Embiggen Yourself

art project

2009-09-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

for those of you less skilled at the intertubes, I should mention my little art project was a success. :)

Oh. happy day !

2009-09-08T18:53:00.000-07:00

Got back from a little party in the desert, to some great news.

Today was the first library day for my son in 5th grade. His book find ? I, Robot! Sweet!

We had a little talk about the Three Laws, Asimov as an author, and the implications for UAV's.

F Ticketmaster

2009-08-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

Just a quick tip that if you are trying to get tickets to the Hollywood Bowl, LA Philharmonic, or their affiliates call them directly and f*ck Ticketmaster.

They try to hide the number, but it is 323-850-2000. The representatives are *very* helpful and knowledgeable (unlike the 'tards at Ticketmaster) and you don't have to pay the Ticketmaster fees.

Out of the mouth of babes ...

2009-08-22T21:24:00.001-07:00

My son overhears his grandfather is going to Burning Man.

His 2¢ ?

"He is probably going to Jiffy Lube"

You can't buy the kind of laughter that followed.

Meeting Karaoke

2009-03-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

I recently downloaded the new Google Mobile App for Blackberry, which has location based searching and voice input. I was playing around with it during a meeting and discovered something fun. If you hold down the input key while someone is speaking during the meeting, the term Google tries to search for is pretty funny.

Here are what I got -

jet air ohio is for allah
crime in stereo in jersey city
2 officers and literacy west law
ivy cap on and off
youtube williamsburg working class hero bag
the river ranch florida 100 warrenton
meeting in san jose charity

Best ice cream in LA ?

2009-01-14T16:34:00.000-08:00

We went to Fosselman's in Alhambra for ice cream this weekend. While they have good fresh ice cream in lots of flavors literally made in the same building you eat it, I have always been a bit disappointed by them.

I think these days for ice cream (not gelato or frozen yogurt!) my two favorites are Dr. Bob's and Scoops.

Dr. Bob used to teach at Cal Poly Pomona and decided to quit to make ice cream. It is pretty dang good. However the do not have retail stores. You can get it at the LA County fair, but that is only once a year. Frank's Kitchen in La Crescenta has it all year 'round though.

Scoops is a kind of hipster place over near LA Community College. They have a lot of ever-changing wacky flavors (like Brown Bread and Fig Goat Cheese). They are always happy to let you taste them all and their prices are cheap. If you go late tough, they may be out of most or all of the ice cream for the day.

And while I am on a roll, I will mention a couple out of town places.

Dewar's in Bakersfield is great old fashioned fountain that makes their own ice cream. It like it a lot (don't miss their candy either). The Disney soda fountain next to the El Capitan in Hollywood serves Dewar's ice cream, but somehow it is just not the same.

Amy's in Austin is also quite good. Kind of like a Texas Ben and Jerry's type place. I want to try in again when I get back there.

ps - I first blogged this at work, but figured it would be a good post here too.

Renting a car in Austin ?

2008-10-22T12:22:00.001-07:00

If you are flying to Austin and need to rent a car, do yourself a favor and pick the cheapest thing possible from Advantage. Apparently their lowest end car at the Austin airport is a Hyundai Sonata. For only about 20 bucks a day, it is a good deal ! They will even let you pre-buy 1/2 a tank for gas instead of a whole tank.

Time to do some drilling and cutting !

2008-09-16T14:31:00.001-07:00

I bought a Makita cordless drill a long time ago (10 years?). It lasted a while, but the battery crapped out a few years ago. And it didn't make to the new place.

So whenever I need to use a drill, I have to beg/borrow/steal.

Buying a good quality drill alone can run $200. Buying a tool set is a better deal, but the sets tend to have a lot of crap in them.

I found the DeWalt DC6PAKIA set had a good assortment of tools (Hammer Drill, Circular Saw, Reciprocating Saw, Impact Driver, Cut-Off Tool, Flexible Floodlight, 2 Batteries, Charger, and Bag). Amazon has been carrying it for about 40% off, but it recently went down to 57% off (new, not a refurb).

So if you need anything cut or drilled, I gots the tools now !

Europcar car rental damage scam !

2008-06-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

When I was in Australia recently, I needed to rent a car to get around town and such. In the US there is not much difference between car rental places, so I investigated online and made a booking with National.

It turns out National is some how partnered with Europcar. I didn't see a National counter at the Adelaide airport, so I checked with Hertz, Avis, etc. They were all sold out (weird), but I finally figured out that Europcar==National.

Like a good little renter, I declined the obscene insurance offered. I have car insurance and a platinum credit card after all.

Upon returning the car, the guy noted this 'damage' to the left front wheel skirt. Not much all if you ask me. Maybe it was there when I got it. I didn't run into anything while driving !

The Europcar people ask me if I want to wait for the damage assessor to make an evaluation. I say "no thanks" as THIS IS AN AIRPORT AND I HAVE A FLIGHT TO CATCH.

I return home to find a charge of $1180 on my credit card for damages. WTF !?

I call and dispute the claim and then speak to the Visa rental car insurance people. They explain all I need to do, so then I get on the phone to National.

The lady with National was *very* nice and competent. She gave me her name, number, and email address for follow-up. It turns out since I booked through National, they would go ahead and get all the documentation from Europcar.

When I receive it, I notice the only repair bill is $98 for paint touch-up. Hmm. I forward this to the Visa insurance people and they said this means they would only pay out $98. The insurance guy says this is definitely something to pursue with Disputes.

I finally heard back from the Disputes people today. They found in my favor !

I am not the only person who has had this happen. So be careful renting from Europcar !

Dioramas ! What year is it ?

2008-05-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

If you are in the 3rd grade, I guess May is diorama month.

But this got me thinking how many dioramas are needed until the hot glue gun and such are mastered. Because I don't think this medium is too educational beyond the craft-skills level.

How about teaching the kids to use Google SketchUp to make a virtual diorama ? Or iStopMotion to make a little educational movie set in a diorama ?

sigh ....

I know it is hot, but get outside !

2008-05-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick post to remind you of various great thing you can do outdoors.
And, hey, they are all FREE!

Skidrow (the movie)

2008-04-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

Having lived in downtown LA for several years (in the 90's before it got cool and expensive), in both the Toy Town and Fashion District areas, I know a bit more than the average Angeleno about skidrow.

Skidrow, the homeless, and the addicts are a part of LA that not too many people see. And if they do, they generally try real hard to make sure they don't see it again. Living in the area forced me to observe and deal with the situation.

My primary observation is that most people who stay on skid row are crazy. It is hard to say much more than that, because each person is different. But everyone I ever got to know definitely had some kind of mental, emotional, medical, or addiction issue that effectively made them nuts. They were on the streets because they could not get live any other way.

The best way I found to to deal with the people on skidrow was to treat them like anyone else. I would say 'hi', 'bye', 'excuse me', 'please', and hold doors open just like I do for anyone else. After you see the same person over and over, conversations inevitably occur and you can come to know them as an individual.

I am saying all this to encourage you to watch the documentary 'Skidrow' that came out recently. Hopefully it will raise your awareness and inform your actions regarding the homeless. You can get the movie from Amazon or Netflix.

There is also a special Activist Edition of the DVD available for students and activists that want to raise a group awareness and will help get something done about this growing crisis. You can sign up to host an event at http://skidrow.bravenewtheaters.com. Half of the profits of this Special Edition will go to The Midnight Mission and other homeless shelters.

The Apocalypse begins at BarCamp

2008-03-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

I met a guy today who does ground breaking work with digital life. The kind of stuff that could doom the world as we know it. His name was Travis. He seemed nice.

Untitled Burning Man Post

2008-03-02T01:25:00.000-08:00

If you recall, I went to Burning Man in 2007. While I was out on the playa, I was interviewed for a as-yet-to-air episode of BURNcast with some other virgins about our experiences.

One of the questions asked was - "How has Burning Man changed you ?". At the time I didn't really have an answer for that. Instead I talked about how a deeply appreciated the art and wonder I found out at Black Rock City combined with the sheer scale of the event.

I have always had the notion that if a thing were completely knowable (like an art museum) that I wanted to know it completely. For example, you can't see all of the Prado or Louvre in a single day. And if I had to leave without seeing everything, I would feel like I had missed out or failed in some way.

Today at BarCampLA, we ran into the host of BURNcast (which was a pleasant surprise). And someone else was giving a talk about Burning Man for people who were interested in going. I sat in the talk mostly to hear what he would say and hear what people would ask. But it all got me thinking about my playa experience again and what it meant to me.

The playa is a vast area where innumerable amazing cool things are happening every single second. It is also scale-free in such a way that its physical boundaries are inconsequential. That amazingly cool thing might be a 600' tower of flame seen by tens of thousands or contained in a small yurt and seen but by a few. It is impossible to see everything, even if you didn't sleep all week. It is the exact opposite of a knowable event.

And in that realization is a certain release and relaxation. Since you can't do everything, you need occasionally make sure you are doing the right thing for you, be willing to change what you are doing at any instant, and revel in the fact that other people are carving their own unique paths in time/space/experience.

Now of course there are people you care about more than others and sharing a path with them for some time is great But so is seeing their path diverge and cross and loop and merge and then go off again in a new direction.

Now off the playa, what the hell does that mean ?

I think I have really started to appreciate that the default world has all these same aspects as the playa. It is just more diffuse. You have to wander longer and through more crap to get to another amazingly cool thing.

And you will miss stuff. Time and space conspire to keep you from doing everything. And it is OK. Somehow knowing that the path I am carving is contained within a giant tangle of paths of the people I care about plus those of complete strangers makes me feel good and mitigates some of the pains of life.

And I need to keep checking in to make sure what I am doing right now is the right thing for me right now, be open to change, seek new experiences, and do what I can to help other people get to their next amazingly cool thing.

A Proud Day

2008-02-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

Today at approximately 10:30AM Pacific Standard Time, my 8 year old son decided he wanted his first novel.

340 pages.

No pictures.

Sure, it is based on a video game. But it is a good first book. He can get to A Wrinkle in Time or The Hobbit later.

Tivo Independent Lens Now

2008-02-23T23:36:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to say if you are not Tivo'ing Independent Lens on PBS, do it now. It is great showcase for independent documentaries and dramas.

You won't like every film, but I guarantee you will love some of them.

Travelling much ? You need a towel and and pillow

2008-02-10T01:14:00.000-08:00

I am going to Australia in a couple of months for my sister's wedding. As we all know, you don't travel without a towel because towels are so massively useful.

However, I am going to be doing (all told) about 50 hours of flying. In coach.

Plus camping with hippies, sleeping in dubious hostels, and spending god-knows-how-long in airport terminals.

I decided I need a pillow too.

But I can't just bring one off the old bed. Too bulky. I can't travel laden with supplies like my grandmother.

I can't stand those inflatable neck pillows. What they heck are they for ? I would rather drool on myself.

I found the perfect thing at REI. A Therm-a-Rest compressible travel pillow. I got a large sized one. It rolls up into its own little stuff sack about the size of a submarine sandwich. It is fluffy. It has a cool smooth side and a warm fuzzy side. It is large enough to fold it in half and use for reading.

My pillow is going to be my new best friend while traveling. Sorry towel, you are too easily replaced in this galaxy.

Charitable Dilema

2008-02-06T20:28:00.001-08:00

With the new IRS requirement that all charitable contributions need a receipt, I am considering changing how I contribute to charities.

If you recall, I have a long list of organizations I donate to. Just keep track of how much, when, etc. is kind of a pain.

I also recently got bummed out on the whole "recurring donation via credit card thing". Most charities do a good job with that, but others don't. I have have one billing me $15/month as "NON PROFIT TRANS". I have no idea who that is or how to stop it.

To make my life and taxes easier, I am considering instead making one big donation to a single charity. This will likely be Grand Performances.

I like their program a lot and I think it serves a valuable need in Los Angeles.

Thoughts ?

Election Advice from my 8 year old

2008-02-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

"Be sure to vote for that brown guy. He is awesome!"

M$!

2008-02-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

I call dibs on M$!

Everyone owes me a penny each time it is used.

2008-01-27T14:04:00.001-08:00

Steve and I went to go see the Derby Dolls last night. It was SUPER FUN, the game just flew by. I almost even understood the rules by the end.

Those women really beat the snot out of each other. Several left the game due to injuries.

I didn't take any pictures (because I forgot my camera), and I can't even find any on Flickr. What is web2.0 coming to ?

We ran into a old and close friend last night. Her derby name is Gritty in Pink and she is a Doll in training and writing about it (as is her way). I am glad to have seen her
and I sure hope we can reconnect.

I can't wait until the next game on February 16th !

Some Smashing Required

2008-01-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

To hide from the winds, I sat down into front of the 'tivo' last night and watched two new shows from the Science and Discovery Channel - Smash Lab and Some Assembly Required.

Smash Lab is a Mythbusters rip off. They ditch the whole 'myth' premise and instead start with some idea of dubious plausibility (in this case - arrerated concrete to slow auto crashes). Then they broke into two teams and did a Mythbuster's 'build off' type show. The show clearly has a decent budget, since they used lots of concrete, vehicles, and work crews to get things done. I am not sure about the cast members and hoped for more than one hot geeky girl on the show.

Some Assembly Required is kind of a mash-up of How It's Made and Dirty Jobs. It has a main host and his scientist sidekick. They go to business and inject themselves into the manufacturing process. I saw the Jelly Belly's, Kohler toilets, and Ebonite bowling ball episode. They explain a lot of the nuances that go into the manufacture in a way that How It's Made does not. Who knew that jelly bean, bowling ball, and toilet manufacture was so hands-on ?

Both shows were pretty decent and I will continue to watch them.

School House Rock Live!

2008-01-14T09:12:00.001-08:00

Drew, Grandma Jeanne, and I went to go see School House Rock Live! last night and it was really good. It is put on through Fairfax High School and the Greenway Arts Alliance.

They did a fabulous job of turning animation into live action. And working with a budget that is probably less than your grocery bill. They had a live band playing the music and the cast was all good, especially Jeffery Landman.

If you are a Gen X'er and love the School House Rock, grab the kids (or the neighbor's kids in the case of delayed maturity) and go see this show.

It runs Saturday's at 4pm and Sunday's at 4pm and 7pm through February 24th. You can get tickets either from the website or (cheaper) from Goldstar.

You can also buy the orginals on DVD and put some money in the Mouse's pockets.

RipRoar Creation Station sux0r

2007-12-26T12:41:00.000-08:00

Mike really does not like the RipRoar Creation Station.

And it sure sounds like he tried to get it working.

I am a bad note taker

2007-12-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

I have always been a bad note taker. Every semester I would try to take good notes, and then fail miserably. Same thing at work when I go to meetings.

However, as my job became much more customer focused I find that I am taking better notes in meetings and seminars. Sometimes this is to ease communicating later to my boss and team. Other times is so I don't forget to do something.

I decided to go through the half dozen little notebooks I have floating around and post just the titles of the various meetings.

Large Company Social Computing Issues
Company University site
Pligg to-do
Prioritize Search Initiatives
VAP7 Rollout
Enterprise Architecture Board Collaboration Team
Plone Outages
Company mediawiki
Staff Meeting
Zimba and Company business unit
SAP Contacts
Digitizing the Archives
Content Discovery
Contacts 2.0
CIO Coffee
Wiki Book Project
Calendaring
Google Meeting with Compant Special Events
Moving Servers to of of Current Data Center
Google POC
Wiki Meeting
Plone and Server Migration
Kiosk Issues
Cisco Unified Communications
Zimbra Scope
IT Support
Targeted links
Search Monitoring
Email Delivery
FAST Status
Virtual Iron Meeting
SpikeSource/Intel Collaboration

I note that for many meeting, I failed to write anything down. I guess that is because many meetings are a waste of time. Others are only held for social validation purposes. I am actually surprised that this list manages to capture the diverse nature of my role fairly well.

Google Sync - Unified Blackberry / Google / Exchange Calendars !

2007-12-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

Like everyone one else, I noted the release of the Google Sync from Blackberries with some interest. We have been doing an eval of Google Apps Premiere at work, and the first question we get on calendars is "does it sync to my Blackberry or Exchange?".

Until Wednesday, the answer was "no". Well, "maybe" if you bought some 3rd party app. But we hadn't bothered to test any of others without strong business needs articulated.

When I downloaded Google Sync (see here to get a link sent to your Blackberry), I was wondering what would happen. Had Google added a new category of events to my calendar ? If I created an appointment on my Blackberry, would I get an option to sync to Google or Exchange or both ?

Hmm.

Since there seems to be little discussion of Google Sync yet, here is what I have seen -

Everything you have in your Blackberry/Exchange calender before the install is ignored.
Feature Request - It sure would be nice if there was an option to populate existing events into your Google Calendar.
All events created or modified after install Google Sync show up in your Google, Blackberry, and Exchange calendars.
Modifying events on any of the three places seemed to work fine and sync fine.
With the default "server wins" setting in Google Sync, events don't disappear from the Google calendar (since the server wins).
Settings the option to "handheld wins" causes all three calendars to be in sync. This seems to be the way that Google Sync turns your Blackberry into a magical bridge between Google and Exchange.
Google Sync gives you the option to also sync events from other Google calendars you subscribe to. I would be careful with this.
Bug - Making meetings private in Exchange does not flow through to your Google calendar. So anyone with access to your Google calendar can see your dentist appointment or other embarrassing stuff.
The app seems to sync about every 5 minutes and a manual sync takes about 15 seconds.

BTW - Google Sync works with either a regular GMail calendar or with your domain if you are Google Apps user.

I hope to see more Good Things in this arena. Have fun.

Free cash if you used your credit card for foreign travel !

2007-12-09T16:58:00.001-08:00

I got some big envelope from the US District Court this week. "Uh oh", I thought, "The feds are onto me !"

Turns out that if you used your credit card outside the country between Feb. 1996 and November 2006, your credit card company probably screwed you on fees charged.

I guess someone won their class action suit, because the envelope contained info on claiming to be part of the class or opting out. The options are basically -

Settle for $25
Tell them how many days you were out of the country and they will estimate an amount
Provide detailed data on your foreign transactions
Opt of the of class

I picked option 2. I was out of the country roughly 9 weeks in that time period. Seems like I should get more than $25.

BTW - if you are claiming for corporate card usage, you have to pick option 3.

Anyway, for more info and to submit a claim (even if you did not get a letter) to to CCFSettlement.com.

Free money in the mail ! Sweet !

Social Software is a lot of work

2007-11-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

I just got back from a trip to Arizona for Thanksgiving. I took just over 100 digital photos. In order to be a good social software user, I have a lot of work to do now.

Upload pics from my camera to my computer
Delete crappy pics and tweak the ones I want to keep
Upload them all to Flickr
Organize, title, tag, and geotag all the pics
Send a link to the set to everyone who might be interested (because RSS is only understood by maybe 3% of the world)
Write Yelp review for the place I care to
Upload (again) pics for the places I Yelp'd

Whew !

Of course this is not all altruistic (nor all selfish).

I like having Flickr store all my pics (makes me feel a lot better about not having backups of my computer). I should tag and title my pics so I can find them later. I like Yelp'ing places I particularly enjoyed or hated.

Here is the whole Flickr set. Enjoy. I will Yelp later (see the widget in the sidebar).

Another example of why the aliens will never defeat us.

2007-11-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

Wait for the vocals to come in. Gets really good at the end.

Where do you fall in the Second Life spectrum ?

2007-10-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

On a scale of 1 to 10.

2nd house or 2nd life ?
2nd car or 2nd life ?
2nd flat screen or 2nd life ?
2nd blender or 2nd life ?
2nd beer or 2nd life ?
2nd fish oil supplement or 2nd life ?
2nd ant infestation or 2nd life ?
2nd sty or 2nd life ?
2nd accident or 2nd life ?
2nd tumor or 2nd life ?

How much does it cost to go Burning Man and where to rent an RV in Los Angeles

2007-10-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

When we were budgeting for going to Burning Man, we quickly realized we needed to fill the RV to spread out the rental and fuels costs. We opted to share food costs too and came up with a guesstimate of $3000 or $500 each if we filled the RV.

I just got my September credit card statement, so I sat down and did all the math. You can view the details here, but suffice it to say we spent about $1500 to rent the RV, $600 on diesel, $400 on food and drink, $240 for camp fees, and another $350 on miscellaneous. So the total was $3090 or $515 each. Right on target.

All this is less the costs of a ticket which can be between $200 and $400 dollars.

One reason the price was so good was our decision to use an independent RV rental outfit. The chain RV places (El Monte and Cruise American) have very high daily rate out of LA. Plus they charge for mileage and one of them charges for generator usage. Leaving from Vegas was much cheaper, but would have been a big hassle.

I found American RV after doing a bit of googling. They are a small independent place in Montclair. Their daily rates were as good as the chains Vegas rates. A recon trip proved their RV to be pretty nice and clean, although some were a bit long in the tooth.

Insurance was a big concern and a hassle. The chain places work like rental car places. Anyone can be listed a a driver. Each driver needs to make sure they have RV coverage, which is not standard and will usually cost you some bucks. The chains will also provide insurance if you like (at roughly comparable rates).

Not so with American RV. They only list one driver and only care about their insurance. To permit other people to drive (which is wise;you will get tired) you have to add each other driver onto the primary drivers policy for the duration. This was a major pain and took quite a bit of coordination with my insurance agent. BTW - Her name is Margi and she works for Aihara Insurance. She is a great person to work with. Give her a call if you are in the market.

Once this was all squared away, we were also a bit nervous about getting screwed on the back end. After all, we were going to Burning Man. The thing would be pretty dirty when we turned it back in.

All those worries were for naught. We need a pretty good job of keeping the interior clean and were not charged for anything beyond the contacted price on return.

Oh yeah ! I forgot to mention the RV we reserved was not available when we went to pick it up. So they gave us a comparable one. It slept 6, had a slide out, etc. Expect it was MUCH nicer and almost double the daily rate. But they didn't charge us more for that. Didn't even mention it.

So if you need to rent an RV out of LA, be sure to check out American RV.

addendum - drop me a line if you need any advice !

Another good customer service experience (from Vessel)

2007-10-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

I had seen the Candela product from Vessel at various museum shops a such for a while. I really liked the product. They are sort of a candle2.0 kind of thing. They sit on a inductive charger, when you pick them up they turn on. Put them back and they turn off. Cool !

However, the museum shop price was a bit too steep. One day I was placing an order with a friend from reusablebags.com and they had the Candela for about 40% off. Sweet.

Recently they went a little funny though. I had one light that started turning on (instead of off) when placed back on the charger. It turns out the charger went bad and as their batteries died each light would not charge and instead just flickered madly on the base.

I wrote to Vessel customer support. I honestly was not expecting much, just hoping for a good price on a new charger. To my surprise, they are mailing me a new charger at no cost !

With all the poor customer service in this world (I'm looking at you Target!), I really appreciate places that provide good service.

Burning Man Pictures and Thoughts

2007-09-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

First off here are my limited pics from Burning Man. I misplaced my camera and only found it in the last 24 hours. My friend Steve has his pics here.

Secondly here are some random Burning Man thoughts, in no particular order, that have been floating around in my head.

Take time to explore and figure out what you like and what you don't. Concentrate on what you like. You still won't see it all. Be good with your friends doing their own thing sometimes.
Get an RV. Seriously. I will post our RV story later. But trust me, tents suck.
Bring a drip coffee maker. Cleaning a French press without running water is awful.
Carry those masks and goggles everywhere (at least during the day).
FUCK those people who lock up or otherwise make a yellow bike their own. I got seriously bent on this after a few days and I released a few yellow bikes back into the wild.
Next time, I am going to wear sandals all the time . I washed my feet a couple times a day and put lotion on them at night, so I did not get playa foot. My feet did not really stay cleaner wearing closed shoes, they just stayed sweatier.
Apparently an electric lawn blower helps clear away the small dunes the form in your camp after a dust storm.
You really shouldn't leave the awning down if no one is in the RV. Again, dust storms.
Glow sticks blow. Next time I will invest in some EL wire and more bike lights.
EZ up's blow. To provide shade a steel framed carport (with sides) and rebar to nail it down is a better bet. Don't forget tennis balls for the rebar ends, a 3 pound sledge to drive them in, and big pair of vise grips to get them out.
We used about 20 gallons of water per person for the week. Glad we brought (just) enough.
Using foil to cover the windows provided cooling and darkness during the day.
Using contact paper to cover the floors provided easier cleanup.
Bring a long (at least 50') HEAVY gauge extension cord and power strip. Your RV's generator will be needed by someone at some point.
Go ahead, run the generator. We used less than 10 gallons of fuel all week running it.

What am I not reading ?

2007-08-24T11:26:00.001-07:00

Well, I ain't reading people who don't update their stuff.

Nintendo Wii Repair Service Rocks

2007-08-22T15:08:00.000-07:00

Um, wow. Seriously. Nintendo repair service rocks.

My Wii was acting up (Wiimotes would not stayed sync'd). So I went to the Nintendo service site, entered my info and the Wii serial number. They mailed me a pre-paid UPS label.

I took the Wii to the UPS Store on Friday afternoon and here it is Wednesday afternoon and the repaired Wii is in my hands again.

Waddaya Reading ?

2007-08-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Google Reader has a "trends" feature that keeps track of what you actually read. I think this more about the quaility of the site than my interests, but there you go.

El Vez at the Watercourt

2007-08-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

Too lazy to write a real blog post, but the El Vez show was pretty cool.

See the pics and videos below. I took four video clips, but YouTube has a 100mb and 10min limit. So you only get to see two, because I will be damned if I will re-encode them.

I have to say the Panasonic DMC-TZ3 did a great job, except for audio (which doesn't surprise me).

Gotta go Burn a Man

2007-08-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

My friends Steve and Jackie have convinced me to go to Burning Man this year. We are going the sybaritic route and renting this bad boy.

The RV sleeps 6, so we have room for 3 more people if any readers know people who want to go.

My hope is BM combines the best aspects of the Maker and Renn faires in the desert for a week.

My fear is BM combines the worst aspects of the Renn faire and a rave in the desert for a week.

Podrunner goes all Web2.0

2007-08-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

In order to help promote his burgeoning podcasting empire, my friend Steve started a blog site over at djsteveboyett.blogspot.com. While this is causing him *more* work in his otherwise hectic schedule (read all about that in his first post), hopefully we can figure out some ways to reduce his level of effort that is not directed towards his show.

And if you are a runner or anyone else who listens to music while the exercise, you are listening to Podrunner. Right ? RIGHT ?

802.11 for the neighbors

2007-07-07T19:08:00.001-07:00

Now that I (finally) got some high speed cable modem at home, I figured I would throw up a little 802.11 for the neighbors.

I dug up the old Linksys BEFW11S4 802.11b router that Spyrral left in my old basement, but I can't find the AC adaptor for it.

So if you have a 12v 1A AC adaptor you would like to throw my way, I would appreciate it. Or maybe you have some old 802.11 router with AC adaptor you would like to part with.

At any rate, drop me a line if you do.

Panasonic DMC-TZ3 test shots

2007-07-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

My new Panasonic DMC-TZ3 arrived while I was out of town, so I picked it up today.

I have decided (for now) to use the 16x9 aspect ratio. In high quality this results in a 3328x1872 image at about 3MB. I bought a 4GB card, so it should be good for over 1000 pictures. I have noticed that 4Gb and 8GB card are SDHC, not plain old SD. This means the built in media reader on my PC will not read the card and I have to plug the camera in via USB. Fortunately no USB driver is needed, but it is a bit slow.

I am also a bit vexed on picture lifecycle. I want to take them on the camera, tweak them in Picassa, upload them to Flickr, and link to them on Blogger. Unfortunately this lifecycle is not integrated is a bit of a pain in the ass. I could probably solve this by moving from Flickr to the Picassa Web Albums, but I don't really want to move all my junk from Flickr. Any suggestions ?

Below are some test shots (taken on a tripod). You can click to get to the originals on Flickr.

1x

5x

10x

Amazon Customer Service Rocks

2007-06-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I have always had great customer service from Amazon.

I checked this morning to if my camera had shipped yet (they were saying it would on Friday). Lo and behold the shipped the SD card, but the camera was scheduled for delivery in late November. WTF?!

Usually something like that indicates Something Bad Happened. I called Amazon customer service (and what other ecomm firm takes calls 24x7x365 ?) and got some obviously outsourced, but still plenty helpful, customer service rep.

She checked into it and reported that the shipment they received was damaged and they had to chuck them all. They weren't sure when they would get move, hence the ridiculous ship date. I asked if that was just the black version that I had ordered or if they could ship a silver or blue. Blue is my preference, but they are about $50 more I suppose because they don't make as many.

She went away for a while then came back and said they would ship me a blue DMC-TZ3 next week and they would waive the $50 price difference. Sweet!

So Amazon is again double-plus-good in my book.

BTW - it sure *feels* a lot hotter than 85 degrees today

2007-06-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

OMFG

Time Warner called me and came over this afternoon and hooked up the HD-DVR and cable modem.

Getting me a new camera (Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3)

2007-06-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

I broke down and ordered a new digicam from Amazon. I haven't had one in a some time and while the Blackberry Pearl camera is always handy the pictures are pretty marginal.

I like a small digicam and a good optical zoom. Small means you are more likely to carry it. The zoom gets you shots you might not always get. I also look for good low-light capability for places you cannot use a flash and a wide angle feature is nice. My ancient Nikon Coolpix 950 had all of this, but it is a dinosaur these days and kinda large.

I was looking around and read Cory's joy with his Panasonic Lumix FX07. I started looking into that camera, but it wasn't quite right for me. Then Panasonic released the DMC-TZ3.

The DMC-TZ3 has a horrible name, but seems to meet all my criteria. It is reasonably small and it has a 28-280mm equivalent lens. This means wide angle to 10x optically. It also supposedly has excellent image stabilization for use in low light. Sweet.

Amazon had it for $299 (no tax or shipping of course). Now if they would just ship it to me sometime soon. :(

Don't fret about the old Nikon though. A co-worker wants the telephoto and wide angle lenses for it. And I figure the camera itself will be a good place for Drew to start taking some pictures.

The Can Can can

2007-06-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

I was up in Seattle for work this week, so I was looking around for something to do on Tuesday night.

Yelp pointed me to a local club called The Can Can. I quote reviewer SarahB - "It's like someone crawled into one of the messed up corners of my head and brought together my love of pseudo-french ambiance, sensual ladies in corsets, and campy game show hosts. Than they discovered my love of macaroni and cheese, mixed up a crazy cocktail and grabbed an eclectic bunch of misfits and threw it all down the stairs! It's just that good."

How could I not go ?

I quickly found it under the 1st & Pike Flower market. The room was very nicely decorated and properly dim. I sat ate the bar and chatted with a few people, the crowd was really friendly. The bartender also knew his shit and I watched make some awesome drinks (I just had one pint of a local ale).

The musical act that night was Vinny, a 15 year old kid that sings eerily like Johnny Cash (just him and a guitar). He was awesome! He did about 10 songs and got a nice round of applause.

So if you are up in Seattle with nothing to do one night, drop by The Can Can. I think you will like it.

Grand Perfomances 2007

2007-05-31T16:57:00.001-07:00

Grand Performances has their 2007 schedule out. This is great series of *free* outdoor shows at the Watercourt in Bunker Hill. I have had a great time at all the shows I have gone to.

I am a member, so I can probably get you some reserved seats at a show if you drop me a line.

Quick Updates

2007-05-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Here are my camera phone pics from Maker Faire.

And Drew decided to keep the rat. Jenn agreed it was OK. So we bought a Habitrail knockoff (the SAMDU2) at Petco. I wonder why they don't carry the real thing ?

Little Lost Rat

2007-05-21T14:53:00.001-07:00

While walking to lunch, we found this little pet rat on the street, complete with a leash (you can see him sitting on it).

Somebody said they thought it belonged to this homeless guy that just went by, but we couldn't find the guy.

I brought him with and put him in a box with some wet snacks. I put an ad on Craigslist and a call into rat rescue.

Super Weekend

2007-05-21T11:50:00.001-07:00

Wow, what a very full weekend. I give you just a bulleted list with comments.

Jacqueline - See pictures. She is awesome. 'Nuff said.

Drive to San Mateo - It was dark. We talked a lot.

Coxhead House - A nice little B&B in San Mateo. Comfy rooms, squeaky floors, tasty breakfasts.

Maker Faire - Awesome! So much to see and do. Nicely non-commercial. Lots of interactivity. I am definitely going next year. Look for it to be in Austin in October.

Annapoorna - Got some good veggie Indian food to-go (thanks to Yelp)

Thunderdome at Nimby - Two men enter, one man leaves. Repeat. Add fire, noise, and impaling for effect.

Bay to Breakers - Didn't actually make into The City for this. But we though about it.

Maker Faire - day2 was just as good as day1. Did a little Cyclecide. Still didn't see everything.

Drive back to LA - Took the scenic route with a stop for lunch at Casa de Fruta. A perfect day for a nice drive.

I will get my camera phone pics onto Flickr soon.

Dish in La Canada is just awful

2007-05-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

My buddy Steve came over to help me hang pictures at my new place this weekend. After we were done, we decided to grab some grub and ended up at Dish in La Canada.

Turns out this place is all bark and no bite. The have a great sign, a tasty sounding menu, and a interesting room.

This is all to no avail, as they failed on almost all counts. In an effort to be concise, I will just give you a bulleted list.

Getting Seated - us and another group of people waited about 5min. before anyone even spoke to us. After that it was another 5min. to get seated.
Ordering - they were out of two specials and at least one regular menu item
Beef & Barley Soup - this was basically salt porridge. Campbell's is better.
Mac & Cheese - not very cheesy with a watery and salty sauce
Penne with Sausage - this was perfectly serviceable, but nothing special
Drinks - Steve ordered the drink special, a Mint Julep. With the promise of fresh mint, I opted for a mojito. Both drinks were basically well alcohol over ice with a sprig of lime on top. Quite awful. We hardly touched them.
Strawberry Shortcake - this was pretty icky too. Decent strawberries, but the shortcake tasted like a store bought scone heated up in a microwave.
Bathroom - Their men's room was a completely disgusting in ways that I don't care to mention. Use your imagination.

In short - I will not make a another visit to Dish, even under duress.

Sierra Made to Long Beach via San Gabriel River

2007-05-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

We did a long bike ride this weekend from Sierra Madre to Long Beach via the San Gabriel River. Mapmyrun is all jacked up, so I can't show you the exact route. We started at the end of the Metro Gold Line, rode over to Santa Fe Dam (about 10mi), down the San Gabriel River (about 25mi) , then over to Long Beach (about 7mi). The return route was along the Metro Blue/Red/Gold lines.

Things went bad when we hit the river route. First, we had a headwind. The whole way. So instead of 25 miles of slight downhill it felt like 25mi of slight uphill. That's a big difference for us wimps.

After a couple miles, I noticed Grace's back tire was a bit low. We stopped to give it a few pumps. She has Presta valves on her bike, which I have not used before. But my pump handles them, so I attached the pump and filled it back up. But then I couldn't detach the pump. I was wiggling and twisting and *blam* the whole stem came off in the pump. Grace was screwed.

After much apologizing, cell phone calls, lamenting, and checking of spares (thanks, Desi!), it was decided that Grace would push her bike back to Stan's bike shop in Monrovia and get it fixed and then head back to Sierra Madre. The rest of us pushed on.

We saw lots of interesting stuff along the way. Including this wacky sign and a mariachi band.

By the time we got to Long Beach, we were bushed and hungry. We planned to eat at Alegria, but due to the Coffee Convention they were closed to a private party. We ended up at Hooter's. Meh.

I finally dropped Nick off about 9pm, 10 hours after we started. I then headed over to Anna and Robert's anniversary dinner, which I missed. We had some after dinner drink at The Nose Wine Cellar, across from Vroman's in Pasadena. This is an awesome little restaurant/wine bar. Very intimate and with a friendly staff. I liked it a lot. They even after chocolates from L' Artisan du Chocolat !

I had a great time, got really sunburned, and my legs still hurt. How was your Saturday ?

Getting the best deal on appliances at Sears. Price Match or Sale ?

2007-04-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

I am moving into a new place and need to get a washer/dryer and a refrigerator. A friend of mine told me about a local appliance store that had very good prices I should check out and that Sears would price match them. After cross referencing data and features from Consumer Reports, Sears, and Universal Appliance, I decided on these three units -

Now, where to buy them ?

Universal Appliance has *very* good prices. But I have bought a lot of appliance from Sears over the years, plus they were having a sale. So I decided to go with Sears.

To make a long story short, during a Sears 20% off sale you can either get 20% off of the Sears price or have them match (+10% of the difference) a competitor price. They will still do the free delivery promotion with price match and other rebates may apply.

I have worked out the 'out the door' price I would have paid under a few different scenarios. I have included sales tax, but not factored in delivery charges or rebates. Given the option to purchase a Sears service contract and delivery promotions, having Sears price match Universal was a very good deal. I recommend it to all, though you will spend a lot of time waiting for Sears to make sure it is not a scam and getting manager approval.

Sears with no special sale
1.0825*(1250+1000+959) = $3473

Sears 20% off three appliances sale
1.0825*0.8*(1250+1000+959) = $2779

Universal Appliance
1.0825*(909+859+749) = $2724

Sears price matching Universal
1.0825*(909+859+749-0.1*(3473-2724)) = $2643

Do you have another strategy for getting a good price ?

Seriously, Isn't it time for Window XP Service Pack 3 ?

2007-04-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

I just had to do a fresh install of Windows XP Pro for this awful effort at work I should not even be involved in. Luckily I had just downloaded a brand shiny new ISO of XP with SP2 slipstreamed into it from MSDN. Should be an easy install right ?

Round 1
Well, after the normal XP install I go over to update.microsoft.com like a good little IT boy. There were 88 required and 'optional' upgrades needed. Downloading them on the insanely fast work network and installing took about 90 minutes. Then I had to reboot.

Round 2
Another update yields 8 updates and 15 minutes. Reboot.

Round 3
Only 1 update and 5 minutes. Another reboot though.
The next update comes up clean!

Grand Total: 97 updates. 2 hours. 3 reboots.

This is just insane. Could Microsoft get off their ass and release SP3 some time before the product is end-of-life ? I didn't even have Office to worry about updating !

btw - what is with the KCRW music XP plays during the install these days ? Weird.

Spider in my Sink

2007-04-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Spider in my sink.
Viligant. Watching. Eating.
Bugs that come for me.

BarCampLA and a Piano in the Ice

2007-03-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

I attended Day 1 of the recent BarCampLA.

I found the Saturday sessions to be a bit light, but I enjoyed -

Powerpoint Karoke
Hearing about Qtask (it can even slice bread!)
All the input during my brainstorming session
Thai food dinner and a keg of Bass Ale
Watching everyone play Wii (the poor Xbox360 guy was all alone ....)

And most of all, I enjoyed running into Jackie and going over to a Dangerous Curves event. We rounded a corner in Toy Town to find an upright piano frozen in a block of ice being attacked by Kerouac-like figures wielding axes. Later the flamethrower came out. Sweet !

I have a few pics up on Flickr.

Viva La BarCamp !

Sticking it to The Mann Theaters.

2007-03-18T17:34:00.000-07:00

Or maybe The Mann Theaters stuck it to me. You be the judge.

Drew and I decided to go see a matinée today and he picked Terabithia over Mimzy. There was a 4:30 show over at the Mann 4 in Glendale.

We go over and buy the tickets. It was $17.50 for one adult and one child. Yikes !

So far so good, but then Drew is thirsty and the snack bar has nothing but soda. I am told if I want juice, there are plenty of places outside that sell it.

Fine. We go back out and locate a place that has some apple juice and head back into the theater. That is when the trouble starts.

The boy/girl team taking tickets (apparently this is a two person task), inform me that "you can't come in here with that soda". I point out it is juice, which the snack bar people told me to go buy outside the theater.

Too bad. Policy is policy they say. Actually it was more like a grunt. I ask them why them have to be such jerks and tell Drew to finish his juice up.

The guy informs me that he is doing us a big favor by even allowing Drew to drink his unauthorized juice in the lobby, that he should really ask me to leave, and that if I call anyone a jerk again he will.

At this point my urge is to kick him in the nuts. Instead I throw my tickets on the ground and we leave.

Drew helpfully points out the absurdity of the situation and demands we go ask for a refund. I told him I would rather be out $17.50 than lose my temper and kick some poor Mann minion in the nuts. This causes a bit of juice to come out his nose for laughing.

I don't go out to the movies much these days and sometimes I forget why. You would think theater chains would be striving to retain their declining business. I guess not.

If anyone knows someone at Mann Theater I can mail a complaint letter to, that would be great. All I can find is a generic email address (Talk2Mann@manntheatres.com).

Unpacking the Polywell i680

2007-03-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

I got the Polywell system yesteday. We unpacked it at work and took some pictures (it is too much effort to put all the pictures into blogger, so you can view them all over at Flickr). In general I think the system is pretty well put together. It is pretty quiet for a standard large tower PC. The massive side fan does not add to the noise at all.

A couple of points -

good - There was no crapware to uninstall ! The system was totally usable out of the box. All the drivers and such were installed and working fine.
bad - When I got it home, I popped in the IDE drive from my old system. But the IDE can't reach it and the DVD drive at the same time. So I need to go buy a longer IDE cable.

I did not get a chance to install any games on it yet.

Return of the Ravens ?

2007-03-12T12:27:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago a pair of raven's built a nest on a conference room window ledge at work.

They laid their eggs, three hatched, and two chicks survived. It was pretty cool and I have kinda missed them.

Now my co-workers office has a few large twigs on the ledge. Hopefully the ravens are coming back.

Kingpixel kindly reminded me of the photos he took and posted of the original event. Thanks !

PC Hell

2007-03-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

The world of the PC is crashing down around my head.

When I came back from a trip and turned off my Outlook out-of-office, I stopped getting meeting reminders.
The IT guy couldn't fix so, so he put my XP virtual machine (I am running XP under Parallel's on an iMac) on the domain. Outlook worked fine. For a few hours.
After lunch the new Outlook would not let me reply or forward messages. Instead it would crash. Whoopee. Plus my Outlook and Blackberry calendars were no longer syncing.
Did I also mention that we are in some kind of calendar hell with all the daylight savings patches going on for servers, desktops, Blackberries, Exchange, BES, etc. ? They seriously told us to print out our calendars for the next month. Joy.
I had some kind of power surge at home that blew out all the lights in the kitchen and killed the power supply in my PC. Joy again.

Instead of mucking with my old junky PC, I decided to look to see what a new PC would cost. Dell and the like cost way too much and give very limited control of your configuration. So I ordered this from Polywell for just over $2100 + tax -

Motherboard:Poly i680SLi ATX MB,3PCIe,2gLAN,7.1A,6SATA-R5
Processor:Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6400 2.13GHz 2M 1066FSB 65W
Memory: 2x DDR2 667MHz 1G PC5300 Memory Unbuffered
Case:TS514 10-Bay Black Tower with 250mm Side Fan (the image above is the case)
PowerSupply:700W Quiet PFC SLI P/S, 85% High Efficiency
HardDrive1:Seagate 750GB SATA-II 7200RPM HD 16M Cache
Floppy:Black Floppy+Media Reader 7-in-1 Internal Drive
Disk Controller:On-board SATA RAID-0,1,0+1,5 Controller
I/O Device:On-board 1394 Firewire Ports
Keyboard:Logitech Cordless Internet Pro USB KB+Mouse BLK
Audio Sound:On-board 7.1 3D Audio Sound
DVD-RW:Lite-On 20X LightScribe DVD+/-RW IDE Drive Black
Graphics:Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS 640M PCI-E Graphics Card
Networking:On-Board Gigabit/100/1000T Ethernet
O/S:Windows XP Professional CD+License
Optional Support:3yr Parts Replacement in Advanced

Not bad a bad price at all. Any comments on the configuration ?

Celsius Aborted

2007-02-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

Well after a couple more days of drinking Celsius, both WorkingData and I decidedly (independently) to call the whole thing off.

I experienced the diuretic effect *everytime* I drank the stuff and I did not like it. Or having to pee all the time. Plus when I poured it over ice, the foamy head was a sickly blue-green color. Ick. Too bad I don't have a picture.

WorkingData reports the Wild Berry flavor to be even more sickly sweet than the Cola. Plus it stained his mouth a reddish purple and required a few tooth brushings to remove.

We have taken the remaining bottles to the kitchen for other brave souls to try. That is if we run out of Nestea and Diet Dr. Pepper.

2007-02-25T17:44:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Pasadena. Which is good, because I did The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Race for the Cure 5k today. Can I go on record as saying this is a horrible event name ? How about something more snappy like the SG5K ?

Anyway, we met at Conrad's in La Canada and headed down to the Rose Bowl. There were thousands of people there and it took quite a while to get going. We also couldn't walk at a normal pace due to all the people. But it was fun and for a good cause. You can view the other photos on my Flickr site.

(Oh yeah, work upgraded me to a Blackberry Pearl so now I can have the occasional photo.)

Celsius - Day1

2007-02-23T14:16:00.000-08:00

Our first impression is 'disturbed'. The bottle of Celsius does not list all the ingredients, just the 'thermogenic' ones. A visit to their website is of little use either.

We also notice the subtitle on the bottle is "Enjoy the Great Taste of Burning Calories!". That does not sound appetizing. About the same as "Enjoy the Great Taste of Burnt Popcorn!".

We decided to start with the Cola flavor. A sniff of it smelled like hippie soda. A sip however was quite different. It tasted like super-sweetened diet hippie soda. With a little tummy burn.

After a few sips it was clear this was not a good beverage and we would never drink it again if it were not for this experiment. In fact, I considered deleting the first post and pretending it never happened. But we decided to soldier on.

WorkingData felt decidedly not good after drinking it. I had to head to the dentist office and had to pee not less that 5(!) times while there. Is this crap a diuretic too ?

I figure there is a good chance we still might call an abort on this whole deal.

The Celsius Drink Diet

2007-02-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

Two new beverages have hit the market lately that claim to 'burn calories' by increasing your metabolic rate. See the Celsius FAQ for more information.

Enviga by Coke

and Celsius

The big difference seems to be cans versus bottles and flavors variations. Since Celsius is available at the local Albertson's we use it to perform the following experiment:

People: me and WorkingData
What: one bottle of Celsius a day (consumed at work)
Duration: one week
Data: we will weigh in each day and report deltas. Actual body weight will not be reported to protect the innocent donuts in our lives.

We will also be reporting on the Celsius flavors. I was only able to get Cola, Wild Berry, and Ginger Ale. So let know know if you see Lemon Lime or Orange in the Los Angeles area.

Since Celsius claims to increase metabolic rate and not just burn a certain amount of calories, we are also quite curious about combining Celsius and working out. Therefore the following week we will continue the experiment, but change the time of consumption to 1 hour before working out.

Stand by for updates and chime in with comments !

hiking

2007-01-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

For reasons we won't get into, about a year ago I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands and too much body fat. I used to backpack a fair amount and had done some day hikes with the Sierra Club, so I visited the Sierra Club's Angeles Chapter Outings Schedule to see what sorts of things were going on.

I noticed that there are night hikes in Griffith Park every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 7pm. Since I live and work right in the area, I figured I would give them a shot. Since I was showing for a night hike in the winter, I wasn't expecting too many people. Boy, was I wrong !

There were over 100 people in the parking lot. I didn't quite understand how it was going to work, but it was announced that the hikes are divided into speed rating 1-6, with 6 being the faster and an admonition to not go above 3 if you were new. Out of hubris, I did a 4 (those people did look so tough !). I am still doing 4's today.

I really liked the hikes and quickly fell into a Tuesday/Thursday hiking routine. I have met some great people on the hikes and a few have become close friends.

If you want to find hikes in the Los Angeles area, check the Angeles Outings Schedule, the Angeles 20's & 30's Singles Outings Schedule, and the Outdoors Club Schedule.

Here is a picture of me with a group on a hike to Mt. Waterman (I am at the front left). And so you don't think this is just a guy thing, it is followed by the picture of all the women on the hike. Maybe I will see you on the trail!

My Oppo 1080p DVD player and Projector People rock!

2007-01-05T16:49:00.001-08:00

I have been a bit slow to blog about it, but I bought a new DVD player to go with the new TV. I knew the old Craptacular unit was just not gonna mate well with my 1080p beauty.

I had heard good things about upscaling DVD players, so I headed over to the AVS forums to figure out the geeks opinion. The strong consensus was "Just by an Oppo unit and shut up". OK. If it is good enough that the AVS geeks don't argue about, why should I ?

Oppo is a little niche manufacturer from the Silicon Valley. They have three models to choose from. I picked the new DV-981HD model, since it is the one that scales to 1080p.

To actually *buy* one was a bit of a challenge. Amazon claimed to sell them, but were out of stock. I eventually found Projector People.

Projector People is awesome! They have excellent customer service. A guy called me to manually verify my order and even chatted about the product, how I was going to use it, etc. I promptly got a tracking number and when it arrived the unit was very nicely packaged, came with an HDMI cable, etc. Then Projector People called me a few days after delivery to make sure I got the unit, I was able to set it up OK, and that I was happy with how it worked. I have never experienced that before when ordering stuff online.

We did some subjective eyeball testing of the Oppo vs. the Craptacular. When viewing the same scene, the difference is quite apparent. What I really like is I can burn a DVD of content from my PC and the Oppo plays it just fine. Basically if you are going to spend a bunch of money on a fancy new TV, you may as well shell out another $250 for a kick ass DVD player.

What are other people doing when they get a big flat panel ?

Two Good Meals in Santa Barbara

2007-01-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

I went on a day trip with some friends last weekend up to Santa Barbara, La Purisima Mission, and Solvang. It was a long day (left at 8am and got back at 10pm). Our rental minivan was a Dodge, which reminded me of how crappy Dodge vans are.

We ate lunch and dinner in Santa Barbara and both meals were really good, so I wanted to post about it.

Lunch was at La Super Rica. The line stretched down the block (a lot longer than in this picture) and it was about 20min before we could order.

When we got to order the reason for the line became apparent. There is one lady making fresh tortillas from masa as fast as possible.

However, when we got our food I was glad we came. It was all very good and the fresh tortillas kicked it up a notch. I got a daily special taco that had stewed pork and zucchini. I was *great*. I also got a very nice horchata. Be sure to order a large as it is only 16oz.

Dinner was at Your Choice, a Thai place which we randomly selected while driving around. And good random selection it was. We did a family style meal with tum kha gai soup, mee krob, beef salad, garlic duck, and pumpkin curry. It was all very tasty. The soup was especially good. It is much more creamy than most tum kha gai one finds.

The dining section of santabarbara.com has lots of good info about the area. Check it out !

The Great Indoors sells me a Westinghouse LVM-37w3 1080p monitor for $799

2007-01-02T18:16:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about buy a new TV for some time and the stars aligned today for it.

First off, I was in the market for an LCD. I don't like plasma much due to the crappy viewing angle and DLP is just too weird. Since I want a smaller set LCD is just fine and the prices are getting pretty low.

My boss bought a 50" Vizio plasma a few months back, but he needed the bigger set for his room. My friend Mike bought a 40" Samsung LCD last year and I really like it. It looks great and has no discernible screendoor effect.

But I wanted something a bit smaller and in a true 1920x1080 resolution. Then the Westinghouse LVM-37w3 caught my eye. First off, it is just the right size. The 32" sets are too small and 40" sets are too big. The 37" set is just right, said Goldilocks. The LVM-37w1 and w2 were not 1920x1080 sets, but the LVM-37w3 is.

Some checking on AVS forums indicated pretty much everyone liked it. The only caveat being it is only a monitor, no TV tuner included. However, it was pretty tough to find one on display to check it out. Worst Buy claims to have them, but no store I called had them on display. The Westinghouse website said Great Indoors was the only other dealer in the Los Angeles area, so I called and they did have one on display.

I dragged Mike down to the Burbank Great Indoors at lunch today since he has the objective Samsung eyeballs. We both thought the set looked good, although it was not adjusted very well. There was no price label and when I inquired was told it was $1399, but they did not have them in stock. Oh well, time to leave.

Then the salesman (Winston) tells me the have an open box unit. But it is only about 10% off. As we are about to leave, he asks if I want the open box unit and I say not for just 10% off. He asks me to wait, goes off, and then comes back with $799. Yeah. $799. For a 37" 1920x1080 monitor. My jaw dropped and I said I would take it.

Mike and I came back later to pay and pick it up in his truck. While we are there the manager decides that dealing with the display is too much of a pain, so she tells them to give me a new boxed unit for the same price. Sweet !

All in all I was pretty happy with my virgin Great Indoors experience, even aside from the great deal. The store was clean and uncrowded, it has a Starbucks inside, the staff were all polite and intelligible. I am sure I will be going back.

Stay tuned for updates on getter better cable service and a better DVD player.

My Cheesy Potatoes Recipe

2006-12-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

I hesitate to even call this cheesy potatoes any more, because potatoes are less than half the ingredients. Ah well.

This makes two 13x9x2 pans, so adjust if you want less. This recipe is pretty flexible to ingredients on-hand, so experiment with variations in the vegetables, the vegetable ratio, the amount of garlic and pepper, etc. Make sure you get good cheese and potatoes for best results.

Ingredients

1 turnip

1 rutabaga

1 parsnip

2 pounds yellow onions

4 pounds of potatoes

8 cloves of garlic

1/4 stick of butter

1 pint of half-n-half

2 pounds of sharp cheddar

1/2 pound of mozzarella

1/4 pound of pecorino (or some other hard sharp cheese)

black pepper

1 cup of ham chunks (optional)

Peel and cube the turnip, rutabaga, parsnip, onion, and potatoes. You can leave the skin on the potatoes if you like.

Stir the vegetables up in a large container and add black pepper to taste.

Slice the mozzarella and shred the pecorino.

Peel, slice, and saute the garlic with the butter and a goodly amount of black pepper.

Put the half-n-half in a large saucepan and warm it up on low. Do not boil it. When it is hot, begin adding chunks of cheddar and the pecorino until you have melted it all into the saucepan. Stir in the garlic/butter mixture.

Put the vegetables into the pans. Add the ham.

Pour the cheese sauce over the vegetables evenly.

Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 75 minutes.

Remove foil and place mozzarella slices on top

Bake for 30 minutes uncovered (longer if you like them really browned)

Walmart Wii Windup

2006-12-27T11:13:00.000-08:00

My Wii saga has come to a close. Remember how I wondered what Walmart would do when 30 days passed and they could not fulfill the Wii bundle I ordered ? Well, they canceled the unshipped part of my order a few days before the 30 days deadline. Sweet!

So the upshot of the whole deal was -

Stuff I Kept

Wii Console
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
Elebits

Returned to a local Walmart (for full credit less a bit for S&H)

Ant Bully
Open Season

Canceled Items

Barnyard
Far Cry Vengeance
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent

I am pretty happy about the whole deal. But Walmart could have been a lot clearer in their communication. Or just not bundled the damn thing in the first place.

Newspaper stock quotes == irrelevant

2006-12-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

I was reading the newspaper the other day and there was another self-interest article on cut backs at the LATimes. I mostly glossed over it since I have become resigned to the LATimes sucking even more than it does now. Mike over at Cruftbox has a good rant on the recent cosmetic changes.

But when I got to the Business section, the article got me thinking.

"Why don't they save a few bucks and stop printing stock quotes ?"

I mean seriously, who the heck reads the newspaper for stock prices these days ? This has got to be some of the most useless information printed these days. Worse than the PennySaver or junk mail.

If physical newspapers want to exist, they need to concentrate on some fundamental aspects that set them apart for the online world. In depth analysis, investigative reporting, great local news, crossword puzzles, comics, coupons and ads. But time sensitive news and data is not for them anymore. Give it up guys.

Sunmilk ?

2006-12-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

So I keep seeing magazine ads for a new product called Sunmilk, which claims to be 'real' milk without any saturated fat. I think "Hmm. Interesting." Since I am squarely in the target demographic and I do drink milk as a beverage I figured I would try it if I ever saw it.

Well last week I saw some at the newly remodeled Vons near my apartment. It was about $1 more per half gallon than the regular old store brand. Since my ex-wife preferred non-fat milk and I preferred 2%, we always compromised on 1% milk. So I went ahead and bought the 2% fat version.

I drank a gulp when I put it away and thought "it tastes like milk". Pretty uneventful.

Later on I was reading the label and it says "by removing milkfat and blending in a small amount of natural healthy sunflow oil, you get a great creamy taste with no saturated fat or tans fatty acids" and "it's high in protein and is loaded with vitamins and minerals". This sounds like they basically add sunflower oil, protein, and calcium to nonfat milk. Hmm.

Now every time I drink some Sunmilk it does not quite taste like 'real' milk to me. I think that milkfat has a different mouth feel than sunflower oil. But I am going to buy it again and see how it goes. A little less saturated fat sure isn't going to hurt.

If you are a resident of Los Angeles, San Diego, or Las Vegas you can get a coupon for a free half gallon here.

Walmart has 20 more days to send me my bundle games

2006-12-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

I got another email from walmart.com yesterday telling me that my 6 remaining Wii Bundle games are going to be further delayed.

Basically Walmart has my credit card info and wants to charge me, but it has been 10 days and they still can't tell me when these games will ship. This seems a bit unreasonable, so I called my credit card company to figure if I had any recourse through them.

It turns out Walmart has not yet charged me for anything, even though I have the Wii and two games. What they did was take out an authorization on my card for the full amount of the bundle ($736 with tax and shipping). But they have not charged it yet.

My credit card company says that authorizations are good for 30 days. So logically, Walmart has 20 days left to ship those damn games. You know, so I can take them back at a B&M Walmart.

Ironically I was able to walk into a Worst Buy last night and find the four launch titles I really wanted (Zelda, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Rampage, and COD3). No extra controllers though. Apparently they are sold out in LA.

finally got the Wii !

2006-11-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

So after leaving Tennessee a week ago and not getting any updates on the tracking number, my Wii arrived in LA today and was delivered. Maybe I shoulda sprung for the next day air ?

I received two games (Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Trauma Center Second Opinion) the day before. The good news is the receipt that came with the games has no indication whatsoever they were sold in a bundle. So hopefully I will be able to return the crap games as they arrive at the local Walmart, as this was the plan all along.

Trauma Center sounds pretty good to me and a co-worker is giddy at the prospect of Monkey Ball, so I think I will be keeping these two.

I still haven't played anything yet, since my IT background forced me to connect it to the Internet and install updates straight-away. It is still doing that .....

Walmart/Wii update

2006-11-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

OK, I am a little pissed.

The Wii console and two games shipped at some point in the night and I have tracking numbers. Sweet. Of course they are those weird UPS MI numbers, which don't tell you squat as far as I can tell.

So I called walmart.com and tried to cancel the other 6 crap games they made me buy. (Does anyone really want "Ant Bully" and "Open Season" for the Wii ?). The CSR told me I would not be able to cancel anything and I could only return the entire bundle to them. I tried to explain that two different CSR's told me a different story two days ago, but all this guy could do was mumble an apology.

So now I guess I get to wait until the crap games arrive and trek over to exchange them at a local Walmart. That better work or I will need to plot a way to get approximately $300 worth of revenge at Walmart.

Getting a Wii from walmart.com

2006-11-21T16:41:00.000-08:00

After trying online since Saturday night, I just got a Wii order in at walmart.com. If you do a bit of research you will see only walmart has been having them available on online, and the just a few are available on a periodic schedule.

Here are the things I think you need to do to be successful getting one -

Use the ReloadEvery Firefox extension (or equivalent)
Setup your account billing info and shipping info with walmart. This way you only need to type in the 3 digit credit card ccv code to checkout.
When walmart will let you, put a Wii bundle into your cart. You will likely not be able to order this one and you will see the big red error message on the checkout page.
Now tell ReloadEvery to reload the checkout page every 10s or so. Put the browser window off to the side. Do work or something.
When you notice the page refresh without the big red error, turn off ReloadEvery.
Click through the order process. Shell out $736. Be happy.

Now that said, I got a delivery date of 11/29 to 12/01 with standard shipping.

Supposedly you can call walmart.com customer service and cancel just the games you don't want. Also you are supposed to be able to take the (unopened) games to a real walmart for exchange.

We shall see how this goes. I am still going to try and get one at a brick & mortar store on Black Friday.

Seven years of DVD

2006-11-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

I happened to be looking at my Amazon order history today and noticed that November 12, 1999 was when I bought my first DVD player. It was a Toshiba SD-2109. And yes, I was a bit late to the DVD party.

My first DVD purchase was Criterion Collection edition of Brazil.

I didn't join Netflix until August of 2000. My first Netflix rental was The Lair of the White Worm. Don't laugh. I still like this movie. I have since rented 620 discs from Netflix, which is only about two discs a week.

I am pretty passionate about Netflix kicking ass. I really hate it on the odd occasion that I find myself in a video store. Especially if it is a Blockbuster. The one exception is Videotheque in South Pasandea. I often find they have stuff even Netflix doesn't have or ideas for things to put into my Netflix queue.

charity begins on the web

2006-11-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

I was reminded today of a cool web site I found about a year ago that I think deserves more attention.

The backstory is that I had been making charitable donations through a payroll deduction to the Entertainment Industry Foundation. I had some gross level options on what I wanted my contributions to fund. It wasn't great, but it was easy. In addition we were contributing to a few other charities directly (Planned Parenthood, etc.).

My employer decided to end the relationship with EIF and setup an internal organization to disburse funds. However this new organization would provide little to no control or reporting to the employee. I was pissed. I immediately stopped my payroll deductions and set about systematically dealing with my own charity contributions.

The cool website that helped with this was Charity Navigator. They rate about 5000 charities for financial health and efficiency. They allow you to compare charities to their peers (or is it competitors ?). This was a great help in figuring out what to contribute money too. For example, we stopped contributing to Habitat for Humanity because of their horrible efficiency rating. But they have gotten much better recently, so I plan to revisit that decision.

One other thing I did was try to make as many contributions a recurring monthly charge to my credit card. This helps me spread out the donation over the year, plus I get some frequent flyer miles. But not all charities support this.

For the curious, here are the charities I give to. The ones in red are not charities for tax purposes.

Recurring

Annual

futures markets

2006-11-16T14:01:00.000-08:00

I attend a presentation today by USC Center for Effective Organizations on the topic of "Information Futures Markets for Human Resource Planning and Management". Whew. What this basically means is using the concept of futures markets to better determine the state of affairs than traditional information gathering and analysis. Think the Hollywood Stock Exchange for your organization.

You can find basically the same presentation I heard on the presenters' Penn State website under "Narrated Presentation".

My take-aways from this are -

A futures price is a great aggregator of information into a single value.
For business, using a sports betting analogy is better than a stock market analogy due to the the smaller number of 'traders' and the ability of them to influence the market
Who creates the virtual commodities is critical. The very act of what is created and when is hugely important.
Organizations low on politics and high on innovation do best
The futures market is best to aggregate current information, not to make predictions.

I am also noticing USC is doing lots of interesting stuff these days. There is the Center for Effective Organizations, the EA sponsored games lab, Cory Doctorow's work with the Center for Public Diplomacy, and the new Cinematic Arts minor in video games. Hmm.

midnight Wii

2006-11-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

Any one else in LA going to try to get a Nintendo Wii at midnight on Saturday night ? Supposedly some Walmarts and the Torrance ToysRUs are going to sell them at midnight. My friend and I are going to try for the ToysRUs. Drop me a line if you want to coordinate efforts.

Of course everyone knows about the WiiSeeker mashup, right ?

uWink Geek Dinner and a gear purchase

2006-11-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

I went out to Woodland Hills last night to uWink restaurant for the BarCampLA GeekDinner7. Now generally I only venture out to the ass end of the Valley to visit my mom (who apparently has a hard time figuring out how to cross the 405), so my expectations were high.

Usually when I have high expectations they are not met, but last night was a blast !

First off I decided to ride my motorcycle out since I knew traffic would be bad. One reason was to be able to use the carpool lane. But the other was to try out a new motorcycle jacket. I have only been riding on the street since the summer and now that it has turned chilly, the mesh jacket is not cutting it any more. There is a Cycle Gear store very close to uWink and I had previously seen a jacket I liked there. The jacket is a Frank Thomas FTL240 Cafe Racer (in red). I like the styling, the features, and it is indeed pretty warm. I thought about waiting for a sale, but it is just getting too cold and the regular price ($280) seemed reasonable since it is a lot more money at the few other places I could find selling it.

uWink is located in the old Promenade mall. Now when I was a kid, this was the high end mall with a Sak's 5th Avenue and the like. We did not go there much, preferring the much larger Topanga Mall up the street. Now the Promenade is decidedly mediocre mall. It has a bunch of empty stores, there was hardly any one there, and the anchor is a Macy's at either end. It does have a few other OK food place and a large movie theater, but it seems like the moneyed folks are shopping elsewhere these days.

One other side note, between the Topanga and Promenade malls there used to be a miniature golf course and movie theater. The mini golf is gone and the theater closed and used as retail space. I mention this because this is where I saw the theatrical release of Stars Wars. I recall not really wanting to go and my mom making me. Maybe I was smelling the stench of Episodes I/II/III even then.

When I got to uWink, I was not really sure what to do. I didn't seen anyone I recognized, but that turned out to be because everyone was in the far back. Brent Bushnell was our host and did a great job at showing all the uWink features. He was really interested in all our suggestions and took a lot of notes. His dad Nolan Bushnell stopped by for a bit to explain his vision for uWink. It is always cool to hear such a luminary talk to mere mortals.

And thanks to Heather for coordinating it all !

other links -

uWink on the Wikipedia
Douglas Welch's photos and video from the event

Office 2.0 Conference 2006

2006-11-15T15:12:00.000-08:00

(belatedly published;stolen from my work blog)

I attended the first Office 2.0 Conference. The conference burb is -

What is Office 2.0?
Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think.

Here are my notes and comments, starting with the Top Three Things (in my opinion).

Office 2.0 is a poor name, since it invites parity with MS Office. Work 2.0 is probably more accurate, since we should truly be looking to change how people work not just the tools they use. Work 2.0 reduces the disadvantages of being small, but not the disadvantages of being big.
There is a continuous mention of the generational shift in expectations about work and collaboration. In general look for reduction in email usage, expectation of continuous connectivity, and comfort in working as part of several distributed teams at the same time.
Some companies have banned email attachments and shared drives, forcing the use of wiki's and/or sharepoint. This reduces security risks and allows the discovery of documents by others. Interesting !

Keynote by Ester Dyson

Why do people at conferences work feverishly on their laptops during the presentations ? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of being there ?
We are at the beginning of the beginning of the Work 2.0 revolution.
Dyson has connectivity as a big issue. This is brought up again in almost every session. I think this problem will vanish (at least in the 1st world) in the next few years with the common usage of cell modems and wimax.
The big win right now is in coordination of activity and effort. This reduces the latency in the human equivalent of the SYN SYN ACK handshake.
Dyson is big on the software having business rules encapsulated in it. I disagree as content is hard enough to get explicit. Maybe the software can get smart enough to implicitly infer business rules.
Work 2.0 reduces the disadvantages of being a small business, but not the disadvantages of being a big business.
Continue to look for the innovations to come from the consumer side.
Collaboration lacks a grammar. When it has one it will be much more useful.

Enterprise 2.0 Keynote by Andrew McAfee

Enterprise 2.0 is currently used to make "ad-hoc-cracies".
Enterprise 2.0 needs to making the barrier between structured tasks (think SAP) and unstructured tasks (think email) more porous.
Studies indicate people over value current things by a factor of 3 and under value potential things by a factor of 3. So make sure your cool new thing in 10 times better than what they have already if you want it to succeed.
The big deal is that Enterprise 2.0 make communications persistent and accessible to others.
Enterprise 2.0 sets up some conflicts. Control versus empowerment. Fiefs versus communities.

Office 2.0, Where are we ?

10 people from SAP at the conference and 8 from Microsoft. But 2 from a small bicycle company looking to become just a bit more efficient.

One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker

Mashup standards emerging. See something about Simple Ajax Mashup here.
Gmail is down and a few demos don't go so well.
Thinkfree has a Google Docs type product that we could host internally.

Collaborative Document Management

Alfresco profiles content to suggest reference material and subject matter experts.
Office 2.0 is a good opportunity to re-define *what* a document is.
Ease of use is critical to increase the pathetic adoption rate (~5% even in tech companies)

Evangelizing Office 2.0

Why bother ? Because Office 2.0 is scary to Corporate IT, has *fewer* features, and is a painful to use right now.
The two big factors in Office 2.0 rise will be the expectations of the upcoming generation coupled with frustration with traditional IT.
Office 1.0 is about "personal" computing. Office 2.0 is about "collaborative" computing.
Office 2.0 embraces the chaos of the real world.

Managing Blogs and Wikis in the Enterprise

Blogs are for temporal information where the value degrades over time. And they clearly have an author.
Wikis are for long lived content that undergoes continuous improvement. And has muddled ownership.
Blogs and wikis will likely eventually overlap to the point they become indistinguishable.
The big power of a wiki is that it is *not* a document. Like the Internet, the value in a wiki is less in the content and more in the links and the evolution of the links.
Ward Cunningham (wiki pioneer) would intentionally have minor errors on pages to encourage other's to make a correction. Once they made one edit, each subsequent edit became easier.

Making Office 2.0 Enterprise Ready

SOA is a prerequisite to Office 2.0
To succeed, Office 2.0 needs a simple value proposition.
Maybe the question is instead - 'Is the Enterprise ready for Office 2.0 ?"
Lots of dissent on the panel on whether Corporate IT is friend or foe.
Business user greatly empowered and Corporate IT and the CIO *must* participate to achieve long-term business success.

Making the Transition to Office 2.0

Back to "What is Office 2.0?". Is has to be *less* than "some business application delivered over the network".
Office 2.0 drives connectivity to true utility level.

You made it to the end of this lengthy post, so here is a link to Dan Farber's blog about the event on ZDnet. It has much better pictures than mine.

(sigh). I make another attempt at blogging.

2006-11-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

You will note it has been a little over two years since I last posted, so I think my vast readership has fallen off.

I will try to do this a little more often, which should be easier for two reasons.

1) I am blogging at work occasionally, so I should be able to steal of of those posts.

2) I have a lot more free time in my personal life that can be sucked up by things of dubious value. :)

Salon == Onion

2004-08-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

Salon.com | G.I. Joe is a fake

I like the part where they argue about the cell phone bill

2004-08-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic Online | September 2004 | Inside Al-Qaeda�s Hard Drive | Alan Cullison

Find people to egg

2004-08-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Fundrace.org

Could this be true ?

2004-07-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior -

Be courteous motherfucker

2004-07-28T14:40:00.000-07:00

Sprint

Don't piss off the Whale

2004-07-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

WFTV.com - News Of The Strange - Killer Whale Attacks SeaWorld Trainer During Performance

If you need a new hobby ...

2004-07-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

Iftk!

Can't argue with the Facts

2004-07-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

Curmudgeon Gamer - SysReqs for id Software's post-Doom 3 Game

I need a Hyote

2004-07-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

Jaggle