I took this quiet Saturday afternoon to finish up a project that has been in progress for months - organizing my spice collection.  I found a set of nice little tins at Ikea a while back that fit nicely into my spice drawer, replacing the hodgepodge of spice bottles, tins, and baggies.  Now I have a "standard" spice container for all my most commonly used spices.

But as I know from my day job, with standards comes homogeneity.  That diversity made it easy to quickly find a particular spice based on the shape and color of the container, and often of the color of the contents.  My tins aren't transparent, so there is no visual clue as to their contents.  Naturally, I printed out some labels, so I wouldn't have to open each tin every time I was looking for a particular spice, but each label varied only in the text.  You'd still have to read through a lot of labels to find what you are looking for.  I found myself relying more on the patterns of stains and peeling corners than the text on the label itself!

I thought this was an interesting design concept:  Each tin has all the right design points for it's appointed task: the size and volume are just right, the wide mouth is works for scooping, pinching, or sprinkling, the surface matches the stainless elsewhere in the kitchen, and the surface is easy to clean.  But when that good design is repeated over and over, something happens. The repetition of an appropriate form might exhibit some qualities that aren't that appropriate.  Amount is a design quantity that needs to be considered.

That reminds me of a statement by Robert Irwin about the components of color.  Desktop publishers are used to Hue, Saturation, and Brightness as sufficient to define all the possible colors.  Irwin added a surprising forth component - Amount.  While HSV is sufficient to determine an individual color, the amount of each color in relation to others has a profound effect on how one perceives those colors.

The traditional solution to the Amount problem in a set of spice containers is transparency.  Each container automatically takes on some of the diversity of it's contents.  Not having this "automatic" option, I had to craft an artificial mechanism for diversity.  I based the solution on the diversity of spices by making new color labels which include a photograph of each spice.  At a glance you can differentiate the various spices by color, upon closer inspection you can differentiate shapes, and if that fails for similar spices (like ground thyme and ground oregano), you can fall back to the text label.

Taking all those pictures, cleaning them up in Adobe Photoshop, adding the circular text in Microsoft Publisher, printing, cutting, and affixing each label, was a rather time-consuming effort, multiplied by 50 tins.  Perfect for a lazy afternoon.  But now it’s time to go cook Christmas Eve dinner, spices standing ready, each with its own character despite the regimented rows.

As I reported earlier, I'm attempting an unsupported upgrade of our Gateway Media Center to Windows Media Center 2005 Edition.  I have a moderate level of success to report!

I first bought a secondary hard disk and installed it.  I found some help here on how the Master/Slave jumpers are supposed to be put in.  That wasn't even as easy as I'd anticipated, as the Master/Slave jumpers for the existing were in an initial state that wasn't documented, so I had to guess at a state that would work.  Things seem to be working OK so perhaps I got it right.

The secondary hard disk was to provide insurance that I wouldn't delete any critical data on the system until I was confident the new system was stable.  During the install I physically unplugged the original drive.

My first attempt was to do a clean install of the system, and then go on a driver search.  That was tedious and I never got it to work.

Then I found this report of success online. The methodology worked well for me, though I did it slightly differently:

1. Use the Gateway system recovery CD to partition and restore the drive to "as shipped" state.
2. Download and update the drivers using the Gateway application recovery application.
3. Do an "upgrade" install of MCE 2005.  The install will ask you to switch to the second disk, and then back to the first (don't be fooled that the name it asks for and the label on the disk don't match - that appears to be a fit-and-finish bug.)
4. You can plug the original hard disk back in at this point.  From my failed first install, I was able to switch systems on boot by some minor twiddling with the boot.ini file.
5. Go to Microsoft Update, and install all the system upgrades you find there.  (Beware driver updates from this source though, the ATI RADEON driver it tried to push on me broke the Media Center playback.)
6. Install the updated Hauppage drivers from the Gateway support page.
7. Install the latest Catalyst drivers (5.12) from ATI.  I installed just the Display Driver and the Catalyst Control Center, the WDM Integrated Driver had some warnings that scared me off.  (I see there's a new version released today; don't know if I will try it!)
8. Run Media Center, setting up your channels and so forth.  Live TV worked for me at this point.
9. Install vital applications such as Microsoft Office, OneNote, Money, Streets and Trips, Adobe's Creative Suite, Picasa, and so forth.  Visit Microsoft Office again to get application updates.
10. Use the File and Settings Transfer Wizard to transfer favorites and other settings between the computers.  It takes a long time as it transfers all your recorded shows as well (even if you try to turn it off as I did!)  Outlook settings need to be recreated from scratch (yuk).

Recording, playback, live TV, guide, music, photos, all seem to work pretty well.  There are a few things still for me to debug:

1. Playing DVDs from within Media Center doesn't work.  The WinDVD application that comes with the Gateway works fine though.
2. Google Earth doesn't work.  It doesn't recognize the video drivers unless you install the ones recommended by Microsoft Upate.  But if you install those, Media Center won't work.  Oh well, for now Google Earth will just have to reside on my laptop.
3. Icons for the CompactFlash, SD card, etc. are messed up with the addition of a second hard drive (which is now incorrectly labelled as a media card of some type.) I haven't figured out how to shift the icons back to their correct location yet.  Rainy day project!

Was it worth it?  So far I think so.  If I can solve some of the above problems I'll be quite pleased.  The benefits of the new version are:

1. Ability to use Media Center Extenders.  That's my next project.
2. Primary screen independence.  In 2004 the playback must be on the primary screen or the frame work is halved or worse.  In our dual monitor/TV setup that means the TV has to be the primary screen.  You can fool the system into putting the taskbar on the secondary monitor, but lots of applications pop up dialogs, notifications, and other things on the primary screen - right on top of your TV program.  The new system doesn't have this limitation - the TV works fine as the secondary monitor.  However, it seems to me that there are a few more glitches and momentary freezes in the new system.  Since I just updated my Dish Network reciever too, it's hard to pinpoint whether this problem is really related to the new system.
3. Searching for upcoming movies is much nicer.  There is a "Top Rated" category for searching, and the video art is downloaded just like album covers.
4. Setting up channels is much nicer.  The old version gave me a list of about a thousand channels, with a new one appearing every week it seemed, that I had to turn off in the guide because I don't subscribe to those channels.  The 2005 version trims this list down to a couple of hundred tailored to my area.
5. General user interface improvements.

The meeting dragged on and on because as usual there were three people who loved to hear themselves talk and wouldn't shut up and it took the moderator a long time to figure out that none of them had anything to say.