Found on an internal mailing list today.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/11/10/how-we-know-that-matrix-doesnt-run-on-windows-xp/

This is a good one, in my opinion.

Tags: Humor

Great but tiring weekend this weekend. Zandra and I went up to New York City to spend the day with her sister and our brother-in-law. We did a touristy thing by visiting Liberty Island the Statue of Liberty. Here's a picture of me at the Statue of Liberty (more pictures in the Pictures section of the website).



We also walked around the city. Zandra and I visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We had dinner with Zandra and Sandy's cousin April at a really great Japanese restaurant. A great way to spend the day. Unfortunately, it was a longer day than we had anticipated. For the second time in a row, we had difficulties getting home on the train, with our train being delayed almost 3 hours (putting us in the door at around 3am).

Also got up early to attend a really great marriage conference led by Dr. Gary Chapman. If you've not read his book The Five Love Languages, you really should. It's an excellent book and Zandra and I both enjoyed the conference immensely. It's great to find ways to make a marriage better. Especially when you things really aren't going that badly.

Now, back to the challenge of getting everything ready to erect a new fence in our back yard. That has to be the next blog topic...

Was sent this picture today:



I need to get one of these....

Tags: Humor

An interesting news story I heard on the radio the other day underscored something that I’ve long known since taking my PoliSci 300 class in Michigan with Professor Greg Markus. How you write a survey question can greatly influence the answers you get (and what your polls show as a result).

In addition to the normal examples that they gave, they gave an example of how not to write a survey question that I hadn’t heard before. Survey question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” If you answer “Yes”, the assumption is you were beating your wife previously. If you answer “No”, then the assumption is that you are still beating your wife. The smart ones are the ones who I guess have no opinions on that survey. It seems like that would be the only “correct” answer....

So when listening to polls on *anything* for the upcoming election, find out how the question was asked. Or, if you’re like me, ignore the polls and vote the way you would anyways! It’s *your* vote. You don’t get paid for voting with the winning side.

And as a side note, not that I think anyone would ever *find* this entry looking for recommendations on PS300 at the University of Michigan, but that class was one of the best classes I took while being an undergrad at Michigan. Not only was it interesting and insightful, but the fact that grading was on a 100 point straight scale (meaning, 90+ was an A, 80+ was a B, etc.) and that you only had a chance to get 100 points in a 15 week semester really made the phrase “Making sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s” really relevant.

Another sign of real economic issues - with the price of oil plunging, I just filled the Freestyle with gas at Costco for $2.37 per gallon. 10.5 gallons was around $25. That would have been almost $15 more a few months back.

That paid for pizza today for me and the boys.

I’ve gotten lots of questions about, “How was Disney”? In short - wonderful. I really admire how a company can get all their employees to be so consistently happy all the time. The only time they were close to not being happy was when Declan decided he didn’t like the kiddie coaster and jumped out of his seat while we were still out of the station to dive into Zandra’s arms. Sigh....

The weather was warm (maybe actually a little too warm the first 3 days) and we did come back sick to some degree. Still, a great trip.

We also got to go see some old family friends of mine - these are the folks responsible for my preference for Italian food. I’ll get pictures posted eventually (I did the first step which is get them off my camera...)

Some other thoughts:

- You’d never think that the favorite family ride would be the PeopleMover/Tomorrowland Transportation Authority (TTA) ride that takes you around Tomorrowland. Declan and Andrew love it. I wish Mr. Tom Morrow would ring his party from Saturn some day though. They’ve arrived after all.

- We got to see the inside of Space Mountain. One of our rides on the TTA, Space Mountain was in a “set up” condition. When the ride is down, the lights go up, and you can see the entire inside of the Mountain. It’s quite impressive. Especially for an ex-roller coaster operator like me.

- Declan doesn’t like roller coasters at present. Not even the Goofy Barnstormer coaster. And I wonder why they call the coaster an flex-octoplane. It only has 6 wings....

- All the fireworks are spectacular.

- The WDW Swan and Dolphin hotel were very nice, but I think the consensus is that next time, we will try to pay extra and get a villa again. The ability to have a fridge/kitchen and maybe eat in a few nights is really invaluable with young kids.

- 4 days is probably the right amount of time for a trip for us. I think after 4 days, we were ready to come home. Even if we had all been healthy.

- I am proud to say, I never checked work email once, and we never set up the laptop in the hotel.

So we’re back from our 4 day adventure at Disney World. It was great fun! The kids had a good time (we think) and the two parents enjoyed no work for 4 days. I even deleted the work account from my iPhone to make sure I didn’t check email.

Of course, no vacation is perfect and we’re all back with some varying degree of coughing. Zandra and Andrew are the worst off.

But to prove at least the kids were there, here’s a picture of the kids with Pluto at breakfast.



More pictures later!

Tags: Andrew, Declan

While it doesn’t make up for the losses in the stock market, the fact that the side effect has meant lower oil prices became evident to me this weekend. Filled up the Freestyle at $2.89 per gallon at Costco. Wow. Big change from a few months ago when it was almost $1 more per gallon.

Also, taking some lessons from driving Zandra’s hybrid has meant that I’m also getting better mileage on the Ford Freestyle at the moment - the current tank is averaging a little over 25 mpg.

Question now for me is will silly Americans go back to buying gas guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks now that gas has dropped $1/gallon. Maybe not this time, because Americans don’t seem to be buying much of anything right now....

After 2 years of using my Treo 650 as a work phone, I decided that it was time to get something different. There really wasn’t *that* much wrong with the Treo, though I was getting tired of the crashing during mail reading and other routine cell phone functions (like phone calls). Also, with me having an iPhone which really has a much better mail reading interface, having another phone to use to read mail with didn’t really make as much sense. Having a small phone to use as a *phone* really seemed to be the requirement. So I set off to research the latest phones. Again, the requirement was a smaller phone, good battery life, and something that would still sync nicely to my Mac using iSync. Having a 2100MHz WCDMA phone also was a “wish” - it would be nice if the phone worked in Japan in case I have to go there.

I discounted SonyEricsson phones immediately. Because after 3 years, I’m still mad at them over the Z520 buggy firmware which caused my phone to crash every day or so. I don’t like the Motorola interfaces, so that kind of left me with Nokia. T-Mobile doesn’t really have a good selection of Nokia business phones, plus, I really didn’t want to buy a carrier-crippled phone, so off to searching Amazon.com for phones.

I was originally looking at a Nokia N82, but the N-series phones are expensive, and I really didn’t need a 5MP camera on the phone. Too bad because I actually really like the Series60 Symbian OS on the Nokia phones. I finally happened upon the E51 - and on sale to boot. Small, relatively light weight, and Series60 OS with iSync capabilities direct from Nokia. I ordered one up in the black metal color.



Compared to my iPhone (left), it’s about the same thickness, but about 2/3 the width. It has an unconventional key layout even for a Series60 phone. No Edit button, but shortcuts for Home, Calendar, Contacts, and Email instead. Smallish keypad, but I have small fingers so it’s not a big deal. Absolutely brilliant display. Nice sturdy feel.

After having this phone for about 2 weeks, here is some feedback on the phone.

Pros: The battery life and size of this phone are great. Sound quality is excellent, and the reception seems to be at least as good as my Treo (which had a stubby external antenna which kept jabbing me in the side). Bluetooth works great (paired right up to my Nokia BH-900 headset). Syncing is about as good as you get from anyone that isn’t named Apple, and this has got to be the *fastest* charging phone I have ever had. Nice familiar (to me) Series60 interface and the “Active Standby” has been greatly improved so it now shows me a summary of my day’s events from the calendar, waiting voicemails or text messages, and customizable short cuts to favorite things on the phone. Nokia even thoughtfully put speed keys for Bluetooth on/off and Silent/Normal mode on the * and # keys. When using my Bluetooth headset, the mute button is the button on the right in between the volume keys. Handy! This phone also does 2100MHz WCDMA/UMTS so it should also work overseas. Also has 802.11b/g wireless so it links right up to the home wireless networks. Calendar, ringtones, and music player all work nicely. Oh, and my current Nokia chargers are compatible with the new phone.

Cons: This is not a US 3G phone. It has 850MHz WCDMA support, but AT&T only supports that in some markets, and I’m not using this phone on AT&T anyways (I’m using it on T-Mobile). The side buttons are a little hard to push. The camera is really for emergency use only. And the SIM card fits in so tight, I don’t think I’m ever getting it out of this phone.... I also had a very bad time setting up email on this phone. I interrupted it while it was downloading the initial email headers and after that, every trip to the email program caused the phone to slow down and hang. I finally had to do a *#7370# to reset the phone back to factory ROM image before that problem would clear up. How extreme! Even now, the mail program isn’t the world’s fastest. It’s good for an emergency, but not much else. That’s fine though - it fits my usage criteria. No games though - not even the standard Snake game. I guess it’s because it’s a “Business” phone...

Overall, I consider this phone to be a major winner. It’s certainly a lot smaller and lighter than the Treo and the sound quality and stability of the phone are just great. It’s nice being able to have a conversation on the phone and not having to worry about the phone mysteriously crashing in the middle of the call....

Tags: Technology

It wasn’t all smooth, but yesterday, I updated the map in my Garmin Nüvi 650 and realized that my Garmin now knows my home address! Living in a new house in a new subdivision, the various online map services have only just in the last 12-18 months begun to accept our home address as a valid location.

Of course, getting this map is never as easy as saying, “Update my map”, especially when you are trying to take advantage of a free offer. First I had to upgrade the system firmware. Then I had to get my Mac to talk to the GPS. Then I had to download the (2.16GB) map. But about an hour later I was done. So I thought.

I took the GPS out for a spin and realized it was no longer speaking the names of streets. After getting home and spending some time with Google, I found out that I needed a TTS (Text to Speech) voice for that feature. Except there wasn’t one listed.

Then I remembered during the system firmware update the note about “optional voices will be erased with the update, but you can download them again later.” I had ignored it because, hey, I had never added any optional voices. Apparently the TTS voice is optional, but happened to be loaded with my GPS.

As a further pain, I could not find anywhere on Garmin’s website how to update voices to the Mac. I found the PC installer, but no Mac information.

Frustrated, I loaded up the Garmin WebUpdater software to see if I could maybe revert back to the older version of firmware to get my TTS back. The second the WebUpdater software detected my GPS, it immediately offered to add optional voices, like my TTS back. Hey! Why didn’t they just say that in the first place!

So now, I’m happy. My GPS is back as it was with new maps. Now why couldn’t they have made that voice installation instruction a little more obvious? Hmmmph!

But everyone with a Garmin - if you want to come over and not have to punch in the address to the pool house to get here, get a map update!

Tags: Technology, Rants