It’s possible the crime shows have never been more popular. With the market for cable-original shows popping up, it’s exploded. Paradoxically, though, with the exception of Law & Order, there are extremely few of what I would call “cop shows”. When L&O eventually goes off the air, it’s possible that there will be one on regular TV and a few on cable.

The distinction I make between a crime show and a cop show is that the latter is about cops while the former is about people that are solving crimes. Almost all cop shows are crime shows but not the other way around. Matlock, for instance, is a crime show but falls in a different category (“legal drama”). NYPD Blue was a cop show. In between the two are what I would call pseudocop shows. They’re shows that are technically about law enforcement, but are actually about some super-specialized group of cops.

For example, I don’t really consider CSI to be a cop show. It’s a show about forensics pretending to be cops. Crossing Jordan also fell into this category except about MEs. NCIS is and JAG was about military police, which is similar but not the same. Castle is a show about a crime novelist joining forces with the cops, so it doesn’t count any more than Murder She Wrote did. Monk is about a former cop who is a “private consultant”, as are the protagonists in The Mentalist and Lie to Me and The Forgotten. Others are about special units of dubious realism. Cold Case is about a special unit investigated old homicides and Without a Trace is about a non-existent FBI missing persons unit. So while these are shows that are ostensibly about cops and police departments, they’re still not what I would call “cop shows” in the same way that NYPD Blue, Homicide, The Shield, and to a lesser extent even The Wire were.

There are some exceptions. New TNT series Dark Blue as well as Criminal Minds sort of count insofar as they are about groups that exist, but they’re still special units of cops solving very special crimes. Saving Grace and The Closer more-or-less count and may actually shed light on the recent shift towards pseudocop shows. Life mostly counted, though they had the special hook of an ex-convict detective trying to find out who framed him. Southland counted, but was unceremoniously dumped (though it appears TNT will be bringing it back).

The question is, why is it that at a time when crime shows have never been more popular. Here are some possible explanations:

1. Cop shows have gotten old and therefore, the only way to get people interested in them is to have some unique twist. This could be true. It could be that if you take the pseudocop shows off the air that they will be replaced with more reality shows.
2. Law & Order sucked the oxygen out of the room. This strikes me as quite possible. L&O is not one show but three. Therefore, fans of cop shows get their fix out of the way and there’s not much room for any other standard procedural and so the networks have to find original twists. It’s possible that when L&O goes off the air, it will create a void that will bring in more regular cop shows.
3. There are just as many cop shows as there have always been, it’s just that they’re of more segmented interest and therefore are more likely to be on cable and less conspicuous. It isn’t so much that L&O has taken over but rather that the new cop shows that would be network shows are now debuting on cable. Mathematically, it is probably true.
4. It’s Jay Leno’s fault. His show can’t fail fast enough for my taste. Taking away 5 1-hour timeslots killed Life and Southland (albeit temporarily). This makes network TV real estate more scarce and makes cable a more natural venue.
5. It’s women’s fault.

I mention (5) because it seems that of all of the cop shows, there are a surprising number of them that feature women prominently. Blond women in particular. These things are sometimes a coincidence, but in this case I’m not so sure. One of the interesting factoids about Law & Order is that it is extremely popular among women. I really wonder if one of the issues is that the demographics behind cop shows have changed from a primarily male to a primarily female audience. That would explain cables creating shows around women and crime-y shows in particular. In addition to Saving Grace and The Closer, the most prominent character in Cold Case is female and In Plain Sight features a woman (all blond women, actually). Further, one longstanding tradition of cop shows is to have very uncoplike women as cops. I’ve Facebooked before “male or female, cops should never look dainty”. Watching some long-haird 5’4″, size-0 woman try to be intimidating in an interrogation room is amusing but not very real-seeming.

And it also helps explain why there are so many more shows about crime but not more about cops. I think that women watch these shows primarily because they’re interested in crime and not very much interested in the testosterone-fueled atmosphere of police departments. So these cop shows either center around a woman that bucks the norms or about cops that aren’t really cops. “Cops” that use their intellect rather than brute force. Cops that are really scientists or medical examiners or psychologists or pet-mindreaders or whatever. Hence, more and more of the Special Unit stuff. That way they can make it about crime, but also have more in the way of romantic plots between dainty women agents and their hunky underwear model turn actor coworkers.

There was a steadfast rule in the Truman and Himmelreich houses preventing Clancy and I from sleeping together when we visited our respective parents. I don’t think anybody held any illusions about anything, but there are appearances and respect and all that jazz. Which was perfectly fine with us.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch since we arrived at my parents house. Not because of any parental dictate, but because the bed that they would have us sleeping on is one of those t-something beds (trundle?) and when it’s “out” it’s actually two beds up against one another. So when we’re sleeping in the same room, we might as well be in different beds.

Also, I find that as part of my TV watching tradition, falling asleep while watching TV is also something that I like to do. We don’t have a bonafide TV in our bedroom in Cascadia. I have a Pocket PC that I watch stuff on, but it’s not quite the same. I have to turn it off when Clancy goes to bed because she doesn’t like noise when she sleeps. And honestly, I don’t want to lose my place in whatever it is that I’m watching. Since the point of watching stuff down here is to be more careless and free, it’s less an issue. If I fall asleep, I fall asleep. I can easily find where I was on the DVR if I want.

So the result is that I fall asleep on the couch. When my folks get up at six in the morning, I then move to the bedroom and finish my sleeping there. Right now it works in a blast-from-the-past sort of way since I did this so often when I was younger, but I’m looking forward to making our way to her folks’ place in Beyreuth where we will have a single bed to sleep in.

An update on the Mini vs Micro USB post from before.

Mom and Dad got a new phone that is apparently equipped with MicroUSB ports. The cables they got with them look a lot sturdier than the ones that used to break off at work, which is great to hear. On the other hand, their GPS has MiniUSB ports. They used my cell phone charger to charge it.

All of this confirms my initial point that having two standards is okay. Dad got his MiniUSB cables for a dollar a piece on eBay, which is just outstanding. And so long as these cables work with a number of devices, it’s money well spent. Heck, at a dollar, it’s worth it anyway. Same goes for Micro. It’s all working itself out.

Peter is getting momentary fame over at Half Sigma with the Peter Principal Rule, which states: Non-athletic activities which only men participate in, yet are not viewed as traditionally masculine, are the nerdiest activities.

There’s a back-and-forth over at Half Sigma where Engineer makes the strong counterargument that it’s not that the nerdiness of the activities define the nerd but rather that the nerdiness of the actors determines the nerdiness of the activity.

Kevin K, on the other hand, suggests that it’s the difference between doing and simulating. If you’re actually hunting, then booyah, but if you’re simulating it on a computer, then that’s nerdy. By this standard, fixing a car is doing… but so is fixing a computer. Are they received the same way? Probably not so much.

All of this is a long way around to wondering how nerdy the following video is. I mean, creating comic books superpowers? Engineer would say nerdy because it’s not the sort of thing that popular people would be into. But the dude’s creating fire, which would meet with Kevin’s approval of masculinity.

Personally, if that’s being a nerd, then I wouldn’t ever wanna be cool.

Right now my workstation has three computers: Ryoko, Ayeka, and Washu. Ryoko, the most powerful desktop I have, has been sick lately. It started with some random USB problems that afflicted the other two but that PCI-USB cards resolved for the other two. The problem with Ryoko is that plugging in something to one port causes another port to stop working. The PCI-USB card simply added more ports to be incompatible. Then, about two months ago, Ryoko started (rarely) rebooting during periods of high usage. In the last week or so, it’s started rebooting regardless of what I am doing.

I thought that I had figured out the problem when one of the hard drives on the machine started misbehaving. I had run into similar problems with Ayeka and Washu and the problem was generally insufficient power. Given that it had previously been disinclined to work during times of high usage, it made sense. Further, I’d been adding hard drives to this machine and never upgraded the (600W) power supply to match the other two (850W and 1000W) even though it’s now carrying about the same number of drives (both by adding to Ryoko’s load and relieving the other by swapping more smaller drives for fewer larger ones). So I was preparing to buy a new power supply when Ryoko started acting more erratically. The aforementioned drive wasn’t just getting dropped, it had become full-blown problematic. Windows did it’s little thing where it says “Hey, there’s a problem with some sectors on this drive, so we’re going to take care of that” and then promptly erases the entire partition. Not a big deal in the case of this specific drive, but still disconcerting. I tried reformatting the drive twice and it rebooted each time.

This could still be power supply related. The dropping of the drive damaged some sectors or somesuch. Insufficient power supplies are the root of much evil, I’ve discovered. But it could also be something else. The best thing to do is to start swapping out parts to see what works. But since Ayeka and Washu are working so wonderfully, I don’t want to touch them. The most likely culprits are the power supply, the problematic hard drive, the RAM, or the processor. I can test around a lot of things (test the power supply by lightening the hardware load, the hard drive by taking it out, the processor by process of elimination). The biggest concern is RAM. I need some RAM to test out with, but I don’t have any spare DDR2 RAM laying around.

What’s really frustrating about all of this is two weeks ago I did! If this had happened two weeks ago, it would have been perfect. I ordered some laptop RAM and they sent me some DDR2 desktop RAM. It took us a week to get it all straightened out and in the meantime I had the RAM just sitting there. They even offered to sell me that RAM at a discount and I told them I would but I simply had no use for it. Now, of course I do. Possibly just for testing, but possibly for replacing. Fortunately, Linux LiveCDs often come with memory testing so I can probably isolate the problem there.

I am hoping that it’s the hard drive, which is one of the least important that I own. If it’s the computer, it’s going to get tricky. There are a number of IDE drives invested in that machine and IDE has apparently gone the way of the do-do. And, of course, DDR2 RAM is itself reaching obsolescence. And I would probably not feel secure unless I had a new power supply anyway, so that’s another hundred or two. So instead of looking at buying a cheap CPU/mobo combo for a couple hundred bucks, I’m looking at a near-complete replacement of $500.

Somebody, somewhere is saying “That’s why I own a Mac! So I don’t have that problem.”

Indeed. With a Mac, you would already be resigned to buying a completely new machine. And it would cost way more than $500. And it wouldn’t have the hard drive capacity Ryoko has anyway.

Once upon a time, there was a post here. This post was written a year ago, when it was standard procedure to forward-date posts. Unfortunately, the post was forgotten about and one year later, up it went while I was out watching a movie. Oops. It was never supposed to go up. Sorry for the confusion.

UPDATE: Problem solved! Phew. We’re waiting in anticipation on a possible job offer from Gemini Falls. I think I’ve been much more stressed out. Everybody wish us luck!

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For those of you that have never had to use COBRA, it’s a pretty good thing. Basically, the government told employers that they cannot tax-deduct health insurance unless they supply a plan that allows 18 months of coverage after a person loses their job (for any reason except malfeasance). So employers in turn lean on insurance companies and insurance companies reluctantly comply.

The problem with this sort of government-enforced transaction is that if a company does not want to do business, they can be pretty resourceful about finding ways not to. They delay sending out the paperwork by a month or more, hoping that you’ll make other arrangements. You get 60 days to sign up and if you miss that deadline then they absolutely, positively will not continue your coverage. All claims until the paperwork goes through are denied and you’ll have to recoup the money later. Then, when everything gets settled, you have 30 days to back pay everything you owe, so you have to have three months’ worth of premiums on hand. If you weren’t saving for that like you should have been, tough luck.

I knew all this when I signed up for COBRA, so I expedited things by signing up on their website. I didn’t want there to be any chance of my check “getting lost in the mail”. I also made darn sure that I paid all of my premiums over a month in advance so that they couldn’t make any claims about when the check did or did not arrive. But apparently, even doing everything right is not necessarily enough.

We’ve been simultaneously lucky and unlucky here in the Truman household. Rather, our luck has managed to mitigate the damage of our extraordinary unluck. Although I don’t know if you can call it unluck if it’s dependent on the bad-faith actions of others. In this case, the culprits are former employers and insurance companies.

We came back home from our Great North by Northwest Jobs tour a little bit earlier than expected. It actually wasn’t a welcome development because we were hoping to swing back by Gemini Falls and sign some papers. But home we came and it was a darn good thing we did. In the main was a letter from the health insurance administrator informing her that her COBRA enrollment period had lapsed and she is not only uninsured, but has been uninsured for the all-important 60+ days.

This was crazy because we knew for a fact that she sent in the money. We also know that the mail was taken that day because another letter sent that day was received a couple weeks prior. So she called her health insurance administrator* (HHIA) and they said that they had in fact received the check but that ARRA** had been denied so they sent it back with a letter explaining that she needed to write another check (for more money).

So suddenly her insurance went up from $200 a month to $600 a month because the federal government wasn’t going to kick in. Why wasn’t the federal government going to kick in? Because her former employer declared her termination “voluntary”. Given that she was on a one-year contract just like I was and that (immediate) renewal of said contract was not an option, that just didn’t seem right to us. Either her employers were being jackholes or my employers were being unexpectedly generous. I’m disinclined to believe the latter. But whatever.

We had 14 days from the date of the letter to get them the contract and full amount of the policy back to them. This was on a Friday. Day 14 was Monday. We could fax them the signed contract, but not the money. Further, that Monday we were going to be driving back to Gemini Falls for a second interview. Long story short, their corporate headquarters was in Zaulem and I woke up at an ungawdly hour of the morning to go out there and hand-deliver the check. It turned out that the 14 days was 14 days inclusive and ran out on that Sunday. Fortunately, they’d put a flag on the account and so they were going to give us an extra couple of days. That was the only good turn we got from just about everyone we’ve dealt with.

About the same time that we got the letter from HHIA, I got a letter from my New Health Insurance Administrator (NewHIA) saying that FIREA, my former employer, had signed a contract with them and that they would be taking over starting on 12/1. They also sent me an Open Enrollment letter to. Notably, it would be cheaper for her on my insurance than it was on hers***.

It was cheaper with or without ARRA assistance and the wording was vague as to whether or not I could get ARRA assistance even though it had been denied for her. My guess is that we cannot. But even then it’s cheaper and I feel better paying one health insurance administrator rather than two. But I thought I would call NewHIA and see if ARRA might be covered and what the bill would be.

That was when the anvil fell. NewHIA informed me that my policy had been canceled. I had to sign up within 60 days of eligibility and I became eligible at the beginning of August. I should have received a letter. But the only two letters I had from NewHIA were the one informing me that they were taking over (and that I had a bill to pay before 12/1) and another about Open Enrollment. Long story short, as far as they knew, I’d never signed up with OldHIA. Except that I had and I was actually a month ahead on my dues because I paid a couple months ahead. A whole lot of good that did me.

NewHIA told me to contact OldHIA and have them forward my information. OldHIA said that they really couldn’t do that, but at the end of my policy they could send proof that I had been insured. That was not acceptable because that would create a gawdforsaken gap that could give NewHIA cover to cut my COBRA coverage completely (again). I asked them if they could send me a copy of the document. She put me on hold, came back, and said she could. But it would take two weeks. In two weeks, my coverage lapses.

I called NewHIA again and got a very unhelpful woman who said that there was nothing she could do without something from OldHIA proving that I had been insured. She suggested I call FIREA. So I called FIREA and they said that they would look into it. Perhaps she was just a good actress, but I got the feeling from her that she actually will.

So that’s where things stand right now. I actually run a not-insignificant risk of having my insurance cut off due to no fault of my own. I signed up within 14 of the 60 days alotted to me to sign up for COBRA. I have not only paid every bill on time but I am actually a month ahead. But none of that matters because NewHIA and OldHIA can’t talk to one another and I’m relying on FIREA, a company that has not been a friend to me and that could care less if my insurance is cut off. NewHIA will not accept an enrollment form or a check as long as my account is listed as “canceled”. Further, I’m going to be out of town for the remainder of the month starting on Friday and I won’t be back until after the lapse date, so I can’t have anything mailed to me. I’m not sure that matter because everything seems to take 5-10 business days to get mailed anyway.

And even if this does straighten out, there is virtually no way that I can get Clancy on my plan. That’s due on Friday and they’ve made it clear that there are absolutely no exceptions. The likelihood that this will all be straightened out Friday is pretty small. If ARRA doesn’t cover it, and I don’t believe it does, it may not be worth the effort anyway.

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* – Health insurance administrators appear to be all the rage. Basically, instead of dealing with your employer or the insurance company for your health insurance, you deal through a third party that coordinates it all. Somehow, this adding of another layer of organization is supposed to save people money. Maybe by creating miscommunications like this.

** – ARRA is the part of Obama’s stimulus wherein the government helps unemployed people by paying 65% of their insurance cost.

*** – This is sort of topical. Republicans are trying to allow for insurance companies to “shop across state lines”. As it happens, I am insured by Blue Talon of Estacado, the same insurance company that I had when I was in Estacado. Since my employer is based out of Estacado, they can get away with that I guess. I doubt it’s a coincidence that insurance in less-regulated Estacado is cheaper than insurance in more-regulated Cascadia. I’m probably not as protected, though.

Back to the neverending topic of weight loss and exercise, the NYT spotlights research that seems to come from the “well, duh” department: the secret to weight loss is to burn more calories than you consume.

The main problem today is, people have no idea what they’re consuming. As the article points out:

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

Most people I know go through 4-5 cans of soda per day. I personally have felt a lot better, and noticed myself getting trimmer (and wanting to exercise more regularly thereby!) when I gave myself one simple rule: don’t stock soda cans in the house. I have juice, I have milk, and that’s it. Generally, after a glass of juice or milk, I don’t feel the need for more than water afterwards; if I drink soda, I find myself thinking “hey, I want another soda.”

I switched to using smaller bowls and smaller plates, and doling out smaller portions (I have “soup bowls” that are wide but shallow but have a circular imprint in the center, so I only fill the imprint and use some whole-grain bread to sop up the gravy from whatever I cooked).

This is not to say that these are easy things. Sticking your giant-sized bowls and glasses “out of the way” and replacing them is an expense, though not that expensive ($20 at Ikea replaced pretty much what I needed for daily use). Cutting how much you eat may require “feeling hungry” for a while as your body adjusts. But the research is clear; “inability to lose weight even though exercising” is much less likely to indicate that you have some hormonal/metabolic issue, and much more likely to indicate that you’re finding some hidden source of calories and not accurately measuring your caloric input or how many calories you’re burning.

The last time you were at an airport, you may have seen a device-charger station. It’s a kiosk with a good two-dozen or so cables so that you can charge just about whatever cell phone, portable music player, or Pocket PC you have. Seems kind of like a waste, doesn’t it? Surely these companies could get together and figure out some sort of universal charger.

Well, the UN is on the case! It has approved a “universal power charger” for cell phones:

The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes.

“This is a significant step in reducing the environmental impact of mobile charging,” said Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau.

“Universal chargers are a common-sense solution that I look forward to seeing in other areas.”

For the technologically uninitiated or for those unfamiliar with the latest cell phone technology, this may sound like quite the achievement. But it’s actually likely to confuse things further and it is embracing a more problematic standard. And at best, it is an unnecessary intervention into an area that was already in the process of sorting itself out.

Anyone that has had cell phones for a while knows of the frustration that comes with differing chargers. You get a cell phone, buy a car charger and an extra wall charger or two, but then when you need to replace your cell phone all of the power adapters are suddenly useless. I avoided this for a while by getting Nokias that held true to the same charger for a while, but then I got a Motorola (courtesy of an inane cell phone insurance policy) and I was out in the cold. By the time I got back to Nokia, they’d switched standards. And, of course, my digital camera and Pocket PC each had proprietary chargers. It’s no wonder that the UN wanted to get involved!

But in recent years, that’s started changing. In my last job, I worked on a dozen or so cell phones from four different manufacturers. Add to that mix a different brand I use at home and two other brands I’ve looked at recently. Between these seven manufacturers (and if I wasn’t so lazy I could rack up a lot more brands, I’m positive), they used all of two different chargers: All but two of the brands used a single standard: Mini-USB. The remaining two used Micro-USB.

This is a great thing for the consumer. Not only do you not have to worry about chargers becoming useless when you buy a new phone, but it becomes a lot easier to replace a charger on the fly when you need to. I lost my digital camera USB-to-device cable years ago and it cost $25 to get a new one. A Mini-USB cable you can get for less than $5. You had to order the digital camera cable from Minolta or an online retailer that got them from Minolta. You can get a Mini-USB cable at Best Buy (though you lose most of the price advantage). On the Micro-USB side, you see similar advantages. On most Plantronics headsets, they come with a Plantronics-proprietary charger. The good news is that Plantronics chargers are universal so if you use a lot of Plantronics earpieces or headsets, you have a lot of chargers. But they can cost $20 or so to replace and a new earpiece costs $25! Meanwhile, some Plantronics earpieces use Micro-USB and you can replace those for under $10 (though not, alas, at Best Buy).

The Mini-USB is becoming the standard. It’s not only used on a lot of cell phones, but also on PC-to-device connections for a load of other devices. For instance, Motorola Bluetooth headsets also use Mini-USB, as do portable card readers. It’s extremely handy to be able to buy a Mini-USB cable and know that it can be used for a bunch of devices. And they’re still cheaper. Widely adopted. And cheaper. Happy day!

The UN, in its ultimate wisdom, has endorsed the Micro-USB. The Micro-USB does have its advantages. The connection is smaller and so it can go not only on smaller cell phones, but also to devices like bluetooth earpieces. Motorola used the Mini, but Motorola’s was a full-on headset. I have a Plantronics earpiece that uses a Micro. The article implies that the Micro is being used on digital cameras. That may be true since my digital camera is pretty old, though digital cameras are generally large enough that the Mini would work just as well.

The bigger problem I have with the Micro is that it is weaker. I had three devices (out of over 100) that had the USB connection ports break and all three were Micro-USB connections. This despite the majority of devices I used using Mini connections. While it could be the particular model is itself problematic and not the Micro-USB in general, I think has more to do with the fact that the Micro-USB port is smaller and therefore more prone to break if tugged in the wrong direction. The Mini-USB just feels sturdier. If it were just the chargers that would break, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but when something went awry, it was the device (which cost my putative employer thousands of dollars and will cost the consumer hundreds). That’s problematic. They’re also a little bit more expensive, though that may simply be because they’re not as widely used.

The article suggests that Micro-USB chargers have particularly good power conservation and movement and though I did not notice that it may well be true. Or they could be comparing Micro-USB to other proprietary standards. It’s also possible that, as devices continue to get smaller, the Micro-USB will make more sense than the Mini-USB. However, since smartphones have become graphic-oriented, there is only so small that they can make these things. On the third hand, the main device that I tested that used the Micro-USB was wicked-thin and a Mini-USB would have had trouble fitting on it. And maybe as technology progresses, they will figure out a way to make the Micro-USB less prone to break. So it’s a tough call.

Ultimately, though, I don’t view two distinct standards as being a real problem. I think that this is one of those cases where it’s best to let the market decide. If you have a Mini-USB and you buy a Micro-USB phone, somebody somewhere can use your current cables or you will probably need them in the future so you don’t need to throw them out. Ditto the other way.

The real problem is the use of proprietary technology, which is diminishing and not going to be pushed all that much further by the UN. Two holdouts include Apple and Hewlett Packard. In the latter case, they are coming from a position of weakness but they do have a somewhat loyal following so maybe they can get away with not switching. However, HP has notably stuck with the same standard for as long as I can remember, so loyal HP customers are free to accumulate chargers without fear that they will go to waste. As for Apple… well, they like doing things their own way and the UN isn’t going to change that. From what I understand, Apple itself is standardizing its chargers between the iPod and iPhone, so loyal Appleheads will need to worry about that less in the future.

I’m sure that there are other holdouts, but as more and more people get used to universal chargers, they’re going to have to make tough decisions. Maybe they will adopt Mini-USB or Micro-USB standards or maybe they won’t. But at the very least, people will have a choice as to what to do. For my part, with the exception of HP (which I already have numerous chargers for), I am going to be pretty reluctant to get a product that I would have to buy a whole new set of chargers for.

Update: I’ve learned a couple new things since writing this. First, HP now uses mini-USB, so their proprietary standard is gone. Second, I talked to the guy at Verizon to get a feel for their offerings and he says that Verizon is applying pressure on cell phone makers to adopt Micro-USB. Also, Blackberry, which I had believed to use Mini-USB, actually uses Micro. I still believe that Mini is the superior standard, but it looks like it’s a closer race than I thought and may have already been shifting towards Micro.