Skot Nelson’s blog

His jaw's been broken
His bandage is wrapped too tight
His fangs have been pulled
And I really want to see you tonight

After deciding to hold onto my somewhat aged PowerBook G4 for a while longer, I decided to invest in a wireless network upgrade. It's been a while.

It has, in fact, been a while since I've paid for Internet access. When I moved to my current location, there was a Linksys Wireless router in place. Tragically, it was an 802.11b.

All was fine until I recently purchased an Airport Express in order to get music from my computer to my stereo. Keen memories may recall that I had a Squeezebox to do this, but I think a power outage or breaker switch blew it. Sadly, there will be no more Pope Gravely Ill days for me.

The Airport Express is different from the Squeezebox--all of its control and input is provided by the computer. I could have bought an (as yet unavailable) Apple TV unit but this would have meant having the TV on to control music. Since I don't like my TV anyway, I chose to go this route. It was also quite a bit cheaper.

Unfortunately, 802.11b was just not enough to feed the Airport Express. My solution?

Yup. I bought a new Airport Extreme to replace the Linksys equipment. The last Airport base station I bought was one of the first in Canada, served only 802.11b and is still in use some 6 years later in Toronto.

So how did the upgrade go?

read more...

As further evidence of the fact thaf if you've been listening to music without listening to Neko Case and Wilco you've been doing it wrong I offer up this clip from YouTube of Jeff Tweedy's performance on Zed.

Jay Bennett was famously ejected from Wilco shortly after the completion of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The events of that recording were filmed in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which remains one of the finist musical documentaries ever filmed.

Jay was also an immensely talented musician. His last solo albo was released on 'Rock Proper":http://www.rockproper.com/ as a free download. It was deeply personal, and quite wonderful to listen too. I was hoping for a solo tour.

It seems that won't happen. Jay passed away in his sleep on the weekend.

Apple shipped a single button mouse for years. I loved that mouse, and it's replacement with the so called Mighty Mouse has been hard for me.

There's a simple reason one button mice are nice: they force interaction designers to truly think about menu structures. Microsoft's original two button mouse has blossomed into a mouse of many buttons, but a minimum of three. The right mouse button is, in the world of Windows, responsible for contextual menus. The idea is sound: right click on an item and get a list of options specific to that item. The reality is different. Not only do a surprising number of people not understand the difference between Click and Right Click, contextual menus have also made interface designers lazy, with functionality being shoved into invisble menus.

I thought Microsoft's own Office Suite was amongst the worst offenders...until I had to use a Blackberry Enterprise Server.

The Blackberry server administers all of your Blackberry users. The screen shot below shows the list of users, and in it I've right clicked on a user, and was presented with the, frankly, shocking list of options seen below that.

By my count there are 35 different options on that menu, not all of which are even clearly linked to a single user. With no hierarchy (aside from the occasional line break) and nothing to guide the eye, the menu is virtually useless. The use of technical terms in the menu (_Peer-to-Peer Key_, Configuration Check Status) makes it hoplessly confusing if you're not intimately familiar with the functions. Items aren't seemingly grouped by function, with Statistics Exporting sharing space with Purge Pending Data Packets.

As an example of how not to design a menu, you couldn't dream of a better one. As an example of why hiding things behind a Right Click is a bad idea, I've never seen better either.

I hate my right mouse button, but I seem to be stuck with it...for now.

Dollhouse has been renewed, which is good news but it doesn't make up for the cancellation of Firefly..

According to the Guardian, Serenity, Firefly's theatrical offspring, might even be better than Star Wars.

bq, Firefly won almost as many awards as it had episodes aired, sold DVDs by the shipload and ended up on the big screen in the form of 2005's possibly-better-than-Star-Wars Serenity.

I'm not going to disagree with that statement...with the possible exception of Boba Fett.

Quite at random, both Brian and Ben Mulroney made the front page of the Globe and Mail. It's not often that the worlds of politics and entertainment clash with such vigor.

Brian must be so proud of his son (though I always thought Brian was Canada's Ryan Seacrest...though I have very little idea of who Ryan Seacrest is.)

London does these great cycling tests. This is just part of a series.