terrible disaster that requires me to drop everything else I'm doing to deal with.

I now also have a sense of disdain when it comes to phone communication. I can think of hardly anything at all that's so urgent that it requires I be contacted immediately - and I now associate any phone call with a demand for instant attention. Almost anything that needs communicating can be communicated by leaving a voicemail or by sending me an email. In some sense, I feel as if I'm dealing with post traumatic stress - and the sound of a phone ringing always sets is off.

If I'm on my own, I almost never answer the phone. I don't give the caller the satisfaction of knowing that they can control me by having me pick up at their whim. Almost every time the phone does ring, I'm in the middle of something else anyway. I don't see any reason to interrupt what I'm doing to pay attention to this other thing. Whatever it is, it can wait for when I'm finished what I'm doing and want to deal with the communication.

I'm aware that most people don't feel this way. It's a side-effect of what I've been doing with my professional life over the last few years. I've spoken to others in the same field, and they all feel exactly the same way. The more you have to deal with waiting for phone calls as part of your job, the less you ever want to deal with them in your personal life unless it's a necessity. Others in the field also understand when I explain all of the above things to them.

If I lived on my own, I would still have a phone - but I'd leave it unplugged. I would only plug it in if I needed to make a call, or once a day to check for messages anybody might have left. If I didn't have a phone at all, that also wouldn't bother me. In some ways, I'd be grateful to not even have the option.

Michelle doesn't understand this. I've tried explaining it to her, as has somebody else I work with and who gets it, but it's not something that she can appreciate. As she can't understand my reaction, she laughs and thinks that I'm just lazy and making excuses. This is the furthest thing from the truth. I am quite sincere in my position here. If we're doing something together and the phone rings, I will ignore it. Invariably, she will always ask me to see who it is. As soon as she asks me this, I start to feel that sense of panic I'm familiar with at work - and stressed out over the fact that I'm now being told I have to deal with this immediate, interruptive, demand on my attention. It's not good. I'm also aware of the fact that my reaction has been growing steadily stronger over the past year. After being told to look at who's calling, I will increasingly frequently snap at her and be in a bad mood for longer periods of time afterwards.

The same thing happens if she answers the phone, it's for me, and she passes it over. I can positively state that I almost never want to speak to that person right then - and for similar reasons as above. Worse, is when she picks up the phone and passes it over without saying anything herself - thereby preventing me the choice of not answering, and putting the burden on me to deal with the person at the other end right away.

I'm going to have to come to some sort of agreement with her over this - if only in order to manage my sanity and make sure that our differing approaches to the phone don't negatively impact our relationship. Perhaps even something as simple as making sure that the phone is always in reach of her so that I don't need to be forced to deal with it myself. And if it's for me, letting me know who it is but not just picking it up.

I don't generally have a problem with the phone if it's Michelle or Glen calling. Those are the only two people who, most of the time, I'm happy to talk to right away. (Although there have still been a few times I've let even them go to voicemail.) And I have no problem at all with the phone ringing if I'm actually expecting somebody to call. In that case, the call has been planned ahead of time - and there's no feeling of panic or urgency when it happens.

All of my work over the past few months to upgrade my servers has been lost. I ran into some kind of compatibility problem between ESXi 3.5 u4, and then later ESXi 4, and my server hardware that caused networking to / from my virtual machines, the ESXi server, and my workstation to stop. The longer after an installation, the more often it would happen - and it was also preventing me from backing up my virtual machines over the network in any way. (Backups would start, then networking would die.)

In the course of troubleshooting and trying to recover from this, I managed to lose the virtual machines stored on the ESXi datastore. This was entirely my fault as I'd become so flustered over methods of fixing things without losing the VMs that, at one critical point, I reinstalled without having copied the data off to a 2nd drive.

The end result is that I ended up going back to a version of the single old Fedora server I'd been using months ago. I got this up and running under Workstation on my personal computer. Since then, I've rebuilt a Gentoo firewall, and have been working on another new version of Gentoo for Web and mail.

The transition over to that will likely take me a few more weeks. The good news is that I'm now familiar with the new operating system and it won't take me as long to get things going as it did the first time around.

My server, currently turned off, will never be turned on again. I will cannibalize parts from it instead. Whenever I do move over to a dedicated server in the future, it will be a completely new system.

Shortly after Christmas, I bought myself something I'd known about for a while but didn't have the money to afford - an electronic book reader. The one I picked, mainly because it's the only kind available and/or really usable in Canada, was the Sony Reader. I went with the PRS-505 model, even though the newer PRS-700 had just come out. After spending a lot of time reading reviews, I decided that I didn't really need the additional features of the 700 and that I would prefer the crisper and more viewable screen of the 505. The 700 is touch-screen and, because of the additional layer on top of the display, the contrast isn't as good as that of the 505, requiring the use of the 700's "side" lighting to view the same text as the 505 could read without any lighting (the 505 doesn't come with a side-light). I figured that none of the physical books I've read have come with built in lighting, so I didn't require that in an electronic book reader either.

In the months since I started using it I've become a total convert. I love it. I find it so much easier to hold and carry around, and I like the fact that I don't need to deal with any kind of physical page turning. At first, I wasn't completely comfortable with the lack of tactile indication as to how much of a book I'd read. (In the physical world, I can tell by how many pages are in my left hand, how many in my right.) I still don't have that feedback, but it no longer bothers me. The best part is that it's always the same size. Even if the physical book equivalent would be huge, the electronic version is always the same - with the only noticeable difference being the number of pages (screens) to be flipped through.

I have shopped for books at Sony's eBook Store and while there have been a few titles I've looked for that have not been available, I have so far has no problem coming up with reading material. Clicking and downloading to my Reader is so much simpler than going in person to a book store. I miss the feel of browsing for books, but the shopping process itself is far easier - and there's no waiting at all for your purchase to be delivered.

My own reader is the silver model, but I bought Michelle the red model for Valentine's Day. I thought that red was appropriate for that. I'd mentioned electronic book readers to her before but she never showed much interest. As soon as I bought mine and showed it to her, though, she wanted one herself kept dropping hints that I should be buying her one for her birthday. I got her the red one ahead of that date. Like me, she has preferred using it to physical books. At the time that I'd got it for her she'd recently bought herself a few books with Christmas gift certificates. I bought and downloaded the electronic equivalents for her. She gave the physical books away and hasn't thought about them since.

I bought myself a different case for mine at one point, from Tuff-Luv, and used it for a couple of days. Although I liked aspects of it, and at first thought that I'd end up switching to it permanently, I came to realize that I didn't like the way it looked. For me, it just wasn't as pretty as the stock case and I didn't feel "pride" in handing my reader to somebody in that case to show it off. I've since switched back to the stock cover. I do, however, have something else in mind. When I got my reader, and was researching various things about it, I came across the excellent Web site MobileRead. In its discussion forums was the news that Oberon Design, who make some really beautiful leather journals covers, among other things, and who've created covers for Kindle readers, are working on creating covers for the Sony readers. Their work has just come out of the beta test phase and they should be selling these shortly. I will definitely be picking a couple of these up when they are available.

The one thing about these readers is that I no longer have any desire to buy physical books again. I will also be telling friends and relatives to hold off on doing so. If they want to buy me a book they can give me an online credit at the Sony eBook Store instead.

I haven't posted anything in a while. This is because I'd been working on moving my server from its old operating system (Fedora) to something new (Gentoo) - and that process took a bit of time. During the transition, I didn't want to post anything new because, if I did, I'd have to worry about transitioning the new post in addition to the entire set of posts that I'd already moved over.

I did finally get my server up and running on the new operating system - but, by then, I'd kind of lost momentum and I didn't feel the urge to create new entries for a while. I finally feel like doing so again. I've "saved up" several topics, so there may be a bit of a flurry of activity as I now get around to actually putting them online.

In mid-November I sent an email to Nature's Path's director of marketing. Nature's Path is a company that makes organic cereal. They'd started a marketing campaign involving several different posters that talked about their cereal in a "fun" way. On my way to and from work each day, I'd pass by a couple of these posters at the Burlington GO station. For a while, before I wrote the email, I'd found myself repeating the phrase of one of these posters in my head. I wasn't sure why it struck me so much more than other advertising I'd read, but it did for some reason. The day I wrote the email, I stopped and actually concentrated on re-reading the poster and trying to figure out why it kept demanding my attention.

Here's what it said: "We've found that social and environmental responsibility go particularly well with milk."

Thinking to myself that there must be something wrong with that, I set myself to figuring it out what it was - and I did so quickly enough. In my email to the marketing director, I told her that the ad copy wasn't right. It should either read "responsibilities go" or "responsibility goes".

She wrote back and thanked me for my interest, and asked me for my mailing address. She wanted to send me something for my feedback. Just today, New Year's Eve, I received a beautifully designed box with the following items inside:

Flax Plus Granola: Pumpkin
Flax Plus Granola: Vanilla Almond
Flax Plus: Pumpkin Raisin Crunch
Flax Plus: Red Berry Crunch
Optimum: Blueberry Cinnamon
Synergy: 8 Whole Grains
Pomegran Plus with Cherries
Whole O's
Hot Oatmeal Variety Pack (Apple Cinnamon, Flax Plus, Maple Nut, and Multigrain Raisin)
Optimum Energy Bar: Peanut Butter
Optimum Energy Bar: Orange Chocolate
Optimum Energy Bar: Pomegran Cherry
Optimum Energy Bar: Blueberry Flax & Soy
Optimum Rebound Energy Bar: Banana, Nut, Matcha & Flax
Weil: Goji Moji Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Banana Manna Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Chocolada Walnut Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Pistachi-Oh! Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Chia Razz Pure Fruit & Nut Bar

Who says that using proper grammar, and pointing out its mis-use, doesn't pay? (Incidentally, I can spot two problems with the grammar used in the names of these products. Can you?)

If there's one thing I can't stand it's revisionism. Whatever happened in the past should be reported that way as time goes on. To change something is to be giving a false statement about how things used to be.

For some reason, I'd missed the controversy of the recent re-release of Apocalypse Now on DVD (and soon to be released on Blu-ray). The issue is that it was originally filmed and presented in the theatres in a 2.35:1 aspect ration. But, when the latest DVD was released, the directory of photography, Vittorio Storaro, decided that it should be cropped to 2.0:1. This caused major waves among film purists, who insisted that by doing this the original framing and presentation as seen in the theatres was no longer possible to experience.

Storaro defended his action by saying that he'd intended it to be seen in 2.0:1 all along, and was putting it out as it should be. However, in frame by frame comparisons of the original and the re-release there are some scenes that have suffered. Further, as people who argue with him in outrage for having "crippled" his movie, the question is raised: Why in the world would the original film have been screened in 2.35:1 in the first place if that's not how it was intended to be shown? Storaro has no response to this - at least none that I've read about.

The film The Last Emperor, which he also photographed, has just now received the same cropping treatment for its Blu-ray release by Criterion. Criterion has defended their publication of the film in this version, saying that it's how Storaro and director Bertolucci wanted it released. But that doesn't appease film aficionados who don't care about what these people want from a current version - they just want to see the movie as it was originally presented in the theatres.

To further complicate matters, Storaro has been known to say that he doesn't like watching widescreen movies on regular TV sets - because he finds the black bars annoying. For "home viewers" he would rather present them with an aspect ratio that helps eliminate this "issue". He also doesn't believe that typical home AV equipment lends itself to a good viewing experience of exactly the same thing you'd see in a theatre. So, when he says that both Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor were intended to be shown in 2.0:1, rather than 2.35:1, his critics are saying that's garbage. All he's really trying to do, they say, is push his own values of what he'd like to see at home on other people. They all doubt that if he were to screen these movies again in a theatre that he would do so in anything other than the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

While I understand that a photographer (and director) may have certain wishes with respect to their own material, I have to say that I'm in the camp of his critics. I don't have a standard TV, I have a high definition widescreen TV that's fully capable of giving me a theatrical experience as it should be. And, personally, even if I did only have a "crappy" 10 year old standard resolution TV, I do happen to be one of those aficionados who would still want to see things in exactly the same way they were presented in the theatre when originally released. Even if my experience wouldn't be the same, being able to view all of the picture would be more important to me. I don't like having what I should watch being dictated to me. I don't care if it was shot in widescreen, full screen, or whatever - so long as when I watch it, I get to see it as it was presented originally. (The only exception would be if there was a clear case where it was actually presented in the wrong aspect ratio in error. Something that I haven't heard of happening - although I imagine it would be possible - and which I don't believe was the case here.)

I have the same problem with Steven Spielberg editing the guns worn by police officers in E.T. to make them into walkie talkies, or with George Lucas making even more sweeping edits of the Star Wars films, such as making it so that Greedo shoots first, rather than Han Solo. These are just examples of directors changing their minds after the fact - and while it may be what they'd like to see now, it isn't how things were done, or they wanted to see them, at the time. People talk of directors' cuts. In some cases, movies are released in a way that directors aren't happy with at release time. I have no problem with seeing a re-release of what their vision was at the time - but, for budgetary or production reasons, were unable to bring to the screen. So long as there is still a theatrical version that's also available. And, also, so long as that really was what they'd wanted back then - and not what they've since changed their minds about now.

Storaro, in 1998, proposed a new film format called "Univisum" that is 2.0:1. It's, apparently, an attempt to standardize things between small screen TV and big screen movie theatres to a standard that can "work" equally well on both. That's fine, as far as it goes, but I don't like the fact that he's now going back in time and "re-writing" what he had wanted to do with his films shot in a different format - or the fact that he's trying to have everybody else live with this revisionism when buying these films to watch at home.

For my part, I probably would buy the Blu-ray of The Last Emperor. (Which, after all, may be the only aspect ratio version ever to be released.) But I'd be cognisant of it being a somewhat "crippled" version, and not quite what it was when it was first released. If / when a "corrected" version came out, I'd buy that version and then get rid of the edited version.

The latest in "scandal" news is Sharon Stone offhandedly suggesting that the recent earthquake in China might be related to bad karma for that country's treatment of Tibet - and how it made her cry when she heard about Tibetans helping out Chinese afterwards, despite them having been treated badly. Because, shouldn't we all do our best to help others out, even if they aren't nice to us?

This has apparently outraged several people in China, one a theatre owner who's now banned all of her films and complained about how she's bringing personal politics into the discussion of a natural disaster.

I find this quite humorous. Of all the cultures to understand a passing comment about karma and how things come around in cycles, you'd think that China would be somewhere at the top of the list - given that they embrace philosophies that embody that principle to a degree more than most others.

Disagreeing with the implication that they have done something bad to warrant the disaster in return is one thing, but reacting in such immediate hostility to the possible suggestion of karma at work (as well as to the positive sentiment toward Tibetans) is silly.

I have a problem. After having watched Blu-ray movies on my home theatre system I'm now spoiled. While regular DVDs still look good, Blu-ray discs look even better. This is now preventing me from purchasing any more DVDs - unless I suspect that they might either never be released on Blu-ray, or that their source quality is such that Blu-ray, itself, won't make things look better than they already do.

My problem, however, is my existing movie collection. How many of the movies that I currently own do I want to "double dip" on? In other words, what do I buy in Blu-ray that I already have in standard DVD format? One answer is anything that relies on really good cinematography. Another, is any movie that I really like. The issue with the second answer, however, is that I only have movies that I really like in my collection.

Also, what do I do with all of my regular DVDs when I end up with their Blu-ray equivalent? Keep them, give them away, sell them somehow?