Inspirational Technology

Desktop Pro Natural Keyboard

The last couple days I've been having some pain in my wrist and after examining how I was typing I decided it was time to switch back to a split keyboard. I had one of the original Microsoft Natural Keyboards several years ago, but ended up giving it to my girlfriend at the time. I liked it, but for some reason ended up preferring a regular keyboard again, don't remember why. Anyway, today I wanted to get another Natural Keyboard and it turns out Microsoft has really screwed up the product line. From what I can see they currently offer three different natural keyboards and all of them have compromises. Either they're PS2 only, have little tiny cursor keys, or are bundled with a mouse. I ended up with a Microsoft Optical Desktop Pro which is a combo keyboard mouse deal. I'm not too enthused about having to buy the mouse, but there was no option. I needed a USB keyboard with normal sized arrow keys and this is the only one Microsoft makes anymore. I also didn't want a wireless keyboard as batteries are just an extra expense for no real benefit. I never move the keyboard off the desk. Ugg, oh well. Anyway, the keyboard itself is pretty decent and the drivers for Mac OS X seem to work pretty well.

I spent about an hour remapping all the special keys on the keyboard and I think they make a great addition. You can pretty much program them to do whatever you want. With the media control center on the keyboard you also don't lose any of the functionality of the standard Apple Pro keyboard. Actually you pick up quite a bit like being able to hit play and having it launch iTunes and start playing automatically plus easily skip forward and backward. That's a great feature that I had previously been using PTHiTunesNotifier to provide via multikey hot keys. I'm actually a little surprised, but Microsoft did a great job of integrating the keyboard with Mac OS X.

The bad thing about this combo is that the mouse isn't all that great. It's designed to be usable in either hand and suffers a poorly designed shape because of this. My initial thought was that I would just keep using my Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical and hook the Microsoft mouse to my Tablet PC, unfortunately, the mouse and keyboard share the same receiver so that's not possible. So I either end up ditching the Microsoft mouse and keep using the Logitech, or I use the Microsoft mouse and hook the Logitech to my tablet. I'd just as soon not have the mouse at all, it's very disappointing that they only sell this as a bundle.

Another small complaint about this is that the receiver is rather large and has an extra PS2 connector on the end. This isn't a huge deal really, it just conflicts with my desire for clean design.

Overall if you need a split keyboard for a Macintosh running OS X, the Optical Desktop Pro isn't a bad choice. It's just unfortunate that the price is inflated by the inclusion of an inferior quality mouse. Oh yeah, the whole point of buying this thing was to relax my wrists. They're definitely feeling much better now.

Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Greendale

For some reason I've never paid any attention to Neil Young. He's been around about forever and I'm sure I've heard many of his songs before but I sure couldn't name one. I listen to an incredible variety of music too, but there's a big hole around the country rock area, especially from artists that were big in the 70s. Neil Young definitely falls into that category, but a few days ago he showed up as the number one artist on Rhapsody. This piqued my curiosity, so I had to check it out. It turns out Rhapsody had released his new album Greendale a few days early.

At first listen I didn't care for this album at all. Neil Young's voice is well, let's just say it takes some getting used to. Coming into this album with no knowledge of prior work means it was all new to me. It turns out this is a concept album that tells the story of the Greens from a fictional town Greendale California. This makes the album a series of stories more then it does typical songs. This is clearly the country influence showing through. You could just as easily imagine Johnny Cash singing these songs as Neil Young. However, the music is different. It reminds me much more of modern delta blues then it does country. But that's more in feeling then it is in the actual notes that are played. This probably doesn't make much sense. Anyway, it's a dirty sound, driven forward by unrelenting drumming that constantly reminds me of people like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. The guitar is particularly distinctive. I'm not too knowledgeable about guitar effects so I'm not sure if the effect is distortion or feedback or something else, but I really like the way it's used. I guess it's a common sound for Neil Young.

The production of this album is another thing that reminds me of people like Junior Kimbrough, meaning it's raw. For this album it shouldn't be any other way. This is music that's rough with a retro americana sound that blends blues, country and rock into a fascinating mix. I guess that describes most of Neil Young's output, so maybe this isn't much different. Particular standout tracks include Devil's Sidewalk, Double E and Sun Green.

In the end, even though I didn't care much for this at first, it's now moved into the top spot in my current rotation. I'm really surprised by this, but I absolutely love this album. If you check it out, just make sure you give it some time.

Now this brings up another one of the absolutely incredible features of Rhapsody. After starting to get into Greendale I decided I wanted to explore some of Neil Young's other work. In the past I would have had to go out and buy a bunch of CDs, now it's just a few mouse clicks to have access to virtually his entire recorded output. Rhapsody has 33 Neil Young solo recordings that can be explored to any depth. This is what I've wanted out of a music service, it's incredible. I can't even begin to recommend Rhapsody strongly enough. If you're a Macintosh user, just buy a cheap $100 used PC, slap Windows whatever on it, install the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client and follow my instructions for hooking up the sound. Rhapsody certainly can be improved, but as it stands right now it is absolutely worth the $9.99 per month.

OmniWeb 4.5 Final

OmniGroup has released the final release of OmniWeb 4.5. This is the first release of OmniWeb that uses the Safari rendering engine and it seems quite nice.

OmniWeb was the first browser I used regularly after getting annoyed with IE. It always rendered beautifully, but suffered from poor performance and weak standards support. With the new release both of those problems have been solved and it still renders beautifully. It's really interesting to compare how it looks to Safari. Even though they use the same engine, Omniweb still comes out looking better. For one thing, they use different default fonts and colors and I like OmniGroup's choices. It's actually really surprising how much of a difference there is.

It's great to see this release. A lot of people thought Safari would mean the death of Omniweb, but Omnigroup is smart and now we can get two different interpretations on the same basic rendering engine. I don't know how much I'll use Omniweb, but this release puts them back on the playing field and it's fun to check it out. Here's what I see so far that I really like.

• HTML source view with syntax checking and highlighting. This has been in Omniweb for a while, but it's a nice feature and much better then the very basic source view in Safari.

• Better looking fonts.

• Spell checking turned on by default. Safari supports spell checking but you have to turn it on for each text field, which is really pretty silly.

• Searchable history so that you can search sites you've visited yet can't quite remember where you saw something. Seems like a feature that could be quite useful. May have been in old Omniwebs, but I wasn't aware of it at the time if it was.

• Auto checking of bookmarks to tell you when they've been modified. This is a feature that I was actually thinking of firing up Omniweb to try out again. It might be enough to get me to use it more as I'm working on a project where I want to monitor a large number of sites for changes.

• Omniweb isn't overly aggressive when caching files like Safari. I had such a problem with this when editing my MovableType templates that I had to start using Mozilla to do all the edits.

• And the number one killer feature that no other browser has, zoomable text fields. This is an awesome feature that gets you out of the stupid fixed size text areas that are so annoying on web sites. When you use a text area Omniweb adds a little button above the scroll bar that zooms it out into a new window that is fully resizable. Outstanding! I'm going to play with this more, but this feature alone may be enough to get me to use Omniweb as my main browser. Like Safari's aggressive caching this has been a major problem in editing the MovableType templates as the text area is always too small.

Hmm, OK, I'm liking this thing more and more. I'm going to give it another day or two and then I'll probably spring for a license. The only thing missing is tabs, we'll see if I can live without them. I'd definitely say Omniweb is back and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes in the future now that they can focus on value add rather then just rendering problems.

BuyMusic.com or err... um OK you can't actually buy it.

I mentioned this in my previous post, but I thought it was so funny I had to mention it again. The name of the site is BuyMusic.com, but from their Terms of Use:

All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement.

So on this great service called BuyMusic.com you can't actually "buy" music. Great, just great, doesn't anyone care about how the customer fits into this equation?

Oh yeah, one more thing. They're incredibly deceptive with the $.79 per track price, almost nothing on the site is actually $.79 cents. And even if all the tracks were actually $.79 it's still a horrible value with all the DRM restrictions. The pricing on the site is all over the map and there's no consistency at all. Many full albums are as much or more expensive then the CD. This place is NOT worth giving a dime to.

BuyMusic.com steps up to the plate, swings and ... nothing but air.

Buy.com launched their competitor to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) today. I'm really quite perplexed by this service. I don't at all see how it is any better then any of the other music download services that have come before. The files are in Windows Media format and are heavily restricted with DRM. What's even worse though, the DRM varies widely across different files. Talk about a headache. I'm unhappy about the level of DRM in the iTMS, but at least it's the same for every file. With BuyMusic.com you have different restrictions for downloads, burns and transfers to portable devices and each file is completely different. Who wants to keep track of that kind of thing.

There's also a distinction between whether a computer has a primary license or a secondary license. The computer you buy the music on has the primary license and it looks like you can't directly transfer files to another computer without re-downloading them again so that you can get a secondary license. A secondary license just allows you to listen to the music on that computer, you can't transfer it to any other device or burn it to CD. Also, not all songs are licensed to allow you to access them from more then one computer. For instance, 50 Cent Get Rich or Die Trying. Even though it allows unlimited burns and transfers to portable devices, only allows one download. That is something that really doesn't make much sense and is massively limiting. Here's another, Norah Jones Come Away With Me, only 3 burns or transfers and one download. This is horrible value when you're paying $.99 for a song.

The existing services like Rhapsody and Pressplay are way better value then this. Sure you don't "own" the music, but read the terms of use on the BuyMusic.com service and you'll see you don't "own" the music there either, it's "licensed" to you. I'd much rather pay $9.95 per month for unlimited access to the entire collection on Rhapsody, then pay $9.95 or more for one albums worth of songs from BuyMusic.com. So what if it's tethered to the computer, at least that way if there's something that you find out you really, really want to own then you can buy it online and get the actual CD. You still get instant gratification to listen to the music and you can be sure you're really going to like it. The CD will probably be cheaper too, as on BuyMusic.com full album prices vary wildly. For instance that Norah Jones CD, if you want to buy the whole thing will set you back $13.59, which is actually $.10 more then the real CD on Amazon. With all the restrictions this is not good value, not at all.

There's also the interesting quirks, like having one of their top downloaded albums not even available for download as a full album. And you can't even actually buy the whole album through the service since one of the tracks isn't even available.

So as far as I can see this service has all the problems of iTMS (partial albums, too expensive, DRM), but with none of the benefits (easy to use, tight integration with iTunes). Just for good measure they also throw in extra headache inducing DRM, that's far worse then that in iTMS and don't even support the most popular portable music player. Music selection isn't any better and is certainly far worse then Rhapsody. So I guess the one redeeming quality is that it works on Windows, well so does Pressplay and Rhapsody and who knows how many other mediocre services.

People seem to forget that this model has been tried and tried and it just doesn't work. A friend of mine worked on a site for Virgin, I think four years ago, that sold music just like this. It failed horribly. What makes the iTMS work, isn't the fact that it's selling individual song downloads, it's the entire package that matters. The iTMS is only successful because it's extremely easy to use, convenient, and isn't horribly draconian on the DRM front. Take away any one of those and iTMS would flop just like all the others that have come before. BuyMusic.com has none of those things going for it, I think you can see what the conclusion is.

Review: Listen.com Rhapsody

I'm a big music fan, no really I mean a big music fan. I'm one of these people who devours music, lot's and lot's of music in all different genres. I have music playing just about all the time. I have a huge CD collection and have been building an even larger MP3 collection from eMusic, the iTunes Music Store and any other place that I can find legal music. To this point eMusic has been my favorite service, since I'm just the type of person who can appreciate the selection that they have to offer. However, last week I finally decided to give LIsten.com Rhapsody a real try.

Listen.com Rhapsody is a music on demand service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalog for $9.95 per month. You use their proprietary software to access the service, select the music you want to hear and play that music back. The service also offers the ability to burn individual tracks to CD for $.79 each, although not all tracks are available for burning.

The first catch with Rhapsody is that I'm a Macintosh user and the Rhapsody software only runs on Windows. Fortunately I also just acquired a Tablet PC with one the specific goals of it being to access services like Rhapsody. What makes this workable is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac OS X. I don't often say nice things about Microsoft, but the Mac RDC client is quite nice and makes it perfectly livable to have a Windows PC to complement your Macintosh. I basically treat the RDC client as if it was the Rhapsody software running on my Mac and it works quite well. Of course, I'd much prefer to have a native Mac OS X client for the Rhapsody service, but as it stands the current solution works.

Anyway, on to the actual service. First we have to be clear, Rhapsody is not a download service. It's a music on demand service. This means you have to have a computer connected to the network to listen to the music. For people who spend large amounts of time at their computers like, well, me for instance. This isn't really a bad thing. However if you're the more mobile type who actually has a life away from the keyboard it might not be as appealing. The Rhapsody service does offer the ability to burn CDs, but I'll offer my opinion on that feature later.

For music on demand you browse the collection of music and add tracks or albums to your playlist and the client then on demand downloads the song and begins playing. While you can think of this as a streaming service, it's not really streaming in a technical sense. It's simply downloading the file when you ask to play it and then beginning play before the download is complete. Because of how this works the software does cache some number of the downloads, so playing a track again does not necessarily result in it being downloaded again.

On my Cable modem connection the performance of this mechanism is pretty good. However, all is not perfect and this is where we encounter our first glitch with the service. Since it's downloading each track individually there is a pause between tracks while it buffers enough of the download to begin playing. This pause can be very distracting on some albums where the tracks are intended to play together with no breaks. I first noticed this while listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and it was very annoying each time a song changed. On most albums this won't be a problem, but for people who like music put together in longer forms, like much classical music, it will be a real problem. It's unfortunate that the service is marred by this problem as they clearly have ways that they could have minimized the problem with a little extra work on the client. Starting to download the next track on the playlist before the current one finishes playing is one obvious alternative.

For the most part playing works pretty well. I've experienced the occasional glitch where it seems to not quite download the song fast enough, but that's been pretty rare. The experience on a lower bandwidth connection may be a different thing altogether.

Since Rhapsody has licenses from all five major labels and a number of independents the selection on the service is pretty good. Obviously, no service has everything yet and Rhapsody is no exception, but of the services I've tried so far, it does seem to have the overall best selection across all genres. It's also not plagued by the partial album problem as much as the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). In addition, because of the nature of the service, when you do encounter a partial album it's no where near as annoying as it is on iTMS. Here you're paying $9.95 for unlimited access and you're not actually buying individual albums. On iTMS when you encounter a partial album it means a waste of money to buy the partial set of tracks if you think you still might want to hear the whole thing. On Rhapsody there's no incremental cost involved so it isn't as big an issue.

Particularly notable artists that I've found on Rhapsody include: Wynton Marsalis, Annie Lennox, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, Mogwai, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Son Seals, Jack Johnson, Coldplay and Mono. Some that are missing that I would love to see added include: Goldfrapp, Evanescence and Lilith. Obviously this is a small set of what exists, and it seems that they're adding a couple hundred albums a week. Jazz looks pretty good and classical is better then most services, but not great (the pause between tracks is an issue as noted), Blues is good for the modern stuff, less so for older recordings (eMusic is particularly strong here), folk and country look fairly good though I'm a bad judge for country. Rock/Pop is of course well represented with the usual suspects missing (Metallica, Madonna). Overall the selection is good, if still very incomplete.

I used to be an audiophile, however, I hung up my golden ears when I decided to trade quality for convenience and move to 100% computer based music. Given this, to me the sound quality of the service seems quite good. I believe the files are encoded at 128kbps, I'm guessing in Windows Media format, but the exact format isn't really clear. All I can say is that I've been quite happy with the sound quality for how I use it. I've mostly been listening through a pretty good quality set of Sennheiser headphones that are fairly revealing and I haven't noticed anything annoying about the quality. It seems at least as good as the 128kbs AAC files from the iTMS and I haven't noticed any major difference with the 192kbs AACs I've ripped from my own CDs. Is it CD quality? No, certainly not, but it's good enough for the type of service it is. Definitely better then any FM radio and better then the digital music services available from digital cable companies. Plus you can't argue with the ability to select whatever music you want and play it on demand with no waiting to download the entire thing.

Even though the service is primarily a music on demand service, it does offer the ability to burn CDs of tracks from the service. This ability has an additional fee attached, currently $.79 per track. With this you can burn one copy of the selected tracks. Any additional burns incur an additional charge at the same rate. The price just covers burning to a CD, it does not cover retaining any kind of digital format file on the computer. I haven't actually used this feature, because I find it to be a poor value. In fact I think the service would be better off without this feature, because I believe it skews peoples perceptions in a negative way. The $.79 per song burn price is a very poor value, but the $9.95 music on demand service is an excellent value for what is actually a very good service. The problem comes in trying to compete with free downloads and this is an unfortunate situation. The Rhapsody service can't offer the same kind of capability while retaining reasonable pricing and in making that attempt the real value of the service can easily be lost in the negative feelings brought on by the poor value of the burn capability.

Other then the poor value of the CD burn feature, Listen.com Rhapsody is an excellent service for music on demand. If nothing else, it's worth $9.95 per month just to be able to preview the full length album prior to purchasing it someplace else. I enjoy the service greatly. I do wish they would release a Mac OS X client, but as it stands the service is usable and a good value. Since I spend so much time at the computer I actually prefer this service to the iTunes Music Store and it makes a good complement to the more eclectic selection found on eMusic.

There really isn't a single service that is perfect. Fortunately, it's fairly inexpensive to subscribe to more then one and by using them together you have access to a library of music that is vastly larger then anything previously available. I personally own ~2,500 CDs, and the selection within that collection is vastly smaller then what is already available in these services, this to me is truly exciting and I look forward to the day when the RIAA finally decides to allow the construction of a complete music service. Until that time Listen.com Rhapsody is a pretty good start and I highly recommend it.

New Free eBooks from Microsoft

Microsoft has posted the next batch of free eBooks in their summer reading program. Last week the titles weren't too interesting, but this time around it includes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Flying Book by David Blatner and The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs. All three look pretty interesting, and the Douglas Adams is a book I've wanted to read for, well ... for years. I've picked it up in the bookstore many times, just never managed to make it to the counter with it for some reason.

Right now I'm still in the process of reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. This was part of the first weeks promotion. It's turning out to be really interesting, but kind of slow going. It's a very good book and I definitely recommend it. It's just not the riveting kind of thing you would get with a fiction novel so it's not that kind of suspenseful page turner.

For the last year or so I hadn't been reading nearly as much as I used to, now with eBooks I'm starting to get back to my old ways. In fact I now actually prefer eBooks to paper books. Even with the limitations (some still significant).

A tale of two Tablet PCs

Well last week I completely broke down and went out and bought an Acer 110TCi Tablet PC. I had previously posted that I'd ordered an Acer 104TCi from Costco, however the Costco unit took too long to ship so I, well ..., got impatient and bought the 110TCi at a Franklin Covey store. Of course when I then went to try to cancel the 104TCi, it did finally ship so I'll be getting it later this week, oops. Oh well, anyway, this isn't about the 104TCi it's about the 110TCi as well as the tablet I eventually ended up with.

Buying from Franklin Covey is really a bad idea, there are cheaper ways and they don't have the best return policy in the world. Of course, I'm a geek and my curiosity got hold of me and I couldn't stop. So I went ahead with the purchase. Well, so now you might ask what do I think of the Acer 110TCi? And my answer, it's a piece of junk.

So why did I choose the Acer 110TCi? Quite simply, I was seduced by its feature list. Of all the current Tablet PCs it easily has the best set of features. 900 Mhz Centrino, built in wireless, firewire, USB 2.0, built in keyboard, up to 2GB RAM with 512MB already on board and small size. Only the Motion m1300 comes close, and is of course better if you want a pure slate, which I didn't (or thought I didn't). Unfortunately, while swayed by the feature list of the Acer I forgot one very important thing. I'm a Macintosh user! The Acer epitomizes everything that I can't stand about PCs. It has tons, and tons of features and a great spec sheet, however, the industrial design, build quality and usability for the task absolutely stink. This is pure PC garbage all the way, it seems that the engineers only cared about adding features and gave no thought at all to how people will actually use the device.

If they had given it any thought, they wouldn't have designed the absolutely pathetic excuse for a display latch or the stupid rubber plugs for all the ports. They wouldn't have spread those ports all around the outside of the machine so that when you hook up AC power, ethernet and audio you have cords coming out of three sides. They wouldn't have put that incredibly dumb nubbed plastic disk under the touchpad. They would have used the removal of that disk to make the mouse buttons larger.

If they had given any thought, they would have maybe considered exactly what buttons to put on the front of the machine so that you actually have some power to do more then just scroll. They also maybe would have designed those buttons so that they require less pressure to activate and don't hurt your fingers after using them for a while. They wouldn't have put a bright red flashing light right next to the screen. They wouldn't have put the hardware button to easily toggle power to the wireless card in a location that is inaccessible from the form factor where you're most likely to want to toggle the power to the wireless card.

Once again, if they had given it any thought, they would have put in a battery that actually lasts more then about 2.5 hours. They might also have come up with a more elegant and easier to operate mechanism for pivoting the display. They might also have designed the software that controls the features of the machine with more consideration for the fact that the machine is a tablet. They would have maybe put in a powered Firewire port so that you don't need to have, yet another, AC adapter to use the provided CD-RW drive. They might have also considered that sometimes people might want to pick the machine up while it's plugged in. So maybe having nice, thin and flexible power cables would be helpful, so you don't take out everything on your desk when you move it. They may also have considered that using the Pen is a common operation on a computer designed to be used with a pen and that it might be nice if that pen was easy to remove and replace in its storage compartment. Or they might even consider that people don't usually like to write with those little thin stubby pencils that you find next to the card catalog in the Library and that using them as the model for your built in pen might be a bad idea. Maybe they would have even considered that a tablet is held at a different angle then a regular laptop and that they might want to do something about the quantity of glare that comes of the screen at that angle.

Ugh, the Acer was such a huge disappointment. I may not even need to bother to mention that the wireless card in my unit didn't work, that the pen calibrartion went out of wack every five minutes or that the plastic cover over the IR port fell inside the machine after one day.

At first i was incredibly angered that the wireless card didn't work, however now I'm thrilled. That is what allowed me to return that complete pile to the store.

I read a ton of reviews of the Acer before buying one, pretty much all of them were good. This is a very depressing reflection of how low the standards of PC users are. It's really depressing to me that something so horribly designed, could receive so much praise. It also tells me that the computing press really isn't doing its job anymore. If the people who review the products aren't willing to criticize them for their flaws then there's no incentive for the companies to improve. It's even more depressing when you consider this is a second generation machine.

So, anyway, I gladly returned the Acer.

So does this mean I'm now completely against the whole Tablet PC concept? Well not necessarily, this is the tale of two tablet PCs after all. The rest of the story will come in a later installment.

Review: Tom Clancy Red Rabbit

I've always enjoyed Tom Clancy's books, enough that I've read almost all of them, many twice. The last couple books have seemed to be pretty slow going in the beginning, like the first 200-300 pages. However, it's usually worth slogging through the drawn out character development in the first few hundred pages to get to the excitement at the end.

Red Rabbit starts out in the same manner, it's very slow and not particularly interesting. But then something happens, well OK, not really. In fact, through out the entire book nothing happens. No plot twists, no intrigue, no unexpected events, nothing, nada, zilch. The book is filled with banal conversation between characters about the most mundane topics: drinking coffee, watching television, shopping. Everything goes exactly as planned and nobody gets hurt. Either Tom Clancy has completely run out of ideas, or this book was written by somebody else. It's flat out horrible and a complete waste of time to read through the 1,000+ pages. In fact it's so boring that after about 600 pages I just started skimming, literally reading 2 or 3 words per page and had no trouble following what was going on. Yes, it's really that uninteresting. You get pages and pages of discussion between characters about, well ... nothing. You'll hear more interesting conversations on the street.

Oh yeah, the plot. Hmm OK, Russian's plot to kill the Pope, Russian KGB comm officer decides to defect because of his conscience after learning of the plan, contacts CIA and defects, Pope still gets shot. Yep that's about it, use the 1000 pages of the book for fire kindling or something. Thankfully I checked this one out of the library.

For a good read try The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games or Rainbow Six. Also just noticed there's a new Tom Clancy book coming next month, The Teeth of the Tiger. Boy I hope that one is better, but I'm not even sure I'll bother.