The only story I can tell to bring Operation Gadget back from the dead is one about my wife and what she's been through.

On November 7, Kathleen was in a car accident that scared the heck out of us. She fainted while behind the wheel on Interstate 95 about four miles from our house. Kathleen was seven months pregnant at the time.

Although the car was stopped on the roadside, it wasn't in park, so the car travelled across the southbound lanes of traffic and struck a median barrier. The car was miraculously not struck by another vehicle, otherwise Kathleen and the baby could have been killed.

Kathleen was transported to a nearby hospital and spent 10 hours in the Labor and Delivery Unit being tested for cardiac and neurological problems as well as for signs of premature labor. She was given a clean bill of health then, although she was encouraged not to drive until after she delivered because of what was thought to be a benign fainting spell at a really inopportune time.

The driving restriction had a big impact on family life and logistics, and was initially the number one reason I stopped blogging here. Since she was still allowed to work and wanted to do so, I became the chauffeur for the next 9 weeks. This ate up a lot of discretionary time.

What we didn't realize at the time was that Kathleen might have been experiencing signs of a condition that would fully manifest itself on the day of her scheduled c-section on January 21. She experienced shortness of breath, persistent tiredness, and a number of other symptoms that her obstetrician and cardiologist attributed to the late stages of pregnancy.

However during the c-section Kathleen went into heart failure. Although she came out of the procedure with a beautiful new son named Peter and in stabile condition herself, her heart was extremely weak. So much so that she had to be transferred from the community hospital where Peter was born to the Cardiac Care Unit of a major Philadelphia hospital.

She was later diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare but potentially fatal condition that afflicts a small percentage of women in the time around giving birth. This was a big shock, but Kathleen made a fantastic recovery. After spending five days there, she was able to walk out of the CCU and go home to continue her recovery.

Kathleen left the hospital wearing an external defibrillator vest. Her cardiologists wanted to rule out the possibility that she had an arrhythmia condition that might have caused her to faint before her November car accident. That sort of condition might also have been the cause of a six-second run of ventricular tachycardia that occurred to her while she was on the table during a cardiac catheterization procedure.

Over the next three weeks, she didn't have any further arrhythmia episodes, so the cardiologists cleared her to stop wearing the defibrillator. Then the cardiologists put her on a telemetric heart monitor to monitor her electrocardiogram (EKG) in higher resolution than the defibrillator monitor could, just to ensure there were no further signs of an arrhythmia.

She spent another three weeks with that contraption before being cleared to remove it. Including her time in the hospital, she was monitored for a total of about seven weeks.

Operation Gadget has often featured reviews and discussion of heart rate monitors used for athletic training purposes. We aren't reviewing these devices that Kathleen has used. They aren't about fun and games. They're nearly as serious as the cardiac events that they try to prevent.

None of Kathleen's cardiologists felt comfortable with her returning to driving a car before she had extensive telemetric heart monitoring and a tilt table test. She had to wait weeks after the c-section for all of these tests to run their course or take place.

In the past eight weeks, we've had a lot of fun times and a lot of hard times, but the focus has been on getting Peter off to a good start and getting Kathleen back on the road, literally and figuratively. When you have two kids under the age of three and you live in a small house, you need to be able to drive if only to give the kids or yourself a change of pace.

Kathleen started driving last week. Her first trip was out with Jimmy and Peter to Target, a place where Kathleen and Jimmy used to shop together quite often before Peter was born. It seems like trivia, but making a trip like that is a big step toward Kathleen getting her personal autonomy back.

I want to salute Kathleen who has shown great personal courage in getting through a scary time. I can't think of anybody who's had a more positive outlook in the face of the frightening possibilities of a medical diagnosis.

Life has been getting back to normal for some time, and now is the time to bring this blog back to life. I hope Operation Gadget is as interesting as it used to be. Welcome back to reading it.

{Updated / corrected information in this post is shown in italics.}

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Operation Gadget went quiet at the end of August. This is by far the longest break in posts in the five year history of the site. If you are wondering why, consider:

• I lost my job in September.

  This happened a couple of weeks after my family came back from vacation at Stone Harbor. I was only at that job for seven weeks, so it's hard for me to see the job loss as anything but a function of the deteriorating economy.

• I started a new audio podcast.

  Losing my job was helpful in one way: I was able to get off the ground HockeyRefCast, my podcast about hockey officiating. Episode 1, including an interview with Ian Walsh of the National Hockey League, turned out really well.

• I found a new job in October.

  Freelance writing and blogging took a backseat to finding another job. I was surprised to find that there was as much demand for my services as there was. I actually received two job offers.

  A well-known web publishing software company called Six Apart hired me to work for their professional services division in mid-October. I started working with them on November 3. This was a God-send because....

• My wife was in a car accident a week ago this past Friday.

  Kathleen was in a car accident on Interstate 95 just south of Newtown on November 7. [ Photos of the car after the accident ] This was a harrowing experience for our family, because Kathleen is seven months pregnant.

  We spent 10 hours at the hospital while tests Kathleen underwent tests to make sure that neither she nor the baby were hurt and that she was not in premature labor.

  That was a scary time, and I felt that Twitter was somehow inappropriate.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, I said I'd publish my daily schedule so you readers of Operation Gadget could see what life is like for me now that I'm working full time in Manhattan. Here it is:

• 4:40am: Wake up, dress in workout clothes, drive to the gym
• 5:00: Arrive at gym, do approximately 45 minutes of exercise, shower, dress for work
• 6:20: Leave for NJ Transit train station in Hamilton, NJ
• 6:45: Arrive in Hamilton Train Station parking garage
• 6:56: Board express train for Penn Station in Manhattan
• 8:00: Arrive Penn Station, change to New York Subway Number 1 train, head downtown
• 8:10: Exit the subway at 18th Street & 7th Avenue, walk east on 18th Street, south on 6th Avenue, east on 17th Street
• 8:20: Arrive at office in a non-descript office building on West 17th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues

• 5:30pm: Leave the office, head for the subway at 18th Street & 7th Avenue
• 6:03: Board the NJ Transit express train, bound for Trenton
• 7:10: Get off at the next to last stop, Hamilton
• 7:45: Pull into the driveway at home in Newtown, PA

If all goes according to plan, the total time in transit is about 4 1/4 hours.

I get a lot done on the train. I get extra programming done. I write my articles for Inside iPhone and Operation Gadget. I've been planning my hockey officiating podcast, which I'm still planning to launch in September.

It's hard to believe, but I'm probably in better shape, more organized, and more productive commuting over four hours a day than I was a month ago when I was working at my dining room table.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know what you're thinking. Dave was about as absent from the 2008 Tour de France as Team Astana. More in fact, because Johan Bruyneel appeared on Versus during the last week of The Tour as a color analyst.

So what happened?

I accepted a new job in New York working for a travel-related Internet company. The job started last Monday. Getting into commuting from Newtown, PA has been a huge effort for me, as well as for Kathleen and Jimmy. It has changed our lives and our schedules quite dramatically.

I'm doing the best I can to keep up. It's going to be tough again this week, because I've got a lot of hockey-related work to do in addition to the work at my job.

I did get a post published on Inside iPhone last Thursday. If you have time and are interested, check out Obvious Winners and Losers in the iTunes App Store Rollout. There I talk about an app that I think is a game changer because it makes the iPhone usable by people in a new industry, an app that surprised and delighted me, and a couple of apps that disappointed me somewhat.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NoGrapesNoNuts.com tells a humorous story
about Grape Nuts cereal. [ Image: Kraft Foods,
reposted on my Flickr photostream ]

Jesse Gardner and a few other friends of mine sent me links to NoGrapesNoNuts.com, a website that advertises Grape Nuts cereal.

The site includes a monologue by the presentor taking a humorous look at Grape Nuts position in the marketplace and its history as a product. I think you need to see at least part of the presentation in order to appreciate it.

What I like most about this site is that it pokes fun at the notion of building a website to promote such an old-school type of cereal. This goes to show that if you think outside the box, you can promote anything.

I think the site is very well done. I wonder how many more sites like this we'll see before the end of 2008? How many are already out there?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I had some things to do this afternoon that pulled me away from watching Steve Jobs' Keynote at WWDC 2008 where the iPhone 3G was announced.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in April, I wrote How to Create iPhone Ringtones from TV Show Soundtracks Using Audio Hijack Pro and GarageBand '08 and created a The Hockey Night in Canada Theme ringtone for my iPhone as an example.

For those U.S.-based hockey junkies in our readership who haven't heard, several Canadian news outlets are reporting that the license agreement between the CBC and the licensor of the song has expired and may not be renewed.

The song was written by Dolores Claman in 1968 and has been the theme song for Hockey Night in Canada for 40 years. Wayne Gretzky once said that this song is the second Canadian national anthem.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many of you know that I officiate college ice hockey, so you probably won't be surprised at my interest in a few video clips taken from interviews with four NHL Officials selected to officiate the Stanley Cup Finals:

These interviews were made available by ESPN on a website called ESPN Video.

I've never seen NHL referees and linesmen interviewed in this manner before. I think it's great because it shows the officials are human beings, just like the players.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Birthday Jimmy!: My son
Jimmy Aiello turns the big "2" today.
Here's a photo of the two of us
when we were riding the new
carousel at Sesame Place a couple
of weeks ago. [ Photo: Kathleen Aiello
via Flickr ]

I've been insanely busy this week, but I wanted to take a moment to wish my son Jimmy Aiello, the happiest two-year-old in Newtown, a happy birthday.

Jimmy has come a long way in a year. He looks a lot more like a little boy to me than a baby, and he has developed a real appreciation for trucks and trains. We play with them every day.

I've been fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with him over the past few weeks, and I see the delighted reaction of complete strangers when he tries to engage them in conversation. I know that most little children get extra attention from nice people at stores and around most towns. But I feel like he's got some combination of personality and cuteness that brings out the best in the people he meets.

Kathleen and I are taking Jimmy to the Philadelphia Zoo in a few hours. I haven't been there in at least 25 years. I'm sure we'll have a blast.

Jimmy's party is on Saturday in the backyard. Lots of friends and family will be there.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a music video that's making the rounds of web sites I read:

The movement away from Windows and toward the Mac is still in it's early stages, so lots of people haven't seen all of these Mac applications before. My question is, does it make more sense as a music video or an ad for Leopard?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a follow up to last week's article about Smart cars on the road in the Philadelphia area. The Boston Globe published an article on Tuesday that indicates that many owners of SUVs and pickup trucks in New England are trying to sell their vehicles because of fuel costs.

Near the end of the article the reporter relates the following information, attributed to Herb Chambers, a prominent auto dealer in that part of the country:

At his Mini dealership, Chambers said people have been turning in Chevrolet Suburbans for the tiny British car in recent weeks. He currently has a one-year waiting list for the coveted Smart Car, an 8-foot-8-inch vehicle that gets more than 40 miles per gallon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday on my way to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off Kathleen, Jimmy, and a couple of other relatives for a weekend trip to Atlanta, I saw two Smart ForTwos on the road in less than an hour.

Smart ForTwos like this one that was seen by
fleur-design in Louisville, KY are
appearing more frequently in the Philadelphia area
too. [ via Flickr ]

I saw one in Newtown coming on to the Newtown Bypass. I saw another headed south on 95 toward Center City before the Franklin Mills Mall area. Neither of these cars were Philly CarShare vehicles.

I'm really surprised at how quickly I'm starting to see these cars popping up around here. We live in a fairly affluent community here in Bucks County, but I don't really consider this area as trend setting as places like Manayunk or Conshohocken, or some other place where more city-oriented people with money live in this area.

I guess the fact that I saw these Smarts is an indication that people with disposable income are reacting to gasoline prices, concluding that the price trend is a long-term phenomenon, and adjusting their capital spending accordingly.

These cars cost as little as $11,600 if you want a completely stripped down model. I would never buy one that's low on features because you don't even get a radio, but you can get something reasonably equipped for under $15,000.

My friend Ramona Morel used to own a Smart. I rode in it in Zürich a few times. I didn't feel unsafe in it on the highway there. I wonder what it would be like to drive one in the USA?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've noticed that the first stage of attracting followers on Twitter (beyond your actual friends) is that accounts that act like bots start to follow you. Not to name any names, but one of my followers is just reporting random things from Google News, another one is just throwing out facts and observations about dog behavior.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Merlin Mann came up with a great idea a few minutes ago on Twitter:

Craving some kind of existential regular expression that could give me one week without hearing a single syllable about the primary race.

I'd love it if this concept was embraced by Google Reader. Imagine if you could use regular expressions to filter content out of feeds that you don't want to see? Or if you could use regular expressions to help you discover new feeds you might want to subscribe to?

The possibilities seem endless to me.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chosen to officiate at the 2008 USA Hockey Girls' Nationals last week in West Chester, PA. This was a marathon tournament that ran from April 2 to 6 and covered four different age groups:

• 12 and Under
• 14 and Under
• 16 and Under
• 19 and Under

The tournament was structured so that 12 teams could participate in each age group, and they were divided into two six-team pools for round robin play on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The quarterfinals of each age group were Saturday morning. The semifinals were Saturday evening. The final game in each age group took place on Sunday.

Amazingly, a total of 15 overtime periods were needed in the four age group finals on Sunday. This included a remarkable 8 overtimes in the 12 and Under game where Assabet Valley, Massachusetts beat the Pittsburgh Aviators.

I was impressed with all of the teams I officiated in this tournament. I was selected to work the Girls' and Women's Nationals five years ago in 2003. I must say that it's clear that the number of players and the overall skill level of each player has dramatically improved since then.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Beginning Wednesday, April 2, I am officiating the USA Hockey Girls' National Ice Hockey Tournament in West Chester, PA. I may not have time to post very much on Operation Gadget until the tournament is over on Sunday.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge on NYTimes.com: This story came out last week, right before Taylor Phinney raced in the Individual Pursuits at the Track Cycling World Championships. Taylor finished eighth. His father, Davis, is a legendary U.S. cycling champ who has struggled with Parkinson's Disease in recent years. This article summarizes their recent struggles and successes.
• ScreenFlow: The Killer Screencasting App on MacTips: "ScreenFlow is the application I've been waiting for on the Mac. I've been using it recently for the MacTips Videos and I love it! It's saves me so much time because I'm able to focus on creating valuable content rather than editing videos."
• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, if Others Participate, Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD: "As smart as in-car navigation devices are, they could be smarter. They could talk to each other via the Internet and share information on how fast traffic is moving on the roads they have just traveled.... Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms... But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express... becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. "
• Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? on Computerworld: "The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000."
• Coming Soon to a Phone Near You on WSJ.com: This article summarizes forthcoming developments in mobile phone voice control, improved web browsers, enhanced storage, and video sharing. [ Subscription may be required to read this article. ]
• How To Use Nokia’s Sports Tracker as a Photo Tracker on The Gadgets Page: "Ms. Jen was part of Nokia’s Urbanista Diaries Relay, which means they sent her to India to promote the Nokia N82 in all its glory. While on the trip, she realized how well the Sports Tracker (a typically exercise related feature) could be used to track the geo-locations of your photos"
• Note to readers: Today would be my grandfather James M. Lynch, Jr.'s 95th birthday. He died in 1982. He is one of the inspirations for this site, since he bought and tried every important electronic gadget that existed in the 1970s. He owned the first digital watch, desktop calculator, and personal computers I ever saw.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy mistook Windows XP for
Teletubbyland: Does your toddler do that
too? [ Image: Dave Aiello, in my Flickr
account ]

I started building a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Fusion on my new MacBook Pro the other day. My 21-month old son Jimmy was really excited when he saw it and came running over, pointing, and saying "La-la, la-la".

Suddenly I realized he thought the "Bliss" background was Teletubbyland. I started howling with laughter.

Although I recently returned to the Mac community, I always felt like an expatriate in the world of Windows. As such I never set up a Windows machine to look this way. I always made it look like the "Windows Classic" theme on Windows XP which kind of enhanced the backward feel of that operating system for me.

In this case, I was just part way into installing Windows so I could run a couple of legacy applications that I'll need for a while, like Microsoft Office and QuickBooks. This was just the way the screen happened to appear when it caught Jimmy's eye.

I switched over to the "Red Moon Desert" background so Jimmy wouldn't be distracted.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I never met Sheldon Brown, but I learned a great deal from him.

Sheldon developed a website, SheldonBrown.com, that had an incredible amount of technical information about bicycles and cycling. If I Googled for some information about one of my bikes, I often ended up consulting his site.

Sheldon passed away on Sunday, February 3, 2008, reportedly of a massive heart attack. May he rest in peace. [ via spare cycles and BikeRadar.com ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• RPI Plays Princeton tonight in the 31st Annual Big Red Freakout. RPI needs the win. In other news, the White beat the Red in the Alumni Game 9-8.
• Kipkay's Video Tips & Tricks on Instructables: "Here are 5 easy and cheap tricks for anyone who uses a camcorder. Total cost for all 5 is under $10!" [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Devices and Applications on the Wi-Fi Front on Web Worker Daily: "While many Mac-based users already have next-generation, draft 802.11n Wi-Fi technology in their homes (because they use Apple’s Airport Extreme routers) lots of other folks still use slower 802.11g Wi-Fi. This year is when official certification of 802.11n Wi-Fi is supposed to arrive, and the month of January brought some product announcements that point to what the widespread arrival of 802.11n technology might mean...."
• Review of the Nike Amp+ iPod Control Watch: "... the Amp+ isn't designed to be an all-around running or fitness watch. It's specifically designed for runners who already have the Nike + iPod kit. Similar to the Timex iControl we recently reviewed, the Nike Amp+ is a remote control for your iPod Nano, however unlike the Timex, the Nike Amp+ uses the existing Nike + iPod gadget that plugs into your iPod, so you're actually adding the iPod remote control to the Nike iPod system." [ via TUAW ]
• Crazy Apple Rumors on Hiatus on TUAW: CrazyAppleRumors.com is a site I just found out about recently. It's articles are what you might read in The Onion if they covered Apple more aggressively. Sorry to see it go dark.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday's New York Times had a terrific article about fighting a weight loss battle while working a full time job which resonates with me. What was most interesting was the fact that two of the three people profiled work at very athletically-oriented companies.

• Steve Madden, the editor of Bicycling and Mountain Bike magazines is 44 years old, 5-feet 10-inches tall, and weighs 198 pounds. In other words he's almost exactly my size.

  The shocker in this story is that Madden rode his bike 4,451 miles in 2007. No question that he could have journaled it all using a heart rate monitor like the one I use. How can you ride 85 miles per week, year round and not lose weight? I know. You eat what you want and never commit to a serious eating plan.

  There's no question that Madden is both fit and overweight, as I am at the moment. He demonstrates how far you can take this lifestyle as an amateur athlete.




• Marcello Aller, National Athletics Account Manager at Polar USA is 34 years old, 5-feet 8-inches tall, and weighs 218 pounds. He says:

  My colleagues think I look fine, but it’s become more of a challenge to become lean.... I’m not an endurance athlete, like a small cyclist or a runner. I have a typical, square football-player build. Sometimes it’s more difficult to regain a hard body; my metabolism has changed with age.

  Aller is an inch shorter than I am and weighs over 20 pounds more than I do. I weighed this much when I worked on Wall Street. He needs to realize that he'll have to both change his diet and work out in order to achieve the results he wants.

  I think a warning sign in his behavior is that he thinks his metabolism has changed at age 34. This may be the case to a small extent, but he'll do a lot better if he admits that the quantity and type of food he eats is a substantial part of the problem.

These two men work at athletic lifestyle companies where it should be easy for people to lose weight, keep the weight off, and stay in shape. Yet, it's obvious that doing the right things is not as easy as it should be. Most overweight people cannot lose weight by exercise alone. They have to watch what they eat and control the size of their meals and snacks. That's the key to achieving significant fitness and appearance goals.

I can completely relate to their situations. I can be an even better athlete if I have an eating plan. I made the commitment to plan what I eat again a couple of weeks ago. It's a struggle, but I hope to see the benefits by the end of the hockey season.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday morning 6:30 A.M. There's an eerie silence in The Home Office.

Over the next 10 minutes I come to the conclusion that the power supply on The Blogging Workstation, my four year old AMD Athlon 2500XP+ ATX Tower Machine that's the fastest PC in the house, has breathed its last.

This is the machine I use to sync my iPhone, and I'm only days away from buying a new MacBook Pro (or another high end Mac notebook, as soon as Steve Jobs tells us what the product line is for 2008). What do I do now?

Luckily I had a PC at the office that has been cannibalized for parts. I brought it home, took out the power supply, and initially thought that it wouldn't work with my motherboard. I found out that the 24-pin main connector for the motherboard was modular and could be divided into a 20-pin main connector and a separate 4-pin connector. I tried this and the machine started.

The Blogging Workstation still failed POST because I didn't connect the floppy drive and a few other minor things. I can fix those tomorrow. Hopefully then I can sync the iPhone and backup as much of my synced data, iTunes library, and other irreplaceable data on that PC to another machine on my network.

What a relief.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I came down with food poisoning on Wednesday night, and that threw many of my plans for this week completely off. There are few weeks during the year where a one day illness like that would be more disrupting. I was able to get most of my work done but the extra stuff that I normally do, like writing articles for Operation Gadget fell by the wayside.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I updated Operation Gadget to Movable Type Version 4.01 a few minutes ago. So far so good, but the website still says it was created by Movable Type 3.33. I'm sure I'll get the kinks worked out in the next few days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shortly after midnight last night, I was thinking about all the good ideas I get for stories for Operation Gadget that never make it on to the site. I get them while I'm busy at work. I'm right in front of or close to a computer, but I don't have time to write the story there and then. So I try to commit them to memory and often fail.

The thought occurred to me: Instead of coming up with a new information management strategy, just start a new story in Movable Type, type what you want to remember, and save it as a Draft.

Duh. How long have I been doing this?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the FedEx Tracking Details
from the $30 Apple Store order
that got shipped from China.

I crushed one of my iPhone earbuds the other day in the parking lot of BJ's Warehouse Club in Langhorne, PA. I dropped my headphones while trying to load the car during a shopping trip with Kathleen and Jimmy. I apparently ran the earbud over with at least one of the wheels of my 2007 Honda Accord.

It stinks to have an iPhone with headphones that don't work properly. I don't have the money or the time to decide which aftermarket headphones are actually better than the Apple headphones. So, I took the easy way out and ordered a set of replacements from the Apple Online Store for about $30.

Here's where the story gets interesting.

A lot of times when I order something from the Apple Online Store it ships from a warehouse somewhere in Pennsylvania, so I get it quite quickly. This time, however, Apple decided to vend this item from their supplier in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China. I have the FedEx Tracking Data to prove it:

• Nov 14, 2007
• 12:29AM | Package data transmitted to FedEx
• 9:45AM | Picked up | SHENZHEN CN
• 2:11PM | Left origin | SHENZHEN CN
• 3:55PM | In transit | LANTAU ISLAND HK
• 1:51PM | Departed Fedex location | ANCHORAGE, AK
• Nov 15, 2007
• 12:10AM | Arrived at FedEx location | INDIANAPOLIS, IN
• ...
• 6:13AM | At dest sort facility | PHILADELPHIA, PA
• 7:59AM | At local FedEx facility | BRISTOL, PA
• 8:07AM | On FedEx vehicle for delivery | BRISTOL, PA
• 9:39AM | Delivered | NEWTOWN, PA

Of course the packaged gained a day crossing the International Date Line.

FedEx delivered the package to my house in Newtown, PA before 10:30AM on Thursday, one day before they promised. All this package contains is a set of iPhone replacement headphones. I got free shipping on this order.

Imagine how much it would normally cost an individual to ship a package of any size via FedEx from Shenzhen to here at this speed?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 6 is Ernie Aiello's 75th birthday. I want to take this opportunity to wish my father a happy birthday and many more.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took an unplanned, long vacation from writing on Operation Gadget. It began when I unexpectedly changed jobs back in September. I don't want to go into what happened. I'm glad to leave that job behind and move on to a new one.

Shortly after I left my job, I participated in a tryout for the ECAC Ice Hockey Officiating Staff. I was chosen to work in the ECAC West Conference, which is NCAA Division III ice hockey for men and women. Getting the opportunity to officiate at the college varsity level has been a big goal of mine since I graduated from RPI. Kathleen and I are very happy that it happened.

I found a new job and started work in mid-October. At the time I was still finishing the paperwork from the end of my old job.

The combined effect of the job change, new officiating situation, and my normal duties as part of my family were enough to occupy all of my time. I'm coming back to writing now because I see the dust settling a bit, and I think there's room for me to write at least a few articles a week.

Stay tuned for news about how I used my iPhone to find a new job and other exciting stuff.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My father-in-law George Kuykendall pointed out an interesting article in The New York Times called The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin. It talks about the types of cyclists that go on European cycling trips that follow the route of The Tour de France and how older and/or heavier riders often turn out to be more successful than most people might expect. The article says:

... cycling is a lot more forgiving of body type and age than running. The best cyclists going up hills are those with the best weight-to-strength ratio, which generally means being thin and strong. But heavier cyclists go faster downhill. And being light does not help much on flat roads.

The article goes on to say that Dr. James Hagberg, a kinesiology professor at the University of Maryland, thinks that cycling is not as physically demanding as running. Anyone who uses a heart-rate monitor in their training can easily see this. There is a significant difference in average heart rate and estimated calories burned between running and cycling for 30 minutes.

This is a popular article in my office, where the all of the cyclists can more easily identify with Thor Hushovd than they can Michael Rasmussen, at least in terms of BMI .

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Jim Courtney over on Skype Journal reports that Andy Abramson and Dr. Helene Malabed got married today in France. Andy and I have only met virtually but we've both worked as administrators of the Atlantic District of USA Hockey. We have had a lot of experiences in common, including the good fortune to have each married Medical Doctors.

Andy is one of the most influential bloggers around, through his blog VOiPwatch as well as being the brains behind the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. I think the Nokia Blogger Relations Program is responsible for 99.9-percent of the buzz around the Nokia N95 in the USA..

Congratulations Andy and Helene, and we hope to see you in the Philadelphia area soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry I haven't updated Operation Gadget since my son Jimmy's birthday last week. There was a lot going on that took me away from my computer:

• Jimmy's first birthday party: We had what I consider a small scale party for Jimmy when he and Kathleen got back from the Shore-- only 25 or so of our closest friends and family attended. The preparation for it was very time consuming, but the day itself was great fun.
• Jimmy's surgery: A lot of this past week centered around preparing for and surviving Jimmy's hand surgery at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Jimmy had minor corrective surgery on both hands on Friday. This was planned a long time ago for around his first birthday so there would be fewer possible issues with anesthesia. The surgery went very well, but it was an all-day effort for the whole family. Preparing for this over the past few days was much more time consuming than I had expected.
• Major DNS problems at CTDATA: I did a big DNS server migration on Memorial Day that didn't go perfectly. The problems really started to surface on Friday morning, while Kathleen and I were at the hospital with Jimmy. (Operation Gadget and 10 or 12 other websites were affected.) Fixing the problem took up all of my time on Friday afternoon after we got home from the hospital.

I think we're back on track now, and I'll probably have more time to post the stuff I've been working on recently.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy at Age 1: Jimmy is
one year old today! [ Photo: Kathleen
Aiello ]

My son Jimmy Aiello turns 1 today. Tonight we're having a small family celebration dinner. The larger party for family and friends is this weekend.

Jimmy and Kathleen are spending the week at Sea Isle City, NJ while I am up in Central New Jersey working. It's a long drive to get down there for dinner, but I'm leaving the office shortly so I can be there.

I loaded several podcasts on to my iPod before I left home. This will allow me to catch up on my web development best practices while I'm in the car.

I forgot what it's like to drive long distances while I was working out of The Home Office. I'm getting back into listening to audiobooks and podcasts again, now that I spend at least 8 hours a week in the car by myself.

Happy Birthday Jimmy! Mommy and I love you very much.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the more interesting articles I've read recently is the reflection of a French Internet community leader on his role in the Nicolas Sarkozy presidential campaign. Loic LeMeur is one of the founders of the LeWeb3 who decided to invite the three leading candidates for the French presidency to his annual blogging conference that took place last December. Two of the candidates showed up, including Nicolas Sarkozy the eventual winner of the election.

The Sarkozy campaign subsequently asked Loic to join the campaign as one of their advisors on relating to the Internet culture. He said:

Sarkozy's team contacted me and offered me to become an advisor on Internet topics, I gladly accepted to participate in an Internet committee every week, a couple of hours, but that was all, I did not even take any membership in the party, and this is still the case today.

What's interesting about this article is the way the Sarkozy campaign ended up using the Internet to engage younger French voters. The effort included:

• taking questions from instant messaging and "live bloggers" during campaign television broadcasts, and having Sarkozy respond to the questions in real time, and
• creating an island called I'lle Sarkozy on Second Life which was enhabited by volunteers who reportedly survived attacks from virtual political opponents.

There was some Internet outreach in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, but nothing like this. Is this the sort of thing that we will see take place in this country in 2008? [ via VoIP Watch ]

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I worked on the migration of a cPanel server almost every working moment from February 27 to March 6. This was an effort to give my Weblog Improvement clients a better, more stable hosting environment.

The first stage of the migration was intended to be the only stage, but the server that I migrated the clients to started having primary hard drive problems almost immediately. That eventually necessitated a complete re-migration of the same clients on the weekend of March 3 to 4. The dust didn't start to settle until March 5 or 6.

I was really fortunate to be were working with a hosting provider with as many resources as ServerBeach. When the first server I got from them started developing problems, they gave me a second server almost immediately. This gave me the opportunity to get the migration started during the weekend and minimize the amount of misdelivered and delayed email.

From there, I had to jump almost immediately into the Time Zone change from Hell. I want to write an article about all the problems I stumbled onto in Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Windows 2000, TiVo, and the PalmOS, but I'm not sure when I'll have time. I guess the bottom line is that I'm shocked at:

1. How poorly most of these operating systems designed their time zone change mechanisms considering that time zone changes are determined by governmental organizations that are subject to politics.
2. How little operating system designers learned from the U.S. government reactions to the oil crises of the 1970s. If they had remembered the way that Congress futzed with the time zones back then, they could have designed a patch mechanism that could have affected the tables that drive time zone changes.

After I got done with that, I was so shell shocked from burning the midnight oil that I wanted to stay quiet for a few days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry I was away from Operation Gadget for the past few days. This weekend I officiated games in the playoffs for the Great Northeast Collegiate Hockey Conference and the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association. I spent most of the weekend at one of the rinks in Pennsylvania where these tournaments were being held.

We had another mixed precipitation storm in Newtown over night. I spent a good part of this morning shoveling and spreading rock salt on my sidewalk and driveway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been snowing or sleeting in Bucks County, PA since noon on Tuesday. The snow that was falling yesterday afternoon and evening didn't amount to very much. This seemed really odd to me because the weather has been below freezing for at least the last two weeks. We've also got frozen lakes and ponds in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania which is always the hallmark of an extended streak of cold weather.

We awoke today to the whispery sound of heavy sleet. Unlike most sleet events in this area, however, there was no thick ice on cement and asphalt surfaces. Instead we had very fine ice pellets everywhere. I later learned that this occurred because the air temperature at ground level was well below freezing while the upper atmosphere was quite a bit warmer. This is the opposite condition from the typical sleet or freezing rain event in this part of the country.

I shoveled a three-inch deep mixture of snow and fine ice pellets from the sidewalk and driveway in front of The Home Office. In our typical mixed precipitation events around here, this would be back-breaking work because wet snow would fall first followed by sleet, followed by an icy rain. Today we had very fine, light snow and ice mixed together. All of it was moved quite easily.

Kathleen drove our new Honda Accord SE to work with no real problems, but a lot of slow going. She told me that the road crews (known as PennDOT around here) didn't plow the roads the way they normally do. Instead, they put down a mixture of road salt and fine sand or gravel to increase traction. According to a news report she heard on the radio, PennDOT was concerned that plowing would have caused conditions to deteriorate because the roads would be more suceptible to icing.

They might have been right about that. I think the sidewalk in front of my house is a bit more slippery now than it was before I started shoveling.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and I are going to see Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. Kathleen's alumni association from Middlebury College arranged a group tour.

Febe Armanios an assistant professor of history at Middlebury will give a presentation on what we will see. Her focus is on Middle Eastern history and comparative religious history.

This is the fourth and final U.S. city in which the exhibit will appear. The last time the treasures of King Tut's tomb where exhibited in this country was from 1976-1979.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent four of the last five days in arenas in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and that's reflected in the lack of new content on Operation Gadget.

It's amazing how little of this type of car travel I remember from when I was in college. In those days, I used to officiate games between Rome and Albany, New York along Interstate 90, and between Albany and Glens Falls, New York along Interstate 87. I would drive hundreds of miles a week because that was my way of earning enough money to pay my expenses at RPI not covered by financial aid and scholarships.

(For those of you who really know officiating, this was well before USA Hockey instituted the Junior Officiating Development Program and my mileage pales in comparison to the amount driven by those dedicated guys today.)

In one 24-hour period this weekend I drove from my home in Newtown, PA to Newark, DE via my wife's office in Ambler, back to Newtown, then to Rahway, NJ, back to Newtown, to Aston, PA, and back to Newtown. That's 361 miles according to Google Maps multi-point directions, and it should have taken me 8 hours of that 24 hour period.

When I started this article, I was going to say that I've become soft with respect to doing the traveling that you often have to do as a hockey official. But looking at the map, I see that anyone would have been taxed by driving those roads at the times I did.

Anyway, now you know why I've been so quiet lately.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy at the Christmas Meeting
of Kathleen's Book Club: Here's the
picture of my son Jimmy that
everyone in Kathleen's Book Club
wanted.

Kathleen took our new Canon PowerShot A540 to the Christmas meeting of her book club on Sunday. This is always a really nice affair, and it got everybody who was able to attend in a festive mood.

When I got home from my hockey game on Sunday night, Kathleen showed me the photos she had taken, using the LCD screen on the back of the camera. When she got to this photo of our six-month-old son Jimmy, she said that this was the photo that everyone said they wanted a copy of.

I thought a few of Operation Gadget's regular readers would want to see it as well. Seeing it puts me in a little more of a holiday mood myself.

I think that this is the kind of photo that shows the PowerShot A540 at its best: a snapshot of a person or a small group of people where the subjects are relatively still and well within the camera's flash range. We keep the PowerShot A540 in the "Pets and Kids" scene mode most of the time, so that we get the best possible photos when Jimmy is part of the picture.

This is a very good camera for the money, although it isn't as good at stopping subjects that are in motion as our old Canon PowerShot A95 was.

Technorati Tags: Canon PowerShot A540, digital camera reviews, Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wes Howson was born on Tuesday at a hospital in
New Jersey. Everyone's very happy. [ Photo:
Kathleen Aiello ]

Wesley Howson was born on Tuesday evening in a nearby hospital. Wes was 7 pounds, 14 ounces, and 21 inches long. My sister Julie and Wes are doing fine. A number of friends and relatives visited over the two days they were in the hospital.

This is Julie and her husband Robert's second baby. Wes has a big sister Emma who was born in March 2005. Kathleen and I took a lot more photos of Emma than we did of Wes, but the main reason was that we had our own son Jimmy to keep entertained while taking the pictures. That's life in a growing family I guess.

This was the first time we used our new Canon PowerShot A540 to take newborn baby pictures. I still have to compare the images of Wes and his family to the ones we took when Emma was born. The Emma photos were taken with a Canon PowerShot A95 and I thought the pictures taken with the flash supressed came out darker than they looked on the LCD display.

This time we stayed away from the flash-suppressed shots, and it didn't matter as much because Wes slept a lot while we were there. So far the shots from the A540 look great. This is a great use for a point-and-shoot camera like this one.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Jeep Grand Cherokee: Here's the Jeep as
he looked on April 28, 2002, the day he passed
200,000 miles. I'll replace this photo with a more
recent one when I have time. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]

A few regular readers of Operation Gadget may have wondered where I've been for most of this week. On Monday I was looking forward to officiating my first New Jersey high school hockey game of the season, and all seemed well. I left for the rink as scheduled on Monday afternoon, but I never made it there. My 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee which had taken me to so many games in so many places coasted to a stop on the Sloan Avenue bridge over Interstate 295 in Hamilton, NJ, and couldn't be coaxed to move again on its own.

I had it towed back to Kerrigan's Sunoco in Newtown, PA, a few blocks from where I live, and I walked home from there. At the time I didn't think there was anything too serious wrong with the Jeep; Nothing a couple of hundred dollars couldn't fix. Maybe it was some weird piece of 11 year old electronics that failed that I'd never heard of before. The guys at the Sunoco station had fixed that sort of thing before for me.

Wednesday morning I learned that there was something seriously wrong with the transmission. The mechanic that looked at the Jeep wasn't exactly sure because he doesn't do internal transmission work, but he thought that the torque converter or the front pump inside the transmission had failed.

I've been this way before with my Jeep. We've driven most of the 275,502 miles on his odometer together. We did major transmission work at around 100,000 miles and again around 225,000. Neither time has the bill been less than $1,000. I talked to Kathleen and we agreed that we couldn't justify spending money on this significant a repair to the Jeep when we knew about other expensive services that would need to be done to the car in the next six months before it got reinspected.

Most people will never buy a car and keep it for over 275,000 miles, so the sense of loss that I feel might seem a little strange. For the past 11 years the Jeep and I have been together. When I worked in New York, we spent hours together everyday. I bought it so I could get to work regardless of the weather, and we got through some incredible weather events that left other people stranded.

Over the past few years, the Jeep has become somewhat less reliable mainly because of wear and tear on parts like the suspension system. I changed the shock absorbers on the Jeep a month or two ago because it wasn't handling pot holes well at high speeds anymore. I felt like that repair made a real difference in how the Jeep handled, and that we could easily get another year or more out of him as a result.

Last weekend, my wife and I took an overnight trip to Hershey, PA to celebrate my birthday, and the Jeep took us there. It was the first long trip we'd taken in the Jeep in a year or two, and we talked about how it was just like old times and the trips we'd taken with him to Troy, New York, or Freeport, Maine, or Toronto, or Charlotte. We thought that the Jeep must be happy being with us.

It's hard to believe that the Jeep kind of died the next day, on the next trip to a local rink.

Hopefully by Monday I'll find a charity that will take the Jeep and repair it or salvage the parts that are worth money. I wish there was some brighter future for my reliable old friend than this.

Over the past few years I've talked to dozens of people about the Jeep, and the conversation has always ended with someone saying, "That car owes you nothing." You're telling me. He left it all on the road.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

RinkAtlas.com, my new Google Maps Mashup, has been doing well lately. We're steadily building traffic as more and more hockey and figure skating programs begin their seasons.

I'm working on a marketing initiative now that requires extensive research and contact list building, so you may not hear from me on Operation Gadget for a day or two.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's actually been a couple of weeks since I last posted anything on Operation Gadget. I've regretted not saying anything on this site many times over this period, when I'm on a walk with my son, when I'm running or biking, or on my way to bed at night.

The good news for me has been that things seem to be going really well with my new project RinkAtlas.com. Working on RinkAtlas over the past few weeks has made me feel like an entrepreneur again, because so much of the success of RinkAtlas will come down to how well I do guerrilla marketing for it over the next month or two.

As is the case with a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, I can't take my eye off the ball in other parts of my life. I have to keep marketing Weblog Improvement-- my consulting business, because RinkAtlas isn't paying the bills at home yet by any stretch of the imagination. I also have to reserve large blocks of time to take care of my son Jimmy, which is one of the most surprising pleasures of my life. Who would have thought that I would have looked forward to feeding a baby or pushing a stroller?

I've been trying to figure out an example of someone who succeeds at blogging and being an entrepreneur simultaneously. There are probably many examples, but the one name that pops up in my head most often is Guy Kawasaki. He runs Garage Technology Ventures and also has time to write a blog Signal Without Noise-- a blog way more popular than Operation Gadget.

A few of my more cynical friends are about to chime in: "Sure he's your blogging role model. You just like the fact that he raved about RinkAtlas a few weeks ago and you want another way to mention it."

Oh, you mean when Guy Kawasaki said:

If you ever need to find a rink, this is the site to use. It’s the first mashup that I’ve found useful. :-)

No, I really admire him for being able to run a business, be a sought after speaker, and blog at the same time. But if he likes one of my sites that much, shouldn't I tell my readers?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Five years ago today, the worst terrorist attacks in American history took place in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Washington, DC area. This day is always hard for me, because I knew several people who lost their lives that day at the World Trade Center. I attended two memorial services for people I knew, and those were some of the hardest moments of my life.

In 2001, I was a well-paid IT consultant on Wall Street. When I worked in Lower Manhattan, I travelled through the World Trade Center every day. I still find it hard to believe that the towers are not there anymore. I've made my peace with it by riding the rebuilt PATH train line into the new World Trade Center Station. The tracks were laid in almost the same place as they had run before the attack.

One day I hope that the events in September 2001 are put in their proper historical perspective. Right now I fear that the political differences between well-meaning people in our society are still clouding some people's judgement.

May the victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks rest in peace, and may peace and understanding be with their families and friends.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The "hybrid" map of Van Buren Ice Rink in Van Buren, ME.
[ Image: RinkAtlas.com ]

Jason Kottke gave us his thoughts on "The Middle of Nowhere", prompted by an article in En Route Magazine. I have a different perspective, since I'm in the process of geocoding all of the ice rinks in America for my RinkAtlas project.

The Middle of Nowhere, in my opinion, is just about any place where Google Maps doesn't have a satellite image that lets you identify buildings. There are quite a few places in America that meet that definition. Places like:

• Van Buren, Maine
• L'Anse, Michigan
• Morgantown, West Virginia

Why do I say that these places are The Middle of Nowhere?

It has to do with the fact that the company that Google contracted with for satellite imagery didn't deem these areas worthy of a high resolution satellite image. This may have to do with the pace of economic development rather than isolation. After all Google has high res images of Bad Axe, Michigan, which is unlikely to be considered the Center of the Universe.

Places like Morgantown are strange because you can see high resolution map segments very close to low resolution ones. Dorsey Avenue in Morgantown goes from Civilization to the Middle of Nowhere in the time it takes to drive from Don Knotts Boulevard to Morgantown Municipal Rink.

For those of you who like to compare map services, Yahoo! Maps often has high resolution photos for rural areas that Google Maps is missing. I guess The Middle of Nowhere is a different bunch of places from their perspective.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

James Aiello was born on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at
a hospital in Bucks County, PA. Everyone's very
happy. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]

James Aiello was born on Tuesday night, May 23, in a nearby hospital. Jimmy was 7 pounds, 3 ounces, and 20 inches long at birth. My wife Kathleen and Jimmy are doing fine. Many friends and relatives visited during their stay in the hospital. They came home on Saturday afternoon, in time for most of the long Memorial Day weekend.

Kathleen and I took about 65 photos and uploaded them to Flickr as soon as we got back home. A lot of the services that Flickr provides, such as a built-in invitation management service, are really useful when you want to give friends and family fast access to a set of photos, but don't want the world to see them. There are many other ways to get a job like this done, but Flickr makes it easy.

Thanks to everyone who has already sent their best wishes.

Although our families and our closest friends knew that Kathleen was pregnant, I never took the opportunity to mention it here on Operation Gadget. The main reason was that I didn't want to give myself another reason to go off-topic. It's hard for me to keep this site as focused as I would like sometimes. I hope this makes sense to you.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have good news to report on the rehabilitation of my left leg. (I broke my left fibula in a collision with a player during a hockey game that I was officiating on January 24.)

My trainers at NovaCare Rehabilitation have decided that I'm almost ready to stop physical therapy. I have two sessions left next week.

After that, I can use the three hours per week that I've been spending in their facility to build up my road biking mileage and possibly find some spring league hockey games to officiate.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Kathleen and I met with my orthopedist for the first time since my leg was put in a cast. The orthopedist had my cast removed and had my left leg x-rayed again. The x-rays showed that my fibula is healing, but hasn't yet healed 100 percent. The orthopedist decided not to put me in another cast, so I can start physical therapy.

We were all surprised at how swollen my lower leg was after the cast was removed. I knew that my leg was swelling intermittently while I had the cast on it. It's clear that the swelling I was feeling was when my calf was swelling near the top of the cast, and that my ankle and foot may have been swollen much more frequently than I thought.

I need to do two to three sessions of physical therapy per week for the next four weeks, in order to strengthen my leg and regain flexibility. After that, we will meet with the orthopedist again to see the fibula has fully healed and if I can start skating and cycling again.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We had another power failure at The Home Office this morning. The power failed at about 10:30am and was off for about 90 minutes. The uninterruptible power supplies we installed to keep our VOiP lines running worked well again.

I want to briefly mention the good experience I had with PECO's gas and electric emergency reporting system. PECO is the local utility in the Philadelphia area that's owned by Excelon.

I called the emergency number, navigated through the voice prompts using Touch Tones, reported that I was experiencing a complete power outage, and dialed in the phone number where I could be reached for futher information. The system told me that I could call back later for a status report, if I wanted.

I called back about 45 minutes later. The emergency reporting system used Caller ID to recognize that I was calling back, and proceeded to give a status report. The system said that:

• the outage was affecting about 3,500 customers
• the cause had been identified
• a crew had been dispatched to repair the problem
• restoration was expected by 12:00 noon.

The power came back on at about 11:55am.

About 40 minutes after the power came back I received an automated call from the system. It told me that power had been restored in my area, and asked me to press "1" if I still didn't have power.

This is an example of an automated system that works. I had the option whenever I called PECO to switch out of the automated system and speak to a human being, but I didn't need to.

I think that this system is a huge improvement over previous mechanisms for reporting and assessing the scope of power outages. I hope that all utility companies are implementing automated response systems for this purpose, if they havent already.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

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)

Trek 1500 Road Bike: Members of my
family contributed to a fund so I could
get this bike for a combined birthday
and Christmas gift. [ Photo: Trek Bicycle
Corporation ]

One reason that you haven't heard much from me in the last few days is that I've been shopping for a new road bike to ride in the 2006 cycling season. If you've read Operation Gadget for a while, you probably know that I like to participate in endurance cycling events and occasional duathlons, and I trained extensively for the 2005 Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope Washington DC Fundraising Ride.

As the events I've trained for involve more mileage, it's become increasingly clear that I needed to switch from a mountain bike to a road bike. My wife Kathleen decided that this year was the best opportunity we would have for some time to get a good road bike for me, so she told my friends and family that she was starting Dave's Road Bike Fund and invited them to contribute to it for my birthday and Christmas.

I didn't know anything about this, so I was loading up my wishlist at Amazon.com with a Video iPod and accessories for it.

When the surprise was sprung on me three weeks ago, my initial reaction was: Oh boy, now I can get an iPod and a road bike. Reality set in when I looked at how much money I would need to buy both without making significant compromises in iPod capacity or road bike performance.

I decided to buy a Trek 1500, the top-of-the line model in their Alpha Aluminum line. The suggested retail price of this bike is $1150 and I paid somewhat less than that at the dealer I chose, Jay's Cycles in Princeton, NJ. Trek makes a lot more expensive bikes, but, I felt that the 1500 was a good combination of price and performance for someone making the transition from mountain to road biking at my skill and training level.

I also want to say that my decision to purchase a Trek was heavily influenced by my experience covering the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team during 2005. My friend Bruce Turner from AMD put me in touch with some people at Trek like Michael Sagan who really believe in the products they make. I was able to learn a bit about Trek's design approach for pro-caliber bikes, embodied in the F-One partnership with other Discovery Team sponsors, and how that's improved Trek's bikes that I can afford. I felt that the 1500 was the right bike for me at this point in my life-- the full carbon fiber bikes will have to wait.

I'm planning to pick up my new bike tomorrow and I hope to be able to post some up-close photos of it within a few days. I rode it for about 10 minutes before I bought it, but I'm hoping for good weather, strong sun, and light winds one day before Christmas so I can get a longer ride in and post an article about the experience.

Technorati Tags: Trek 1500, Video iPod, road bike, Tour of Hope, cycling, Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team, Trek, AMD, Christmas gifts

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

A couple of loyal readers have emailed to find out what I've been up to recently. I haven't posted much at all on Operation Gadget since we got home from The Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope, and there are some important reasons for this. Let me list a few of them here:

• Helping launch a new multi-author weblog: My friend Chris Nolan hired me to help build her new multi-author weblog called Spot-On which went live October 5. We're still tweaking the site to make it perfect, but this was an effort that demanded tremendous focus and intensity. [ If you need help building a state-of-the-art weblog, visit Weblog Improvement, my blog design consulting business. ]
• Restoring some websites that got knocked off-line: CTDATA had one of its three servers knocked off-line by an infrastructure failure at one of our ISPs. My partner and I decided to take this opportunity to move onto a LAMP platform three websites that still ran on Windows. This took significantly longer than I expected, and we're not quite done yet.
• Officiating lots of hockey games: I've officiated 13 hockey games in the last 18 days. That may not seem like much, but seven of them were ACHA college hockey games. ACHA games are three hours long and are often fifty or more miles away from my house. Officiating one of these games can take half a day including travel to and from the arena.
• Family issues: We've had a lot going on in our family over this period as well. I can't get into what's happening now, but I hope to have some news to share with Operation Gadget readers shortly.

Thanks for your interest and I hope to have more articles posted here shortly.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pink Breast Cancer Charm Bracelets
are new for 2005 and are available from
Target.com and Amazon.com.
They benefit The Breast Cancer
Research Foundation.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The businesses down on State Street in my hometown of Newtown, Pennsylvania have all decorated their storefronts in pink. This is to remind everyone that we need to find a cure for this disease which still kills far too many women each year.

Operation Gadget doesn't have a storefront, but we have the ability to get involved and call attention to products that support the cause. For the second consecutive year, Target has released limited edition, pink products to increase awareness of breast cancer. By far, the most popular product in the line last year was the Target Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Wristband.

Target decided to come out with new breast cancer awareness bracelets for 2005. The Target Pink Charm Bracelet Set has replaced the original Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands, of which Target sold hundreds of thousands last Fall.

Instead of the classic rubber bracelet, Target has designed thinner plastic bands in three different shades of pink. On these bracelets, you can hang charms that say "Hope," "Love," "Courage," "Mother," "Sister," and "Friend". These charms are included with your purchase.

Target's Pink Charm Bracelet Sets are much more widely available now than the original Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands. If you are looking to purchase Breast Cancer Awareness jewelry, we recommend that you order the Charm Bracelet Sets unless you are willing to wait for delivery of Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands.

Each Target Pink Charm Bracelet Set costs $10.00 and includes:

• 4 triple-strand rubber bracelets joined by a silvertone Target/ribbon charm
• 20 single-strand bracelets in shades of pink
• 6 inscribed silvertone charms that hook onto bracelets

Target donates one hundred percent of the profits on its Breast Cancer Awareness Products to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, an independent, non-profit organization founded by Evelyn Lauder in 1993. The BCRF granted over $18 million dollars in 2004 to 97 researchers in the United States, Belgium, Canada, France, Israel, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

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

Please take a moment to remember Newtown Borough Police Officer Brian S. Gregg, who was killed on September 29, 2005. I believe that he was the first police officer from Newtown Borough or Township ever killed in the line of duty.

Kathleen and I have lived in Newtown, Pennsylvania since July, and Officer Gregg was one of four full-time officers in our little town. We often forget that being a police officer is dangerous work, but it's easy to remember that if you're passing through Newtown today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've had a hard time making time to write for Operation Gadget for the past week. On Friday, Kathleen and I were in Maryland attending her brother John's graduation from a three year on-the-job training program. It turned into an all-day affair because most of Kathleen's family was there to attend and celebrate afterward.

This week I've been working on two different projects for clients of my Weblog Improvement consulting business. I'm working on a huge set of deliverables for my friend Chris Nolan, a journalist based in San Francisco. It's so much work that I probably won't be done until the end of next week.

Today I finished a small project for Harris Salat, a writer and producer who blogs about food and exotic culture. He calls his blog He ate well and I've had fun reading his articles during breaks in the stylesheet and template wrangling.

I'm trying to make time to ride my bike because otherwise I'll show up for the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope DC Fundraising Ride without enough miles in my legs. So far this week, I took one afternoon when I otherwise might have written some articles for Operation Gadget and hit the road instead. I'll probably have to do this again tomorrow.

I guess it's good to be this busy, but I'm feeling pressure from every direction. Maybe I should look back at some of the suggestions I made in the Productivity and Organization section of this site.

Technorati Tags: Tour of Hope

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not surprised that people in other countries are shocked by the situation in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They can only react to what they see on TV and what they read.

Americans need to demand a non-political response to this disaster. Politicians need to stop blaming each other and start leading the people. Racism has nothing to do with how Americans respond in time of need. We all need to think twice before criticising because it just makes the United States look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world.

If you haven't yet made your contribution to help our fellow Americans, do it now. Give to the Red Cross at http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html. Josh Hallett has listed lots of other good charitable giving options on his Hurricane Katrina page.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Judge John W. "Jack" Bissell, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, retired from the bench today. I've known Judge Bissell since about 1990 when I joined the Metropolitan New York - New Jersey Chapter of the National Ice Hockey Officials Association. He was a member of that organization at the time and helped me resolve a dispute with a coach that had the potential to disrupt my officiating career.

The Star-Ledger published a long article about Judge Bissell's 27 years as a state and federal judge. All of my friends from hockey officiating got a kick out of reading it. The part I liked best is this:

Today, with the rap of a gavel given to him when he first became a judge, Bissell will conclude his duties on the bench by swearing in a new group of citizens -- a send-off he selected because it is a time in a federal courthouse where everyone is happy.

I didn't want to miss this opportunity to wish Judge Bissell well as he retires. He's done a lot for the people of New Jersey and the United States.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I want to join my friend Doc Searls in pointing out splogs and urging concerted action from the search engine providers and context-sensitive advertising services to take as much of the profit out of splogs as possible. According to Mark Cuban, a splog is any blog whose creator doesn't add any written value.

The owner of a splog is typically trying to create a site with high search engine relevance without doing any work. The goal is to divert information seekers to these splogs, display context-sensitive ads, and get the information seekers to click those ads. Google, Yahoo!, and other ad service providers then pay the splogger for the clicks and the splogger has a quick profit.

I pay attention to referrals to Operation Gadget from other sites. Many of the sites that provide referral tracking services such as Technorati and IceRocket have recently shown a large increase in links to Operation Gadget which would normally be welcome. However, a disproportionate number of recent links to our site are actually from splogs. Here are a few examples:

• A page from "Your snow tires info" contains the bulk of a post called Maxxis Inflatable Tire Not in Place on Brasstown Bald Due to High Winds, a report I filed from the top of Brasstown Bald during the 2005 Dodge Tour de Georgia. No information about snow tires whatsoever.
• A page from "Your pmp info" contains the bulk of a post called Discovery Uses Personal Media Players to Fine-tune TT Technique, an extremely popular article about the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team's use of AMD technology. This splog appears to be trying to divert people searching for information about the Project Management Professional (PMP) business certification, but it's scooping up information about Personal Media Players as well.
• A page from "Your tmobile info" contains the bulk of a post called What T-Mobile is Missing by Not Quickly Upgrading to EDGE, an important article about management decisions that T-Mobile USA made about their wireless data services deployment. This splog appears to be trying to divert people searching for for T-Mobile ringtones, hotspots, and billing plans.

I'm sure you can see the similarity between these splogs. They take original content from Operation Gadget and other sites by scraping RSS feeds and simply put the articles on new web pages. Any ad clicks that these splog sites capture result in money paid to people who didn't do any of the research, reporting, or analysis.

Doc Searls doesn't run ads on his site, but he realizes that lots of sites would cease to exist or be scaled back if the value chain of context-sensitive advertising is disrupted by profiteering such as that embodied by splogs.

What I'm doing to help fight the splog phenomenon is:

1. I'm calling attention to it in this article.
2. I've started submitting splogs that misappropriate content from Operation Gadget to a site called Splog Reporter. This site was inspired by Mark Cuban's call to arms and built by Frank J Gruber V. [ Thanks to Doc for the correction. ]

Please let me know if you think of anything else I should be doing.

Technorati Tags: splogs

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm hard at work on a new blog for one of my Weblog Improvement clients. I hope to be done with the first production-ready version of their templates and style sheet early this afternoon. In the meantime, you won't see much posted here....

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pennsylvania License Plate: The only one
you'll find on my Jeep, and it's on the rear lift
gate. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]

Kathleen and I spent several hours yesterday working our way through the bureaucracy of the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles, also known as the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation or PennDOT. I found the overall experience better than I did with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, but New Jersey was one of the worst systems in the country before it started enacting reforms recently.

What blew my mind about the process of getting new titles, license plates, and registrations for our cars was the gaps in the information provided by the DMV in How To Title and Register Your Out-of-State Vehicle in Pennsylvania. This page tells you how to get a new title and registration for your car, but it says nothing about license plates. It also implies that you should go to the DMV to do this business, when most Pennsylvanians go to a insurance agency or another business specializing in "auto tags".

Maybe this is the way it is in the rest of the country, but in New Jersey the Motor Vehicle Commission issues license plates and the only way to get them without going there yourself is to get someone from a car dealership to go and do the work on your behalf.

The Driver's License Procedure made a lot more sense. The people at the Bensalem, PA office of PennDOT were overjoyed when we showed up with all the correct identity documents, including our marriage license. I guess they deal with a lot of folks who don't look at their website, or had the same experience we did with getting tags and just disregarded all of the other information on the site.

I guess everyone wastes many hours when they move and sometimes moving from one state to another makes things considerably worse. However, I expect that when I find authoritative information on a state's website it would better reflect reality.

Did I mention that Pennsylvania only issues one license plate per car and you put it on the back? I guess that's an oddity on par with not being able to pump your own gas in New Jersey.

Finally, I have a question about vehicle inspection in Pennsylvania that I have not seen answered anywhere on-line:

If I get a car inspected at a repair shop and it fails the inspection for some reason, do I have to pay the full price at that repair shop to have the car reinspected?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Greetings from the new Home Office in Newtown, PA.

I was telling a story of the move last night at a dinner with my wife's co-workers and we were laughing about how I had said, "there will probably not be much new content on Operation Gadget until late Thursday or early Friday." There was pretty much no chance I was getting on-line yesterday unless I wanted to post a story from my Treo 650, and that was not really a priority.

I had planned ahead and had DSL pre-installed in the new house, but finding the firewall and the WiFi access point and having time to install and re-configure them was a different issue.

OK, the set 'em and forget 'em stuff is done. Now we can move on to the truly important stuff: re-assembling the desk, putting in a few Category 5e drops, and finding the clean underwear in the boxes my wife packed. Maybe we can even put the living room furniture in approximately the right places sometime today too.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My sister-in-law Mary Kuykendall called me earlier to point out that this weekend a nationwide fundraising effort for pediatric cancer research will take place. Alex's Lemonade Stand, a charity inspired by Alexandra Scott's (aka "Alex") courageous fight against cancer, will be recreated in hundreds of locations throughout the country.

Many of those locations will be at horse racing tracks, in part because the thoroughbred horse named Afleet Alex was named after Alex Scott and will be running in Saturday's Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park Raceway in New York.

I've never done anything to help this charity before, but I feel close to it because my wife, Kathleen, has often cared for patients in the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Unit at Bristol-Myers Squibb Childrens' Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ during her pediatric residency. It's both inspiring and difficult to hear stories of the bravery of the kids and their families, and I've often wished I could do more to help them.

No kid deserves to have one of these diseases that we collectively call "cancer". I hope you'll consider joining me in finding one of Alex's Lemonade Stands that are open this weekend [ see a list of locations broken down by state ].

I'm going to try to go to the stand that is supposed to be at the U.S. Post Office in Roosevelt, NJ on Saturday, although I don't know if it will still operate after the Post Office closes and I've committed to attend the Lawrence Hopewell Trail Dedication in the morning. Hmmm.... [ Thanks, Mary! ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I keep telling friends and Operation Gadget readers that you shouldn't look at the major gadget sites like Engadget for credible discussion of fitness gadgets and sports technology. The editors of that site have adopted a sneering point of view toward the stuff that we're interested in.

There's no better example of this attitude than the article Nokia intros 5140i fitness phone. For illustrative purposes, I'll quote from it and place emphasis where I think the tone is most negative:

All right, fitness geeks, Nokia’s got sumthin’ for you. The 5140i is a tri-band handset designed for "active-minded consumers" (as opposed to the rest of us sluggishly-minded folk) that offers dust and splash resistance and "durability," which is apparently not a feature found in other phones. The deal with this mobile is it pairs up with special fitness-related software on Polar wrist computers (yeah, that means they’re watches) to download training data to your phone after a workout. The software keeps track of stats you fitness-types need to know, like heartrate and other various sundries (we wouldn’t have any idea — they never let us out of Engadget HQ)....

I won't get personal with the author of this piece because I'm pretty sure that the tone is an affectation that they've decided impresses some segment of their audience. What hipster sub-demographic likes this attitude?

You know, this reminds me of life in my high school. There was a large group of people back then who wanted to be good at the sports they participated in, they just wanted others to think that they did it effortlessly. When they thought nobody was looking they practiced as hard or harder than the serious athletes, but if you pointed this out they'd say, "Nah, I'm just out here to have fun," and they'd slow down to a jog.

Most of us young suburbanites grew out of such tendencies years ago. Isn't it time for Engadget to grow up too?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Pope John Paul II passed away on Saturday as a result of the collective impact of several illnesses. Whether you are a Catholic or not, you have to admire the Pope because he had great interest in our favorite subjects:

• Practical use of technology for everyday purposes: The Pope brought the Catholic Church into the modern world by commissioning a huge Vatican Web Site, http://www.vatican.va/. He also took greater advantage of television and radio to communicate than any of his predecessors and traveled to 129 countries. All of these efforts furthered his goals of reaching out to the world and communicating the word of God as widely as possible.

• Lifelong participation in sports: The Pope has often been called "God's Athlete". He was an avid participant in soccer, skiing, hiking, kayaking, swimming, and ice hockey, continuing to swim, ski, and hike until late in his life. His outreach to athletes was well known. He presided over a Jubilee for the World of Sport at the Rome Olympic Stadium in the Year 2000. His homily at the Jubilee for the World of Sport drew on many Old Testament and New Testament passages that he felt supported and encouraged athletic achievement.

It would be crazy for me not to mention a few of his other most significant achievements. Pope John Paul II played an instrumental role in the fall of Communism. He reached out to people of other religions in an unprecedented way. He was committed to the culture of life and the protection of weak and defenseless people long before he himself became ill.

Pope John Paul II demonstrated throughout his life that it was important to change with the times and adopt new techniques to reach out to others, while at the same time holding steadfastly to one's principles. He will go down in history as one of the key figures of the late twentieth century. May he rest in peace after a life well lived.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Yesterday it was 65 degrees Fahrenheit in East Windsor. The snow was almost melted. I took a jacket with me to an afternoon meeting but didn't put it on, even when I returned home after dark.

What about today? It was 45 degrees Fahrenheit and pouring rain at 5:30 this morning. By 11:30, it was 35 and snowing with 40 mile per hour wind gusts. The temperature fell to just above 20 degrees before dark.

There's nothing like a 45 degree temperature change in 24 hours. I'm glad that I'm at the Home Office and not on the road this afternoon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the first things that my wife, Kathleen, did after the holidays were over was to update her Amazon.com wishlist. She removed all of the gifts that people gave her that had not been purchased from Amazon. After she did that, she offered to update my wishlist as well.

Thanks to Kathleen who pruned my list, and to family members, friends, and Santa Claus who gave me gifts, I don't have that much stuff on my wishlist any more. I can't let my list stay that way.

One of the ways I can repopulate my wishlist is to consult Amazon's most wished for items lists. The first one I looked at was the most wished for items in Electronics which includes a large number of Apple iPod and Canon PowerShot-related products. The most wished for items in Toys didn't have anything I wanted to add to my list; The one thing that I would like, Atari Classics 10 In 1 TV Games, I already have.

There are some good ideas for most people's wish lists on the most wished for items in Kitchens and Housewares: there are a lot of Calaphon pots and pans on that list and two Roomba vacuum cleaners.

Apparently, Amazon.com maintains a limited number of most wished for lists: Electronics, Toys and Games, Books, DVDs, Music, Kitchen and Housewares, Baby, and Health and Personal Care. There are a number of other categories where I'd like to see what people put on their wishlists. Maybe Amazon will start producing and publicizing others for the next holiday season.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

We had a nice visit with Kathleen's aunt from Atlanta, Jane Kuykendall, over the Christmas holiday. Seeing her got me thinking of the Dodge Tour de Georgia. A quick check of their website indicates that the 2005 race is scheduled for April 19 - 24. No route announcement has been made at this time.

Regular Operation Gadget readers will probably remember my interest in the The Lance Chronicles television program which aired on The Outdoor Life Network. The Tour de Georgia was a major feature of this series.

I thought the 2004 Tour de Georgia was very entertaining. There's no doubt that it turned out to be helpful in judging Lance Armstrong's fitness for the Tour de France, still two and a half months in the future at that point. As was the case in the Tour de France, Armstrong won a stage in a sprint finish. At the time, some said that was indicative of the weakness of the Tour de Georgia field. I think not.

I'm pointing the dates of this race out to pro cycling fans who live in the U.S. in case they want to consider planning a trip.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

S'mores Nativity Set: The
Holy Family as marshmallows.
[ Photo: Santa's Depot ]

Kathleen and I have a number of S'mores ornaments made by Midwest of Cannon Falls. Most of them are things like a marshmallow man dressed as a doctor or a marshmallow man in a halloween costume. Over the past few years, many different figures have been produced.

Yesterday I saw that the series now includes a nativity set. When I first saw this on Boing Boing and The Bitter Shack of Resentment, I thought that it has to be a hoax. Apparently not. A quick Google search for S'mores nativity set produced many results, including an entry on WhoWouldBuyThat.com that speaks volumes.

What's next, the Presidential S'mores collection, with a figure for each U.S. president down through history?

I guess this shows that any concept, no matter how whimsical, can be taken a bit too far.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's light story volume is the result of my trip to New York City. Kathleen and I went in for the afternoon, had lunch at my favorite spot when I worked on Wall Street, Rosario's Italian Bistro, saw the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center, and went out to dinner in Greenwich Village. The weather was great (partly cloudy, about 50 degrees Fahrenheit) and the people were out in droves.

We visited a number of unique New York City stores, including:

• The Apple Store on Prince Street in SoHo,
• The Toys-R-Us in Times Square,
• The NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center, and
• B&H Photo and Video on 9th Avenue.

The city looked great and I'd recommend a visit before the holidays are over to anyone who can make it. The Wall Street area looked especially good, considering how much of an armed camp it has become. The Christmas Tree erected outside the New York Stock Exchange was as nice as it has always been. I was a bit surprised to see it standing in the middle of Broad Street with all the security measures arrayed around it.

I took some photos with my Nikon N50 which I will probably post when I have time to get the film developed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CyclingNews reported that Eddie Merckx rode in the Israel Triathlon Open in Eliat this weekend, participating in a relay team that also included German triathlete Lothar Leder and Israel Triathlon Association chairman Chagi Pagirsky.

The article points out that Merckx, arguably cycling's most legendary champion, has been extremely visible in the cycling world in 2004 and has dramatically improved his physical condition. Anyone who has seen photos of him in recent years (such as this 2003 photo of Merckx at the Amstel Curacao Race), and then looks at the photo of him taken in the transition area of the triathlon can see the impressive change.

I am really thrilled whenever I see anyone make a fitness turnaround, but the number of important public figures that make this much of a lifestyle change is quite small.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Home News Tribune reports that a series of cyclocross races took place in Highland Park, New Jersey on Sunday, November 21, 2004. I missed them because I had to officiate two hockey games (fun, but I can do that any weekend). I would have really enjoyed going to watch. I could have taken some photos and learned more about the sport.

For those of you who don't know, cyclocross is sort of an amalgamation of road cycling and mountain biking, usually contested over the sort of course that is used for a high school or college cross-country running race. Organizers generally throw in a few obstacles that require most riders to dismount and carry their bikes.

The Highland Park Cyclocross has been run annually for five years now. It is a UCI-sanctioned event. It's part of the Verge Mid Atlantic Cyclocross Series. I'll have to watch out for it next year.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TDFblog pointed out a New York Times article summarizing the doping case against Tyler Hamilton and his on-going quest to clear his name. A lot of fans of the sport have difficulty believing that Tyler would commit the offense that he is charged with (transfusing another person's blood into himself without medical purpose). Others, such as Olympic timetrial silver medalist and USA teammate Bobby Julich, wonder how so many blood tests could have been done in the past three months and only three positives uncovered for this offense (two by Tyler Hamilton) without a presumption that the test results are valid?

The New York Times takes a fair look at it, providing people on both sides an opportunity to say why they feel the way they do. In any case, the biggest issue yet to be decided is whether Tyler Hamilton will be banned from competition for two years. This is expected to be the penalty if the test results are upheld.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dave Aiello Out of the Saddle:
Covered Bridge Metric Century,
August 15, 2004, Lancaster, PA.
Click on the photo for a larger image.
[ Photo: Harvey Levine ]

Here's a photo of me riding the 2004 Covered Bridge Metric Century, a large cycling event that took place on August 15 in Lancaster, PA. The photo was taken very near the Pinetown Bridge which crosses the Conestoga River in Lancaster.

The Covered Bridge Metric Century is a ride I mentioned in an Operation Gadget article called Toolkit for Turning Garmin Forerunner 201 Data into Overlay Maps. My father-in-law, George Kuykendall, and I rode it together. We chose to do the 50-kilometer (31 mile) route rather than the full 100 km.

This photo was taken by Harvey Levine, a professional photographer from Harrisburg, PA who has taken some really good Temple University Basketball and Penn State Football photos. It has taken a while to get this specific photo and publish it here, but Harvey made sure I got the one I wanted. I'm going to put a copy on my bio page as well.

This photo is probably the best sports action photo that's been taken of me since I graduated from RPI. I'm going to try to find out what equipment he used to take it because that information is probably more interesting to Operation Gadget readers than when or where the photo was taken.

In case you are wondering, I bought an 8 x 10 print and it will be hanging in the living room before too long. [ Thanks again, Harvey. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got an email from Linda Frost, a relative of mine, asking for gift ideas for the upcoming holiday season. This is always a challenge because my birthday is right after Thanksgiving, so I have to pick a number of things at once in order to keep my family happy.

If you're interested in my complete wishlist, you are welcome to check it out. You can even buy a few things on it and send them to me. Keep your friendly neighborhood gadget blogger happy. :-) Here are a few recent additions:

• Cycling Gear
  • Rudy Project Kerosene Sunglasses: I wear a pair of these everyday throughout the year. They are the most comfortable, durable sports sunglasses I've ever used. Replaceable lenses and a number of different frame color options. I purchased my last pair over three years ago, and one pair is starting to fall apart.
  • Bellwether Drymax Long Sleeve Cycling Jersey: I've got one long sleeve cycling jersey. I need more. These are on sale in a color I will wear (medium blue).
  • Cannondale Vertex Shell: This is a cycling jacket that's breathable but water and snowproof. I have a winter cycling jacket from Specialized made out of Windtex. It's black and rather heavy. I need something brighter and somewhat lighter in weight.
• Electronics
  • Canon PowerShot A75 Digital Camera: This is a small digital camera (4" x 2 9/16" x 1 1/4") with a 3.2-megapixel image sensor and 3x optical zoom. I want a small digital camera that I can carry in my briefcase when I leave the office and in jersey pocket during rides. If I get one, you'll see a lot more photos on Operation Gadget.

  • Canon PowerShot S1 IS Digital Camera: This is a larger digital camera (4 7/16" x 2 5/8" x 3 1/8") than the PowerShot A75 that's capable of taking similar-sized images: (3.2-megapixel) . Why would I want to receive another 3-megapixel camera? The PowerShot S1 IS has a 10x optical zoom and that's an f/2.8 - f/3.1, 38-380mm lens in 35mm terms. This would make a good companion to my Nikon N50 35mm film camera for shots at family events.

    I'm not looking for a 6- or 8-megapixel prosumer digital camera because I don't think I'd use most of the features.
    

  • Apple 40 GB iPod Photo: I need an iPod. My wife has been kind enough to let me use hers much of the time when she is at work. I looked at the available options and decided that I don't need the iPod mini form factor because I'm not jogging as much as I was last year. I plan to have a lot of digital photos to show people, so why not go for the dual purpose iPod?

    One reason: price. I don't know if my father or another close relative would consider a gadget this expensive, even if they are particularly generous this year.
    

  • Apple iBook Notebook with 14" Display, 60-gigabyte disk, and SuperDrive: Every good wishlist has something big on it that's unlikely to be given unless a relative hits the lottery. I've got to many PCs and Linux servers in my life. I need a Mac with DVD movie creation capability. If the sky was the limit, I'd probably go for the 15-inch PowerBook G4, but that's probably more machine than I need right now.
    
  
  
• Entertainment
  
  
  
  • 2004 Tour de France 12-hour DVD: If you don't know why I want this, you're not an Operation Gadget regular.
    
  • The Flintstones - The Complete First Season: I used to watch the Flintstones every day after school. I have no idea which programs were produced earlier and which came later, except when I see obvious things like Pebbles and Bam-Bam not being in an episode. Seeing the first season in order would give me a new perspective.
    
  • Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Two: I am a big Bugs Bunny fan. Looney Tunes Volume One was great. I'm sure this series will be excellent as well.
    
  • Star Trek The Original Series - The Complete First Season: I put the original Star Trek series on my TiVo Season Pass list earlier this year and watched maybe two dozen episodes. I used to watch this show on almost a daily basis when I was in high school. I'd like to see the series in the order it originally appeared.
    
  
  

Yea, that's right-- no clothes. Just like when I was a kid.... Considering the things that I'm interested in, I think it's a pretty good list. I might make a couple of additions later, so check back. Do these products give you any ideas for your wishlist?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Living in Pink Wristband:
imprinted with Living in Pink
are available directly from
LivingInPink.com,
a non-profit that supports breast
cancer research.

Mark from the organization Living in Pink emailed earlier today and reported the following:

Living in Pink is also selling Pink Wristbands and donates 100 percent of proceeds to breast cancer research and awareness programs. We have discouraged people from selling/buying them on eBay as well.

Living in Pink's wristbands are $2.00 each, come in packages of 25, and are apparently only available on-line at LivingInPink.com.

Other pink breast cancer wristband programs:

• Target Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands, $1.00 each, available individually at Target Stores (limited stock, call ahead), or on-line from Amazon.com and Target.com in packages of 10.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is Election Day in the United States. Although Operation Gadget is not about politics, I feel safe encouraging U.S. readers to vote today if you feel strongly about the candidates running in your district.

I'm on safer ground when I urge you to get some exercise today. I think that exercise during the period between Halloween and New Year's Day is critical to lifelong fitness. Once we pass the end of Daylight Savings Time in North America, a lot of people lose their opportunity to exercise outdoors in daylight. Don't stop working out now and lose the fitness you've gained through the Summer.

I have the good fortune of being a home office worker at this point in my career. I need to look for days with good weather and calm winds, and use daylight conditions to get out on my bike. Riding at this time of year helps me maintain my fitness base so that I'm comfortable officiating ice hockey games on the weekends.

If you are an office worker, look for ways to incorporate exercise in your midday break (that time that most people call "lunch"). If you are fortunate enough to have showers at your workplace, bring exercise clothes and hit the road for a run or a fast walk.

If you don't have the flexibility to interrupt your day, try to timeshift by exercising before work. It will be brighter in the morning before work for a few weeks. Try to use that time to your health advantage.

If none of those options work, sign up for some sort of indoor exercise. Here are some options:

• get a three to six month gym membership,
• join an industrial hockey, basketball, or tennis league,
• climb artificial rock walls,
• participate in martial arts.

You'll thank yourself for being proactive on Thanksgiving afternoon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Boston Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals, winning their first World Championship since 1918. In spite of the fact that I've been a Yankee fan since I was a kid, no team and no city deserved this victory more.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pink Breast Cancer Wristband
imprinted with Share Beauty.
Spread Hope. were available from
Target.com and Amazon.com in
2004.

Pink Breast Cancer Charm Bracelets
were available in 2005 from
Target.com and Amazon.com.
They benefitted The Breast Cancer
Research Foundation.

A lot of people have been searching for information about pink wristbands that are similar to LiveStrong yellow wristbands, but specifically support breast cancer research and awareness. Target Corporation has developed the Target Pink Breast Cancer Wristband to benefit The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The wristbands are imprinted with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation's mantra "Share Beauty. Spread Hope." and cost $1.00 each. They were sold in packages of 10 via Target.com and Amazon.com beginning September 2004.

Target decided to come out with new awareness bracelets for 2005. The Target Pink Charm Bracelet Set has replaced the original Pink Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands. Instead of the classic rubber bracelet, Target has gone with thinner plastic bands in three different shades of pink. On these bracelets, you can hang charms that say "Hope," "Love," "Courage," "Mother," "Sister," and "Friend". These charms were included with your purchase.

Target's Pink Charm Bracelet Sets were much more widely available in the second half of 2005 than the original Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands were. At the time, we recommended that people ordered the Charm Bracelet Sets unless they were willing to wait for delivery of the Breast Cancer Awareness Wristbands, which were often back ordered.

Update: Target Corporation's breast cancer awareness program typically begins in late September, and stock is eventually sold out. This was the case in 2004 and 2005. Neither of these products is currently available at retail, despite their popularity.

Other pink breast cancer wristband programs that run year 'round include:

• Living in Pink Wristbands, $2.00 each, available on-line from LivingInPink.com in packages of 25.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (107) | TrackBacks (0)

I learned last night that Tyler Hamilton's performance in the 2004 Olympic Time Trial has been questioned as a result of an anti-doping test result that indicates that he may have received a homologous transfusion. The test Hamilton failed was administered at the time of the competition, nearly one month ago. He also reportedly failed an anti-doping test administered a few days ago at the Vuelta a Espana. That test also indicated that he may have received a homologous transfusion.

According to information available on the Internet, a homologous blood transfusion is one which is received from another person. Transfusions of this type are considered illegal in cycling because they have been used to temporarily boost the number of red blood cells in the rider's system. Increased red blood cell levels can help improve aerobic performance.

The test that Tyler Hamilton reportedly failed, ON and HR-OFF was introduced at the 2004 Tour de France. According to CyclingNews, there are two components to the test: "ON" which points out use of blood boosting drugs like Epoetin taken within the last five days, and "HR-OFF", a test that indicates possible "blood manipulation". Here's what CyclingNews said about the blood manipulation test, also known as "HR-OFF":

The more interesting method is HR-OFF, which can detect blood manipulations for up to four weeks using a formula based on the quantities of hemoglobin and reticulocytes in the blood. If this falls outside a certain limit, then a rider will be declared unfit to race and a disciplinary procedure will be opened against them.

We should all recognize that many of the tests that are being implemented to detect doping today are based on indicators that may point out abuses. The hematocrit blood test indicates the percent of whole blood that is composed of red blood cells. It doesn't prove that an athlete is using a performance-enhancing drug. Similarly, the HR-OFF blood test that Hamilton reportedly failed indicates the level of hemoglobin and reticulocytes (immature red blood cells) in the blood. As far as I can tell, it doesn't indicate that he definitely received a blood transfusion from another person.

Tyler Hamilton and his Phonak Cycling Team had a press conference yesterday where they insisted that they had done nothing wrong.

In my opinion, the anti-doping tests for the men's Olympic cycling competition should not have taken over three weeks to complete. It's ridiculous to have the time trial results thrown into question at this late date.

I also think that the anti-doping tests that are not definitive proof of a rule violation ought to be thoroughly explained to everyone with an interest in cycling: athletes, coaches, sponsors, and fans of the sport. I don't think that anyone without a medical or athletic testing background can judge whether the tests that Tyler Hamilton reportedly failed were fair to him. Everyone needs to be able to understand these rules, particularly if they are going to be used to disqualify finishers after the race is over.

Update: TDFblog provides an excellent report on the Tyler Hamilton doping case, drawing on previous reports about Jesus Manzano's allegations of blood doping activity while he rode for the Kelme pro cycling team. I didn't make this connection when I initially heard about Tyler Hamiton's positive test result.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's Boston Globe had an article called You Survived Cancer. Now What? that focused on the difficulties that Shari Dicker and other survivors of adult-onset cancer face as a result of having the good fortune of being a long term cancer survivor. The article talks about the Lance Armstrong Foundation Adult Survivorship Clinic that was announced on August 30 at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The Lance Armstrong Foundation gave a $1 million dollar grant to Dana-Farber to make this new clinic a reality.

The Boston Globe article says:

Armstrong, a survivor of testicular cancer, recently jump-started something of a minor social movement around the issue, drawing attention to the problems of survivors, in addition to providing direct funding. His foundation's "LiveStrong" yellow wristbands have become the fashion statement of the moment -- worn by dozens of Olympic athletes, among others -- and are helping to raise money for survivorship research and care.

This is one of the best articles I've read so far, in terms of explaining exactly how LiveStrong campaign money is being used.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, two Operation Gadget readers commented that they have received LiveStrong yellow wristbands directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation by placing an order for 10 wristbands and waiting for delivery. I will repeat their comments here so that more readers can see them:

Just because the bands are backordered doesn't mean you can't place an order. My friend ordered a 10 pack at the end of July and it came in 2-3 weeks. Not sure why someone would want to pay $10 for one band, just to get it sooner. Also, the LAF sends them to countries all over the world, not just the USA.

For those of you who "only want one", don't be cheap. Buy a 10-pack and give them to your friends and family, for crying out loud.

--jvickers in response to Where to Buy a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband

I'm from the Philippines and we did your 3rd suggestion. {"Organize a small group of friends and purchase a 10-pack directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation."} The package just arrived last friday. I'm proud to say that I'm now wearing the band. :)

--Charo in response to Suggestions for Finding a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband Outside the United States

If their experience is an indication of how the Lance Armstrong Foundation is handling back orders, then I think ordering a 10-pack of LiveStrong yellow wristbands directly from the LAF is the most efficient way to get them at this time. I ordered a 10-pack directly from the LAF this morning. I was charged $13.06 for a 10-pack, including shipping.

When I receive the 10-pack that I ordered, I'll let you know here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (61) | TrackBacks (0)

After almost two days of trying, I've uncorrupted my email archive. The idea that I had to convert my archive from mbox to maildir didn't work for reasons that are too technical to discuss here. I'm back on the job now....

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you're wondering why I haven't posted anything on Operation Gadget in almost two days, I really messed up my email archive. When I start my email client, my computer tries to rebuild the indexes on my inbox and ends up hanging after 20 or 30 minutes.

I am attempting a truly geeky solution: converting my email from the mbox to maildir format. Hopefully this will work. I will let you know if it does, but I don't intend to blog the details. I want to get away from solutions that only a Linux hacker could love. I've felt like one of Wile E. Coyote's relatives lately.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally met Doc Searls in person last night at a reception in his and his wife's honor at Andrew Rasiej's house in Manhattan. Being there was one of the neatest experiences I've ever had as a result of running a weblog. I met 10 or 15 people that broadened my horizons a bit. That's a lot for one night.

Many Operation Gadget readers weren't here at the very beginning. But, Doc generously praised this site early on. He's one of the founding fathers of the weblog movement, and a really nice guy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today The Wall Street Journal reported that eBay is hosting the auction of hundreds of individual LiveStrong yellow wristbands because they do not have a rule against profiting on the resale of them. [ Paid subscription required to access the article. ] I visited eBay today and saw that eBayers are doing a brisk business reselling these wristbands. Here are a few examples of auctions I saw:

• One LiveStrong wristband with a BuyItNow price of $30.00.
• Multiple LiveStrong wristbands in one day auctions, with multiple bids well in excess of $1.00.
• Shipping charges of $4.00 or more for one LiveStrong wristband.

The examples I chose don't say anything about donating profits from the auctions to the The Lance Armstrong Foundation. So, I have to assume that these people are hoarding LiveStrong wristbands and trying to profit on their resale.

Some people would say that these eBayers are performing a useful public service by making LiveStrong wristbands available at prices that reflect their true market value. But, by hoarding the wristbands in the first place, they are contributing to the shortage and increasing the likelyhood of receiving a small windfall.

Nobody has to stop doing business because I say so. But, I have no respect for people that bought extra LiveStrong wristbands with the intention of making a profit.

Continue reading "eBayers Hoarding LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands can be
ordered from the Discovery Channel
On-Line Store by customers in Canada
and the United Kingdom. In other countries,
buy from the Lance Armstrong
Foundation On-Line Store.

Over the last few days, thousands of visitors have come to Operation Gadget from Google and other major search engines, looking for information on obtaining a LiveStrong yellow wristband. Apparently, interest in wristbands is particularly high in Europe, where the coverage of Lance Armstrong's sixth consecutive Tour de France victory was particularly intense.

Early on in the marketing effort, LiveStrong supporters in the United States were able to find LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands using the LiveStrong dealer locator. Many of the stores listed there no longer keep LiveStrong Wristbands in stock. That doesn't matter to people who live outside the United States, since LiveStrong Wristbands were never available at retail stores in most countries.

If you live outside the United States, I recommend the following approach:

• If you live in Canada or the United Kingdom, order a 10-pack of LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands from the Discovery Channel On-Line Store. The cost is US$ 10.00 plus shipping and handling. As of February 10, 2005, Discovery has plenty of stock and customer service has been excellent.
• If you do not live in Canada or the UK, order a 10-pack directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation. This has been particularly successful since July 2004, see Readers Successfully Buying 10-Packs of LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands Directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation for more information.

Good luck obtaining your LiveStrong wrist band. Wearing one is a great show of support for cancer patients and survivors everywhere.

Update: This article was updated on February 10, 2005 to reflect the latest information about LiveStrong Wristband availability.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (43) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night, I stopped in to Cranbury Pizza to pick up dinner. While I was paying, a young woman that worked there shouted, "Hey he's got one of those wristbands too!" I looked up and saw that she had been talking to a co-worker who wears a LiveStrong yellow wristband, and they had both just seen me for the first time.

I asked her, "Have you never seen anyone else wearing one of these?" She said "No."

A conversation ensued. The owner of the pizzeria asked me what these wristbands represent. I guess he never thought about it because he'd only seen one of them. I told him about the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the LiveStrong program, and the fact that the Wear Yellow campaign is aimed at raising $5 million to help cancer survivors who have unmet physical, emotional, or practical needs. The owner said, "Well, we all know someone who has survived cancer." Sounds like he'll be looking for a yellow wristband of his own soon.

Hopefully, everyone who wears a LiveStrong wristband knows a bit about the program behind it. You can never tell when you will have the opportunity to tell the story.

Update: Did anyone else notice that Fillippo Pozzato of the Fassa Bortolo cycling team won stage Tour de France Stage 7 wearing a LiveStrong wristband?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Outside Magazine did a fine job previewing the 2004 Tour de France in its July 2004 issue. Five major articles including:

• An interview with Lance Armstrong when he was still training in California. (Excerpt available on-line.)
• An article about Tyler Hamilton, including many more details of his life before cycling than are typically provided.
• A lengthy article about Victor Hugo Pena and training for the Tour around his home in Colombia. Too bad he was named as a USPS reserve rider.
• An article about Phil Ligett and Paul Sherwin, the television hosts of the Tour de France on the Outdoor Life Network.

Plus brief articles about:

• the five leading contenders for the Yellow Jersey in this year's Tour: Jan Ulrich, Iban Mayo, Ivan Basso, Alexandre Vinokourov, and Roberto Heras, (Vinokouov is out of the Tour this year with an injury),
• three "living legends" who each previously won five Tours de France: Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain, and
• illustrations of important Tour stages and terminology unfamiliar to new Tour viewers.

Overall, it's a surprisingly good issue-- well worth the $4.95 charged on the newsstand.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've really been cranking away for the past few days, trying to put the finishing touches on a state-of-the-art Postfix+Courier-IMAP+SASL2+PAM+MySQL+Amavisd-new mail server. If you remember my article from 10 days ago, First Run of the Season in the Heat is Always Depressing, I feel the same way I did then, but this time I'm beaten down technically. I wish it would work, but it won't.

When I solve the problem (can't get SASL to authenticate a crypted password stored in MySQL), I'm sure it will turn out that I overlooked the obvious or omitted one step of a 37-step process. It's a relief when I put a problem like this behind me. But it takes a long time to regain that feeling that I really know what I'm doing when it comes to Linux.

It's important to have exercise habits at times like these because sometimes I think of other approaches to solving difficult technical problems when I'm running, riding my bike, or even mowing the lawn. I thought maybe I'd have an epiphany when I went to Newark Liberty Airport to pick up a friend this afternoon. I didn't.

I'll do the workout early in the day tomorrow.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands are available
from the Discovery Channel On-Line Store
or the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

It's pretty obvious that some people are visiting Operation Gadget looking for information on the availability of LiveStrong yellow wristbands. The Get It Here link prominently displayed on the Wear Yellow website, sends you to the Lance Armstrong Foundation On-Line Store where the wristbands are available in quantity 10, 100, or 1200. Ordering from the Lance Armstrong Foundation On-Line Store is currently the best option for people who live outside the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

For people in the USA, Canada, and the UK, the fastest way to get a LiveStrong Wristband is to order a 10-pack from the Discovery Channel On-Line Store. Discovery Communications is the new sponsor of Lance Armstrong's professional cycling team, and they have made a major commitment to support the goals of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I ordered two 10-packs from the Discovery Channel in February 2005, and I received my order in six days. The price of the 10-packs is the same as at the LAF, and the money goes to the same place, so you can't go wrong.

These are the most reliable ways to obtain the wristbands at this time, without resorting to buying on eBay. When you buy LiveStrong wristbands on eBay, you often end up paying significantly more than $1.00 plus reasonable shipping costs. No one can guarantee that the extra money you pay will be donated to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Therefore, I would urge people who are committed to the goals of the LiveStrong campaign to buy directly from the LAF or the Discovery Channel On-Line Store and give away the extra wristbands that you and your family cannot personally wear.

Update: This article was updated on September 20, 2004 and February 10, 2005 to reflect the latest information about LiveStrong Wristband availability.

Related articles:

• LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands Available Quickly from the Discovery Channel On-Line Store
• Readers Successfully Buying 10-Packs of LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands Directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Suggestions for Finding a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband Outside the United States
• Nike and LAF Sell LiveStrong Wrist Bands at End of Each Tour de France Stage, Some European Media is Still Critical
• Meeting Other LiveStrong Yellow Wristband Wearers
• Why There is Some Confusion Over the LiveStrong Campaign Fund Raising Goal

Articles related to how to buy Pink Breast Cancer Research Wristbands:

• Pink Breast Cancer Wristbands Available from Target.com and Amazon.com

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (257) | TrackBacks (0)

AFP reports that Lance Armstrong has been accused of cheating during both his pre- and post-cancer careers in a new book that is about to be published in France. Excerpts of the book L.A. Confidentiel appear in this week's l'Express, a French magazine.

I read the excerpts of the book using the Google translation tool and I have to say that I'm not impressed. The accusations by Emma O'Reilly and Stephen Swart are old, which doesn't make them wrong, just suspicious. They must both be very angry at something in order to be willing to turn back the clock and make allegations like these. If the allegations are true, why did they wait until Lance Armstrong had won five Tours de France before making them?

Then there's the idea that someone like Lance Armstrong could secretly be on erythropoietin (EPO). This is a drug that can be detected in the blood within 72 hours of administration. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has rules that are designed to deal with these limitations. Lance Armstrong and his co-author Sally Jenkins discuss this in Every Second Counts:

Even out of season, I was, and am, tested by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. It's a moment of wearing familiarity: I'm sitting in my kitchen early one Texas morning, sipping coffee and whispering so as not to wake assorted children, when there's a loud ringing at the doorbell. Standing on the front step of my home is a representative from USADA, coming on like John Wayne, holding out a piece of paper like a warrant and telling me to take a drug test or risk being banned from my sport....

... I was required to inform the USADA of my whereabouts at all times. No matter where I went. Anytime I changed locations, I was supposed to fax or email them as to my movements.

The book and the AFP article also re-raises a bogus in-season drug testing issue. The AFP article says:

Armstrong has always strenuously denied taking performance enhancing drugs and has only tested positive once - for a corticostroid at the Tour de France in 1999, for which cycling's world ruling body the UCI did not sanction him.

Why didn't the UCI sanction him? Armstrong says in Every Second Counts:

I used an analgesic cream that contained corticsteroid to treat a case of saddle sores, so the press reported that I tested positive for a banned steroid. It was untrue. I had received permission from race authorities to use the cream, disclosing its contents. In fact, all of my tests were clean, and I asked the Tour to release the results, which they did.

In order to believe the allegations in L.A. Confidentiel, you'd have to believe that significant portions of Lance Armstrong's two books are false, and The Lance Chronicles documentary is a sham. I don't believe the allegations, and I don't think it's because of my wishful thinking.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since I got my LiveStrong yellow wristband, I've been confused about the fundraising goal of the campaign. Some websites say the goal is $5 million, others say it's $6 million. Thanks to an interview Lance Armstrong gave to CyclingNews earlier this week, I now have an answer. Here's what Lance Armstrong says about the campaign {emphasis added by me to point out the relevant information}:

Our web guy at the Lance Armstrong Foundation, Randall Macon started probably eighteen months ago creating the content for the Livestrong program and it was a long time before we launched it and it's not even fully launched yet. Livestrong is a division of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, with a separate website (www.Livestrong.Org) that's a resource center for cancer survivors, family members of cancer survivors, anybody with questions. We want this place to be the place that people go, like they're diagnosed, they go to the doctor, they get the bad news, they come home and they go to Livestrong.Org, just to try to find answers to their questions, to try and find support from fellow cancer survivors, people who've been through what they've been through or what they're going to go through. It will be our flagship program over time.

So what happened was Nike came along, heard about it and loved the idea and came to us with the offer of making five million of these yellow wristbands [with Livestrong on them] and selling them for a dollar and giving the proceeds, which is five million dollars, to the LAF.

But to kick it off, [Nike] donated a million {dollars}, so you're talking about six {million}. Last I heard, they'd blown through the five million, I think and are considering making more. And the great thing about a company like Nike, outside of the fact that they actually did it, is that they've got famous athletes all over the world, that they say 'hey another one of your fellow Nike guys has this going on, and will you wear this'... I mean, to pick up L'Equipe (cover page) the other day and to see Thierry Henry, the French soccer hero, who quite frankly I've never watched in my life, running on the practice field before Euro2004 with a yellow wristband on, man, it's amazing!

So, there you have it-- $5 million dollars raised from sales of LiveStrong wristbands, with Nike kicking in $1 million of its own. If you want to get involved, visit WearYellow.com.

Update: If you are looking for places to buy a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband, please consult these Operation Gadget articles:

• Readers Successfully Buying 10-Packs of LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands Directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Where to Buy a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband
• Suggestions for Finding a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband Outside the United States

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While we were in Princeton on Wednesday evening, my wife and I stopped into the Princeton Running Company to browse and ask the store personnel about podiatrists that athletes in the area have seen. Inside we noticed a point-of-purchase display of LiveStrong yellow wristbands which are being sold to support a new $6 million fundraising drive by the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The LAF's new LiveStrong initiative is aimed at helping cancer survivors improve their quality of life.

These yellow wrist bands are being sold for $1.00 each and all proceeds go to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

My wife and I have a number of friends and relatives who have recently had cancer. My friend Peter Andreas Frank passed away last year from brain cancer after a long illness. We also have survivors of testicular, prostate, and breast cancer who are very close to us. It is in their honor that I will wear a LiveStrong wrist band this summer.

The display and packaging of the LiveStrong wristbands that we saw in Princeton strongly suggest that Nike is using its distribution clout to get them out to local sports stores around the country. (They deserve a lot of credit for participating, if this is the case.) Look for them next time you are at the store, and buy one to show your support. More information about this program is available at WearYellow.com.

More information on Operation Gadget:

• Readers Successfully Buying 10-Packs of LiveStrong Yellow Wristbands Directly from the Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Where to Buy a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband
• Nike and LAF Sell LiveStrong Wrist Bands at End of Each Tour de France Stage, Some European Media is Still Critical
• Why There is Some Confusion Over the LiveStrong Campaign Fund Raising Goal

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Ronald Reagan passed away on Saturday after a long illness. I told a friend in Switzerland earlier today that I thought that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of my lifetime. I would argue that the technology community owes President Reagan more than most people realize. Consider:

• January 20, 1981, Reagan's First Inaugural Address

  At a time when stifling inflation and massive unemployment beset America, at the end of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and before the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh came to market, President Reagan called upon Americans to rise above their problems and create again.

  In his first term, he would cut taxes from a maximum rate of 70 percent to 28 percent, freeing up capital which was put to work building the technologies that make life so interesting for us gadget fans. President Reagan told us that it was up to individual Americans to make the country successful again, not the government:

  We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they're on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They're individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.

• January 28, 1986, The Challenger Disaster

  In the first major technological disaster ever televised, seven NASA astronauts died in the explosion of a spacecraft that had been launched moments earlier from Cape Canaveral, Florida. This mission was intended to involve school children as Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, was to teach lessons while in space.

  Had the disaster been handled differently, a generation of Americans that is now in its 20s and early 30s could have grown up fearing technological progress and space exploration. In an address to the Nation that evening, President Regan said:

  ...I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

• June 12, 1987, The Brandenburg Gate Speech

  President Reagan spoke to the people of the divided city of Berlin before the Berlin Wall fell. This was the second time he had come to the city to give the isolated citizens of West Berlin, and the millions enslaved by Communism in Eastern Europe, a pep talk. Because of the proximity of the stage to the Wall and the Brandenburg Gate, many in the adjoining neighborhoods of East Berlin were able to hear the speech as well.

  Without the end of Communism in Europe, the Internet would never have been widely connected to Eastern Europe and Russia and dozens of major contributors to the Open Source software community would not have been able to make their contribution. The technology community benefited handsomely from the historic political realignment.

  Through brilliant use of economic and foreign policy, the United States defeated the Soviet Union without firing a shot. In perhaps the most often quotes speech of his life, President Reagan said:

  In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor....

  General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
  

Thank you, President Reagan, for your great contributions to technology. You may never have written a line of code or designed a circuit, but you fostered an environment that made our dreams come true.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Forbes Magazine and a number of other outlets reported that Gateway will shutter all of its Gateway Stores and layoff at least 2,500 sales people that it employs at these locations.

A lot of people have looked at Gateway Stores and wondered why they lasted so long. "Big Box" electronics retailers have been less willing to sell Gateway products because the company has stores that are considered competitive.

Last week, Forbes published an interview with Lap Shun "John" Hui, the entrepreneur that sold Emachines to Gateway earlier in March. In the interview, Hui stated that he considered buying Gateway as early as July 2002 with the intention of taking it private. The article quotes Diana Maranon, an investment banker at Averil Capital as saying, "Under the plan to go private, we never got down to this level of specific plans, clearly... {John Hui} would have been a proponent for closing the stores."

Gateway Stores are undoubtedly a huge drain on the company. For a number of reasons they have not enabled Gateway to do what Apple Computer has done so successfully with its stores: control the presentation of its product line and successfully sell Apple customers more of its products than they might otherwise have bought.

Operation Gadget readers ought to be sad to see Gateway Stores go. We have a tendency to shop for electronic products with very specific features, and not simply buy the least expensive product in the category. We benefit from the existence of smaller retail stores where products can be closely examined, compared to each other, and seen assembled with other products into complete systems. This is not one of Best Buy or Circuit City's strengths.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the weekend, two of the media's favorite gadget weblogs (I'll let you guess which two) discovered that AT&T Wireless was offering free downgrades for many of their customers' high end phones. One of the weblogs even suggested that their story was an "exclusive," despite the fact that Operation Gadget published a report on this issue four days earlier.

It's not like our story claimed to be original. We partially attributed it to an article on studio2f.com that was published on February 27, while adding some new information and offering disaffected AT&T Wireless customers alternatives that included changing carriers.

The piece that was labeled "exclusive" was well written and had some new information in it. The label just struck me as misleading, given how much information was already out there in the blogosphere before the article was published.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Slashdot pointed out a brief but excellent interview of William Gibson by David Hiltbrand in the February 17 edition of the Philadelphia Inqurirer. The interview was done in advance of an appearance he made that night at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The visit to Philadelphia is part of a book tour to support his new book Pattern Recognition.

I realize that it's almost a sacrilege to say this in some parts of the technology gadget community, but I've never read a Gibson book, and I fell asleep while watching Johnny Mnemonic on one of my first dates with my wife. Nevertheless, I'm interested in reading Pattern Recognition after reading Hiltbrand's interview with Gibson, and here's why: In refering to the technology he uses at home, Gibson said:

Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest technology ever does me any good.

Hiltbrand calls this "a shocking admission from the author who has painted such a vivid and chilling portrait of our microprocessed future," which is pretty accurate. But, in a way, I'm impressed that Gibson would admit this.

Another reason I'm interested in Pattern Recognition is because the story is about a "'cool-hunter' who ferrets out developing consumer trends". This sounds right up my alley. Reading more detailed reviews of the book, it's pretty clear that the main character, Cayce Pollard, is not doing exactly the same thing that I'm doing here. So, it doesn't seem like the book will hit too close to home.

I am also intrigued at the idea that Gibson may be trying to make a subtle commentary about the use of technology for its own sake through this book. This is an issue I am becoming more aware of, and trying to reconcile with my tendency to want to use many of the latest technology gadgets for the imagined sometimes imaginary marginal productivity improvements that they will bring to my life.

Readers in New York may be interested to hear that William Gibson will appear at the Columbia University Bookstore on Saturday, February 21.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I subscribe to Forbes Magazine and I have for several years. I get a lot of ideas for Operation Gadget articles from it, including the article about the Panasonic SVAV100 D-Snap MPEG4 Camcorder.

My subscription is expiring in late March, so I'm getting direct mail pieces asking me to renew. The rate they want me to pay is $59.95 for one year (26 issues). I happened to be sitting in front of my laptop when I opened the offer, and I remembered that I saw that Amazon.com offers magazine subscriptions. So, I went and found the offer to subscribe to Forbes Magazine and saw that I could get the same one year subscription for substantially less.

So, you can guess that I am going to subscribe through Amazon, rather than resubscribe and pay twice as much. If you have subscriptions to renew, you might want to consider checking the Amazon price before you just mail back the subscription renewal that your favorite magazine sends you.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)