Blackmoor Vituperative

I received a Harmony Ultimate from Logitech because I own several Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote remotes and have recommended them highly. I was looking forward to the Harmony Ultimate, since I had given an unfavorable review to the Harmony Touch, and I was hoping that the Harmony Ultimate would correct the design deficiencies of the Harmony Touch. It does correct some problems, but it also introduces new ones. Here are some good things and bad things:

Good things:

1. The removal of the number buttons to make the Harmony Ultimate a more convenient size was a good move. The on-screen numbers are easy to find, when they are needed.
2. Overall, the size of the Harmony Ultimate is convenient and comfortable.
3. Most of my settings were successfully imported from one of my Harmony One settings, so that saved me some time during set-up.
4. Having a dedicated button for the DVR and for the four colored buttons is a great addition.
5. The remote comes with a “hub” and a pair of “IR blasters”, which one could place in a cabinet to control concealed electronics. That’s nice, I suppose.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few things that make the Harmony Ultimate a bad fit for my living room experience.

1. The location of the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons to above the screen makes using the Harmony Ultimate more awkward than using the Harmony One, even though the Harmony One is significantly larger. Using the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons on the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote can be done one-handed. On the Harmony Ultimate it requires awkwardly shifting the position of the hand, or using two hands. This is a significant step backward in usability. However, what’s worse is….
2. Putting the touch-sensitive screen between the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons and the up-down-left-right buttons is a terrible design. I was constantly hitting the screen when trying to use the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, causing all sorts of mayhem. This rendered the remote useless.
3. The addition of “favorite channels” is a needless complication. Every DVR has favorite channel lists built in.
4. The Harmony Ultimate itself does not control a Roku box. The remote *only* sends commands to the Roku box through the “IR blaster” widgets. For me, this would require putting the Harmony Ultimate “hub” in my already crowded entertainment cabinet and re-arranging it so that the Roku box can face one of the “IR blasters”. Why not just have the remote itself send the commands? That’s what the Harmony One does,and it works perfectly. Even the Harmony Touch was able to get this right. This is a bad design.
5. The Harmony Ultimate does not have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”. To activate those frequently-used commands, you have to hold down the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons. This is a bad design.
6. There is no obvious way to access the commands for Devices, in order to send a command directly to one of your components. On the Harmony One, the “Devices” button is always easily accessible at the bottom of the screen. On the Harmony Ultimate, the Devices button is hidden in an on-screen sub-menu.
7. After the activities are set up, they are listed on the screen, much like they are on the Harmony One (a great improvement over the Harmony Touch). However, the on-screen button for the bottom-most activity is located *behind* the on-screen “Menu” button for the remote itself (this menu is where the “Devices” menu is hidden). This makes accessing that fourth activity … difficult.

Conclusion: in a world where the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote had never been invented, the Harmony Ultimate would be a nice addition to any living room. However, the Harmony One does exist, and has existed for years. That being the case, there is really no excuse for the flaws in the design of the Harmony Touch.

Suggestions for the Harmony Two, or the Harmony Ultimate Plus, or whatever the next version will be called:

1. Put all of the physical buttons, including the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, below the screen, where the user can reach them with one hand.
2. Have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”, located beneath the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons, as the Harmony One currently does.
3. Do not put any physical buttons above the touch-sensitive screen.
4. Eliminate the “Favorites” screen and replace it with a list of the user’s “Devices”.

I received my lovely (and exorbitantly expensive) HTC One today. It’s a well made phone, attractive and solidly built. I was very pleased with it until I discovered it has no SD Card slot and, more importantly, no way to replace the battery!

Like most people, I assume, I am paying for this phone over the course of two years. As we all know, the Li-ion battery in a cell phone typically lasts a year or so. To put this into perspective, I have worn out and replaced three batteries in my previous phone before the phone itself died and needed replacing. (That’s why I bought the HTC One.)

So now I have a phone that will literally not last as long as the payments on it. I can’t express how disappointed I am. How on Earth could anyone think that making a disposable $580 phone was a good idea??

I’m sending this back tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll do for a phone. Maybe a Galaxy S4.

P.S. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4, which arrived yesterday. I am well pleased, and would recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 to anyone considering the HTC One.

Republicans claim to oppose high taxes, but they vote for more Big Government — and higher taxes. The latest case in point is a U.S. Senate vote to pass an Internet sales tax bill that would force online retail outlets to start collecting taxes on behalf of state governments.

(from Republicans and Democrats vote for new Internet tax, lp.org)

I can’t tell you just how bad an idea this is. Much like some other recent legislation that died in the Senate (cough gun control cough), this is legislation that pretends to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, and actually makes a real problem worse.

The problem it pretends to fix is the failure to tax businesses that sell online. Fun fact: every American business that sells online pays sales taxes to every single state (and county, in many states) where it has a physical location. I wrote the sales tax code for DriveThruRPG, so I know for a fact that this is not a trivial amount of work for a small business. Expanding that added bureaucracy and back-end work to pay every single county in the USA is GODDAMNED INSANE (I am speaking for myself here, not for DriveThruRPG).

Adding injury to insult, it actually makes a real problem worse. The real problem is that local brick-and-mortar retailers can sometimes be undercut by online retailers. A solution to this problem would be to make sales tax lower, making the local retailer more competitive. Erecting a massive bureaucratic impediment, discouraging local brick-and-mortar businesses from selling their products online, actually makes their situation WORSE.

And, as usual, the only political party with two clues to rub together are the Libertarians.

I have another idea for a political cartoon. On the right hand side of the cartoon is a gate with the sign “Glue Factory”. A horse is on the left side of the cartoon, wearing a blanket that says “2nd Amendment”. A guy in a suit is pulling on the horse’s bridle, trying to lead it to the glue factory. The man in the suit has a voice balloon saying, “What are you worried about? No one wants to get rid of you. Just take one more step!”

“No one wants to take your guns” is bullshit, and everyone on both sides of the fight for and against that particular civil right knows it. We all know it’s a lie. It’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone that hears it, right up there with “separate but equal”.

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Sorcerer (7th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-11
Dexterity-11
Constitution-11
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-13
Charisma-13

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Warning: this video is graphic. It shows dead people. You’ve been warned.

Now for my thoughts:

The first segment, on the Philippines, illustrates the scenario that I think motivates some of the anti-gun hysteria in this country. Ironically, I think that divisive rhetoric and attempts to infringe on other people’s civil rights makes that scenario more likely rather than less. I hope, really hope, that Americans wake up to that and stop with the attacks on each other. Ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear are poor foundations for public policy.

The second segment, on the Taliban and Afghanistan… that’s almost too tragic. I have trouble even wrapping my head around it. It would be easy to blame religion, but the suicide bombers aren’t even being told what their own religion says. They are lied to and manipulated by their Imams and Muftis, who are distorting their own religion to use these children as weapons. The horror of it baffles me.

I am so grateful that I live in a relatively safe, relatively sane country. I hope it stays that way.

The author of this letter to “gun control” Democrats is a left-leaning supporter of reproductive rights “who participated wholeheartedly in the Occupy movement and in the national campaign to expose ALEC”. They make six suggestions on how to better present the argument for gun control in the USA. It’s worth reading.

I had an idea for a political cartoon. There would be three people at a table, and in each panel they would each say something, expressing their opinion about a topic. The first person believes in creationism, that there’s no evidence for evolution, that evolution is a plot by satanists and atheists, etc. The other two people would follow a similar pattern, but with homophobia and “gun control”, respectively (e.g., there’s no evidence that homosexuality is natural or that guns save lives, it’s all a plot by the gay Jews in Hollywood or the gun lobby and the NRA, etc.). In the final panel, they would each say that “90% of Americans support…” their own particular brand of ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear.

It’s too wordy for a cartoon, though. Also, it strikes me as a bit unkind. Just because someone has a different opinion, even an opinion I consider hateful and ignorant, that alone doesn’t make them a bad person. It’s not that simple: even genuinely good and kind people can have genuinely horrific opinions. Human beings are complicated.

“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

An image or “meme” equating traffic lights to restrictions on firearm ownership has been showing up recently in the usual places. I find this disappointing, because it’s such an absurd analogy.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the essential difference, that vehicles are for transportation (important, yes, but is it a basic human right?) while firearms are for defense of one’s life (an essential human right). Setting that aside, a traffic light’s purpose is to prevent an operator of a vehicle from driving their thousands-of-pounds of metal into the direct path of others’ rapidly moving thousands-of-pounds of metal, because this would be a direct and imminent danger to the lives of other people. This is completely reasonable. An equivalent (or nearly equivalent) analogy would be some form of signal intended to prevent a firearm from being fired at other people, or where other people are quite likely to be. And, in fact, we do have laws that serve this exact purpose, although they take the form of general prohibitions rather than signals. And these, by and large, are also reasonable.

The people who “like” and redistribute images like this one, alas, are anything but reasonable.

I love this Todd Rundgren song. It reminds me a bit of early Rick Springfield.

What do you mean, who is Rick Springfield? He played a vampire in the movie Nick Knight, which was later retooled as the series Forever Knight, with Geraint Wyn Davies playing the vampire detective, but Rich Springfield played the part first. He was also on a soap opera, the name of which escapes me, and yes, he was also a pop star for a while.

P.S. Here’s another great Todd Rundgren song.