Branko's Weblog

Swiffer

The problem? I am lazy.

The circumstances? A downstairs with a laminated wooden floor.

Usually I use either a broom combined with a dustpan to clean the floor, or a vacuum cleaner.

At a time when I spent a lot of time working for the man, leaving me little time to clean, I was curious if buying a Swiffer would save me work.

Let me tell you the punchline first: Swiffer is additional cleaning technology. Use it if you want to increase your workload (for an even cleaner floor), or for a quick sweep of an already fairly clean floor.

So Swiffer is a system that looks like a broom, except that you stick stick a paper towel instead of a brush at the end. Wikipedia says that Swiffer uses the “razor-and-blades business model”, i.e. you pay little for the hardware and lots and lots and lots for the paper towels (pads).

The good news is, Swiffer works. It actually gets a lot of dust off the floor, much more than my broom or vacuum cleaner will. (I am sure the vacuum cleaner works very well, but vacuum cleaners spit out fine dust at about the same rate that they take it in.)

I have tried using generic paper towels instead of the official, expensive product, and those work too, just not as well. If you look at the Swiffer ‘pads’ as they are called, you will notice that they are thicker and more heavily textured than regular paper towels, which explains the difference in effectiveness. The official pads have more surface for dust to cling too.

I am sure there are third party developers who have worked around this.

The other good news is that Swiffering goes fairly fast.

The thing is, Swiffer does little for bigger objects such as tiny stones, nail clippings, hair and so on. In fact, sharp objects get dragged along the floor making a worrisome noise that seems to suggest you’ll end up with scratches.

You can also use wet pads for your kitchen or bathroom floor. They are not nearly as effective as using an old fashioned scrubber, but the pads are heavily perfumed, making your house at least smell clean.

In the end Swiffer replaced neither my broom nor my vacuum cleaner. I still use the system now and again though, typically when Visigoths visitors are at the door and I need a quick sweep.

Since the Swiffer system does seem to work well at the level of fine dust, I could probably recommend it to regular homemakers who wish to take their cleaning to a next level. For that reason alone it gets three stars.

My rating: 3.0 stars

Oom Henk

A quick review.

Synopsis: Koen is a law student who, for a reason I missed, pretends Henk de Koning (Hank King), a notorious criminal, is his uncle. Henk forces Koen to start working in an old people’s home to try and get the secret of 12 million euro ransom money out of former, but now demented kidnapper Sjon de Nooyer.

- This is a black comedy, but also a farce.
- The violence is generally of the cartoon type – you never actually see people die, and corpes are often hidden in empty barrels.
- The plot is what it should be. The scripting could have been a lot tighter though – a tear was shed when realising what Tarantino or even Richie could have done with the premise.
- Two thirds in the plot starts to slow to the point that you’ll contemplate switching channels, but the end makes up for it.
- The acting was fine – I was especially impressed with Tobias Nierop who hit some fine notes; the bad notes being forgiven easily for his tenderish age.

You should watch this:
- If you are stuck in a hotel room and there is nothing else on.

You should not watch this:
- If you still have an unseen Game of Thrones episode on your hard disk.

Even shorter review: nice movie, only marred by the fact that the writers did not sit on the script for a year or so.

My rating: 3.0 stars

The Testament

I read somewhere, a few weeks ago, that there is such a thing as Grisham’s Law. And although I could find only a single definition—once you’ve started reading a John Grisham novel, it is impossible to put it down—this reminded me I had an unread book of his lying around, The Testament.

What a disappointment. The first quarter of the book is used to introduce a huge ensemble cast of heirs, which is then used nowhere in the book, at least not seriously. What’s worse is that none of the heirs differ from each other. Not only could Grisham have scrapped them (almost) all, it would probably have made for a tighter story—one good guy versus one bad guy.

Every character is a parody. The lawyers in this book are all painted as greedy, law breaking miscreants. The alcoholics in this book are painted as being constantly on the rebound. And the believers in this book are being painted as labels. No matter how much I rack my brain, I fail to remember a single interesting character.

The protagonist, an alcoholic lawyer called Nate O’Reilly, manages to redeem himself and kick his habit by becoming a Christian (this would be a good time to cringe). He penetrates the impenetrable swamps of the Pantanal in Brasil in order to find the last heir, death lurking around every corner, except that as a reader you know Grisham won’t kill off his hero, not halfway the story. That neatly kills off any lingering suspense the book might have retained.

The rest of the novel is one dreadful string of self-contained events. In the rare occasion that Grisham seems to want to build up suspense, he tends to get bored with it and opts for a quick way out.

I still finished the book. Don’t ask me why. I felt like… like the writing must simply get better at some point. And then when it was clear it wasn’t going to get better, I had already invested too much time. Or perhaps I could not put it down because of a universal law at work.

My rating: 1.5 stars

As I wrote earlier, I bought me a Samsung s5230 Star mobile phone. My needs were extremely modest:

• A long standby time
• A built-in camera of at least 1 megapixel

The Star’s aspirations are far from modest: it tries to emulate far more expensive phones by providing a similar but toned down feature set. So it’s got a medium sized touch screen, a photo and video camera, a media player, an organiser, FM radio, voice recorder and widgets galore.

When you have got to cut costs, you had better come up with clever solutions, and the Star has some of those. Rather than putting in a second camera so that you can see yourself when taking a picture of yourself, it’s got a tiny mirror underneath the lens of its single camera. That sort of stuff.

Unfortunately the Star has too little of that sort of stuff, and lacks polish in general. It has an untested feel. For instance, the lock (activated by pressing a handy little button on the side of the phone that doubles as a camera lock) sometimes switches off spontaneously.

Also, the screen is completely useless outdoors. When I tried to make a call when it was overcast, I could barely see what I dialed. When I tried to look at the time during sunset (nice big clock), I could see nothing at all. I would hate to think what would happen in full sunlight at noon. Presumably the entire phone will render itself invisible.

I already expressed my satisfaction with the camera in a previous post, but to spare you the trouble of clicking a link I will repeat what I said: I love it because it is such a limited camera. That means that whenever I take a good picture it is all because of my skills, baby!

Does the battery last 800 hours on a single charge, as advertised? I would not know. I have been playing the free games that came shipped with the Star a lot lately (mostly while waiting for trains), and they drain the battery like you wouldn’t believe.

Finally, an anecdote. The other day a friend who owns one of these iPhones or HTC Android shiny wonder thingies lamented that he thought his T9 (word prediction) was unusable, because switching between languages was so hard. Ha! Not only will Samsung’s T9 implementation let you switch between languages easily, but it will let you do this while you are typing your message. Just tap the language symbol and switch languages on the fly and to your hearts content.

I don’t know how common any of these features are, but they are light years ahead of what my previous phone offered.

If you make 99.5% of your calls indoors, this phone comes mostly recommended. But do check other reviews to see if it meets your needs.

My rating: 2.5 stars

The Dogs of Riga

I know I haven’t been blogging for a while, but I just do not have the time, so I will keep it short.

People pay money for this?

It’s not that Henning Mankell’s police procedural The Dogs of Riga is badly written, indeed for most of the time, and especially the beginning it is quite entertaining. The end though is very weak. You don’t believe the author for a second. You can see the denouement coming from miles ahead, and the only thing that keeps you reading is the thought that goes continuously through your head: “Surely, Mankell would not end the book like that?”

It’s only his second book in the Wallander series, from what I understand, so I’m going to assume that the author will perhaps master copying Sjöwall and Wahlöö with some proficiency later on.

My rating: 2.0 stars

NIDF Canon EOS 1000D workshop

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When I bought my Canon EOS 1000D camera earlier this year I got a coupon that allowed me to participate in a photography workshop (EOS is their range of so-called Single Lens Reflexes, the D stands for digital, and the large number signifies the entry level model).

For 25 euro, a man told us everything about using this camera model during about 5 hours. As the workshop started at 10 am, and there were several breaks including one for lunch, the workshop almost spanned an entire working day.

Since it’s been awhile, I’ll just list what I thought was good and what was not so good.

The Good:

- Information filled: I actually learned quite a bit.

- The price? I would probably not have signed up if the workshop had cost four times more.

- There were a number of sessions where we got to put the things we had just learned into practice.

- The institute provided drinks and a simple lunch, which made the whole affair seem just that much more thought out. During the breaks, the instructor was available for questions.

The Not-so-good:

- Read the manual out loud: the bulk of the workshop consisted of going over almost the complete feature set of the camera. This turned out to be necessary: some of the students hadn’t bothered reading the manual. But since I myself had bothered to read the manual, I could have done with more of ‘how to use these features to make great photos.’

- The teacher sometimes reverted to sarcasm; it sounded like he needed a vacation. If you cannot treat your customers with civility, why bother showing up? (Then again, this was at the end of the day, perhaps he was getting tired.)

- Large chunks of the presentation were accompanied by bog standard Powerpoint presentation, i.e. reams of text on an overhead projector. Good presentations involve powerful imagery to make an emotional connection with what the presenter is trying to stay. It strikes me that if anything is suited for good Powerpoint, it would be a photography workshop. I want to be able to see what I can achieve by using the camera in a certain way.

- The price? Especially at the end of the day the crowd started getting noisy and restless, making it difficult to follow what the instructor was saying. I figured people would have been more attentive if they had had to pay more. But perhaps it wasn’t the price of the exercise, but the duration and nature that caused a restless audience.

If I could have changed one thing about the underlying idea of this course, it would have been to offer two workshops, one for people who already had read the manual, and one for people who had not.

Summing up, the workshop was worth the money, but it could have been much more vibrant. Whether it’s worth it for you depends largely on the amount of time you can spare; the price is hardly an object.

My rating: 3.0 stars

Life Ascending, The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

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What little I remember about the organization of life from my few high school biology classes in the early 1980s is that the realm of the living was divided into animals and plants.

The world of biology has not, it seems from this book, stood still in the intervening years. Animals and plants are still there, but they make up an ever dwindling part of the taxonomic tree of life, hidden somewhere on a branch behind amoebæ together with fungi.

The ten great inventions of evolution are, according to Lane:

• The origin of life
• DNA
• Photosynthesis
• The complex cell
• Sex
• Movement
• Sight
• Hot blood
• Consciousness
• Death

Of each of these things he discusses where they came from and how they got where they are now, mostly by looking at the genetic record.

I had two problems with Life Ascending. The first was Lane’s insistence on talking about religion. I have attended a Catholic elementary school, grammar school and university for more than 24 years combined, and the only time ever teachers talked about religion was during the bible readings at the start of the school days, and during the weekly religious lessons. Biology classes were blissfully spared from any religious intrusions, and the reason is obvious. When talking about science, you should not be going to give any attention, not even a little bit, to the rantings of kooks.

Religion simply doesn’t live on the same plane as science, so why even discuss it in a book that purports to be about science? Lane weakly argues that religion tries to come up with answers to questions about where life came from, but so do all kinds of crazy people who are not inspired by faith, and Lane doesn’t take a single of their theories seriously.

What is more, Lane doesn’t seem to like religion very much, which makes him come across like those hordes of American priests who publicly condemn homosexuality in the strongest of words, but then get found out as both lovers and connoisseurs of smoking the meat cigar.

Spending three, now four paragraphs to talk about Lane’s love of discussing religion’s crazy antics makes it seem the book is full of such talk, and there I can gladly put your mind at ease. For the full length of the book, the author takes about as much space talking about religion as the reviewer takes here berating him for it. The reason I mention it at all is the same as the reason you might mention catching a short glimpse of the waiter scratching his balls in your review of an excellent meal at the world’s finest restaurant—it still grates.

My other qualm with Life Ascending is that Lane often declares certain evolutionary paths to have been inevitable (the evolution of eyes and the cell wall), and others to have been sheer coincidence, without giving more of an explanation than “the DNA done it.”

Let me explain this for a second. If you see evolution as a tree where some features have come into existence repeatedly, and other features have only come into existence once, this would suggest that some things are evolutionary inevitable, and others are the opposite.

Take eyes. There are some 13 different branches of eyes that have all evolved separately. You can discover these things by comparing DNA of living and dead creatures and determining if they are similar or distinct. If the DNA for a single feature, no matter how far it has further developed, is strikingly similar across species, you may assume that all these species had at one point a single ancestor, the thin part of the hour glass they crawled through.

But Lane only mentions the “one or many ancestors” bit, and then blithely ignores the exploration of the much and much harder issue of why a certain feature would be likely to happen or not.

I only mention this because I am completely incompetent in judging a book about biology on its biological merits, and therefore have to judge it on its methodological merits, and a scientist who shows not much curiousity is just a tell-tale sign for all kinds of trouble.

But then again, as a result I spent a lot of time simply checking Lane’s facts, and I guess that is a positive thing. Although, once you have found out there are plants with eyes, you will contemplate giving up all food for a while, before becoming more omnivorous than ever.

Lane’s own prime concern with his work appears to be that his selection of the ten great inventions of evolution are perhaps not the best he could have made, and I tend to agree with that. But that is probably the wrong way to view this book. Life Ascending is instead a solid, accessible refresher course for people like me (the arts ‘n’ humanities crowd), people who got a few sprinklings of biology classes a couple of lifetimes ago and weren’t really aware that the world of biology has decidedly moved on since then. It is an excellent spring board for further exploration, and I really recommend you buy it just to get your facts about Life (and that interesting feature, Death) re-aligned.

My rating: 4.0 stars