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Article posted on Sep 27

Build a safety net into your checking account

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 27, 2009, 5:38 pm

Now that my bank allows you to cancel overdraft "protection", I logged in and did so recently. Having a debit card declined is vastly preferred to overdraft charges for me, but I would just rather not run out of money in the first place. It's been years since it's happened, but I decided to build a safety net into my checking account in Quicken. I went up to the first of the year and put a $300 unreconciled charge in. The net effect is it looks like I have $300 less than I actually have. (I ignore bank/ATM balances, as they almost always don't take into effect charges that haven't hit the bank yet. Always use your financial planning software or checkbook as a reference point for how much usable money you have.)

However, the little accountant in the back of my head was waving his finger back and forth, as while this is a great idea from a personal financial perspective, leaving a virtual placeholder charge not balanced with anything else isn't very good accounting. So instead, I looked to my "Stored Credit" account in Quicken. It's used for tracking gift cards and whatnot, and is treated as an asset account, not a cash account (since you can't use gift cards to pay off debts). So what I did is made the $300 a transfer from Checking to Stored Credit. It'll still remain unreconciled, but now the $300 is still counted toward my net worth.

I haven't done so, but you could take it further and set up a scheduled transaction to "transfer" $25 per month from Checking to Stored Credit. That'll nab you $300 per year in safety net money. At the end of the year, simply roll it up into one transaction (since we're talking about virtual transactions here), and you'll have an even stronger safety net.

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Article posted on Sep 25

Blu-ray: Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 25, 2009, 1:20 am

On Tuesday, Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection was released on Blu-ray, containing all TNG movies, remastered for Blu-ray. I picked up a copy on Tuesday (for a very good price, too), and this post acts as a 100% biased mini-review.

Star Trek: Generations (1994): The movie was re-scanned from master negatives, and is definitely "high definition", but for better or worse, nothing was changed. No special effects were recreated, and as far as I can tell, it's identical to the original release, save the higher resolution. For example, if I were tasked with "improving" Generations, the first thing I would do is fix the scene where Data and Geordi are looking at the emotion chip. The chip is supposedly suspended in a force field and rotating, but is shaking back and forth while rotating, as if it were suspended by a wire. Also, the scenes on the mountain still have a black tint on the top sixth of the screen, the result of a visor shielding the sun from the camera's lens. These are good examples of a fixes they could have easily made with today's technology, but they didn't. Again, I'm not sure if they should have, but this movie is on par with any other Blu-ray release that has simply been upscanned from original film source.

Don't get me wrong, it's still very good quality, especially given this: I currently own Generations on DVD, and it was made in the early years of the DVD era. Its quality, even by DVD standards, wasn't that great, and on top of everything, it was mastered horribly. The DVD is presented in widescreen 2.35:1, but is mastered in letterboxed 4:3 non-anamorphic. So the actual viewing area of the on-disc data is little more than 50%, and when viewed on today's widescreen displays, it is both letterboxed and pillared.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996): Wow, what a difference two years make. First Contact was the first Star Trek film to use all digitally-created ships and space effects, and they went all out in bringing this to Blu-ray. The ships include an amazing level of detail, though no scenes were "changed". That is, scenes shown are shot-for-shot the same as the original, the level of detail has been bumped up to incredible levels across the board. I was particularly impressed by the space walk scene. Also, the first scenes with the Borg flashback and the Battle of Sector 001 were beyond belief. It's as if the first 15 minutes of the film were written and directed while saying, "OK, say 13 year from now, if new technology allows us to remaster the movie in higher definition, let's make the shots look as sweet as possible!" The normal film scenes were also upscaled in amazing ways. The scene where the Borg Queen grafts skin onto Data stands out. In the original, when she blows on the skin, you see goosebumps form. This takes it even further; you can see condensation form momentarily on each individual hair. It's almost to a fault, unfortunately. Data's paint job, especially in the scenes in Engineering, did not translate well to close-ups in high definition. Also, Beverly Crusher looks a lot older in high def. Still, in summary, "Wow."

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998): I will preface this by saying I didn't dislike Insurrection. It's certainly not the best Star Trek film, but it wasn't terrible. So keep that in mind when I say this: meh. The technical quality is almost on par with First Contact, but has none of the "epic" feel of it. There are no huge pans of mighty new starships. The story, while OK, frankly would have been better as a TNG episode. Believe it or not, this actually contributes to the perception of technical quality. The quality is on par with, say, an episode of Enterprise, being from roughly the same era.

Overall, it's a good purchase. Too bad they only made 3 TNG movies. The set includes 5 discs; the last two discs must both be supplemental features.

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Article posted on Sep 19

You did.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on September 19, 2009, 2:02 pm

In 1993, AT&T launched a series of "You Will" TV ads, predicting the not-too-distant future. I had long forgotten these ads, but upon seeing them again, I instantly remembered watching them back in 1993. I remember seeing them and thinking of all the concepts as "futuristic", but not entirely alien, which was the point of the ads.

Here we are, 16 years later, and it's amazing how many of the technologies showcased in the ads are commonplace in today's world, and in many cases, incredibly close in implementation details. Let's look at the claims:

• "Borrowed a book from thousands of miles away" -- Highly available, moderate usage. While Project Gutenberg was started long before the 1993 ad, it paved the way for e-books in the late 90s. Today, you can buy a Kindle, load it with books and take it anywhere, surpassing the ad's vision of scanned books on a large computer in a central library setting.
• "Crossed the country without stopping for directions" -- Highly available, high usage. This is probably the claim that takes the least interpretation. What is presented in the ad is spot-on identical to today's in-car GPS navigation devices, from the 3D road interface to the voice turn-by-turn instructions.
• "Sent someone a fax from the beach" -- Highly available, extremely high usage. While the fax concept is dated, the overall concept is in heavy use today. I can whip out my iPhone on the beach and talk to a friend, send someone a letter, a short message, or even announce to the world how awesome it is here in 2009. (No, I didn't write this from the beach. But I could have!)
• "Paid a toll without slowing down" -- Highly available, moderate usage. Again, the demonstration is close to what we have now, but today's technology even surpasses that. Many metro areas use systems like FasTrak, where you simply mount a transponder in the car and drive through a special lane. You don't even have to swipe a card in your car, though you do have to "slow down", just not stop.
• "Bought concert tickets from cash machines" -- It's complicated. So, many venues do have ATM-like devices that let you buy tickets, and real ATMs are starting to offer non-bank-related services, but the two concepts haven't been combined. However, remember this is 1993. Most people aren't on "The Internet" yet, and just didn't imagine a global network where you could visit a site like Ticketmaster from your home computer or mobile device and order tickets that way. So today, you can't order concert tickets from a cash machine, but why bother when you can order concert tickets from your cellphone?
• "Tucked your baby in from a phone booth" -- Highly available, low-moderate usage. What's this "phone booth" they're talking about? The concept of a videophone as a hardware device has been talked about for decades. The technology has been around for a long time, but has never entered public adoption. What has been more widely adpoted has been "webcams" over instant messaging networks, allowing for personal video communication. Also, while almost unheard of in the US, in Asia video chat integrated into cellphones are commonplace.
• "Opened doors with the sound of your voice" -- Moderately available, unused according to strict interpretation. While voice recognition is certainly available, I can think of nowhere where it's been used as a door lock, except in the movies. However, modify the wording a bit, and you've got a recent system: With Toyota's Smart Key System (SKS), I can walk up to my Prius, pull on the door's handle, a proximity sensor recognizes that the key is in my pocket, and it unlocks automatically for me.
• "Carried your medical history in your wallet" -- Mostly unavailable. While the various bits of technology are available for something like this, privacy and security concerns have killed any sort of global standardization of a system like this. However, we're starting to get there on the backend. It's starting to get to the point where your doctor, hospital and pharmacist have access to the same information through their own computer networks.
• "Attended a meeting in your bare feet" -- Highly available, high usage. Business-class videoconferencing and document sharing services such as WebEx are widely used today. And once again, high-speed wireless devices make it even easier to do so from a beach house, as in the example.
• "Watched the movie you wanted to the minute you wanted to" -- Highly available, moderate-high usage. YouTube popularized the idea of video on the Internet, but those are mostly clips, not movies. Netflix's streaming service can be thanked for that, and the system used in the commercial looks very close to, say, Netflix on an Xbox 360. However, let's remember a system that predates this by years: on-demand movies over cable. The selection usually isn't great, but it fits the experience offered by the commercial. This is probably one of the few examples in all of these that evolved without the Internet's help.
• "Learned special things from far away places" -- Highly available, extremely high usage. Again, the example in the commercial is dated. While universities do offer video-based teaching similar to the example offered in the commercial, the Internet as a whole has itself become a learning tool that has far exceeded the expectations of anyone, even given the research-oriented origins of the Internet.

On a related note, I remember a similar commercial from the 90s, but I don't remember the company, and it would be nearly impossible to search for. Here's the setup:

A young, shifty man in a long trenchcoat enters a supermarket. He moves quickly through the lanes, taking items and stuffing them into his coat, constantly looking around. When he's finished, he heads toward the door, passing through a large arch. The arch beeps as he walks through it, and a security guard stops him. "Excuse me," says the guard. The man looks around nervously. "You forgot your receipt," says the guard as he hands the man a slip of paper that came out of the arch. The man walks out of the supermarket.

That is what RFID was supposed to have done. The technology is here, but again, concerns about privacy have made the idea very unpopular at the consumer level.

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