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I recently upgraded to a
Blackberry 8700g.
Email, cellphone, web
access, and PDA all-in-one.
I love Canon digicams.
I had an S330, then an S230,
now an SD400. They're solidly
made, they take great pictures,
and they're ultra-portable.
I've gone back to the dark
side. I once again have an iPod.
This time it's a 60gb iPod Photo.
The Dell Latitude D620
is my current work laptop.
It's a cleanly designed
Centrino Duo machine with
amazing battery
life and a nice screen.
My home laptop is a
15" Apple MacBook Pro
dual-booting both Mac OS X
and Windows XP. Hooray for
Boot Camp!
I recently upgraded to a 20"
Dell 2001fp LCD. It has great
image quality, and convenient
USB ports on the side.
My current PC is
a P4 system based on an Intel
D915GAG motherboard in an Antec
Sonata II case. 200gb Seagate
SATA hard drive, nVidia GeForce
6600GT video card, SB Live 5.1,
and NEC DVD-RW drive.
Just like with digicams,
I like Canon inkjet printers. My
i860 is quiet, fast, and produces
first-class color prints.
Not much to say here.
If you're an aviation enthusiast
and you have a fast PC,
go buy FS2004 now.
If you get hooked on
flight sims like I did, you'll want
a good flight controller. The
CH Products Flight Sim Yoke USB
is probably the best all-around
flight controller out there.
It ain't cheap, though....
My Current Reading List
Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans,
the Middle East, and
the Caucasus
by Robert D. Kaplan
Falling Off the Map
by Pico Iyer
Great Bridge: The Epic
Story of the Building of
the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
The Polish Way: A Thousand
Year History of the Poles and
Their Culture
by Adam Zamoyski
Best of Europe 2006
by Rick Steves
2008
October (2 entries)August (1 entry)
June (1 entry)
May (2 entries)
February (2 entries)
2007
July (1 entry)June (7 entries)
April (5 entries)
February (4 entries)
January (11 entries)
2006
December (5 entries)November (3 entries)
October (10 entries)
September (6 entries)
August (4 entries)
July (7 entries)
June (5 entries)
May (7 entries)
April (15 entries)
March (9 entries)
February (7 entries)
January (15 entries)
2005
December (4 entries)November (6 entries)
October (15 entries)
September (4 entries)
August (9 entries)
July (18 entries)
June (10 entries)
May (12 entries)
April (19 entries)
March (18 entries)
February (10 entries)
January (20 entries)
2004
December (9 entries)November (21 entries)
October (9 entries)
September (15 entries)
August (7 entries)
July (7 entries)
June (8 entries)
May (10 entries)
April (5 entries)
March (12 entries)
February (18 entries)
January (9 entries)
| 09/30/2004 11:30 |
| I have a Blackberry 7230 PDA/Cellphone/Pager/thingy through T-Mobile. They have a new Blackberry 7100t that looks more like a cellphone, has speakerphone, has BlueTooth, and various other cool features. T-Mobile sent me an email saying that the 7100t is now available, and that you could buy one for $199. Existing customers, they went on to say, should call to find out if they could upgrade their current T-Mobile phone to the 7100t (at a discount, you would think). Wrong! I could "upgrade" for "only" $334.99 if I would extend my contract for another year. Lucky me! Why is it exactly that cellphone companies treat existing customers like crap?
|
| 09/21/2004 17:53 |
| I'm in Toronto for some software training. It's the first time I've ever been here, so it's all new to me. But before I even got here, Canada took an opportunity to subject me (and all the passengers on Air Canada Flight 698) to unspeakable horrors. Part of the inflight entertainment, along with some dumb movie, was a special music video starring Celine Dion and emphasizing how great Air Canada is. It's one thing for Celine Dion to exist (somewhere else), but to force innocent travellers to experience her horse-faced screeching-out-of-the-side-of-her-mouth "singing," that, my dear friends to the North, that is going too far. Perhaps the US and Canada could strike some kind of deal whereby we pick one of our biggest cultural embarassments, encase them in concrete, and sink them to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and they do the same with theirs.... |
| 09/17/2004 22:19 |
| Yee-hah. My eBay feedback score just reached 200. Now let's hope it doesn't go back down....
|
| 09/16/2004 14:18 |
| Ziga Update: The digital picture frame is a huge disappointment. It locks up frequently, the remote only works about 50% of the time, it has corrupted three different compact flash cards full of pictures, and it has very poor picture quality. Maybe I got a bad one, but I'm guessing that it's just a poor/incomplete design. Ah well... It's goin' back. |
| 09/15/2004 19:11 |
| “If we turn up dead tomorrow, it’s my fault,” said Jane Allinder, who stayed stubbornly behind at her daughter’s French Quarter doll shop to keep an eye on her cat. --MSNBC Boy, it's a shame she doesn't have any choice but to stay put and get run over by a hurricane. Oh wait, she does have a choice, she's just choosing to pay the moron tax. Just once I'd like to see a news report use the phrase "...stayed foolishly behind..." or "...stayed stupidly behind..." rather than romanticize the stubbornness of someone making a bad decision. Because of course, cats aren't portable. Oh, and notice that MSNBC has a custom logo for Hurricane Ivan. Good to see they're taking care of the important things....
|
| 09/12/2004 10:11 |
| I watched a PBS special on video games that I had ReplayTVed last Wednesday night. There was a segment about (insert software behemoth's name here)'s testing/usability labs, where I may/may not (NDA, you know) have gone/not gone for a game test/not game test or two in the past. The show pointed out that (insert software behemoth's name here) has psychologists who watch through two-way mirrors and via hidden cameras to see people's reactions and behaviors while playing the games. Uh, oh. Didn't realize that. Hmm... |
| 09/11/2004 20:32 |
| It's important to wear nice socks. And I don't mean nice as in department store gauze-thin dress socks. I'm talking about hiking/walking socks--Thorlos, SmartWool, or my favorite, Bridgedale. If you going to spend a lot of money on shoes, you should at least be as particular about socks. And don't even start with the big bag of white tube socks from (insert name of discount store here). My uncle introduced me to nice socks in England ten years ago, and I've been a believer ever since. I had a few pairs of Bridgedales that lasted 6-8 years. They are terry cloth on the inside and wool on the outside. Huzzah for socks.
|
| 09/11/2004 14:51 |
| The missus came back from a trip to SFO where she stayed at the W Hotel. She had great things to say about the bed there, and how much more comfortable it was than ours. Sooo... We decided that our current bed, a $400 King Koil set from a "mattress factory outlet" type place in Joplin, must be past its prime, and we went shopping for a new one. There's a Sleep Country USA store just down the street from us, so that was a logical destination. We laid down on several before a salesman finally explained to us the finer points of picking the right bed. We expected to pay more this time around, but we had no idea how much we might spend. All of the beds seemed to have "list prices" that were shockingly high. Everything was $1800, $2400, $3k and beyond. Turns out that everything is on perpetual sale, though. We ended up selecting a Simmons BeautyRest "Didsbury Avenue," I think it was. It's a pillow-top set that is about an 8 on a 1-to-10 firmness scale. It was the only bed that immediately felt better than our current bed. Also, we got an Olympic Queen size, which is 6 inches wider than a normal queen, but narrower than a king--perfect for our bedroom. The bed gets delivered tomorrow, so in the meantime we're making note of how squooshy our current bed is--I noticed it right away when we came home from the bed store. I guess it's similar to the way you don't realize your old shoes are shot until you try on new ones. |
| 09/09/2004 19:39 |
| Alright dammit, now I'm mad. The city (of Olympia) has apparently parked a big piece of construction equipment out in front of my house. It's on the other side of the street, but it's still out in front of my house. Frankly, my house is pretty small, and this thing is bigger than my house. Anyway, a little Googling taught me that the thing is a Roadtec cold planer, for grinding up road surfaces. For anyone interested in a cold planer, I would encourage you to take a good look at Roadtec's line of cold planers. The one I'm keeping my eye on is the RX-500, which, according to Roadtec "is a 500 horsepower cold planer with sufficient conveyor swing and turning radius to accommodate today's demanding urban milling conditions." Anyway, my real issue is that I looked out and saw a big fat rat jump off the thing and start running up and down the street. Having multiple college degrees in history, I immediately thought of 14th century merchant ships returning to Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, London, etc., and disgorging plague-infested vermin. If it turns out that this is some secret agreement between the City of Olympia and Roadtec to spread bubonic plague amongst the citizens of West Olympia, I'm not going to be happy. Especially if I end up with nasty suppurating buboes in my armpits and groin.
|
| 09/09/2004 17:02 |
| I bought a Kodak digital picture frame a couple of years ago when Kodak gave up trying to make money from a monthly charge to download pictures via modem and discontinued them. It turned out to be one of the coolest gadgets I've ever bought, but there is nothing comparable without spending $300-500--the Kodak was $99 at the time. Anyway, I saw that there is a new reasonably-priced digital picture frame from Ziga. (Please, no "gettin' Ziga wit' it" jokes.) It's $169 at NewEgg.com, so I ordered one out of sheer reflex. I hope it turns out to be as cool as the Kodak, but it might be better. It supports all flash memory formats, it has a nice clean modern look, and it has a remote.
|
| 09/08/2004 19:40 |
| ...a joint venture of Matsumura Fish Works and Tamarabuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern....
|
| 09/05/2004 23:46 |
| Over at www.plastic.com, in a discussion thread about Chechnya, I saw the following quote: "We certainly won't see an end to the war on terror if all "we" do is blindly attack where violence pops up; the only way it can be won is by understanding what turns a human being into a terrorist, and altering geopolitical reality as required. This doesn't mean that we need to sympathize with those who have already committed violence upon us, just that we need to prevent more people from following the same path." Pretty much right on target, I think. |
| 09/03/2004 09:01 |
| I finally pulled the trigged and bought XM. I just went ahead and got the XM Roady from Best Buy. $99 for the whole thing plus installation, plus a free home kit is a nice enough deal for me. I might even get a second home kit to have here at my office, and just run the line cable into my sound card. Everything is wired in, but the guy ran out of time last night to actually attach the mounting bracket to the inside of the CD storage compartment in my console. I'll go back for that tomorrow. The hilarious part was when I tried to activate online. I did the activation, waited 30 minutes, then went out and started the car expecting to hear XM. Uh, yeah. It helps if the thing is actually on when you're trying to activate... The XM activation came through just as I pulled into the parking lot here at work this morning... I was scrolling through all the channels, and when I came to the traffic/weather channels for various cities, the Miami one showed "HURRICANE WARNING" in the display. That's good to know. Also, traffic is flowing nicely in St. Louis this morning. Traffic is stopped on I-5 in San Diego.
|
| 09/02/2004 14:06 |
| The BBC has a story about Microsoft's unveiling of its new online music service, in conjunction with the release of new handheld devices that support the storage and playback of music and video. Anyway, the photo of the Creative Labs Zen portable media player shows a video of Randy Johnson in a Mariners' uniform. He hasn't pitched for them since '97. And it's the long-mulleted Big Unit, too. Oh, the things people preserve for later viewing....
|
| 09/01/2004 19:58 |
| Well, Chancellor Consulting has completed its migration to Netgear networking equipment. The ol' Linksys BEFSR81 had served me well, but it was never the same after the last firmware upgrade. It would lock up if I connected to the Internet via my laptop and my WRT54 in the other room, it seemed slow at times, and other times it would just lock up for no apparent reason. Anyway, now I have a Netgear WGR614 wireless router, and a GS608 Gigabit switch. So far, so good. The gigabit upgrade is nice for moving files back and forth from my desktop to my server, but I'm mainly after a little more stability. Not to mention the Netgear stuff looks damn good. |
