03 Jan 10 - 15:08Lenovo Thinkpad Edge
tagged as technology, toys - one comment
29 Dec 09 - 16:15The KC-10 Flight Simulator
We spent about 3 hours in the KC-10 simulator (a training simulator for the DC-10) taking turns flying with the instructor, traveled to San Francisco, under the Golden Gate Bridge, to Hawaii, to icy Alaska and back. The most incredible was Mike trying to refuel in the air. It is quite a sensation when you actually crash a DC-10. [read more]
tagged as movie - one comment
13 Nov 09 - 17:19Droid Eris vs. iPhone
I bought an HTC Droid Eris (on Verizon) this week-end… just to play with it and to decide whether Android was a threat to the iPhone. This phone still runs Android 1.5 so there will probably be quite a few changes once 2.0/2.1 gets released for this phone. The cool thing about the Eris HTC’s Sense UI. They built Exchange integration for Android and they also created a whole slew of applications making the handset really useable (much more so than a raw Android handset). Read on to see my favorite features and my main gripes. Sneak Peak… I returned this phone within the 1 month trial period.
tagged as toys - no comments
14 Sep 09 - 20:01The joys of a fast machine
I’ve been pretty happy with my Lenovo S10 Netbook, and furnished it with a 320GB hard drive and 2GB RAM. It is great for travel, even though I tend to plug it into an external monitor wherever I can since 600 pixels is just not enough to work on spreadsheets (even though it works well for email…). But at home in front of my 1920x1200 monitor, I missed the performance of a high-powered machine. So I bought a desktop computer:
HP Pavilion Elite e9110t PC
- 64-bit Windows 7 (64-bit)
- Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad processor Q8300 [2.5GHz, 4MB L2, 1333MHz FSB]
- 8GB DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
- 1TB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
- 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4650 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]
Needless to say, this quenched my need for speed. Click through to see the full comparison between my two machines.
[read more]tagged as technology, toys - no comments
07 Sep 09 - 15:11Love this simple concept
Upside down power strip, what a cool concept. Can’t buy it yet, but Hyukjae Chang should get rich from this design! I want one. No, I want 5 of these.
01 Sep 09 - 14:56Your Software Project Is Doomed if…
Check out 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed. Some of my favorites:
- You start hiring consultants so they can take the blame
- Project estimates magically match the budget
- Developers use the excuse of ’self documenting code’ for no comments
- You still believe compiling is a form of testing
- Your manager insists that you track all activity but never uses the information to make decisions
- Your white boards are mostly white
- The client continually mistakes your burn-down chart for a burn-up chart
- A Change Control Board is created and your product isn’t even its first alpha version
- All performance issues are resolved by getting larger machines
- You know exactly how many compile warnings cause an ‘Out of Memory’ exception in your IDE
- Broken unit tests are deleted because they are obviously out of date
31 Aug 09 - 20:45Email for kids?
So Paul asked me a good question… what to do if you want to set up an email account for your child? What is the best way to create a whitelist so that your child can only receive emails or send emails to an approved list of people?
I found this cool article and decided that the best/easiest option at this point would probably be Windows Live Mail… you can set up an account for your child with the ‘Family Safety’ option… which let’s you easily manage the white list. Pretty cool.
27 Aug 09 - 01:35Replacing my iPhone headset
So I have been struggling with the iPhone headset for a while. On the one hand, I love the little controller that sits on the headset wire. It controls volume, play/pause, skips tracks and can answer calls, and has the microphone built in. However, the earbuds are very uncomfortable and keep on falling out of my ears. I have to continuously jam it into my ear canals. Very uncomfortable. Then I saw this video and it inspired me to break apart the iPhone earbuds and replace them with more comfortable ones. I searched around and found a pair of AKG K324P in-ear buds for $20. Perfect. After some soldering, I can now use my iPhone headset!
tagged as toys - no comments
24 Aug 09 - 13:43Vacation in Siesta Key
We took a small break in August and decided to fly out to Florida for six days. Ed and Joan Grenke offered us their condo on the beach at Siesta Key, just a mile away from Paul, Michelle and my god-daughter Meg's home.
The condo was perfect, with two rooms, a shared pool, and a 2 minute walk to the beach. Speaking of the beach... Siesta Key is now my all-time favorite beach for families with kids. The sand is bleach-white, and textured perfectly for building sand castles. And the water was luke warm, with waves sized for little kids. Daniel was actually able to catch some swells with his floaties on! And of course, there are toy stores and ice cream shops right on the beach. The only down-side is that it was hot and humid. Really hot. But that is what the pool at the condo is for!
We took it easy most of the time, with the kids recovering from jet lag and swimming their hearts out in the ocean and the pool. I realized that I did not take many pictures, and most of these pics are taken with my iPhone! I think there are mainly two reasons... had too much fun, and considering the amount of bags and chairs and toys that had to be lugged everywhere, the camera bag had to take lower priority.
tagged as travel - five comments
07 Jun 09 - 15:39Napa Valley Wine Auction
Maureen and I went to the Napa Valley Wine Auction on Friday. Wow! Tickets for the day were $250 per person, but we got to go for free, since we were helping Bruce and Danielle pour their three clicks wine. What an amazing event. I even had a long chat with Margaret Mondavi. She was chatting away as if we knew each other! Hard to believe there is a recession out there. I took a few pictures with my camera phone, but it was quite a feast. 700 guests, 500 wineries, wines poured from the barrels by the owners and winemakers, and food by the valley's finest chefs and restaurants (Thomas Keller was serving!). Some of the auction items went for millions of dollars.
I went in early on two barrel auctions (J.Davies 2007 Cab and also the O'Shaughnessy 2007 Cab) hoping that my low bids might somehow stay on the board. The barrel auctions work such that the top 10 bids (in increments of $50) each win a case so my starting bids were around $300 a case. Both these auctions finally closed with lows of $500 and $800 and highs of $1,000 and $1,300. Definitely not what I could spend! I think the top bid was for a case of Shafer 2007 Cab at $6,000.
tagged as food, wine - no comments
