• Personal

    Do not mock Mother Nature

    Other than gazing at faraway mountain tops, or driving up to the ski hills around Vancouver during Christmas, this past Saturday (January 14th) marked the first time I saw a single falling snowflake since our move out west. Considering how much snow can fall by mid-January in Toronto, this was a welcome relief. When it did snow on Saturday, it was almost laughably mild; it didn’t even feel cold enough to be snowing at all, and it was more or less a light dusting, leaving behind just a few melting and conglomerating globs of ice:

    It’s hard to see unless you click for the larger version, but it was mild enough for a bug to be running around on one of those ice-covered pieces of grass.  As I went for a walk around 4pm, most of what fell had already melted in the afternoon sun:

    In fact, it had turned into a pretty nice day, and I was carrying my camera specifically to capture the mildness of the first “snowfall” I’d seen in Washington.  By the time I’d made the brisk walk to the western edge of Kirkland, still just wearing a light fabric “jacket” that I sometimes wear inside the office, it felt more like fall than winter:

    If I didn’t have a backlog of photos in my camera to process, I might have posted that day about how nice the winter was here. Fortunately, I did have a backlog, because that post would have looked pretty stupid by Sunday afternoon, seeing this when looking out the back door:

    I have to say, though, that it was actually pretty beautiful, especially since there was no wind – so the snow was falling very softly.  Even the narrowest branch could still have snow piled neatly on top of it, as if someone was carefully balancing each snowflake in a game of Jenga at the molecular level:

    You could hear the neighborhood kids off playing in the distance; some decided to use our long, steep driveway to go sledding (though fortunately stopped faster than the car which made the run a few months ago), and later I saw that another group had tried to roll the snow on our driveway into the start of a snowman!

    While the total accumulation wasn’t anything that wouldn’t have been cleaned up overnight back in Toronto, it was a much more significant event around here. Though a good part of the snow melted off over the next day or two, the steep slopes and relative lack of snow clearing infrastructure made for quite a mess and a rash of closures; our office shut down today, and will be closed all day tomorrow, as we’re expecting snowfall that apparently hasn’t been seen since 1996 through the day tomorrow!

    The saddest thing is, despite being a Canadian, I don’t even have a winter jacket handy (there’s probably one in a box around here somewhere!), I don’t have a pair of boots or a snow shovel (thanks to living in a condo in Toronto), and my car is the one I bought in the U.S. more than a decade ago which wouldn’t have the slimmest of chances of making it up my driveway.  With the family in Taiwan, I’ve had minimal face-to-face human contact for half a week – other than a poor delivery guy who had to park his truck and pull my 120lb package through the snow by hand yesterday!

  • Photography

    The best camera you have with you

    A phrase you’ll hear mentioned from time to time is “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The point of the phrase is that it’ll do you no good to get the D4 I mentioned in the last post if you don’t carry it around with you all the time. Since there isn’t a smartphone without a camera built-in anymore, we’re now at a point where you almost always have at least one camera with you. But sometimes, it’s been fortunate that I’ve had more than one. Like back in October, when there was a nice sunset at about 6:40pm, as I was leaving the Google offices. I took a picture with my HTC Sensation:

    While there are worse cameraphone images, I was pretty disappointed. The sunset looked much nicer than the above, and you didn’t have to look too closely to see lots of noise in the image. Fortunately, the best camera I had with me wasn’t the one that was built into the HTC Sensation; I was carrying the PowerShot S90 (about 1.5 years older than the HTC Sensation). I felt it captured the sunset a little better:

    Zoomed in a little, something you still largely can’t do optically on smartphone cameras:

    I mentioned in looking at the statistics of which cameras/lenses I actually use, that I barely use the S90, and this is true. But because I have it much of the time, it’s still handy when I don’t have a DSLR nearby (which I never do when walking to/from work).

    I read recently that sales of compact cameras in 2011 were significantly lower than 2010, as a result of the growing ubiquity of smartphones. It’s a shame that many people might not fully realize what they’re giving up when going to the cameras built into their phones, even in comparison to a compact camera. As I mentioned in a post when I was still kicking myself for not having my DSLR when we ran into Kim Clijsters, the difference in output between classes of camera (phone, compact, 4/3rds or APS-C, and 35mm) is still huge. With even a consumer-grade D5100 or D7000 in the above situation, there’d even have been enough dynamic range in the picture to bring out some foreground detail (if you want it), like this shot in much less interesting conditions in Vancouver:

    I’m not that fond of the above photo, but I’m nevertheless amazed that it’s possible to capture the sun and details in the trees (you’ll need to click for the larger version to actually see the detail, probably) in a single frame with no HDR tricks applied. Unfortunately it seems like it will still take at least 5-10 years (given that APS-C overall performance is just now approaching the first full-frame D3 from over 4 years ago, and that the sensor size drop going to a compact is much bigger) before compacts reach what APS-C sensors can today.

  • Photography

    Time to go full frame?

    Nikon announced the D4 last last week, a $6,000 successor to the Nikon D3s:

    The image is Nikon’s, and links to their blog post announcing the D4. It’s a 16.2MP camera, only a little more than the D3S, and essentially the same as the D7000 (which is what I use, and is the latest model in Nikon’s line of cameras that use smaller DX sensors). It’s marquee features are awesome low light performance, better video than any prior Nikon camera, and very fast shooting and auto-focus.

    According to NikonRumors.net (which was spot on with the D4 prediction), the replacement for the less (but still) expensive full-frame D700 is also forthcoming.  They say it’s named the D800, and will be a whopping 36MP – though significantly slower in terms of shooting speed than the D4 as a result of this. It will probably have a body that’s more like the D700, which is to say, much smaller than the monstrous D4 (which appears to be similar in size to the D3 that I used for a few months). Is one of these for me?

  • Personal,  Photography

    25 Megapixels

    Do more megapixels really matter? Camera manufacturers seem to think so, with the Sony NEX-7 pushing things up to 24MP and Nikon’s forthcoming D800 rumored to have a whopping 36MP. Well, I now have a 25MP photo in my collection:

    I always link images to SmugMug’s X3 size, which is pretty big, but well short of 25MP. If you want to see every last pixel, this link is the full sized JPEG. Now, I like this picture independently of any of the technology behind it, simply because in all our thousands of photos we have very few that are of all four of us, which isn’t surprising given that someone has to hold the camera (especially since my camera is configured in a weird way that makes it hard to hand over to someone).  So, what was this picture shot with?

  • Personal

    Happy 2012!

    It seems with each passing year, we pay less attention to the actual new year itself. 12 years ago, I rang in the new year with my cousins in Malaysia, where there was a huge event on the grounds of the old international airport (relegated to handling a few domestic flights after the opening of KLIA) – while wondering what Y2K chaos might ensure for computer systems. 11 years ago, I was with friends and family in New York City’s Times Square as we welcomed 2001; the size of that affair needs no further description. This year, I went to bed at around 9:30pm (because Olivia still refuses to go to bed on her own), and while I did wake up a couple of hours later, I didn’t even stop to really think that it was the new year until later. I think I was actually playing Starcraft 2 when the new year rolled in!

    Still, 2011 was a busy year with lots of change for us – where we live, where I work and the type of work I’m doing, one of our cars (after 10 years with Dopey) , to name a few – and with the kids starting 2011 at 2 years 8 months and 10 months old, the pace of change within the year as they develop is nothing less than astonishing. I haven’t really thought about and don’t really know what to expect or strive for in 2012, which is too bad because I usually do set some goals at the start of the year. But with Valerie and the kids heading to Taiwan for a while shortly, I’ll have some time to think about this. For now, I’ll just share a couple of interesting stats…

  • Customer Service,  Personal,  Travel

    Travelocity << Singapore Airlines

     

    I had intended to write three travel-related posts consecutively before getting sidetracked with the last post.  I figured that by going from bad (United Airlines) to good (Singapore Airlines) to awful (this post), I might avoid sounding like a perennial complainer.  And indeed, as I mentioned in a recent post on customer service, I really think it’s worth calling out and supporting great customer service (and the companies that provide it) so we get more of it – and less of companies like Travelocity.

    You already know that this story doesn’t end well, so I’ll caveat things up front. First, I technically booked through travelocity.ca as opposed to travelocity.com; but were they to tell me that’s a separate corporate entity with a relation in brand only, I’d tell them that I don’t care and that they should be more careful with their brand. Second, this is just one experience; I am sure that some people have good experiences. Much probably depends on which agent your call is routed to, and whether they’re having a good day. Though having communicated with them many times via both phone and E-mail, I must have hit many bad days. Finally, there are definitely things I could have been more proactive about or attentive to. Still, I think customers deserve better.

    The context is simple – I needed to go back to Malaysia from Seattle for my mom’s birthday. Since I was no longer living in Canada or flying out of Toronto, which I was pretty familiar with, I had to look for different options and decided to give Travelocity a try (due to a slightly negative experience with Expedia, in which a flight booked with Expedia got cancelled, but I got charged for the hotel I also booked with Expedia anyways; understandable in some respects, yet unpleasant nonetheless).

    The first challenge was just finding flights. Like essentially all travel sites, you type in what you want and what feels like 5 minutes later, you get back a list of options (some of which have impossible connection times and other traps to watch out for). I look forward to the day when the awesomely fast Google Flight Search covers the whole world and not just the U.S. Now, I understand that finding optimal flight routes is something of an NP-complete problem, but taking 6 different airlines via different cities isn’t going to work anyways, so it’s unclear that the search space should be that large. Yes, arcane fare rules and airline partnerships probably make matters more complex, and I have no doubt that the people who work on this problem are very smart. But the results aren’t great, yet.

    What do I mean by not great? Searching for flights from Seattle to Kuala Lumpur turned up a few options, all with 2+ stops, that were not appealing and also quite expensive. Searching for flights from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur and then matching flights from Seattle to Los Angeles offered a whole host of viable options not returned by the first search. You can try it right now! Plugging in this same set of routes (SEA -> KUL versus SEA -> LAX -> KUL), with a random date, the two-part search found flights $70 cheaper – with the same number of stops (2). In my case, the difference was more than $70, and more importantly, I was looking for a decent airline (Singapore Airlines) and also a Star Alliance carrier since that would have put me at the 100k threshold to qualify for Super Elite status for another year. The added inconvenience and time of flying via LAX was easily worth it to earn those miles.

    But my gripe is not about the search process not being as good as it could (or should, or will) be. It’s about three things that happened next:

    • As I check in at Los Angeles for the flight to Singapore, the check-in agent tells me that in addition to only having middle seats (which I can accept), that I’m on a special fare that doesn’t qualify for miles. I’ve rarely ever seen such fares, especially not for international travel – but in all cases where I had, it was fully disclosed.  There was no mention of this in any interaction with Travelocity, and I did indeed read all the fare rules.  I read them again after discovering this, complained to multiple people at Travelocity about this, and all they could say was that it’s an airline policy, not their policy, and that I have to talk to the airline about it.  They were utterly uninformed, and this was a serious failure in disclosure.  The net cost of this was approximately 40,000 miles (I earn 2-for-1 through this year due to being Super Elite), which is enough for 1.5 round trip tickets anywhere in North America.  And it put me well out of reach of making Super Elite for next year (which historically meant 50,000 extra miles during the year – another 2 round trip tickets).  Of all the issues, this was the most serious – it still makes me angry thinking about it, especially given their clueless and uncaring response to the issue.
    • Several weeks after booking, I received several E-mails on both flights informing me about changes to the flight schedule – made by the airlines (Singapore and Alaska, in this case).  Flights, in particular the LAX -> SEA flight, moved several times, sometimes backwards, sometimes forward.  I knew I’d have to check this at some point, but assumed that it was just a change of schedule.  In actual fact, my LAX -> SEA flight had been moved earlier enough that there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to clear immigration and customs, walk between terminals (it’s LA!), and go through security to catch my flight. Once I realized this, I called to correct the situation.  Their response?  I should have called sooner, now I’m stuck with unworkable flights, and have to pay $200 to get something later.  I paid less than $200 for the entire round trip initially!  To add insult to injury, they spent a bunch of time trying to convince me that I initiated the change – when I was looking at E-mail directly in front of me that made it clear that I didn’t.  Thank goodness I was calling with Google Voice, or it would have cost a fortune to listen to them tell me that I decided to pick impossible flights for myself.
    • A day later, they get in touch via E-mail to say that my rebooked flight didn’t go through, because my credit card – the same one they had yesterday when they were on the phone with me – has now expired.  Note this isn’t a credit card I had given them; they asked if the same credit card was fine and I said yes, without actually thinking about exactly which card I had originally booked with.  Oh, and in the whole 24 hour period that went by that it took for them to discover what normally happens in the 10 seconds after you click the “Book” button, the fares have changed – upward – and now I have to fly through Portland.

    I’ve probably traveled between 800,000 and 900,000 miles by air during my lifetime, but this qualifies as the single worst experience in that entire history of air travel. The only two that come even remotely close are benig told by the now-defunct airline Jetsgo that we our flight out of Newark was cancelled because it was snowing in Toronto (it was over 10 degrees Celsius, and an Air Canada flight was departing at the same time – this was just an outright lie), and being locked in a room for over four hours with my brother while on transit as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles.

    I won’t be using Travelocity again, and I suggest that you don’t either.

  • Gaming,  Personal

    Finally…

    I wrote a post back in July, titled “Is it always better to get better?“, in which I wondered why we try and improve even at meaningless things that don’t have actual value. In my case, the example in question was Starcraft 2, a real-time strategy game I spend far too much time playing.  Despite the utter lack of value or meaning, I nonetheless set a personal goal of making it into Diamond league, which is approximately the top 20% of active 1v1 players.  Being in the top 20% of anything you set your mind to really ought not to be that hard (well, unless you pick a goal around height or some other relatively immutable property), and there’s many thousands of Diamond 1v1 players in Starcraft 2; nonetheless, it took till tonight for me to finally make it.

    It’s certainly been more difficult than I anticipated it to be. For a long time, I was really just playing the game, and not actively thinking about how I was playing, and what I needed to improve. I might go in with a plan, but once the actual back and forth combat phases started, I’d just focus on playing things out – and not on what I was trying to do better. The other challenge is that everyone still actively playing the game more than a year after it’s release was also pretty serious. Strategies evolved, things that used to work ceased to, and sometimes even when I felt I was playing near the peak of my ability, I’d take a string of losses.

    As I wrote the prior blog post, hitting Diamond was the very last thing I expected.  Starcraft 2 runs in seasons; at the end of each season, you’re locked into your current league, and when a new season begins, you’re slotted into a league for that season based on your cumulative performance to date. It should be harder to get promoted into Diamond than to be placed into Diamond at the start of a season, because there’s a threshold designed to prevent you from ping-ponging between adjacent leagues every few games. The last game I played yesterday wound up being treated as my first Season 5 match, and I was slotted back into Platinum. That really felt appropriate; I had been facing fewer diamond players in recent games, as I’ve been a little sick for about a week. And if there’s one place you really notice when you’re not at 100%, it’s playing something competitive and mentally intense.

    Still, with today being the first day that I’ve felt mostly back to normal (after a really full night of sleep yesterday), I decided to play one last game before heading to bed. I’d won a reasonable string of games prior to the earlier blog post, perhaps on account of being back to normal, so I could still lose and not be too bothered about the day’s games as a whole.  It’s harder to sleep after going 3-8! As it turns out, that final game earned a promotion to Diamond. It was a lucky win at that; a Protoss vs. Protoss where he was going for colossi off of one base; I’d anticipated a 4gate and didn’t expand either, but had no robotics support bay (i.e. far from having colossi of my own); I’d have died in a straight ground engagement, but just managed to get enough void rays to hold off the attack, retain my expansion, and win from there off of better momentum and economy.

    I’m still by no means great at the game.  There was an internal Google tournament (for fun, but I can’t enter due to timing with the kids), and about 20% of players were Masters level – that’s the top 10% of Diamond, i.e. the top 2% of all players; they’d likely beat me with one hand. But now that I’ve finally got to this entirely meaningless and pointless milestone, I’ll probably finally get to playing other equally pointless but high quality games, like Uncharted 3 and Zelda: Skyward Sword!

    If you compare this image to the earlier post, you’ll see that it took me a ridiculous 740 wins – meaning roughly 1480 games (though some of that was 2v2, not 1v1) – between setting the goal and reaching it. That’s a lot of wasted time (probably 400-500 hours) and I’m sure I could have used it for something much more constructive. But at least I got a shiny icon!

     

  • Travel

    Singapore Airlines, Singapore Airport

    This is the second post in a series of recent travel experiences, the first of which was on how United’s policies almost seem designed to cause frustration. This one is more positive, before heading into the horror that was my experience with Travelocity.

    My mom turned 60 in November, so I went back to Malaysia to celebrate – though I’m still earning enough vacation days to come back to parity, since I had only recently started the new job. Now, while Seattle looks geographically closer to Malaysia, unless you get a very specific set of flights, it’s actually further way by travel time.  That’s because Toronto has a plethora of direct flights to various parts of Asia, whereas Seattle has relatively fewer.  For my timeframes, there was truly nothing convenient or economical.  And while I haven’t done a United international flight for a while, my experience with Asian airlines was overwhelmingly better, so I wanted to avoid them if possible, while sticking to Star Alliance if I could (that backfired too, in a different way).

    In the end, I wound up with a doozy of an itinerary: Seattle -> Los Angeles -> Tokyo -> Singapore -> Kuala Lumpur, a grand total of over 30 hours of travel.  The way back was even longer – 36 hours, an extra stop in Portland, and a 9 hour overnight transit in Singapore. The fare was pretty attractive – I had to pay around $200 to get to Los Angeles, but the route from there was under $1100, much cheaper than any other option besides Air China which I was unsure of (and isn’t a Star Alliance airline to boot). Equally appealing was that both long-haul legs – between Los Angeles and Tokyo, Tokyo and Singapore – were on Singapore Airlines.  I used to fly SQ on occasion when I was younger, and always recall it being a positive experience; they are consistently rated highly in studies, and they seem to be among the first to get the latest aircraft.  And they are a Star Alliance carrier to boot.

    When it came time to board in LA, I was not disappointed – the flight was on the relatively new, absolutely gargantuan Airbus A380:

    No, I did not miss my flight in order to get a picture of the A380 taking off.  Nor would I likely have gotten this nice a shot, even if I did – if you follow the link above, it will take you to an account of the first flight, by a photographer who posted that and a number of other pictures.  It’s good reading if you want to know more!  I’ll put a break here to save you if you’re reading on RSS and not interested…

  • Travel

    Artificial Discomfort

    There’s a series of three posts on travel that I’ve meant to make for some time, that I’ve had trouble getting around to – on United Airlines policies, Singapore Airlines and Changi Airport, and on why I’ll never use Travelocity again (and suggest that you don’t either).  I’ll start with this post about United!

    This was motivated by a flight from San Francisco back to Seattle that I did in October, though the picture above was during travel via Tokyo (and was mostly an experiment in hand-held mild HDR; unfortunately, it’s through glass, which is visible).  Now, there was nothing particularly terrible about this flight, but between the aforementioned flight and the original one down, two things struck me as rather poorly designed about the overall UA flight experience.

    No, That Doesn’t Fit in the Overhead

    Like most North American airlines, there’s now a fee for checking even the first bag on United.  As if the relatively poor quality (at least if judged by personal experience with bag loss) of bagging handling at most U.S. airports (especially LAX!) wasn’t enough to dissuade you from checking a bag, there’s now an added financial incentive to bring all your possessions on-board with you.  I’m sure that somewhere, someone created a spreadsheet that projected reduced costs from fewer checked bags, and increased revenue from passengers paying for bags that they really did have to check.

    However, I’m not sure if airline executives bothered to take a full flight before coming up with this brilliant idea.  If they did, they might have noticed that overhead bins on a full flight are always over-capacity.  In fact, the sole reason for frequent fliers to get on the plane early – no, it’s not the comfy seats – is to ensure that they can stow their bags.  Literally, I can’t think of any other reason you’d want to get a head start on sitting down in cramped quarters; this is definitely the only reason I ever use priority boarding.

    Anyways, now people try to bring carry-on luggage that’s so big, it makes those baggage sizers that you are supposed to be able to fit your bag inside look like a cellphone case.  But who can fault them?  One failed attempt to stow your luggage, and you can hand it to a flight attendant who will gladly check your bag – for free – to your destination.  On my departing flight, the airplane couldn’t have been more than 2/3rds finished boarding, and the flight attendants were already helpfully announcing that if your bag doesn’t fit in the overhead, they’ll be happy to check it for you.  I’ve only once – on an Air Canada flight – seen the flight attendants enforce the size limit prior to boarding, and that was equally comical because hardly a single bag actually fit in that thing.  But don’t worry, if it didn’t, they were happy to check your bag for you.  For free.

    Of course, this slows down the boarding process for everyone, and since nobody really wants their bag to run the LAX gauntlet if it doesn’t have to, there’s lots of squishing and shoving and relocation of bags at the tail end of any boarding process when the flight is full.  It just feels like there has to be a better way.  And having done relatively short flights such as Kuala Lumpur to Singapore (about an hour), having fast, free, reliable checked bags seems to be a good option, but perhaps the cost of labor makes that untenable here.  Though I’m not sure the extended boarding process (during which time you’ve got to pay a pilot instead of a bag handler) is cheaper.

    Economy Plus/Minus

    For my long-time colleague and frequent fellow flyer, Adrian, there were few questions more important on a given flight than whether or not he (or we) might get an upgrade.  This was one of those things that just always seemed vastly more important to him than to me; if we were bidding on a business class upgrade, I’m pretty sure he’d be willing to pay at least 3 or 4 times more than I would.  But United’s economy “plus” concept gave me at least one plausible, simple reason for this: the discomfort inflicted by the crammed seating in economy grows exponentially as total legroom reduces to the point that your legs don’t physically fit.

    What does this have to do with United Economy Plus?  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an added tier of service between business and regular economy, in which you get an economy seat and service, but a bit more legroom. Ostensibly, as the marketing material went when they introduced the concept, they ‘removed’ some seats to provide the extra legroom in Economy Plus.  And perhaps, at some point in time, there was some truth to that.  However, I can say with certainty that the “standard” economy seats on United – let’s call them “Economy Minus” – are significantly more cramped than the economy section of the Air Canada flights I used to take frequently out of San Francisco and elsewhere.  This isn’t subjective; whether or not you can actually open your laptop (and to what extent) is a fairly reliable measure of how much space there is in front of you.  In Economy Minus, I don’t even try taking it out of the bag.

    But saying that economy class is crowded is like saying that the sky is blue.  Where the ridiculous side effects of this scheme comes into play is with not full flights.  Roughly 40% of the economy section seems to be allocated to Economy Plus, but very few people are willing to pay the $39 that United asks (on a relatively short 2 hour flight) for the upgrade to Economy Plus.  So while you’ll find a few people up there – 1K members that are seated there for free, perhaps – you get a situation where regular economy is packed – every middle seat is full – and Economy Plus is sitting there, empty.  Unless you want to pay $39, you can’t move up there.  I’ve done a few more flights since watching this dynamic at work, and on every flight you see the flight attendants defending those seats, telling people they can’t move up there unless they pay.  Sometimes, they even announce make announcements over the intercom, explaining why nobody is allowed to sit in those seats.

    The hilarious thing is, their rationale is that some people paid the $39 to sit there.  When you look at the variation in what people sitting next to each other paid for a given seat, this is pretty laughable; depending on when and how you booked, there might be hundreds of dollars in fare differences between passengers, but there’s still going to compact you into the Economy Minus section.  So ironically, like the baggage scheme, it’s not clear that many people actually ever pay to sit in Economy Plus – but they sure do force a lot of people to sit in the middle seats in Economy Minus as a consequence.

    I think I understand now why Air Canada often says it’s rated the best North American airline – it probably is.  Just don’t compare against the Asian airlines!

  • Technology

    New Keyboard

    I mentioned the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 I received as a parting gift from my co-workers in Toronto, but another thing that they gave me was a Razer Marauder Starcraft 2 keyboard. Functionally, it’s a keyboard; visually, it takes the Starcraft theme to the max, going with a design that looks like it was lifted straight out of the game. It also has some cool features integrated with the game itself, like color that reflects your current APM (how fast you are inputting commands), and the ability to turn red when your army is being killed. I had lots of opportunities to see that – I lost 6 games in a row after trying the keyboard out!

    Unfortunately, my particular unit had an issue during regular typing, in which keys would sometimes get input twice for a single keystroke. I’m also not sure what it was, but E-mails I was writing would sometimes get sent spontaneously while I was still in the process of writing them. Getting this fixed wasn’t straightforward, and I hadn’t gotten around to it. However, in searching for information about the issue, I did come across information on the complex world of mechanical keyboards – and long having been a fan of some of the old style keyboards – I even still have a keyboard with a 5-pin DIN connector (the predecessor of the PS/2 keyboard connector), which I used with an adapter for quite some time thanks to its nice clicky feel.

    Well, it turns out that they do in fact make them like they used to – if you’re willing to spend $100 or so on a keyboard, which most people aren’t. I was, though (heck, many in the Toronto office spent that much on mechanical joysticks for playing Street Fighter 4) – and the keyboard I chose arrived this week:

    It’s a Das Keyboard Standard Model S Ultimate.  The “Ultimate” denotes a feature (or lack thereof) you may have noticed above – the keyboard is unlabeled! And while many people do type without looking at the keyboard, you may discover that the location of some of the more obscure symbols isn’t quite as ingrained in your memory as you think. Typing with one hand, which essentially means you’re not typing reflexively anymore, is also pretty challenging.  I actually chose to go with the “Professional” model (same keyboard, with letters), but the promo price ended in the few hours since I decided – so I got the above instead. It feels great so far, and if you spend a lot of time typing, I do suggest putting a little effort into finding a keyboard that you really like!