On Thursday, Apr 12, I ordered an item from Adafruit Industries, one of my go to places for electronics. To present some perspective, I live in Oregon, so the package is going to have to get all the way across the United States to get to me.

My first order weighed in at 0.64 lbs, and I chose to go with the recommended shipper, UPS. Figuring that I didn’t want to spend too much on shipping, I went with UPS Ground and was told it would be 3-7 days. The package shipped out on the 13th.

The following week, I realized there were a few other things I wanted, and my inner lazy scientist decided to try a little experiment. According to UPS, My package would be arriving on Friday, Apr 20th.

I placed another order, this time on Apr 16th. I gave this one to USPS Priority Mail. The package was 1.34 lbs. This one took a few days to actually get shipped, And went out on Apr 18th.
My experiment was relatively simple: Who’s the quicker shipper in the same relative time/cost frame?

Here are the results:

Now, granted that the second package was 3/4 of a lbs heavier than the first, so the price was $3 more. Using Adafruit’s cart shipping estimator, if I’d done order #1 through the USPS, it would have cost me ~$8.05 for Priority mail.

If I had more cash to spend I would do some more thorough experimenting. My conclusion is pretty simple: The United States Postal Service offers a really really dang good deal. Moreso, UPS has an incentive to not get the package where it’s going as quickly. The USPS is going to your house 6 days a week. UPS or FedEx are only going to show up if they already have your money. USPS gets the package to you faster because they already have a lot of mail going your direction anyway. They’re not going to go out of their way to get the package to you faster, but they’re spending the money on the plane, the processing, and the truck already. UPS on the other hand wants you to know that your package could have arrive in  3 days instead of 7, or 2, or 1. They can make it happen, for a price.

UPS and FedEx are decent services, but if you can wait a couple of days USPS is where it’s at.

Contrary to popular belief, the Postal service is not subsidized with federal tax dollars. Your mileage may vary, but if I’m footing the bill I think I might be sending a few more things through USPS.

• My very rough first personal training experience.
• Star Wars Merchandising including cool toys, weird books, and underoos (which I find mildly disturbing.
• Another contest! (Enter this time, seriously. You could win stickers!)

I hope you enjoy. Your feedback is always very welcome, so please take some time to let me know what you love/hate/whatever.

• Nintendo Commercials!
• Nostalgia!
• A musical I’ve never seen!

Chapters and Enhanced Podcastness is on temporary delay as apple forgot to update their chapter tool that’s 4 years old (yeah… forgot).

17 old Nintendo Commercials
Legally Blonde: The Musical

The DragonLord:

There’s something I just can’t get over about short programs centered on Christmas that air only once a year. (“Air” is a funny term, isn’t it? I haven’t watched Over-The-Air television in years.) A number of these specials have caught my attention and wonder over the years. I thought I’d step up and present the list of my favorites (in no particular order)

Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas – MGM Television (1966)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas is one of those specials that is a foundational Christmas component. A tale of someone who doesn’t like Christmas, and reforms after he learns to appreciate what Christmas is really about. Because of this special, I rarely think of the Grinch as green, in spite of his appearing that way almost everywhere else. I usually think of him as a yellowish-green. I have two favorite parts to this special.

1) The Grinch slithering around a WhoHouse.
2) Roast Beast – I love that pun.

Boris Karloff (who voiced the Grinch, and did narration) is most famous for playing The Monster in the original Universal Frankenstein film. The special was directed by Chuck Jones of Looney Toon fame…

Santa Claus is Coming to Town – Ranking & Bass (1970)

Rankin & Bass are the big names in Christmas specials. If you’ve seen a stop-motion special, you’ve seen their work. This is one of the classic Stop-motion clay christmas specials. The kind that everyone replicates these days for a “Retro-christmas” feeling (See Community, Eureka, and Home Improvement) Santa Claus is Coming to Town is a story about how Santa became who he is. It’s pretty clever and addresses the common components of the American Santa. They explain how Kris got his name (both Santa Claus and Kris Kringle), why he makes toys, where flying Reindeer came from,  I think my favorite part is Topper, a penguin that Kris befriends. “Honk Honk” is the extent of his vocabulary. We watched this one while we were decorating our tree this year.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas – Rankin & Bass (1974)

Another Rankin & Bass classic. Well, maybe “classic” is going too far. I’m not sure how well known this one is, but I know it. This one stuck out in my memory for some strange reason. It’s a story about a young mouse who offends Santa Claus in a letter, and the town that deals with the aftermath. The mouse sees the errors of his ways and fixes a clock tower that’s supposed to invite Santa.

If I recall correctly, he writes an editorial or something and Santa (in retaliation) decides to bring no Christmas to Junctionville. Y’know, because Santa is that kind of guy… I think this is the biggest gapping hole in the whole story. The Mouse writes an editorial, signs it “From all of us”, and Santa just takes that as verbatim? Seriously. What kind of Santa is this? It’s hard not to like though. In this one, the Mayor offers this awesome line: “We have concluded, for reasons unknown, Mr. Claus (Santa, that is), has taken an unconscionable attitude of hostile retaliation toward… ah, oh heck, he’s mad at us!” How can you not love that?

Mickey’s Christmas Carol – Disney (1983)

I think I was surprised when I learned how recent of a production this was. I was alive when this came out. Making it one of the few specials I watch that did. A Christmas Carol is a wonderful story, and mixing it with classic Disney Characters was a great idea. The character of Scrooge McDuck was named after Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol, but it was 36 years before the character got to play his namesake. I like that we see more than just the standard fare of Disney characters. Rat & Mole from The Wind and the Willows, Jiminy Cricket, The Three Little Pigs. It’s a cornucopia of Disney IP. My favorite is Goofy. As Jacob Marley, he is hilarious.

Prep & Landing – Disney (2009)

The webcomic XKCD recently made an observation that Christmas these days is mostly about recreating the childhood of Baby Boomers. It’s a fair assessment. When something new comes along it naturally gets put under a good amount of scrutiny. Will it be worthy to be added to Christmas? A couple of years ago Disney produced a really delightful Christmas special called Prep & Landing. It was executive produced by John Lasseter. Besides being a great story, this short describes something from my Childhood. When I was very young, I remember having assembled a Lego creation that depicted Santa’s workshop. Unlike the workshop of so many stories, mine wasn’t littered with rocking horses and hammers. It had an assembly line complete with computers. Elves were responsible for automation and computer controlled construction. Prep & Landing gave me a peek back into the world that I wanted Santa to be. In 2010, Disney produced a 6 minute short called Prep & Landing: Operation Secret Santa. This year, another full-length special was produced Prep and Landing: Naughty vs. Nice. I’ve enjoyed all three very much.

A Charlie Brown Christmas – CBS (1965)

This is probably my favorite Christmas special of all time. It is the quintessential Christmas Special. The thing that is most illustrative in this show is how old the problems we face are when it comes to the holidays. Charlie Brown spends the special frustrated about the commercialism of the holiday. This is 1965... I was sure that commercialized Christmas was a much more modern complaint. More recently I came across Lucy complaining of Christmas items in stores before Halloween candy was gone in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. As Charlie Brown seeks to find the true meaning of Christmas, the realities of Christmas in America are unfolded. The Christmas Pageant, artificial trees, “Cash – tens and twenties”. Against all recommendations, Charles Schultz pushed hard to include (and keep) Linus’ recitation from Luke 2. Like many, what I love most about this special is its quirkiness. The imperfections in the animation, the fact that Sally’s lines had to be broken down to individual sentences. That jazz was chosen for the soundtrack.

So there you have it. I love Christmas specials. I hope everyone has a delightful Christmas season!

Even though this blog is at AaronEiche.com, I tend not to make it very personal. It’s mostly because I don’t really want to expose most of my personal life to the slings and arrows of the internet. However I made a decision a while back to return to school, and it’s gotten me thinking about college, degrees, grades, and everything that goes into them.

College, Take One.

My senior year of high school was consumed by my trying to make certain I would graduate. College was on my list, but it was not a very high priority. In the end what did push me toward college was me trying to impress a girl (as so often things are). It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, but simply that I was caught up in living the high-life at home. With virtually no expenses, I had a tremendous amount of disposable cash. My priorities changed, and I applied late for school.

I found myself at Montana State University a year after most of my peers. It didn’t really matter. The one person that I knew who was attending stopped the year I started. While I loved my social connections at MSU, I did poorly in most of my classes. The reason is that I’m pretty good at attending class, but lousy at doing my homework. I’m generally too selfish with my time.

At MSU I was taking film classes. At the time, MSU was supposedly ranked 5th in the nation for film schools. I had a best friend in high school who knew from 8th grade that he wanted to be a filmmaker. I think I oscillated in and out of various careers in the film industry. I went from director to SFX guy to writer to director to producer. I wasn’t enjoying the “weed out” classes for the film program (imagine that) so my second semester I tried out Computer Science, and thoroughly hated it. I did poorly in the class mostly because I didn’t do the work, but partially because I was using a Mac in a class where we were all supposed to be programming in Java on PCs. This was in the very early days of OS X (still Beta I believe) and I had very limited success getting the particular IDE to work on my Power Mac.

It suffices to say that I was responsible for my poor performance, and it would be some time before I returned to school again. When I left MSU I had decided I wanted to serve a mission for my church. I didn’t enroll for classes the next term, and set back for home to pay off the debt I’d incurred.

College, Take Two.

It was a full 4 years before I was back at school again. 2 years paying off debt, 2 years on a mission. I served my mission in Utah and returned there after only a month at home. It was the right place for me to be. Here was my plan:

1. Study Film at Salt Lake Community College
2. Study Film at Brigham Young University (Or University of Utah)
3. Become an awesome filmmaker

There was a flaw in my plan. Although I’d convinced myself that it was a matter of dedication rather than interest, I once again found myself not enjoying film-making. At this point, quite by accident I found myself building a website and making actual money doing it. A friend was headed on a church mission of her own, and knew that I had some HTML experience. It was true. I’d spent many a night learning HTML and hacking together web pages in my youth. Limited by what I could accomplish with Static pages, I dove into PHP and rounded out the site with dynamic magic.

I realized that I didn’t hate programming, and in fact loved it. Most of my college was invested in an art degree. At this point I was becoming sick of the game that post-secondary education is. College seems like a big game sometimes: “Jump through this hoop”, “No, you can’t do that until you do this”, “Do not pass go, do not collect $200″. After film, and some back-and-forth about majors, I settled on English (now convinced I was going to do some writing). In part I fell towards English because the coursework looked appealing and I was doing well in that area anyway.

I wasn’t getting where I wanted to be, and I was experiencing success in my uneducated programming life. I’d been hired at a small company developing web software. I was making a lot more money than I ever had, and I was enjoying myself. I took a CS class and did poorly due to laziness. I thought that I’d been well on my way to my Associates of English only to find I was missing 2 or 3 courses. Somewhat reluctantly, I applied for the only degree that I could actually get: An Associates of Science in General Studies.

If you’ve never been to a community college (or Junior college), an Associates in General Studies is a transfer degree. It’s designed to allow a student to move from a local (and less-expensive) college to a 4-year school. It’s really meant for someone who hasn’t quite figured out what they want to pursue. Also according to my community college, it’s not considered a “complete degree”. To add insult to injury, most academic programs are designed to be started as a Freshman. Because of this, even if you complete the non-degree requirements you’re still looking at 4 years of school because of the way course schedules are laid out. (That is, you must jump through hoop 1, before jumping through hoop 2)

Sick of school and sick of the way it worked, I got my Associates of nothing, and gave up on college.

College, Take Three

A little more than a year later, my wife and I had moved to Oregon. I was encouraged to give school another shot. My interests had grown some in the time between formal education, and I had begun programming micro-controllers. I was reminded of childhood dreams of building robots and blinking lights. I started again, at Portland Community College. I took a single class, and did quite poorly. I was disappointed and angered. Why didn’t school work for me the way I wanted it to? It was the same reason I had always done poorly. I wasn’t doing the work, I was lazy and selfish.

I gave up on school, yet again.

“Give it the Old College Try”

In my case, that’s probably a terrible phrase. It would simply mean “Pay some money, screw around, and get nothing of benefit out of it.” Hykel (my wife) convinced me during several conversations that having a degree would always be more beneficial than not. I tried to ignore all the evidence that college would be a better choice. I had been working for more than 5 years as a web developer making as much money as my degree-holding peers. I looked around online for arguments that would support my hypothesis: “The age of college education is over.” While I did find some proponents of this idea – that I could have a productive, wonderful life without having earned a degree, I was also reminded of the advantages that come in college. You learn things in a structured manner, you get theory instead of just practicals, you have opportunities to ask stupid questions without risking anything more than pride.

It took some will on my part to push ahead and do it, but this past spring I gave college yet another shot. This time it was going to be different. I promised Hykel I would be responsible, do all my homework, and focus on doing well in the class. I also had a bit of an revelation: The goal of a class no matter what the class, is to learn. If you learn what you’re supposed to, you’ll do well in the class. Grades and performance can be directly related to learning and understanding the material. I had complained so often about already understanding a concept or topic and being irritated that I had to go through a particular class, I never appreciated the value of the class.

Armed with this new knowledge and perspective I returned to school: One class, in the evening. A math class that I’m sure I’ve covered at least 4 times in the last decade. I did all the homework. I attended every class period. I did well on all the tests. I made every effort to learn that I could. One time on my way out I shared with my instructor my epiphany about learning. He told me “When I understood that was the moment that I really started to do well in school.”

It worked. I got an “A”

Next week, I start my second class.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m a bit of a performer and after listening to podcasts for years now, I’ve finally broken down and made one. This isn’t my first attempt to make a podcast, but it’s my first successful attempt. So give it a listen. All future apologies for poor audio quality, improper mixing, and lack of interesting topics. I think everyone understands that podcasts tend to get better with time. So hopefully you’ll like this and just plain love episode 15, whenever it rolls around.

Topics Include:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• 3D printers
• Podcasting

The Aaron Eiche podcast is clean, but I admit that I hesitated on calling it that because I included pictures from a particularly racy episode of TNG. Nevertheless, if it’s safe enough for 1987 network television, it’ll probably be okay for most people. Feedback (Good, Bad, etc) is very welcome at feedback@aaroneiche.com.

The Netbook was running on OS X, my Operating System of choice. If it’s not obvious to you, Apple doesn’t make netbooks, and OS X wasn’t designed to run on that machine. It’s a Hackintosh, and as such tends to have a handful of problems. I can’t update the OS without some significant work. On top of that the Atom processor is great for web surfing, but lousy for heavy-duty processing that my MakerBot wants (at least if I want to spend less than 10 minutes slicing models)

So after some saving, some well-timed windfalls, and some planning I was set on getting a new Apple laptop. I knew it’d be more expensive (by a long shot) than any other x86 machine, but as I said before: I prefer OS X. I was going to go with a MacBook Air. A compact secondary portable that I wouldn’t use too often and would live in the back room doing the things that the netbook does now.

After perusing what was available from Apple several times, I was having a hard time choosing. The MacBook Airs were nice. I liked the size of the 11″, but not the speed. The 13″ was nice, bigger than I wanted though, and much more expensive. Hykel (My wife) went to the Apple store with me one evening and thoughtfully steered me toward the MacBook Pros.  She pointed out to me I was headed back to school and that it would be helpful.

This computer was turning into more than just a secondary portable machine. A compromise of size, price, and functionality I went with a MacBook Pro 13″. Apple just barely released these computers. Seriously. This machine was announced on the 24th of February. I bought mine on March 17th. That’s a record for me, save except I think for the first mac I purchased on my own: My Sawtooth G4 tower, which I think I bought within a few days of announcement.

So I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few weeks. I’ve found that I’ve been using my iMac less and less. With the exception of the graphics chipset (and the screen size) my MacBook outpaces my iMac in every way (lower clock speed but compensated for by a better bus, and higher efficiency). While I can’t do anything about the graphics (a paltry Intel integrated 3000 chipset) getting a 24″ monitor is simple: $200, I could step up to a 27″ monitor for about $300. My MBP doesn’t have the 640GB that my desktop does, but do I really need that space anyway? I can put any media on our NAS. Do I need heavy duty graphics processing? Not really, the heaviest thing I do is Starcraft II… and that should play back decently on the MBP’s Intel 3000.

The point of all this is that I never thought I’d be in a position where I’d want to get rid of a computer that I didn’t consider obsolete. Here I am wondering if I’m ready to ditch my much-loved iMac.

I decided to start anew giving it the benefit-of-the-doubt and try to genuinely get it to print the way I wanted to. Part of that was calibrating it correctly, part of it was connecting it to a computer that was a little more powerful than the little netbook that was running it before.

I can’t say that the prints are perfect, but it’s amazing what a little effort and dedication can do. After printing a whole bunch of calibration prints:

I finally got the thing set to a point where I think I can be proud of it. I printed a couple of things for fun:

This stands as the beginning of my printing round two. I look forward to seeing what I can accomplish with this little piece of machinery.

I’m an advocate of time-shifting and space-shifting content. When I say content I mean books, movies, TV-shows, games, whatever. Time-shifting refers to the process of utilizing something at a different time than it’s origin. In terms of media, the old analog is taping a show to watch later. These days it means Tivo, Netflix or Hulu. You’re simply watching something at a time other than when it was broadcast on television.

Space-shifting is slightly different. Instead of moving whatever you’re wanting to watch to another time, you’re moving it to another medium. I want to watch this television show on my phone, or on my computer. It usually incorporates time-shifting, but not always.

I feel like this is not a big deal. If I want to watch a show on a Saturday on my phone instead of on Tuesday on the TV, I’m probably only making a few advertisers unhappy. But I’ve been doing that for years. I mute the TV when the ads come on, or I’ll walk out of the room. I never owned a Tivo, but if I had, I would’ve let it cut the commercials out all together. Advertisers have begun to respond by getting their commercials into the show via product placement. Seemingly the most intrusive ones being in NBC’s “Chuck” where I’m constantly being bombarded with Subway sandwiches and Captain Awesome talking about how awesome his Toyota mini-van is. I digress…

Because I feel like it’s not a big deal, I figure I can be somewhat flexible with the means by which I get stuff. If I own a copy of Ender’s Game that I legitimately bought, I see no problem downloading an epub version of it off the seedy underbelly of the Internet. I already own the book, and paid for it. If I want to read it in a loose-leaf notebook or on a digital device, I see it as my perogative to be able to do so.

So time shifting and space shifting has never really been a big deal to me. I got my second E-Reader this past Christmas, and I love it. I’ve been of the mind that if I own a physical copy of a book, then I ought to be able to read it on my reader. I figure I’ve compensated the publisher and author, and essentially bought the right to read the book.

But then, this morning I came upon this awkward situation: If I buy the book used, then I haven’t compensated the author or the publisher – only the bookstore I bought it from. If I believe in duly compensating the author and publisher, I’d need to go buy a new copy.

In the United States, we have a law that broadly protects the sale of copyrighted materials called “First Sale Doctrine”. Basically, it says that you can a piece of copyrighted material (a book, a movie, etc.) if you don’t own the copyright provided the material is yours. When you purchase a book, you’re purchasing the physical object itself, the ink on the pages, but not really the words themselves, or their arrangement. This is where the breakdown of copyright happens. There’s no obvious answer as to how to handle a work in the ethereal sense.

I would be delighted if any or all of you that can make it came.
Details on the poster below: