Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Archive for January, 2005
Bad Luck Travel
Jan 23rd
The adage “if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all” really fits me this week. After spending most of the week (Tuesday through Friday) down in LA for my new job I managed to really rack up the bad luck points. Here are the highlights:
- The rental car company gave me the wrong directions to my hotel, leading me on a 1 1/2 hour tour of some of the scariest areas of LA
- Once I got to the hotel, I found they allow pets in some of the rooms. While pets should not have been in my room, More >
One more ski trip in the books
Jan 16th
I have just returned from another Heavenly ski trip. Now that I’ve been up there more than 6 times the season pass has paid for itself. That is good news. The bad news is that the runs were jam packed with people over the 3 day weekend (since some companies observe MLK day in the US) and many of them were inconsiderate weasels.
In the course of two days I was fully run over by a snowboarder who just said “sorry dude” after tackling me to the ground in a semi yard sale bending my right thumb all out of sorts. Later More >
TiVo's Death Nell Near?
Jan 7th
I’m glad I didn’t make it to CES 2005 this year, otherwise I would have to hear this directly: DirecTV is building their own DVR and intends to dump TiVo. Now this isn’t completely new news, but when put together with other comments they made this week (MPEG4 broadcasts for local HD, home media centers) DirecTV seems determined to separate themselves completely from TiVo, and leave us current Direc-TiVo owners high and dry.
TiVo isn’t sitting still, they announced that they are building a new class of stand alone HD TiVo just for cable and that they are partnering with Microsoft to offer a More >
The Tao of Spare Change
Jan 6th
After procrastinating far too long, I took in a bundle of change to the local Safeway and used one of those change counting machines to convert it back into useful currency. On the way in to the store I probably lost $2 or so, plus another $1+ from the house to the car. Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity (in reality only a few minutes) of noisy shaking and clanking, the machine spit out a receipt that read like this:
Change counted: $242.58. Counting fee: 8.27% Redeemable Value: $222.39
Now I’ll admit that it isn’t fun to take change and make More >
Another Weekend, Another Ski Trip
Jan 5th
I spent this past Sunday and Monday up at Heavenly skiing, using up some of those pre-paid season pass days where I can. On Sunday the skiing was pretty good, temperature was in the 20’s, and the lifts weren’t too crowded. There was a base of about 8 feet of new snow since my last trip up, so it was pretty easy to ski.
On Monday everything changed, however. The temps dropped into the 10’s, visibility went to nearly zero, and the few people on the runs we saw were having a tough time keeping upright, thanks to high winds and More >
New Look for a New Year
Jan 5th
I didn’t know if it was going to happen there for a bit, but I’ve managed to pull together a cleaner, faster loading look for the site without too many personal headaches. You should find everything running quite a bit faster now as I eliminated a large chunk of the graphic files that had to be loaded each time the pages were built.
The downside of all of this is that the new layout is even less IE friendly than the one before it. IE just seems to suck at dealing with standards, and this site is using more and more More >
Movies: The Aviator
Jan 1st
I saw The Aviator recently and I walked away impressed. I was pretty confident in its accuracy thanks to a recent interview of the director, Martin Scorsese, and I wasn’t disappointed. What I was afraid of was Leonardo DiCaprio and his seemingly impossible task to act like a real person. He surprised me with a good, one would almost say moving, performance as a prolific and later delusional Hughes. Kate Blanchett does a fantastically good job as Katharine Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale does as well as Eva Gardner. They both help move the story along while remaining true to their characters More >