Category: off topic

Hope that everyone here in Canada had a great Canada Day weekend, and that everyone south of the border has a great 4th of July tomorrow.

Blogging will be light this week, since I expect that half of my readers are on vacation.

I was in San Francisco this week for a vendor conference, and the gala event was 750 of us heading off to AT&T Park to watch the Giants play the Colorado Rockies. I’ve never been in this stadium before, and one of the first things that I noticed was this juxtaposition of Yahoo’s ad and the 400′ distance marker on the outfield fence.

I pointed this out to a few people, had to explain it to a few others, and generally concluded that no one else had noticed this. I thought it was hilarious, and can’t believe that it’s accidental.

Oh yeah, I was there for Barry Bonds’ 743rd home run, too.

This meme has been floating around for a few months on the web, and it’s time for it to die. I was tagged by Neil Ward-Dutton, and I promised to respond although I’m not passing it on from here. Time for a new meme!

So here goes, five things that you (probably) don’t know about me:

1. I hold a private pilot’s licence, although I’ve only flown once in the last five years. I remember my first solo flight like it was yesterday, and regret not keeping it up.
2. My favourite TV shows are Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Don’t even try to psychoanalyze that one.
3. I love to cook, and most times would rather cook for friends than go out to a restaurant. In particular, I will cook just about anything on a barbeque regardless of weather, which seems less weird if you consider that my family traditionally cooks a 30-lb Christmas turkey on the barbeque. In the snow. My favourite vacation ever was cooking school in Tuscany.
4. My first programming language was FORTRAN, and I never learned COBOL. I started my career writing Fourier analysis pattern recognition applications for satellite images, although I’d be hard-pressed to remember what an eigenvalue is these days.
5. I learned to read at age 4, and it’s been my most common leisure activity since that time. In spite of that (or maybe because of the number of books that I read), I rarely keep books for very long: I either borrow them from the public library, or buy them and pass them on to friends/family when I’ve read them. My only “permanent” collections are cookbooks and travel guides.

My other half didn’t quite make it to the card store — although I understand that a spa day is in my future — but TIBCO remembered me on Valentine’s Day (click on the image):

I have to say, they have some of the most playfully eye-catching marketing graphics in BPM.

A cool map that you can create of the countries that you’ve visited. Here’s mine:

create your own visited countries map

When I look at it, I’m more amazed by the places that I haven’t been (nothing in South America? or Asia?) than the 29 countries that I have.

I received an email from James Taylor today, and on second reading, I noticed the following in small print at the end of his signature block:

Despite not being sent from my Blackberry, this email may nevertheless be terse and contain spelling and grammatical errors.

As a very sympathetic Blackberry user, I’m still laughing.

The past few days, I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as read by Mark “the Brooklyn Bluesman” Forman on his Getting a Leg Up blog. Forman’s not a great reader — or maybe I’m totally spoiled, having just listened to Stephen Fry read the last Harry Potter book — but at least this way I can load it up on my iPod and listen while I’m walking around town or on the subway. If you prefer the printed word, you can also download it in PDF from Doctorow’s site, where he makes some of his writings available for free under a Creative Commons licence.

I was walking and listening today, and heard a bit of prose that describes our current age as seen from the vantage point of people in the future who live with embedded hardware in their brain that provides constant access to their digital environment:

…living like the cavemen of the information age had, surrounded by dead trees and ticking clocks.

I was struck by the imagery that that phrase conjured up for me, of the old days when paper was still a significant budget item, and as a cavewoman of the information age I immediately rushed home and browsed the PDF version to get the full quote. The following line was even better:

Being offline helped me focus.

Oh yeah, I know that feeling. Someone please take away my RSS reader for a day or two?

It’s not even mid-month, and I’ve been a total techno-geek. To wit:

1. I hooked up my new video iPod to my TV so that I can play video podcasts on the big screen, without using a proprietary Apple cable.

2. I installed Blackberry Messenger so that I can IM on my Blackberry. As if regular email, PIN messaging and SMS aren’t enough.

3. I signed up to go to MashupCamp in California next month.

4. My boyfriend found out that I’m going to California next month because he read it on my blog.

5. I uttered the phrase “sometimes I think about going back to coding”.

6. I installed the Firefox X-Ray extension so that I can see the html tags on a page without viewing the source code.

7. I downloaded ubuntu.

8. I moved almost all of my bookmarks into del.icio.us.

9. I loaded Google Local for Mobile onto my Blackberry and I can’t stop grinning and showing people the map directions. Then, within two hours, I convinced three other people to load it on theirs, and gave two of them an in-person tutorial.

10. I’ve spent the last hour browsing open source shopping cart solutions that I can customize for my wine-tasting club.

Maybe it’s something in the air for 2006?

I received one of the new video iPods as an early Christmas present, and I’m loving it. Although I loaded up a bunch of music that I’d ripped for my previous MP3 player, I mostly use it to listen to podcasts and audio books. There are a few video podcasts that I’m watching on it; although the screen resolution is great, I’m unlikely to watch anything as lengthy as a TV program. I’m starting to like the iTunes interface; I was using the much simpler iPodder (now Juice) for podcast subscriptions previously, but this has the advantage of easily synching them up with the iPod and doing a whole lot more than iPodder does. Earilier this week, on the subway coming home from a client, I watched the daily 5-minute video podcast from Rocketboom, then listened to a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Cool.

The down side: the control to scroll through the menu lists is a bit jumpy sometimes, making it hard to land on the right item. More importantly, however, there is a weird interaction with my new Blackberry: when I have them tucked side-by-side in my handbag, the iPod volume changes (usually increases) when the Blackberry transmits or receives data. I originally thought that there was a fault in the iPod, but noticed that it was actually a device interaction one day when on the subway: as soon as we hit an above-ground spot on the line where the Blackberry could send/receive, the iPod volume changed. I’m guessing that the Apple engineers never tested for that. And one last complaint: why can’t they use a standard USB cable instead of one with a proprietary connector at the device end? Even the Blackberry uses a standard USB cable with the mini-port at the device end, but Apple has created one more piece of cable on my desk.

That’s it for gadget week — see you in the new year!

This was a birthday present (well, at least he doesn’t buy me kitchen appliances), and it’s great to have a super-fast CD and DVD reader and recorder that — in theory — burns the DL (double-layer) 8.5GB disks. Ripping an entire music CD using iTunes takes less than four minutes; writing a 4GB data backup to DVD is faster than I ever imagined possible. Although I bought a lightweight external CD writer/DVD reader with the tc4200 (which has no internal CD drive), I keep that for travel and use this racehorse for everyday use.

The down side: the “in theory” bit about the 8.5GB disks. I bought a pack of TDK DVD+R DL disks, which appear to meet the specifications, but had no luck burning. After several back-and-forth emails with HP support, they admitted that “DL discs that are manufactured using the ‘2P’ process will not be compatible with the dvd640 series”, and recommended that I buy HP (of course) or Verbatim disks. It would have been nice if they had mentioned this in any of the product documentation or on the product website before I spent $30 on a pack of 5 disks, or even if they explained what the dreaded “2P” process is and how I can tell whether disks were manufactured with that process from the packaging. Apparently HP is working on a firmware upgrade to try and fix the problem, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I bought a 100-pack of 4GB disks for under $50 at Costco, so I’m quite happy with $0.50 per disk instead, even if they are only half the capacity of the $6 ones.