The first substantial posting is one in which we expose the so-called "Santa Fe Salsa", complete with pictures and everything.

In case it's not obvious, I've run out of steam for Zen Haiku itself. I plan to post any usability or photography entries on Fiendish Master Plan.

Take a look.

1. When three shows conflict, it complains and gives you the option of canceling one. No, not the one episode that conflicts, the ENTIRE RECORDING, forever into the future. I lost a number of shows to this before I realized what was going on. Laziness extraordinaire.

2. When you are watching a show that is being recorded, and the recording finishes, the DVR does what's easy for it, not the viewer, stops the recording, and dumps you out to watch the channel that was being recorded. Since Jeopardy is on right before the awful Wheel of Fortune, this is especially unfortunate. When I had the Tivo, as I recall, it would sometimes pause for just a bit while it finalized the recording and then continue: the right behavior, not the lazy one.

3. I thought the Tivo interface where you use the video game style alphabet square to input two or three letters to look up a show to record was clunky until I started scrolling through 80 pages of "S" entries because the DVR is too stupid to let you narrow it down more than that. Oh, and you can only look at one day of "S" entries at a time.

4. This seems like a good time to mention that the remote is even slower than the somewhat sluggish Tivo remote.

5. The on-demand is buggy. If you switch to the on-demand channel and dare to change the channel while it's trying to connect, about 85% of the time, the DVR reboots, apparently just because the channel number and what's being displayed no longer sync. Talk about lazy!

6. When unattended, the DVR starts to act up like a bratty child seeking attention. It un-pauses shows way too quickly, and changes itself to "random" channels which all seem to be pay-per-view. Even more bizarrely, when it does un-pause a show, it goes into infinite loop mode and plays the same show over and over and over. Is that supposed to be an anti-theft deterrent?

6. The box only has one week of program schedule data. Now, given the problem with schedules changing, you might think that was a good thing, but it downloads a new schedule every night, so that shouldn't be an issue. The real problem is that if you encounter a new show you like, you have no way of knowing if it's a one-time special or on every week.

Here's the one positive thing about the Comcast DVR :

6. It has a dual tuner that records shows straight onto the hard drive.

Here's hoping the Tivo Comcast works much better. Here's hoping it actually materializes—if not, I'm switching back to the Tivo, dual tuner or not.

I haven't been posting regularly for quite some time, but the site's not dead, just going through a slow period.

However, I have been taking quite a few pictures with a Canon Powershot S1 IS, which I've had for nearly six months now.

My mini-review. Overall, I'm quite happy. The zoom lens is a great deal of fun, and the image stabilization actually works as long as you try just a little to hold the camera steady. With other cameras, "holding steady" was an exercise in frustration. I found that in any other light condition than full blast sunshine, handheld shooting produced too much blur. With the S1, I can go down to 1/30 and even 1/15 if I have to, although that's starting to push it.

The purple fringing issue occurs more often than I expected, but usually in small areas.

Here's a picture I could only have gotten with a zoom lens:

The overall sunset was decent, but these clouds look almost hellish to me, and it was the detail in them that I liked.

Here's a postcard picture taken in the Jemez, ones of my favorite places to go for landscape photography.

Some people would mean postcard pejoratively: I take it as a compliment. Taken at nearly full zoom.

Here's a picture I took to shut up the "But where's the picture of you with your really long shadow in it? That's never been done before!" emails I constantly receive.

Here's the mini-rant: the follow-on to the Canon S1 IS is the Canon S2 IS. There are two problems with Canon expecting people to just smoothly upgrade: 1) They switched from CompactFlash to SecureDigital memory formats, which means the 800+ Megs I have in CompactFlash would be worthless with the S2. and 2) They changed the adapter size from 52 to 58mm, which means almost all the filters I have are worthless. What a slap in the face.

And now, I leave you with a picture I found mildly humorous:

• fresh basil
• fresh oregano
• fresh parsley

I was feeling ambitious, so I went to the organic chain down the road for the spices and veggies, as a separate trip from the one to the main supermarket. I went to the refrigerator with the flat packs of fresh herbs. I found the basil and oregano immediately, but couldn't find the parsley. They seemed to be out of it, like they were out of the fresh dill. I didn't actually see the tag for parsley, but I was tired enough at that point where that didn't click.

So I got mad, left with what I had, and went to a different organic store. They too were out of parsley, as I exclaimed to my good friend Monte, who happened to have called me on the cell. "Did you look in the lettuce section?" he asked. "The lettuce section? Why would they put it there?" But, sure enough, there it was.

How is parsley not a spice?

Here's another example of poor classification that occured at a "regular" supermarket recently. My wife requested that I purchase some new dishwashing sponges. So I headed to the non-food side of the store, and soon spied the dishwashing detergent. Sadly, they had only refills for some automated scrub brush contraption I wanted no part of, but no scrub brushes. I started wandering up and down the aisles and discovered a small dish sponge/scrub brush section hidden on the "Baby" aisle. We're talking pampers here people. There were other signs at the end of the aisle but none even hinted at dish sponges.

What? The only thing I can figure is that, if I were a completely sexist store layout designer, everything on that aisle could be thought of as "for women".

My wife, upon hearing my rant, admitted that she knows exactly where the parsley lives in the supermarket, but seemed to find the scrub brush location odd.

My overall point: I often find myself longing for a search box as I wander the aisles of the supermarket. The way my brain works and the way supermarkets categorize things often does not mesh.

Update: A more recent trip to the same grocery store chain that blew the scrub brush location showed they put the parsley under the herb packs, and the whole section directly next to the lettuce, so either way of thinking about it would get you there.

I went to look at a PDF file, and this is what I saw (shrunk down a bit to fit in my web site):

Why isn't the update automatically selected? What's up with making me pick an update when there's only one? It's an update I didn't even want! Like most people, I just wanted the stupid update over with, so I hit Update and received an error message about nothing being selected.

Just as bad is the way this Adobe update window usually disappears below my web browser, apparently crashing it. It got so bad in the past with the Adobe® Photoshop® Album Starter Edition constantly being suggested that I actually downloaded and installed the damn thing, although I never use it.

My current solution is to "File, Save As" PDF files and look at them outside of Firefox, but of course, a few enterprising web sites have javascript links that break this approach.

The software is thorough and currently has frequent updates. There's only one problem. When it finds a piece of spyware, it uses this godawful alert sound that made me jump the first time I heard it. Just today, I left Ad-Aware running in the other room, and went to the next room to greet my wife Karen just home from work, and she jumped about three feet sideways when that "BLAT" noise came barreling out of my subwoofer. Making me especially mad is that I thought I had already turned it off.

Lavasoft has succumbed to the dreaded WinAmp disease: let's make the interface skinnable, cool and mysterious. So it took me a while to figure out that the icon with the gear on it is for settings. Once there, I scanned the list of buttons on the settings window, and decided that "Interface" is how I would turn the sound file off.

So I blanked out the file name for "Play This Wave file if Targets Are Found" field in question, and saved the change, figuring it would stop playing it. No luck. Finally, under the "Tweak" option, under a sub-category called "Misc Settings", I found the option that turns the sound off. (To be honest, I had already deleted the sound file, but now I was mad.)

Why not make blanking the file work, or at least indicate it didn't, rather than silently (or noisily!) failing? Better yet, why even make noise at the user in the first place? If it were any other program, behavior that anti-social would be cause for immediate removal.

All said, I have to recommend you look past the interface and download Ad-Aware. It found things Spybot missed, and cleans out your system restore files. I've already had to use a system restore that had spyware in it, so I appreciate the thoroughness.

But don't forgot to turn that infernal sound off. To summarize, from the main window, click on the button with a gear on it, click on "Tweak", then hit the plus sign on "Misc Settings" to show both options. Next, click on the green check mark next to "Play sound at scan completion if scan locates critical objects" to change it to a red X mark, and click "Proceed" to actually save your changes and turn the sound off, and then scan in peace.

I've switched back to Mozilla Mail. Here's why.

1. Thunderbird has an irritating habit of blanking out the pane that displays the message information (subject, sender, etc). If it only did it once in a while, that would be one thing, but this seems to be intended, and happens all the time. It shouldn't have been.

2. Slowness. Thunderbird would often show the hourglass wait icon, sometimes for reasons that still elude me. Granted, I have a complicated setup: 3 accounts, one of them a secure connection, and all using IMAP. But Mozilla Mail deals with it much more gracefully.

3. Worse, Thunderbird randomly crashed three or four times on me for no apparent reason. Googling led to some information that said I should delete my XUL cache. (Thunderbird uses this to keep track of all the menus and such.) What the heck, I did. It seemed to crash less after that. Not something you should need to do for an allegedly 1.0 version.

3. The dealbreaker? Spam. I wasn't surprised that I might have to train Thunderbird spam filter, and sure enough, 17 spam emails landed in my inbox. So I marked all 17 spam messages as spam, and they just sat there.

I checked the setting: it was indeed set to move spam to the Junk folder on marking. I tried the Run Junk Mail Controls on Folder command: nothing. I gave Thunderbird the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe it somehow didn't get that these were spam, so I tried a promising-looking function that would delete mail marked as spam in the current folder: nada.

Rather irritated, I quit Thunderbird and got back into it. The Mark submenu I use to mark spam had vanished. Mark was still there, but there was no arrow showing that it would expand out. Come on! I guess I wore it out from so much use. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. (It's possible, now that I think about it, that the menu was still there, just the arrow was missing, but I'm not going to use a program that flaky. )

Not only that, but when I pulled up my Task Manager, it was still running after I quit it. After killing it, I uninstalled with extreme prejudice.

Many faxes happened. It wasn't until fax number 3 that the Bill Pay option on the web site showed up. After figuring out that I need to "Add a Payee", I tried, and no matter what, I received this error message.

"Please try signon again"? What kind of wording is that? And what is an "Unknown error"? I tried taking spaces out of the account number. I tried it in Internet Explorer, to no avail. I even "tried signon again". It reached the confirm page just fine, and then, every time, the same error message, when I tried to actually submit.

So I called the tech support, who said to fax the form. The same one I've had faxed 3 times now. Oh come on. They told me it'd been turned on but not authorized. What? How is that even possible? Oh, and they had to turn it off so it could be turned on properly.

After insisting that I had indeed faxed it, I got put on hold. They couldn't reach the person they believed to have one of the three faxes, so they were going to get back to me. I gave them my phone number.

They never got back to me. (You knew that was coming, right?).

A few days later, I called them again, and ended up going in and faxing the form for the fourth time. This time, it's addressed to the person I talked to, and it finally worked.

While on Thanksgiving holiday, at the folk's house, I signed on and added "Comcat" as a payee. Once saved, you cannot edit the official payee name. So I had to delete "Comcat" and re-enter everything under "Comcast"®—just to fix one letter. So I went in and added some people and sent off a payment.

Here's hoping the actual bill paying goes more smoothly than the signup.

I see a good category (Doors and Windows), so unlike at the Home Depot site, I use a category approach instead of a search. It takes me a second to choose the jargony "Window Treatment" subcategory.

Then it asks me for my zip code. Surprisingly, I don't even mind, possibly because it promises to check inventory for me. I just punch it in. And then Lowes proceeds to send me to the same page and ask me for my zip code. Again.

Being the clever web monkey that I am, I notice my trusty status bar showing another web site that Lowes site is talking to. Ah, I said, they are trying to give a cookie to some other web site, and have programmed stupidly so that if that doesn't happen it fails. So I change that setting to allow that. And it still doesn't work.

Miffed, I try over and over again. I can get it to fail if I enter random letters, but never to suceed. Weirder. Finally I sigh and think, maybe they're so clueless it only works in Internet Explorer, not Mozilla Firefox. No such luck. Maybe they forgot about New Mexico? Nope, 90210 doesn't work either. It really does seem to be broken. Worse, it fails silently, dropping me onto an identical page.

I'm a motivated buyer, I want to march down there after work tomorrow and buy blinds and they can't show me what they've got. Oh, the other option is to register. Guess how much I want to try that after they can't even deal with a simple zip code?

Update: Monday evening, I thought maybe I'd been too harsh and checked back. The site seemed to be working this time: my zip code actually took me to the Window Treatment category. Deciding I didn't want to see all the curtain stuff, I did a search for vertical blinds. I looked at one of them, then saw a link that promised to show all products in the vertical blind category. I clicked on it. It just sat there. I switched to another tab for a while and then back again and it still hadn't come back. Buh-bye!

(Crib sheet for non-techies: DNS means Domain Name System. It's the system that takes a name like www.yahoo.com and turns into an IP Address, which is the unique number used to send anything on the Internet. Oh, and nameservers are the computers that hand out the numbers).

Regular visitors or RSS subscribers may have noticed the site was down for a week. This was due to a comedy of errors that kept on piling up, since some DNS changes take 2-3 days to go through. Things started to turn around when I work up at 5 am two days ago determined to double check everything.

The first problem had been solved: all the websites were talking to the right nameservers. However, the IP addresses for those nameserver themselves were wrong. So I went back to the domain name site and looked at it again, and pretty much clicked on everything. I looked at the right sidebar.

Which is when I noticed these little boxes, which I had thought were decorations. The incredibly low color contrast of dark blue on black obscures the plusses and minuses they have.

So I clicked on the plus and lo and behold, the wrong IP addresses showed up, complete with a link to modify, which I did immediately.

Here's what the expanded version looked like.

But wait, there's more! I got a call from my brother, who said, there's something wrong with your site. I said, I know, I've been working on it for nearly a week now, and he said, no, it's not down now, it's just weird.

Turns out the wrong site was being served. Logging into the reseller control panel revealed that the IP address all the sites were listed as using were different than the ones we set up, on the instructions of the web hosting people. So I changed it to what looked like the correct IP address, and called my wife at work, and she saw the correct site.

So some people are now (August 18, 2004) seeing some random fan chat site about musical group Matchbox 20 instead of this site. Eventually, things should straighten out. I would still be seeing that apalling site myself, except that I made my computer use the right IP address, which is how I'm posting this in the first place.

I'm still not convinced it will stay working. It's week's like this where I'm totally frustrated with the Internet.

Thus I waded into the mine field of RSS formats. I read Mark Pilgrim, so I should have known it would be frustrating. I think I have an RSS 2.0 format that works: at least the Updated dates seems to make sense (ie, they are today) and I have paragraphs now. Frustratingly, there was no way I could make Bloglines go get a fresh copy, so I just had to wait. (I'm still working on the RSS 1.0 feed.) Suggestions on the format are more than welcome.

Then I discovered that if I wanted to prove to the technorati folks that I existed, I had to add javascript to my site and then ping them. Which this post will do, now that I've added them to my ping list.

I had seen one of Albuquerque's latest public art pieces, "Aluminum Yucca." The public arts folks are working on getting gateways to each entrance to the city installed.

Well, being the photographing type, I had to get some pictures. This involved a death-defying stop on the shoulder of I-40 with semis roaring past, hopping over a wall, and clambering up some rocks, but was worth it.

OK, it was during that day, so it wasn't that death-defying. Because I thought the sculpture looked like a bunch of rockets, discovering what it was called took a lot of googling. Since it was made with salvaged F-15 fuel tanks, I like to think I was close.

If you're into the sport know as geocaching, which is sort of a modern day treasure hunt using technology, there is a geocache near the Aluminum Yucca.

I used the store locator on their web site and got the number of the local repair shop. I dialed it, and the option for customer service kicked me back to the main line. I called back and hit "0" right away.

The response? An automated "Good bye". And they hung me up! What's up with that?

I combed through the invoices one at a time ooking in vain for anything detailed about the phone in question to prove it's still under warranty. There is no search function—all the bills are in PDF. Never mind that the one helpful person I talked to on the national number told me the activation date put it under six months).

Later, after going back twice, we managed to browbeat them into doing the right thing and replacing the defective cell phone. The new cell phone had this crappy imitation of the Mac OS X Dock, which Ask Tog (Bruce Tognazzini, a former Apple employer) has already trashed for its poor usability, that my wife had to turn off before she could stand to use it.

Click on the image for a background image size (1024x768).

So I want to read an actual paper, but am having no luck on the Gottman Institute web site getting from an abstract page to a paper. After several tries, I click on this abstract and read it, then try to go to the actual journal page.

The error message I get is "You have entered a phrase that is too generic. Please try again."

What? Running a web site like Zen Haiku, I understand why the link went stale, but that's still an awfully strange error message.