Blessed by the Potato

I’ve had a Kingston USB drive with U3 for a while now, and have quite liked it. The U3 software can be a little naggy at times, and does slow down the first recognition of the drive by Windows, but the ability to carry around some programs, and most importantly, to easily password protect the whole stick appeals to me.

So when my dad decided that he didn’t want to carry his laptop back and forth with him to the cottage, and instead bought a second to leave there, he suddenly had a need for something to securely carry his data back and forth. I decided to get him a U3 thumb drive, and some kind of automated synchronization software. When I saw the SanDisk cruzer 4 GB U3 stick with “Cruzersync” I figured I had exactly what he needed. Cruzersync is billed as a synchronization program:

CruzerSync™ U3 Edition software allows SanDisk Cruzer® smart drive users to easily and securely (AES 128-bit encryption) access, edit and restore ALL their personal files (productivity documents, audio and video files, bookmarks etc.) and Outlook® data (emails, attachments, calendar, contacts, notes, tasks) at anytime from any computer in the world. A true Mobile Desktop at your fingertips!

[emphasis mine].

It turns out, though, that it’s not a synchronization program at all. It is fairly intuitive and easy to set up a “synchronization” between the computer and the stick, and once the directories to sync are set up, it will “synchronize” with just one button to find, so it’s perfect for my dad… except that it only works on one computer. You can’t really synchronize at all, instead it’s just a flashy automatic backup program. There is a mechanism for uploading files off the stick to another computer (or to your “main computer” if you accidentally delete some), but it’s no more automatic or intuitive than using the drive as a normal disk/folder and manually copying the files back and forth.

Other than that bit of bait-and-switch, it seems to be a good drive. It has a decent write speed, it’s light, and attractive (the black with orange accent light is very Halloweeny :)

With U3, there are some other providers of software, so I’m trying some other synchronization tools to see if they’ll work for my dad (they’re a bit pricey, around $30, but that’s really nothing compared to $900 for a second laptop). Otherwise, I may have to teach him how to copy his work to the U3 drive and then back to the computer, or create some kind of batch file to do that automagically.

Wayfare also recently got a new Kingston memory stick, this a 4 GB one without U3 (she just outgrew her 2 GB stick). However, it’s been frightlyfully slow, taking a good couple of seconds to save an empty Word document to the stick, and over a minute to save my thesis. Her old memory stick, also a Kingston, was at least twice as fast at transferring the very same files. Kingston tech support suggested that there might be a defect with it, and that they did have a batch go out that should be recalled due to slow speeds, but her serial number wasn’t in the range. We replaced it anyway, but the replacement is just as bad. Of course, they both came from the same Best Buy within a day or so of each other, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected any kind of improvement. I think we’re going to try exchanging it for a SanDisk next week.

David Shiner is currently a city councillor for Toronto, and running in the provincial election as a conservative (pthew!). While campaigning, he’s not really focusing on his job as a councillor, and it has become the custom in Toronto politics for councillors to go on unpaid leave when campaigning in other elections. Shiner didn’t, and for the past few weeks has continued to collect his rather substantial salary, raising a minor controversy. Attempting to make things right,

“Shiner also announced the pay he’s received since the election campaign began Sept. 10 will go to charity. His unpaid leave of absence will begin when he formally submits a letter to the city, which he expected to do Thursday or Friday.”

That really isn’t good enough. The city of Toronto is hurting for cash at the moment, it’s all over the news lately. The money should go back into the city coffers, not to some random charity (and in that case, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he got a tax receipt for the donation).

I have a bit of a strange Azureus problem recently. I thought at first that Rogers’ throttling had gotten even more restrictive, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. It looks as though there’s some sort of negative interaction between PC-Cillin, Azureus, and possibly my network card.

Symptoms: As soon as I open Azureus (even if I have all torrents stopped), I can’t surf the web any more, or connect to any local computers over http (that was my first clue that it wasn’t just Rogers’ throttling, my second was that while I was complaining about the network being down, Wayfare was having no trouble at all). I simply get a long wait period and then a could not find server message. The download on Azureus is even more erratic than normal: varying between 0 and 15 kB/s (this torrent was running at around 30-40 kB/s, which is fairly decent, but not a mind-blowing speed, last week). When I was watching it earlier today, the speed seemed to mostly stay around 2-4 kB/s: dreadfully slow, but moving at least. Within the last hour or so, the download speed has been essentially zero (in the 40 B/s — that’s bytes per second, no kilo!). The upload is steady at whatever max I choose to set it at, until I get to about the halfway of my connection’s theoretical maximum, where it plateaus. This all started sometime within the last week — I had left my file downloading when I went away (and the house got broken into), expecting to have finished downloading long before I got back.

Troubleshooting so far: I noticed that PC-Cillin was using well over 70 MB of memory with Azureus open (not checked with it closed). I tried tweaking its firewall (there were a lot of obvious torrent traffic hits in the firewall log with “packet matched filter rule” or some such message, and I have no idea if that means that the firewall let the packet through, or if that means it was stopped. Disabling just the firewall part of PC-Cillin didn’t seem to help the web surfing problem. Closing PC-Cillin entirely, and I can surf the web again. Closing Azureus (with PC-Cillin open), and I can surf the web normally within about 20 seconds. Adjusting the max upload rate down did not allow me to surf with PC-Cillin open. The only things changed on the computer recently are various automatic updates (Firefox, PC-Cillin, etc.), and being forced to upgrade my MSN Messenger (though I still have the problem with Messenger closed).

Solution: I haven’t a clue right now. I’m not comfortable running my computer with PC-Cillin closed, so the download will just have to suffer. I don’t know what makes Azureus kill my connection, even with nothing running. If anyone can suggest anything, let me know!

During my troubleshooting, I had a look at my router and cable modem, and noticed in the logs that my router lost power after midnight (closer to 1 am) on Friday Sept 20. It might be possible that that was the time of the break in. It could be coincidental, since I’m not sure exactly why my router would lose power. I at first thought the thief might have flipped some breakers in the basement to kill an alarm system, but then that would have reset some of the clocks, and they all seem fine. It’s possible the power bar or cord got moved when they were searching my room, and maybe was temporarily disconnected that way…

Edit: Now my firewall log is filled with outgoing ICMP requests every second, so now I fear I have a virus/spyware/something evil going on…

Edit2: I seem to have fixed the problem, but I’m not sure how, exactly, since I sort of did a bunch of things at once. I did remove some suspected spyware with PC-Cillin, and one more piece of unrecognized software that HijackThis found, but I also killed a few background processes (including ATI’s hotkey detection thingy and the PC-Cillin proxy server, which I wasn’t knowingly using, but for some reason was eating 40 MB of RAM anyway). I also set up my router to block outgoing as well as incoming ping requests (previously it just blocked incoming).

I am so incredibly fed up with stupid thieves. What possesses people to steal things from other people?

Perhaps just as important, I’m fed up with incompetent thieves. It makes absolutely no sense to me for someone to put me to all the emotional anguish of being broken into or stolen from, as well as the cost of repairs and actually taking my crap, when the thief gets next to nothing out of it. With my car, I had to pay for thousands of dollars of damage to it, and all the thieves got was a ride for a few hours and maybe $12 from the change in the ashtray, and a used poker set. The benefit to them was way out of proportion to the cost to me, so it’s not just theft, it’s retarded and spiteful.

So Wayfare was congratulating us today since we made it through a Sunday without going to the hospital while we drove back to London, and we got here to find the house was broken into. And broken into by what must have been the world’s most retarded thief. The guy must have been high and looking for drugs, or just out to piss me off and not actually steal anything.

They broke in through the basement window (which I’m 95% sure was locked), and then had to get from the basement to the rest of the house. We have a door at the top of the stairwell, and while there’s a bit of a trick to opening it, it wasn’t locked. So the thief grabs a giant concrete cinder block/brick and bashes the hell out of the unlocked door to get to the rest of the house. Walks through the kitchen (tracking mud, I might add), past the $50 Home Hardware gift card sitting smack in the middle of the kitchen counter (thanks Jonathan!), and into my office, where a lot of things were rifled through, where I think my nice newish digital camera was taken, but where my 22″ flat screen and computer were left (thankfully — I could easily deal with the loss of the screen, but would hate to lose the computer, or at least the hard drive). Then, into my bedroom where a much more thorough search was performed, including looking in the boxes of board games and dominoes (probably for drugs). On my dresser is a box that is my life: I had my passport, an emergency credit card, a bunch of cash/coins, a gold coin my dad gave me after I graduated from middle school (I don’t know what the spot price of gold is, but it’s probably worth at least $200), and all kinds of other miscellany: ticket stubs from my first date, my PADI card, movie passes, etc. They took the box, and all the Canadian money, but (thankfully) left my passport and I think all of the cards, as well as the gold coin. What’s just dumb is that in another room, they threw out the ~$50 in Japanese Yen I had and a crisp $100 US bill (yes, the 3rd place poster award was in cash), and just left it here.

The chocolate bar from my desk was taken, and left, half-eaten, on the floor of Wayfare’s room. Gross, but it might give us the only clue in this case with some saliva/DNA evidence (the thief apparently wore gloves for the rest of the break-in).

The rest of my room and Wayfare’s were rifled through fairly thoroughly, but nothing else was taken. So our best guess was someone was looking for drugs rather than money (and boy, did they pick the wrong house to look for that!). Now I’ve got a long night of cleaning up ahead of me, as soon as the evidence guy from the London police leaves…

One thing I wasn’t impressed with was when I called the police to report that “I’d been broken into and robbed”, the operator got all pedantic on me, saying that it wasn’t robbery unless I was home at the time, so it was “just” a break-in. Then someone took my name and number and hung up, without even telling me when or if they would call back (we ended up waiting about an hour and a half)…

I take a fair number of shopping surveys, and one question often asked is how I perceive organic products. Organic products often cost more, but aren’t necessarily of higher quality, though it’s a somewhat common misconception that they are. With the PC organics line though, it looks like they take that rather modest price increase and decide to put a bit of extra quality in there to justify it beyond the organic label: I’ve had rather good experience with most of the PC organics products I’ve tried, particularly the chips (that they then discontinued on me). It’s sort of like the opposite of decaf coffee: there’s nothing about the decaffeination process that harms the flavour of coffee, but since it’s an expensive process manufacturer’s tend to use cheaper beans for the decaf line so that the end product is the same price. (Thank you, Alton Brown, for more random food trivia)

So this week I decided to give PC’s organic pretzels a try. It was promising: the bags were sized about right for me (smaller than the giant Rold Gold pretzel bags, but larger than an individual snack size), and they also had 50% less salt than Rold Gold. While I love salty snacks such as pretzels, I don’t like it when they’re too salty, and often find myself knocking off a lot of that coarse salt. However, I just haven’t had much luck with reduced-salt pretzels: the Hannover bag I tried some time ago was rather tasteless, but it had less than a third of the salt of Rold Gold. So I thought that the PC Organics should have been a happy medium, and they were fairly healthy beyond that (loaded with carbs, sure, but very low in fat). They were also featured in the Loblaws (or was it the RCSS?) flyer this week.

They were awful. I was really disappointed in them. They were quite hard to chew, and very nearly tasteless. It was, as Wayfare put it, “like chewing glazed cardboard”. They won’t be getting another chance. And damn them for marketing to me! I was sucked in by the ads!

I find it odd sometimes how taste can be affected so much by changing the salt (or sugar). I don’t know if it was also due to the brand change, but those reduced salt pretzels were nearly tasteless (not quite as bad as the PC ones, since they at least had a decent texture, but pretty boring). Likewise, the 1/3 less sugar Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops were fairly terrible as well. Yet everything I know about human taste perception says that it’s logarithmic: taking away half the salt or sugar shouldn’t make it taste half as good, it should be more like a 30% change. Indeed, Campbell’s for a long while had 50% reduced salt tomato soup and I could never tell the difference (nowadays I don’t seem to find that variety, so I don’t know if they just stopped bothering with the original and now sell the reduced salt version as the normal one, or if they gave up on the slightly healthier choice).

And if anyone from President’s Choice is reading this, please bring back my thick-cut organic potato chips in the medium-sized bags! (They don’t even have to be organic, just yummy!)