Brandon Notices

Is one who sews called a "sewer"? This is on the display for the Polder Reversible Tabletop Ironing Board, at Costco. When "sewers" is accompanied by the places "dorm rooms" and "apartments," I have no choice but to assume that "sewers" must also be referring to a place.

This sign is on the inside of the window at Starbucks. I think it sounds funny. It reads as though the safe is protected by some kind of time-travel machine, or something that can otherwise affect the flow of time.

I've been watching Men of a Certain Age. I'm not sure why I like the show—I didn't particularly like last week's episode—but I watch it. I told the Comcast DVR to set up a series recording so that it'll be on the DVR every week.

It airs Monday at 7:00 PM. For some reason, though, the DVR didn't record it this week. The DVR schedule listing had a "don't record" symbol next to the name, but I didn't notice that it wasn't recording until the episode was mostly over, so it was too late to tell the DVR to record it. I don't know why it didn't record; Mom's recording of Hoarders was also at 7, but there weren't more than two things being recorded at the time, so the tuners should both have been available. Anyway, I was glad to see that another airing of the same episode would be airing at 10, so I had the DVR record that.

Actually, though, it didn't record that either. Well, it recorded the first 22 minutes of the show. The description of the recording mysteriously says that the recording couldn't be completed. In the recordings menu, there were also 8–10 other recordings with the Men of a Certain Age title. These clips are of varying length, between just a second or two and 17 minutes. But they aren't clips of Men of a Certain Age. One is a clip of the KING 5 News from that night. That's the wrong channel! There was also a short clip from The Tonight Show, but it might have been a promo aired during the news. It also recorded some clips from Today, Good Morning America, and Live with Regis and Kelly! Those last two items air on KOMO-ABC, another wrong channel!

What was the DVR doing, recording stuff on KING and KOMO at the wrong times?

This isn't the first time the DVR has messed up a recording of Men of a Certain Age. A week or two ago, it didn't stop recording, and recorded for several hours beyond when the show ended, presumably until the DVR ran out of available space.

This is probably the most frustrating electronic device I've ever tried to use: the Totes Shower Clock Radio.

I removed it from the package and couldn't even get the battery compartment open. I hurt my thumbs trying to turn the knob and pull on the door. I'm not sure if I wasn't turning the knob hard enough, or if I wasn't pulling on the door hard enough, because I had to ask my dad to open it for me. It's very easy to remove after the first time, but I have never had so much trouble just to get batteries into something. And the trouble didn't stop there.

Setting the clock was more difficult than opening the battery compartment. The clock's buttons didn't even seem to depress when I pushed them. Maybe this has something to do with waterproofing the device, but it didn't even feel like the buttons were designed to be pressed. I had to put all my body weight into pressing them. I physically exhausted myself and hurt my thumbs trying to press them. When I finally thought I had set the time, I was disappointed to realize that I had set the date instead.

The radio has nice volume, but it doesn't seem to tune anything in very well. The tuning dial is very touchy, but I haven't been able to get anything that wasn't very noisy and staticky. I couldn't get anything at all in the AM band except for a loud buzzing tone.

The mirror seems like a clumsy addition. The manufacturers intend for you to hang the device on the showerhead, but unless your showerhead is at eye-level, you won't be able to see anything in the mirror except for the ceiling's reflection. If you're able to hook the shower radio onto anything lower than the showerhead, then you could use the mirror.

I received this from my parents as a Christmas present. I've asked them to return it. I don't recommend that anyone try to put up with this shower radio. I've posted a similar review on Amazon.

There are some fundamental problems with the QWERTY keyboard, mostly because of how it was designed. The keys were arranged the way they are to prevent the typewriters' typebars from jamming together—commonly used letter pairs were arranged on the keyboard so that the typebars wouldn't collide and get stuck. That said, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the way the keys are arranged on the keyboard. Have you ever noticed where T, the most commonly used consonant, rests on the keyboard? You have to reach all the way up there!



There's QWERTY on top and Colemak on the bottom.

Colemak was released in early 2006; I've been using it for a year and a half. The keys are in a more comfortable arrangement: many of the most frequent letters—E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D—are all on the home row, so you don't have to move your fingers far. According to Wikipedia, "the 'top twelve' letters comprise about 80% of the total usage," so this is sort of a big deal. All of the symbols are in the same place, except that O is where the semi-colon is in QWERTY, but I never felt that I used the semi-colon that often anyway. Some of the letters are in the same place—in fact, except for N being switched with K, the entire bottom row is the same. This is very nice, because frequent keyboard shortcuts which benefit from muscle memory and proximity to the control key, like Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+V (paste), and Ctrl+Z (undo), are in the same place. The Caps Lock key becomes Backspace. Since this feature isn't available yet in Windows Vista or 7, I can't vouch for how much of a good thing this is, but it must be a relief from having to reach my right pinky to the awkwardly distant Backspace key.

One of my favorite things about the Colemak keyboard is that it can be used to type international characters by turning the right Alt into an AltGr key. This is especially useful for me because I'm a student of German, and it helps me type the foreign letters that aren't on my keyboard. To type an eszett (ß), you type AltGr+S. To type ä, ö, or ü, you type AltGr+D (for the umlaut) and then a, o, or u. AltGr+E is é; AltGr+N is ñ. If I want to type an em dash (—), I type AltGr+Shift+hyphen. I love em dashes. There are combinations for cent, yen, pound, and euro currency signs. There are also some special combinations using the backslash. AltGr+\ then D gives the degree symbol (°). AltGr+\ then T gives the trademark sign (™). It's very nice to be able to type these characters without having to resort to the Character Map, or even without having to move the position of my hands.

Learning Colemak didn't take as long as I thought it would, but it was of course a bit disorienting at first. I started without incremental lessons. I just printed out a layout of the keyboard, color-coding the keys which are typed with each finger, and referred to the chart when I wanted to type a letter. Typing was slow at first. I did this during the summer, when I didn't have a lot of important homework to type. I'd say I was up to pretty good speed after a few days or a week, but this was over a year ago, so I can't say for sure.

Now that I know Colemak, QWERTY seems awkward to type, especially the letters T and P. I am a little more prone to making mistakes while typing in QWERTY, especially when I try to type S or N. Looking at the keyboard helps me remember that I need to be typing in QWERTY; otherwise, I get a bit confused.

I suggest Colemak to anyone who is capable of touch-typing, looking for a more comfortable keyboard, and wanting to easily type international letters and special characters. If you want to try it out or read more information, go to colemak.com.

Yesterday, I was at the Meridian Cost Cutter in Bellingham. I was a bit surprised to see that within the grocery store was a small dollar-store section. They had shelves of merchandise including cheap toys, housewares, pet stuff, and food—all for just one dollar! They also had a few shopping carts filled with junk. Inside them, my cousin found some water balloons in horrible shape.



The balloons were disintegrating! They were dried out, and parts of them were flaking apart! I suspect these balloons were cheaply made; do normal balloons ever get to this point? I wouldn't buy these to use as water balloons, not even for a dollar! They'd probably break apart instantly... or possibly melt into a colorful slime. Also, the label has "balloons" misspelled.

This decorative snail-on-a-pedestal was in the half-off clearance area at Wight's. I tried to convince Kevin to buy it and display it proudly on his mantle, but he wasn't very interested in the idea. I would like to spray paint it gold and award it as a trophy, perhaps to the slowest competitor in a footrace.

Here in Seattle, new episodes of the syndicated show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire air Monday through Friday at 6:00 p.m. on KONG. Also, a rerun airs immediately after at 6:30 p.m. Also, on GSN, episodes of Millionaire air quite often. This blog article will discuss the difficulties I have had recording new episodes of the show with my Comcast DVR.

With a series recording, I can have the DVR record a show whenever it airs. In the series recording settings, I can tell it to only record the episodes that air on KONG, so there's never a problem with it trying to record GSN reruns.

So that just leaves the KONG airings. I can set the series recording options to record only new episodes, to record new episodes and repeats, or to record every show even if it would create duplicates. So there we go! All I need to do is have it record only new episodes of Millionaire. But that doesn't work. Perhaps because the show is syndicated, the info for each show on KONG says nothing about whether the show is new or not, so the DVR tries to record both shows, perhaps because it doesn't know whether or not the shows are new.

This would work, but I don't want it to record the reruns at 6:30. They would fill up the DVR, they would prioritize the TV tuners (see Comcast DVR Filling with Reruns), and the cable box is so slow, it'd be a pain to delete them.

I remember years ago, the Comcast DVR series recording settings had an option to record a show only if it aired at a certain time. Where did this option go? It was awesome! I could tell it to record The Simpsons only if it aired at 8 p.m. This way, it would record only the new episodes, which air at 8, and it would ignore all the other syndicated reruns that aired around 6. If I could tell the DVR to record Millionaire only on KONG at 6 p.m., it would be great. But this option is gone now, and the DVR is worse because of it.

So for now, I have been setting up manual recordings, bypassing the series recording entirely. Since the program guide listings only go out about two weeks, I have to do this every other week, but it works. It's just too bad I can't use Comcast's series recording options quite so successfully. Does anyone out there know of any tricks or settings I'm missing that would enable me to record only the new episodes?