Recently in hi tech Category

Yahoo! News reports....

ARKADELPHIA, Ark. - A 16-year-old Arkansas boy is suing his mother, accusing her of slandering him on his Facebook page.
Denise New of Arkadelphia is charged with harassment and her son -- whose name has not been released -- is asking that his mother be prohibited from contacting him.
Authorities say the boy lives with his grandmother, who has custodial rights.
Denise New says she believes she has the legal right to monitor her son's activities online and that plans to fight the charges.
Prosecutor Todd Turner declined to comment, citing the boy's age.

I don't really see how that story should have made it onto the AP wire. Granted, it mentions Facebook, but there's not really any substance to the story - like what she said - and with him being a minor, there's not a lot that they can even report.

What a waste. The fact that I'm sharing it with you? Probably wasteful too... :)

While I don't see the "problem" of her being able to see his Facebook page, if she doesn't have custody, I don't think it's her job (anymore) to try to run his life - that appears to be his grandmothers job now.

So, back over the summer, my cell phone (a Motorola K1m "Krzr") stopped being able to text - or do much else beyond making or receiving calls - while we were on vacation. It was a pain, but it still sorta worked, and we were on vacation, so whatever.

I went to a local Verizon store, they fiddled with it and got it working again by resetting it and updating the firmware. I wasn't super excited about it - as usual, they can backup your address book but that's it - but the phone worked again. Problem solved.

Closed to Halloween, the display in my phone started to act up. At first it was intermittant, but then the display in the outside of the flip only showed the Verizon logo. After a few days, the internal display just showed white - super useful. I brought it to the store again and they said that they couldn't fix it, but I was eligible for a "new every two" replacement. Super - but what do I get?

Several folks at work pestered me to get a Blackberry of some sort, but I know myself, and I also know that our budget can't handle an extra $60 a month just for me to have internet access every where I go. And since I usually have my laptop and some kind of Wifi connection, it seemed especially silly - so I looked at more reasonable replacement handsets. I stopped by the Verizon store a couple times to try out phones, and also kept visiting the Verizon website nearly daily in an effort to stay on top of what phones were available, and what new offers they had for replacement handsets. Mere days before Halloween, after being without the ability to text directly from my phone for a couple of weeks*, I made up my mind: a Motorola A455 "Rival". What I like most is the QWERTY keyboard. (* It should be noted that with the aid of BitPim, I was able to backup not just my contacts, but also every photo, movie and sound on the phone, as well as see any text messages that came in so that I could call people from another phone to answer and let them know not to text me anymore. Very useful software, and it's free!)

Fast forward to this week. Wednesday, as a matter of fact. I've had the phone for a while, and resolved when I first got it to take good care of it. I usually do a good job, but I had decided when I got it to not shove it in my pocket all the time, but rather to get a good belt clip for it. I'm a big guy, and the arms of my office char are probably a little closer than I realize, so I tend to be rather hard on the phone clips - I've been through more than I care to think about it since I started at my current job. On the plus side, I had been buying really inexpensive plastic clips, so it wasn't costing me an arm and a leg - very good.

Shortly after I got the phone, I found a nice leather like case which has a magnetic clasp that holds the phone in - it does a great job. Between that and just being careful in general, I think I've taken pretty good care of this phone - it certainly hasn't fallen down two stories of stairs, making me cringe with every step it hit.

In other words, I'm babying this thing. Which is why I'm so irritated that the display no longer works. At all. I was walking down the hall at work when I heard a text message come in. I pulled out the phone and hit a button to "wake" the phone up, only to find that the screen was white. Completely white. Crap. I put the phone back to sleep, then tried it again - still white. I wasn't happy, and it wasn't getting any better. I got back to my desk and decided to shutdown the phone, then try it again. I got color, so I thought it was working - until I looked closer. A bit more fiddling and I got the screen to work again. For a time. Remembering what had happened with the last phone, I decided to start purging the items that can't be backed up: text messages. Photos and movies on the phone are on a flash card (love that feature, thank you very much). Verizon - or, possibly, the cell phone companies - in their infinite wisdom, have decided that they can only move the address book information from one phone to another.

Can anyone explain this? It's 2010, right? Shouldn't it be easy to transfer text messages and other information? At the very least, I would think it should at least be possible to do from one specific make/model to the same make/model. Transferring between different handsets, I can see, but from the one handset to the other that are essentially the same? That's just dumb.

Why is it like this? The only thing I can think of is: money. If you have applications that you've paid for and downloaded, then they now have a chance to make you pay for it again. If it's a song you downloaded, ditto. Movie? Same thing. Just about anything on the phone that's not an address book entry, apparently, is worth something to them.

This kind of dumb ass corporate greed is probably what led us to the problems we had in the banking world recently. Idiots.

So I've created a new category: sh*tlist. In this case, I'm putting Verizon on the list. Like any company, they will do things that please me and make me cranky. Any company that gets on the list more than three times is very much likely to end up loosing me as a customer. Will I actually do this? Ask Cablevision - they'll tell you they have no record of a customer with that name. There's a reason for that (one, two, three.)

So Wednesday night, I managed to get to the local Verizon store - I had called their 800 from work. I was told, over the phone, that I should bring the phone into one of two specific stores, where they should have a tech who might be able to fix the phone. When I got to the store, the woman asked what was wrong, so I showed her and explained what I was told. "Did she have the phone in front of her?" was her sarcastic response.

I have to tell you that I almost completely lost my shit on her at this point. I've worked for a variety of company's in my days, and I can tell you that seeing a pissed off customer and then trying to piss them off more? It never ends well. The only variable at that point was me - and rather than being hauled out of there in handcuffs for beating the poor, senseless woman with my phone, I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth so I could get the phone replaced. I was told I'd have it in two days. At work the next day I decided to turn off my handset - the ONLY display on my phone wasn't working, so incoming calls had no caller id, and sending or receiving text messages is out of the question. It took a few tries, but I managed to dial the sequence to forward my calls to my work phone.

So imagine my surprise when I got home on Friday night and found that the replacement handset wasn't there. I called them and finally got a person on the phone - apparently Friday night is a busy time in their call centers. I got the tracking number and was told that the handset should be in my hands by 7:00 pm on Monday night. Even if you ignore the weekend, as they are not "business days", that's still three days. Three days, not two. If it wasn't for the fact that I have a work cell phone, and that it's on the Verizon network, then I'd be even more cranky - no way to answer the phone, don't you know.

Verizon, you're on notice. Let's see how this turns out.

The Wall Street Journal | Blogs brings us the tale of the TwitterPeek. Similar to the Peek Pronto, and produced by the same company (Peek, the TwitterPeek device is available for a set price ($99.95) with a subscription (six months free, then $7.95/month) or for a one time price ($199.95) which includes "lifetime service" - as long as the service is available, I guess.

While I don't have a problem with Twitter - I tweet quite a bit - I have to wonder if this device will take off like they're clearly hoping that it will. If people aren't adapting to use Twitter on their cell phones - and considering that you can simply send a text message to update it on even the most basic phone - then I wonder who their target audience is.

I myself tweet from my cell phone, the computer I happen to be using, or even my iPod touch. It's easy, convenient, and hassle-free - so maybe they have a point here. I guess maybe my problem is that it becomes yet another device to carry around. Granted, it's purely optional, so I guess it becomes a matter of using it or not, depending on your needs. I wish them luck, but I don't think I'll ever be buying on. Christmas sales, however, will be a good prediction of how the device will do over all. Time, as always, will tell all.

If you've been following me on Twitter, flickr or Facebook, you may have noticed that I'm in the middle of a trip from Connecticut down to Fort Lauderdale. My niece is moving down to live with her mother, and I volunteered/got suckered into the trip. So far, it's been ok - I'll have another post with other stuff like hotel reviews (one not awesome, one really good so far), photos, and other thoughts.

In the meantime.... My brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law have all chipped in and bought my neice and got her a GPS unit. We got a Garmin nüvi 205, which has proved to be invaluable to us so far. Yes, I have printed directions from Google Maps, and from the hotel websites to get us there. But what if we make a wrong turn? Then we're pretty much boned, right? Well, not now. We have, on this trip, come close to a wrong turn or two. And on one occasion, we were driving to get some food and left the GPS on by accident. With this thing turned on, it tells us that we have to give it a second while it figures out where we are, and then tries to re-route us accordingly. It's pretty cool, and I hope she makes extensive use of it.

When we went to New Hampshire for our summer vacation, I borrowed a more "robust" model from a friend for the trip - considering we had been to the area once before, and to the park we went to once before (Story Land), we had some idea of where we were going for things - but what about some more out of the way places? Or if we got lost? Not a problem anymore. If it was up to me, I'd buy one now - never know when it will come in handy.

So far, it's been easy to operate, which is going to be key for my niece. When I got it I had to register it and then download some upgraded maps - almost 3gb worth! Considering it's for the whole US, I guess that's pretty reasonable. It hooks up to my computer (yes, Mac compatible!) via USB, and the Garmin applications (for setup, updating and POI loading) are not only usable, but easy to use and not a complete and total pain in the ass. Very good move, Garmin. After I change the registration info, I hope to have her get the apps for her computer and keep it up to date herself.

Another good purchase I've made recently:
A-DATA 16GB Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) Flash Card. I bought it to use with my ExpressCard SD card reader for an experiment - I wanted to load Mac OSX onto it and see if it loads faster than the built in drive for various reasons - not the least of which was that Snow Leopard was coming out. Testing a newer, faster, leaner OS on a faster interface is a win win situation, and I wanted to see how it might also help out with battery life - unmounting the hard drive while booted from the flash drive would remove a pretty significant drain from the battery, I hope.

Anyway, after taking some photos and videos yesterday, I decided to try to use it in my camera - after a quick reformat, it showed up fine. I can take more than quite a few photos (9999+, and that's just a sign that there's room for TONS of photos), but there's also apparently room for about 135 minutes of video - and I think that might be just for one clip. Can't be sure on that until I have that much footage to shoot - and I think that I'd probably run out of juice before I got to that point.

So, there you have it: two little gadgety things that I've been using for a couple of days, but so far, they're working out well and will probably be becoming a part of my regular geek kit.

TechCrunch seems to be the only website even mentioning Apple's cool "App Wall", which was setup at the WWDC in San Francisco. The icons pulse and such when an application is purchased, but the data isn't shown in real time. It does, however, show every icon available, which is pretty impressive.

I'm still kinda irked that I couldn't go this year....

(Photo stolen from the Tech Crunch article, but it's THEIR photo. Really)

Andy Ihnatko recently posted a photo on flickr of his attempts to test several HD formatted digital camcorders. The photo itself is interesting in that he's got three of these things to play with - that's pretty cool.

What I'm curious about is: are they worth the money? And the effort? We have a newish mini-DV type camcorder that works pretty well. I plug a firewire cable in and can edit things in iMovie and turn the tapes into movies to share with the family - and that's fun and everything, but I basically have to watch the footage before I can do anything with it. I usually use this time to review what I want to keep and get rid of, so it's useful, but as anyone who's done any editing of home movies, or any kind of editing of movies, knows, you usually have a lot more footage than you need.

What it comes down to is... do these cameras speed up the editing process at all? Does it make importing faster? Is there a conversion process to deal with to get the footage into iMovie?

One of the reasons I loathe making the family movies is all the time it takes to import the footage - and as you might imagine, with 4 kids, there's a lot of footage. Since the newer camcorder we have can only fit about an hour on a tape (and we've only tried it a few times so far, just making sure it works ok), that means I'll have a lot of work ahead of me, and a lot of footage to log - and quite a bit of tape swapping to do. Again, it is usually worth the trouble and effort in the end, but it's a lot of work to do - so is there a way to avoid some of it?

I need some real world feedback - which camera's are worth it? Which ones are dogs? And which ones work with the Mac OS X (which seems like a silly question these days, with Apples ever increasing market share....

I just made a change to the site - I'm now including my posts to flickr and twitter to the home page. I'm sill trying to figure out if I can include them in the archives (should be possible, right?) but in the meantime, this will do the trick. I'm posting this partially to share the news - now it won't look like I never post - and also to test it out and make sure all the loose bits have been tightened up properly.

Finally figured out a good use for the programmer switches that came with the 68k Macs we used to have on campus. And since both my phones are Motorolas, I'm "keeping it in the family," so to speak. I wonder if the phones are more powerful, CPU wise, than some of those 68k machines.......

Since I got this iPod Touch (detailed post forthcoming), I've suddenly become less computer dependent but more WiFi dependent. Right now I'm waiting for my chiropractor, using a random, WIDE OPEN access
point. So open, in fact, that the default username and password worked fine when I tried the admin login. It's rather sad, really.

Anyway, while having dinner with Noah and Abby last night, I rembrered that McDonalds has WiFi. Keeping in mind that this is America, they want money for it. Lucky for me they also partner with, among others, AT&T, for access. After a few minutes of thinking, I was able to remember my DSL credentials and actually get online. To load photos of the kids of the Internet. I'm not really sure why I had to, but suddenly the kids didn't care about the "Kung Fu Panda" action figures - they wanted to see their photos.

Technology: 1
Plastic toys: 0

I came home from Noah's baseball game yesterday to find a "Sorry we missed you" note from the fine folks at the USPS. It seems that someone is trying to send us a certified letter and no-one was home to sign for it. Now, for most people, the question becomes: who's sending us a certified letter? And even more importantly, why?

Did we inherit some money? Are we overdue on some bill? Is the town about to take our property and turn it into a park? Did my letter to the furnace maker have something close to the desired effect? Except for the last one, I'm not sure. The furnace maker actually had something in the mail that same day, telling me I was foolish for neglecting to include the serial number of our furnace. Silly me, thinking that if my name is the same as the one that paid for the dang thing, that they'd be able to look me up. But I digress.

The problem here is that I can go to the USPS website and track the certified letter - it's got it's own tracking number and everything. But when you go to the page, you learn more about the letter and where it's going than you do about where it's supposed to end up. While I can see that this would be useful for the sender, it seems that having even the city and state that it's coming from might also be helpful.

For the sender, to maybe make sure they entered the 20 digit tracking number in properly (especially since it can be hard to read the handwriting on the little slip).

For the recipient, to maybe give you a small clue as to who's trying to get in touch with you. Granted, something like "New York, NY" might not tell you much, but it's a little bit more than knowing that someone from somewhere is trying to send you some bits of paper and really wants to make sure you have it.

But that's just my thoughts on the matter.

Oh, and Noah's team won, in case you were wondering.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

A quick note to say that I'm now completely off the internet. For a whole weekend. Part of me is really cranky, and another part doesn't care simply because Cablevision no longer gets my money (well, after they finally send us a bill for the correct amount).

The problem stems from cancelling the TV service - the phone rep didn't understand me when I said "I also have a cable modem provided by Cablevision under a separate account" and I didn't realize fully what "disconnect you from the cable system" meant. Mostly my bad, but I feel that the phone rep should share at least some of the blame. What happened is that Cablevision feels that since I'm no longer a paying customer, then I shouldn't be on their network at all. You see, you can get basic cable for free if you're still connected - they can't stop the signal without a physical disconnect. The problem is, as I said, that I get my internet from them too. I hadn't fully fleshed out all my options for a replacement for them when it came to the fore on Thursday night - no internet. I called to complain, and Cablevision was nice enough to offer to send someone out between 10 and 7 the next day - provided I would be home in case they needed to come inside the house to check things.

Not for nothing, but if the internet stopped when you disconnected me from your wires, why would your tech need to come inside the house? Needless to say, I declined. They said that they could see about getting someone out on Saturday, but that was also not much more than a "we'll see what we can do, but no promises unless you're willing to stay on hold for 15 minutes" sort of thing. I passed on that too.

I called AT&T from work and signed up for a DSL package. I'm not happy about it, but I think I've made it clear that I want Cablevision out of my life. They overnighted me a kit, and I hooked it up, and.... nothing. A call to their tech support for new installs reveals that they can't hook me up for some reason, and they'll get back to me about it. I expect to get a call on Monday, but who knows. I'm not happy, especially since what I received from them (a wireless router/DSL modem) is not what I requested (a DSL modem) since I have all the extra fancy stuff I need already at home.

At this point, I fully expect them to tell me that they need to replace the equipment outside the house (a terminal, I think it's called) since it's a few years shy of being ancient. Oh, and quite dirty. But we'll see how that turns out on Monday.

More updates as events warrant.

Oh, and thanks mom and dad, for letting me use your internet while Ethan took an entirely too long nap.

CL&P Blog: All Criticism of This Website Is Hereby Forbidden

CL↦Blog brings up the topic of Dozier Internet Law's website and, more interestingly, their "User Agreement."

Ooops. Apparently I've managed to mess up - I just linked to them, so I've violated the "User Agreement" of their site:
We also do not allow any links to our site without our express permission

There I go again - I quoted part of their website, which violates another part of the "browse-wrap" license agreement:
Dozier Internet Law, P.C. has a lot of intellectual property on our site. For instance, we are the creators of all of the text on this website, and own the "look and feel" of this website. We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so. In addition, you should not make any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us.

I think I might be in a lot of trouble now. Good thing I have a handy dandy user agreement of my own. (For the record, even thinking about my website means that you agree to the terms. Of course, I really should modify the agreement to say that you also owe me $5 for loading the site. I think I might have stumbled upon a new "revenue stream" for the site...)

Anyway, this type of heavy handed bullying has been tried before - and it usually fails before it even gets to the courtroom. On the rare occasion that it makes it that far, cooler heads usually prevail.

I wonder if Dozier will come after me? Time will tell.....

NIKE MISSLE BASE KC-SILO 60 - (eBay item 300156975741 end time Oct-31-07 05:23:14 PDT)

Sure, it's 60 acres. And sure, the Missle silos are filled with water. But there's an 800 sq. ft. fortified bunker you can live in. I'm thinking....
* 1 silo filled with water for free diving
* 1 silo with cargo netting for climbing
* 1 silo turned into a rock wall/climbing area
* paint ball in some of the land
* "agri-tainment" in other bits
* there's still room for the old homestead....

Of course, as Rudi pointed out, it's still in Kansas. Not that I have anything against Kansas - I just don't know if now is the best time to uproot the whole family and move.....

This might be boring, tedious, or both. If you don't have Cablevision for your internet/tv, or if you don't live in an area where they are located, or you just don't care, then move along. The rest of you can read more by clicking the link....

Todays drive into work was pretty atypical for several reasons. One was that I left the house when I meant to - since Jen was long gone when this happened, and the kids weren't actually fighting me (for a change), this was a pleasant surprise. Drop off went well, so that was good. A left, a right, a left, another left, and one more right and I'm on the highway - but the iPod is coming up with nothing but things I just don't want to hear. I had yesterday off so the family could visit my Aunt and Uncle who are visiting from Australia, so today is my Monday. I needed a little something to pick me up and get me going. It was a long hard road to finding something - I was 3/4 of the way to work when it finally happened: "Hot for Teacher", from Van Halen's "1984".

That song is only about 3 or 4 minutes long, so I had to find something else to fit into the remaining 5 minutes of my drive. What to do, what to do? The iPod was picking out more stuff I didn't want to hear - including several passages from an audio book that really, really needs to come off there - when suddenly I heard "Angry People" by Barenaked Ladies, off of "Are Me & Are Men Deluxe Edition". It's a double CD set that I got off of the iTunes Music Store, and it's chock full of BNL good-ness. Keep in mind that it's called "Are Me", but it's supposed to be read like "Barenaked Ladies Are Me" - or, as they put it on their podcast, "Barenaked Ladies Army" since their fans are so very loyal. Just a fun little tidbit for you there. Anyway, "Angry People" is kind of a happy, upbeat song, despite the name, and it helped continue the momentum built by "Hot for Teacher" to get me into a mindset that I'd be able to tackle the day.

Of course, when I remembered that today isn't Monday, and that I still have a piece of go-suh work cell phone and I have no idea when or if a replacement is coming. It works, but the battery won't hold a charge anymore - I need to charge it about once a day, and I don't use it to make more than two or three calls a day. BAD CELL PHONE!

But then I get to the office and there's good news! The new phone - a nice, shiny new phone - has arrived. A phone call, some idle chatter w/ the Verizon rep, and an activation later, and I'm playing with my new RAZR V3m phone. So far, it's working quite well - I've managed to get around to updating my address book with all the important phone numbers and email addresses, and then sync the phone to the work computer via BlueTooth. The biggest downside: Verizon crippled the phone. They don't let you do OBEX data transfers from the phone - which means if I take a photo with the camera, I either have to "PIX" the photo to myself (and use up messages that I think we pay extra for) or use the Micro SD card that the phone has - only you have to dis-assemble the phone to get at the card. OBEX, on the other hand, allows you to take and put data right from your computer to the phone and vice versa. Most other carriers offer it, but Verizon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that you don't want that - they know what you want, and instead of being able to take your photos right off your cell phone, or play YOUR MP3 files on your phone, you really want to pay them to let you do it.

I don't want this to turn into a giant "Verizon is evil" rant, so I'm going to stop here, but point out that it's my phone, and I think I know what I want better than they do. Well, ok, it's the State of Connecticuts phone, but I have the same issues with my personal phone. Anyway, that's enough of that.

Clearly, it's been a while since I posted. In the post move ruckus, I was dealing with the normal change stuff, but when I planned the move, I seem to have forgotten just how extensive my old website was. All kinds of crazy stuff that I don't recall creating/linking to - but it's there, so I must have done it. Apparently.

Anyway, when I'm not checking out the missing file error log, then I've been tweaking things. Oh, and working on the continued success of raising the kids and all that other fun/crazy stuff. Which reminds me: parentingchronicles.com seems to be offline, largely in part due to the way that the site is configured. Sorry, can't change it now, but that will be fixed shortly (I hope).

What's new.... Well, the kids are almost done with school for the year. We had the kindergarten picnic earlier this week - it went well, I thought - and we also bought a new camera: The Canon PowerShot A560. It's a super-fancy 7.1MP digital camera with 4x optical zoom and some other fancy stuff - like the new Automatic Face Finder thingee, which is all the rage with the cool kids of late. If your camera doesn't have that, then you're camera is old and weak. Really. You should just give up and go home ;).

Anyway, like I said it's a great camera. The LCD is 2.5", which is pretty big - much bigger than we're used to. It makes it easy to see what you're getting a photo of, and makes it really easy to make sure you got the right shot. The only bad photos I've taken so far have been the ones with bad poses - or the usual eyes closed thing - I don't think there's a feature that can fix that, but I keep looking....

We've only taken a few photos with it so far, but as I said, they've been mostly good ones. :noah: has a T-Ball game today, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to get some good photos during the game. If not (it will be me and three kids), then I'm hoping to be able to post some of the photos from Kindergarten picnic the other day.

We've also got some exciting stuff going on in the schooling front. Miss Abigail (Miss B or just plain :abby: ) is making the exciting from pre-school to Kindergarten. We don't know who her teacher will be next year (although we're liking Ms. Griffin after all of Noah's success this year) we're sure she'll do fine.

Noah is moving up to the multi-age program. I think I've covered this before, but it's two classrooms that are both 1st and 2nd graders. It's a co-operative learning environment. I don't know much about the theories behind it, I just know that the school has had a lot of success with the program, they're proud of it, and :emma: had a good time with it when she was in the program. If our luck holds, Abby will be in the program in two years, which would mean that she and Noah will be together in some of their classes. Hopefully they'll do a little better dealing with each other than they do now - but since that's in two years, I'm hopeful that things will be ok.

:ethan: is progressing nicely. We're not doing anything formal with him, but he's a bit of a sponge when it comes to learning things. He's working on colors, knows a shape or two, and is just a great, funny little monkey. He's got more than a few words under his belt, and he's starting to put toddler sentences together, which makes everyones lives easier ("I want cookie" is much more likely to get a cookie and no tears than "That!" and a lot of pointing in a general direction). Plus, who doesn't love hearing "Daddy!" shouted when he spots me coming home and then a big hug from a little monkey? The other kids are all "Oh, hey, your home - can I have a snack?" or something.

Well, I think that's enough updating for now. Emma's got a party to go to, I have to get ready and then get the other three ready for the T-Ball game, and then there's supposed to be some time for some lawn mowing later today, I hope. Well, maybe. Photos and updates, and will hopefully resume on a more frequent basis starting later today - depending on how T-Ball goes, I should think.

So, on October 4, I was browsing a site, checking out pricing for some computer gadgets. As I occasionally do, I decided to do a price check on some network cameras. I don't _need_ one, but they're kinda cool, and I'd like to get one if the prices ever come down below $50 - they might be handy to have so I can see what's going on at home when I'm not there - enough said.

I noticed that one of the adverts on the search results page was to get a free camera. "Sure, but what's the catch" I said to myself - I've been down this road before, and never bothered to go past the page where they explain that they'll spam you and everyone you know if you sign up.

picturephoning.com: Netizen Debate Ensues Over 'Dog Poop Girl'

It all started with a Korean woman who didn't want to clean up after her dog. Someone posted a photo of her, then of another passenger on the same train cleaning up after she got off the train. It then got a little... out of hand. People were trying to identify her and the dog - they did - and started posting information about her and her past. It ended up, allegedly, with her quiting university - all because she refused to clean up after her dog.

Wrong? Right? Either way, welcome to the Brave New World we all live in. I'm not saying that I'm capturing anything too weird when I post photos on my flickr account (except the occasional shot of Elvis crossing the street), but with the prevelance of all these pocket sized toys out there, it won't be long before public nose-pickers are being villified on nosepicking.com or something (and yes, that is a website, but no, don't go there since it's a advert based site.....).

Trying not to offend: Stuck at apple

It's only a week or so old, but the glass elevator at the Apple Store Fifth Avenue got stuck with some folks inside it. Apparently they weren't too traumatized by the ordeal, but it turns out they weren't offered iPod minis as consolation prizes. That's just too bad.

Check out this video over on YouTube to see some of the chilling effects of what's going on....

The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE) Act is supposed to be a good thing. Turns out that it's been hacked quite a bit by various people (aka special interest groups) to allow them to disregard the network neutrality agreements. What is network neutrality? Check out the wikipedia link (new window) for more info.

Basically, the way things are worded now, if the bill becomes a law, then your ISP will be able to "tax" websites for access to their customers. If, say, Google doesn't pay the fee, then an ISP could slow customer access to the website, or block it entirely. They could even, theoretically, make it so that when you go to Google, you end up at their own search engine. And blogs that are critical of the ISP? Oh darn, you no longer have access to that site - it's now on the black list.

It would also allow companies to do whatever they wanted on their own networks - in the mid-90's, Cox Cable blocked the common ports used for VPN access - "forcing the state of Washington, for example, to contract with telecommunications providers to be sure its employees had access to unimpeded broadband for telecommuting applications." (Wikipedia).

If you enjoy the internet the way it is now - where you can access a wide variety of information in a timely manner (based on the level of your internet access, of course), then you need to take action.

You can:
Contact your Congressperson (via the House website, or MoveOn.org)

Sign the Save the Internet Petition

Spread the word.

90% Crud: TechnoratiTags

I've had a Technorati account for a while, and I've been using del.icio.us for a while too - del.icio.us is an awesome for online bookmarking, btw - so I've been using the whole "tagging" thing for a while. Add Flickr to the mix, and you've got some interesting ideas - I tag a post with "macintosh", then add a link to the Technorati and del.icio.us sites, and people can extend the connection between what I type/say and what they find online. It's really kind of cool.

The reason I mention it is that I've just configured this site to add a Technorati and del.icio.us link/tags to the bottom of every post (check them out). I wonder if I should track the clicks on those links to see if anyone finds them useful.....

::asian freckles::: Crazy del.icio.us:

I've never been a big fan of Juicy Couture. I never jumped for joy at the return of sweatsuits (velour, no less) to the fashion market, never found it appealing to have the word "Juicy" stamped across my ass. I found it odd when girls I knew in college would complain about going out at night (particularly to TJ) only to be whistled at and catcalled, I mean, what were they, pieces of meat? They were the same girls who wore Juicy pants. And had exceptionally large breasts which they didn't bother to try and hide.

So plastering del.icio.us on your butt is, apparently, a better choice. At least the implications of delcious are better than those of juicy, anyway....

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz

Kyocera | News release:
KYOCERA Inaugurates First-Ever Solar Grove

Kyocera today announced that it will hold a public dedication for its first-ever Solar Grove(TM); an array of 25 "solar trees"(TM) that converts a 186-vehicle parking lot into a 235-kilowatt solar electric generating system -- on Friday, June 24, 2005 at its North American headquarters and Kearny Mesa plant, located at 8611 Balboa Avenue in San Diego.

I've long wondered why such things don't happen more often - doesn't it make sense to use the solar power that's otherwise just making cars hot? Harnessing this amount of solar power will be equivalent to the electrical needs of 68 typical San Diego homes (based on an average consumption of just under 6200 kWh a year).

Now imagine something like that at the local mall. Or at the local high school. Heck, you could probably power all of Bradley airport if they covered all the different parking lots that are near there.

Google has satellite photos of a section of New Orleans available on their maps.google.com server.

Very interesting photos, and it's just jaw dropping to actually get an idea of how many homes are ruined. It's one thing to hear it over and over on the news every night, a whole other thing to see it with your own eyes, even if it is in an abstract way.

MarteyDodoo.com » SPAMIS is Spam

I've only received a few of these, but it's to a specific address that I only use for administrative things having to do with... well, let's just say it's not an address I give out to anyone.

What I don't get - even after reading Martey's notes about it - is why the idiot thinks that sending out SPAM that borders on libel is going to help him.

Whatever.

NRDC: OnEarth Magazine, Spring 2004 - Six Brilliant Megawatt Ideas:
Six Brilliant Megawatt Ideas
by Evan Ratliff
A few very smart people came up with some very smart ways to curb our energy needs. You can even try them at home.

It's quit cool to be "green," and I don't just mean keeping up with the Jones's. Making simple changes to your home - although a new roof isn't quite "simple" - can change not just how comfortable your house is, but your energy bills and the environment around you.

Since we remodeled the house, I've noticed that it's not quite as hot upstairs. Sure, part of it is the central air conditioner, but a large part of it is the new roof we had put on. Additionally, the crawl space at the front of our house is now open to the attic area, and the attic area has a thermostat controlled fan that kicks in when the thermometer hits 85. It pulls the hot air out of not just the attic, but the crawl space in the front of the house - aided by a Vornado fan we had laying around - and the breezeway at the apex of the roof. I think that just the fans alone are pulling cooler air in from outside, and the new shingles are making things less hot - good all around.

Anyway, it's worth a read and some considering.

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