It's been a quiet week at the Thingo compound. The rest of the family has been visiting relatives in Ottawa. I've tried to use the time productively, with mixed success. One of the obstacles to full success was simply the amount of time I need to devote to non-research activities like lecture preparation. I also had other distractions, like a needed shopping excursion, some baking for today's social hour in my lab, and a yoga class last night (finally!). Finally, the work itself is vague, and it just turned out that the projects I wanted to drive to completion aren't getting there so easily. I'm sure I can still put together a paper, but I'm not as excited about it as I'd like to be.

On an unrelated note, I can't resist including a link to a Q&A about the legal powers of the US president. Very thoughtful! Here's an excerpt that made me laugh out loud:

Q. Things sure have changed since the innocent days of mutually assured destruction! But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?

A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!

Q. How does a War Bill become a War Law?

A. It all begins with the president, who submits a bill to the president. If a majority of both the president and the president approve the bill, then it passes on to the president, who may veto it or sign it into law. And even then the president can override himself with a two-thirds vote.

Tuesday was a day I had been dreading for a long time. I needed to get a periodontal procedure (gum surgery) done as part of the ongoing saga of a tooth that got a root canal last year. See, when you put a crown on a dead tooth, you need the crown to hold on to the tooth. But the filling in my tooth goes so up above the gum line -- a crown in this case would probably be holding on to filling, not tooth. The only way to build an effective crown is to move the gum (and remove some bone) to expose more actual tooth. Um, in case Dan's reading, I'll just leave it at that.

I was fearing the worst. I didn't know how much pain to expect during the procedure, or how much soreness afterwards. Worst of all, I knew that after the surgery they'd be wrapping the tooth and gum in a putty dressing so that it could heal properly. I wasn't looking forward to walking around for a week with a wad of old chewing gum stuck to my tooth.

Well, it turned out to be a non-event. Almost pleasant, actually -- the periodontist is a friendly, interesting guy and we were having a good conversation when he wasn't busy cutting into me. I was out in under an hour. When the freezing wore off I wasn't in any pain at all, just a little tender. I was back in the office that afternoon after working from home the rest of the morning.

I am wearing a putty dressing, and that kind of sucks. But it's not as bad as I had feared. I'm not talking funny (no more than normal, anyway), so I can still teach lectures. The related issue is that I'm forced to do all my chewing on the other side of my mouth, which is inflaming the TMJ problems I already have there. Fortunately I'm the stoic type (seriously, I'll take this over last year's toothache any day). Anyway, the dressing comes off next Tuesday. I'm expecting it to go a bit like a horror movie where the protagonist's face is all wrapped up in bandages, and when the doctor removes the bandages he goes into a rage: "My gums! Dear god, what have you done to my gums? I'm a MONSTER!"

We've gotten to know a bunch of families in the neighbourhood. Within this group Zebula enjoys the company of a couple of other little girls roughly her age. Now, as far as I know, none of the moms (or dads) in the the neighbourhood are girly-girls. Yet, somehow, this group of little girls has become indoctrinated into the whole pink thing. They like pink, they like dresses, they like tiaras, they want to be ballerina princesses. What gives? Is one of the moms surreptitiously feeding them the whole pink culture? Do we have a mole? Maybe Mattel secretly finds neighbourhood moms to push the pink meme so that girls will buy more barbies.

I seem to have a developed a habit of visiting Future Shop on Boxing Day. I'm not sure exactly why this is. It's not a great store, and Boxing Day is certainly a stressful day on which to visit it. But I always manage to find some reason to go. Last year, it was a new TV. This year, I was armed with a gift card I had received as a holiday present, and I knew I needed to acquire a copy of Serenity on DVD.

The other reason I wanted to go is because I've been thinking for a while of picking up a small digital voice recorder. I sometimes have good ideas for talks or papers while walking, and it would be convenient to be able to capture them before they're gone, without having to stop to pull out a pen and paper. Most of these voice recorders are really just music players with built-in microphones, and the potential for listening to music or podcasts or what-have-you while walking to and from work had a certain appeal too.

Earlier in the year, I had received a recommendation for iriver as a good brand of portable music player. Based on that recommendation, I picked up a T30 last week. Besides functioning as a voice recorder, it fulfills another requirement as a music player: it plays OGG files (OGG Vorbis is an open-source MP3-like format of comparable or better quality). Most of my music collection is now in OGG format.

I took the gizmo home and was initially very excited about it. It's small, light, records like a charm, and has a user interface that doesn't make me want to pull my hair out. The trouble started when I tried to transfer files to it. The packaging said that it required Windows XP and Windows Media Player, but most USB devices are friendly and willing to talk to other operating systems too. Not this one. It uses USB, but it doesn't come up as a hard drive, meaning that it doesn't support UMS (never mind what that means). Instead, it's built on top of a bonehead Microsoft-proprietary protocol that effectively locks you in to XP and WMP.

This just burns me up. Okay, any hardware vendor is allowed to make deals with software vendors (like Microsoft) so that their products only work with each other. But the ability to play OGGs (remember, open-source) seems completely at odds with Microsoft-only support. And there's no technological limitation here: in other parts of the world, you can buy a T30 from iriver that's identical except that it supports other operating systems (via UMS). I can only assume the limitation comes from a licensing agreement that is somehow advantageous for iriver, and I shouldn't hold my breath.

Eventually, I convinced my Linux machine to upload songs to the T30, but it wasn't pretty, and I'm not sure it's a solution that would satisfy me in the long run. I'm left with few options: return the item (strong possibility), upgrade to XP (not likely), wait for iriver to come to their senses (yeah, right), or wait for the open-source community to improve their workaround (probably what I'll do). Ultimately, it's a nice toy and I'm reluctant to part with it so quickly. But the Windows-only nonsense is just such a shame. I'm hoping iriver opens the darn thing up to OGG users, who are highly unlikely to be running Windows.

[update: 03 January at 23:44]: I returned the T30 this morning. In a rare moment of clarity, I realized that I didn't have the patience for pointless hacking. There's no reason to keep the T30 if other makers sell units with all the same features and no arbitrary restrictions on compatibility. It's not my responsibility to hack around deficiencies in a product. Earlier this evening I ordered a Cowon iAudio U2, which also includes an FM tuner and a built-in rechargeable battery.

[update: 06 January at 21:55]: My iAudio U2 arrived this afternoon. Stick it into the USB port, and poof, mount it as a storage device under Linux. No muss, no fuss, no circumventing idiotic rights management. I copied about eight albums onto it in a few minutes and I was ready to roll. Voice recording works like a charm, and the whole thing fits comfortably in my pocket. I can even operate it pocket-pool-style. I'm a happy camper.