This holiday season, I'm hoping some of you got Macs instead of PCs. Either way, check out this video parody of "I'm On A Boat" [NSFW:Language]

And, if you did get a Mac, here's Gizmodo's list of 10 things you must do to get the most out of it.

If you were unfortunate enough to get a PC, then here's Gizmodo's list of 10 things that Windows 7 really needs in order to be usable.

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I recently had the opportunity to take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment and I thought I'd share my experience with people through the immense audience of my blog. My day job offered a free book to anyone who wanted one along with a group followup to discuss and learn from the assessment. The basic premise of StrengthsFinder 2.0 is that they have...let me just quote them:

Based on Gallup's 40-year study of human strengths, we created a language of the 34 most common talents and developed the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment to help people discover and describe these talents.

Which basically means that they did a lot of interviews and compiled their results into a simplified list of categories (they call them 'themes') that describe people. The StrengtshFinder 2.0 assessment asks you a long series of questions and uses your responses to find the top 5 of the 34 themes that fit you. For reference, my themes and their descriptions were:

Relator: People who are especially talented in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Futuristic: People who are especially talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.

Empathy: People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations.

Adaptability: People who are especially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to “go with the flow.” They tend to be “now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.

My first thought was that these were pretty much no-brainers as far as describing me. I have a small group of close friends. When I get an idea in my head that really appeals to me, I can keep coming back to it over and over for weeks. I love to think about what the future could hold for us and I'm concerned about how the actions we take now could affect the future. I don't like to see my friends, or anyone really, sad because I want to help, though often don't know how. My whole life outlook is based on going with the flow and not worrying about the things I have no control over.

In addition to these short descriptions, there is a long list of maybes and perhapses that are supposed to more specifically describe how each theme fits me. This section, unlike the descriptions above, will be different for everyone who takes the assessment. I thought these were pretty hit-and-miss as far as accuracy.

One of the things that we were asked to do before attending our followup meeting was to send our assessment to a few friends and ask them when they'd seen us exhibit the behavior described by our themes. I talked to my wife about it and she said that the first thing she thought of was cold readings, so lets talk about that. According to Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, illusionists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

So basically they ask a bunch of questions and, based on the mark's responses and the reader's past experience, make statements that they think are likely to be correct. They also don't make those statements specific or conclusive, they leave them vague and tentative, allowing the subject to fill in the missing details that they couldn't possibly know because they're not really psychic; if they were, they'd already have won the lottery and collected James Randi's prize.

I took a longer look at the other 34 themes that the StrengthsFinder 2.0 offers and tried to decide, on my own and from the short description of each theme, how well each of the other themes fit me. Of the 34 themes, 5 were picked by the assessment that I mostly agreed with. I also picked out 9 that I'd have agreed with just as much. I could make an additional 13 fit me if I stretched a bit. Only seven of them would have been completely off the mark for me. For example, my world is not "best described by the order I create." This tells me that out of the 34 possible themes, there was a 79% chance that I would agree with any one theme. Maybe my Adaptability is just way way off the charts, but that seems like a stacked deck to me.

The StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment and a cold reading both ask a lot of questions and they both give a lot of vague responses. On the other hand, what does a psychologist do? All three of these things seem to have the same potential of making the subject think more about their situation than they have in the past and gain a better understanding of themselves and their personality.

The problem I see with this approach (and talk therapy for that matter) is that it depends on self-assessment. Any time you're asked to come up with information about yourself, regardless of the method, it will be information that you already have. This information is also of questionable merit given that the information you have is generally information you believe to be true, rather than information that is verifiably true. For example, one person I know to be a poor communicator had the 'communication' theme in their top five. This person might communicate frequently, but never seems to communicate accurately.

My conclusions about the StrengthsFinder 2.0 can be summed up thusly: It could be useful, but take it with a grain of salt. If you're going to try to apply it to your life, talk to others about the results and see if they agree with your assessment. Other people probably know more about your behavior than you do and can provide more insight than a book written by people you've never met.

--Photo courtesy Ben Zvan Photography

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Today is blog action day from what I'm told and the topic is global warming. I wanted to address the issue of return on investment (ROI) from green practices.

People say you can't make money from green technology like lower gas mileage and renewable energy. What they're really saying is that you can't make a quick buck from any of those things. They're not counting in any ROI outside of 2-5 years and they're not counting the potential cost of global warming. That's all a bunch of hooey because we're all going to be here much longer than 5 years.

From an anecdotal and personal standpoint, I can definitely say that I am saving money through green living: I invested in new windows, a handful of insulation and a high-efficiency boiler for my home last fall. My savings just in heating costs is around $140 per month. Now, I'm not going to pay off the upgrades to my house for many years but I raised the resale value of my property and I am using the savings to pay my mortgage down faster, which is compounding my savings by reducing my total interest paid.

Four years ago, I chose to take a job that was within walking distance of my home. As a result, I drive around 30,000 miles less each year than I used to. At my average of about 24 MPG, that's a $3,000 per year savings. Just take a moment and imagine being able to give yourself a $3,000 raise. I know the job market is tight right now and that may not be a good option, but it may be again soon.

All my electric power, which I mostly use for computers, is from WindSource. In my area, it's an extra few cents per KWh. I know I'm not making money off that deal, but I also know that less natural gas and coal are being used as a result. This is an even greener move than converting all my light bulbs to CF which, by the way, is a significant and immediate savings.

So, when you look at the cost of doing something green, don't think about the quick returns, think about the long-term savings.

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Here is some science you should know about.

NASA has taken 3D printing to a whole new level by using electron beams to print titanium parts. --via Gizmodo

Normally an aircraft builder might start with a 6,000-pound block of titanium and machine it down to a 300-pound part, leaving 5,700 pounds of material that needs to be recycled and using several thousand gallons of cutting fluid used in the process.

With EBF3 you can build up the same part using only 350 pounds of titanium and machine away just 50 pounds to get the part into its final configuration. And the EBF3 process uses much less electricity to create the same part.

Canon, Nikon and RED have been coming out with some amazing new cameras lately. Just don't expect them to blow up a mule as a demonstration.

Looking forward to Windows 7? At least one study shows it's not that much faster than Vista on current hardware.

Have you ever wondered what people are doing with film cameras now that digital is the same quality or better for a reasonable price? It turns out one photographer was willing to sacrifice his film camera for this picture (right). Luckily, he only ended up sacrificing his lens.

With the number of new-hire zombies we've had in our data center this week. I'm glad we'll have a white paper we can use to make sure our DR plans include the inevitable.

You know all about Saturn's rings, right? You remember how they disappeared for a while when Saturn was edge-on to us? Well, there's a new ring in town and it's a little bigger than the others.

-- Photo Copyright Ben Cooper

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Sure, you've seen this illustration of the difference between serial and parallel processing:

But have you seen this illustration of Marilyn Monroe?

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An optomistic project silks 1,000,000 spiders to create 44 square feet of spider-silk cloth. 96-strand threads made from silk extracted from golden orb weavers with a modern copy of a turn-of-the-century machine make a strong, elastic material. The project took four years and only yealded 1 square foot of cloth per 23,000 spiders. It's not practical for large-scale production, but it sure is cool.  -- Wired

The search for water on the moon is over. Hydrogen from solar winds may have bonded to the oxygen in lunar dust to form water but whatever the cause, it's there. Next step: figure out how to harvest it. -- io9

Studies on gender differences are easy to misinterperet. A recent study of gender and religious affiliation concludes that women are less skeptical than men. But really, did they ask the question they were trying to answer? -- Almost Diamonds

If you're going to start an avalanche and then get stuck in the snow and then get rescued a few minutes later, you might as well record it for the rest of us to watch. -- Gizmodo

The smell of death is not just a metaphore. Scientists have isolated compounds that act as universal bug repelents. "Hey, something here is dead. And it's us!" -- Science Friday

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Do you have eight minutes? Good.

Sit down, turn up the volume, press play, and slip into an animated world of somnambulistic narration, captivating animation, and a story about smokey hookas and smoking hookers. Get ready for the bohemian behemoth, post-midnight soiree.

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

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On Friday, I attended an event on the east bank of the University of Minnesota campus, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to stop at the bookstore and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard. Over the weekend, I discovered a few things that I thought I'd share.

Installation
Gizmodo called it 'a move that can only be described as showing off.' Snow Leopard can complete it's installation even if you accidentally (or intentionally) shut down the computer during the upgrade. In another impressive move, the installation runs for about 20 minutes before the first restart. During that time, the dashboard app still works fine, so if you want to see the calendar, check your stocks, or do basic math with the calculator, you still can. It restarts once part way into the installation and then again once the installation is complete. There are a few background tasks, most notably the Spotlight metadata importer, that will slow down the computer for a little while after the upgrade. After that, you're good to go.

Speed
With every release of OS X since os 10.0, the system has gotten faster. The one exception to this was 10.5. My guess is that they spent a lot of time porting the system over to Intel x64 hardware while keeping support for x86 and PowerPC chips. With OS 10.6, they took the time to optimize all that code and remove support for the older PowerPC CPUs. Unfortunately, that leaves me with four systems that I can't install 10.6 on, but it also means that the newer machines see a performance boost once again.

Secure Empty Trash
Emptying the trash Securely has been an option in OS X at least since Leopard and, since I work with some sensitive data that I try not to have on my hard drive, I turned that option on. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I've found that emptying the trash takes significantly longer (despite the improvements I mention above). I wonder if the definition of 'secure' has changed from 10.5 to 10.6. I have heard that it now follows DoD procedures and overwrites the file seven times. I might just rely on disk encryption to speed things up a bit. We'll see.

File Vault
Speaking of disk encryption... I've had some trouble with File Vault in the past. Preferences like firewall settings and my default browser wouldn't get saved correctly due to some permission or file location issue with the encrypted disk image. That all seems to be fixed now because Firefox has reliably been my default browser after every reboot. I spent quite a while discussing this issue on the Apple support forums and it's good to see that they finally fixed it.

1080p
I use a Mac Mini as my DVR and video player at home. It's connected to my 1080p LCD television via a Mini-DVI to HDMI adapter and for some reason never supported 1080p output, only 1080i. I had suspected that this was a problem with the video adapter not being dual-link. With the upgrade, I can now select 1080p as the display resolution. Not a huge improvement, but really a bonus in the home entertainment category. I paid for all those pixels after all.

Cisco VPN Support
A welcome addition to the OS is native support of Cisco IPSec VPN connections. That means I can delete my 3rd-party Cisco VPN client. It also means that I get the convenience of a menu bar icon to connect to VPN and the seamlessness of support that keeps my applications from complaining that their IP address has changed. Groupwise used to crash horrifically if I changed IP addresses while it was open and the Oracle Calendar client used to complain loudly.

Parallels 3
Unfortunately, Parallels 3 is non-functional under Snow Leopard. On the other hand, the only reasons I was using Parallels was for a couple of web applications that didn't work under Firefox or Mac OS and now also don't work under Explorer 8 and isolating my VPN connection... see above on that. Parallels says they're working on enabling support, but they've had quite a while to release an update and Snow Leopard is actively blocking the application from starting up. Parallels 4 works fine, so this sounds more like a matter of forced obsolescence to me. Fortunately, the free Virtual Box from Sun has no problems.

SSH-Agent
I make dozens of ssh connections every day to support Linux, Solaris and AIX servers. (Oh Windows, why hast thou forsaken me?) In order to streamline the process, I use a passphrase-locked ssh key to authenticate with the servers to avoid using my two-factor keyfob. This is still two-factor authentication because the ssh key is something I have and the passphrase is something I know. SSH-agent is a tool that unlocks the key with your passphrase and then keeps it unlocked for the next time you need it. It's automatically enabled in the new version of terminal.app so I only have to enter my passphrase once. And as long as my screen locks properly, it's still secure.

Developers
I am amazed at the number of developers who are still relying on 32-bit support in the OS. This upgrade has been coming for over a year and has been available to developers for months, so there's been time to release updates for  64-bit compatibility, but there are still a number of Preference Panes that require restarting System Preferences in 32-bit mode to run them. I haven't seen any updates coming through to take advantage of Grand Central for parallel processing either, but I'm confident that both will happen before OS 10.7 comes out and drops 32-bit support completely.

Quicktime X
I like the fact that Quicktime now has built-in support for screencasting and iSight recording, but I probably won't use either one of those any time soon. The new look is nice, especially the way the title bar of the window fades out for a bezel-less effect while playing a video. Unfortunately, Quicktime now looks like it was designed by a different company, since the rest of the OS still has the brushed-steel theme going on. Update: Under the same category of mismatched interface elements, the context menus for the dock are white on black and the context menus for everything else are black on white.

Finder/Dock
The Dock has some new functionality, like grouping minimized windows under the application icons and integrating with Exposé more closely. The long-click that Apple has always used on the dock will work well if they ever produce a touch-screen tablet running OS X rather than the iPhone OS. I use the Spaces multiple desktop manager to expand my screen real estate and I'd like to be able to use the flip and cube transitions that are built into quartz to switch spaces, which didn't happen in this upgrade, but that's just eye-candy.

So... a few things don't work any more. More things work better. I guess that means Snow Leopard is exactly what I'd expect from an OS upgrade.

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Most people don't really understand the concept of the Big Bang. Here it is in two minutes and twenty seconds:

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So... I'm a fanatic do-it-yourself-er in some areas. Food is one of the areas. I brew beer, I grow herbs in the kitchen window, I kill large animals and butcher them...

I've been thinking a lot about adding carbonated water and soda to the list. I love a good gin and tonic but modern/American tonic water is sweetened, which isn't exactly traditional, and I've heard that homemade is far better, if a little time consuming. There's also a whole world of root beers and ginger ales out there that would be possible with a little carbonated water. I really don't want to buy carbonated water though. Tonic water and soda are bad enough, but just water with bubbles? Nah. A rechargeable seltzer bottle would also give me a second reason to buy a CO2 system.

There are several sources of selzer bottles online, but finding one with a shrader valve is another story. There are bunches of poorly described bottles on Ebay, but I wanted to know what I was getting. So I contacted one popular manufacturer of seltzer bottles to see if they made or were aware of such a thing.

Hi, I'm looking for a seltzer bottle that I can recharge from the CO2 rig I use for kegging beer. Do you have or know of such a product?

I was quite happy when I got a response back from the owner of the company. But I didn't stay happy for long.

You need to support the economy and buy our 8g CO2 cartridges, do cheap out on us.

With grammar and customer service like that, they're going to go a long way.

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