Assault on suburban living?

Are we going to see a move back to city living, reversing the trend towards suburban and country living? The rising costs to fuel cars and heat/cool homes is making people think twice about the length of their commutes and what it takes to maintain their large homes. The New York Times just published an article on this topic called, "Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise."

The house we're going to purchase in Milwaukee is a baseball's throw from the University of Wisconsin campus where we'll be working. It's also two short blocks from a bus stop, and within walking distance of many amenities such as grocery stores, drug stores, restaurants, coffee shops, a hardware store, hair stylist... well, you get the picture.

Neither of us is an "eco-freak" or "treehugger" in any sense of the word. Our choice of location is based on pure economics. Parking is a known problem and expensive on the UWM campus. If we can avoid having to pay parking fees for both cars, it saves us money. Additionally, by not driving to work every day we save wear and tear on our cars, reducing our potential maintenance costs. The same applies for not having to drive to Walgreens to pick up a prescription, or to the grocery store to get the last-minute forgotten food item, or many other routine errands.

I suppose telecommuting or telework would work for some people, but not for the kind of jobs we have. Until electronic communication can be a complete substitute for face-to-face communication - and not just in a technical sense, but widely socially acceptable as well - our physical presence is still needed for us to do our jobs well.

In many ways, this reminds me of recent articles about the growing trend in "green" data centers. Most people in the industry admit that organizations aren't creating green data centers to be good citizens (though the PR doesn't hurt), but doing it because it will save money for organizations in the long term.

Imagine if it became criminal to live more than a certain distance from your workplace. I can't imagine this happening, but who knows what the society's future will bring? One thing's for sure - suburban living is coming under assault.

Security/privacy paranoia

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I spent some time yesterday passwording and encrypting the system/data drive on my laptop. My USB key is already set up with a password and encryption, as is my USB hard drive (Western Digital My Passport drive) that I use for backups.

The product I used for the laptop is TrueCrypt, which is open source. It provides different encryption schemes, but after running the performance test I stuck with its default AES-256 encryption algorithm. I was concerned about performance, because Ariel (my Fujitsu Lifebook U810) has a pretty wimpy processor - the price one pays for having a teeny-tiny laptop. I don't think running TrueCrypt has made a noticeable change in the laptop's performance, but then again, I'm not sure I'd notice because it's a bit pokey as it is.

One wonders if all of the effort put into this paranoia about security/privacy is worth the time and effort.

Chumby's Here!

Well, despite my spouse's skepticism when I ordered my newest gadget, even he has to admit that the Chumby is pretty cool. It's in our kitchen so that we can read news and whatnot over coffee in the morning. He likes the idea of listening to The New York Times podcasts while reading the screen for other items at the same time. He even said that the speakers were remarkably good for a device like this.

It was pretty simple to set up the Chumby on our wireless network. Fortunately I had the hex key for our wireless handy. I still haven't gotten in and played with the hacks I found online at the Chumby Tricks wiki, such as enabling the sshd and the NFS client, but I will when I have time. So far, we're really liking this device!

Chumby Lust

I am definitely on a gadget kick right now. After much discussion on Twitter with my friends and colleagues, I broke down and bought a Chumby. The UPS tracker says it's been shipped from its location in China and is scheduled to be delivered on May 12th. I can't wait!

Gadget Lust and the Kindle

Yes, I broke down and bought a Kindle. I've read and heard all of the reasons that I shouldn't own one, including: DRM, it's ugly, it's expensive, the selection of books is limited, you're locked into Amazon.

Until we have a better way to ensure artists (in this case, authors) are properly compensated for their work, I'm not terribly bothered by the DRM used here. There's a risk that I could be left high and dry by it if Amazon decides to abandon the proprietary AZW format, but the same could be said of the other ebook formats I own. Of course, Amazon's agreement keeps me from lending an ebook to another person unless s/he has a Kindle linked to the same account, but given how many books I lend and never get back, perhaps this isn't such a drawback after all.

I admit the Kindle is fugly, but not nearly as bad as it seems in the photos. The e-ink display is incredible. As someone who has read a lot of ebooks on PDAs and laptops, the e-ink display is a blessing - no eyestrain as one gets with a backlit screen.

The $399 cost is pretty high, but I've downloaded plenty of free books from sites such as manybooks.net. I've also purchased books via the Kindle from Amazon that were significantly less expensive than their tree-book counterparts (often $9.99 rather than $15.00 - 25.00).

Granted, not every book that I want to read is available in Kindle format... yet. However, a significant number of books on my Amazon recommended and wish lists are available in Kindle format. Given that Amazon already owns me insofar that it knows what I like and can recommend more items that I know I'd like, I'm not terribly bothered by buying into the giant Amazon money-grubbing conglomerate.

The coolest things about the Kindle are:

• I can carry many, many books (potentially hundreds) in a 10.3 ounce form factor.
• The search function will search through all of the material I have on the Kindle. This makes it easy to find something if I only vaguely recall what I'm looking for.
• 1-Click, for all of its evilness, makes finding, buying, and downloading a book I want fast and easy on the Kindle. Instant gratification!
• The Kindle makes it easy for me to read at pretty much any time in any place.

So far I'm loving the Kindle and looking forward to using it every day.

Earthquake in Illinois!

We had an earthquake in Illinois early this morning. Twitter has been all a twitter about it all morning. It certainly trumped conventional news outlets in terms of timely reporting, though not substantive reporting, mind you.

Evernote Beta

Got the Evernote beta. It looks really cool. What really makes it is the ability to upload your notes to the web. Although I really like OneNote 2007, the one stickler is that I have to maintain a central file share on which all my instances of OneNote can synch, or I'll end up having to transfer my notes from machine to machine using a USB key.

Evernote also has a mobile version, and can also run on a Mac. I don't have a Mac, but I'll bet they're happy. I do have my Treo, and have installed Evernote mobile on it.

Now to start using the beta. Let's see how it stands up to OneNote 2007. More to come...