Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’d been meaning to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a simple external USB drive, a Western Digital MyPassport. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.²

So I finally made it to the counter to pay for the thing. No, I hadn’t shopped there before. Would I like to sign up for the Best Buy blah blah card thing? I sure would! And I proceeded to do so. Take that, people behind me in line.

“Oh, my email address? Certainly. It’s ‘catherine’…”

*tap tap tap*

“at”

*tap tap tap*

“catherine–”

*DELETE DELETE DELETE*

“Uh…no. I mean, yes, my name is Catherine. You spelled that correctly. My email address is Catherine at CatherineWinters.com.”

*tap tap tap*

“Catherine with a ‘C’.”

And so on and so forth. So that was pretty fun.

Protip: Once Best Buy security agrees not to call the police if you promise never to set foot in the store again, you can partition your external drive as half Time Machine and half storage, formatting it for convenience’s sake as NTFS, not MacOSX-native HFS+. The NTFS 3G driver for OSX allows you to both read and write NTFS-formatted drives, and you’ll still be able to connect to Windows PCs should need arise.

If you do this, however, you have to be really careful about ejecting the stupid thing properly. If any files get damaged, you’ll lose write access to the NTFS partition and the resulting error message will in no way be helpful. If you suddenly find that you can’t write to an NTFS-formatted disk, plug the thing into a Windows PC and run chkdsk on it to fix the errors.

Congratulations, I just saved you three hours of Googling.

Next Time: In Case of Fire.

1. Yeah, you know that time that your computer died and you lost everything and you said, “next time, I’m going to do regular backups” and then you didn’t? I’m marginally smarter than you.
2. Unfortunately, my 5-year-old Dell 24″ monitor has a crappy, crappy USB hub that causes my MacBook Pro to kernel panic whenever Time Machine starts–Windows users: that’s the OSX version of a bluescreen. There’s an app for that. So I lose a USB port; no hub for you, WD My Passport! This is actually a good reason to use Firewire, come to think of it.

I’m tall. Really, really tall. (Yes, taller than that one friend of yours. No, I don’t care if he’s single. A swimmer, you say? Does he have a sister?)

Now, what you may not be aware of is that there tends to be a few downsides to being tall.

On the plus side, I never get heartburn and laugh heartily at the signs that read “please ask for assistance for items on this shelf” at the pharmacy. On the other hand, humans tend not to have joints built to handle a larger frame, and with much greater distances to pump, our hearts don’t work as long.

One other issue tall people can face is actually pretty difficult to claim as a particularly bad thing, — though it is if you’re as unaware of it as I was. Differences in proportion and scale being what they are, I can gain 20 or 30 (or 60) pounds without anyone really noticing much difference.¹ Including me, unfortunately. (Yes, that’s right. I just complained about my appearance being too forgiving. Stone me now.)

However, as ridiculous a “problem” as that is, it’s actually not super for one’s health, particularly if you don’t realize it for a year. In late 2008, wracked with knee pain so severe that my doctors had been talking about osteoarthritis and the possibility that I might be unable to walk by the age of 40, it was discovered that I was just in disastrously poor shape. In fact, despite walking fairly regularly and having a “healthy” BMI^[2], I’d managed to develop virtually no muscle mass whatsoever.

On the one hand, this was a relief. On the other hand, it would have been nice to have had no culpability whatsoever.

So, back I went to physiotherapy. Again. Years ago, I tore the crap out of my rotator cuff while working as a shop assistant in a giant ladies’ clothing store. Carrying jeans, yes. You see, the thing about jeans for tall women is that they have to be much longer, contain more fabric, etc. The thing about bones for tall women is that they don’t just tend to be longer, they also tend to be bigger. So we’re not talking about carrying around Size 0 capris here, we’re talking dozens of pairs of Size 16 and 22 jeans, each leg several inches longer than what a regular store carries. It adds up, trust me.

Messageboard testimonials suggested Vancouver’s best physiotherapist was Kelvin Tam of Kelvin Physiotherapy Clinic. I am pleased to report that this appears to be highly accurate.

“So let me guess,” he said, looking at my chart. “You hurt your shoulder playing volleyball?”

“No.”

“Basketball? Softball? Soccer?”

“…lifting pants?”

I think Kelvin still thinks I might be making that up. This would be much better if I hadn’t seen him a further time for my elbow, suffering from both golfer’s and tennis elbow — from using the mouse too much. I had to make a significant lifestyle change there too as well.

Annoyingly, if I had injured my shoulder or elbow playing sports, I probably wouldn’t have had this problem with my knees. Of course, I likely wouldn’t have suffered those injuries either.

So, several months of physiotherapy and exercise later, I’m finally moving up from walking to jogging. So far, things seem to be working out okay. I’m currently in week two of the Couch-to-5K Running Plan from Cool Running. So far, so good, but it’s pretty exhausting, I have to say. I suspect I’m still not quite in good enough shape, given my struggles last week, so I’ve inserted a second “week one” into my own exercise regimen.

I’ve also been eying the Nike+iPod gadget for my iPhone — which is ridiculous, frankly. I don’t need that and I really don’t want to use any of their social media features like sharing how far I’ve run/limped about. Let’s all just assume that things are going really well for me, okay?

Anyway, dealing with sports bras and running shoes is novel, but dealing with bikes is fun! Yes, I’m secretly an aspiring bike nerd, and I’m finally able to ride one again. Sadly, it turns out that Catherine-sized bikes are fairly difficult to come by, but I’m pleased to report things are progressing smoothly despite that. I will post details of the great bike-building project shortly!

[1] Case in point: as of the writing of this post, the last time a close friend has called me a “skinny bitch” was approximately 36 hours ago.

[2] Seriously, Body-Mass Index is the worst possible measure of physical fitness there is. Not only does it have trouble scaling at the top and bottom ends, but it doesn’t even account for what that mass consists of. Ouch.

One short diagnosis of tennis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Catherine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doctor ordered me to find a less damaging pointing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my laptop, but for desktops, I needed a better solution. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB trackpads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store provides a dozen or so “trackpad” apps, most of which use VNC to function as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi network to get your iPhone going as a trackpad. Surprisingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gadget overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves trackballs. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beautiful. So majestic.

Consequently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kensington Expert Mouse 7.0, the latest version of the classic ADB trackball. Kensington trackballs are so good, in fact, that sometimes I print out trackball-advocacy literature and go door-to-door, inviting people to hear the good news.

The latest version of the Kensington Expert Mouse boasts the same four buttons in a butterfly layout, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s movement could be a little smoother, but it moves easily and is difficult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly recommend the Kensington Expert Mouse to anyone, if only because I rely on other people’s continued interest in trackballs to ensure companies keep producing them. Aside from that, trackballs are generally fairly good, egonomically speaking, and also make it more difficult for mouse-only friends to use your computer, providing you with ample opportunity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my keyboard, I’ve been alternating between my MacBook Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple keyboard. I own a Microsoft Natural Pro ergonomic keyboard, but I never liked the “mushy” feeling of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they definitely have sufficient give and are nicely clicky — within the limits of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft keyboards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when character entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smiley emoticons look terrible: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s keyboards have never exhibited this problem.

Trackballs: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Canadian trivia: the Royal Canadian Navy developed the first trackball back in the 1950s.

However, astute Canadians will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR trackball assembly using flat-head screws, rather than superior, patriotic Robertson screws. For shame!

That’s right, I have a smartphone with no web access at all. Why? Well, the 650’s wifi capabilities kind of suck, but it’s usable. However, if I want to use EDGE, I don’t have a lot of options.

Canada has three national mobile phone companies: Bell and Telus, which are both CDMA, and Rogers, which uses GSM. (It’s actually four national companies, if you include Fido, which is now owned by Rogers, and which uses the Rogers network, but has separate branding and billing plans, including things like per-second billing.)

Despite having an otherwise highly developed telecommunications network, there is a flaw: Canada’s cellular companies are gouging us on data fees. Observe. Sadly, at one point, Fido had a $20/month unlimited EDGE plan, as well as a $30/month unlimited incoming/outgoing calls plan. Needless to say, after their acquisition by Rogers, both of these were quietly canceled.

So right now, my want-to-buy device seems to be the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s a tiny 800x480, WiFi/Bluetooth web browsing, media-playing, handwriting-recognizing, 8GB-extensible Linux device. There’s no phone, but then again, I already have a phone.

So, who wants to buy me one?

So enough about products whose chief value is making its user look cooler and more affluent than non-owners! There’s a far more geeky smartphone just over the horizon!

Behold, OpenMoko! It’s made of Linux! FIC (not that FIC) has spearheaded the open smartphone platform with their currently-almost-released Neo1973 phone being the first capable of running OpenMoko. The actual handheld looks… cute, actually. Kind of 70s retro, like a non-translucent clamshell iBook.

The featureset is impressive, with WiFi, AGPS and a 640x480 screen, and includes everything we’ve come to expect from a smartphone, save for a camera. According to the OpenMoko wiki:

“The 2nd generation OpenMoko device will be introduced at this time. We have something special in the works, but again, you will help shape this device.”

That sounds like a camera to me, since one’s missing, but who knows?

The UI seems somewhat dated, which is not altogether unheard of with Linux, though it will obviously be skinnable in some way — a feature I’d definitely want to make use of. I’m not totally impressed by the look of the dialer in particular. I’d like to see something a bit higher-contrast, personally.

I do like the fact that it uses a similar multi-touch panel as the iPhone, but isn’t that patented? Oh. Yes it is — but maybe not by Apple.

Personally, I find the most important feature of a phone or PDA is ease of use and how well it can sync with my computer. I’m eager to see how well the OpenMoko platform does among the early adopter crowd, but for now, I think I’ll be holding off on that preorder.