Today was spent in Salt Lake City.

I went to Salt Lake City this morning. I was supposed to take my buddy Chadd with me, but he backed out at the last minute... no, last second. I'm not the least bit upset about that. Heh.

I took my laptop with me on the trip so that I could listen to an assortment of musical selections which I copied over to the laptop from my MP3 collection on the file server (tic) at home. I just connected the cassette tape adapter which normally runs into my MPTrip CD/MP3 player into the headphone/line-out jack on my laptop.

For some reason mpg123 isn't working right on my laptop. Previously (i.e. before I sent my laptop in for repair and new hard drive) I used mp3blaster but I haven't gotten around to reinstalling it. Besides, I thought mpg123 would be adequate. Instead, the music skipped around every half a second or so. It was really annoying. I had heard that mpg123 was not the greatest player around, but I had no idea it was this bad. Of course, the problem could be all my fault, somehow.

So, instead, I used xmms.

My musical selection for the trip down was the soundtrack to the movie Groove which I recently watched on DVD (and bought the soundtrack on CD the next day).

I had lunch with my father-in-law and my friend Steve (who used to be my manager at Sorenson Media) at Chili's near the E-Center in West Valley City.

My 2:00 interview downtown went really well... better than I expected, even. That scares me and could potentially put me into a dilemma: I might actually consider a position if it were offered to me by this company. But I'd have to work (and possibly, eventually live in Salt Lake City). Life is full of choices, right?

After the interview, I went over to my father-in-law's office (temporary office, actually) where he (and I) programmed my left hearing aid which Starkey had returned after replacing the telecoil and the receiver. It sounds perfect now. So perfect, in fact, I think I'll be sending the right aid back for the same procedure. :-)

After this, I went to my parents' house and visited with my mom. She and I went out and bought my dad a new flatbed scanner for Fathers' Day since his Umax broke a few months ago. We got a Hewlett-Packard 2100 at OfficeMax for $60. It seems like a decent scanner... and HP usually has decent warranties on their hardware.

HP == Bloat?

The main thing I worry about with buying HP hardware for systems running Microsoft operating systems is the bloated software they usually package with everything.

For example, my sister has a G85 Fax/Print/Scan/Copy/Toast/Clean combo thing. If you pull up the tasklist in Windows there are literally dozens of little applications running at all times just to keep an eye on that beast. And, we all know what that does to Windows: It makes it even more unstable than it usually is!

Why did this HP 2100C scanner software require over 100 megabytes of disk space? My Umax Vista S6 (which still works after 6 years) only required two or three floppies. The updated Windows drivers are only 12 megabytes, total.

This is the perfect time for me to insert one of those tidbits of wisdom I frequently spew and believe wholeheartedly, but do not necessarily practice religiously:

Just because you can do something...
Doesn't mean you should do that thing.

Just because you have 650 megabytes of space available on the gold master for your scanner software, you don't need to try to fill it up.

Computers would run so much better if people would still maintain the minimalist philosophies they had to abide by up until the mid 1990s. Does anyone program in assembly anymore?! Why did WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS install in three floppies and 6.0 for Windows took something like thirty?!

Caldera

One of the people who interviewed me today asked me what I thought about Caldera. It was an interesting question because the Caldera CEO recently stated that he agreed with very-visible figures at Microsoft that have been ranting that the General Public License (and therefore, Linux, they figure) is fatally flawed and incompatible with business.

Many of my Linux-using friends now hate Caldera CEO Ransom Love. My wife made an interesting point that it's possible his statement was mainly meant to save Caldera's stock price from tumbling as a result of Microsoft's comments. Having thought about that, I think that is a good possibility. It raises the fact that we need to take all public statements from company representatives like this with a grain of salt and actually watch to see if the company actually does what they say they intend to do.

I hope Caldera isn't as screwed up as many of my Linux-using friends feel they are (okay, pretty much all my Linux-using friends feel this way). There is a lot of potential for companies that get it.