Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs (1955–2011).

My first computer wasn’t an Apple. It was an Atari 800. As a young boy into videogames, the Atari was the natural step up from the Atari 2600 game console. It was videogames that got me fascinated in computers, and it was the Atari that helped me discover how much I liked making them run.

After a few years, though, I had outgrown the Atari. The system had limits, and the company was reaching its limits as well. As a loyal Atari owner, I disliked the Apple II, with its relatively crude graphics and very un-arcade-like analog joystick. In middle school, though, all the school computers were Apples, and I saw software that just wasn’t available for the Atari.

So, my Christmas wish one year was for an Apple //c. By then, Mom and Dad had learned the true meaning of the word “peripheral”—an education that started on the Christmas morning after I got the Atari when I didn’t want to shut it off lest I lose my programs, having no cassette drive or disk drive.  I had an Apple with all the trimmings. It was a well-travelled computer, making weekend trips to the family cottage in New Hampshire and the occasional trip in to school to supplement the small computer lab there.  I was an Apple owner, but I wasn’t truly an enthusiast yet.

That came in eighth grade. By then, I was the undisputed computer nerd of the town school system; the adults came to me for advice. That’s how it came that one day they asked me to come down to the computer room: I excelled in English, I lived and breathed computers… they wanted me to be an editor of the school newspaper, because they wanted to create it using a new thing they were testing: a Macintosh.

I had read about the Macintosh in Creative Computing and BYTE, and it had intrigued me… but that day in the computer lab, it was love at first sight. I took to MacWrite and MacPaint like a duck to water, and I started to learn the intricacies of ReadySetGo, one of the first of a heretofore-unknown type of software: desktop publishing.

Guess what was on the Christmas list the next year?

I had a Mac Plus back when they were still beige. I have oddly fond memories of the wub-wub-wub noise an Apple 800K disk drive made as it changed speeds, the ka-CHUNK a floppy made as you inserted it. I learned about INITs and CDEVS; I studied Inside Macintosh and learned Pascal. I took BASIC computer programming as a high-school freshman when the class was still being taught on Commodore PETs; being an old hand at BASIC, I breezed through the curriculum and started handing in programs written in Microsoft Macintosh BASIC, including GUIs.

I remember getting my first hard drive, a Jasmine 80MB SCSI disk that sat underneath the Mac, and thinking I’d never find enough things to fill it. I remember playing Epix’ Winter Games on the Mac, sliding the mouse back and forth rhythmically to simulate cross-country skiing. I recall driving from my parents’ home in North Granby, CT to the suburbs of Springfield, MA, not long after getting my drivers’ license, to get my hands on a freshly-minted copy of System 7, and lusting after the Macintosh Portable in all its portable-typewriter/boat-anchor glory while I was there. I remember the magic of the ThunderScan, a device that replaced the ribbon cassette in the ImageWriter II printer with an image sensor, allowing you to use the printer as a crude drum scanner. I spent hours going through my favorite VHS movies with the VCR hooked up to a MacRecorder, creating sound clips of favorite lines to use as beep sounds.

That lead to a particularly favorite prank. The school system’s computer expert was named Dave, and he wasn’t yet comfortable with Macs. One week, he made it known that he’d be taking the school’s Mac for the weekend to learn more about it. I played a little joke on him (with the knowledge of the teacher in charge of the computer club): Before he left, I added a program to the Mac’s startup disk that let you tie sounds to certain system events. Upon ejecting a disk, the Mac played a sound clip from the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible: “This disk will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!”  He later related that he panicked at first, before realizing that he’d been had.  (This was before computer viruses were on anyone’s radar.)

That Mac Plus was also well-travelled. The latter half of my high-school career was spent at a private school in Hartford; I was a fixture in the computer lab there, and an editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. When crunch time came for the yearbook, that Mac came to school with me daily in its big blue Cordura bag.

Somewhere in there was the summer I sent a resume to MacConnection hoping for a summer job, despite being a teen; they were headquartered in the next town over from our cottage. I managed an interview with the CEO, but I didn’t get a job.

I remember two treks from New Hampshire down to Boston for MacWorld Expo, back when it was a massive affair occupying two conference halls—and before the era of the Stevenote. I brought home bags of goodies, and a wonderful memory of spying Harry Anderson, star of Night Court, from afar as he negotiated a sizable purchase from one of the big Mac mail-order companies at the back of one of their booths. (Anderson was one of the most famous Mac enthusiasts of the era.)

Late in senior year, I hit Grandma up one more time, and made it count: I got the top-of-the-line Macintosh IIfx. (It’s often joked that the name expanded to “Macintosh Too F—ing Expensive”.) I got a stripped-down model and added my own hard drive, memory, and keyboard. I loved that thing.

Around that time, I was a beta-tester for a friend’s program, Wallpaper, which let you set color desktop patterns larger than the Apple-approved 8 square pixels. One of the background patterns I created featured in the advertisement for the program that appeared in MacUser magazine.

When I went to the University of Rochester, I remember setting it up in my dorm room on the Computer Interest Floor and having someone come in and exclaim “Woah! You’ve got a workstation!” (The E-Machines 16″ Trinitron monitor was physically imposing, and computer monitors bigger than 13″ were still uncommon then.)

That IIfx saw me through college, and through my first job and much of my second job. Then, I convinced my employer that I’d be more productive if I had a PowerBook, so I got a PowerBook 1400c. Sadly, when I left, they wanted it back… but I picked up a discarded Power Macintosh 7100/80AV to replace it. Meanwhile, the IIfx continued on as the girlfriend’s computer.

While at Global Crossing, I upgraded to my first personally purchased new Mac, a Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500MHz. For some time, that second processor sat idle, unused by virtually any software, until Mac OS X came out. I got that the day it came out, and lived with its shortcomings because it was cool, and it was UNIX. I also saved up for the original Cinema Display, the first of Apple’s awesomely huge displays. (That display was in nearly constant use until earlier this year, when the backlight started to flicker and I replaced it so Dad could keep using the G4.)

When I’d been at Bank of America for a while and replenished my funds, I bought a Power Macintosh G5 Dual 2.7GHz and a new Cinema Display. That served me well for years, and became another hand-me-down. It currently resides in my basement, awaiting rebirth as an Ubuntu system; the Cinema Display is my second monitor for my work laptop when I’m home.

The G5 gave way to a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz; that was my workhorse system until the girlfriend’s 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac flaked out and I found that 4GB of RAM wasn’t enough for a power user; I replaced it with a 27″ iMac Core i7 Quad, and gave the 24″ iMac to the girlfriend.

This spring, for graduation, my girlfriend’s daughter and her friend got MacBook Pros; I now have OS X Server and Remote Desktop to manage the household network.

I wasn’t the first person in line to get an iPod, but it didn’t take me too long to get one. I loved that first-generation device; I took many long walks with it. Sadly, it died after I handed it down to Mom and Dad, when they didn’t realize it wouldn’t take well to being left on the dashboard of their Jeep in the Florida sun.  By then, my girlfriend had given me a fifth-generation iPod.

I was waiting at the door in my Apple t-shirt for the UPS driver on the day the iPad was released. I’ve used it every day since. I am a voracious reader, and five years ago I would’ve said that I would never stop buying paper books. I love books, and I love bookshelves. I have visited a bookstore once in the last six months; I now buy almost all my books for the iPad, because it’s so much more convenient. I have my iPad with me in places I’d never lug around a book, so I get to read more.

Last Christmas, I got an Apple TV. The household has three Apple wireless access points.

Prick me, and I bleed five colors, modern monochrome logos notwithstanding.

Back in the late 1990s, when Apple was struggling and the faithful engaged in guerrilla marketing to help the company, I managed to read about Apple offering the first set of “Think Different” posters in time to order a set. Dad built some fames for them; they have places of honor in my office. (Well, except for Picasso, because I’m short on room, and frankly, he’s creepy.)

While the Atari got me into computing, Apple products shaped and fed my interest throughout my life. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ company, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have gotten half the jobs I did—my first job out of college, working tech support for Xerox printers, came about in part because of my computer knowledge, and in part because of my long experience with desktop publishing.  I may never have met the man, but he had a profound impact on my life.

For the last week or so, a work crew has been tearing up the road outside my house. It turns out that this was Central Hudson Gas and Electric, installing a new natural gas line. This project showed me that CHG&E’s management has no clue when it comes to treating customers right.

Rudely awakened, dropped by voicemail, made to wait at CHG&E’s contractor’s whim for most of a day, a garden trampled and dug up, a ruined lawn, all because of what seems to be an institutional lack of common courtesy and decency aforethought.

First off, I have to say that individual CHG&E front-line employees I’ve dealt with have almost all been very helpful, courteous, and a benefit to the company. However, it’s obvious to me that CH’s management has some serious customer scorn going on.

To put the following tale into context: In January 2011, in the middle of a week of deep freeze, somewhere between 800 and 1,000 natural gas customers in Kingston lost service because a gas regulator froze up from cold and precipitation. I was one of those customers. The weather wasn’t particularly cold or particularly wet for the area; I can only assume the regulator was not well-maintained. It took a few days for CH to restore gas service. During that time, like many other Kingston residents, I was without heat, hot water, or the ability to use the stovetop to cook. CH’s employees busted ass to restore service, but the important thing is that they shouldn’t have had to.

So, the current work.  I understand that CH needs to replace gas lines, and after January I’m all for modernizing the system. However, when someone comes and paints up your sidewalk with dig-safe markings, and then commences to dig a foot-wide trench across the mouth of your driveway, it would be nice if the perpetrator gave you some advance warning.

On Saturday, more than a week after the work started, I get a letter dated the previous Wednesday from CH. A “Gas Operating Engineer” from the company deigns to tell me that the gas main, and the service lines to the homes, are being replaced by a contractor. Because my old house has an indoor gas meter, they will need to get into the house to turn off the gas and pull the new pipe.

“A representative will contact you during this process in an effort to schedule your service replacement that will allow us to minimize our construction time and its impact on you”, says the letter. “All areas impacted by construction will be restored to their prior condition.”

Okay, so I guess we have to move some stuff around in the basement to free up access to the gas meter, which is buried in a corner. We make plans to start cleaning up, but because we haven’t been contacted about scheduling yet and we already had weekend plans, we didn’t make tons of progress toward that goal on Saturday or Sunday.

Fast-forward to Monday morning. 7:10 a.m. The doorbell rings. It’s the contractor.  They’re ready to replace our gas main, can they come in and look around in half an hour or so?

This, apparently, is Central Hudson’s idea of “scheduling.”

The contractor doesn’t like it when I say “no.”  He doesn’t want to take “no, not today” for an answer, not even when I point out that (a) we have had no notice of when they were going to do this, (b) we aren’t prepared, and (c) having just been rudely awakened we have not yet showered and prepared for work. He finally allows as how maybe they could start at 9 a.m. after we shower?

Notice how this ignores the question of who will remain around to give them access to the house. Lucky thing for them that I had the day off—especially considering that at 7:25 a.m. they’ve already got a four-foot-deep hole in the sidewalk and the street.

I try calling the engineer who sent the letter. I get voicemail. I try calling CH’s customer-outreach specialist per their website, and get voicemail. Okay, I try the main customer-service number.  I’m told that the office doesn’t open until 8 a.m., so the people who could address the issue aren’t available.

At 8:05 a.m., I’m still getting voicemail. I try calling the office of the senior vice president of customer services, Charles Freni; the voicemail system tells me in a strange robotic voice that the function is not valid and hangs up on me.

By 8:20, I call the CEO’s office. I’m just talking to the secretary when Alana Mikhalevsky, the Operating Supervisor for Community Relations & Consumer Outreach, calls me back. I explain the situation to her, and she agrees that the situation has been horribly botched. She tells me she’ll make some calls, get in touch with the right people, and get back to me.

That’s the last I hear from Alana today.

The clock hits 9 a.m. and keeps on going; no one working outside bothers to come talk to me. By 10:15 a.m., I see the foreman and a presumptive CH employee looking at paperwork on my front steps. I go out to talk with them. No one apologizes. They ask if they can come in now. I let them in, and they tell me that it shouldn’t take long, the gas should be back on by around noon.

They don’t turn the gas off until noon.

Around two o’clock, they tell me they’re having problems. It seems that the gas main has a right-angle bend in it under my lawn, which means they can’t simply pull the new plastic pipe through the old iron pipe. This doesn’t particularly surprise me, given the topography of the lawn: the service enters the basement about three feet below ground level, and the yard slopes downhill about two and a half feet before reaching a two-foot retaining wall in front of the sidewalk.

This means they now have to dig up my yard and front garden.

I have the pictures of them digging out the gravel from behind the wall that forms its drainage, and the dirt from the yard, and commingling them into one pile. Of them stepping all over the plants. Of them piling tools on the other plants.

It takes them some time to unearth the elbow and replace it. Meanwhile, the apparent CH guy leaves. The workers are now on overtime and frustrated by the 90°F-plus temperatures. The older guys have some care, but the younger workers don’t seem to have much respect for what they’re doing to someone’s property and hard work.

Meanwhile, the stepdaughter and her friend (who lives with us) come back from a walk, and tell me that the contractor’s flagman has been wolf-whistling at them whenever they go by.  Classy. (They later tell me that while they were later walking to my girlfriend’s workplace, the work crew’s truck drove past them and the lot of them did it again, apparently including the foreman.)

Eventually, they get the gas line hooked up, and they put the dirt and gravel back into the hole (not in any particular order, that I could see), and when they come up short, the worker starts taking shovelfuls of dirt out of my other garden to make up the difference. When they’re done, I have some very traumatized plants, garden edging that used to be straight and is now a wavy approximation, a bare patch of lawn, gravel all over the lawn, and no gas service because they aren’t qualified to turn it back on and the CH guy has fled.

Around an hour later, a CH serviceman shows up to unlock the gas shutoff, turn it on, and watch my stovetop light up again.

This isn’t what I expected, and if I had a true choice for energy service, I’d be choosing someone else.

What should have happened?

• CH should have sent out notifications well before they started ripping up the road, and they should have started making arrangements for access at that point.
• The contractor should have verified with CH that the homeowners had been contacted and had replied before ringing doorbells at 7 a.m.
• The contractor shouldn’t have started digging up sidewalks before confirming access to the house.
• If the contractor is going to start work at 7 a.m., the customer-service line should be prepared to take calls about the contractor’s work at that time. A supervisor should have pager or cellphone contact information for the engineer in charge of the project.
• CH’s voicemail system should not default to unceremoniously dropping calls to executive offices outside of business hours.
• When sending notifications about work, the letter should include usable contact information, not the company’s main line where you can be put through to the voicemail of the engineer who is out in the field someplace.
• Alana should have followed up with me at least once during the day to make sure that things were progressing okay.
• After I spoke with Alana, CH should have made sure that one of their engineers was on site, if not their manager, and they should have come immediately to my door and offered an apology in person.
• Since I had already been greatly inconvenienced, and had put my life on hold to allow CH to do the work on their unannounced schedule, CH should have made sure that they had employees on site to take care of any problems or necessary work as quickly as possible (such as turning the gas back on).
• The contractor should have come to me before digging up my garden, giving me the opportunity to save plants, note any problems with my irrigation system, etc.
• The contractor should have taken care to preserve the construction of the wall, including the gravel fill, and should have used a tarp to prevent the gravel from spreading into my lawn.  At a minimum, they should have raked up the gravel.
• It goes without saying that they shouldn’t have dug up my other garden.
• I would have expected them to at least tell me that someone would be by to finish putting things right with my lawn, such as reseeding it.
• It would have been nice if they’d asked for a broom to sweep up all the dirt they tracked into my house with the multitude of comings and goings. Okay, it was just the cellar stairs, but it would have been excellent customer service.
• There’s no excuse for contractors wolf-whistling at passing women, especially those that might be underage. They’re lucky I didn’t see it happen myself, or I would have called the cops.

Last night, Kingston held its annual Fourth of July fireworks show… a week early, as usual. Due to budget cuts, the show wasn’t as good as it has been in past years.  On the other hand, because there was no budget for a weekend-long festival in the Rondout District this year, the crowds weren’t as obnoxious and there weren’t lines of brightly-lit, diesel-belching busses blocking the view, so that’s a plus.

I got some pretty good pics with my new Nikon ultracompact.  It’s nowhere near DSLR quality—I’m a bit disappointed in the image detail under normal use—but for a stick-it-in-your-pocket camera, it does pretty well.  It certainly did better than I expected with the fireworks show!  I’ve posted the pictures to Flickr.

A few years back, I bought an Apple Time Capsule.  I had just purchased a new iMac to replace my Power Macintosh G5.  The G5 had two internal drives, allowing me to use Time Machine (Apple’s automatic incremental backup/snapshot system) on the second drive.  As the iMac has no provision for a second internal drive, my choices were to attach an external drive, or go for the Time Capsule.  I bought the Time Capsule, thinking it would be more useful: it could also back up a few other Macs in the house.

I just bought a newer iMac, and I bought a FireWire external disk for it and migrated my backups.  It’s time to bury the Time Capsule.

First, I should say I didn’t have any problems with the Time Capsule’s reliability—unlike, apparently, a great many people.  It seems that early builds of the Time Capsule were prone to premature failure.

No, it’s the actual usability of the thing that soured me.

The Time Capsule is essentially a wireless access point with an integrated network-accessable storage (NAS) device.  Time Machine is picky; it won’t play nice with many other NAS devices.  However, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly fast NAS device.

My iMac was connected via a Gigabit Ethernet network. While I can copy files Mac to Mac over my GigE network at essentially the limits of the hard drives’ speeds, the Time Capsule is a laggard. It seems like it has an underpowered processor. That wouldn’t be surprising, except that Apple commands a premium price for the device, and Apple now has their very own powerful embedded processor chip, the A4.

The poor network performance pales, however, compared to the way Apple chose to implement Time Machine for networked volumes.

On a system with a directly-attached hard drive for Time Machine, Mac OS X uses features of the HFS+ filesystem to work the backup magic. These features aren’t available to network-mounted volumes.  To work around this, Time Machine creates a disk image file on the Time Capsule in a “sparse bundle” format that can grow and be modified as backups are made.

It takes forever for the system to parse in the disk image. Even with a dual 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo.  Even with a quad-core Core i7. If you’ve changed a lot of files, your hourly backup may take more than an hour.  During that time, your system can be sluggish as it deals with the backups.

But that’s nothing compared to trying to restore a file.

With a directly-attached drive, Time Machine is wonderfully responsive.  You can fly back through time, find your file, and restore it in short order.

With a Time Capsule, you’re going to need a lot of patience.  You’ll click on the Time Machine icon… and wait.  Eventually, you may get a progress bar telling you that it’s working on mounting the backup image.  You’ll wait another minute or two.  Finally, the Time Machine screen will appear.  Twenty or forty seconds after that, the contents of the directory you want to restore may actually show up on that screen.  When you click to go further back than the most recent backup… prepare for lag.  The further you go back, the longer the wait.  Uncharacteristically for Apple, there’s no feedback to reassure you that the system is doing something with all these pauses; if you aren’t within sight of your Ethernet switch to notice the blinking lights, you might think the system has frozen.

Did I mention that it’s even slower if more than one computer is trying to read or write to it at a time?

With the Time Capsule, you have to be truly committed to restoring a file to put up with the delays.

The really crazy part came when I tried to delete the sparsebundle file after using Disk Utility to restore its contents onto my new FireWire drive.  After the Finder warned me that the file would be deleted immediately, and I clicked OK, it took about an hour for it to delete the one file.  (That’s probably because it’s a bundle hiding who knows how many actual files behind one icon.)

It does work, if agonizingly slowly, and it has saved us from disaster once: my girlfriend’s hard drive died, but we were able to restore its contents from the Time Machine backup on the Time Capsule.  Of course, it took the better part of a day to restore under 200GB of data, but she was happy to get her stuff back.

One place where the Time Capsule does fall down is in certain migrations from one Mac to another.  The files on the Time Capsule are keyed to the system’s name and MAC address.  When you move to a new Mac, you may find you have to create a new backup file on the Time Capsule.  While you can still access the old file, Time Machine will no longer automatically prune that file when your backups fill the Time Capsule.  You’ll either have to delete your old backup image, accept a much smaller active backup space, or attach an external USB2.0 drive to the Time Capsule for additional storage.  In my case, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the old image onto a new external hard drive.  When I pointed Time Machine at the external hard drive, it recognized that it contained backups for a Mac with a different name, and asked if I wanted to use it anyway. You don’t get this option if all you have is the Time Capsule.

I hope Apple creates a Time Capsule Version 2 that’s actually useful for backing up and restoring multiple Macs in one household. I’d like to see a version that has two or three 2.5-inch, 10k RPM drives with a hardware RAID, and an A4 processor providing wire-speed networking. It should also implement a network protocol that works natively with Time Machine, not using the wonky sparsebundle format and its speed flaws. (However, it should have some way to dump any given machine’s backups to a disk image, so that users can migrate.

In the meantime, my advice to Mac users is: if at all feasible, go buy external FireWire 800 or USB2.0 hard drives for each of your Macs, and use that as your Time Machine setup.  It will be faster, it will be easier to deal with, and you’ll get more use out of them.  External hard drives are cheap nowadays.

As I sit here, I’m listening to Christmas music piped from my Mac to my home stereo over my home’s Ethernet network, under the wireless remote control of my iPad. To most people, this sounds like an incredibly geeky accomplishment—perhaps even science fiction brought to life.

The thing is, despite this feat of digital integration, I know there’s so much more that my house should be able to do, but can’t… and most of it is due to legal or policy restrictions that do little except inhibit innovation and preserve outmoded business models.

For instance, both my TiVo and my Blu-ray player have network connections. Neither, however, can play videos that I purchased from iTunes. Everything with a video output seems to support Netflix nowadays; where’s the AirPlay support? For that matter, why can’t the entire industry agree on a standard for sending high-def video locally over TCP/IP, and implement it everywhere?

My TiVo used to be able to record shows that it thought I’d like to watch. Since Time Warner implemented switched digital video, forcing me to accept a buggy “tuning adapter,” that function works rarely if ever, and almost never manages to find the high-def channels. Of course, it’s a bit of a crapshoot if some of those high-def channels will tune, or if the tuning adapter will punt on them. The sad thing is that the tuning adapter is little more than a customized cable modem, and I already have one of those in the house. There’s no technological reason why the TiVo can’t send its tuning requests to Time Warner via TCP/IP. My opinion is that Time Warner will take any action it can get away with that makes TiVo ownership painful, in hopes of renting its own substandard DVRs to customers instead.

TVs now come with Ethernet support to retrieve movies from Netflix and YouTube. Imagine if you could also use this capability to send video signals within the house: Networked televisions could all draw on the same feed from your TiVo to let you watch a show as you wander from living room to kitchen to laundry room without them being out of sync, and without huge investments in video distribution infrastructure.

Gigabit Ethernet switches are cheap. HDMI splitters are not.

I bought the VGA cable for my iPad. I could use it to put presentations on my TV, or YouTube videos, but not movies I bought from iTunes; apparently I’m not allowed to watch anything at resolutions above 480p in analog form any more, as I might bootleg videos that way. (Of course, if I’m technically competent enough to use an iPad and a VGA adapter with my television, I could probably find a way to copy that video in digital form if I were truly so inclined.)

There’s a vast market for “universal remote controls.” The technology in all my entertainment-center remotes is identical; why do I need to spend even more money on integration? Why can’t vendors sit down and create a universal standard for commands, the way that USB has a universal standard for keyboards and Bluetooth has a universal standard for headsets? For that matter, HDMI was supposed to enable this, by letting components talk to each other and share command information: insert a disc in a HDMI-equipped Blu-ray player, and it could tell your audio receiver and your TV to make appropriate settings changes, and the TV could pass back remote-control commands it receives from its remote. In practice, this technology only works if all your components come from one vendor, and even then it’s often half-baked.

There’s so much that could be done with our existing technology, if only we could keep scared businessmen from prohibiting it.

I’m not a rabid open-source advocate of the Stallman camp, the type who believes that all software must be free of charge and free of restrictions. Open-source software has its uses, and there are places where proprietary software is necessary to ensure growth of the ecosystem. Whether the software is free or not, though, the protocols need to be free and unencumbered. Proprietary devices are more useful, and thus more likely to be profitable, if purchasers can use them in novel and unanticipated ways. In the modern world, what your widget does isn’t as important as how it plays with others.

I only wish that consumer-electronics manufacturers would realize this.

Being the first of several reviews of grocery stores in the Kingston, New York area.

Adams Fairacre Farms is a three-store chain in the Hudson Valley of New York.  It’s really more of a “Super Farm Market,” as they advertise themselves, than a grocery store.

The good

When you walk into Adams, you walk into the store’s best department:  the fruits and vegetables.  Adams works with local farms to stock as much local produce as possible.  In general, they have higher-quality produce than any of the chain stores at any given time of year, even if it isn’t local.  If you care about quality veg, one trip to Adams will convince you to make it a regular weekly stop.

Adams’ meat department is no comparison to the local competition; it rivals any dedicated butcher shop for variety and quality.  They stock both quality “store brand” meat—typically better than the premium national brands found at other stores—and high-end brands like Bell and Evans.  They typically stock a selection of USDA Prime beef, as well as local beef.  The meat department is well-staffed, and they will gladly handle special requests.  There’s also a full-service seafood department.

The delicatessen carries Boar’s Head products as their value line. Again, the quality, the selection, and the service beat the chain stores hands down.  They will make sandwiches to order.  There’s a selection of hot and cold foods.

There’s a cheese department with a wide range of gourmet cheeses.  A very good salad bar.  An on-site bakery.

The rest of Adams’ “grocery store” is relatively small, but they carry most items that a serious chef would need, if not with so much variety as a large chain store.  Typically, what they do carry are premium, local, or otherwise hard-to-find brands.  If you’re making a recipe that calls for an unusual ingredient, Adams should be your first stop.

Kitchen Store

The Kingston Adams has a small kitchen-goods store.  It’s a mixed bag; they carry some decent items, a fair amount of overpriced items (like CIA cookware), and a good dose of high-hype, low-quality items (Food Network branded stuff).  It’s neither as cheap as Bed Bath and Beyond, nor does it cater to the serious cook like local favorite Warren Cutlery.

Garden Center

The other half of Adams is the garden center.  The greenhouse and nursery stock a wide range of plants, all healthier than what you’ll find at the big-box home centers. They carry a range of other garden products, again emphasizing the premium lines such as Droll Yankees bird feeders and the upper end of the Weber grill range.

Checkout

Adams really shines at the checkout.  Although there are fewer lanes than the big stores, they’re well staffed, and the clerks know what they’re doing. It’s rare for lines to get more than two deep, and there’s usually little delay from checking out.  Like much of the store, the checkout is cramped, so bagging can be a challenge.  Many lines offer bagging staff, but you’re welcome to bag your own, and it may speed things up even more.  Adams offers a 5¢ discount for each reusable bag you use.

Unlike the chain stores, Adams doesn’t offer automated self-checkout.  You won’t miss it.

The Bad

Adams day-to-day prices are generally higher for identical items than any other local store.  Many of their products simply aren’t available at other local stores because they are premium or ultra-premium brands, and those products are usually considerably more expensive than what you’ll find at Hannaford or ShopRite.

While Adams has excellent vegetables, the small size of the chain means that they sometimes don’t have all the vegetables you might need for your menu.

The hot foods available range from good to merely edible.  This has gotten better over time, but it’s still a very hit-or-miss proposition.  The cold prepared foods are likewise highly variable.

Adams has a longstanding habit of not complying with the Ulster County retail pricing law.  It’s not unusual to find products that have no marked price, and no price on the shelf.  This is especially true in the frozen-foods and dairy areas.

The store gets very busy on weekends, when it draws a lot of traffic from New York City weekenders.  Unfortunately, that crowd has a… different standard of grocery-store etiquette.  This can make it frustrating to navigate the store and the parking lot.  The store’s parking lot becomes overcrowded at certain times on the weekends, around holidays, and most especially when the store runs special events like their annual garden show.

There is no dedicated bottle-return area.

Suggestions

Here’s what I’d like to see Adams change:

• Try to negotiate more competitive prices on some commodity items, like soda.  Work with vendors to ensure those items are consistently stocked.
• Improve the signage in the parking lot, to ease the traffic flow issues at peak times.
• Build a more consistent quality in the hot foods, perhaps preparing less at one time so it doesn’t dry out in the steam case.  (Go tour the Wegmans store in Pittsford, N.Y.; that’s how you do it.)
• Consider installing WiFi in the store.  Adams appeals to affluent buyers—the type that have iPhones and iPads and such, and WiFi appeals to them.
• Tell the folks at the deli counter that some people are hard of hearing, and they should push the button to advance the “take a ticket” number before they call it out.

Having lived in Rochester, I can’t help but judge every grocery store against Wegmans.  Wegmans isn’t perfect, but they’re better than everyone else.  In many ways, Adams comes close, albeit on a smaller scale.  That’s especially true in the vegetable department; not surprising, since both companies started as farm stands.  For me, saying a store is “like a small Wegmans” is high praise indeed.

I’ve published my quick and easy chicken soup recipe elsewhere on the website.

Now’s a good time to freeze up a batch before the fall cold season starts.

The refresh of macwhiz.com is complete!

Don’t worry about your old links. Most of the content has been moved to the new content-management system; there are redirects in place to make sure that you get to the latest version of those pages.  Anything that hasn’t been updated will continue to exist at its old location for the foreseeable future.

Link permanence: an important part of the customer experience for your website.

A few months ago, I finally got around to sending my Saab 9-5′s Information Display off to be repaired.  (That story would make a good blog post itself…)  Soon after it came back, now with 100% working pixels, my Saab wanted to test it out.  It did so by telling me: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Okay, no big deal; you can replace the brake light on a SportWagon with the provided screwdriver and about three minutes’ time.  (The only trick is realizing that you have to sort of rip the thing back and to the side after undoing the two screws, as the front edge of the light assembly is held in place by two friction-fit pop-in pins.)

I have my girlfriend Kim go around back while I step on the brake, so we can identify which light has failed.

They’re all working.

So this happens sometimes; you get a bulb with a loose filament that gets intermittent.  I push CLEAR on the SID.  A day or two later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

But they still all work.

This goes on for a few weeks, before I remember to go searching the Internet for the answer.

The first recommendation: Sometimes the sensor gets confused if the impedance of the bulbs on either side of the car becomes different.  That could happen if the bulbs are from different manufacturers, or if the contacts in the bulb socket on one side have gotten corroded.

I replace both bulbs from a new package. While I’m at it, I clean the sockets with a pencil eraser, even though they look reasonably clean.  I also don’t see any broken wires.

A day later: BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE.

Well, according to the Internet, that left one thing: the center high-mounted brake light. It’s an LED strip on the SportWagon.  Apparently, sometimes the circuitry flakes out and it ceases to identify itself as “good” to the sensors even though it works just fine.  (I wonder if it’s yet another component sourced from Lucas Electric, the Prince of Darkness.)

Being LEDs, the CHMBL is expensive: $142.99 at eeuroparts.com, my preferred vendor of Saab bits.  But I’m tired of BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE, so I pony up.

There’s another problem that this may help, as well.  For some time, I’ve had water leaking in through the back hatch, making wet spots on the cargo cover. It seems that this can also be caused by the CHMBL.  Sometimes the foam seal around the edge goes. Sometimes the lens cracks. Sometimes the plastic ears on the back that hold the bolts in place crack and it loosens from the car.

Soon thereafter, the replacement CHMBL arrives.

Among the things I adore about my Saab is that the engineers clearly considered routine maintenance when they built it.  The parts you might have to replace are generally easy to get to.  In this case, the trim panel at the top of the back hatch pries off easily, and there’s the three nuts that hold the light in place.  Disconnect, loosen, remove, insert, tighten, connect, and pop the cover in place… no sweat.  The hardest part was finding where I’d left my metric socket set; it’s one of the few lighting repairs that can’t be made using the tools provided with the car.

(I really love that Saab, unlike other GM vehicles, uses stout metal push-clips for trim pieces that are designed for repeated use without loosening or breaking.  American carmakers have always loved those plastic once-if-you’re-lucky trim panel clips that usually need to be replaced every time you remove a panel…)

The original CHMBL did indeed have a cracked lens, and the plastic ears for the center bolt were loose as well.  My theory is that water got in through the crack and/or seal when it poured, and possibly damaged the circuitry, as well as causing the damp spots.

A few soaking rain storms later, I have no damp spots in the cargo area, and no more BRAKE LIGHT FAILURE on the SID.

Hopefully this post helps a few other people who run into a similar pattern with their Saab.

In the past I’ve written about my esteem for Cook’s Illustrated. They make it easy to be a great cook.

Tonight, however, Cook’s has lowered their reputation with me considerably, by trying to scam me out of my money.

I got a telemarketing call from them.  They wanted to reward me for being a valued subscriber by sending me their “Summer Grilling” special, and another book.  The young man on the phone said it was free, but upon close questioning allowed as how the other book was a “free trial,” and if I decided I didn’t like the book I would only have to pay for it.  Is it okay, he asked, for them to go ahead and send it?

My reply:  Sure, send it… but understand that I have not ordered anything and if Cook’s decides to send me anything in the mail without my having ordered it, I’m keeping it and I’m not paying a dime for it.

The call ended quickly thereafter.  You see, Cook’s Illustrated wanted to sucker me in by sending me the book, hoping I’d keep it so they could bill me for it later… even if I simply forgot to send it back.

Every month, my subscription copy of Cook’s comes wrapped in extra pages detailing the latest book they’ve published, offering it to me at a low rate. In the fine print, one discovers that ordering the advertised book actually signs you up for a book-of-the-month club, where you’ll start getting volumes in the mail as a “free trial” unless you return them or cancel.  I thought that was a shady way to do business; the fact is I would have ordered several cookbooks direct from Cook’s if it weren’t for that bit of legerdemain.

This phone call, however, was a straight-up con job.

The sales rep went to great lengths in how his words were phrased, and in the speed and manner that they were presented, to gloss over the fact that this was an attempt to get me to “order” a book-of-the-month-club subscription.  If I weren’t already aware of this type of scam, I might have said “yes, send me the free stuff!” and then, when the bill arrived later, be told that I was on a recording having “placed the order.”

Even if Cook’s didn’t intend to pull this, it still comes off as incredibly shady.  The offers every month around my magazine tell  me that it isn’t just an overzealous telemarketer—it’s something Cook’s has decided to do to make money.

I don’t begrudge Cook’s finding ways to stay afloat.  But this is dishonest, and beneath them.

And it has me seriously considering dropping my subscription at the end of my term.

Few people are aware of Title 39, United States Code, Section 3009.  That’s the part of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that covers unsolicited merchandise.

In the United States, if you receive merchandise in the mail and you did not order it, you have no obligation to return it or pay for it. You may keep it.  You can mark it “Return to Sender” and the Postal Service will send it back at no charge.  Or you can throw it out.

This law was passed to prevent shady organizations from sending items to people via mail, and then billing them for things they hadn’t ordered.

Under this law, sending that bill is now a Federal crime.

Unless.

39 U.S.C. §3009(d):

(d) For the purposes of this section, “unordered merchandise” means merchandise mailed without the prior expressed request or consent of the recipient.

What Cook’s telemarketer was trying to secure was the “consent of the recipient” for the unordered merchandise (the cookbook).  That’s the out.

And it’s a damn shady end-run around the law.  I’d expect it from a fly-by-night encyclopedia company, not Cook’s Illustrated.

Shame on you, Christopher Kimball.

Cook’s Illustrated should immediately cease using this underhanded sales tactic. They should be up front about their “book of the month club,” and they should cease cold-calling subscribers to get them to sign up.

For that matter, if Cook’s is going to make sales calls, they should pay attention to the Do Not Call Registry. Although the law doesn’t prevent them from making calls where there’s an “existing business relationship,” a wise company will note that people who are listed on the Registry don’t like being interrupted by telephone sales pitches, and that calling them anyway will usually lead to a reputation hit.  Send mail instead—the Postal Service could use the cash.

Or perhaps give up the book-of-the-month stuff altogether, and just rely on a compelling product at a good price.