Thanks very much to my friends and readers of Operation Gadget who have called and written to wish me well since I broke my leg a week ago today. My recovery is going well. My orthopedist says that I will probably have my walking cast removed on February 20.

I had to give away all of the hockey games that I was scheduled to officiate for the rest of the regular season. This means that I have a lot more time to get things done in the office than I expected. I hope to use this time to finish some tasks that have been hanging over me for a long time.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You should see me trying to move around The Home Office since I got home from the orthopedist the other day. They fitted me for a walking cast which is a fiberglass cast from just below my left knee to the arch of my foot. I got a boot to put over the foot end of the cast so that I can walk on it.

The problem is that the cast protrudes underneath my foot further than the soles of any of my shoes. I hobble worse with the cast on my leg than I did before I knew that I had broken my fibula. The problem is more annoying when my right foot doesn't have a shoe on it at all.

I told Chris Nolan this story and she suggested that I get a cane.

A relative who wants to remain nameless (because people at work discovered prior references to him on Operation Gadget and started discussing his life outside of work) is bringing a couple of canes over here this afternoon for me to try. I'll try to report on whether either of them help me to more effectively move around the house.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got injured last night while officiating a high school ice hockey game. The athletic trainer who was covering the game came into the officials' locker room during the intermission between the second and third period, evaluated me, and said that I may have a high ankle sprain, which is a syndesmotic ligament injury. This is not your garden-variety ankle sprain. If I have this injury, it may take me a while to recover from it.

I injured my left leg, so I was able to drive myself home from the rink. That's good because I was 65 miles from home and Kathleen was working last night. I rested and iced my leg last night and slept pretty well.

Now that I'm up this morning, I find that my leg is rather stiff. It's not impossible for me to move around, but I'm limping at least as badly as I was last night.

Kathleen is a pediatrician. She read her orthopedics books and some on-line resources last night and concluded that I should probably get an x-ray and an evaluation by an othopedist or a sports-medicine doctor. I'm calling my doctor's office when it opens to ask whether they think I should go to the Emergency Room or if they will give me a referral to see an orthopedist at this point.

I'll provide an update on my condition after someone who deals with injuries like this takes a look at me.

Update: After 10 hours of trips between my regular doctor, a radiologist, and an orthopedist, Kathleen and I are back and I have a walking cast on my left leg. I broke the left fibula between my knee and ankle.

The orthopedist says that I can be out of this cast in four weeks. After that, I will do some physical therapy to get back some of the strength and flexibility that I will lose over the next month. I hope that I can go back to my normal activities in about six weeks.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Even though I live and work in Bucks County, PA, I still listen to New York City radio stations whenever I can. Most of them are flat out more entertaining than stations of the same format broadcasting from Philadelphia. One drawback of listening to New York radio stations as much as I do, however is that there are some significant gaps in the format map:

• New York has no country station on AM or FM, since Y-107 changed formats in 2003
• New York has no oldies station on AM or FM, since WCBS-FM switched to Jack FM in June 2005

This situation is changing now that several of the major radio station networks are rolling out high definition radio broadcasting, also known as HD Radio. According to an article in yesterday's New York Daily News, HD radio is bringing back the classic formats on the HD2 channels of many big New York stations. Oldies are coming back on WCBS-FM's HD2 channel. Country is back on WKTU's HD2. Modern rock returns to WFNY's HD2 after just recently being displaced by talk on the primary FM channel.

HD Radio differs from Satellite Radio in two respects:

1. HD Radio broadcasts from traditional radio transmitters already utilized for AM and FM
2. HD Radio uses the broadcast economic model: advertising-supported, as opposed to the Satellite Radio subscription model

You need an HD Radio receiver to start listening to these HD2 channels. The hottest selling HD Radio sold through Amazon.com at the moment is the Boston Acoustics Recepter Radio HD High Definition AM/FM Clock Radio. This is the HD version of the Recepter AM/FM Clock Radio. You pay a $350 premium for HD radio circuitry right now-- talk about an Early Adopter Surcharge. I hope this price gap decreases as the number of HD receivers produced increases.

There's no question that my next tabletop radio for the Home Office will have HD Radio circuitry. The questions are: when will I buy it and what will it cost? I still want to try Satellite Radio for a while, and I may buy a subscription to it before I try HD Radio.

Technorati Tags: HD Radio, Boston Acoustics Recepter

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

While researching my article on the White Screen of Death problem my Treo is having, I ran across a recent piece by Stewart Alsop where he asks "Do the vendors choose the color of the death screen intentionally?" He says that the screens of death for his favorite gadgets are:

• Blue for many flavors of Microsoft Windows
• Green for TiVo and DirecTiVo
• White for Treo 650Treo 650 handsets that work on the Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon mobile networks

Stewart and I both have each of these products. I feel fortunate to be able to say that I've only seen two of the three screens of death that Stewart has seen. (I own two TiVos, but I've never seen the Green Screen of Death.)

I told my friend Chris Nolan about Stewart's story. She laughed out loud when she heard it because she knows Stewart pretty well. Small world. Chris has a TiVo, but hasn't experienced the Green Screen of Death either. She has made other platform choices for her computer and her phone, so those two other colored screens don't apply to her.

Do you know of any screens of death that are notorious because of their telltale color? Let me know by posting a comment and I'll add them to the story.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, TiVo, DirecTiVo, Microsoft Windows, BSOD, WSOD, GSOD

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the reasons you haven't seen many new articles on Operation Gadget in the past week is that I've been trying to identify an annoying problem with my Treo 650 that began after I upgraded it using the Cingular 1.17 Firmware Update. I had trouble upgrading my Treo by following the instructions provided by Cingular, so I only performed the Cingular 1.17 firmware update on my Treo and didn't do it to my wife's.

A couple of days after I ran the update on my Treo I experienced a White Screen of Death (known on many Treo-related discussion forums as a WSOD). This was the first such error that I ever experienced with this handset. My initial thought was that the problem had two potential causes:

• inheirent instability of the 1.17 firmware
• interaction problems between Chatter E-mail (my Treo email client) and the 1.17 firmware

I spent several days going through support and issue forums related to the Treo and to Chatter and concluded that I needed to rebuild my Treo application stack, from the core applications on up, and look for a third-party application or applications that were behaving badly. I did this four different times, and found nothing conclusive. The thing that pointed me back to Chatter was that the phone didn't crash or have a WSOD for hours when Chatter wasn't running.

I worked closely with Marc Blank, the author of Chatter Email, over a period of several days. I sent him a number of logs from the Chatter application after crashes or WSODs occurred and asked for his interpretation. He hasn't found any indication that the instability I'm experiencing is the Chatter application's fault, but he's given me some things to try that may have helped reduce the frequency of the instabilities.

A number of readers will probably ask why I didn't go back to Cingular immediately? After all, the problems I'm experiencing now are much more severe than anything I experienced prior to this firmware update. The reason I waited this long is because I depend on Chatter so much that I wanted to rule out problems with that application first. I don't think I've totally eliminated the possibility of a problem with Chatter, but I've done all I could.

What I'm planning to do tomorrow is contact Cingular and try to get routed to the Wireless Data Group. These folks are generally the only people in the Customer Service / Technical Support system who have a good handle on the issues with Treos, Blackberrys, and other high end handsets.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates, WSOD, Chatter Email

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

We had some nasty weather in the Philadelphia area on Saturday and Sunday. The temperature fell from 55 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit in about four hours on Saturday evening. During that time rain changed to snow, creating a scene reminiscent of Narnia. At about 9:30am on Sunday, the power went out due to downed trees in the area. Electric service wasn't restored until almost 6:00pm, so we were without electricity for about 7.5 hours.

One of the things that Kathleen and I had wondered since we moved to Newtown was, how would our Voice over IP-based home telephone service work in emergency conditions? Up to now, we hadn't experienced a weather-related emergency. This would be our first chance to see if calls could still be made after a power failure.

Since we moved in, I installed two rather large APC Uninterruptible Power Supplies from the Small Business product category. We felt we needed one in the Home Office and one in the basement where the VoIP and DSL equipment live. The UPS in the Home Office was mainly there to keep our PCs from crashing as a result of power fluctuations. The one in the basement was intended to keep the DSL connection and the VoIP lines running in the event of a power failure.

I was pleased to find out that the APC UPS in the basement kept our DSL router, firewall, and two Motorola VoIP telephone adapters running for just over three hours before the battery was drained. During this time I made several calls to the electric utility. All of those calls were connected properly. There were no call quality issues whatsoever. Kudos to our DSL and VoIP provider, Speakeasy for engineering their network so that a local power failure didn't interrupt our DSL and VoIP service. I know they use Covad for their local network services and Level 3 for VoIP network engineering. Both of these providers' local gear kept running during our power failure.

Most power failures that we experience around here are pretty short and have to do with things like automobile accidents that take down utility poles. All we're trying to do with our UPS equipment is survive this sort of brief outage, in case someone calls in to us on one of our VoIP numbers. Kathleen and I have mobile phones that we can use to make outgoing calls and that will probably keep working during extended outages like the one we experienced yesterday.

Now that we've experienced a day-long power failure, I definitely recommend that people who are replacing their old-style telephone service with VoIP invest in a UPS that has the capacity to power their terminal equipment (including their router, firewall, and TAs) for at least three hours. I would segregate these devices onto their own UPS even if you have other devices that you want to protect. This will simplify your planning because you will not have to arrange for the shutdown of non-essential electronic equipment in order to maximize the runtime of the UPS that supports your VoIP phones.

Your VoIP phones may not survive every outage with this safety margin, but they'll keep running during many of the power failures that we experience in the Continental United States.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, APC, UPS

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Kathleen and I had a terrific time at Walt Disney World for the past few days. We stayed at Disney's Wilderness Lodge and spent a day each at Disney-MGM Studios, the Magic Kingdom, and Epcot.

The weather was just about as perfect as you can get in January: mostly sunny and 75 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 27 degrees Celsius) each day.

This trip was about relaxation. I needed a break from writing Operation Gadget, consulting on the design of other websites, and managing servers. Kathleen needed to get away from the office and relax. We achieved our goals.

I'm not sorry that I missed most of CES, Macworld, or the Alito hearings. I didn't turn on the TV after the NFL games ended on Sunday. This was the right way for me to relax this time, and I'm going to try to remember this approach for our next vacation.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I are on a trip to Florida for some rest and relaxation. I probably won't have much to say here on Operation Gadget until Thursday or Friday.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Macintouch produced a very detailed Macintosh laptop reliability study with responses from its readers. Forty-one different models of Mac laptops are covered: everything from 233-Megahertz PowerBook G3s to 1.67-Gigahertz 17-inch PowerBook G4s.

There are a lot of interesting results here, well worth reading for Mac laptop users and non-Mac users alike. Maybe the least surprising conclusion is that the 12-inch Apple iBook is the most reliable of the current crop of Mac laptops. It's got the smallest footprint and it's made of the simplest laptop materials. When you compare it to the 17-inch PowerBook G4, you can see why:

• The PowerBook screen is huge, so there's more of a chance of the display going bad.
• The alumnium alloy case is very lightweight, but is also subject to failures from wear and tear that the plastic surrounding the iBook is not.
• The PowerBook is more prone to heat dissipation problems due to its exotic design.
• Innovations like the illuminated keyboard are the kind of thing that makes that laptop more likely to be returned for repairs. The only devices I own with illuminated keyboards are mobile phones.

On the other hand, wouldn't you prefer to have a PowerBook G4 if you could afford it? I'd probably prefer the 15-inch PowerBook G4, but I'd choose the PowerBook over the iBook if price weren't an object.

Technorati Tags: PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4, Macintosh laptop, Apple Computer, laptop reliability

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)