As one of the many people who work on Music Row who feel it’s a good idea to get out of the office for lunch once in a while, I often find it hard to find a place that other people haven’t found as well. Since I’m not crazy about waiting forever for food, I rarely visit sit-down restaurants. Generally, between the waiter/waitress being mysteriously absent, the almost ordering, the waiting for everyone to know what they want, the real ordering, the food arriving some time later, I end up taking about an hour and a half for lunch when I prefer to take about half an hour.

So, today when one of my coworkers responded to my poll of what’s up for lunch with Dan McGuinness for Fish and Chips, I was a little hesitant. Okay, actually, not hesitant at all because I was starving, but in other cases I would’ve been quite hesitant.

The ride over to Dan McGuiness was short, in fact we probably should’ve just walked but the sky was threatening rainfall and I really didn’t want to muss my hair.

Leaving a little early paid off when we arrived, finding only a couple of seats in the whole place occupied. The three of us (we picked up an extra on the way out) grabbed a table next to a big open window letting us feel the breeze off the roundabout while we grabbed our food.

If you ask me, that’s a fine portion for five bucks. While the plate may look a little empty in the pic, in reality it was both a very large plate and a very large portion. Rarely do I not finish my food, but today I actually left a bit of fish behind. *sniff*

The waitress was great, not over attentive or under, and very direct in getting things done.

Dan McGuiness is a fine place for a quick lunch too, I was surprised to find. From the time I stood up from my desk to when I returned to my desk was about 40 minutes. Definitely worth a go once every couple of weeks, I think.

Though they’re probably known more for their backed house at night and stage in the back, Dan McGuiness is a pretty sweet spot for a quick sit down lunch that is Music Row friendly — if you get there early.

http://www.danmcguinnesspub.com/nashville/

As a replacement to my slowly dying MX3000 keyboard set that has served me nobly for close to a year and a half, I picked up the MX5500 Revolution kit this evening. I don’t know if Logitech is one of those evil companies that engages in planned obsolescence or if my generally hard use of the hardware lead to the demise of my MX3000 unit, but it’s death was slow and aggravating. First the keyboard began misbehaving–not responding despite fresh batteries and current use, which I tolerated choosing to bang the keyboard around and slap keys ad hominem until it started responding. Within a couple of weeks of that, I noticed that my mouse drags were terminating prematurely, leaving me often with files copied to the wrong places, crop selections missing their marks, etc. This evening around 4:30 my ratio of annoyance to miserliness reached the tipping point and I broke down and bought a new set. It may have been that the receiver was dying and that the keyboard and mouse were fine, but I would rather upgrade than spend the time troubleshooting, confirming, and then negotiating with Logitech to send me a new receiver.

Enough with the past, let’s talk of revolution!

The revolution mouse is truly a stand-out in the world of wireless mice. At the nearest evil retail price gouger, I tested out every mouse on the rack and found that, at the most expensive end was actually the best mouse, not just the most hyped.

Until you have used the rubber wrapped steel scroll wheel of the Revolution mouse you probably can’t imagine the feeling of the weight and momentum of the wheel. Unlike any other mouse I’ve ever used, the Revolution also features a software customizable clutch system that allows you to scroll normally (with the quiet, clicky, one-line-at-a-time speed) or to spin the wheel with some gusto and disengage the clicky mechanism allowing the steel wheel to spin freely on bearings. The result: a page that scrolls at blinding speed (or not so blinding speed, depending on how hard you flicked the wheel) for several seconds without you doing anything. I have yet to test the system with a stop watch or other method, but I have been able to scroll smoothly from the top of a very long page to the bottom with a single flick of the wheel’s rubber center track. Very cool. When the wheel stops, the clutch re-engages letting you scroll smoothly again.

The mouse also has a unique thumb scroller which reminiscent of the scroll wheels of several years ago. On some sort of spring, the wheels allows about a quarter turn forward or backward. Using the SetPoint software that comes with the set, I was able to set the thumb scroll wheel to control the playback volume on my workstation. As an over frequent loud music jammer, it’s very nice to be able to click the thumb button to mute or rock my thumb back, letting the volume decrease gradually when the guy next door starts banging on the wall.

The mouse also glides much, much more smoothly than the one it replaced on the same desk surface. Maybe that’s something that wears down over time, but for the time being I’m soaking up the glidiness (note: glidiness is not a word). Overall, I’m very satisfied with the Revolution mouse. In fact, if there had been a decent corded keyboard, I might’ve gotten the mouse alone and a separate keyboard.

Who needs an LCD on their keyboard, really?

I’m not a fan of whirlygigs and dohickies that serve no practical purpose. While it’s certainly nice to be able to use my keyboard as a thermometer… or to use my keyboard as a stand alone calculator, since I don’t have one of those available in my operating system, I can imagine my life without this stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a way to disable the LCD either, so I’m interested to see how short of work the keyboard makes of the 4 AA batteries it requires.

Aside from the completely extraneous features the keyboard sports, the key resistance, clickiness, and angle of keyboard are all very nice. Definitely superior to most of the other keyboard I tried out. Though I have to say I would much prefer a Firefox logo function-key icon on the F5 key rather than the Internet Explorer “E” it sports. They should at least give you a sticker or something you could cover that up with so if my friends come over and see my keyboard I won’t feel embarassed. =) If anyone does judge me harshly, I’m sure I can win them over with the cute noise the Capslock key being toggled makes the keyboard emit.

Bluetooth? I thought white teeth were in fashion these days?

Yay! Bluetooth! Meh, no matter how hard I try, I still feel a little underwhelmed about having a bluetooth device that I actually make use of. Maybe as I use the keyboard the necessity of this will reveal itself.

I should also note that the Logitech Bluetooth dongle does NOT play nicely with other bluetooth devices and settings your machine my already have in place. In my instance, I had installed a Widcomm bluetooth antenna in months past. When I installed the Logitech drivers and restarted my machine I was met with some port devices not showing in my system boot and then Windows hanging perpetually on the loading screen. After several restarts to the last “good” configuration with no luck, I arrived the conclusion that Logitech can make Windows simply not boot. A quick restart in safe mode and removal of all things Bluetooth from my system got me back into normal windows and I was able to reinstall logitech from a downloaded executable with no issues.

Overall, despite paying a price that I am trying to love my new hardware enough not to be ashamed of, I’m pretty satisfied with my new desktop input devices

Ouch, the Power key is no joke

Seriously, the Power key by default body slams your machine into standby without a confirmation warning, delay, or shred of mercy. I thought my machine had crashed.

Conclusion

Viva la revolution! For the price I paid I am determined to be happy with the set and, in truth, it’s not hard to be happy with the MX5500 Revolution Cordless Desktop. Lots of superfluous extras and great coverage of the fundamentals, the kit is worth the price.

While looking around for a way to better manage the way I’ve been jockeying files between development machines, I found this Allway Sync, http://allwaysync.com/. Attracted initially to its small file size (only 3.8 megabytes), I was also happy to see that it was free software as well. It has an option for a license, but I was also shocked to see that the price tag is only $20 bucks. Before I had downloaded Allway, I found it satisfying two out of three of my ideas of what good software should be: easy on your system in terms of processing and file size, reasonable about licensing fees, and does-what-it-claims functionality. So, all I had left to do was to download and run the application to see if Allway was 3 for 3.

To my surprise and delight, the app installed quickly, quietly, and in less than 10 seconds. Though I do have a fairly fast workstation, this was still much faster than a lot of the crap I have downloaded recently.

So now what? A long lengthy configuration? Lots of preference settings and setting up a synchronization repository or something equally invasive? Nope. In fact, within about a minute of running Allway Sync for the first time I was able to set up two Jobs–their term for folders and files you want to sync up–and synchronize all my project files to my jump drive (see here). I got a little tripped up in how to create/save jobs, but in doing so I found another cool feature of this application–multiple receiving folder synchronization.

Allway supports synchronizing your files across drives and even into multiple folders. So, for me, I can backup my files at the same time as synchronizing them since Allway also allows you to set up different preferences for each synchronizing folder. Allway indeed.

Needless to say, I’m very excited to have Allway in my arsenal of cool, free apps that help me do what I do. Visually, Allway is a little bit lacking. In fact, it could almost pass for a 16-bit app from years gone by. But who cares? The app has works so flawlessly it could be all ASCII and I would still use it. The other upside is that the light-weight interface means it’s really light on the processor.

I hate to shamelessly plug something without at least needling it’s flaws a little, but there’s really not much I can say about Allways except that its menus could be a little more intuitively laid out. The functionality is there and is good.

The 8 GB model shown here marks Corsair’s new line of ultra-durable flash storage drives. Generally the drives come with lots of stickers, but I’m of the mind that if the device looks good without embellishment, one should let it be what it is.

While the 16 GB and 32 GB were both tempting offerings, but at $63 dollars shipped by ZipZoomFly.com was clearly the best value. The 8 GB make roughly 16 times the capacity of the drive it’s replacing, so I’m not too worried that I shouldn’t have gotten one of the larger models.

The construction is rugged, even a little imposing. To my eye, it looks a bit like the sort of device the evil villain would manipulate in some way to reveal a glowing green glass vial of something hazardous. Within the first minutes of having the drive, I removed the stickers that label it as a Corsair Survivor. The slightly spattered stencil-like “SURVIVOR” logo doesn’t really fit the smooth anodized aluminum shell if you ask me.

Larger than your average drive, the Corsair Survivor sizes up more or less equally with a full roll of nickels. It feels lighter than you would expect for how solid it looks, but you definitely know you’re handling some hardware. When opened, the drive looks as though it’s probably just glued into the screw-on cap rather than being a solid piece of aluminum. One molded piece would be stronger, but the glued plastic feels very solid. I pried against it for several minutes to remove the last of the goo from the adhesive of the label and never felt as though I was going to damage the drive or break it loose from the cap.

The LED built into the drive is an exceptionally bright blue. You’ll definitely know if the drive is operating if you’ve got a clear view of the machine it’s plugged into.

Access speeds speeds seemed acceptably fast to me. My previous drive was a three year old 512 MB SanDisk, so anything would probably seem blazing fast to me.

Bundled with TrueCrypt

When I plugged the drive into a USB port I was surprised to see AntiVir throwing several heuristic warnings and one virus signature match on the drive. All the warnings and detections were caused by non-essential auto run files to launch TrueCrypt installer. All were easily deleted without breaking any functionality of the drive that I’m aware of.

The TrueCrypt interface was surprisingly good and I easily set up a 512 MB encrypted volume on the drive to use for all my deep dark secrets and my Swiss account numbers. The next time I’m on an international flight and get cornered by the bad guy, I can feel comfortable turning my drive over, I guess. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get much use out of the ability to securely store lots of files, but at present I’m using it to store backups of all my server user names and passwords in case I need to migrate systems, etc.

If nothing else I can say that I got a bit of education about the world of file encryption with TrueCrypt. Though I have nothing to substantiate the opinion, I think the folks who wrote/write/maintain TrueCrypt definitely know what they’re doing. I’m not exactly sure what a TwoFish Serpent Whirlpool encryption scheme is all about, but it definitely sounds complicated and hard to crack. If you’re interested in protecting the key codes to your off-shore intercontinental ballistic party poppers, check out TrueCrypt.

All In All

Overall, I’m very happy with the drive. I won’t have to worry as much about handing it over to a consulting client and having the disk be too full to copy the necessary files. I’ll do my best to put the drive through it’s paces, and I’ll update this post if I manage to break the drive or cause it to malfunction.

And of course, if you’re into massive flash drive storage capacity, there’s always the 16 GB and 32 GB alternatives.
Corsair Survivor 8 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 16 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 32 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

For those out there who will stumble around as I did for a solution to apparently missing items in the code hinting context menus inside the Flash ActionScript editor, the answer is as you probably suspected–something simple.

If, for instance, you try to import a sub-package of the flash package and find yourself with only display, external, filters, geom, net, and text much like this:

The problem is that your ActionScript file is loading code hints for Actionscript 1.0 and 2.0. This problem would be very apparent to anyone who, unlike me, leaves the ActionScript editor’s built-in class and package browser open. For those who have closed this frame in order to save horizontal space might be at a loss for why their code hinting is incomplete.

The Fix

To fix this issue, just open the ActionScript class and package preview pane and select the proper version of ActionScript for the AS file.